M. Orange

Because now they can’t increase the prices anyway and get better profit margins.

And yeah I really do think…

This is amazing!

I would like to write more, but I just woke up, so brain no worky.

I don’t know why everyone’s all doom and gloom right now. Yes, this is a massive issue, but they’re not even federating right off the bat, just allowing accounts to be imported. Who’s to say Threads will even take off? While they may take a bunch of new users, I can’t see a ton of people currently using Fedi services switching to Facebook (I refuse to call them Meta).

Yes, we need to be on our guards, but don’t forfeit the battle before it even begins.

7digital is a pretty good DRM-free digital music store, and they even have lossless music. They don’t have everything, but their catalog is pretty huge.

Admittedly you would have to be pretty rich to buy all the music you want to listen to, but if you have an Android phone, I’m pretty sure there are apps you can use to stream from YouTube Music or Spotify without a subscription.

Personally, I’m poor and lazy, so I just stick with Apple Music. Anything they don’t have, I just upload to my library.

At first, I was like “okay, delaying it two years just to release it the exact same way you were planning”, but it actually makes a weird sort of sense to me. Most people in their general user base won’t be blitzed with big news about comparisons because the two companies are no longer doing it at the same time. Making a comparison years after the fact won’t generate as much outrage. Out of sight, out of mind essentially.

I like Lemiverse. It’s a lot more searchable than Lemur and reminds me of the space theme of Infinity with the lil guy in the flying saucer.

k.

A good dry cider (or at least something with no added sugar to it…).

Alternatively, I love a good dry white wine, specifically a Sauvignon Blanc/Fume Blanc. Definitely more of a white than red person, though I do enjoy a nice spicy or jammy red (South American, especially).

Muskrat would never take a train; he’s taking a private jet.

And it’s not a loss of control, it’s called a “controlled flight into terrain”.

Not an album I own on vinyl, but I do have it on CD somewhere…

The song is “Ondo no Funauta” (音戸の舟唄; trans. “Ondo Boat Song”), a fishing song from Hiroshima as sung by pop singer Hitomi Shimatani (島谷ひとみ). It appeared on her album Sign Music.

TL;DR: Japanese pop singer who started off as a folk singer returns to her folk roots and it’s very very pretty.

Context

She’s had a very long career on one of Japan’s largest labels, avex trax. After winning a nationwide singing contest as a high schooler in 1997, she got a recording contract with avex as an enka singer (think blues mixed with Japanese folk; this is important for later), but quickly pivoted to pop when that first single didn’t even chart. She released several popular albums and singles (one of which, “Amairo no Kami no Otome” (亜麻色の髪の乙女; trans. “The Girl with the Flaxen Hair”), became a huge hit and a Japanese karaoke staple), but eventually fell into relative obscurity as pop singers over the age of 30 tend to do.

She released various cover albums and “mom pop” songs from 2008 to 2013, an era that culminated in 2012 with the release of Sign Music: an album of nursery rhymes and folk songs produced by Jazztronik, a fairly prominent electronic jazz producer. Despite his pedigree, the album had no electronics and very little in the way of jazz. It was also quite baffling for the three international fans she had left, including me. Regardless, the nursery rhyme recordings are very musically interesting, and the folk song recordings are quite well-done.

The Song

The above-linked song immediately captured my attention when I heard it. It actually was hard to find when the album first came out because it was a bonus track on the CD-Only version of the album (Japan often had (has?) multiple versions of albums with varying numbers of DVDs attached), which was weirdly more rare than the CD+DVD version. It starts with her voice alone for the first line, after which a jazzy piano accompaniment comes in.

I was transfixed because, 13 years after she released her first and last enka single, she whips out a traditional singing style that you would only hear in enka or true Japanese folk music. She stays delicate throughout the whole song, and definitely keeps an inflection somewhere between a pop song and lullaby, but the beautiful melisma and wide vibrato are full display. It feels at once calming, nostalgic, and bittersweet, and hasn’t left my mind since. It was really my immediate thought when I saw this thread.

pls enjoy and sorry for writing so much

“They don’t really work for Amazon because we just fired them!”

(i know that’s not what the article says, but that was just my first thought)

If I remember correctly, it specifically never goes on sale.

It seems that this study was conducted for NT people (I would hope they controlled for attentional issues), so I kinda get that. It would make a lot more sense tho to compare - caffeine, Adderall, and placebo.

Side note, as someone with ADHD, Adderall is the fucking devil. It makes me jittery and bitchy, and it was only formulated so Shire could have something to sell under a patent after the Dexedrine patent ran out. I wish it would go away.

I mean… that’s on you, then. Historically, that’s not how the Fediverse has worked, and it likely will continue to not work that way. Things could always change, considering the Twitter exodus and now the Reddit exodus, but the way most Fediverse services are set up seems to encourage smaller communities rather than large, centralized ones. Plus, if you have centralized ones, what happens if admins go rogue? What if the servers go down? What if, what if, what if? With decentralization, you avoid so many issues that come with having those large, centralized instances. Of course, there are downsides, but if you want something centralized, maybe try something like Tildes?

The thing about a ham, it’s got lifeless eyes, black eyes, like a doll’s eyes. When it comes at you it doesn’t seem to be livin’… until she bites you, and those black eyes roll over white.

In all seriousness, she cute. Is that an all wood enclosure??

a stronger form of mute

Yeah, Muskrat. You know what that’s called? BLOCKING.

Honestly, I appreciate the protests, but this whole kerfuffle got me to realize how much I… don’t like reddit anymore? There are certain communities that I’ll stick around for (shoutout to /r/BravoRealHousewives), but I’ve already set up an RSS server for news and I’m probably going to unsub from a LOT of the more general ones. Too many bots, too much negativity, etc.