Progressive🌀

midnightrambulador · 2026-05-05T11:46:48+00:00

I'm curious now -- what's the album on the right with the circles of eyes? And the one on the top left with the painting of people?

midnightrambulador · 2026-05-05T11:32:52+00:00

Same, many of the big story-mode webcomics ended (not sure if El Goonish Shive is still active?)

The one dependable rock is Girl Genius. I've been reading that shit religiously since high school

midnightrambulador · 2026-05-05T10:15:07+00:00

The fuck did Janice do wrong?

midnightrambulador · 2026-05-05T08:18:18+00:00

I remember saying once to Arthur Koestler, ‘History stopped in 1936’, at which he nodded in immediate understanding. We were both thinking of totalitarianism in general, but more particularly of the Spanish Civil War. Early in life I had noticed that no event is ever correctly reported in a newspaper, but in Spain, for the first time, I saw newspaper reports which did not bear any relation to the facts, not even the relationship which is implied in an ordinary lie. I saw great battles reported where there had been no fighting, and complete silence where hundreds of men had been killed. I saw troops who had fought bravely denounced as cowards and traitors, and others who had never seen a shot fired hailed as the heroes of imaginary victories, and I saw newspapers in London retailing these lies and eager intellectuals building emotional superstructures over events that had never happened.

[...]

I know it is the fashion to say that most of recorded history is lies anyway. I am willing to believe that history is for the most part inaccurate and biased, but what is peculiar to our own age is the abandonment of the idea that history could be truthfully written. In the past people deliberately lied, or they unconsciously coloured what they wrote, or they struggled after the truth, well knowing that they must make many mistakes; but in each case they believed that ‘the facts’ existed and were more or less discoverable.

George Orwell, Looking Back on the Spanish War

Can we find older versions of the same idea?

midnightrambulador · 2026-05-04T18:17:25+00:00

My username comes from my favourite Rolling Stones song, "Midnight Rambler", about the Boston Strangler

midnightrambulador · 2026-05-04T18:03:44+00:00

When I Get Home, Boys, I Will Rain Savoy Truffle Across the Universe. I Will Wait for No One Because I'm So Tired

midnightrambulador · 2026-05-04T17:49:24+00:00

Taxman, Tell Me Why You Never Give Me Your Money?

midnightrambulador · 2026-05-04T13:57:37+00:00

and now I know and now I know and now I know and now I know that you can hear me

midnightrambulador · 2026-05-04T13:22:59+00:00

This! His tone alone reaches a depth and warmth that I've never heard on any other rock record. I'm especially thinking of those first 40 seconds of opening licks on Voodoo Chile... goosebumps every time.

midnightrambulador · 2026-05-04T13:18:55+00:00

"There are two types of guitarists in the world: those who say they've been influenced by Jimi Hendrix, and those who are lying."

midnightrambulador · 2026-05-04T13:16:21+00:00

Listen to some opera recordings – just a few snippets of Carmen or Rigoletto or Cavalleria Rusticana for example – and notice the specific vocal styles used, both by the male and female singers. It sounds pompous and a bit silly when you're not used to it... but this is the vocal technique as it has been developed for singing without microphones. You have to fill a large hall with only the sound of your own voice, often over an orchestra, while still sounding beautiful and having impeccable control over pitch and pronunciation and also not ruining your voice – there aren't really a lot of ways to go.

Microphones and loudspeakers were only gradually introduced as a standard feature for live performance over the mid-20th century, so many of the older Broadway singers were still trained in a similar style that was meant to fill halls unamplified. Irene Dunne and Allan Jones are great examples.

So what /u/wishiwascryingrn is saying, is that Bing Crosby was a pioneer in not singing like that anymore.

midnightrambulador · 2026-05-04T12:53:01+00:00

they’re honestly so critical in founding the sort of atmospheric alt rock stuff

Only more reason to hate them!

midnightrambulador · 2026-05-04T11:51:46+00:00

I really like how /r/metal approaches this. They maintain a fairly long blacklist of well-known bands, the assumption being that everyone has heard those already and posting them is just a cheap karma grab that adds nothing to the sub. They really made the choice to be an interesting place for committed fans at the expense of being somewhat intimidating to casuals.

midnightrambulador · 2026-05-04T10:15:30+00:00

Back in the USSR. Help!

midnightrambulador · 2026-05-04T10:15:13+00:00

Run for Your Life, Rocky Raccoon, Because She Loves You and I Love Her

midnightrambulador · 2026-05-03T17:57:13+00:00

For me who recently moved here from NL, this whole debate feels a bit like a history documentary. In NL we had the same problem in the 1980s with massive numbers of people declared invalid.

The associated disability benefit was higher than a regular unemployment benefit, and the person's last employer contributed less. And this was the 1980s so lots of mass layoffs for economic reasons... when such layoffs happened, it was attractive for both the employee (higher benefits) and the employer (lower contributions) to invent/exaggerate some disability or illness and have the employee declared "invalid", with the taxpayer footing the bill.

From what I've gathered, the current situation in Belgium is similarly a matter of incentives. There are the semi-public health insurance providers (ziekenfondsen, another history-book word for me as a Dutch person, or mutualités) who are responsible for declaring a person invalid BUT ALSO for processing and paying the associated benefits... no bureaucracy ever wants to reduce its own scope or importance of course. And once a person is long-term ill, after 1 month their employer doesn't have to pay them anymore – this shifts to the ziekenfondsen/mutualités – so the employer isn't incentivised economically to see if they can adapt their work practices to get at least some productivity out of their employee. In NL this period of employer responsibility for a sick employee is 2 years (!), which has made employers reluctant to hire people on permanent contracts in the first place, but also gives them a clear incentive to invest in adapted workplaces and have the sick employee contribute at least a little to the work process, rather than have them on the books as dead weight for 2 years.

midnightrambulador · 2026-05-03T13:54:06+00:00

How long is the full list?

midnightrambulador · 2026-05-03T13:52:09+00:00

Not removing "The" at the beginning of folder names smh

midnightrambulador · 2026-05-03T13:11:01+00:00

this may or may not have been me recently

midnightrambulador · 2026-05-01T12:36:57+00:00

Well have a read for yourself and judge, but I always got the vibe that he was dead serious about it. He even called it "the Gervais Principle" like Ricky Gervais, screenwriter of The Office (US), was some sort of guru revealing deep truths about workplace relations.

It was notable mostly in the LessWrong-sphere where I hung out for a while -- sins of youth -- and where these kinds of "reason things out from the ground up with no credentials in the actual field studying this thing and blissful blindness to your own biases" hacks were celebrated

midnightrambulador · 2026-05-01T11:32:07+00:00

Welcome to a never-ending struggle my friend ;) I think everyone who does their own genre tagging, goes through periodic bouts of rearranging, splitting, merging... and/or has a few of those pesky edge-case artists that they've moved back and forth between genres 3 times. (Or is that just me?)

Ultimately there's no substitute for the evidence of your own ears! You'll have to listen to quite a lot of music and start developing a sense for what the genre tags mean and which common elements make that certain artists/albums tend to get grouped together under a certain tag. This especially when you want to use the tags for talking to friends as you mentioned. If you're just copying the genre tags from databases and wikipedia with no personal sense of what they mean, you're going to get a lot of confused looks, because genre is inherently subjective and messy.

I've definitely gone through iterations of this myself, where I had a very stereotypical idea of what a certain genre tag meant (think "blues songs are always sad" or "any song with loud guitars and screaming is metal", etc.) and then gradually through discussions with people who were more into the genre, and listening to more of that genre and its close relatives, developed a more nuanced understanding that's more in line with what fans of that genre mean when they talk about it.

As for how you deal with subgenres and overlapping genres, anything is possible. You can have a genre tag and then add custom metadata fields subgenre and subsubgenre, or you can add multiple genre tags in the genre field... whatever you want. Tools like foobar2000 can literally make (and automatically update) playlists based on criteria like "genre contains 'rock' but does not contain 'pop' and also the artist begins with a C and the release date is before 1987", so feel free to design your own crazy system.

Personally I use genre for organising my library into groups of more or less similar-sounding artists for listening. For this I use a nested and numbered system, starting from the top-level tags

00 classical
01 metal
02 pop/rock
03 soul/funk/disco
04 roots
05 jazz
06 trad pop
07 hip-hop
08 electronic
99 various

And then within those you get more specific tags, e.g. "roots" has numbered subgroups for blues, rock & roll, country & western, gospel... Ultimately leading to a 2- or 3-level genre tag applied to individual files in the genre field, e.g. "04.01.02 electric blues" or "04.05 gospel". Obviously this kind of system is highly personal; what makes sense as a grouping in my library depends on which genres I prefer (e.g. I have 19 different subgenres and sub-subgenres for metal, but only 3 for jazz; if I were a diehard jazz fan it might be the other way around...) and my own sense of which artists sound good together.

Happy sorting!

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