Poor Fanty has been in the wars, she’s just passed her 3rd cativersary with us, and needed dental work in 2022, and now is no longer in possession of any teeth after a further visit 🙁
Her last check had warned ominously of this, but “if she seems OK and is eating that’s probably OK”, but then she’d started drooling a lot, and had got smelly breath.
A visit to the vet confirmed all was not well and she was booked in for the next day, and we were at first upset to learn she was now toothless, but the return home changed our minds: she’s clearly happier and brighter and is eating normally. Poor Fanty: 6 is young to be toothless (Mr Catface reached 16-17), but it was clearly very uncomfortable for her.
I’ve wittered on before now about the Loudness Wars and I’ve repeatedly whined about a couple of albums in particular: Hard-Fi’s Stars of CCTV and Metallica’s Death Magnetic for being particularly poor examples of how to ruin an album which could have been excellent my wringing the life out of it.
Both recordings were deliberately compressed: we’re not talking about bitrate compression like MP3 here, but dynamic range compression. This squeezes the quiet and the loud bits of the music together, making the overall sound louder (because there’s less quiet), but in doing so it robs the sound of some of the, well, dynamics. This makes things sound lifeless, and taken to extremes (like Death Magnetic) means that before whatever distortion your equipment adds, the sound is already distorted because it is clipping (hitting the maximum range of the recording or playback equipment).
Listen to Stars of CCTV and the drums sound lifeless and flat. At least they had the excuse of being musicians, not engineers or producers, and not having a ton of cash, while Metallica just did it for the lolz, making a CD that I have only listened to once because it’s painful.
There are valid reasons why dynamic range might be compressed- sometimes, like with TV adverts, it’s deliberate to make the advert (or song) stand out. Sometimes it’s to tailor sound for the expected playback device or audience: a cheap radio literally cannot cope with a high dynamic range as the quiet bits will disappear and the loud bits distort: hence chart pop music is often heavily compressed to fit commercial radio and Alexa and so it doesn’t disappear against it’s competitors.
The good news is that the worst abuses of this have gone, with the peak being around the launch of Stars of CCTV in 2005. There’s been a bit of a backlash, though that hasn’t made Metallica release an un-fucked Death Magnetic, apart from the version in Guitar Hero, but it’s such a shame to deliberately compromise recordings so badly.
As I’m continually behind the curve, I don’t use Spotify, but I do mostly play music from my rPi player or phone these days (in fact, it seems I’ve been using that rPi player for 10 years now, with a few changes).
An upshot of this is that a proportion of my listening gets logged at last.fm, and that is linked to Musicbrainz, which means that you can all see what I’ve listened to. It’s not my full listening: my phone isn’t logging, nor is the car stereo, but the Cantata clients on my work and personal laptops do, so this will be skewed towards work-time listening.
Graphic from Musicbrainz showing my listening for 2024
The data can be misleading as this is the first full year of data.
My top track of the year was Nightwish’s Sleepwalker, a track that was a Finnish Eurovision entry (though I prefer the “heavy version” from Bless The Child.
My top tracks of 2024: clearly I’ve listened to Sleep Token a lot.
Top artist was Nightwish: it’s serene enough to work to but not dull.
My top artists of 2024
By comparison, here’s specifically what I’ve listened to on my phone:
I’ve wittered on here before about consumer VPNs and why if you’re using one for security. you’re deluded.
There’s only two legitimate use cases for a consumer VPN:
* Disguising your geographic location for reasons such as watching TV services in a different country
* Hiding your traffic from your ISP or government
The important point about hiding your traffic, perhaps because you distrust your ISP, is that you then have to trust the VPN provider. At some point the traffic that is encrypted at your PC had to be decrypted, and that point is your VPN provider’s exit point. Do you know they’re not snooping?
Come to that, are you sure they’re not using your home connection, flogging it to all and sundry?
Here’s the thing: TLS (what a https:// website uses) is already encrypted and is strong enough for anything you’re doing anyway. Don’t fall for the bullshit.
Another end of year summary post started early, edited at the time. It’s now 21 years of this rubbish!
As I’m starting this we’re approaching Christmas 2024, and I’m not feeling festive yet.
2024 has been another year I’ll be glad to see the back of overall, but let’s try to remain objective, eh?
So far (hurriedly crosses fingers and hopes to not need any edits) 2024 saw one human death, zero feline in extended family, one death of a greatly valued family friend (kind of sad to attend a funeral of a friend of your parents as the sole direct relative), and a couple of far-too-close calls.
Health issues persist, both for us and for family members and at least one very dear friend. You know who you are, should you read this. I suppose some of this is to be expected as we age, but it seems a disproportionate amount of friends and family are really quite ill.
It has been a stressful, tiring year for us both and for people around us, and I definitely haven’t been dealing with some of that as well as I could. Once again, I need to reflect and see that at least most of us are still here, we have a home, an income, and cats. There’s always cats.
My work, while sometimes very tedious, is overall, pretty good. If i could just eradicate Citrix from the planet, eh?
The country? It’s still fucked, but maybe a little less fucked. The Starmer government isn’t ideal, in many ways, but at least there’s a vague air of competence there (just about), and instead of a load of culture war bollocks, they’re actually governing, even if they could be so much better, by comparison, it’s sheer brilliance.
I’ve come to recognise that my warnings are not being heeded, so 2025? *sigh*. Just do whatever.
Song choice will be Tristania’s Requiem.
Now a second silence
Peace restored
If you lose the battle
Win the war
It’s Christmas Eve. I’m sitting listening to From Spirits and Ghosts (Score for a Dark Christmas), the turkey is in the fridge, having been collected before 8am when things were still quiet. I have green tea and a lapcat is gently purring. My better half is out at a prior engagement but will be home soon. I’ve called in on one branch of family.
I’m finally feeling a little festive. We know where Muppet Christmas Carol is.
We did our winter sun thing again, and again, like last time going wasn’t a certainty, but go we did, with a hefty additional sum to the travel insurance people and some help from assisted travel- more of that soon.
The journey out was delayed at take-off and featured an aborted landing attempt, but eventually we found ourselves at our hotel in Playa Blanca.
We’ve visited the resort twice before (well, in fact my better half has been one more time on top of that), so it was quite familiar stuff, even if negotiating the Marina’s nooks and crannies is challenging in the dark. Still, we found food and drink.
Of the assisted travel: my mobility isn’t great and hasn’t been for some time, and last year was very hard work at security at BHX, even using the express lane. My other half has recently had health issues too, and the recent security changes, best described as “a shitshow”, meant that we asked for help.
In practice this worked well enough, but like everything else at BHX, had an air of disorganisation, chaos, and “this is too complex”. Honestly- just how does BHX manage to be this shit? Areciffe airport was maybe a little chaotic, but by comparison, worked like a well-oiled machine.
Anyway, back to Playa Blanca.
We found cats. No great challenge, and between the tourists and the locals that know the tourists, the cats are cared for: the seafront area features multiple cat houses/feeding stations.
One of us cuddled a kitten, that’s how used to people the cats are:
Mary cradling a kitten in her arms
There’s not just cats, of course. An impressive promenade, bars, restaurants, shops if that’s your thing.
We walked a little, slooowly, and much less that in 2008 (and a bit less than 2019, I think). One of us chose to go flying behind a boat (clue: that wasn’t me), we swam a bit.
I don’t often do open-source software stuff here these days, but it’s worth noting that the best email client (and one that works nicely cross-platform on Android, Linux, and Windows) has reached 20 years old: I think I’ve been using it most of that time., and as well as being as being good to use day-to-day, its flexibility makes it a valuable tool in my line of work.
Nightwish’s latest, Yesterwynde, finally landed on my doormat yesterday, a rare delay from Amazon.
I still buy CDs, and while I sometimes stream music (if working and not working at home, mainly), I still like physical media the best, and I’ll reluctantly buy digital downloads, but I like having media, so while the release was last Friday, I had to wait, like the sad old Gen-Xer I am.
Paradoxically, the first thing that happened was the CD went into the computer to get ripped. FLACs for home and phone, MP3s for the car, but if I fuck up my music again, even if Google Drive fails me, I have media, and if my chosen music falls foul of a streaming licence, I still have it.
As is the way these days, the album has been heavily teased on Youtube, which led me to pre-order back in April.
The album itself? Well, if certain people hear it they’ll shake their head and say how I rubbish prog, because despite the symphonic metal base it’s, well, proggy. It’s concept album territory here, even though there’s a couple of tracks that stand out as singles (like Perfume of the Timeless). This shouldn’t be a surprise given previous work- the album is stated to form a trilogy with Endless Forms Most Beautiful and Human||Nature.
Smooth, polished production, Floor Jansen’s vocals- not as operatic as earlier Nightwish with Tarja, not as outwardly rocky as Annette Olzon, but magnificent. You’re not going to have to be as keen as I am on symphonic metal to like this.
This time, it wasn’t Sovereign Harbour, as back 17 years ago we could walk more, so being out of town wasn’t an issue, but this time we wanted more facilities.
So, the Old Town was the place, on a busy bus route, with a park, cafes, pubs, and a huge Waitrose within our much reduced walking distance.
Recent events that I’m not going in to here and now meant we’d considered not going, but it was paid for, our wonderful nibling was lined up to cat and house sit, and at the end of the day, it was in the UK and I was driving, so we were in control, so off it was for the delights of the M6T, M42, M40 with a brief pitstop for a slash and a sandwich, M25, M23, A23, A27, encountering the outskirts of Brighton.
So, with about a 4hr 30min journey time (M25 LOLs!) we arrive, and unusually don’t hit the pub straight away, leaving that for the next day. Just Eat to the rescue (and a superb but pricey curry)!
The next day saw us wander to Gildredge Park, dodging the rain in a cafe, and later excellent food at The Lamb Inn.
Weather overall was a bit changeable and cooler than we might have hoped, but we did get sun in Eastbourne itself, in Bexhill, and in Brighton, where we rode the i360, and I got asked to zip my coat over the “Sample it, loop it, fuck it and eat it” T shirt 🙄 “because there’s kids about”.
The remains of Brighton’s West Pier: Not much left now. At the foot of the i360.
This holiday made a contrast to last year’s trip to Southwold: less sunshine, a lot less expenditure, even given this was the south coast. More facilities: all those things my soft,metropolitan elite ass whinged about Southwold lacking existed easily, the taxis, multiple buses, takeaways, wide range of restaurants and supermarket all existed, and made life easier. The cashless transactions abounded- all buses took them, and the De la Warr Pavillion expressed no preference over cash or card for £2.50: Brighton Palace Pier were actively promoting taking cashless admission charges by card (it’s £1!), and generally, cash was the less popular choice.
The one tech fail was Uber, which had poor availability, but even if you had to call a taxi like some Neanderthal, you didn’t need cash to pay, even if I actually did use cash for that- probably the only cash transaction all week.
This made for an easier time for food, drink and getting about, even with the car staying parked all week and the limited walking range and general tiredness, which was nice.
Return journey saw more M25 fun, with a brief (as brief as possible) pistop at Beaconsfield Services once the M25 was dispensed with, and nearly 5 hours, not including that stop…
