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Cake day: July 3rd, 2024

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  • In thousands of songs, I’ve never noticed Picard doing anything to the length of the files. I tend to manually review every album by running it through Picard and letting it handle the renaming and tagging. That structure used to be Artist/Year Album/Song. I’ve been less strict about naming the songs themselves. It’s always at least track - Title, but sometimes Artist - Album - Disc # - is prepended. Eventually I ran into a situation where I had multiple versions of a release/album with different enough content to warrant keeping both, so now I throw a release ID number (if is exists) after the album name, and inside brackets, for the directory name.

    It’s a very flat structure by design, so I’m never quibbling about where I sourced something or what particular genre it is when I’m looking for it. That dramatically reduces the likelihood of duplicates too. Real metadata is better left to tags, since that’s mostly what any player will see anyway.

    If I’m having trouble getting Picard to recognize something it always because: musicbrainz.org is missing the release, doesn’t have acoustic ID, or Picard preferred the album track when I’m trying to rename and tag a single or EP. Adding the release info and acoustic ID to musicbrainz is easy and I can usually use the info before the release is even reviewed, but often in trying to add the release I’ll find the correct one and now I can help fill out the data about it.

    I treat musicbrainz.org as MY metadata database. If a release is missing or has problems, I do the work to make it better. It’s good digital citizenship and learning about their rules for releases helps me manage my server better.







  • Meditation (for a lot of people) is an exercise in learning that even doing nothing is active. Doing nothing is still doing. Rest is an important part of being productive. Rest is not a waste of time, so you don’t need to feel guilty over it. These are all lessons that the brain can understand on its face immediately, but the body requires reinforcement and practice.

    And if stillness is a problem you struggle with, walking meditation or meditation through movement can be a more approachable way to get started. There are lots of ways to meditate, find the ones that work for you. Meditation isn’t a cure all, but it does have wide ranging impacts and it doesn’t hurt to try it.





  • The absolute best are rainy days without lightning in a place with some nature and privacy. I feel like dancing naked in the rain and being able to come back in to a dry house, a towel to dry yourself, a good book, and a hot tea, is a very rare experience these days. Thunderstorms are great too when you have safe shelter. But dancing naked in a thunderstorm feels a bit like tempting fate too much, which is thrilling too in a way but also I’ve got creatures inside depending on me staying safe.


  • There is a whole podcast series about Lugosi and other movies of this era, You Must Remember This. I’m not sure if this specific detail is covered explicitly. But my impression (and very hazy memory) leads me to believe that it may be a situation where Lugosi was cast because he looked like the expectation of a vampire from the other movie, but then Lugosi performed better and caught the public’s attention better. Kind of like Hydrox vs. Oreos. Hydrox was first to market, but ultimately lost to the copycat. To be fair to Lugosi, he still added several other elements of style we now consider essential to the quintessential vampire character. He just happened to naturally have a widows peak and authentic “old world exotic accent” (he barely spoke English when he got his start in Hollywood), which gave him an advantage.

    EDIT: I should clarify that Karina Longworth’s podcast, You Must Remember This, is about WAY more than Bela. That was just a short series within that podcast. It’s a great listen is you have any interest in film history or long form non-fiction podcasts in general.