I love dark chocolate, but it has its place. I’ve tried dark chocolate in cookies, but semi-sweet is better. I’ve tried dark chocolate with s’mores, but (for me) it neither improved the s’mores nor the chocolate. I think the issue is that those two treats in particular are more about nostalgia than anything. If they don’t taste like my lower middle class childhood they’ll never be quite as good (for me).

This, but once I’ve caramelized the exterior by setting it aflame, I slide the toasted bit off and eat it. With the fresh white gooey flesh of the marshmallow exposed, I again set the whole thing aflame, blow it out, and eat the next layer of crispy caramel skin. This method works best with one of those jumbo marshmallows. Once the jumbo marshmallow has been roasted and skinned enough to reach regular size, it gets the chocolate and graham cracker s’mores treatment.

And for a final hot take, only Hershey’s milk chocolate will do for the s’mores. You need that choco umami to balance out the marshmallow sweetness. Fancy expensive chocolates, super dark chocolate, and most European chocolates just cannot make a good s’more.

They’re rebooting Ernest Saves Christmas now?

I delight in reporting genuine emails from my company that look like sophisticated phishing attempts, bonus points if they send a follow-up assuring us that the previous sketchy email was in fact genuine.

If the fake phishing emails can be caught by my very rudimentary filter they weren’t particularly good anyway. Besides, I still have to look at those emails and report them, otherwise my IT still counts it as a strike against me. Win-win. IT continues to keep me on my toes and I don’t have to take another 30min training course because I ignored an email for a day or two.

My worst nightmares have always been just me going through a mostly mundane day of school and/or work only to come home tired and just as dream me is getting to bed the alarm goes off and it’s time to wake up and get to work.

They don’t even know cron exists and you’re going to throw them to the wolves by suggesting Systemd? That’s like calling in a drone strike to swat a mosquito.

In thousands of songs, I’ve never noticed Picard doing anything to the length of the files. I tend to manually review every album by running it through Picard and letting it handle the renaming and tagging. That structure used to be Artist/Year Album/Song. I’ve been less strict about naming the songs themselves. It’s always at least track - Title, but sometimes Artist - Album - Disc # - is prepended. Eventually I ran into a situation where I had multiple versions of a release/album with different enough content to warrant keeping both, so now I throw a release ID number (if is exists) after the album name, and inside brackets, for the directory name.

It’s a very flat structure by design, so I’m never quibbling about where I sourced something or what particular genre it is when I’m looking for it. That dramatically reduces the likelihood of duplicates too. Real metadata is better left to tags, since that’s mostly what any player will see anyway.

If I’m having trouble getting Picard to recognize something it always because: musicbrainz.org is missing the release, doesn’t have acoustic ID, or Picard preferred the album track when I’m trying to rename and tag a single or EP. Adding the release info and acoustic ID to musicbrainz is easy and I can usually use the info before the release is even reviewed, but often in trying to add the release I’ll find the correct one and now I can help fill out the data about it.

I treat musicbrainz.org as MY metadata database. If a release is missing or has problems, I do the work to make it better. It’s good digital citizenship and learning about their rules for releases helps me manage my server better.

Correct. My mistake.

I don’t know if Clifford D. Simak is lesser known, but his work is pretty foundational for a lot of more modern sci-fi. Before there was “I, Robot”, there was “City”. Before there were Ewoks, there was “Little Fuzzy”. Before there were living ships like in Farscape, Lexx, or Xenogenesis, there was “The Visitors”.

I should have remembered that was H. Beam Piper. Also great.

Meditation (for a lot of people) is an exercise in learning that even doing nothing is active. Doing nothing is still doing. Rest is an important part of being productive. Rest is not a waste of time, so you don’t need to feel guilty over it. These are all lessons that the brain can understand on its face immediately, but the body requires reinforcement and practice.

And if stillness is a problem you struggle with, walking meditation or meditation through movement can be a more approachable way to get started. There are lots of ways to meditate, find the ones that work for you. Meditation isn’t a cure all, but it does have wide ranging impacts and it doesn’t hurt to try it.

“Secret Links”, Like that one scene in that Sandra Bullock hacker movie, The Net.

https://triviahappy.com/articles/welcome-to-the-net-every-webpage-from-the-1995-movie-the-net

Dracula was published in 1897 and put the vampire count’s origin in Transylvania, Romania. Bela Lugosi was born and raised in what is now Lugoj, Romania, and would go on to play Dracula on Broadway in 1927, then the the Dracula movie began production in 1930.

Bela certainly made his mark on the character, but the accent was just typecasting not an artistic choice.

The absolute best are rainy days without lightning in a place with some nature and privacy. I feel like dancing naked in the rain and being able to come back in to a dry house, a towel to dry yourself, a good book, and a hot tea, is a very rare experience these days. Thunderstorms are great too when you have safe shelter. But dancing naked in a thunderstorm feels a bit like tempting fate too much, which is thrilling too in a way but also I’ve got creatures inside depending on me staying safe.

There is a whole podcast series about Lugosi and other movies of this era, You Must Remember This. I’m not sure if this specific detail is covered explicitly. But my impression (and very hazy memory) leads me to believe that it may be a situation where Lugosi was cast because he looked like the expectation of a vampire from the other movie, but then Lugosi performed better and caught the public’s attention better. Kind of like Hydrox vs. Oreos. Hydrox was first to market, but ultimately lost to the copycat. To be fair to Lugosi, he still added several other elements of style we now consider essential to the quintessential vampire character. He just happened to naturally have a widows peak and authentic “old world exotic accent” (he barely spoke English when he got his start in Hollywood), which gave him an advantage.

EDIT: I should clarify that Karina Longworth’s podcast, You Must Remember This, is about WAY more than Bela. That was just a short series within that podcast. It’s a great listen is you have any interest in film history or long form non-fiction podcasts in general.

A relevant xkcd bot is really the only AI I want in my life.

It’s definitely more than a horror project. But, it’s also definitely still horror.

Common names of animals often describe phenotype not genotype. If it looks like a ducks, walks like a duck, and quacks like a duck, it’s common name is duck. There are lots of animals with common names grouping them by physical characteristics and ecological niche rather than genetic relationship, especially animals named longed before we had any real scientific study of their genetics.

His family name was actually Drumpf. His immigrant grandfather Americanized it on or shortly after arriving in America.

I spent a little more to get the upgraded newest model of the android phone I’m currently typing this on, released in January 2021 and received by me in March. I had to replace my previous phone because the battery started to fail and it was failing behind in Android versions, meaning some newer apps could no longer be installed and some older apps could no longer be updated. Current phone still going strong, no signs of being any slower than it was originally. Mostly have used wireless charging and battery protection schemes in the OS, so USB port still works well and charges just fine either way. I feel like phones hit a performance plateau a few years ago and I see no reason for an “upgrade”. If my current phone needs to be replaced, I fully expect to be forced to pay more for less given the costs of memory these days. Previously I’d been basically forced to upgrade every 2 years because I always bought the contract special “free” phone and updates stopped or the battery pillowed.