For the second time of this Autumn/Winter season, we are starting to fall into sickness [pun!]. Barbara was the first to go after a week or so of having sniffles. Kaz and I are getting hit about the same time.
The first usual harbinger that announces I am getting ill is that certain smell/taste that my sinuses get. I don’t know how else to describe it but to say it is something like stale turpentine plus a kind of organic earthiness. Like a cup of black tea left out for a couple of days in a rainy pine forest. Can you picture that smell?
The second harbinger is a bit grosser. Not lose your lunch gross but I’ll be kind and obfuscate it: q mgX o XPu5B 1OVX OC igVI 1O3V 1KgoX. bPusB “CgigV 1KgoX.” qX 1POK1 3H Bust OC VostOfUI ost u1 VosB XO fg. q’ig oHOUOmuxgt FgCOVg oFO3X uX XO HgOHUg F3X OXPgV1 Poig XOUt fg XPgI 5os’X 1fgUU uX. bPg Fg1X q 5os m3g11 u1 XPoX uX 5Posmg1 XPg 313oU 15gsX gsO3mP XPoX fI FOtI XoBg1 uX o1 1OfgOsg gU1g’1 1fgUU ost uX XVummgV1 o Vgi3U1uOs.
The third harbinger is when my bones feel like that weird disorientation that your brain gets when you feel deja vu. Know what I am talking about, like your brain is in a hole slightly too large for it but yet your brain fills it? That, only it also slightly hurts.
Usually fourth harbinger is just getting sick and by then we are pushing the definition of an harbinger pretty hard. If the fourth sign that God is showing up is He is standing next to you, you are perhaps past Revelations.
I’m somewhere between #2 and #3. The last sickness that passed through the house, my body decided to fight it off long enough for me to build up a huge viral load and then I got knocked around with bonus dice.
Here’s hoping my body just compromises this time. Just get it over with. Don’t be a hero, body.
Music Stuff (at least, part of it)
I was actually going to talk about some of the new music and stuff I was doing today but in typing that it up, I realized it was really its own post. I’ve cut-and-pasted into a different post and will work on that one tomorrow.
The tl;dr is basically that I am back to getting physical CDs where I can and have been playing on ripping those to both AAC and FLAC formats. FLAC goes to my file server for longer-term storage. AAC I then keep on the computer and upload to my media server. Also copy over to my phone. I miss OGGs but enough players whine about having to touch them. Feck it, maybe I’ll just switch back, anyhow.
While doing this, I ran into the ghost of an old problem I had practically forgotten all about. Back deep in my Linux days {which I miss}, mplayer was my boy for playing music. Then, as I started using more devices, I gravitated to VLC for most of it since it was more compatible with more things.
Only VLC still has issues with gapless playback despite years [decades?] of people requesting it. For a lot of things, such as shuffling your playlist, it won’t matter. For some albums where each track is supposed to blend the next track, it starts to annoy having that quarter second reset.
The long and short of it is that I decided to give foobar2000 a spin. My very short “have played it for around 2-3 hour” review is: it works. It’ll take longer before I know for sure if it is for me but I don’t really see why not.
I guess that exposes a lot more of my musical tastes than I was planning on but I doubt anything is a shock.
Quick Review of the Two Albums Shown
Two of the four “test cases” for the workflow of backing up things are shown in the active playlist: alt-J’s 2022 The Dream and Ado’s 2024 Shinzou. The other two albums were Paul Simon’s Graceland since that’s one I’ve ripped a couple of times (first into ogg, later back into mp3) so it was a good baseline and Babymetal’s Metal Galaxy (I got their Metal Forth, recently, and really liked it so am moving back through their catalog).
The two I have played the most are the two shown, a couple of times each. My quick reviews are…
Ado’s Shinzou
Absolutely phenomenal album. The concert video is also top notch and immense fun to watch, but has enough flashing lights to make it a bit rough for me to watch in a single setting. The double CD that came with it has the audio-only portion and there are so many moment’s to love. The screaming her voice to the brink and then bringing it back down.
It’s hard to explain how entertaining she makes a concert designed around not showing the star, but here’s a sample (just keep in mind that whole “flashing” thing I was talking about):
alt-J’s The Dream
I have enjoyed playing this album but something I noticed on the second round through is that there doesn’t feel like a single song that really reaches out and punches me. The album feels more like a whole, a sustained mood that satisfies the “alt-J vibe,” but one where the whole fits more into the background of the day. Looking into it, there does seem to be singles from the album but even listening to them out of context feels kind of off.
A good album to space out into the liminal.
Also, the limited edition comes with a cool facsimile copy of the handwritten notes leading up to it.
Credits
“Forest Tea” is Photo by Олег Мороз on Unsplash.
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