things i’ve liked this week, vol. 2

2024-12-12 17:00

here are some things, new (to me), that i liked this week. it’s been six days since the last one but that’s close enough, right?

music

chronic illness wish (2024) by genital shame

released early in the year, this made bandcamp’s top metal albums of 2024 so that’s where i found it. i’m pretty new to listening to metal/hard rock (which started when i stumbled onto chat pile a month ago) so really i have no reference points other than that i like it and it makes me feel very powerful.

boys for pele (1996) by tori amos

nothing else to say right now, especially because this album is really new to just me, but this is also extemely good, nade better by the fact that tori amos produced virtually every aspect of the album. a word that comes to my mind is “lush”; another is, yes, “powerful,” not in a traditional sense, but in the way it pulls you into its world (a comparison i could make is to have one on me by joanna newsom. these are albums that i only listen to occasionally because they demand my full attention.)

reading

“defining ai” by ali alkhatib

i found this post from edward ongweso jr. on bluesky¹. this quote resonates to me (emphasis mine):

I think we should shed the idea that AI is a technological artifact with political features and recognize it as a political artifact through and through. AI is an ideological project to shift authority and autonomy away from individuals, towards centralized structures of power. Projects that claim to “democratize” AI routinely conflate “democratization” with “commodification”. Even open-source AI projects often borrow from libertarian ideologies to help manufacture little fiefdoms.

software

last.fm pro + quietscrob (iOS) + sleeve (macOS) + web scrobbler (firefox and safari)

i feel like a caricature of a hipster when i say that i was on last.fm before it was cool but i’m glad it’s seeing a little resurgence. i actually signed up for last.fm pro to change my handle a few months ago and kind of just left the subscription going, and while i have to say that you definitely don’t need it, the statistics last.fm pro generates are genuinely fun and detailed. and they actually are actively developing the product, which i’m kind of shocked by!

of course, what to do about scrobbling?² especially if you’re partially locked into the apple ecosystem. apple music on iOS doesn’t really support last.fm, so the last.fm ios app was pretty dismal and prone to double-counting my track plays. plus you can only scrobble tracks added to your apple music library (a relic from the iTunes days, i presume.) i thought that this was the best i could do.

until a few weeks ago, when i discovered quietscrob, which lets you scrobble music in the background using iOS’ background app refresh feature. and it allows you to scrobble music from anywhere on the apple music service, not just tracks you’ve added to your library! and it lets you filter data from other devices to prevent tracks from scrobbling twice!

for macos, you have plenty of options to scrobble your music. neptunes is free and it’s good, but recently i purchased sleeve ($5.99, a one-time fee, if you buy directly) and it’s been great. the main attraction is not really the scrobbling but rather the very well-thought-out interface for designing your own “now playing” HUD. it makes me a little happier during long coding sessions.

finally, there’s web scrobbler, which rounds out virtually every other scrobbling case, even on your iphone (since there’s a safari extension!) it’s incredible how many services are supported: most internet radio websites, and even locally-hosted services like navidrome.