My 3 AM Thoughts Were Me Thinking About How My Country Fucked Itself By Leaving The EU (guess).

today in "google AI is fucking useless because it hallucinates things that never happened", i bought a couple CVS thermometers that have both been acting up, tried to search if there had been a problem with the whole product line:

there is no record of this product recall. it did not happen. the date "feb 8 2024" is the date someone listed a thermometer for sale on ebay.

Ocean

go to this random coordinates generator and say in the tags how you would fare if you were dropped where it generates without warning. i’ll go first i’d be dropped in the middle of the fucking south atlantic ocean and perish

I'm locked out of my house

I went to see a musical for the first time in a year and a half, and London really does seem to have forgotten the existence of ol' Rona. It's kind of surreal to see an entire train car of people ignoring signs plastered all over the carriage and station.

Anyway, went to see Six, and it was much pog, can reccomend.

spotify is raising prices again here's the apk that gives you premium for free

It's kinda been a brute force process for me. I still don't get every rhythm or pitch right, and I've been playing the piano for at least 14 years (unless you count what I did at 2 years old with no lessons as "playing piano", in which case 16). I also play guitar, but the process is similar.

As you do more playing, you'll find your brain automatically places notes correctly (I no longer have to think almost at all about notes within one ledger line of the main stave for either clef) which will help with playing rhythm, which should also be getting better with playing. You can also train rhythm specifically with exercises. This can be as simple as ignoring the pitch of a note and just playing/clapping rhythms, or you can use exercises you find online.

I did grades, and the progression of these can be very helpful. Not only does the gradual increase in the difficulty of pieces give a nice guided progression, but the exam board I use now, Trinity, has exercises at the back of each book, of which you must learn some (i think one from each category), and one category is rhythm. For my grade six, for example, one of them was all about 3:2 (three against two) polyrhythms, look them up to figure them out, or you can ask and I'll try to explain.

Overall, keep trying to have fun. Play things you enjoy, play things you think are weird or might be a good challenge, improvise, whatever. Just play stuff, it'll get easier.

HOW THE FUCK DO YOU READ MUSIC NOTES??? HOW????

My eyes have always been good so idk what I expected

How well do you see color?

I’m cry I scored 60, I feel blind

had a minor crisis when 12ft.io went down yesterday and thankfully it's back now but this seems like a good opportunity to compile a list of similar paywall-evading tools in case 12ft ever gets canned for real:

12ft.io: the legend himself. definitely my favorite of the bunch by virtue of being the easiest to use (and the easiest url to remember), but it's configured to disable paywall evasion for a handful of popular sites like the new york times, so you'll have to go elsewhere for those.

printfriendly: works great; never had any issues with removing paywalls, even on domains that don't work with 12ft.io. since this site is literally designed to make sites print-friendly, it might simplify the overall formatting of the page you're trying to access, which can be a good or bad thing. my only real issue is that the "element zapper" (which lets you remove content blocks from the print-friendly preview) is a little sensitive if you're browsing on a touchscreen device, which means you might accidentally delete a paragraph when you're just trying to scroll. but if that happens you can reload the page and it'll revert everything back to its original state.

fifteen feet: basically a 12ft clone, minus 12ft's restrictions. haven't used it much since I only discovered it yesterday in the wake of 12ft's 451 error but it seems to do the trick.

archive.today: an archival tool very similar to the wayback machine, but it also works as a de facto paywall removal tool. (the wayback machine seems to remove paywalls as well, but archive.today has better UX imo and is way faster to use.)

and an honorable mention for sci-hub: only works for scientific/academic journals, not random news articles, but the other sites listed above only work for random news articles and not academic publications so you gotta have this one in your toolbelt for full coverage. pubmed is your oyster.

Dog

That is all.

Bog Leaving time folks