• 48 Posts
  • 94 Comments
Joined 2 years ago
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Cake day: August 4th, 2023

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  • A VPN is a must if you wanna go down this route

    Soulseek (and I recommend the Nicotine+ client over the official one) is a fantastic source for all music in all formats, and particularly obscure off-label shit you won’t get anywhere else. You’ll even have some success finding audiobooks there, although this is very hit-and-miss. I wish audiobook pirates would use it more heavily. It’s P2P, like Napster used to be. You’ll have to share something or you’ll get auto-ignored by most users.

    RuTracker is a great non-private/non-ratio-monitoring torrent site for music (does require a free account though). I’ve never had a single torrent from there that wasn’t seemingly seeded by a Godzilla’s dick. Obviously it’s in Russian, but there’s really no difficulty navigating around. The only thing you might struggle with is signing up for an account, but just have your favourite translation tool open in another tab 👍

    If you don’t mind slow download speeds (from the likes of RapidGator), I enjoy Exystence. It’s a blog that shares link to the latest albums and offers both lossy and lossless versions. Nice RSS subscription to have.

    If you do find yourself using RapidGator a lot, don’t waste money buying a sub directly from them, it’s insanely pricey. Instead, get a reseller like Real Debrid, which costs like 10% as much and also covers you for about two-dozen other file hosters. I highly recommend putting as much distance between your credit card and the company as possible, just for safety reasons. Using PaySafeCard is fine, as Real Debrid will never see your details in that case. I don’t have any specific reason to be weary of them, I just don’t trust random/small/hitherto unheard of companies as a rule.




  • Wikipedia has an unusually high hit rate for me. I start reading about a band, a genre, or something music-related, then before I know it, the wiki rabbit hole of blue links has introduced me to 50 other bands. Some of my favourite bands were found this way. If you’re averse to using anything web-based at all, maybe you could get your hands on a music encyclopaedia from the library or something. If you’re into a specific genre, you can probably narrow down the scope with a book just about that genre.

    I have never, not once in my entire life, been recommended an artist by an algorithm that I ended up liking. Not on Spotify, not on Last.fm, not on Bandcamp, it just doesn’t happen for me 🤷‍












  • I wanted to try Brave a couple of years ago. I ran the installer, and it was one of those pieces of shit installers that just goes ahead and installs without any input from the user, dumping god knows what onto your system, and it puts everything in some obscure AppData subdirectory that can’t be deduced without right-clicking the desktop shortcut. I uninstalled it without even launching it once.

    If a user is 50/50 on whether or not they just installed malware, you might wanna check your programming practices.










  • The pee-secreting gland that moves the pee into the kidney to be washed and warmed up before being passed into the bladder - a little dime-sized gland call the “Penguinal Class Action Monitor” - can sometimes become overactive and try to secrete too much urea at once, faster than the kidney can accept it. This causes something of a backlog, the medical term being “St. Bartholomew’s Lump Reversal”. It causes the gland to swell up with pee, something it’s not really equipped for given that it’s a gland and not a hollow chamber like the bladder, all while the kidney simply refuses to take even the normal a mount of pee because it’s guarding against possible infection upstream. The term for this is the “Immune Raster Verifier Cadence”, and this is likely the cause of the back pain you mentioned.

    I am, in fact, a doctor. I have a degree in Major Arterial Anaphylaxis from the University of Chechetchistserster in England. The professor who taught me said I was the best student he’d ever had. Keep in mind, though, that he also once taught a little-known scientist by the name of Isaac Newton. Sooooooo… 🤷‍

    Treatment: drink lots of alcohol and eat lots of cheese while watching copious amounts of pornography. It’s important you don’t move around too much by, say, going to work or doing chores, because the alcohol needs to be able to settle around your glands to cure them.

    Either that or kidney stones.


  • Leonardo DiCaprio. I get huge, cringy ‘imposter syndrome’ vibes from him, like he knows he shouldn’t be doing this for a living but soldiers on regardless. I’ve never bought into a single one of his performances. He always seems like he’s ‘acting’, and never really embodies the characters or reacts ‘in the moment’. It’s all a poor imitation of what he has seen other actors do.

    I hate that he became Scorsese’s new De Niro, and so when I hear of a new Scorsese film I get excited and then immediately lose interest knowing that DiCaprio is probably gonna be leading it. Literally every film he has done would have been better with a different actor.

    Also Nicolas Cage. I get the memey antifan sort of thing that bolsters his career, but let’s be honest, there’s no hint of talent in the man. He has ruined what might have been great films. Bringing Out the Dead could have been a legit classic if not for his involvement.