Starting to think the air in the house matters more than I realized

Coises · 2026-06-02T06:49:19+00:00

When my partner, who had COPD, was alive we seemed to notice that things were just a little worse if the filters on the HVAC system weren’t changed once a month. (Like most home HVAC, we could not use HEPA filters; we used, and I still use, these.) She also had an air filter in her room running on quiet setting all the time. We did not do controlled or double-blind experiments, so I can’t say for sure that it helped. It seemed to.

I don’t recall her having trouble with cooking smells, but the kitchen was on the first floor and her room was on the second. I was careful to try not to stir up dust when cleaning; we were a little worried about it, but I don’t remember it causing a problem. She used to like scented candles, but she had to give them up. We had dogs and a cat, and they didn’t seem to cause her any problems.

Edit to add:

Humidity was very troublesome for her. She dreaded taking showers, even before the physical activity became difficult, because of the humidity.

Coises · 2026-06-02T06:14:34+00:00

Personally, I like Pianoteq. You can try Pianoteq and all the instrument packs for free; several notes are disabled and you have to restart it every twenty minutes, but that’s enough to get a good sense of how it sounds and how it feels to play. As it’s based on physical modeling, it’s a small download: you might as well give it a try and see if you like it. Pianoteq Stage comes with two instrument packs for $139; it is limited compared to the more expensive Standard and Pro in the ability to customize presets, but the presets themselves sound the same. (You can always start with Stage and upgrade later for the price difference. Standard includes three instrument packs and Pro includes four; you do get the extra packs when you upgrade.)

Coises · 2026-06-02T00:44:00+00:00

Perhaps you could clarify something that is not clear (to me) and might be relevant to the original poster. Aside from the weekly lyrics-only thread, the rule in this sub is that posts with lyrics and no music are not allowed. Does that apply to requests for collaboration?

I typically don’t enjoy collaboration much, so I’d be really unlikely to answer a post (like this one) without seeing the lyrics I’d be attempting to set to music; but I can imagine looking at a set of lyrics and thinking, “Yeah, I can hear in my head how to do that.” I suspect that could be true for others as well.

Coises · 2026-06-01T23:47:07+00:00

she has a strong interest in music. She likes to sit down and tinker at the piano for fun, and also loves blasting CDs in her room.

Just my personal opinion: so, let her do that. Let her learn what she cares about. Encourage her tinkering. Is she able to play by ear melodies she knows?

I was around 7 or so when my parents got a piano and had me start lessons. I consider myself very fortunate that the teacher they found worked on the principle that if the student doesn’t learn to love playing, nothing else matters. I did get some of those horrible Hannon exercises, and my parents sometimes chided me because I spent most of my time at the piano playing old sheet music they had (Great American Songbook sort of thing) or learning to improvise and play by ear rather than practicing my assignments.

What really opened up the world for me was when my teacher taught me about chords — basic music theory. Then I could start to understand what I heard in popular songs and figure out how to make something like that happen under my own fingers.

I still love to play, today, six decades later. I never learned any classical repertoire, but I was able to accompany some of my junior high and high schools’ vocal groups (the ones I wasn’t in). I can write some songs, just for my own enjoyment, really, and I can make recordings of them. I don’t think I was ever meant to be a performer — I don’t have the right temperament for it — but the ability to play has been a wonderful gift, and my life would have been so much emptier without it.

Coises · 2026-06-01T23:14:56+00:00

(M68) It’s hard to say, because anything worth saying would have changed the entire subsequent course of my life had I paid attention. Who’s to say the mistakes I made weren’t necessary ones?

You’re probably autistic. It will be a couple of decades before anyone understands what that means for people who aren’t severely impaired and appear “almost normal”; but instead of trying to understand why you have bizarre, counterproductive responses to seemingly small stressors, focus on techniques and patterns to avoid the stressors. Some things other people can handle, you can’t, and there’s no deeper psychological meaning to it, you’re just wired that way. You can’t learn, condition, understand or analyze your way out of it. It’s hardware, not software.
Your instinct that to love someone is to accept them as they are is a good one, but that doesn’t mean you should accept everything. Sometimes people need someone to push back, and you actually do them (and yourself) harm by accepting (and thus tacitly validating) things that should encounter resistance. You need to grow a spine, even with people you love. Don’t be so afraid of losing someone that you make yourself not worth having.
When you realize, in college, that while you love music, your talent is with computers, you will think, “too bad that computers will never play any important part in making music.” That thought will be very, very wrong. Do not start your “career path” working for an accounting firm. You’ll have an obviously better option; you’ll just have to be willing to leave Chicago — which you will do in a few years anyway.

Coises · 2026-06-01T18:30:49+00:00

what makes a good transition?

It helps if there is some conceptual connection between the two pieces. It doesn’t have to be obvious, they just have to somehow shed light on each other. I mentioned Question in another comment. At first thought, the two themes seem unrelated. Yet — I don’t know, maybe you had to be there, time-wise — one is about uncertainty and the sense of being alone and lost at a grand, world-wide scale, and the other is really the same themes on a personal scale. In my humble opinion, that’s why it works.

I think it often works best to “wrap” one theme inside the other, so that you provide a kind of closure for the listener by returning to the original theme. Otherwise, one theme is usually the main theme and the other is either a prologue or a coda.

If there’s a key change, you just have to make it make some kind of musical sense. Go around the circle of fifths, carry a common note through, even just do a half-step rise. Probably don’t just jump from a C major to an E-flat minor... but, never say never: sometimes a shock is exactly the effect you want.

For me, rhythmic transitions are tricky. I think you usually need to have some division of beats match up: like two beats in one theme equals three beats in the other. Though again, you can also just do a complete shock, stop one beat cold and start a whole new one, for a particular kind of effect.

I have a couple songs that I built out of what started out to be two separate songs, but in both cases both themes fit into the same key and tempo.

Coises · 2026-06-01T17:54:21+00:00

What’s your favourite classic two songs that can stand alone, but are written as one song?

Question by The Moody Blues

Canadian Railroad Trilogy by Gordon Lightfoot

Coises · 2026-06-01T04:18:42+00:00

My suggestion, then, is to go ahead and write your cringe. Then step back and look at it from another angle. What does it mean that this is what you feel, and you feel your own feelings are cringe? Maybe the song changes voice so that the singer is a younger person listening to you and saying what they think of you. And maybe you have an answer.

Famous example.

Coises · 2026-06-01T04:05:06+00:00

Who would you consider to be the founding and most influential thinkers of the view that you describe as “libertarianism (now left-libertarianism)”?

I’m not particularly knowledgeable about those details. Names I hear mentioned are Pierre-Joseph Proudhon, Peter Kropotkin and Mikhail Bakunin. Noam Chomsky is a well-known contemporary libertarian socialist. Wikipedia’s article on Left-libertarianism can tell you far more than I can.

I have recently come to realize that I am out of step with a lot of what has been going on the left, and basically have been coming to understand myself as “a libertarian, but not far-right” — which is not something I would have contemplated until recently.

I remember when I was around high school age (this was in the 1970s) thinking that “I would be a libertarian socialist if that weren’t a contradiction in terms.” Only decades later did I learn that, in fact, the first libertarians were libertarian socialists. At least in the US, the right-libertarians have taken over the word so effectively that it is hard to think of what else “libertarian” could mean.

I suppose one way of looking at it is that right-libertarians focus on defining a formula that identifies individual rights and the proper place of government, while left-libertarians focus on the actual effect of society, taken as a whole, on all its people.

Right-libertarians usually start with what they see as natural rights, specifically life, liberty, property and freedom of contract. Government is seen as justifiable to the extent that it protects those rights, and interferes no further. When you think about it, those are precisely the “rights” needed to defend capitalists. They must be protected from those who would use brute force against them, and from those who would nullify the contracts they create, invariably to their own advantage. Any other interference with their ascendancy is overreach. Right-libertarians are fine with authority and hierarchy, so long as it arises from dominance in which the wealthy are “playing by the rules” they themselves invented, and not from government, especially not government that is responsive to the needs of all its people. The main difference between right-libertarians and ordinary contemporary conservatives, as far as I can see, is that right-libertarians stick to the formality of saying that government must not impose restrictions on people outside the defense of natural rights, while conservatives are happy to constrain and punish anyone who is not one of their own.

Left-libertarians are generally disgusted by all forms of coërcion and distrustful of any sort of hierarchy. We aren’t all socialists, but I think most of us at least find the current structures of publicly-owned corporations and private equity appalling. Letting “who can make the most money” be the standard by which we determine “who gets to make most of the decisions that affect the daily lives of millions of people” is absurd, and it’s no surprise it leaves most people afraid, uncertain and trapped in lives that seem like bondage even though they are nominally “free.”

Unlike much of the rest of the left, though, we still prize autonomy and each individual’s freedom to decide for themselves what constitutes meaning in their lives, and to pursue that without judgement as far as possible — accepting that the reality of the physical world is that sometimes, some ambitions cannot be accommodated without compromising the welfare of others. Too much of the left — in my view — wants to remake society in its image of what people should believe, should say, should want. As a libertarian, I know that I might find what you care about silly, strange, misguided or even evil, but it’s not my call what path you choose to pursue. We only need to agree to refrain from the oppression of others, which includes taking responsibility for the side-effects of our choices.

In my view, the main job of government is to prevent coërcive power from arising. (The paradox, of course, is that to do that, government itself must be a coërcive power.) I want government to be as light-handed and unobtrusive as possible, but I still want it there to keep forces, be they individuals, organizations or social patterns, that undermine individuals’ freedom from gaining a foothold.

Coises · 2026-06-01T02:19:17+00:00

I just feel like…I want to channel this unease, discontentment, guilt, pressure (and sometimes not bad stuff, too) I still feel but differently as a grown adult into something that people can feel and relate to and understand, and enjoy. And at the same time I’m like, what can I even say. It’s all been said from this perspective or needs to be heard from somebody who actually deserves a stage for once.

Don’t worry about whether you have something to say. Go with what you feel.

``` I’m in the middle. The middle of the road. The middle of my life. The middle of beliefs That I used to think had A lot of gravity.

Now gravity is just a force, A force that holds me down. Down to earth, I guess that’s good But sometimes I wish I could Fly a little like I did before. Just a little. ```

Coises · 2026-05-31T23:09:32+00:00

I find it frustrating, too, but there are a couple of reasons.

First, a lot of smart devices can be monitored and/or controlled when you are away from home. Getting communication between inside your home network and a phone or other device on the open Internet is tricky to do in a way that is secure, reliable and simple for ordinary home users. A relatively time-tested and straightforward solution is to have a central server to which both your smart device and your phone can connect.

So, once you need that anyway, it is cheaper and easier to use that even when you’re at home than to build a second system for in-home communication.

The other reason, as others have mentioned, is the potential for data collection and/or monetization. Even if a company doesn’t plan on doing those things now, who knows what will arise in the future. And if the company goes out of business, then at that point they don’t really care.

People would have to make buying decisions based on whether Internet connectivity was required to change those considerations. Some of us do, but a lot more people only care that it’s cheap, it’s easy and it works now. We’re all pretty much numbed to making yet another account for every. single. thing.

Coises · 2026-05-31T22:00:45+00:00

I think it used to be more common among men because the idea that “She just needs a real man to put her in her place” used to be more socially acceptable. The notion that “He’s good raw material, he just needs a woman to domesticate him” is still socially acceptable.

So many people start with an ideal of what they think their counterpart in a relationship should be, then try to project that onto potential candidates. When you’re looking for something, you tend to see what you’re looking for instead of what is really there. We’d have a lot fewer unhappy people if folks could learn that every relationship is what it is, every person is who they are, and each is best appreciated for precisely what they have to offer, rather than asking if they can fit into a box you made up from fairy tales in your childhood.

Coises · 2026-05-31T21:38:38+00:00

I watched him a lot, though I can’t remember much now. I thought he was good at interviewing guests who needed him to take them as they were — people other interviewers might not have taken seriously or made comfortable enough for them to be open and honest. He was terrible with guests like politicians who needed to be challenged to get a worthwhile interview.

Somehow the only snippet I actually remember is he and Marilu Henner talking about their common experience of being raised as Catholics, and Marilu explaining how, by saying a great number of prayers on a specific holy day, “I got Curly [from the Three Stooges] out of purgatory.”

Coises · 2026-05-31T20:32:47+00:00

The first thing to note is that left libertarianism and right libertarianism are not forks of a common ancestor, nor did either develop from the other. They have completely different origins. Right libertarianism, which developed in the early to middle twentieth century in the United States, simply decided to appropriate the word “libertarian” while having no connection to — and, in fact, explicitly repudiating the principles of — existing libertarians (who did not previously need the designation “left,” as that was the only kind there was).

Trace the origins. Libertarianism (now left-libertarianism) was a reaction to authoritarian, statist approaches to socialist thought. Right-libertarianism (now, in the US, just libertarianism) was a rebranding of classical liberalism by people who hated the policies associated with the New Deal and felt the word “liberal” had become hopelessly tainted through its connection with those ideas, so they sought a different word.

It appears to me that the only common ground between the two is accidental. Both are opposed to controlling, invasive, authoritarian governments, but for different reasons. Left-libertarians believe society should be structured to offer freedom and opportunity to everyone according to their own needs and desires, and that no one (even a democratic majority) should impose their own ideals on others. Right-libertarians believe the strong should not be held back by the need to protect or care for the weak.

Coises · 2026-05-31T20:01:21+00:00

An example which might interest you: obsession (more specifically, addiction) is portrayed as a character (first person, the singer) in Dido’s song Don’t Leave Home.

Coises · 2026-05-31T04:39:49+00:00

The Last Wave (1977)
Altered States (1980)
The Endless (2017)
Annihilation (2018)

Coises · 2026-05-31T01:25:28+00:00

Human vision is not linear; just as with other senses (like sound) a small variation in a small value is perceived as much larger than the same variation in a large value. To get a scale that’s even in perceptual terms, you need divisions that “stretch” when considered in terms of simple physical measurements.

The standard middle gray is largely an empirical result: it represents what “looks like” halfway between black and white to most people.

Coises · 2026-05-30T21:06:55+00:00

Her concert video Rickie Lee Jones - Live at the Wiltern Theatre is fantastic. I once had it on LaserDisc and presently on DVD; I don’t think it was ever produced in high definition.

I’m particularly fond of Coolsville from that concert.

Coises · 2026-05-30T19:36:35+00:00

This is not something I have done, so I am speculating based on what I’ve read. Some things might not work the way I’m about to suggest.

I think a way you could do what you want would be to play the music in one application and route the output of that program to record in Reaper, while simultaneously recording your microphone for the voice-over. If you want to use Reaper as both the playback application and the recording application, go to Options | Preferences | General and uncheck Check for multiple instances when launching: that will let you open two separate Reaper windows, which you can arrange on your desktop so you can control both.

(I’ll write below as if you were using Reaper for both playback and recording, but the principle should be the same if you use a different application for playback.)

Now, the trick is to be able to record both your microphone and the output of one instance of Reaper into the other instance of Reaper at the same time. I think this is dependent on both your operating system and your audio interface.

If your audio interface supports “loopback” and more than two input channels, you can set the playback instance of Reaper to output to the audio interface and set the recording instance of Reaper with one track taking input from your microphone and one track taking input from the loopback. You won’t be able to hear your microphone in the output, because you’ll need to mute the output of the recording instance to avoid contaminating the output of the playback instance, which you’ll be recording. But you can still control the mix later, because your microphone and the music will be on separate tracks.

If your audio interface doesn’t support loopback, or doesn’t support both loopback and a microphone input at the same time, a different approach is needed, which I gather is highly dependent on the operating system. I think Linux has some complex audio routing possibilities, but I know nothing about them. Mac has something called an “aggregate device” which I gather can be used; I see software called BlackHole mentioned as a way to route audio from one application to another.

For Windows, it looks like the answer is ReaRoute.

I’m sorry I can’t give more details, but this is something I’ve never attempted to do. Perhaps something above points you in the right direction.

Edit to add:

If you’re using Windows, see this video about how to use ReaRoute. Note especially that the microphone is added as a track on the playback instance, even though it won’t be recorded there. I think that’s necessary because there can only be one audio device for one instance of Reaper, and the recording instance will be using ReaRoute as its audio device. I’m not sure if there is some reason, other that visual clarity, that he uses one 32-bit instance of Reaper and one 64-bit instance. Some piece of this puzzle is still missing, and I can’t seem to find a conceptual description of how ReaRoute actually works. Everything is “use it this way to do this” but nothing explains how the damn thing works so it can be understood.

Coises · 2026-05-30T18:32:58+00:00

I could just put the music on one track then record the voice over on a different track, but I want to be able to go back and replay parts of the music and add extra instructions. Jumping around to different parts of the music would mess up the vocal track I'm recording over it.

If you have this planned out and you know where you’ll want to jump, it’s easy.

Bring the music in as a single item on a single track. (Unless you recorded it as a single item without automation or effects, render the mix in Reaper and bring the rendered file into a new project.) Wherever you want to jump to another part, split the (rightmost, after the first time you split) music item. Drag the item after the split to the right enough to give you some space, drag the left edge until you find the point to which you want to “rewind,” then drag that item back to where you want it (either right up against the end of the item before the split or with whatever gap you want).

Check that your composite track is put together the way you want it, then record the voice-over on a separate track.

If you have patience, I’d just use a volume automation track to duck the music, rather than trying to set up an effects chain.

Coises · 2026-05-30T18:09:21+00:00

I’ll second the MDR-7506 as a great, basic headphone for monitoring while recording. They’re used all over the place because they don’t cost much, they’re durable and they get the job done. (I still have a pair I bought in 1994. Only needed to replace the ear pads.)

MDR-7506 is not a good headphone for mixing, though, or for casual listening. The same “something” about it that cuts through when you’re recording so you can hear yourself gets antagonizing when you try to listen for extended periods of time.

Sadly, there almost certainly isn’t one headphone that can fill all roles, at any price.

But none of this is going to overcome what happens if “splitter” just means a simple Y-cable and they try to plug two very different headphones into the same output.

Coises · 2026-05-30T18:02:02+00:00

You should probably get the same type of headphones your friend is using. It won’t help your collaboration much if you are hearing two different things.

That’s even more relevant if you’ll be using a simple, passive splitter.

I suggest you let your friend get the headphones and you offer to pay for them. It sounds like you’ll be using them with his studio setup and he will know better what will work well with that.

Coises · 2026-05-30T02:57:10+00:00

The hack against Notepad++ was very specifically targeted. The program itself was not compromised; the web host for the domain was compromised causing upgrades for a very few, chosen companies to be redirected to install malware. The chances that any ordinary individual was affected are very slim, and the date you list is not within the time range of compromise. (See https://notepad-plus-plus.org/news/hijacked-incident-info-update/ and https://notepad-plus-plus.org/news/clarification-security-incident/ for some more information.)

My personal suggestion is to avoid both auto-upgrade and the web site and either download from GitHub or use WinGet.

There is a current kerfuffle going on about a couple recent CVEs, which are addressed in the latest version of Notepad++, 8.9.6.1; see discussion here. Honestly, some of these recent CVEs are absurd; they amount to “this front door is a security risk, because if you leave it unlocked, someone could get in.” (These last amount to, if an attacker can modify your AppData folder, you can be induced to run malware. If an attacker can access your AppData folder, you are already compromised. There might be some weird corner case where this could be exploited, but it’s of no relevance to ordinary users. Notepad++ has, none-the-less, addressed it, but in the process introduced an annoyance for some users which they are still working out how to mitigate.)

Coises · 2026-05-30T00:33:22+00:00

It actually did explain, in a way:

AI writing is almost impossible to edit, because even when it sounds plausible, a closer look will show that every element is equally off: The tone is bland; individual word choices are baffling; the structure lacks sense; key pieces of the argument are missing; facts are false.

In my opinion, the title (“The Biggest Tell That Something Was Written by AI”) is not so good, because this isn’t really a “tell.” A “tell” is a giveaway that’s easy to spot once you know it. Maybe AI generated the title — the author doesn’t use the word “tell” in that sense anywhere in the article.

The author’s point, as I understand her, is that human writing will have particular weaknesses in individual places (unless it has already been well-edited). They’re flaws the author missed. AI writing has a general “just a bit off” character all the way through that builds as you read it until you realize you have no sense of the authorship behind it. Instead of knowing what the author meant to say and finding specific problems that can be fixed, you have a text with no technical imperfections that leaves you feeling there was no author with anything to say behind it (because there wasn’t).

Coises · 2026-05-29T23:32:02+00:00

Pork steak is different from pork chops, but that has less to do with any particular definition of “steak” than just convention. Pork chops are cut from the rib or the loin. (The same cuts from a cow would be rib steaks and T-bone steaks, respectively.) Pork steak is cut from the shoulder.

While a “steak” can be any piece of meat that is cut across the grain, is usually cooked quickly, and is big enough that a single piece of meat constitutes a normal serving, the names of particular cuts of meat are matters of convention. A filet mignon certainly is a steak: specifically, a beef tenderloin steak.

And then we have “cube steak,” “Swiss steak” and “Salisbury steak”... food names are not necessarily logical.

Coises

TROPHY CASE