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Siderea ([personal profile] siderea) wrote2026-03-19 12:46 am
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Benn Jordan plays the stock market [econ, tech, dataviz, music]

Just hit play.

(All about the sound, but visuals also nice.)

2026 Mar 18: Benn Jordan [BennJordan YT]: "I'm here to disrupt the finance synthesizer scene."

siderea: (Default)
Siderea ([personal profile] siderea) wrote2026-03-19 12:36 am
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Grok, explain Butlerian Jihad [ai]

Screenshot of two comments on X.  One says, "Reading Dune.  Frank Herbert was cooking." and shows a section of a photo of a book page reading, "'Once, men turned their thinking over to machines in the hope that this would set them free.  But that only permitted other men with machines to enslave them.' '"Thou shalt not make a machine in the likeness of a man's mind,"' Paul quoted."  Below that someone replied, paging Grok, X's resident AI, "please explain this post and the quote in in, what should I understand about it?"

Debate is raging on BSky if this is deliberate wit or accidental idiocy.

(h/t user mlyp.bsky.social)
zarla: smilin parasect (8))
Zarla ([personal profile] zarla) wrote2026-03-15 03:29 am
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~GoodBYE, Columbo

A few things going on lately!

I sent out the next Vargas chapter to be beta'd so it's happening!! Depends on when I hear back from her and how long I decide to fret about it before I post it, haha. It always feels like such an event to me! It's nice to get the ball rolling on it though.

I went back and fixed the broken images in the giant sketchposts at least, although posts with individual images are still broken. I figured the giant posts would be the ones people would most likely be looking at, haha. Relive the memories! Or not! I can't tell you what to do!

In terms of my cool music page, I added two more cassettes I found! One called "Radio Picks 92" which really only has a handful of songs and, mysteriously, Silent Lucidity like four times in a row?? If it was me who recorded it I don't know what I was thinking. The other one is "Special tape for car only" which despite its name just has very normal music on it. BACK BEFORE MY TASTE IN MUSIC BECAME TERRIBLE BEYOND BELIEF
If I decide to do any more tapes maybe I should set up a second page, it seems long with just the four on it already! Or maybe my resolution is just too small.

On a related note, there is now also an ipod on that shelf! You can click it to get to a new page for my car playlist, which is like 1300+ songs long at current. No downloads or links for that one because christ but I have been working on a youtube mirror of the playlist, although I'm only like 900 songs through it. You can get a taste of it though!

Setting up the ipod to flip open on hover was really annoying, I ended up trying like a few different methods and running into weird roadblocks before I got it doing what I wanted. Tough to get it to stay in place too! Getting a good shot of the ipod itself I could use was also annoying, I went through like three different versions of it open/closed before I decided on this one. It looks so realistic on the shelf!

I also made some Teeny Tower rooms!



One for Horses because that's so inappropriate lol. I need to make a post about that at some point. I love how the little horses came out, cute and creepy at the same time, poor things. Had a hard time thinking of a background but then I figured I could work with the whole silent film/theater symbolism it has going through it.



BRAINLESS RAAANDYYYYY there is SO MUCH fog in the Illbleed cutscenes I swear



Hornet and Shakra are girlfriiieeenddsss god, everything in Hollow Knight/Silksong is so ornate and intricate, it was murder to try and get it all down into such a small space. I based it off of my bellhome in Silksong so I have all the relics in there and everything, haha. Very hard to get a sense of metallic surfaces on a small scale!



Something reminded me or made me think of how a lot of Undertale environments would make for good little rooms, so I went with Asgore's throne room first. He looks so cute!! Cutest tiny Asgore! The window was a pain to try and shrink down. It's interesting seeing this one set against all the others since it has dark outlines, which very few of my other rooms have. Really emphasizes how simplistic Undertale's art style is...



And the brothers' room! Well really it's all about the Mettaton TV, haha. Mettaton on every channel! He's gotta be doing something! I spent way too much time on all those little segments. I could still add one for the news if I felt ambitious...



And as a complete tonal shift, that one scene from Hereditary. If you've seen it you know! I wonder how recognizable it will be to people when it's so tiny? It was a lot of fun to recreate this, trying to balance the right amount of darkness in the doorway so you're not sure if you see something.

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mark: A photo of Mark kneeling on top of the Taal Volcano in the Philippines. It was a long hike. (Default)
Mark Smith ([staff profile] mark) wrote in [site community profile] dw_maintenance2026-03-14 01:04 pm

Performing some traffic maintenance today

Happy Saturday!

I'm going to be doing a little maintenance today. It will likely cause a tiny interruption of service (specifically for www.dreamwidth.org) on the order of 2-3 minutes while some settings propagate. If you're on a journal page, that should still work throughout!

If it doesn't work, the rollback plan is pretty quick, I'm just toggling a setting on how traffic gets to the site. I'll update this post if something goes wrong, but don't anticipate any interruption to be longer than 10 minutes even in a rollback situation.

zarla: newspaper article about eiffel 65 (eiffel65wooo)
Zarla ([personal profile] zarla) wrote2026-03-10 07:42 am
Entry tags:

~Because five ate nine! Wait

I got a little USB Cassette converter to digitize some of my old tapes! As such I went and digitized the two tapes I could find, Randomousity 5 and 8. I had a whole series but these are the only ones on hand! I'm not sure many I made of them. :O The rips are pretty good quality, it's mostly the tapes themselves that have gotten damaged over the years. Sometimes the audio gets kind of rough or fades in and out, but mostly it's pretty clear! It always gets rough when each side stops and starts. But maybe some of you are into that kind of thing. |D

As such, they're on the site now! I added a third shelf for them on the index since they needed the space. :B They lead to the same page though. Notably for the spine/cases, I took some photos of my actual tapes! Well, one tape and one case, the others were all in pretty bad shape or had a bunch of drawings or track listings on them.

Case in point )

They look a bit more realistic as a result than the others but still. |D I think they're neat. I figured a horizontal pile would be a fun contrast to the vertical CDs. You can download the tapes on the site itself! Should I link to them in this entry too...? Well, I can do the tracklisting anyway, haha. A lot of these songs show up in later CDs, I've had them for a long time.

Randomousity 5 went...

SIDE A
The Cynic Project - Matrix ]|[
Bamble B - Crime of Passion (Main Mix)
Bjork - I've Seen It All
Rhexx - Yellowstone
Massive Attack - Everywhen
Ben Folds - The Ascent of Stan
Blind Melon - No Rain
System of a Down - The Metro
Nine Inch Nails - The Perfect Drug
Kittie - Brackish
Cirque du Soleil - Jeux d'enfants
--
SIDE B
Cirque du Soleil - Jeux d'enfants
Zilch - Into Heaven
Hiro feat. Sweet Little 30's - Heaven is a '57 Metallic Gray (GimMIX)
Final Offset - Twin Bee -Generation X-
Mr. T - xenon
tiger YAMATO - r3
Becky and Pokemon Kids - Soratobu Pokemon Kids
Ben Folds - Carrying Cathy
Ben Folds - Zak and Sara
VA - Always (DJ Tatana remix)
The Swan Princess - This Is My Idea
Matt Wilson - Real Folked Up (Cowboy Bebop Remix)
Within Temptation - Mother Earth
Heino - Die Schwarze Barbara

This tape was odd since it started on a down note and then went up, which was the opposite of how I usually did it.

Randomousity 8 went...

SIDE A
Dr. Reanimator - Move Your Dead Bones
Haiducii vs O-Zone & Gabry Ponte - Dragostea Din Tei RMX
Gigi D'Agostino - The Riddle
Ministry of Sound - Deepest Blue - Deepest Blue
J.B.O. - Hey, Pippi Langstrumpf
Dance Nation - Have Yourself a Merry Little Christmas
Sonny and Cher - Gypsies, Tramps, and Thieves
The Pirates of Penzance - I am the Very Model of a Modern Major General
Tom Lehrer - The Elements Song
Randy Newman - I Love L.A.
The Magnetic Fields - All My Little Words
The Magnetic Fields - I Wish I Had an Evil TWin
The 6ths - Dead Only Quickly
The 6ths - San Diego Zoo
--
SIDE B
The 6ths - San Diego Zoo
The 6ths - Give Me Back My Dreams
Ryan Cabrera - On The Way Down
The Exies - Ugly
Yoko Kanno - Butterfly
Conjure One - Center of the Sun
Vast - My TV and You
explode 16 - thunderstorm
Lord of the Rings - Into the West
Spacekats - Land of the Rising Sun
Spacekats - Mellow
Crispy - Bubble Dancer
Crispy - The Game
Crush - Jellyhead

The label on the tape was so damaged I could barely read it! The tape itself played fine, mostly, although it definitely has some rough bits. I remember listening to this a lot while writing Vargas back in the day, and of course I was visualizing Move Your Dead Bones to it, hehe. This might have been one of the last ones I ever made, it's hard to remember now. I found tapes for the DDR 5th and 6th megamixes, but you could probably find those anywhere in much better quality so I didn't transfer them.
(zaaaarrr you can find all these tracks anywhere in much better quality, why did you do thiiissSs)

It was satisfying to handle the tape transferrer, it feels just like an old Walkman. Very nostalgic to flip it open, slide a tape in, click the thick buttons, hear it whirring in there. I used my Walkman so much back in the day! It was more durable than a Discman and tapes didn't skip if you banged them around, haha. I used it way after everyone had switched over to Discmans, which was foreshadowing for how I keep using things way after everyone else has left. STILL POSTING HERE AND UPDATING MY PERSONAL SITE, AFTER ALL THIS TIME

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zarla: duster playing the bass (dustertamekichi<3)
Zarla ([personal profile] zarla) wrote2026-03-09 07:36 am
Entry tags:

~The rhythm has my soul!

FINALLY MADE A SONG PAGE ON MY SITE

I've had a mental image of what I wanted to do for a while but I just wasn't sure where to start on it. It just seemed like it'd be so complicated! What did I want it to look like exactly, all these fiddly details... finally I just decided to get in there with a general wood pattern (like my desk) and just try and figure something out. Once the ball got rolling the rest started coming along! It took me a long time to finish though. I think it really looks cool, haha.

I went through my LJ looking for posts I made about CDs here and there to copy em over, so now I've got back-up copies in case something happens! Always a good idea, especially with ones like the Lady or Vargas FSTs that got absurdly long write-ups. In the process of looking around I found out I'd written up posts for some VGmix CDs and DoD ones that I had no memory of. I didn't have any convenient cover art made for them, so instead I just decided to go the simple route and set up a blank CD-R in a case and then wrote the name on it using a ClipStudio pen, haha. It looks surprisingly realistic! It's like I took a picture of the CD! I ended up putting the other covers in the cd case with some weathering/age effects too so they'd all match. You can see the clean versions of the covers on their own individual pages.

A tricky thing is that for a while I was posting individual songs from 100 song chunks from my main Winamp playlist where all my music has gone for decades now (currently at 41119 songs). There are a lot of them but I don't know how I'd convey that on the shelf! I have a big ipod playlist for my car as well, and I GUESS I could put an ipod on the shelf but I don't know...

In the meantime, I got curious about whether or not there are USB converters for cassette tapes and there are! I ordered one and we'll see if it works. Maybe I can dig up some REALLY old mixtapes for you lol. I mean, assuming anyone downloads or listens to any of these... if nothing else it's nice to have them in an easy place where I can get them if I need them.

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jonw: Red die (random)
jonw ([personal profile] jonw) wrote2026-03-07 05:47 pm

Daily musings 20260307 *

  • for unusual definitions of “daily”

It’s definitely Spring here now. There are full-on plants blooming and I’ve been able to sit outside for about 3 hours now and not get cold.

We arrived on the island in May last year and the weather has been amazing ever since. Now we’re getting into the preview to how it got that way. The first year in any new place is interesting because you have no background knowledge to pin your expectations on. But you can still compare; for perspective, my motorcycle would be in storage for another month on the east coast. Here I’ve ridden several times this year already.

Spring also brings the time switch to many regions. My province has decided to join those regions that don’t bother with it and today is the last time we’ll do it. We’ll be in “Pacific time” eternally.

It sounds like a small thing. Who really cares deep down inside if we do or do not do the time changes? Yes, there’s always some people wagging about evidence of this or that, but the recording of time is a human construct that has zero connection to the universe.

Where it does matter is where we don’t see it. Payroll systems, the unending plethora of time servers on the internet, stock transactions, and a shit ton of stuff I don’t even know exists rely very heavily on knowing the time very f*ing explicitly to not screw up.

Obviously we can deal with this on the tech front. Time and date math in programming has been a constant teaching example in college and university computer science courses since time immemorial (yes, I see it). But just because we can deal with it doesn’t make it any less interesting to me. That’s why I’m a geek.

On the Freemason side of things, I saw a brother do his “prove up” on the 2nd degree. That is what we call it when a brother proves to us that he has learned the lessons of the degree and is ready to progress to the next.

I’ve seen many prove ups in my time, but not in this jurisdiction. It was different and longer than I was used to, but still familiar. He did great which means he is going to proceed to the fabled Master Mason degree.