Australian urban planning, public transport, politics, retrocomputing, and tech nerd. Recovering journo. Cat parent. Part-time miserable grump.

Cities for people, not cars! Tech for people, not investors!

  • 29 Posts
  • 21 Comments
Joined 2 years ago
Cake day: November 5th, 2022
  • AJ Sadauskas@aus.socialOPtoPopHeads@poptalk.scrubbles.tech•The new Alessia Cara single "Dead Man" is finally out today, and it officially slaps!
    1·
    3 months ago

    @NovaPrime @popheads There’s some more details about Alessia Cara’s forthcoming album in an interview she recently did with People Magazine.

    It will lean into her '50s and '60s soul influences. Also, a guest appearance from John Mayer on one of the tracks:

    "On Friday, July 19, Cara released “Dead Man,” the lead single to her soon-to-come fourth studio album with production from Mike Elizondo. It’s a song she describes as a “jam” with a jazzy touch, an in-your-face horn section and the feeling of “all the music that I loved growing up.” There’s splashes of her favorite material from the ‘50s and ‘60s, a “little bit” of 2000s, and it of course features Cara’s distinct , always-commanding vocals.

    …

    " The album itself, which Cara has yet to reveal the title of, is set to arrive in the fall. She says it’s not a jazz album by any means, but rather “feels like a collection of all the things that I love." And she loves a lot of music. Over the last few years, she’s tapped into some music from the ‘60s and ‘70s, African funk, bossa nova, and primarily what she described as material created in “eras before my time” — the Lijadu Sisters, Billy Joel and some old Red Hot Chili Peppers records.

    "Recorded between late 2021 and the top of 2024, Cara’s new album process started “very slow,” when she was ‘in a little bit of a rut lyrically and conceptually’.

    "‘I wrongfully felt like I said everything that I needed to say, and I was just stuck on what to say. I was actually in a good place, and I don’t really tend to write well when I’m in a good place because you don’t really need to vent when you’re happy, I guess. So I was like, ‘What do I do? I’ve never been a writer from this perspective.’ So I had to readjust my mindset and readjust the way that I approached songwriting, which is kind of a fun exercise and a fun challenge because you have to, I don’t know, put yourself in a different position or exercise a different muscle that you don’t typically exercise,’ she says.

    …

    “During one song in particular that’s yet to be released, Cara features a minute-long John Mayer guitar solo, something she calls ‘one of the coolest things I’ve been able to make happen in my life.’”

    https://people.com/alessia-cara-interview-dead-man-single-exclusive-8680099

  • AJ Sadauskas@aus.socialtoFediverse@lemmy.ml•Federated Blogging Platforms
    6·
    4 months ago

    @sabreW4K3 Plume doesn’t appear to be active, unfortunately 🥺

    There’s a notice on the official Join Plume website saying the former developers don’t have the time to maintain it anymore. Most of the former public instances now throw up errors of various kinds.

    WriteFreely ( @writefreely ) is alive and well. I was seriously toying with the idea of setting up a blog through its main instance, which is called Write.as Professional. The sticking point for me was that the official on-platform monetisation tool (Coil) appears to be dead, and doesn’t support members-only posts (like Ghost).

    Ghost, when federation goes live, looks like it will be the best option for my blog.

    WordPress plus @pfefferle 's plugins is another great option, depending on what you want to use it for. (There’s no shortage of WP plugins!)

    As for Lemmy, I could see a blogging-focussed front end being created for it, in the same way FediBB put a traditional message board front end on it, but one doesn’t appear to exist at present.

  • AJ Sadauskas@aus.socialOPtoGreen - An environmentalist community @lemmy.ml•General rule of thumb: Low gross emissions are better than net zero or net negative emissions.
    62·
    6 months ago

    @zerakith To be clear here, I am talking primarily here about corporate or organisational level here.

    By net versus gross, I mean the difference between continuing to pollute, but “offsetting” that pollution, versus getting their gross pollution as close to zero as possible.

    There’s many orgs and businesses out there claiming to have a plan to reach, or have reached, net zero (or net negative).

    And in many cases, what they’re talking about is basically their direct emissions (scope one) and offsite energy (scope two). Not their supply chain (scope three).

    And what they really mean is that they’ll continue to pollute, and just buy the cheapest carbon offsets available. In many cases, those cheapest available offsets are of dubious value.

    That all sounds great in a press release.

    But what’s a lot better is to continually measure and reduce gross emissions across scope one, two, and three, getting them as low as possible.

    At a global system-wide level, I would argue we would be in a far better position if we had more businesses, organisations, and governments looking to achieve gross zero than net zero.

  • AJ Sadauskas@aus.socialtoFediverse@lemmy.ml•Pixelfed introduces Loops, a Short-Form Video App
    1·
    7 months ago

    @thegiddystitcher @helenslunch I think hashtag feeds being overrun with vertical videos is an excellent point. (One I hope @dansup considers!)

    But beyond that, I think vertical videos through Loops on the Fedi are likely to be far less obtrusive than they have been on other platforms.

    What’s so annoying about them on Instagram and YouTube is that the algorithm automatically drops vertical videos into my feed.

    And there’s *lots* of them in my feed, often on topics I’m not interested in.

    They’re not there because I’m interested, but because they serve the commercial interests of the social media app’s owners.

    Hashtags aside, on the Fedi, they’ll only appear in your feed if you follow a Loops account you’re interested in, or someone you follow finds one interesting enough to share.

    And if people on your Mastodon server all find them really annoying, there’s always the option to just block the Loops servers and be done with it.