Nicholas Toone

Posts!

Here there be my blog posts,

  • Money, Meet Mouth

    I’ve spent the past few posts ranting about the state of big tech and how it is just getting worse and found myself feeling a little off.

    I’ve been going on and on about moving away from big tech and here I am using Windows. While I really like Windows 11, there is something wrong with having to spend time disabling tracking and ads in a fucking operating system. I recently reinstalled Windows 10 on an old laptop and the amount of absolute crap you have to opt out of/disable/uninstall is just stupid.

    So I decided to give Linux a try once again. Fedora 41 (Jam) baby!

    Took a bit of work at the start. I don’t know what I did with my first install, but after messing around in the console trying to get software installed for my keyboard and mouse, I rebooted to an 800×600 desktop with no other hardware working properly: no internet, no sound and… whatever. I’d not installed anything at that point so I reinstalled and here we are.

    Issues and Thoughts So Far…
        • Reaper won’t connect to my Scarlett 2i2. Got this somewhat fixed; the Scarlett is connecting now. It’s a GUI issue in Reaper. When you choose ALSA, you have to choose the device. If you click on the drop down, you get a blank list. This led me to beleive that the hardware was not detected. Turns out that you have to click exactly on the drop down arrows to see your device choices (e_e) I still need to test at some point as I don’t see the two separate inputs when I select a track input.
        • Installing and getting Scrivener 1 to run on Linux was a pain in the ass. I tried setting it up in Bottles and just could not get my license to activate no matter what I tried. I finally got it running in Lutris and so far so good even if the font rendering isn’t as crisp as it is in Windows. It did crash a couple of times at the beginning, but I messed with it and now have it working. I am pleased that I can access the work saved from Windows via my OneDrive folders (thank you sooo much Insync!).
        • Razer. Oh Razer. I love your hardware. Your DeathAdder mice are the best I’ve used when it comes to ergonomics and feel. And this Ornata TKL I have is is simply fantastic. Your software though? Garbage. Just garbage. For Linux there is OpenRazer. Means I can get my hardware working in Linux, yay! Everything is just as janky in Linux as it is in Windows, boo! Note that this is a not a bitch about Linux, or the people who work on OpenRazer. This is a bitch about Razer. I really don’t know why these companies can’t make decent software for their devices 2.

    And… I think that’s it? For now anyway. I mean, I just can’t figure out how to customize parts of the interface; there have been some changes in KDE Plasma in the past year and a half it seems, but that’s just me nitpicking. Besides, I’m goddamn playing The Witcher 3.

    On Linux.

    And it’s absolutely glorious 3.

    Look, I could go on about this shit forever and I know that there are those of you out there rolling their eyes thinking “oh, here he goes again!”. I also know that me blathering on about this shit doesn’t really amount to anything, but so what? I’m allowed to change my mind when I want just like everyone else is allowed to change their minds if they want. And like you all out there, I have to navigate the systems in which we live. I’m just not going to play ball one hundred percent of the time. I want to try and live by what I feel is right and blindly supporting Big Tech is not something I feel comfortable doing so I’m going to do my best to not support them, I know that there are times that I’ll have to use their services. I’ll just have to be conscious of my decisions.

    Will this Linux thing work this time around? I don’t know. I really don’t know. But I do know that I didn’t feel right not even trying.

    1: I own and use Scrivener for writing non blog stuff. After spending nearly six months trying out different writing software, Scrivener was the one that had the features I need and would use. Unfortunately, it’s Windows and Mac only.

    2: I mean, come on. I’m a simple man. I just want my lighting set to static white. That’s it. I don’t care about game modes or intelligent functions or breathing fire waterfalls. Just static white. Yet this never sticks. And if I bounce back to Windows for a moment holy crap, the lighting in both the mouse and the keyboard starts having seizures. The shit thing is that the software for all other peripheral companies is just as bad, if not worse. I’ve had to deal with Logitech before and Razer is downright revolutionary in comparison.

    3: For this I give a semi-cautious shout out to Valve and their Proton compatibility layer. Yes, I know Proton exists so they can sell Steam Decks and yes, there are things wrong with Steam,  but no other game group has, that I can see, has allowed for something like Proton. Sure, there is Lutris (which I have installed for Scrivener, but yet to try with games), but the fact that Steam not only built this compatibility layer but decided to include it in a Linux desktop version of Steam is actually pretty amazing and, so far, the experience has been seamless.

    Is Valve one of the bad guys? Sure, they are. I mean, they are the biggest digital game storefront there is so they do throw their weight around. Yes, yes, I have a GOG account, have bought games from them, and support their “you own the game” ideals, but unless Lutris really comes through then GOG is pretty much Windows only, and even if the GOG platform means well, they still offer and support games from the big studios so where do I stop?  I’m not here to go down every rabbit hole. I’m here to do the best that I can.

  • I’ll Always Be Right Here

    Most all technology companies start with the very best of intentions. They want to fix something that they see as broken. So they launch their product sow, their goodwill, and start to chip away at fixing the thing they saw as broken. They get investor cash, and then some more investor cash. They start to ramp up a user base of people who also believe that the thing was broken and is now being fixed for the better. Maybe there’s no ads. Maybe there are ads, but they’re not intrusive. Maybe there are fees, but they’re reasonable for what you’re getting out of this new thing that has totally fixed the old thing.

    Then the company either goes public or get bought out (or both). Things are ok for a little while. The company has fixed the thing and are turning a tidy profit, are well liked, and held up as an example of what kind of good tech can do. Then they have to start bending to investor pressure to make more money! More! No, not good enough, even more! Being profitable isn’t good enough anymore. They have to grow. And keep growing. Profits are now judged against last years profits. If they do even a penny less, then the company is seen as failing. So the company start to change. They start to remove useful features and add confusing features, especially cutting edge, buzzword features that other companies are using even if these features have nothing to do with the original something that was fixed.

    The founder decides to leave having seen his vision through to this point and wants to spend more time being a normal, regular person just like you and me by, sailing around the world with his family. On his yacht. A new leader comes in, promises to increase shareholder value. There is a round of layoffs, mostly from the customer facing groups like support and service. Fees are raised and more fees are added and they start adopting business models they once said they were against. They start copying features from other companies (who were also fixing things). Maybe they buy another company so they don’t have to actually code a new feature; they’ll just shoehorn it right on in there after another round of layoffs because it’s more cost effective to hire offshore than it is local. Everything becomes third party, ad infested slop barricaded behind some kind of subscription based paywall. Either that or there is an offer of a free login, the only cost being that your contact info and whatever data you provide is then harvested and sold to the highest bidder. There is a data leak and a scandal of some sort thrown in for good measure.

    Users start to complain. Users start leaving. Just a few at first. But the new CEO can’t stop saying stupid things and the new algorithm does nothing more than serve up hot garbage so more users leave taking their money and precious data to a new platform that has promised to fix what was broken.

    The company is then sold to a firm like Blackstone who takes them private, fires three quarters of the employees so they can “realign with the original vision of the founders”, run up huge debts at the companies expense and run the whole thing into the ground. While the company may still exist, its now a shadow of its former self and little more than a footnote in everyone’s mind.

    Now, that’s all overly dramatic but it kinda fits, doesn’t it? All you have to do is look around and see that there is a lot of shady shit going on. Right now, there are a good number of companies that are shitting the bed in one way or another bit are just too fucking big to budge (just yet anyway), but there are a more than a few mid-tier services that have become hostile to their user base like Etsy and Airbnb. You have DistroKid being assholes. Medium is little more than a virility promoter, among other things, that’s buried behind a “sign up” page. Substack is turning into a racist shithole.

    For me a glaring example of all of this is DeviantArt. While I haven’t paid attention to DA in a few years, I do remember it fondly as a bastion of creativity. I had an account back in the day (think like 2001-2003) and loved sharing art and perusing other people’s work. DA crossed my mind the other day so I looked it up. Now it’s owned by Wix.com and is a fucking AI Slop generating hellhole, while working to hide anything that is said against them:


    and promoting whatever the rancid fuck this is:

    I mean yes, of course there were always issues with DeviantArt and copyright back in the day, but this? An AI Generator? Wow. I’m not even going to explain why an AI Generator on DeviantArt is slimy. As the kids say, if you know, you know.

    In short, nearly everywhere I turn on the Internet, things suck at a level of hostile suck I never believed was possible.

    I’d like to think that people are starting to wise up to the bullshit these companies are forcing us to eat, but I’m not so sure.  I mean, most of the solutions to shit companies are new copycat companies pop up promising that they’re better. And maybe they are … for now. Give it time, those companies will either turn into their own version of high level suck, or they’ll die out because they’re not making money.

    Shit's Broke, Yo.

    Look, I don’t have solutions. I’m not that smart. While I feel that the “social” platforms we’re using now are in the beginning stages of a death throw, I honestly can’t envision what the next big thing will be. I do know that unless we take a good hard, honest look at what the current issues are, the forthcoming Next Big Thing will just be more of the same which is “Wow! This is neat. It has the potential to change the world. Now how can we monetize the hell out of it?”

    But you know one thing that’s still around? Blogs. There are people out there who are writing in their blogs. Not some weird ass writing platform created by some weird ass company, but like a simple WordPress install running on a small server somewhere. Maybe they’re making a little money by sending out a monthly newsletter, or maybe they’re not. Maybe they’re just writing for the sake of it. What they’re not doing is fighting for whatever scraps an algorithm is handing out. They’re not beholden to overly onerous license agreements. They’re not hustling every second of the day. Sure the hosting provider is probably trying to sell them dumb features (the hosting company I’m with constantly wants me to upgrade my plan), but you don’t have to buy SEO packages or make use of the AI Website Generator. Hell, you don’t even have to use WordPress if you don’t want to. What I think a lot of people forget (or just don’t know) is that the Internet is, at its very base, nothing more than text files running on computers that you can connect to. Yes, we give these files fancy names like HTML, PHP, JavaScript, etc. But they’re really all just shit people have typed into Notepad. And HTML isn’t even difficult. Just write something up in a plain, old HTML file, name it index.html and stick it on the web somewhere 1.

    Like I said, I don’t know where any of this is going and I don’t have answers. But this doesn’t mean I have to play along. I do know that I have my own little corner of the web, so here I’ll stay. I don’t want to be beholden to any platform that seeks only to enrich itself at the expense of those that use it.  And if the time ever comes that WordPress decides to one hundred percent shit the bed then I’ll code a basic website using Notepad like I learned how to do twenty five years ago. No database. No scripting. Just plain, old HTML 2.

     

    1: Free hosting exists and I’m currently investigating how good these are, especially the ad-free ones. While I’m lucky enough to be able to enjoy a paid service (albeit a very minimal service), I want to know what the free alternatives look like.

    2: I fucking love the fact that this shit is still out there and, for the most part, still completely functional.

  • Rebellion in Retrospect

    “I will always be like this.”

    I remember saying this to my folks when I was about 16. Hair down to my ass, dressed in a patch and stud covered jean vest over a leather jacket, a Metallica shirt, torn bluejeans, white basketball hightops; the 80s Thrash Metal Uniform.

    This was me. This was, for all intents and purposes, my rebellion. I was angry. Had that chip on my shoulder. No on understood me, my art, or my music. I believed that, right down to the very core of my being, I was my own person and no one could tell me what to do. The system, The Man, wouldn’t get its hooks into me.

    What I didn’t realize when I was young was that our little rebellions are prepackaged.

    The bands that I listened to when I was a teenager screamed “think for yourself!” and we all screamed back: “Fuck yeah! I think for myself!” as we handed over fist fulls of money for albums, and t-shirts, buttons, and patches. All so we could advertise to the stiffs of the world that we were the same as all the other people who thought for themselves.

    Like Rock n’ Roll in the fifties, the hippies in the sixties, punks in the seventies, Metal in the eighties, Grunge in the nineties… eventually the rebellion is analyzed, figured out, homogenized, put on an assembly line, mass produced, wrapped in shiny packages, marketed as unique, and sold to the greater masses.

    This is what the moral panic groups never understood: There is no Satan. There is only capitalism.

    Clarity in life is realizing that those you considered to be heroes all signed on the line and were then sold to you and the marketing was soooo very good that you didn’t see it coming until it was too late; Che’s face on your t-shirt.

    You can still rebel. You can delete your social media and not shop for dropshipped garbage from Temu or Shein (or Amazon). You can install ad blockers and download media from questionable locations on the internet. You can rebel by not paying hundreds or even thousands of dollars watch a band who once told you to think for yourself play a two hour nostalgia set list because they know their fans won’t won’t be happy unless they hear songs primarily off the first three or four albums.

    Or you can go right ahead and do all of those things. You can do whatever you want. Don’t forget, you’re supposed to think for yourself.

  • Your One, Short Life Remix Update

    Remix is complete!

    I’ve updated the files here and on Bandcamp with the remix.

    I’ve put the original over here for posterity.

  • 2024 Books

    For 2024, I’ve decided to forego the x/10 thing.

    The Sentimentalists – Johanna Skibsrud
    Part of the 2023 Christmas Book Advent Calendar 1. Had never heard of the author. The blurb on the back hinted that it has a Vietnam War backstory, which I’m a sucker for, so I decided to give it a go. Turns out that this book is a quite lovely, sad, slightly plodding slice of life. It kept me engaged right on through. Wonderfully written, it’s the type of book that you reread sentences simply because they’re beautiful.

    It – Stephen King
    I first read It, freshly released in paperback, when I was a teenager (thirty seven years ago, JESUS) and I loved it. I reread this book every couple of years and my thoughts on it change every single time. There are moments of absolute  brilliance and wonder hidden in Its pages (the Derry Interludes are favourite passages of mine), however a good third (at least) of the book has not aged well (and I’m not even talking about “that part”), even when looking at It as a product of Its time.

    Microserfs – Douglas Coupland
    It was… merely ok. While there are small bits of wonderfulness scattered throughout, I don’t think it would be half as engaging if I didn’t know anything about Seattle and Silicon Valley in the early 90s. It’s a very specific snapshot in time and if you weren’t there, you may not get it. I don’t think I’ll be rushing to read another of Coupland’s books. I like slice of life, meandering books but this was really nothing special. A couple of chapters in, I was enjoying it just enough to maybe read some more of his works, but by the time I finished I decided that I’m going to pass.

    Crash – J.G. Ballard (DNF)
    Wow. What a fucking bad acid trip this book is. I kind of, sort of see where he was going with it? Maybe? Nah, I don’t know. It was just too absurd for me. Started feeling a little repetitive about half way through (if you can believe that people jizzing all over car dashboards as they crash can become repetitive) and became a slog so I just gave up on it. Disappointing because I fucking loved High-Rise.

    Bright Lights, Big City – Jay McInerney
    Very, very good. While it’s dark, it’s not Hubert Selby Jr./Brett Easton Ellis, “capital D” Dark.  What stuck with me is that it looks at the middle class and reminds you that addiction of any kind is not just the realm of the of the nameless, abused underclass or the bored, abusive upper class. Here is someone who, from viewed with a quick glance by a passerby, may appear to have it all together and shows that addiction doesn’t necessarily include extreme poverty, brutal violence and/or sexual humiliation but that a good number of people with addictions are out there, trying to live a “normal” life (whatever that is) and are just barley keeping it together.

    Opposable Thumbs: How Siskel & Ebert Changed Movies Forever – Matt Singer
    As a fan of both Roger Ebert and Gene Siskel, I thoroughly enjoyed this. While I knew some of history of them and their show, this book really explains how massively impactful these two critics were not just to movie criticism itself, but to movies in general and they way that they are made and marketed.

    His Majesty’s Dragon – Naomi Novik
    I was surprised by this. I’m not what you’d call an ardent fan of historical fiction but sometimes I give it a shot. Most of it was utterly predictable (of course the dragon is a Celestial!) but it’s very readable and not half as ridiculous as I’d expected.

    Throne of Jade – Naomi Novik
    A little more plodding than the first. Somewhat dark in some places but it never really pushed it. Got somewhat confuddled near the end with a big fight at a palace and the wrap up was, uh, ok? I guess? There was a small setup half way through that made the outcome very convenient. Like very, obviously overly convenient (so you were descended from royalty, eh? Uh-huh, cool beans). Didn’t enjoy this one half as much as the first and I don’t think I’ll read any more of this series.

    The Nineties – Charles Klosterman
    A very astute, well researched look at the decade I lived through in my twenties. Very much a walk down memory lane and a very poignant look at the decade “before everything changed”.  From grunge to slacker culture to selling out, if you lived through that time, you’ll most likely enjoy this book more than you’d think and marvel at some of the dots that are connected as you read it.

    The Librarianist – Patrick DeWitt
    I discovered Patrick DeWitt thanks to our yearly advent calendar which presented me with a copy of The Sisters Brothers. Since reading that, I’ve gone through all of his works. The Librarianist is not as dark as the aforementioned book, nor as crazily weird as Undermajordomo Minor, nor fantastical as French Exit. It is subtle and, of all things, somewhat believable … until the section with eleven year old Bob running away and joining up with a couple of travelling actors. That whole bit could have been cut out and nothing would have been lost. In the end, I enjoyed this book, just not quite as much as I enjoyed his others.

    Sex, Drugs, and Coco Puffs – Charles Klosterman
    Decided to read this based on how much I loved The Nineties. This one was… Ok. Like barely, merely ok. It reads like a series of ranty blog posts that didn’t age well. The book as a whole appears somewhat out of touch, even for something written in 2006. Klosterman is more than mildly misogynistic and some of the pieces come off as “look how much smarter than you, I am!” that’s akin to some of the shit you’d find these days buried in the bowls of Medium or some douchebaggy tech pundit’s site.

    The Kite Runner – Khaled Hosseini (DNF – I gave it up with maybe forty pages left to go)
    While I’m sure words cannot really describe how much I disliked this book, I’ll certainly try. This was another Advent Calendar book. Had good reviews. Sold a ton of copies.  Won a few awards. A movie was made that seemed to be well liked (Ebert named it the fifth best movie of 2007). In short it was popular enough that I knew the title, so why not?

    I was completely engrossed at first and it wasn’t until the protagonist and his father go to the US that I found the book starting to show itself for what it is: typical, cliched, Hollywood style tripe. When he goes back to Afghanistan the book casts aside whatever it was hiding under and confirms, in a huge way that yes,  it’s just typical, cliched, Hollywood style tripe. I hate that everything in this book is so very convenient and outcomes are so very neatly wrapped up in glittery paper. With a bow. It takes a horrific, super complicated subject and streamlines it into a basic story of capital “C” Coincidence 2.

    Neuromancer
    Count Zero
    Mona Lisa Overdrive
    – William Gibson
    Mental mouthwash to get rid of the taste of The Kite Runner. I fucking love the Sprawl Series and realized I haven’t read it in a good long while. All three books hold up for the most part. Mona Lisa Overdrive is still my fave out of the three.

    Virtual Light
    Idoru
    All Tomorrow’s Parties
    – William Gibson
    Just kept right on going with the Bridge Series. I found these to be a little less better than I remember. Especially Virtual Light. There are bits that seem moderately juvenile to me in my old age; weird little quips here and there that really don’t drive the story and wouldn’t feel out of place in one of Stephen Kings lesser books. Still, the idea of The Bridge is wholly original and, at one time, wholly plausible; it’s a shame the eastern span of the actual Bay Bridge was replaced. Out of the three All Tomorrow’s Parties is my fave.

    Mrs Frisby and the rats of NIMH – Robert O’Brien
    I first read this book it in grade school right around the time the movie came out (I would have been ten). This book holds a special place in my heart as it was the second “novel style” book I read (the first being My Bodyguard) and also my first realization that 99% of the time, the book is better than any film adaption 3. I saw the movie, The Secret Of NIMH, not in the theaters but a few years later when it hit VHS (yup!) and I remember thinking that all the magical shit they added, and turning Jenner into a major villain who kills Nicodemus,  was over the top and dumb. This book is still a nice, quick read and I was happy that I still enjoyed it.

    Cat’s Cradle – Kurt Vonnegut
    Jon Stewart mentioned that Kurt Vonnegut was his favourite author so I decided “why not?” Not knowing where to start, I asked the Internet and people suggested that one should begin with Cat’s Cradle then move on to Slaughterhouse Five.

    So I started with Cat’s Cradle, and it was… interesting. I definitely didn’t hate it, but I’m pretty sure I didn’t love it. Don’t know what more to say about this odd story other than it certainly got stuck in my head for a few days after I read it, so mission accomplished?

    Slaughterhouse Five – Kurt Vonnegut
    This book was not at all what I was expecting. I see a description like “the author was in World War 2 and this is based on his experiences” and I think of what we all think: “Oh! Band of Brothers!”

    Heh, well, I can see why the sages of the Internet recommend starting with Cat’s Cradle as Slaughterhouse Five was definitely not Band of Brothers. I could see how one could be put off by the strange, weird, yet wonderfully original use of seemingly oddball 60’s science fiction. I really don’t know if I’d have enjoyed Slaughterhouse Five as much as I did had I not read Cat’s Cradle beforehand; I was at least somewhat prepared for it.

    That being said, I don’t think I’ll be going out of my way to read any more Vonnegut. It’s good. It’s definitely original. I think I’m just a little too young and a little too jaded by the modern WW2 movie experience to really appreciate Slaughterhouse Five.

    With The Old Breed – Eugene Sledge

    This… Oh. Where do I start? We are taught to see war as patriotic; flag waving and cheering, this was the first book I’ve read that really questions this. By this I mean, it’s a person who believed, volunteered, fought and saw first hand what a complete and total and utterly complete waste war is. I know this. I hope that you know this, and I pray we never have anything on this scale again.

    I have seen the The Pacific, on which some parts were based on With The Old Breed, but I didn’t really like it. Now I know why. The Pacific is more in line with the modern WW2 movie experience, covering most of the entire Pacific timeline while throwing in some of the more egregious happenings without clear context.  With The Old Breed is the context from beginning to end. It’s a hard read, but an important one.

    Vox – Nicholson Baker – DNF
    I started it. Just didn’t quite get it. Put it down. Picked it up again. Still didn’t quite get it. Put it down. Maybe I’ll get back to it. Maybe I won’t.

    Official Truth, 101 Proof – Rex Brown
    Your standard rock autobio.  Rex seems to be the only one of the Pantera members with any real kind of head on his shoulders (then again, it is his book). It’s not as party focused as rock bios go. While he does talk about booze and drugs (and how it almost killed him) he certainly doesn’t glamorize much. I did find the intro chapter a little insufferable; he lays on the “I’m the only smart one in a sea of dumbasses” pretty thick. He settles that shit down pretty quick, and it becomes an easy, enjoyable read. If you’re a Pantera fan, then this book is a no brainer. If you’re not a Pantera fan, but like rock bios, then this is worth it.

    Infinite Jest – David Foster Wallace (DNF)
    I got about maybe a quarter of the way in, and I just had to put this book down. The five star reviews out there say you have to stick with it and it starts making sense several hundred pages in 4. In a plebe sense I felt like I did when I started watching Infinity War; like there may be something here, but I was missing it so I gave it up because I was bored and confused. Then a friend told me I had to watch no less than twenty other MCU movies and TV shows in a certain order to make any real sense Infinity War. Yeah. No thanks.

    I have patience, but not that much patience. I like plot twists, unreliable  narrators, and non linear timelines but I found this just a little too much for right now. Mammoth paragraphs, runalong sentences, and a plethora of words that are either pretentious or seemingly made up. Maybe I’ll come back to it. Maybe I won’t.

    (Narrator: He won’t.)

    Although, I do wonder if that dude ever got his weed…

    Never Let Me Go – Kazuo Ishiguro
    Not at all what I was expecting. Slow burn science fiction that’s low on the science part. It’s there, but it’s not in your face. I tend to not try and over analyze the meanings of stories. I like to let good books unfold. Never Let Me Go surprised me as I felt it was a look at the world as I’ve been seeing it of late; an examination of what makes us who we are and how all the dreams and expectations that we grow up with usually turn out to be just that: dreams and expectations. I felt the idea of “possibles” not as who you came from, but where you think you can go. It’s not so much “I came from a lady who works in an office” it’s “I’d love to be working in an office like that lady”, yet it rarely, if ever happens. Just because you want to be an astronaut when you’re a kid doesn’t mean that’s where you’ll land. All these years later, while you’re spending your days answering emails, you think back of the possibles that were, and how here you are now, donating your organs to a society that takes what you have to offer as long as they don’t have to see you. And then you “complete”.

    Weaved in and around this are the those few that care enough to try and make things right by everyone, yet those in power only make half hearted attempts at any kind of change before letting everything slip back into the status quo.

    The Time In Between – David Bergen
    \The first book in this years Advent, it turned out to be one of the best books I read in 2024. Dark. Sad. Beautifully written. I wish I could conjure up something more to say. This is one of those books that I loved but can’t really express why. It just is. And it stayed with me for a good while when I’d finished.

    I tried to start four books after this one, and just had to put all of them down as none of them clicked with me for various reasons 5 but mostly because I was still thinking of The Time In Between 6.

    The Nickel Boys – Colson Whitehead
    Finished this the evening of Dec 30 – I wasn’t sure I’d have it read by the 31st, but I managed it. The Nickel Boys was an excellent, albeit hard read that left me feeling scraped out. Very well written, very deserved of its Pulitzer. I may have more to write about it in the coming days after I’ve had a chance to live with it for a bit…

    1: A local, second hand book store does a yearly “Book Advent Calendar” where they have tables and tables of bags marked like “Popular Thriller” or “Science Fiction” etc and each  contains 24 pre-wrapped books. Our family has been doing it for a couple of years now; it’s a good way to reuse/recycle and much more fun than the standard off the shelf garbage Advent Calendars you get at box stores.

    2:When the villain takes off his sunglasses to reveal himself and starts monologuing about how he came to be with the Taliban to get his revenge and so on and whatnot. I literally rolled my eyes and yelled: “I’M SYNDROME!!!”. Then he  gets a slingshot round to the left eye, conveniently by the son of the person who threatened to put a slingshot round through his left eye 30 years prior. Uh-huh. I sighed and just gave up. I put the book down, Wiki’d the ending and it boy am I glad I didn’t waste the last 40 pages or whatever reading what was, essentially, a cop out ending to a cop out book. I’ve played yellow paint slathered video games that don’t even come close to insulting my intelligence the way The Kite Runner did. What a fucking waste of my time.

    3: Fight Club is one notable exception. One of my favourite movies. A somewhat less than mediocre novel.

    4: And one dude on Goodreads (scroll down to a review by Kemper) says “And then there’s the fact you have to use two bookmarks because you’re constantly going back to the endnotes…. (and) Some of the endnotes contain long wandering passages that also don’t seem relevant to anything.” No, please. No thank you.

    5: Including, but not limited to: adult trying to write as a first person teenager (usually always falls flat), cliché depictions of supposedly troubled people (yes, yes, goth bad), and one of the worst opening sentences I’ve read in a long, long time. After The Time In Between, the 2024 advent calendar served up mostly duds.

    6: I did find a book (finally) that I’m reading now, but I won’t be done before the end of the year. Goddamn, I finished it!

  • My Rules: The Computer Edition

    When writing yesterday’s post about Tech Rot, I was going to add a list of “rules” I have made for myself in order to enjoy being online in any way, shape, or form. It didn’t quite fit the flow or message of the piece, so I decided to post it separately. With the context out of the way, here is the list of “rules” I follow:

        • Uninstall/remove/disable any and all bloatware/scamware/adware in whatever OS you’re using. I happen to like Windows 11, but oh my god, the fact one has to do this to use your computer in relative peace is ridiculous. (Note this rule is not Window specific. Removing unneeded packages from whatever Linux distro you use, or uninstall whatever apps included in macOS that 1: Apple allows you to uninstall and 2: You may not use; GarageBand, Pages etc).
        • Disable any and all completely unnecessary noise.
          • Turn off notifications of everything that does not matter. On your phone, you should get a notification when someone texts you or calls you. You don’t need a notification when some app randomly recommends an article or has a pair of shoes on sale (and don’t get me started on news apps). On your computer, notifications should be for email and chat only.
          • Turn down the intensity of notifications you do enable. On your computer, all you need is a badge on the app (and only if it’s running). No one needs a badge, and a sound, a toast alert, and a preview… just a badge. On your phone, the only thing you should see on your lock screen is the name of the person calling/sending you a text.
        • Firefox. Just Firefox. There is no other browser (unless you want to go hardcore with Tor, but that’s a whole other realm) 1.
          • Run an adblocker at all times. Don’t ever feel bad running an ad blocker and don’t let sites make you feel guilty with their popovers telling you that everyone will starve unless you allow ads. Remember: ads would be fine if they weren’t so absolutely fucking invasive and shitty.
          • Set your browser tracking protection to Strict.
            • The only websites you should have to whitelist for any reason are important ones like banks or insurance companies. If a random website won’t load or work properly because you have an ad blocker installed and/or strict tracking protection turned on, then that website it not worth your time.
        • Thunderbird. Very, very good at stripping out email trackers and other such nonsense 2.
        • Use multiple email addresses. You should have one from a well known domain (Gmail, Outlook, iCloud) for banking and other important life items, one for personal use (family, friends), and at least one burner account to use for signing up for newsletters, software trials, 10% off coupons, etc.
        • Use a VPN. Please, for the love of all that is good in this world, make use of a VPN.
        • Use a password manager. In fact, use BitWarden. It’s free – or very inexpensive if you want to support them 3.

    Finally, and most importantly:

    DO NOT adopt a devotion of any kind to any company.

    1: Don’t @ me about Brave. They’re shoving useless AI shit into their product, have a rewards program (opt in or not, rewards programs on software is lame and shifty), and have been trying to pull some shady shit over the years only to get caught and backpedal. So fuck that shit. Nothing in their business model tells me they’re to be trusted. Yes, Firefox does offer “Sponsored Shortcuts” on their Home page, but all it takes to turn this off is a single checkbox.

    2: The best part is not only does Thunderbird give you an overall option like “Allow content from The Online Store”, it also shows you a list of individual options like:
    – Allow content from tracker.shadyasfuck.com?
    – Allow content from “api.wearealwayswatching.com?

    3: I’m not getting paid to say this. They’re just that awesome.

  • Tech Rot

    Make yourself a nice, big cup of strong coffee, get comfortable, and take the time to read this: https://www.wheresyoured.at/never-forgive-them/

    Take your time. It’s worth it. I’ll wait…

    … you’re back. You look exhausted. Is it because it was a super long read and not a social media sized hot take? Or is it because it hits home in a super big fucking way? Both?

    As I read that article, I remembered my own history with this thing called The Internet.

    I first hopped online in early 1999. It was difficult for me in the beginning as my computer was a 386 Toshiba boat anchor running Windows 3.1 and it was so fucking slow that I had to access everything via a command line using gopher. I do remember once trying to load the homepage for a local ISP on that thing just to see if it was possible, and it took nearly twenty minutes. I went right back to gopher.

    By mid year, with the help of some friends, I managed to get my hands on a computer that could run Windows 95 and all of a sudden, everything began opening up to me. I could just feel the potential. Here is what appeared to be nearly everything I was looking for when it came to creativity.  Yes, yes, “real” art better and all, but here was something I could not only use to create art but advertise said art. Soon, I was introduced to Photoshop and Front Page and that was that. I was hooked.

    One thing I can say was that my desktop beige box was also very slow, so doing anything past surfing was a lesson in patience. I remember a friend of mine, who has just purchased a top of the line PC, watching me work on a graphic for a show poster. It was taking up to two minutes to render an effect on a layer and he said “I don’t know how you sit there and wait for that to render. I’d go nuts.”

    Thing is, I had no choice. At that time I didn’t have the money to just buy a new computer or faster hardware. Yes, people made fun of my slow computer but as I mentioned, I learned something that seems to be missing today: patience. For me slowness wasn’t due to the shittiness or bloat of the software per se, I just insisted on installing the latest, load heavy software on a computer that just met the bare minimum of requirements and then insisted on pushing said software to its limits. I’ll also note that the desktops I had were built from parts. I didn’t have a Dell or a Compaq or an HP so I didn’t discover what kind of bloated shit these companies installed on their branded computers until I helped someone figure out why theirs was running like garbage.

    Luckily I had friends who taught me what to do and what to stay away from. Back then, besides having to be acutely aware of certain issues, namely spam and scams, and don’t reply to shifty looking emails because that Nigerian Prince is not going to send you money 1, I also found out very quickly that the big companies were shady as fuck and made money based on people’s ignorance. The most obvious example being AOL who mailed out hundreds of thousands of CDs knowing that people would put them in their computers and sign up without knowing what they were getting into 2.

    I used to do tech support for a national cable ISP where they insisted you install their shitty software in order to “use the service to its full potential”. This software was nothing more than a scamware browser and chat app that hogged up system resources and served you ads for their other services (Home phone! More TV channels!). When I was going through my training, the first “instructor” was an obvious company shill who bestowed the value of this software on us. The instructor for week two, the actual nuts and bolts tech trainer, informed us that this software was complete, unnecessary bullshit. “You just have to plug the cable modem into the computer, go to the network settings, enable DHCP, and you’re good to go.” Thanks to him, I spent more time on calls getting people to uninstall that corporate shitware than I care to remember. In that second week of ISP Support Training I learned an important lesson:

    A good portion of what any tech company is selling you is shit.

    But at least you could, for the most part, uninstall/delete any and all cruft and go on with your life.

    About halfway through Zitron’s article, he talks about his experience with “the bestselling laptop from Amazon”, and how these machines are so horrible not just due to the older hardware, but the absolute horrorshow of software clamouring for your attention (and bogging down your system resources). I read this bit thinking two things:

        1. I need to remember that, just like past me with a beige PC that would take two minutes to render a Photoshop layer, most people out there don’t have the kind of money to drop on a computer that is not speced with bottom of the barrel parts and bogged down with ad infested bloatware and…
        2. It irks to no end me that the phones we now all use on a daily basis leave the desktop PC’s we were using twenty five years ago in the dust performance wise, and today’s laptops and PC’s are so far ahead of what we had in 2000 that it’s simply crazy to think of. Yet these IT companies are still finding new and exciting ways to make the whole experience utter garbage for a lot of people. Especially those who can’t afford the latest, cutting edge components.

    And, as he points out, not everyone (read: most people) has any real idea how to bend these products to their will. They buy what they can afford and put up with the bloat and cruft and ads and junk and shit performance and more than likely, accidentally make things worse by clicking on some shady link or dialog box.

    On top of all this, on top of the ads that junk up everything, on top of the bloated apps and OS’s we’re pretty much forced to use, on top of constantly changing UI’s and algorithms that serve us up a whole lot of nothing useful, we  fight and argue over which tech company is better. Every single one of these companies serves us shit of some kind and people fall over themselves to proclaim that the shit they eat is better than the shit someone else eats.

    Look, just because one company serves their shit on a silver plate doesn’t make it taste any better than the shit that’s served on a paper napkin.

    What people don’t realize is that at the end of the day, anything and everything any company tells you is just marketing. You are not a better person if you use Apple. You are not a lesser person if you use Android. We’re all just people trying to get on with getting on and these companies bank on us all throwing shit at each other over stupid things like brand preference.

    Use whatever you want to get what you need done. It doesn’t matter, at all, if you prefer Apple or Google or Microsoft or whatever. They’re all the same. Computers, smartphones, tablets, and the software that’s on them are all just tools. Treat them and use them as such. Ignore most of whatever these companies tell you about enhancing the world, or security, or privacy, or sustainability because all these companies care about in the end is profitability and growth, and everything they say, every value they tell you they have, is all marketing in the name of making more money.

    Yes there are teams out there that take things like security and privacy very, very seriously. Trust me, I know. I work with one such team. However, when it comes to the bottom line, the Company can and will make decisions that can and will undermine the work that these good people do. What you have to realize is that it’s mostly the actual workers who care about enhancing the world, or security, or privacy, or sustainability. The people at the very top? They’ll embrace it so long as it makes them money.

    It’s these companies that are making our lives more difficult in every single way that Zitron talks about in his post, and some he doesn’t. I don’t know if it’s going to get any better any time soon. My guess is no. We have a lot more shit to eat before anything changes.

    In the meantime, do what you can to introduce some semblance of normality into digital life. Remember: whatever these companies tell us is normal is definitely not normal; don’t fight for these companies, push back against them.

    So turn on your ad blockers, crank your tracking protection up to Strict, and do your best to not fall for the con that is the Rot Economy, teach friends and family how to do the same, don’t belittle anyone for whatever tech they’re using and hopefully we’ll get there, wherever there is.

    1: Seems downright cute compared to what’s out there today… <cough>crypto</cough>

    2: AOL was the Columbia House of the early Internet age.

  • Thank You, Good Night!

    Not quite what you’d think. Some acoustic venom with a bombastic ending.

    Link To Lyrics


    Thank You! Good Night ©2024 Nicholas Toone

    Song Notes

    This origins of this song can be found in this post from March 2022. As mentioned, I had purchased a hangdog of a classical guitar from a local thrift store. It cost me $75 and it came with a case. I don’t know why I bought it. It just felt like the thing to do.

    Let me tell you, once I got a new set of strings on it, it sounded pretty fucking great.

    It was around that time that I managed to snag a couple of second hand SM-57’s and they lived up to their reputation. The guitars on this recording are the ones from the linked post where I say: “The SM57’s are, hands down, the best for close micing the classical guitar. It may be that they’re the best for the cheap classical I have. I don’t know. I don’t have anything better to compare it with”

    Well, all this time later I can say: Who cares about comparisons? In the past I literally setup the used mics, spent a few minutes improvising on a beat up, thrift store guitar to get a test recording and now, well over two years later, “Thank You, Good Night!” is that test recording as it was originally played.

    To reiterate: this is not a rerecording. The acoustic guitar in this finished song is that original, one take test recording. Only some very mild EQ and reverb were added.

    The heavy solo section was built on top of the strummed chords I’d originally recorded. The electric guitars and bass were played through the ToneLib GFX plugin when I was still using Linux. The synths are all SURGE XT presets. This is the first track I’ve done without an actual drum set. The drums are SSD5 Free 1 played manually via my Oxygen 25.

    Lyrics were somewhat difficult. I had a hard time coming up with melody and a theme. What you hear was written and performed in about a day. I was coming up with lines on the spot, recording scratch tracks, and then ran through the final vocal recording while changing words and/or phrases on the fly.

    Finally, mixing was … almost non existent. Most all of the tracks were done with some minor tweaking via the Mixbus channel EQ and compressor. I routed the drums and bass through my standard NYC comp bus (which employs the ACE EQ and compressor) and the vocals were touched up with the absolutely wonderful Flying Delay.

    All in all, I’m super, super pleased at how this one turned out. There’s just something about it that hit all the right notes.

    Note: The artwork is a from the hip photo I took in NYC back in 2011. It was late at night. It was raining, hard. I was walking through Times Square after seeing a play, trying to stay dry with the five dollar umbrella I’d bought from one of the street corner dudes selling five dollar umbrellas. The lights had this ethereal glow to them. I pulled out my phone and snapped a shot… just as a limo came crawling past. Out of all the “in the moment” pictures I’ve taken, this is probably my most favorite; so spontaneous, so accidental, yet it captured that moment in time perfectly.

    1: I enjoyed SSD5 so much I bought the full version when it went on sale at the end of November. It really is a great piece of software. My only gripe is that they use fucking iLok however, you don’t need the stupid USB dongle, just an iLok login. That, and the fact that it’s a one time purchase allowed me to bend a little. If SSD5 was subscription (and/or if it needed the stupid USB dongle) I wouldn’t be writing this paragraph. This is why I’ll never use the Slate Virtual Mix Rack; it’s subscription and it requires the stupid USB dongle for fucking iLok.

  • Oh! What A Time To Be Alive

    “Oh! What A Time To Be Alive” is this thing in completed form. It took a bit (especially for a two minute song) but it was worth it in the end :)

    Click here for lyrics.


    Oh! What A Time To Be Alive ©2024 Nicholas Toone

    Song Notes

    A long, long time ago, early in the mystical year of 2020, I found myself messing around on my hi-hats. I was trying to mimic that style one hears in trap/pop/hip hop by doing quick buzz rolls on 1 and 4 and filling in the 2 and 3 with simple 8th note single strokes – all on top of a simple four on the floor kick. I eventually settled into the pattern you hear on the song and decided to record it in Reaper, and save it with the working title “Cidada Hats” 1.

    I would come back to it a few times over the years. At some point I came up with that funky bass line (recorded via my Ampeg PF-350 before I sold it) and added some basic, clean, delayed guitar and even some shakers and a tambourine. And… it sat on my drive.

    I came back to it this summer in a big way. I was going through my folders, doing a cleanup and saw the silly Cidada Hats directory and decided to see if there was anything there and, as the post from August details, I ended up doing some surgery:

    1. Deleted the clean/delayed guitar outright.
    2. Deleted the shakers and tambourine.
    3. Edited the fuck out of the composition. The original had three verse sections (each verse double what they are now) and four choruses and running about five minutes. It basically followed a pattern I was stuck on for my last two releases. It was too much. So I cut/moved/rearranged the drums and bass into the structure you hear now. Short, simple, to the point. The track is now just a shade over two minutes.

    Once the editing was done, I added heavy guitars guitars to the choruses via  my Ibanez played through ToneLib GFX. Again, nice and simple. The final bit was some synths using SURGE XT presets. One of these was a preset that I tacked on to the back end of the verses as a goof but I wound up enjoying it so much that I figured out how to play on guitar to add as a double to the synth. The guitar double is not super obvious in the final mix, but if you listen carefully, it’s there.

    A more recent thing I fixed up was sound of the kick. It was lifeless. Hollow. Of course it was recorded using the old Intex kit I talked about here. I didn’t even try to EQ it into something. I just replaced it with a sample. Sometimes it’s the best and/or only option. I then added the snare, toms, and splash in the chorus using the SSD5 Free plugin played manually via a midi controller 2.

    The hi-hat, on the other hand, is the original I put down way back in 2020. Thankfully I’d direct mic’d it with a GLS ES-57 3. It was easy to compress and ratchet up the high end to give it that crisp, trap like buzz right where I wanted it to.

    The lyrics and vocals were the easiest of the three I recorded on the rented equipment.  I’d had vocal pattern nailed down and the lyrics about 90% complete since the early summer 4.

    Note: The artwork is a heavily edited stock photo by Pavlofox on Pixabay. The logo font is DymoFontInvers by Manfred Klein and [smartphone] by woodcutter Manero – both downloaded from FontFreak, my go to site for wacky fonts of all shapes and sizes.

    1: I chose the working title of “Cicada Hats” because of this stupid fucking video where Rick Beato whines about the sounds of the hi-hats in an Ariana Grande song and compares them to the sound cicadas make.

    2: I managed to snag a used M-Audio Oxygen 25 Third Gen from Kijiji for like twenty-five bucks.

    3: I did record overheads as well, but they were shitcanned even before I’d started to edit the song structure. They were really serving no real purpose at all.

    4: It all started when the “heaping dose of shit” line came to me one day during a company all-hands that was, well, not fun. It took me maybe a day and a half to come up with the rest. From there it was simply tweaking and editing in the name of cadence.

  • Warms My Heart

    I’ve been keeping an eye on site statistics lately mostly because I’m curious to see if anyone actually reads what I post here. Seems that there are people out there who drop in from time to time.

    The surprising thing I found was that the number one page on this here blog is Linux Tip #1: Max Amount of Locked Memory. It really warms my heart that there are people out there in this big, crazy world who are trying different things. That Max Amount post was me stitching together what I learned after spending half a day gathering information from a few different websites and putting it all in a simple to understand format in case I ever needed it again.

    At the end of the day, even though I moved back to the world of Windows, it warms my heart that other people are taking a run at making Linux work and I hope I’ve saved them even just a little bit of hassle :)