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I'm currently reading Mood Machine: The Rise of Spotify and the Costs of the Perfect Playlist by Liz Pelly. It's been an interesting read so far talking about how so many bands and artists live and die by inclusion or exclusion from Spotify's generated playlists. How inclusion can be a boon to an artist, but for smaller or independent artists, there's so much going against them in streaming between the big labels putting their thumb on the scale or Spotify going with "ghost artists" to save on royalties. So that's why I'm asking for recommendations.

I'm a .NET developer who outside of work, seldom uses Windows. My primary machine has been a MacBook Pro for around twenty years. I've lately been slowly migrating to Linux, but that's also not Windows. Now that Microsoft made .NET cross-platform, it's great, I can develop on MacOS, Linux, Windows, whatever I want. It's great for everyone in my opinion. The one thing that hasn't been made cross platform is SQL Server and SQL Server Management Studio (SSMS).

One of, if not my favorite movie is Apollo 13, a 1995 blockbuster film telling the story of what was supposed to be NASA's third mission to land on the moon, but turned into a heroic effort to bring the three astronauts home after an explosion aboard the spacecraft. Needless to say, I'm kind of a space nerd following along with what NASA has done with the Space Shuttle, the International Space Station (ISS), its various missions around the solar system, and more. Artemis II is preparing to launch. This is the first manned mission of the Artemis program, and they're going to the moon. They won't be landing, but this is kind of a big mission. Yet, for some strange reason I just haven't been as excited about it as I would've expected.

I mentioned in my latest week note that I got my iPod Classic back up and running. Sadly, the battery seems to be having a hard time keeping a charge.

It's been a month. The first half of the month was frigid, we got some warmer weather mixed in along with several significant snowfalls. Tess loved the snow, but I'm glad to have some milder weather coming.

There's a lot of talk going on around AI and how it's things become faster and easier to create and build. Now instead of spending the countless hours at the keyboard typing out the next great American novel, you can open up ChatGPT. Digital art more your thing? Don't worry it can do that too, and if you're lucky, any humans will have 5 fingers. It's depressing, really. So much AI slop is now out there, everyone is trying to sift through all the junk to find the real stuff, the stuff we want to read, want to look at, want to admire. And none of this even begins to factor in the environmental costs to all of it. Well I have one thing to say to everyone grumbling about that, keep doing your thing, keep creating.

If you go to my bookshelf, movies, TV, or video game pages, you'll notice I'll use a five star rating system. I thought I'd share what I generally mean when I use each rating to make it a little more understandable.

My laptop is a 2020 13" M1 MacBook Pro. The thing is 6 years old, but it's still running great. I have no intention of replacing it anytime soon if I can help it. Lately though, looking at Apple and Tim Cook cozying up to Donald Trump, combined with how well Linux Mint has been running on my desktop, my stretch of Apple laptops might be coming to an end.

I know there's been some pushes to VS Code, Zed, Cursor and others, but for so many projects I work on, I've been sticking with the tried and true, Sublime Text. It's fast, it's light-weight, and it's still my go-to 14 years later.

Substack has a Nazi problem. Though I'd say their actual problem is that they're okay with that. Because of this, my policy has always been that if you have a Substack, I'm not subscribing to it. Not on a paid tier, not on a free tier. It hasn't always stopped me from reading the occasional post or sharing one. I am now changing that policy.

The other day, Discord announced it was going to require a face scan or ID in order to continue using it as an adult. This is only another domino in a line of dominos that have already fallen.

A little while back I was perusing a Reddit thread where someone was trying to figure out the best lifting routine for themselves. They were relatively new to lifting and were going back and forth with others trying to determine the optimum routine. As someone who has bounced around a bit with lifting routines, my primary advice is this: just start lifting. The advice is good for exercise, and can also be good for a lot of other things in life.