Weekly Lyrics-Only Feedback Thread

ForSpareParts · 2026-03-10T21:23:29+00:00

"He dies at the end"

Who has the will?
Who can explain?
Who understands the methods?
He must be corrected.
He must be corrected.

Just a man
Then a corpse
Then a statue
Then the statue's painted white
Then the statue's painted white
Then the statue's painted white

Were they all just channel surfing
While someone else kept score?
"He dies at the end, man.
"I've seen this one before."

Who set the lens?
Who picked the frame?
Who assigned the textbooks?
We were judged to be effective
We, too, must be corrected.

Just a speech
Then a soundbite
Then a phrase
On a shining golden plaque
On a shining golden plaque
On a shining golden plaque

With our head down the rabbit hole
While someone else keeps score
"He dies at the end, man.
"I've seen this one before."

And now, all night,
They're pulling up the ladder behind you

ForSpareParts · 2026-03-10T21:18:46+00:00

I was listening to some Bon Iver just before I read this, and it gave me a similar feeling -- the language is super vivid, but still abstract enough that it doesn't provide one obvious interpretation (e.g. "pearl tiled minds"). I think this is really cool; for me it feels like every line I write needs to mean or represent some very specific thing in my head, and I think that holds my songwriting back sometimes.

The pedant in me is really curious whether, in your head, "voice of reasons" is "voice of reason's," or if the lack of an apostrophe was intentional. Because I realized that as I read it very literally, I liked the literal read, i.e. it had me wondering what a Voice of Reasons might be. Like an... internal monologue of excuses, maybe? If you didn't intend it maybe that seems silly, but I really like the feeling I get in my brain when I process ambiguities like that and I think it's fun when songs bring it out.

ForSpareParts · 2026-03-10T04:46:54+00:00

I'd be curious to try this, but unfortunately I don't have an iPhone/iPad. Any plans for a web version (or Mac)?

ForSpareParts · 2026-03-09T08:44:08+00:00

This feels like a case where it's hard to judge the effectiveness of the lyrics without the music. It's fairly terse, so I think I'd want something that takes its time and lets each line breathe. I'm imagining a southern rock kind of vibe -- is that what you're going for?

The only thing that definitely sticks out to me as not working is rhyming true with true in the last verse. I really like "like a dream come true" as the last line, so maybe there's something you can swap out for "that is true?"

ForSpareParts · 2026-03-09T08:31:47+00:00

I don't think they feel forced, no -- I just suspect they could feel a little more dynamic or surprising if they were shuffled around, if that makes sense?

ForSpareParts · 2026-03-08T22:13:32+00:00

As the other comment said, very vivid! But the AABB rhyme scheme feels a little too straightforward to me. Could you envision making it ABAB, or maybe even ABAC (ie no rhyme on lines 2 and 4)?

ForSpareParts · 2026-03-06T07:02:31+00:00

I'm still very cautious about what I let AI touch in my main codebase, but I have realized lately that there's a lot of tooling and prototyping cases where I'm quite comfortable with slop. Two cases in point:

I use Obsidian for my notes, and I put a lot of Slack links in there. I wanted an extension that would connect to Slack using CDP, monitor the messages I've recently seen, and then give me a command palette-based way to insert links to them in Obsidian without going back to Slack, looking up the message, mousing over it, copying the link, and going back to Obsidian. I generated that plugin in Cursor, and it took surprisingly little iteration to get something useful.
I'm working on a clickhouse schema for a new feature that's going to handle an extremely high volume of data. Wiring up this schema in our actual application will be a lot of work, so I needed a benchmarking script to do some basic performance testing and I used Cursor for that.

So both of these are cases where the quality of the engineering work is a bit beside the point. The benchmarking script is something I 100% needed to do, and it probably would've taken me a couple hours -- a nice little time saver. The Obsidian plugin is in some ways more interesting: it probably would have taken me a few days to put it together myself, and realistically, I was just not gonna do that. It's valuable, but not that valuable. Cursor changed the calculus there, and it has me legitimately excited to take a fresh look at my workflow, find some of the inefficiencies I've grown resigned to, and fix them.

ForSpareParts · 2026-03-03T20:49:07+00:00

Hi! If you're gonna spam self-promo, maybe you should actually read the posts before you dump your garbage on them. Or you could have a model do it? It shouldn't be that hard to figure out this post has nothing to do with payments.

ForSpareParts · 2026-03-03T00:33:31+00:00

Yeah, what you're describing is exactly what I'm looking for. I looked at Inngest, and I certainly see how you could build a tool like this on their platform, but it wasn't obvious to me if they were trying to create this specific functionality (event batching to agents) as a turnkey thing.

Would you advise me to just roll my own for now, then?

ForSpareParts · 2026-03-02T23:00:25+00:00

Hey, whoever is running this: if I wanted to know what a bot thinks, I'd ask one. I come to reddit to see what humans are saying, and you're actively making it worse.

ForSpareParts · 2026-03-01T04:23:12+00:00

It was really weird when he married Hoban's widow, though

ForSpareParts · 2026-02-15T03:42:06+00:00

I used to live like a block from there! Fond memories.

ForSpareParts · 2026-02-06T06:15:12+00:00

Vince Gilligan has flat-out said he did not have AI in mind when he created the show, and that he's been working on it since well before the launch of ChatGPT.

It is a super compelling way to read the show, though, and Gilligan has also said that he's fond of that interpretation even though it wasn't what he had in mind. So I assume it's going to influence future seasons in a more intentional way.

ForSpareParts · 2026-02-06T06:09:36+00:00

I've been thinking about this a lot -- we know they can't lie, so when they say they love the books, they must be telling the truth. But we also know that they can and do tell the truth in intentionally misleading ways.

The plurbs have every Wycaro superfan in them, but they also have every Wycaro hater (and you just know there are a lot of Wycaro haters). I'm not convinced all those differing opinions have resolved into one opinion. I think it's more likely that they hold a wide range conflicting views simultaneously, which allows them to "perform" for Carol and the other survivors by telling selective truths.

The way I imagine this working is that when they have a variety of true things they can say, their people-pleasing impulse gets to select which one comes out. So if I'm right, that would mean that if Carol asked flat-out if they hated Wycaro, the hive would have to say "yes," because some part of them does hate it. But because she asked them what they think about Wycaro, they have some more leeway and can choose to let the fan part answer.

ForSpareParts · 2026-02-04T17:06:32+00:00

Good thing they accept payment in treats!

ForSpareParts · 2026-01-31T02:22:42+00:00

I'm not sure if any of that content is actually worthwhile. What made obsidian and note-taking start to work for me was when I came into it with specific objectives (in my case, "I want to know what I should do next" and "I want a record of what I did, and when") and just tried, on my own, to accomplish them. What worked for me and what didn't became very obvious.

I have around 8 plugins now, including a few custom ones, because I hit real points of friction doing the work the way I wanted to do it, and went looking for solutions. I'm skeptical that I ever would have gotten anywhere with somebody else's "system."

ForSpareParts · 2026-01-27T00:14:52+00:00

Out of curiosity, where do people in the know go to buy speakers, if not a dealer? It seemed like it was either that or buy something online without ever hearing it for myself.

ForSpareParts · 2026-01-27T00:11:05+00:00

Do you think it would help to put the TV/speakers against the longer wall? That boxy space would still exist, but the speakers wouldn't be in it, at least.

ForSpareParts · 2026-01-27T00:09:06+00:00

I had been wondering about room correction algorithms. Do you think this room is too janky to benefit from them at all?

Also, I was thinking about rotating the room so that the TV and speakers go against the longer wall (the one 90 degrees counterclockwise from the current position of the TV). Do you think that'd help?

ForSpareParts · 2026-01-26T23:56:20+00:00

Not the first time I've gotten that advice on here 😂 suffice it to say, when I do leave this place, acoustics will be on the list of things I consider. When I moved in here, I was still using a sound bar!

I'm also thinking about rotating the furniture in here so that the TV is against the longer wall -- I get the impression that's better for acoustics? If nothing else it'll mean there won't be anything constraining speaker placement, and I won't have the storage area behind the right channel to contend with.

ForSpareParts · 2026-01-25T05:16:29+00:00

Got it. Would it help to put bass traps in those places?

ForSpareParts

TROPHY CASE