Too Many Album Versions Man

When you get to a certain age, and you buy a lot of albums, you sorta inevitably end up with several versions of the albums you like the most, don’t you? Or is that just me?

For instance, Talking Heads released eight studio albums in their time, and I have… 24 things from them in /music/repository/Talking Heads/. The situation is even worse with David Bowie, who released 26 studio albums, and I have 166 things in /music/repository/David Bowie/.

(Yes, I rip everything to flac and play from the computer.)

This over-shopping happens for a variety of reasons — with Talking Heads it’s because later versions of the albums have been fucked around with so much in “remastering” that I find them annoying, so I’ve ended up buying several old versions to find a good one.

(For the ’77 album, you have to buy a vinyl from the first few years — in later versions, banjos suddenly appears on several tracks. I’ve read that people have similar problem on streaming services, too? They have a favourite album, but then all of a sudden it’s swapped out with a remaster? What a total, absolute nightmare! *gasp* *shock*)

For David Bowie, it’s just that I’ve got a ton of live albums, and box sets, and singles and singles and singles…

Anyway, the end result is that I’m spending an inordinate amount of time to find the “real” albums for these artists… so I wondered whether I could just quickly hack up a categorisation system that would cover my use case here? Here’s what I came up with:

I typed away a bit, and:

Tada! Now I can listen to the five first Talking Heads albums without futzing around a bit. (I pretend the last three albums don’t exist.)

(Yeah yeah yeah.)

But what about ol’ Bowie?

WHAT A NIGHTMARE

That’s better. But I found when I was doing tagging up the albums, there’s certain EPs and live albums that I consider essential, so I didn’t tag up David Live here, for instance, so I’m a bit inconsistent. But whatevs! I’m gonna save hours and hours!

Fortunately, there’s only a couple handful of artists that I have this problem with, so I don’t have to tag a lot…

Heh, I’ve got 91 Coil things — with an extended bootleg “archive” version of each EP, for instance… OK, there’s more than a handful of artists that need tagging. *rolls up t-shirt sleeves*

Fortunately, this new system means that I can buy even more totally marginal albums, and then just hide them away after listening to them a couple of times.

Didn’t Peter Gabriel also do a German version of another album!? Now that I don’t have to skip them every time I want to play the first four albums… *gasp*

Hey! That’s me!

A Norwegian computer magazine contacted me last week about publishing a translation of my blog post about RFC2045. So I translated, and now it’s here.

It’s the same text, basically, but with added jokes. Very appropriate for the subject matter I’m sure.

The hardest thing to translate was “rock döts”. We workshopped the translation quickly on irc and landed on “röcktödlar”…

… which is a word the world has never seen before! I’m shocked! But also proud.

There’s a soft copyright strike thing now?

Oh, some context — ten years ago I decided to watch as many Ingmar Bergman things I could lay may hands on, which turned out to be 87 things, so I landed on this design for the blog series:

Most of those things I watched were his well-known and fully available films, but he’d also done a large number of stage plays, and there’d been a number of short films, TV plays, and short documentaries about Bergman, and these were really hard to come by.

I found a guy in France (I think; still not sure) that sold bootleg DVD-Rs of this stuff — he must have been collecting for decades, and that helped a lot. I also found stuff on the torrents, and on other blogs, and in the end, people who had recorded stuff from the TV in the 80s also sent me things.

Anyway, after watching all this marvellous stuff, I wondered whether I should do something with this treasure trove… but I didn’t. Then I saw that the bootleg guy had totally disappeared off the face of the internet, and his DVD-R burning business with it.

So I thought the time was probably come to just upload all the things that were not commercially available anywhere to Youtube, as “The Bergman Channel”. And so I did, and I was surprised that the channel survived the copyright strikes, but it did — mainly because the main copyright holder to Bergman’s work is Svenska filmindustrier, who have mainly just claimed copyright for the things in Sweden. So if you’re in Sweden, half of The Bergman Channel is blocked.

But today I got this:

The interesting thing is this:

What to do next
[…]
* Delete your video. If you remove your video before 7 days are up, your
video will be off the site, but your channel won’t get a copyright strike.

It’s a “soft” copyright strike? I’ve never seen one of those before. Are they new? Anyway, it’s nice, because if you get three normal copyright strikes, your entire channel disappears. So thanks — I’ve now deleted “Karins ansikte”. Is it available elsewhere now? I haven’t paid attention…

While I was logged into the channel again for the first time in at least four years, I had a look at the stats:

Hey, total view time is 17K hours! Nice. Looks like the most-watched Bergman thing is the long-lost made-for-TV film Rabies. I mean, you can understand why it’s long-lost — the video quality is kinda bad, and if they don’t have a better source than this, I guess they’d feel bad about releasing it commercially. But like I said, I haven’t really checked whether these things have become available by now…

Watch them all here before they disappear. By this rate (one going missing every four years), that’ll take only 128 years…

I’ve got original pages by Carol Swain!!!

Carol Swain started selling original art a couple of months ago, and I snapped up this three page story, Jig and reel. Each page is about 30x42cm big. They’re so gorgeous!

*calms down a bit*

I think I should get them framed… I wanna have them on the wall. Hm… one long frame or three separate frames and arrange them like a triptych? Hm…

(Wherein I blather on about stuff and I eventually apologise to new readers)

About a week ago, I posted about equals signs in some documents, and that totes went viral, so I thought I’d talk some about that? For no good reason, really — do you need a reason to do navel gazing? Do you?

The first day, the traffic was dominated by readers originating from Hacker News. Then all of a sudden, there was a huge influx of traffic from Twitter. But whyyyy!

It was because of this tweet that got community noted, I think:

It did the numbers, anyway… Somehow this (along with repostings of the original tweet) led people to my account:

*gulp* 600K views! And I don’t even have a blue check! Do you think if I sign up quickly, and then ask Elon to add the views, then I’ll get lots of $$$? No? Darn.

I guess in this situation the traditional thing to do is to post a reply going “wow this blew up listen to my podcast”, but I don’t really have a podcast, and besides, I like using commas too much.

And I looked at all these “… and 100 others followed you” and didn’t understand that that, er, rolled over or something? So I didn’t check my profile until days later, and:

*gulp* I had no idea that so many people were interested in email transport standards! That’s an increase of, er, 20,000% or something. And they’re all going to be really disappointed when they get tweets about obscure 80s comics in their feed all of a sudden. I apologise in advance!

To make it up to these people, perhaps I can talk about RFC2231: “MIME Parameter Value and Encoded Word Extensions: Character Sets, Languages, and Continuations”. To the best of my knowledge, I was the only person who actually implemented this standard, so if you use it in your email, people who don’t use Gnus won’t be able to decode certain headers at all.

Look how pretty it is:

(rfc2231-encode-string "foo" "These are röck döts")
=> "foo*=utf-8''These%20are%20r%c3%b6ck%20d%c3%b6ts"

OK, perhaps there’s a reason it didn’t take off…

But that’s it! From now on there’ll be no more posts about email encoding! You’ll have to get your fix of that elsewhere!

But what you’re all wondering — were there any funny replies? Eh, some, but I liked this best:

Euhm, it’s really not, but other than that: A brilliant tweet.

And I think they should invite me to the influencer awards next year; the appropriately named “Vixen Awards”. There must be justice in this world!

After that, there was another bump originating on Youtube, but now it’s calmed down…

And… that’s enough blathering from me about his extremely important subject. I’ve got comics to read.