what i'm reading:
serial killer support group - saratoga schaefer
understanding the mechanics of DJing has deepened my relationship with dance music. i like thinking, 'this would be a good section to loop', or 'these 4 bars are total transition bait'. (i don't actually know how djing works.)
You can kind of apply the same thing to commercial paperbacks like Serial Killer Support Group. my theory is that publishers come up with titles and auction the book deal off to the writer with the best spec. I imagine this is how we get the oft-maligned genre of High Fantasy Enemies-to-Lovers Bisexual Love Triangle (with trigger warnings) books. But how is that fundamentally different from producing a house track from a sample library? People want to hear the same thing again, but brand new.
I'm legitimately impressed by how the author fleshes out what should be very shallow writing prompt. I was expected the eponymous serial killers to turn out to be a reverse harem of diverse token archetypes, but the author decided to make them all a bunch of really unsettling white dudes, and the meat of the story is the protagonist's really maladaptive coping mechanisms.
what i'm listening to:
Minyo Cumbiero
i misheard a japanese song in a tiktok as having a latin rhythm, and i thought, 'surely there must be japanese latin music'.
this is from a collab EP between Minyo Crusaders (JP) and Frente Cumbiero (CO) full of mind-blowing latin rhythm with psychedelic electronic embellishments from the dub and reggae tradition. i 🇨🇴 music
what i'm watching:
Zoolander (2001)
motherfuckin zoolander.
what i'm working on:
learning strudel
i struggled to get into other algorithmic music software like Pure Data or Supercollider. strudel requires a lot less bootstrapping, and the docs are highly interactive.
back on that cryptohack grind
things have died down at work so i finally have time to do my actual job: pointless coding exercises. cryptohack is a more approachable version of cryptopals that holds your hand a lot and gives you "stars" and "levels" like a good little gamer.
something i liked:
diy shows at local coffee shops
went to two weeknight shows at two different coffee shops, which is something you're just allowed to do. the noise show was a bunch of tgirls with doohickies. I went home with a bunch of homemade tapes. great nights.
something i hated:
platform-capitalism-induced learned helplessness
people are (rightfully) complaining about Bluesky's moderation doing the dirty work for the fascists. i even got a post taken down when i politely asked all USAmericans to kill themselves. we're seeing rising spectre of enshittification as Bluesky prepares for the value-extraction phase-- or so they say.
this is a misperception supported by the past 20 years of platform capitalism, where monolithic companies control your access to a social network, extract value in the form of personal information, silence dissent, and drive people literally insane.
Bluesky is supposed to be different. theoretically, Bluesky is decentralized and based on an open protocol, so anyone can host a Bluesky server and moderate it how they want. that hasn't panned out in reality. There's no competetive instances, and Bluesky is treated by its users like just another platform, and it's hard to shake that perception when the organization behaves like it, too.
Mastodon and ActivityPub, meanwhile, are highly decentralized and enshittification-resistant, but there's just too many roadblocks for mass adoption. "federated" and "instance" are scary words. images take forever to load. it's always yelling at you for alt text and content warnings. going all-in on Mastodon is like jumping the cruise ship for a lifeboat when the ship isn't even sinking.
closed channels like telegram, discord, and private subreddits split the difference, so you have the benefits of centralized infrastructure without as much invasive moderation, but it's useless for artists, journalists, or writers who want to build a public profile.
we could go back to the stone ages and self-host everything, use IRC and never, ever scroll an infinite feed again. i'd prefer that, but i was never even alive for that period, so i'm just getting nostalgia-baited.
this was supposed to be me complaining about Bluesky people not knowing their options, but it just turned into a 'touch grass' thing. uhhhh. whoops.
a picture:
Post 1 image to describe your hysterectomy