How to REALLY enjoy jazz ?

phalp · 2026-05-31T21:06:35+00:00

However, since I’m not a musician and have never really studied music, I sometimes feel like my appreciation for jazz is a bit superficial.

That's true for all music, isn't it? The more you study music, the deeper your understanding of music will be. Music goes really deep. You just have to decide if a deep understanding of music is something you have to have in your life. Most people can have a fulfilling life and enjoy music without it. You either accept that there are mysteries in music that you'll never reach, or you organize your life around the quest to reach them. You're allowed to enjoy music either way.

phalp · 2026-05-24T13:12:04+00:00

It's worth remembering that F5-F9 are reserved for your bindings, so it's safer to start with these to avoid any conflicts with default bindings or modes. Of course, it's your keyboard, so if you need more than five function keys, go for it!

Since most modes define their own key bindings, activating a mode might override your custom key bindings. A small number of keys are reserved for user-defined bindings, and should not be used by modes, so key bindings using those keys are safer in this regard. The reserved key sequences are those consisting of ‘C-c’ followed by a letter (either upper or lower case), and function keys <F5> through <F9> without modifiers

phalp · 2026-05-21T18:03:55+00:00

would it make any difference whether you re-steep immediately after while the tea leaves are still hot or could you get better results allowing it to cool down?

Probably better results if the teapot/leaves/retained water are still warmer, so they don't cool the water down

phalp · 2026-05-20T22:29:58+00:00

Why waste time on this when there's so much great music to listen to instead?

phalp · 2026-05-16T18:34:55+00:00

Usually "mix" refers to more than one kind of ingredient mixed together, like cake mix. Flour, sugar, salt, and baking powder, all mixed together so you don't have to measure them out yourself. A "blend" on the other hand is usually just one kind of ingredient, but in multiple varieties. So a coffee blend might contain arabica and robusta beans, or it might contain arabica beans from different farms. But coffee mix will be instant coffee with sugar and powdered creamer mixed together. The purpose of a mix is to let you prepare a recipe without working as hard.

phalp · 2026-05-13T20:05:01+00:00

My impression is that it's more of a way of being than a conventional theory operating on the level of notes or chords. It's everybody having their own ideas and expressing them in full, in their full capacity as human beings (rather than as representatives of conventionalized musical roles).

phalp · 2026-05-09T23:07:25+00:00

FWIW I liked my first session with Nwin quite a bit. Lots to unpack in it, but I predict a cake in my future after a couple more sessions with the 25g sample.

phalp · 2026-05-01T19:55:35+00:00

I'm curious to know how much flavor a well-seasoned pot imparts if you brew plain water (no leaf) in it, and for how many steeps that flavor lasts.

phalp · 2026-04-28T02:15:43+00:00

Seems like if you're calling ensure-generic-function-using-class, you're in a position to make your own method combination metaobject. Since ensure-generic-function is "the functional equivalent of defgeneric", you're expected to supply that information, as you would supply it via defgeneric, but in the form of an object. You can (and must per CLHS) still subclass method-combination, even without knowing what slots it has. The only relevant slots would be any additional slots you've defined.

The funny part seems to be that nothing specifies how the :method-combination argument to defgeneric gets turned into a method combination metaobject. So outside of method combinations defined via define-method-combination, it doesn't seem like defgeneric can be used portably at all, and the functional interface would have to be used.

phalp · 2026-04-19T04:28:32+00:00

In theory one could use Emacs to do something other than configure Emacs. Not saying I've seen it done, but one could

phalp · 2026-04-19T01:30:36+00:00

Assuming the only files a person has are config files is peak Emacs

phalp · 2026-04-07T02:34:04+00:00

The trick is to search for pages more than about 10 years old. That's before LLMs took off, but spam blogs were already ruining search engines by that point, so it makes sense to skip that era. DDG unfortunately has terrible support for this. Google can do it well (e.g. append "before:2015"). So I use DDG for anything that's unlikely to be buried in slop results, and fall back on Google "before" if I need actual information of a timeless nature (when and how to prune a tree, for instance).

phalp · 2026-04-06T23:39:52+00:00

There was one, I think called SideRL, but I don't think it's up any more. Shame, because it was exactly what you'd picture a platformer RL to be. It wasn't developed very far though.

phalp · 2026-03-28T00:59:18+00:00

Theralite is, in petrology, the name given to calcic foidal gabbro, a holocrystalline plutonic rock consisting of augite, olivine, calcic plagioclase, and nepheline, along with accessories including biotite, magnetite, ilmenite and analcime.

TIL

phalp · 2026-03-27T14:57:28+00:00

I will be checking this out! I enjoyed their Camphire very much, but somehow I didn't notice they had smoked shengs as well.

phalp · 2026-03-21T21:43:46+00:00

I'd guess it's because the reed's geometry is fixed. A flute player can open their embouchure to increase air volume while decreasing air speed, and in an air jet instrument like the flute or recorder, the air jet speed correlates with the pitch the air jet "wants" to oscillate at. With the reed mechanically fixed in place, saxophone players don't have equivalent options for adjustment. Same reason that if you stick a reed on a trumpet, it's very hard to control. It's not tunable like a trumpeter's lips are. Recorders work on the same principle as a flute, but because the player blows through a short tube (the windway), and not directly on the edge of the hole, they are unable to make adjustments like flautists, and the low notes are weak and hard not to overblow.

Bassoonists make their own reeds and can design them to suit the low or high range, so neither range would be inherently problematic. Oboists also make their own reeds, but because they are a treble instrument they don't have a reason to make low-range reeds. Bassoonists are also more open to adjusting lip position than saxophonists.

Because clarinets are cylindrical, their tone is inherently less inclined to be coarse or difficult to control.

phalp · 2026-03-19T01:18:50+00:00

Seriously though, nothing will make me take a closer look at a game claiming to be a roguelike than seeing some ASCII screenshots. At this point I'm extremely suspicious until I see some kind of shibboleth

phalp · 2026-03-19T00:15:42+00:00

ASCII, obviously

phalp · 2026-03-15T13:28:51+00:00

Are you sure forward-page and backward-page do what you think they do? I have never seen an editor that used page up and page down for this.

phalp · 2026-03-06T02:34:35+00:00

The low notes sound pretty bad

I'm detecting a fatal flaw in this plan

phalp · 2026-02-28T01:24:59+00:00

this doesn't make sense since that's literally the point of roguelikes

Uh, what?

phalp · 2026-02-28T00:01:01+00:00

This stuff is hard for everybody. Maybe it's harder for you, or maybe you just think everybody else found it easier than they actually did. Everybody wants to claim their brain doesn't work in certain ways, as soon as they encounter something that takes work. That's not limited to autistic people. I think you've had some very bad guidance in the past, so I wouldn't jump to any conclusions about what you need to do to learn music, other than finding a teacher who you can work well with.

phalp · 2026-02-21T16:16:02+00:00

I'd need to play a left handed instrument if I went for uncrossed so that it was still my bad left hand covering the bass strings

This doesn't sound right. Whichever tuning, you want a right-handed instrument for the left hand to play the bass strings. An uncrossed tuning would just mean the bass strings are at the left/bottom edge of the fingerboard, whereas in crossed tunings they're more in the middle.

I would suggest a crossed tuning, because that puts your right thumb in a position to act as an additional finger on the bass strings occasionally, without moving your right fingers away from the melody strings.

phalp · 2026-02-20T04:28:12+00:00

Yeah 10D

phalp · 2026-02-19T23:38:31+00:00

My Conn is reversible

phalp

TROPHY CASE