Around the time iWork started adding AI shit, I decided to try LibreOffice again on my Mac, and it’s good, but I saved a document in iCloud and figured I’d pick up on mobile, but I couldn’t find a desktop version. Is it desktop/laptop only?

Look, Mondays suck. No one who is normal — not that there's anything wrong with being a little weird, or overly motivated, for that matter — gets by easily on Monday, if they work Monday through Friday. But, today is Tuesday, and we know what we have to do to power through the week and earn another weekend. Today's song of the day is mostly in Japanese, but it has a few English lines. "I know what I have to do now. It's my life, one and only." And of course, the title, "Make my story."

And it's got a great beat. The video ain't bad either. Rocking out on the football pitch in the rain with drones flying around.

So, if you're going into work today, you got this, just say as you walk in, "I know what I have to do now." Get it done. Earn your weekend.

Yesterday, my favourite band, Japanese-founded, currently Los Angeles-based, emo/pop-punk quartet ONE OK ROCK, released a new single, and with it, a Greatest Hits album (Apple Music streaming link linked, because that's what I use).

I'll have to actually listen to it to truly decide, but I don't think it's very good at first glance. I've been curating my own playlist for them for a few years now. At first, it was kept under 80 minutes so I could burn it to CD. Now, neither of my computers have an optical drive, so I dropped that requirement. (I now have an external burner, but I don't have any blanks.) I have the playlist saved on Apple Music, and I have assembled the songs from their albums and I have it as an actual album on my Plex media server.

Just to get ahead of what I feel like somebody is going to ask, no, I haven't used AI to make this playlist. I started it years ago, before we had all these chat bots, and I've just slotted new songs in where I felt they fit, and took other songs out as I got tired of hearing them. But something someone said in that thread did inspire me to eventually make this post. They said it would be more interesting if I did it myself. So, here we are. One I did myself. So I'm curious if the reaction was more about AI or more about music. I suppose we'll see. Because I believe anything using any AI at all should be disclosed. And it's fair if people don't like that. I just believe in honesty and transparency around that or other issues that trigger people or inspire people to emotional response in some way.

So, that said, where the band and/or their producer and I agree in crafting a ONE OK ROCK greatest hits album, is to focus on the new stuff. The official album focuses exclusively on songs in English, not touching any of the albums that mixed Japanese lyrics in. There are basically three generations of the band's music. The mostly-Japanese post-hardcore stuff. The Japanese/English hard rock stuff. And the mostly-English emo stuff. I mix in the latter two; the official package only considers the latter one. That, in and of itself, is fine. Of course we agree on some of their best songs from that era. We both seem to have Vandalize and +Matter in roughly the same spots.

Now, here's where we disagree. There are a couple of mediocre songs the official album uses. The new single, Fever. Perhaps that isn't fair, maybe it will grow on me. For now, it's mid and doesn't seem to belong. This isn't Mary Jane's Last Dance, the song Tom Petty made for his Greatest Hits album that quickly became his most memorable song. It's just a new song tacked on. It also features Change, which was probably the low point of the album it was on. The band has done better and those two slots could have gone to better songs.

The official playlist also front-loads some of the band's biggest songs from recent years, whereas I prefer to put them at the end for a grand finale. They also used Prove, most likely because it was licensed by an anime, Beyblade X, and they want to appeal to fans of the show. Similarly, Vandalize was licensed by SEGA for Sonic Frontiers, but this is not that version. That version has clean lyrics. The line "Fuck the pain away" becomes "fight the pain away" and is arguably just as effective; the problem is, it sounds like a radio edit when they should have just recorded it like that. Side note, Taylor Swift has a clean version of her album The Life of a Showgirl, and by clean I mean it's about half clean... but what she changes, sounds like it should have been there all along. I'm a fan of this album, and I find myself liking the clean version just as much. That's wild to me. That tells me the artist cares about how the song is presented. ONE OK ROCK didn't do that, and they could have, and had they done that, I would have used the clean version in my playlist. I assume that's why the official album doesn't use it. That one song is why the album has the [E] tag on it. It's not the band's only song to be rated as such, but it's the only one on their Greatest Hits, and mine.

Lastly, they called it Greatest Hits. This isn't a popular band. They don't really have "hits". Mine is called "We Are ONE OK ROCK", firstly because it uses the song We Are (as does theirs) so it's a play on words (as is the band's name; it's a reference to "one o'clock," as in 0100, the hour that studio time was the cheapest to rent, and how L and R sound the same in Japanese). And because mine is meant to be shown to someone who's never heard the band, and it introduces you to them.

So, without further ado, here's my playlist. You can use Spotify or YouTube Music or Tidal or Deezer or whatever you use to stream music, or you can go to nyaa and torrent a discography and you can build this yourself, however you do music. I'm going to list the songs, and also give the album it's from. This is mostly important for the first song, as they have several songs called "Introduction". They haven't done them recently, but they used to open every album with a different medley of sound effects and music. And I went with the one with sounds from Terminator and the dial-up modem sound, to set you up for something that's a little technical and sci-fi, sort of.

1. Introduction (Niche Syndrome)
2. We Are (Ambitions)
3. Mighty Long Fall (35xxxv)
4. C.h.a.o.s.m.y.t.h. (Zankyō Reference)
5. The Beginning (Jinsei x Boku =)
6. Liar (Niche Syndrome)
7. Vandalize [E] (Luxury Disease)
8. Make it Out Alive (single)
9. I Was King (Ambitions)
10. Dystopia (Detox)
11. Wasted Nights (Eye of the Storm)
12. Wherever You Are (Niche Syndrome)
13. In the Stars (ft. Kiiara) (Eye of the Storm)
14. Save Yourself (Luxury Disease)
15. Nobody's Home (Niche Syndrome)
16. Good Goodbye (35xxxv)
17. Let Me Let You Go (Luxury Disease)
18. the same as... (Jinsei x Boku =)
19. Unforgettable (Eye of the Storm)
20. Last Dance (35xxxv)
21. Clock Strikes (Jinsei x Boku =)
22. Renegades (Luxury Disease)
23. Stand Out Fit In (Eye of the Storm)
24. +Matter (Detox)
25. Be the light (Jinsei x Boku =)

Note that track 22, Renegades, was co-written with Ed Sheeran. I know a lot of folks aren't happy with him over his support of Israel and their genocide in Gaza. It was a memorable song for the band, so it's a good fit for the playlist, but if your personal morals don't allow it, it's fine to skip it.

So, my playlist/album can somewhat be broken up into four acts, which I like. The first act, which ends with The Beginning and the line "it's finally begun," introduces you to the band. We Are is about how young people are ready to enter adulthood and want to be taken seriously — it was used in a youth rally in Japan. Mighty Long Fall focuses on the band's signature hard rock/emo sound. C.h.a.o.s.m.y.t.h. is about friendship, and the memories of growing up.

Then for the second act, it's really just some of their above-average songs I picked that sound good together. They've set the tone, now they're padding it out. You might find a favourite here, but the songs gradually get better.

The third act is a more proper "greatest hits" kind of thing. The band has established themselves and given you a taste, now they're breaking out the big guns. Where this happens is up to you. If you like everything you hear, you might deny the second act exists, and the entire middle is the third act. That's fine.

The fourth act is the grand finale. This is where all the best songs from each album show up. These are the songs that define the band and their sound. The last three in particular all have meaning to the band and their fans. Stand Out Fit In is about growing up Asian (disclaimer: I'm not, so I can't claim to know about this except what I've heard) in the west (disclaimer: they didn't either, they grew up in Japan), but it's also about trying to be an individual while also conforming to the society of school. +Matter is about how everybody matters. There's this discourse online about how you can only matter if you're a minority because people say you don't and if you're a minority your life and safety and rights are constantly being threatened. And I am 100% on board with that. As someone who is not threatened based on their demographic traits, I know people who look like me matter, but we aren't the focus. We don't need to be. ONE OK ROCK sidesteps the whole thing by saying "you matter to me." It might be simple, like something found on a greeting card, but it's effective. Lastly, Be the light was written for the nuclear accident in Japan, but it was written in such a way that it could be about any tragedy, anywhere. It could be about 9/11 or any other national (or personal) tragedy. It's like how Fred Rogers once said to look for the helpers. ONE OK ROCK is saying to be those people. Be the light for others, because you can't change what happened, but you can change what happens in the future, so inspire others by being the hope and dedication they can look toward and rely upon.

So... if you've never heard of my favourite band, ONE OK ROCK, you can find them on YouTube or whatever paid streaming service you may use, or you can sail the seas, I don't judge.

I don't know where I picked up the recommendation to listen to AURORA, but I've been seeing her on YouTube, and she's kind of a weirdo, so I thought I'd look up her music. After listening to all of her albums, I keep going back to the second one.

Kind of like the ReoNa song Nainai I posted months ago, it's a dark pop song, but more electronic here.

It took me way too long to realise what "he told me I belong in a churchyard" meant. What's the most common thing on a church's property (its yard) beside the building itself? Yeah. Even the next line "he told me I could walk away but I wouldn't get far" didn't really clue me in.

The song itself is pretty wild, but there are some live versions where she just goes off with some gibberish at the end. Goes completely unhinged. But if you've ever seen any interviews with her, or any of the "AURORA just being herself/a comedian for X minutes" type of videos, you know she's not completely normal. And that's awesome in music, especially when it fuels creative expression. And we're all a little crazy — there's no room for judgment here.

Also, it's not in the lyrics on Apple Music, but I'm pretty sure what she's chanting at the end is "a fake human". This is something that comes up on her third album as well. And it makes me wonder if she's familiar with the Japanese book No Longer Human by Osamu Dazai. It's been translated into many other languages. I've read it myself. It shows up on a few of the "most disturbing" book lists because it's about a guy who believes he is no longer [qualified to be called] human, because the things he's seen have stripped away his empathy. The book itself is not that disturbing, it's just when you consider Dazai himself did the same thing that you start to realise it was kind of an autobiography, or partially so. Look out for anyone saying things like "no longer human" or "fake human" who's read Dazai. They might be going through some shit. Also, it's not a long book, or a difficult read. If you have the mental stability, I highly recommend it. If you don't — stay away from that book.

Major spoilers for My Hero Academia

First of all, I don't mean to claim that My Hero Academia had the best ending of any anime, ever. That's generally undecided among anime fans, with some saying it's Fullmetal Alchemist: Brotherhood and others saying it's Your Lie in April. While I'm inclined to side with the latter, I present My Hero Academia as a contender.

To recap the first of eight seasons, Midoriya Izuku is a high school boy without a Quirk (or, super power, though not all Quirks are super) who dreams of becoming a super hero. He idolises All Might, who is basically Superman to their world. A villain does something in public, All Might swoops in, saves the day, smiles, and encourages the public. He's everybody's favourite person. His classmate, Bakugou Katsuki, is a bully whose Quirk lets him create explosions. Bakugou has a big ego, and at one point in middle school, tells Midoriya the best thing he could do would be to jump off the roof of the school. Oof.

During a chance encounter in the first episode, Bakugou is attacked by a giant slime monster, and All Might doesn't arrive. Nobody knows what to do. Midoriya happens upon the scene, and despite having no power, he rushes in to help, with no plan, only the will to be a hero. All Might does show up and saves both of them, and whisks Midoriya off to safety. It's then revealed that All Might was grievously injured and can only do hero work a few hours a day. Midoriya asks if he could be a hero without a Quirk, and All Might not only tells him that he can, but also that he was not born with his power, it can in fact be passed, and so he does exactly that. He gives Midoriya his power, and now Midoriya possesses the strongest super power (or at least, one of them), and is then enrolled in a high school geared around heroics.

Through the rest of the season, we meet several other hero students. There's a girl who can make other things float, and it makes her sick. There's also a guy who can use both fire and ice freely, but because the fire came from his father, who he resents, he's reluctant to use it at first. (He later overcomes this.) Various other students have other powers. One girl is part frog, can crawl on walls, and has a 20m prehensile tongue. Another girl is permanently invisible — all you see is her clothes. Her hero outfit is literally just gloves and shoes, so she's basically naked, except you can't see her. (This is not explicit.) There's a guy with super speed. There's a guy whose hair grows sticky balls he can use to trap or annoy people. There's a guy who can turn his skin to stone. Floaty girl, Uraraka Ochaco, seems to have a crush on, or at the very least highly admires Midoriya, and seems to be the obvious love interest; however, the show never explores romance as the characters are constantly fighting for their lives against the villains, who are equally as interesting, and many of them are sympathetic characters.

In the fifth season, we learn that the main villain, Shigaraki Tomura, had a very tragic back story in which he accidentally murdered his entire family when his Quirk developed, which lets him vapourise any matter he comes in contact with with all five fingers of either hand. He kills his dog, his sister, his grandparents, and his mother before realising it's him doing it (he thinks it's a villain he's running from). His abusive father hits him, and he intentionally kills his father. During a fight, Midoriya catches a glimpse of this back story, and sets out to free the "child within". Author Horikoshi is a big Star Wars nerd, so the connection to Star Wars is pretty obvious (Luke wanting to save Vader).

Throughout the series, Bakugou goes from being an antagonist to a bit more sympathetic as we learn why he's a bully. He spends the next seven seasons after the first atoning for his past mistakes, and the ship emerges as an icon in the LGBTQ+ community. But again, the series isn't romantic at all. And of course, Japan is a very conservative country, and very anti-LGBTQ+. It's unknown if Horikoshi even planned for the ship to be so polarising. I'd say probably not.

By the end of the series, there is no romance whatsoever. The book series ended a year or two before the animated series. The LGBTQ+ community in the fandom took Midoriya not claiming a female partner as a silent acceptance of their ship, and they ran with it. Anti-LGBTQ+ protesters began making death threats to the author, saying that by not ending the series with Midoriya and Uraraka (or any other girl) getting together, he was condoning the gay relationship with Bakugou. Horikoshi released a Japanese-exclusive chapter featuring the classmates meeting up, and Midoriya and Uraraka sharing a moment that ended in a handshake. Not a hug, not a kiss. But, the bigots felt they won, and redoubled their efforts to harass the LGBTQ+ community, pushing the narrative that M+F relationships are the only valid ones, and so on and so forth. The author kowtowing to bigotry ended the series on a sour note, and people began to walk away. (And let's be honest, the bigots were never really fans.)

But then the series got a third ending. And while it was only six minutes long, it may have saved the series's legacy.

So let's go back to child Shigaraki, for two reasons. First and foremost, Midoriya was never able to save him. It ended with Shigaraki demanding Midoriya pass along a message to his best friend, telling him he never turned and stayed villain. (Kind of a mirror to Return of the Jedi's "Tell your sister you were right.") But child Shigaraki was a mirror to Midoriya in many ways. They dressed the same, and they both wanted to be heroes. They both needed a hero to save them. One got one, the other did not.

The fourth season actually introduced a very similar character. We meet a little girl, Eri, who is being tortured by the Yakuza (Japanese mafia) (though, they're called something else) because her Quirk, similar to Shigaraki's, can unmake a person. It's called "Rewind" and it's a more gradual process than Shigaraki's "Decay," but the villains want to use Eri's blood to make bullets that erase Quirks, so only they have them. So they torture Eri to bleed her out. Keep in mind, this is a 7 year old. They're basically trying to make her into a villain, in a sense.

At this point it becomes relevant that Midoriya's inherited Quirk has a huge downside. He has super strength, but it breaks his body the more he uses it. He can hit hard, but he'll break his hand knocking you out. And he's willing to do this to save his friends, and he's constantly being told that he may fight his last fight before he gets his hero license.

Through a chance encounter, Midoriya encounters Eri, and ultimately saves her from the villains. But when he learns what her power is, he realises she is now his ultimate partner, as he can deal extraordinary damage ("infinite percent!") and she can "rewind" the damage he does, in real time. With Eri riding on his back (think Hugh and Diana from the recent game Pragmata), he becomes the most powerful Quirk user in the world. However — and this is hugely important, because the villains have been abusing her to exploit her power — he kneels down and asks her for her consent to use her power along with his. Of course she agrees, they defeat the main villain of the season (not Shigaraki, he gets his much later), and the school does a festival which culminates in the class putting on a rock concert for the community.

Here's the concert: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GgwUenaQqlM

During the concert, Eri smiles for what is probably the first time in her life. (3:30 in the video linked above.) There's a LOT more going on; despite the long post, I am really just scratching the surface of this show. In the books, there wasn't even a song. It was covered, but there were no lyrics given. It was just "they put on a show". In the show, however, they actually did a song. Not only that, they got American singer Chrissy Costanza (now of the band Against the Current) to sing the song. They released a music video for the song (linked above). The song is a big deal among fans, and if the show got canceled after the fourth season, this would have been it, the villains are the villains, but this little girl who could have become a villain, was saved and we got a cool rock show at the end. But it didn't.

So it's the following, fifth season, in which we learn Shigaraki's back story, and we get Midoriya's commitment to save child Shigaraki. Except, he's already done that, but the show doesn't acknowledge it. Saving one little girl was the highlight of the previous season, but Eri's not a threat, she gets adopted by the teacher and everybody loves her, good for her, there's not that much more to her story. She still shows up, and it's always a good time when she does, but there's just not that much to do with her.

The new ending doesn't solve the problem with the biogts who infiltrated the fandom and made everybody mad. But, it does shift the entire focus of the show from the villain Midoriya defeated, to the girl Midoriya saved. The new ending has Eri, now a teenager herself, play a cover of the song in public. Midoriya, his former classmates and teachers, and others are invited to a surprise pop-up event, they don't really know what's going on, but then Eri shows up with a couple other teenagers, and they blast out a cover of that song. Again, the production company got an American singer, Myka Morton, to perform the cover for the anime's 10th anniversary.

Here's the video of a much older Eri performing the song: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pa3tnlMebHI

Here is the full song: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XSFWpB3Mf3c

(Note that if you use any legitimate streaming service, like Apple Music or Spotify, you can also find the songs up there.)

So in the end, it doesn't matter who you shipped Midoriya with. I always thought that said more about the person doing the shipping than the actual characters. For a girl, I shipped him with Asui, the frog girl, because they both have green hair, and green is my favourite colour. For a guy, I shipped him with Todoroki, the fire and ice guy, because of how he convinces him that the fire is part of him and not his father, and for him to realise his full potential. I never had a problem with either the Bakugou or Uraraka shippers. I think both ships are fine, but they're also kinda obvious? Relationships aren't always with the ones you expect to get together. Quite often, couples have a funny story about how they met. "Destined" love doesn't happen much outside of classic Disney movies, and even not so much in modern ones. Usually, the prince turns out to be a jerk and the princess learns value in friendship or family or something like that. What matters is the people Midoriya saved, because that's what it was about. Oh, and if you ship anyone, consider Eri and Kota. Kota was a little boy in the second or third season who hated heroes because they were never around when bad things happened to those around him. Midoriya saves him and becomes his hero, and while he's never really seen with Eri, he does show up at her pop-up concert. Is he there because Midoriya is there? Or is there something more? It's left open, because My Hero Academia was never about romance, it was about doing your best.

Usually shounen series — that is to say, series aimed at young boys that feature heroic young men — don't really end well. The big bad is defeated. The good guys won. That happened here, too, but My Hero Academia absolutely stuck the landing. For me, saving Eri when she could have been saved, as well as the empathy for Shigaraki, is the definition of the series. And while Fullmetal Alchemist: Brotherhood was a genre-defining shounen series that stuck the landing ~15 years before, and Your Lie in April might have the best ending of any anime ever, My Hero Academia did pretty well with what they had to work with.

My Hero Academia is partially streaming on Netflix. They don't have all of it. Crunchyroll should have the whole thing, if you want to watch it legally. If not, well, I think you know where to go (makes cat noises in Japanese).

+++

Curious if anyone here watched it and what you thought of it.

A couple weeks ago, I saw a cool video on YouTube. Hugh Howey, the guy who wrote the Silo books (and is executive producer on the Apple TV adaptation) had made a writing application for writers, and everything about it looked awesome, especially the price tag. Not only was it free, but it was open source as well. I installed it, and I shared it to a writing comm.

I expected to get at least one thanks for spreading the good word, but instead people told me I was posting AI slop. I had no idea! It IS open source, but I didn't think to look on GitHub. So, sure enough, I took a look, and the authors were hughhowey, and Claude, Anthropoic's AI chat bot.

I asked Howey for a comment on it on the YouTube video, and he actually gave me a pretty good answer. He said he made the tool he wanted to use to write books, and he figured he'd share it. Also, he said he had been looking for the perfect tool, what he wanted, and he felt it didn't exist. He also implied he was trying to pay people to write his program, but no one would (at least, at what he was offering). I thought, that's fair. He made it for his personal use, and he released it for free, and posted the code so that anyone can see it.

I decided against using the program because I don't want anyone to be able to say that AI helped me write. Although I will say, to the app's credit, as a Mac user here, anything I write in (current choice is Ellipsus, a privacy and anti-AI focused web-based writing tool; freemium; but also iWork Pages, LibreOffice Writer, TextExit (Mac's version of Notepad), whatever — Apple "Intelligence" is going to suggest stuff as I write. Happens in Firefox, too; and Safari. Howey's tool is able to mute that. It also disables the system spell check. Basically he makes it so you can just write, without your OS looking over your shoulder. (There's a toggle to turn this on and off, for editing.) His reasoning is that if you have a character or town that isn't in the dictionary, you shouldn't be pestered by red squiggly lines.

This isn't the first time I've been fooled by vibe-coded AI slop. About a year ago, or so, I downloaded a cool iPhone app where I could enter in something that happened frequently (or infrequently), and log every time it happens. Some call these habit trackers, but I don't use them to motivate me to keep the habit; I use them to look back. Like when I finished a book, or a movie, or a game. Or when I went to a restaurant, or visited another city or something like that. Also some health/home stuff. So I can show my wife the receipts, as it were.

The app was lacking a few features I wanted (like Dark Mode!), so I wrote the author... after paying $5 for his app. He wrote back and said he didn't know anything about coding, he was out of AI tokens, and he wasn't going to pay more until more people bought his app. Like any reasonable person, he was trying to come out ahead, and apparently he wasn't there (or ahead "enough"). Again I made the decision to drop the app, and I found another one that does the same stuff but better.

The first case, it's kind of on me because it's not that hard to look at a GitHub and see Claude as a contributor. With iOS apps, AFAIK you can't do that. With Android apps, I'm pretty sure you can open an APK in a zip program and look at the Java code. (I'm not a programmer but I know a thing or two.) But back when I was big into modding Android phones, I heard they were going to start encrypting APKs so people couldn't just steal the code or whatever. I do not know if that ever came to pass. I never learned anything from unpacking an APK anyway.

Is there another way to tell?

Maybe there should be a repository for AI-generated/vibe-coded apps, but it would be like playing whack-a-mole and it would be hard to keep up or maintain it. I suppose it would be possible to ask an AI chatbot if it can detect AI involvement, but that kind of defeats the purpose.

This isn't the first time I'm posting a song that seems to pretend it comes from an earlier decade. While Avenged Sevenfold have been called a Metallica cover band, Wolfmother have also been called a Led Zeppelin cover band, and their song, Joker and the Thief, which is absolutely a reference to Bob Dylan's lyrics in All Along the Watchtower, sounds like it was made 40 years before it actually was.

That's just paying tribute to an earlier time that you think was better (you being the band in this case). While some bands seem ahead of their time ("Nine Inch Nails was an EIGHTIES band??"), some bands didn't seem to get the memo that the previous decade ended, and they make songs that fit right in with the past decade. I'm not sure if that's different, but as someone who loved 90s music (though, not as much as 80s music), I'm here for it.

When I first heard Maybe, it was pretty new, but I was hit with a strong, almost physical sense of deja vu: I was so sure this song was from the 90s and I'd heard it a bunch of times. I remember my sister-in-law's loser ex telling me "nah man, this is Sick Puppies, the You're Going Down guys, this song just came out." I knew who Sick Puppies were, and You're Going Down was a cool song, kinda like Headstrong by Trapt, one of those fight songs, but this didn't sound like them, it sounded like, I dunno... Collective Soul, Candlebox, one of those 90s alternative bands.

It's okay to be wrong, though. It's better to just admit you don't know something, especially if you can look up the answer somehow. But, deja vu is one helluva drug!

When I first saw the trailer for Pragmata — https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=i-R3jo3zjFw — I was cautiously optimistic, but I refused to entertain interest in the game until I knew how it ended. Normally, I would not like spoilers, but I have a few "icks" I like to avoid when I engage with media — books, music, movies, games, etc.

Be advised that the video above does show the ending. It doesn't give context, but it gave me enough to tell me to go ahead and get the game. If you don't want spoilers, watch the trailer instead. It has a short version (called the "Core version") of the song, which is not on YouTube on official channels. It's in the trailer, and it's on Apple Music (and presumably the other streaming services). So, maybe after the first 3-4 minutes, I'd just let the song play in the background, if you're listening to the full, nearly 8-minute song. It's a slow song (and, I know, that's rich coming from a guy whose favourite singer is Enya), so maybe the "Core" version would be better. But I'm not providing traffic to channels that re-upload copyrighted content. (I have no problem with them doing that, I just won't be a revenue stream for them.)

If you want to play the game, I highly suggest playing the demo first. The game does something most other games don't: it lets you play two characters at once. Diana, the adorable robot girl, rides on the back of Hugh (the guy in the suit). She doesn't "move" on her own, so your typical running and gunning are about the same as any other third-person shooter. Move with the left stick, aim your weapon with the right stick, aim with the left trigger, and fire with the right trigger. However, you're exclusively fighting robots, and Diana hacks them, and this is done using the face buttons (ABXY on Xbox/Switch 2, and... well... the PlayStation glyphs on PS5). So on Xbox, Y is up, A is down, X is left, and B is right, but it's whatever order your buttons are in. So while Skyrim on Switch flips everything around, I'm pretty sure Pragmata on Switch 2 doesn't. You have a grid, which can be larger or have odd shapes, and you have to navigate through the grid, sometimes around traps, often through bonus nodes, to the target, to do hacking damage, which also opens the robot up to gun damage from Hugh. So not only are you moving Hugh (and Diana on his back) with the left stick, you're navigating the hack as well. What the game doesn't tell you is that if you don't fail the hack (hit a trap, or Hugh gets hit before Diana reaches the target), you can just stop hacking, change position, target for the hack again, and lo and behold you're right where you were, you don't lose progress. This sounds confusing. It's pretty easy with the slower robots, but I'm afraid some people won't be able to juggle all those tasks at once... so you should play the demo to find out if you can do it. You'll face a few enemies, and the first boss. The first boss is kinda difficult, but you just gotta keep moving and plan your attack. It's more time-consuming than anything.

Look — I'm not really a Taylor Swift fan. Definitely not a 'Swiftie'. I did like Teardrops on My Guitar and Blank Space back in the day, but after she blew up? Never really went back to give her another chance. But, there was a lot of hype around her album last year, The Life of a Showgirl, and I already subscribe to Apple Music, so I figured, why not give it a chance? And, I found that I liked it. There were a couple songs that were just okay, but for the most part, the album has a lot of heart and is fun to sing along to.

Then this year, Swift re-released the album with four new songs. So, I played the album again, and decided that Opalite is still my favourite song on the album. It's probably not the best — that's a real hard call between Ruin the Friendship and Eldest Daughter, with the latter feeling like a more honest/personal song and the former being one of those hard-hitting country (esque) songs with a twist at the end that feels like a horse kicked you in the chest... or some other country/western metaphor that fits. I like the album, though. It's fun, there's a lot of heart there, and some catty-bordering-on-cringe stuff for the TikTok generation that is also kinda fun.

Oh, and the video's completely unhinged, which is always a plus.

As far as the new (Encore) songs, Patient Zero is my favourite. It's fun and it's got some of that catty stuff. She's singing about a toxic guy and connecting with his other exes, and identifying herself as "patient zero" because she was the first one to experience the crazy... or something like that. That said, the four new songs don't hold a candle to the album's best. And, she could have also included the Toy Story 5 song she made, but it really wouldn't have fit with these tracks. So good on her for leaving it off. This is not a kid-friendly album.

I heard that Duncan Sheik passed away last week, but this is the only song I know from him. It's not a great song title to post to honour someone who's recently passed, but it truly is the only song I know by him, it's a good one, and it deserves to get posted here.

That being said, if anyone has another song they like by him, feel free to post it.

This song came on my 2000s playlist yesterday while I was doing some housework, and I had to look at my phone to remember what it was and who sang it. Which is wild, because I used to play the crap outta this song on LEGO Rockband back in the day (and in regular Rockband).

A lot of this band's fans came to them more organically, listening to alternative rock, post-grunge, and emo music, but I wasn't listening to that stuff at all. I've said this before with other bands. I gave them all a big miss when they came on the radio and I was not buying their albums, but when they came up in Rockband, I found that they were very fun to sing, and that's what got me hooked.

This version of the song rocks just a little harder than the one I have. I'm not sure if there's a pop mix or if they just made a different mix for LEGO Rockband. There's nothing offensive in this version of the song that I could hear, but the interesting thing about LEGO Rockband was that it had a lower age rating than the regular Rockband games, so violence and sexuality could not be portrayed anywhere in the game or the song lyrics. It was cool because, every Rockband song was being rated either FF (Family Friendly) or SR (Supervision Recommended), though IIRC those ratings were not exposed to the user before. But LEGO Rockband would not read the SR-rated songs. However, any FF-rated songs you'd bought or exported from another Rockband game would load into LEGO Rockband and were playable there. (Unlike The Beatles: Rockband, where no songs outside the game were playable, because the surviving members of The Beatles refused to let their digital likenesses play songs by other people, nor would they agree to exporting, because they did not want the generic digital avatars playing their songs.)

Good news selfhosted crowd! I pitched the idea of setting up a server, and she is down with the idea!

I want to run Linux and host things like Jellyfin, Audiobookshelf, Navidrome, maybe Plex (I currently host it off my Mac desktop but would move it to a dedicated server).

I know you can host Plex et al on something like a Raspberry Pi, but I want a bit more power. I want something that can push at least 2-3 4K streams.

I'm considering targeting 12th gen i5 with 16GB DDR4. Maybe 32GB if I can swing it. Is that overkill? I know you want 8th gen Intel for hardware transcoding of either x265/HEVC or AV1 (probably the former as the latter is newer).

There are other projects I'd like to run. I'd like to be able to host my own LLM/AI but I'm not trying to go performance overkill here. This would be my first server.

I am somewhat comfortable using the command line, and I would be remoting into the server via my Macs (I have a desktop and a MacBook). However, Linux can run Windows games via Proton and that's something I'm interested in for some older titles that aren't on Xbox (like Deus Ex, which came out in 2000 and should run on integrated graphics). I'm not inexperienced with Linux and have been using it off and on (mostly off unfortunately) for over 30 years. My go-to would be Ubuntu, but I've heard great things about KDE lately and I know the Internet is in love with Mint these days. Would the distro really matter all that much as long as I have the required services?