Alex @compucat@im-in.space

Hmm, bored and sleepy at 1am, what to do...

*tosses a ball of yarn at @netkitty*

Travelogue (guess the game): another day on this blasted planet complete. After expanding the oil processing facility, I was able to get the plastic and sulfur needed to create chemical-science packs. As of tonight, the lab complex is back in full swing.

I was even able to use my rocketry knowledge to build a handheld missile factory. Not quite big enough to get me home, but at least it's enough to keep those doggone critters at bay. (My helmet still reeks of acid, bleugh.)

Paraphrased: "Here's how to make a constant in C++:
const int FUN=5;
and you'll notice I made it all uppercase because that's how you define a constant"

>.< um, no? It's canonical and tradition, but the C compiler doesn't care about capitalization

It's funny to think that I still call myself a recording musician.

I hardly ever record myself now - that's been one of the pitfalls of daily-driving Linux. I can't run Ableton Live. I have a solution that involves netjack and a Windows 10 KVM virtual machine...but I end up troubleshooting more than musicmaking...

Oh yeah - and on-the-fly technique switching! I ended up:
- composing a new bassline based around picked bass
- arranging versions of that with pure fingerstyle and fingers+thumbstrumming
- finding out that my Jazz bass' bridge pickup has the perfect gap to hold a pick
- practicing on-the-fly technique switching whenever I dropped a pick :)

Always good to know how you can achieve the same sound (or a good stand-in) when your main technique fails. (Dropped pick, tired fingers...)

So I heard Ariana Masters' "Summertime" (https://youtu.be/uma9Qr5Ob-A?t=2045) a lil' while back and thought "this could use a little more dynamic bass than it has..."

I've unintentionally discovered that it's actually a great song to practice different techniques on :) I've been mostly a fingerstyle bassist before now, but this has been an excuse to practice good left-hand muting, which enables some wacky right-hand work using either a pick or a kinda double-thumb tech borrowed from slap bass.

In the repair shop today, someone recycled a decently powerful HP laptop for some reason. It works, mostly - just a bad battery. Before I had the chance to start refurbishing it, though, my coworker Kevin began bouncing parts off it into the e-waste bin to its left. Thus, today it was christened `backboard` :)

Fun fact: my buildserver/public dev VM that's shared with a few friends is named after someone I met in uni orientation. She needed a server environment to run some OpenCV stuff in...and never used their VM I set up for her. Ah well, hopefully she got it running locally.

So yeah, thanks Elsa! ~

ooo, looking slick!

Let's say I scroll through a feed of friendlier cws.
"I took a selfo in a tree today."
"Life's livid parts."
"This might turn out delicious..."

In "content-warning" style, which IMO tends to make the feed feel like a minefield rather than something pleasurable to read:
"cw: selfie, ec"
"cw: mh (-)"
"cw: food, meat"

I'm obviously blowing things out of proportion a bit, but fedi's more fun when it doesn't feel like every toot has a giant "STAY AWAY" warning on it. :)

Of course, the flipside is poor machine-readability. For that, fedi needs a proper solution. Tumblr actually had a good solution with blacklisting tags.

On fedi platforms, at their core, content warnings are no different than adding a topic/title to a post, or a subject line to an e-mail. Thus, I've found that writing content warnings as succinct, descriptive, casual-glance-friendly titles is much more elegant than writing in ominous "content-warning" style.

For example, this toot might've been "cw: cws, meta." Really, it's not a warning: it's a friendly description of what's inside, should you want to read it.