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Joined 2 years ago
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Cake day: July 3rd, 2024

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  • Empathy begins with relating to others experiences by comparison. I did not intend to minimize or be dismissive of your experience in the way your reply to me was. They are two sides of an unfairly balanced coin. Most men are never going to be able to really empathize with high heels and make-up, but they can understand being stuffed into uncomfortable and impractical clothes. We should be able to commiserate and relate without being dismissive and hostile.


  • It’s interesting how the situation flips somewhat for men in adulthood. In most white collar office jobs it is totally unacceptable for anyone to wear shorts, flip flops, and tank tops. However, women are allowed or encouraged to wear skirts, strappy shoes, and sleeveless blouses. In hotter climates, I’ve known a few men that have seriously considered wearing skirts because pants are so uncomfortable, but the social stigma is just too much. Of course, those men still wouldn’t be pressured to wear make-up daily too. I have no idea how men can wear an entire suit, especially a jacket, in subtropical and tropical climates. Thankfully I work in a field that does not pressure women away from wearing pants, but again pants suck in the subtropics. Plus, women’s business casual pants are almost a completely different thing than men’s pants with regards to fitting closely and being made of thin to nearly sheer materials.

    I hope this doesn’t feel like sealioning, more that I feel like men need to be shown how the patriarchy is bad for everybody. Blue collar dress codes are at least mostly centered around safety. While it seems white collar dress codes are mostly about “professionalism”, which is mostly just code for gender norms, misogyny, and patriarchy.



  • In thousands of songs, I’ve never noticed Picard doing anything to the length of the files. I tend to manually review every album by running it through Picard and letting it handle the renaming and tagging. That structure used to be Artist/Year Album/Song. I’ve been less strict about naming the songs themselves. It’s always at least track - Title, but sometimes Artist - Album - Disc # - is prepended. Eventually I ran into a situation where I had multiple versions of a release/album with different enough content to warrant keeping both, so now I throw a release ID number (if is exists) after the album name, and inside brackets, for the directory name.

    It’s a very flat structure by design, so I’m never quibbling about where I sourced something or what particular genre it is when I’m looking for it. That dramatically reduces the likelihood of duplicates too. Real metadata is better left to tags, since that’s mostly what any player will see anyway.

    If I’m having trouble getting Picard to recognize something it always because: musicbrainz.org is missing the release, doesn’t have acoustic ID, or Picard preferred the album track when I’m trying to rename and tag a single or EP. Adding the release info and acoustic ID to musicbrainz is easy and I can usually use the info before the release is even reviewed, but often in trying to add the release I’ll find the correct one and now I can help fill out the data about it.

    I treat musicbrainz.org as MY metadata database. If a release is missing or has problems, I do the work to make it better. It’s good digital citizenship and learning about their rules for releases helps me manage my server better.











  • Did you have to send an actual physical photo through the post?

    I ask because that was a unique time of tech transformation. I might have had a digital camera then, but being able to email a photo wasn’t yet common enough to be assumed to be possible or convenient for everyone. Just the fact that it was an 800 number and not an email for customer service says a lot. I’m reminded of watching the first Scream movie recently, where cell phones existed, but were rare enough that having one fall out of character’s pocket made them immediately suspicious. A detail that would be totally inconsequential today.




  • I just wish it was more nuanced than good/up or bad/down. I really miss the old /. style of being able to classify how a comment added to the discussion or not (insightful, troll, offtopic, interesting, etc.). Not sure the implementation ever was perfect on /. either, but it FELT more meaningful, especially because the ability to vote wasn’t given to absolutely everyone on everything all the time. When I got the chance to vote, I tended to put some genuine thought into it. I’d like to think that meant less impulsive and reactionary voting and it was a constant reminder about what that site wanted you to value in a discussion.




  • I spent a little more to get the upgraded newest model of the android phone I’m currently typing this on, released in January 2021 and received by me in March. I had to replace my previous phone because the battery started to fail and it was failing behind in Android versions, meaning some newer apps could no longer be installed and some older apps could no longer be updated. Current phone still going strong, no signs of being any slower than it was originally. Mostly have used wireless charging and battery protection schemes in the OS, so USB port still works well and charges just fine either way. I feel like phones hit a performance plateau a few years ago and I see no reason for an “upgrade”. If my current phone needs to be replaced, I fully expect to be forced to pay more for less given the costs of memory these days. Previously I’d been basically forced to upgrade every 2 years because I always bought the contract special “free” phone and updates stopped or the battery pillowed.