I like to listen to music, A LOT. I am now stepping away from the easy access of streaming random songs and letting the algorithm play the next songs and just going the old fashioned way of downloading the songs for offline playback. I will mostly listen to a full album instead of just one song.
I am now adding regular posts of the albums I listened to. Here’s the initial list from the last two weeks.
Satisfaction Is the Death of Desire (1997) by Hatebreed (Metalcore, Hardcore)
Supremacy (2006) by Hatebreed (Metalcore, Hardcore)
Heard That There’s Good Pasta (2020) by Aimyon (J-pop)
Listening to Hatebreed is a huge motivational boost.
I really like Cigarette and Potpourri Leaf as always from that Aimyon album.
I am using my Pixel 2 with LineageOS with Gapps as a secondary phone as a catch all for the proprietary apps that I need. There’s always an itch to completely erase Gapps from this phone and use microG instead. The thought of Google services and apps having root access from this phone irks me a lot.
I decided to remove my dependency on Gapps now and won’t even use microG to replace it. Any app that would cry about the missing Google services, I will not use it indefinitely. This is a challenge as most apps really want these services specially the proprietary ones, but I suspect that this will simplify my phone usage as I will drop a lot of apps in the long run and be left with a few. This is just about the same setup as my main phone, just with all the proprietary apps.
I am willing to embrace inconvenience.
I am always trying to own my device, not the other way around.
“Seed your mental garden from only the most thought-provoking, inspiring sources. Solitude is your water; contemplation a nurturing force.” — You Sould Quit Reddit by Jacob Desforges
Reddit has been big for me for more than a decade now, at least time spent on it. The first few years has been great, I did enjoy being on it even being just a lurker. But nowadays, it just behaves like other big social media. Entries are just constant attention grabbing, noticeably fake, and just exposes being entitled. All of these are not worth it. I need to impose less inputs.
“Besides darling, we may be dark, but let me share a secret with you, sometimes darkness can show you the light.” — David Draiman of Disturbed, talking to a child during a concert
One aspect of heavy metal music which is often overlooked by outsiders is that even though the music is aggressive, the message is positive and raw. It is welcoming. It is not bounded by the norms, and yet still deliver good ideas. Once resonated, that cathartic feeling stays with you, and you will find comfort.
I’ve been back with Solus on both my computers. I’ve been seeing too much irrelevancy with regards to the relevant systems. I’ve used Solus way back 8 years ago and daily drive it for a quite a while. I hope I’ll get the same calm computing now too.
The human machine will finally bleed
The human machine will finally cease to be
So set yourself free
And disengage from reality
— Disengage by Suicide Silence
There’s no actual present moment for humans. Everything they perceive has some miniscule time delay for their brain to process and create what seems to be the present moment. Physics can back this up.
Maybe living in the moment should be stopped because it is pointless, instead, just exist.
Listening to Apink’s MY MY during my bike ride going home, together with clear skies and the moon directly in front of me, feels like everything’s still fine after all. A short ride yet fulfilling at the same time.
I discovered that I now have a proper device to test OpenEUICC. I will be tinkering for the next few days.
It made me realise how rare it’s become to just… talk. To text about anything and nothing. To rant and rave about something that’s happened in our lives. To just say hello or how you doing without a prompt, or to check in without a goddamn link attached.