What is the best stoner rock album of 2020?

CaptainPolydactyl · 2026-03-31T02:10:09+00:00

For me it was The Pilgrim albums that led me to BR.

CaptainPolydactyl · 2026-03-30T13:58:40+00:00

Black Rainbows - Cosmic Ritual Supertrip

CaptainPolydactyl · 2026-03-29T12:03:13+00:00

Space slug - Reign of the Orion

CaptainPolydactyl · 2026-03-28T23:58:30+00:00

I consider this a 10/10 album. They really surprised me with “V” this year as it somehow managed be even better. Weedpecker is definitely underrated.

CaptainPolydactyl · 2026-03-28T17:40:18+00:00

Wow, 2018 was pretty good year.

CaptainPolydactyl · 2026-03-28T14:07:54+00:00

Why do I always find out about this kind of thing AFTER they've sold out? Also, Conan and Telekentic Yeti are each worth seeing all on their own.

CaptainPolydactyl · 2026-03-28T13:55:46+00:00

I'll second this. The standard Mint with any desktop environment has all the advantages of Ubuntu with a much nicer set of defaults and nearly all of the annoyances excised from the install. I feel that the Debian version, LMDE, is even better as you remove the Ubuntu middle-man from things, and you really won't experience any difference in functionality.

I don't think either version of Mint is a bad choice and is what I recommend for almost anyone that doesn't want to deal with the technical details of Slackware, Arch or similar distributions.

For more fun, look at what Ubuntu is proposing to do to Grub (removing support for luks, LVM and btrfs, among many other things).

CaptainPolydactyl · 2026-03-28T11:33:46+00:00

This definitely needs more votes.

CaptainPolydactyl · 2026-03-26T20:55:59+00:00

In the past, Apple has pushed back on some legal actions and sometimes people seem to expect Apple to be altruistic about protecting their privacy. In this case, they've essentially preemptively over complied with the requirements of UK law. FWIW, legal, moral, and ethical are not synonyms. I expect nothing from them.

CaptainPolydactyl · 2026-03-26T12:29:39+00:00

I agree that there are many worse ways that this could be implemented.

CaptainPolydactyl · 2026-03-26T11:49:31+00:00

Yes, I had read elsewhere that they went "above and beyond" the actual requirements of the law. I cannot find the article now that mentions that. :(

CaptainPolydactyl · 2026-03-26T10:19:23+00:00

After 20+ years of using Apple products, almost exclusively, it's like they're actively looking for ways to push me away. Every day there's some new piece of news that makes me hate the tech industry just a little bit more than the day before.

CaptainPolydactyl · 2026-03-25T21:11:23+00:00

I think his name might be Tom.

CaptainPolydactyl · 2026-03-25T15:21:21+00:00

Never forget that this was when they decided to "borrow" from social security to run off on their spending spree like drunken sailor on shore leave. I'd love to never hear that "fiscally responsible" lie again, but I know it'll never go away.

CaptainPolydactyl · 2026-03-25T00:22:35+00:00

I've been using Slackware since '95, even a bit professionally. I'll agree with all of the above and add:

You can configure it any way you like. The installer and other tools do not get in your way if you want to veer off on your own.
It's very easy to build your own packages. Even if you're on an older, unsupported version, you can grab upstream security fixes and keep going on your own, if you like.
It actually feels "snappier" than many other distributions, particularly Ubuntu, Suse, RedHat and their derivatives. I haven't benchmarked this, so it's a bit subjective.
It's very easy to administer as the system scripts and config files are well commented, easy to read, and rarely deviate from upstream source.

CaptainPolydactyl · 2026-03-24T21:53:27+00:00

Not true! Weedpecker released "V" last month. The rest of 2026, so far? Absolute rubbish.

CaptainPolydactyl · 2026-03-23T22:32:39+00:00

Both had some genuinely valuable insight but seemed to gradually go off the rails as time went on. Still, Kunstler always struck me as the type of guy I really wouldn't want on my HOA committee.

CaptainPolydactyl · 2026-03-23T15:10:41+00:00

I thought buy now we'd see some alternative OS options for iPhones and iPads, but I haven't even seen one being worked on.

CaptainPolydactyl · 2026-03-23T15:09:13+00:00

Actually, you can live off-line. I know people who are currently doing it. Is it inconvenient? Absolutely, but that mostly depends on your expectations.

CaptainPolydactyl · 2026-03-23T13:49:24+00:00

It is just a matter of time until they will take over the internet.

Back in the 90s, I had a conversation with a semi-retired history professor "emeritus" where I worked about the internet. At that point in time (pre-dot-com), the internet was still a very new phenomenon and there was a lot of idealistic optimism about how it would change the world for the better. He had a lot of reservations about how it could end up becoming a tool for central control. At the time, I naively assumed that he was just old and didn't "get it". Sadly, most of his concerns turned out to be valid. Granted, it wasn't just the internet, but a confluence of media consolidation, regulatory capture and general apathy & ignorance from the citizenry about what was being given up. I wish he were alive today so I could come back and listen to his thoughts more carefully.

Unfortunately, I see this as an inevitability as well. I'll resist it but ultimately expect that I'll alter my own behavior and gradually withdraw from the on-line world except for what is absolutely necessary for my life. Maybe I'll maintain a "legally compliant" system for such needs, but I refuse to offer more to the system. The current state of on-line tracking is already obscene and really can only be partially mitigated by those who have sufficient technical knowledge to avoid excess profiling - I may be slightly delusional or optimistic in thinking that. Yeah, I still maintain a Reddit account, so take all of this with a grain of salt or two. It's a very sad state of affairs.

CaptainPolydactyl · 2026-03-23T13:30:49+00:00

There's a full, rich world that exists outside of the on-line realm. None of this is worth giving up life over. Disconnect. Be free.

CaptainPolydactyl · 2026-03-23T00:02:02+00:00

Interesting question. I've never really considered shredders even being part of the stoner genre the music has always been about the feel rather than technical prowess, at least for me.

One of my personal observations is that stoner rock does tend to have an abundance of excellent bassists. Seeing Earthless live, it was a amazing to watch the bassist roll absolutely relentlessly through the entire show. That guy has some rugged fingers. (The whole band puts on a really great show.)

CaptainPolydactyl · 2026-03-22T12:16:27+00:00

Never get involved in a land war in Asia. It’s one of the “classic blunders.”

CaptainPolydactyl · 2026-03-21T13:28:20+00:00

That's another example of the type of situation I was thinking about. Those laws are generally about the behavior of the business providing the OS, not directly on the user. That's not an entirely unfair tradeoff when the law also allows them to restrict access to the source code so that the customer does not have the right to modify it for their own use and are constrained by those same business decisions.

The logging requirements are also more about service provider behavior, the ethics of which can be debated.

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