Bluehost went and upgraded my WordPress install without my permission (annoying yet acceptable due to security concerns) and without any notification to me (NOT acceptable.)
Working on either canceling the account, getting a refund, and maybe fixing up my hand-hacked theme that I spent plenty of hours getting right. or maybe I’ll just scrap the whole theme and start with a new one.
The site might have some bugs/be a bit ugly in the meantime…
you immigrate to
likewise, you emigrate from
s’all you need to know
~~~~~~~~
[i'm ambivalent towards haikus, but i still write them. this newest, entitled "haiku.io", comments on the (suitable) use of .io as a top-level domain but also on the important and increasingly-emerging paradigm of reality as a process.
a seedling poem, planted as mnemonic device for myself, waiting now to have it crystalize or whatever it is that plants do when metaphorized.]
I bristle blood
I rustle warm
I’ve decayed so much
I have no form
I have no form
I have no form
I have no
form
That part of your practice when you’re learning balance, and you’re maintaining longer than you’ve ever maintained, by a strong margin, and you notice this personal record and become overly-aware of yourself, and you begin to falter as a result of such; broken concentration by something unexpected. And you stumble, but this time you catch yourself at the brink, where you would’ve given in and fallen before, and you don’t fall, instead pulling yourself back up, utilizing strengths you didn’t know you had.
And then you dig deeper into yoga, towards application and conversion of the physical activity into a mental approach—where realization starts to crack at the habitual negative that no one is entirely without—that presents itself for you to utilize, and to start applying at will in virtually every situation.
Reality’s parts include variables, effects, and thresholds. Knowing that those thresholds can be set, for example, inches higher, seconds shorter—simple dimensions increased or decreased by even small magnitudes—and that you yourself can set those thresholds and bring your ideals into parity with your actions is… tremendously empowering.
I’ve heard more than a few people criticize Spotify as lacking good music-discovery features. While I’ll always lean on the side of human introduction (really knowledgable DJs, music nerds, like-minded friends), and next on solid algorithms based upon large sample-sized (a shit-ton of Scrobbles if you’ve lived in the painted-red Last.fm world), I think Spotify has recently done a workable job of this, and simply so.
In Spotify, pick an artist you really like, and not just a track or two, but have go-to albums for. Click the “Related Artists” on their page. Out of the 20—it always seems to be 20, even for a relatively obscure band like Shrimp Boat (my quick test without getting too “out there”)—choose one you’ve never heard of or have never listened to. That last bit is important. And then just listen.
Ironically, I think this process works slightly better the more varied one’s tastes are; people into a broad range of music, especially music with experimental leanings, will see greater sparsity between sounds of those “related artists”, as they become less related by their similarities and more related by their shared deviation from pop or pop-ish formats. Those with flat music taste: you may have a harder time finding something that knocks you off your feet–you may need that human touch to be steered towards something different but not too different.
This isn’t even including the whole notion of public & collaborative playlists, real-time ticker feed, and the recently added “follow” feature for artists/bands/public figures. Granted, these other features could use some work still, but I think as a whole it’s a program that provides many solid outlets for discovery, though no silver-bullet ideological wizardry. Spotify’s enormous catalog reach allows it—when paired with a decent algorithm—to, as far as I can tell, always recommend related artists; one only needs to travel a level or two deep into this web to have a new listening experience.
Created using my photos and the RMagick library with some Ruby code I wrote (I’ll link to the Github repo once the script is rounded out a bit more). This series has an emphasis on texture and recognizable objects and forms, with some abstraction as a side-effect.
As always, check my Flickr sets for full-sizes of these and lots more imagery.
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