Y’all. It’s been a minute. What’s shakin’?

Our favorite Maryland-based non-profit charity record label recently dropped the latest in their series of benefit compilations, and I wanted to make sure you hadn’t missed out on this one.

Primarily consisting of dungeon synth and other closely-related (mostly) instrumental, (almost exclusively) synth-based sounds, Free Me from This Dungeon is on sale now with proceeds supporting the Safelight organization.

 

Various Artists – Free Me from This Dungeon: A Compilation in Support of the Safelight Organization (Food Desert Recordings, 23 February 2024)

 

 

From Food Desert Recordings‘ Bandcamp page:

Safelight is a 501(c)(3) nonprofit agency that provides support for survivors of interpersonal violence, sexual assault, and child abuse. They make it possible for families who want to be free of violent relationships to succeed. They make hope real.

Safelight gives individuals who have experienced interpersonal violence, sexual abuse, and child abuse a real second chance—an opportunity to redesign and better their lives. Today, due to Safelight‘s broad community support and partners, they are addressing needs in mental health, substance abuse, employment and housing. They provide not only immediate short-term help to children and adults in crisis but help them work towards long-term solutions.

To find out more about Safelight‘s mission, please go to www.safelightfamily.org. All proceeds from this album will be donated to the Safelight organization every month to help them achieve their mission. As always, thank you for your generosity and support.

 

Free Me from This Dungeon: A Compilation in Support of the Safelight Organization is available for purchase right now, right here.
 

 

 
Featured artists include:

Dreadwood Prophecies
Apparition Gauntlet
Dungeon Weed
Lunar Cult
Trǫlláss
Soot Rooster
The Human Veil (whom, you may recall, we’ve talked about before)
spaceseer
18 Slashes
Sanguine Sacrifice
Hermit Knight
Plague of Insomnia
MEGAFAUNA
Zireael

 

* * *

 

Food Desert Recordings: Bandcamp | bsky | Twitter | Instagram

We had quite a bit of weather earlier in the week (nor are we out of it, although Eclipse Day looks to be all right if the predictions hold) and as a result our yard flooded and we had a river running through it. Which is all right! In fact our yard is designed to channel overflow from a neighbor’s pond down our yard and toward a creek on the other side of the road from us. It happens a few times a year and, once the rain stops, it drains fairly quickly and efficiently.

And as a side effect, every now and again, when things dry up a bit, I find these: stranded bluegills in my yard. They are dead, alas for them, and today as I was walking Charlie, I found rather a few of them: at least a dozen, all near the treeline. Because I don’t want the dog to eat them whole, or the cats to drag their carcasses into the garage, I was obliged to chuck all that I found into the treeline, which was every bit as icky as it sounds. I hope not to do that again for a good long time. Also, one really does never get used to random fish in the yard.

So, that’s my Friday so far. How are you?

— JS

From Stephen Robles on YouTube:

Learn how to build 15 iPhone Shortcuts, inspired by YOU. Automatically play music when an alarm is snoozed, schedule a text to auto-send, make your screenshots look pro, and more.

Stephen continues his Shortcuts series on YouTube by building shortcuts off listener requests – a great watch as always.

View the video YouTube.

Some good news today: Starter Villain is a finalist for the Hugo Award for Best Novel. I am, genuinely, thrilled beyond words, for myself, and for everyone at Tor Books who worked on getting this book out into the world (not neglecting Tristan Elwell, who created The Best Cover Art Ever and is also a Hugo finalist this year, in the Professional Artist category; the UK cover, by Black Sheep, is pretty snazzy too!). The Hugos will be awarded at the Worldcon, this year in Glasgow, Scotland. I was going to be there anyway, as I am DJing a dance there, but now I have a second reason to attend, so I have that going for me, which is nice.

Here is the full list of finalists for this year. The other finalists in the Best Novel category, by authors who I am absolutely thrilled to share this joy ride with for the next several months, are:

• The Adventures of Amina al-Sirafi by Shannon Chakraborty (Harper Voyager, Harper Voyager UK)
• The Saint of Bright Doors by Vajra Chandrasekera (Tordotcom)
• Some Desperate Glory by Emily Tesh (Tordotcom, Orbit UK)
• Translation State by Ann Leckie (Orbit US, Orbit UK)
• Witch King by Martha Wells (Tordotcom)

It’s lovely to be a finalist for the Hugo Award in any year, but this year in particular it’s especially meaningful. As I think most of you know, the award has come off a very rough year, in which the legitimacy of last year’s Hugo process and results were — legitimately — questioned. Through no fault of the folks who are putting on this year’s Worldcon and administering this year’s Hugo process, the Hugo Awards are under extra scrutiny and consideration. As they should be. As they must be.

When I was informed that I was a potential finalist this year, I gave some thought as to whether to accept the finalist position; last year I was a finalist for a Hugo Award, and later examination of the process suggested that perhaps I should have not been, and that my position on the ballot was unearned. Could I believe that this time my finalist position was earned, and truly represents the choices of the voters?

The reason I accepted the finalist position comes to this: I have trust in the principals of the Glasgow Worldcon, and I have trust in their principles as well. I know they know how important it is this year’s Hugo Awards are above board and beyond reproach, and I believe that they are committed, by their own inclinations as well as by the circumstances, to making sure this Hugo season runs smoothly, and transparently, and with integrity. In particular, I trust that Hugo administrator Nicholas Whyte will make sure everything happens as it should. He has done so in the past and is of unimpeachable character.

I trust the people and the process this year, and am thus delighted to have my novel be a finalist for the Hugo Award. If you nominated Starter Villain this year: Thank you! If you nominated something else: Thank you, too. All of you, thank you for helping to bring back the Hugos from a scary precipice. I appreciate that faith and determination. It’s knowing that this finalist position comes from readers and fans that makes the Hugo so special, this time and every time. Thank you. More than I can say.

See you in Glasgow!

— JS

Back on January 10, Twitter/X and former CNN host Don Lemon announced a deal for Lemon to host a new show on the platform.

Last Friday Lemon interviewed Elon Musk for his first episode of the show. Not liking the questions he was asked, Musk cancelled the show the next day.

Agreeing to a deal with Musk is like agreeing to a deal with Trump. At best you’ll be paid pennies on the dollar, and probably will never see a nickel.

Link: threads.net/@karaswisher/post/C4djaMXOcQk

My family, like most, depends on a lot of online services. And again like most, a lot of those services come from Big Tech giants in general and (in our case) Google in particular. And like many people, we are becoming less comfortable with that. So I’m going to try to be systematic about addressing the problem. This post summarizes our dependencies and then I’ll post blog pieces about updates as I work my way through the list. (The first is already posted, see below.)

I’m calling this the “De-Google” project because they’re our chief supplier of this stuff and it’s more euphonious than “De-BigTechInGeneral”.

Need	Supplier	Alternatives
Office	Google Workspace	?
Data sharing	Dropbox	?
Video meetings	Google Meet	Jitsi, ?
Maps	Google Maps	Magic Earth, Here, something OSM-based
Browser	Apple Safari	Firefox, ?
Search	Google	Bing-based options
Chat	Signal
Photo editing	Adobe Lightroom & Nik	Capture One, Darktable, ?
In-car interface	Google Android Auto	Automaker software
Play my music	Plex, USB
Discover music	Google YouTube Music	Qobuz, Tidal, Deezer, Pandora, ?
TV	Prime, Roku, Apple, Netflix, TSN, Sportsnet	?

The “Supplier” color suggests my feelings about what I’m using, with blue standing for neutral.

Criteria

To replace the things that I’m unhappy with, I’m looking for some combination of:

1. Open source

2. Not ad-supported

3. Not VC-funded

4. Not Google, Apple, Microsoft, or Amazon

Office

We’ve been using Gmail for a really long time and are used to it, and the integration between mail and calendar and maps basically Just Works. The price is OK but it keeps going up, and so do our data storage requirements, what with all the cameras in the family. Finally, Google has stewardship of our lives and are probably monetizing every keystroke. We’re getting a bit creeped out over that.

I think that calendars and email are kind of joined at the hip, so we’d want a provider that does both.

As for online docs, I will not be sorry to shake the dust of Google Drive and Docs from my heels, I find them clumsy and am always having trouble finding something that I know is in there.

Data sharing

Dropbox is OK, assuming you ignore all the other stuff it’s trying to sell you. Maybe one of these years I should look at that other stuff and see if it’s a candidate to replace one or two other services?

Video meetings

I dislike lots of things about Zoom and find Microsoft Teams a pool of pain, but have been pretty happy with Google Meet. Nobody has to download or log into anything and it seems to more or less Just Work. But I’d look at alternatives.

Maps

As I wrote in 2017, Google maps aggregate directions, reviews, descriptions, phone numbers, and office hours. They are potentially a nuclear-powered monopoly engine. I use Maps more and more; if I want to contact or interact with something whose location I know, it’s way quicker to pull up Maps and click on their listing than it is to use Google search and fight through all the ads and spam.

The calendar integration is fabulous. If you have Android Auto and you’re going to a meeting, pull up the calendar app and tap on the meeting and it drops you right into directions.

The quality of the OpenStreetMap data is very good, but obviously they don’t have the Directions functions. Who does? Obviously, Here does, and I was enthused about it in 2019; but Android Auto’s music powers drew me back to Google Maps. Aside from that, Magic Earth is trying, and their business model seems acceptable, but the product was pretty rough-edged last time I tried it.

Browser

Safari is my daily driver. These days Chrome is starting to creep me out a bit; just doesn’t feel like it’s on my side. Also, it’s no longer faster than the competition. I’d like to shift over to Firefox one day when I have the energy

Then there are the Arcs and Braves and Vivaldis of this world, but I just haven’t yet invested the time to figure out if one of these will do, and I do not detect a wave of consensus out there.

By the way, DuckDuckGo has a browser, a shell over Safari on the Mac and Edge on Windows. Lauren uses it a lot. Probably worth a closer look.

Search

The decline of Google Search is increasingly in everyone’s face. Once again, it refuses to find things on this blog that I know are there.

Others in the family have already migrated to DuckDuckGo, and I now feel like an old-school lagger for still not having migrated off Google. I wish there were someone else taking a serious run at indexing the Web other than Bing — from yet another tech giant — but here we are.

Lauren tells me to have a closer look at Ecosia, which seems very wholesome.

Chat

At the moment you will have to pry Signal out of my cold, dead, hands. You should be using it too. ’Nuff said.

Photo editing

I pay my monthly tribute to Adobe, about whom my feelings aren’t as negative as they are about the mega Tech Giants. I’d like not to pay so much, and I’d like something that runs a little faster than Lightroom, and I’d like to support open source. But… I really like Lightroom, and sometimes one absolutely needs Photoshop, so I’m unlikely to prioritize this particular escape attempt.

In-car interface

Choices are limited. I see little point in migrating between Android Auto and CarPlay, which leaves the software the auto maker installed. Which, in my five-year-old Jaguar is… well, not bad actually. I think I could live with the built-in maps and directions from Here, even with the British Received Pronunciation’s butchery of North American place names.

But, I don’t know, we might stay with Android Auto. Check out this screenshot from my car.

This is Android Auto displaying, as it normally does when I’m driving, maps and music. By default, Google Maps and YouTube Music. But not here; on the right is Plex, playing my own music stored on a Mac Mini at home.

On the left, it’s even more interesting: This is neither Google maps nor a competitor; it’s Gaia GPS, the app I normally use to mark trail while bushwhacking through Pacific Northwest rain forests. Somehow I fat-fingered it into place either in the car or on my phone.

The lesson here is that (for the moment at least) Android Auto seems to be genuinely neutral. It knows the general concepts of “apps that play music” and “apps that are maps” and is happy to display whichever ones you want, not just Google’s. (As a former Android geek who knows about Intents and Filters, I can see how this works. Clever.)

So far, Android Auto doesn’t show ads, but I suppose it’s monetizing me by harvesting traffic information to enrich its maps and I guess that’s a bargain I can live with. I use that data myself when I want to go somewhere and there are multiple routes and I can see which one is backed up by sewer work or whatever.

Discover music

I’ve been paying for YouTube Music since before it existed, and I’m genuinely impressed with the way its algorithm fishes up new artists that it turns out I really like. But just now Google laid off a bunch of YouTube Music “contractors” (de facto, employees) who tried to organize a union, so screw ’em.

I haven’t investigated any of the alternatives in depth yet.

Play my music

In the decades where Compact Disks were the way to acquire music, I acquired a lot. And ripped it. And pushed it up into Google’s musical cloud. And (until recently) could shuffle my musical life on YouTube Music. But they removed that feature from Android Auto, so screw ’em.

But I now have two good ways to do this. Check this out in Play My Music.

TV

The same gripe as everyone else: The streaming services have re-invented Cable TV, which I only got around to dumping a couple of years ago. The right solution is obvious: Pay-per-view at a reasonably low price, then the services could compete on producing great shows that people will pay to see, rather than sucking you into yet another subscription.

I suspect this column will stay red for quite a while. It’s amazing how much business leaders hate simple business models where there’s a clean clear one-time price for a product and customers have a clean clear choice who they buy their products from.

The path forward

I don’t know if I’ll ever turn the center column all-green. And I don’t need to; progress is progress. Anyhow, doing this sort of investigation is kind of fun.