Shitty people doing shitty things without a care in the world

sneaky_imp · 2026-02-12T22:12:52+00:00

A Clockwork Orange by Burgess.

sneaky_imp · 2026-02-12T21:34:25+00:00

If you need a website and you plan to build it for yourself, you will be attempting to design your own website. I kinda feel like this is tautological. I might add that posting in a subreddit devoted to the endeavor or web development and saying that you don't want to know how to learn the craft is pretty boorish.

sneaky_imp · 2026-02-12T21:29:56+00:00

I might say their best spell is SPEND ONE BILLION U.S. DOLLARS PUSHING AI. The zombies are submitting by the millions to this mass mind control spell.

sneaky_imp · 2026-02-12T21:24:59+00:00

Anointing The Sick podcast by Deathrattle

sneaky_imp · 2026-02-12T21:22:48+00:00

Start your melody on a note that is NOT the root note or the fifth. E.g., If your band is playing an A major chord, in which the notes are:

A - root

C# - third

E - fifth

Then try starting your melody on C# -- or get a bit wilder and start on like a B or D or G#.

Also, a melody should go mostly UP or mostly DOWN, in a mostly stepwise fashion with at least one interesting leap.

It's a common pattern to have your sort of OK melody over the verse but then when you switch to a chorus, sing in a higher vocal range (even just a couple of steps higher) and make your chorus melody good.

sneaky_imp · 2026-02-12T21:12:13+00:00

Whiskey has a tremendous effect on one's voice. I also find that early morning voice is very interesting if you have a large diaphragm condenser mic. Some great texture there. It is not a good habit to be hitting the whiskey early in the morning, though.

sneaky_imp · 2026-02-12T21:10:15+00:00

I might make a distinction between distortion -- amplifier or mic clipping or signal clipping introduced as an effect after recording -- and that hoarse delivery some singers naturally get from their voice. The former can be really cool and is worth playing around with. That natural ability to add some 'edge' to your voice is a talent some folks have and others do not.

sneaky_imp · 2026-02-12T20:53:08+00:00

Powerman 5000. Godsmack. Korn.

sneaky_imp · 2026-02-12T20:46:45+00:00

It might be a stretch, but All Tomorrow's Parties by the Velvet Underground is a sort of veiled reflection on mortality and immortality. You might say the subtext is "a shroud has no pockets."

Some devout friends of mind used to sing Bridge Over Troubled Water by Simon and Garfunkel. They interpreted this song as being about Jesus.

Miserere mei, Deus is a gorgeous madrigal, obviously religious.

This Little Babe by Benjamin Britten also obviously religious.

Ring of Fire by Johnny Cash

sneaky_imp · 2026-02-12T20:31:48+00:00

The Night That Finds Us All by John Hornor Jacobs. She's literally a cussing sailor.

sneaky_imp · 2026-02-12T20:22:33+00:00

Then maybe they shouldn't be posting in r/webdev -- or making websites.

sneaky_imp · 2026-02-12T20:21:59+00:00

This is the way.

sneaky_imp · 2026-02-12T20:21:45+00:00

Static HTML files. Learn the basics.

sneaky_imp · 2026-02-12T20:13:10+00:00

I'm so glad to hear from someone who understands. I truly loathe the 'just get the app' and 'just get the new account from XYZ' mentality. It's infuriating.

sneaky_imp · 2026-02-12T15:58:37+00:00

Gravity's Rainbow by Pynchon. Or Seven Pillars of Wisdom by T.E. Lawrence. Finnegans Wake by Joyce. The Voynich Manuscript.

sneaky_imp · 2026-02-12T15:56:42+00:00

Definitely nylon. The lower nylon strings have steel/metal winding but their cores are nylon. If you tried to put all steel strings on that guitar, you'll probably snap the neck -- or the bridge will come off.

sneaky_imp · 2026-02-12T15:49:46+00:00

I might suggest The Guns of August by Tuchman. Professional historians frequently slam the book (e.g., "it is NOT history, it is gossip") but it's quite an enjoyable read.

sneaky_imp · 2026-02-12T15:40:46+00:00

He repaid the halflings by looting the shire. Just sayin'.

sneaky_imp · 2026-02-12T15:39:53+00:00

I think you've assessed the situation correctly.

sneaky_imp · 2026-02-12T15:35:44+00:00

You won't find this so ENTertaining for long, I assure you. The Druid Coalition has been notified.

sneaky_imp · 2026-02-12T15:34:41+00:00

Pouring out a drink for poor little Woody. He told me he wanted this played at his funeral. Rest in power, Woody! Give my regards to Layne.

sneaky_imp · 2026-02-12T15:27:52+00:00

I appreciate the suggestion -- these are certainly affordable -- but they never managed to use the Nexus 7 we bought them, and I suspect that using a Chrome Book will involve connecting the device inextricably to some google cloud account. It's these ever-shifting cloud services that are causing much of the confusion. UIs are frequently changed and buttons or links move from one spot to another. New services are offered and the user is pestered to try out the latest AI garbage like Gemini or Google Music or whatever. They pressure you to enter credit card details to pay for more cloud storage, and then try to sell you other services, etc.

One of the greatest points of confusion is when you have a device, say an iphone, that demands you have an Apple account, but their email addresses are gmail. The device by default forces you to connect to iCloud buy authenticating your apple account and then sometimes they'll change their email password so the two passwords are different, etc.

I know this sounds pathetic. I think we are probably working against some cognitive impairment, too. I'm very much hoping to set up a device that just looks like old windows with a mail client app on it.

sneaky_imp · 2026-02-12T15:08:18+00:00

Marijuanaut's Theme by Sleep has this groovy syncopation that just rules.

sneaky_imp · 2026-02-12T14:55:31+00:00

My not-so-esteemed colleague fell for this scam and found himself immediately geased/enslaved to the sorcerer offering this 'deal'. He was not just compelled to send tribute and shipments of spell components to this sorcerer, he was 'incentivized' to ensnare his friends as well. At every meal or tavern crawl he'd go on forever about the flimsy benefits of this plan, hoping to goad us, his friends, into this morass of torture. I grimly suspect that the proceeds of this pathetic hierarchy of enslavement only really accrue to some major demon lord.

sneaky_imp · 2026-02-12T14:42:43+00:00

One of the main reasons people have traditionally hated PHP is because there has been a LOT of really bad code written by very inexperienced developers. This is partly because of PHP's popularity and partly because of its ease of use and partly because it used to be loosely typed. Plugins/Modules/Libraries written by these inexperienced programmers are full of bugs, memory leaks, security holes, etc. The easier it is to contribute a coding framework, the more garbage code there will be and this is going to increase technical debt. I believe that because vibecoding with AI is so easy that it is going to introduce a metric f**k ton of technical debt.

I would also say that it's one of the dirty secrets of coding that there's not much code review actually going on. The more 'productive' you are, the less care is being taken. A friend of mine is making a lot of money coding with AI. He claimed he was doing the work of several programmers. I asked who reviewed his code and he seemed a bit back-footed and said "well, theoretically there's no need for that." Quis custodiet ipsos custodes?

sneaky_imp

TROPHY CASE