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Cake day: July 6th, 2023

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  • Sorry, I have to admit that I’m not the best at keeping up with LGBTQ+ news, so I wasn’t aware of that controversy. I’ll keep an eye on that and see how it shakes out. If NYT continues to stir controversy, then I can switch. I’m not particularly attached to them. Washington Post would be a good replacement, and I saw that GLAAD article mention that WP’s LGBTQ+ coverage is better.



  • I don’t get my news from any social media platform, including lemmy, no offense to lemmy. I used to do that with reddit, but it’s just too unhinged getting your news that way.

    I stick with Associated Press, Reuters, and The New York Times, in that order. I also use Google News specifically for local news, but I don’t even peek at the main world news feed there.

    More generally speaking, I stick to the old school human editorial board for my news. News that’s presented to me on AP, for example, has already been filtered by a board of humans who are smarter than me and whose opinions I trust on the state of the world. Opening up your selection of news to an easily gameable social media algorithm is just more trouble than it’s worth, in my opinion.





  • Bach’s Chaconne from his violin partita in D minor.

    It’s a song that was written around the time when Bach’s wife died, and if you listen hard enough, you can almost hear that it’s about her. It sounds like there are two voices, a low voice and high voice, who meet and fall in love with each other, and experience all the highs and lows of life and then are torn away from each other by death in the end. And it’s all done with just notes on a violin. And what’s more, it was written 300 years ago! It trips me out thinking about how somebody can write something so epic for a single instrument so long ago.

    Jacsha Heifetz’s version of it is my favorite. Some people don’t like how fast he plays it, but he does the ending the best, in my opinion. You can hear the pain and denial and chaos of the two voices trying to enjoy their last moments together and leave nothing unsaid between each other most clearly the way Heifetz plays it.

    Itzhak Perlman’s version is very good too. He plays at a slower pace than Heifetz, and has a more epic sounding tone. The highs and lows are generally more epic sounding the Heifetz, but I don’t quite understand how Perlman plays the ending. I have no doubt that he’s trying to tell the same story as Heifetz, but there isn’t any of that pain and chaos like Heifetz has. I’ve seen interviews with Perlman, and he seems like a very happy and well adjusted guy, so maybe that explains why his ending is so different. Maybe that’s just how the ending is for happy people like that, and I can’t comprehend it.

    There are other good renditions to check out too, but Heifetz and Perlman are my favorites. Hillary Hahn and Nathan Milstein are other popular ones. Plus a bunch of others. That’s another cool thing about Chaconne. Everybody has their own rendition.


  • I like Gnome the best too. In my experience, it’s the desktop environment that focuses the most on making sure that no little bugs slip in. Like normally when you’re using a desktop environment, it will be good except for a few bugs here and there where you have to remember weird things like not backing out of the settings menu in a certain way in order to not trigger a bug. Gnome seems to have the least amount of weird little bugs like that.

    It’s not very configurable out of the box, but I prefer that too. I’m getting a bit old and set in my ways, and don’t really want to mess around with too much configuration anymore.


  • I quit reddit for a whole two years at one point. It obviously didn’t work out forever, evidenced by the fact that I’m here right now. But when I did quit, I found that it sucked for the first two weeks or so, but once I started to forget about the finer details of reddit and things like that, then I just stopped caring. It’s like you start to forget about what you’re missing out on after a little while, or you get used to missing out and just stop caring.

    So that’s what I would recommend. Try quitting cold turkey and being disciplined about not checking YouTube for at least two weeks. See if the same thing happens to you, where you just get used to missing out and stop caring.