I’m many things. Here’s perhaps a few worth knowing.

I’m:

  • an M.A. in #Philosophy
  • a teacher, mostly #teaching #academic #writing
  • a committed #FOSS user
  • a #Fediverse enthusiast

If you’re into Mastodon, you can also find me @[email protected].

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  • 12 Comments
Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: July 30th, 2023

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  • Thank you for your comment and for bringing in some sanity.

    I’m a former cellist, who has been trained in the western cannon, and you’re absolutely right.

    Music is music. The so-called classical tradition is just hyped up musical culture from the rich and powerful European elite of those days.

    There’s nothing in it more special or high minded except for the fact that it was a learned tradition. It was especially cultivated to cater to those who were wealthy enough to actually pay for the privilege of having music played to them whenever they feel like listening to it.

    I’m over-simplifying, but that’s pretty much the gist of it. In the 19th century, and with industrialization, more and more people came to have their own pianos at home, so they too could have music at home whenever they felt like listening. Guys like Brahms made a huge buck back in the day catering to this new public.

    The point being that classical music is just a fancy name for that music tradition which, as you correctly pointed out, is a white European thing used to assert a supposed intellectual dominance over other peoples and their own cultures.

    Remember, music is music. There’s nothing inherently good about classical European music. Actually, if you hear that tradition thoroughly enough (I did), you’ll quickly find out that some of it is actually really badly written, even by the so-called great (I’m looking at you, Beethoven, and your Op. 91, Wellington’s Victory “Battle Symphony” – what a piece of crap!).

    tl;dr Classical music is indeed a politically charged term with nasty political implications. As a musical tradition, it is indeed over-hyped and made up to be something bigger than it actually is.







  • Not being open source is the great… sin for me. Note taking is an investment in the future, and betting on a closed source platform is a big no no—for me, that is.

    I know the content is safe in Obsidian, since it’s just Markdown files. But the workflow? Not so much.

    And I know the developers behind Obsidian have their reasons to close source it. Nothing against that. But since that’s their way, it’s not my way.



  • Logseq user here too.

    However, for a quick, transitory note, I use Kate or, more recently, Xpad. Only then I transcribe the content to Logseq. Why?

    Because while Logseq is great as an outliner and for network thinking, it’s as graceful and agile as an elephant.

    The gist of what I’m saying is: for now, and for me (hardware might be playing a role here, but I don’t think so) Logseq is a good note database. For quick typing, I have to use something else.



  • My aside:

    In every community I see this. There are always folks trying to narrow the community to some cut and dry descriptors—which for them are always obvious.

    Sometimes the jab is perhaps intended as a joke. But to my reading it’s always a trope, namely the tired fallacy of taking a part as the whole.

    Either way, it’s myopic. In any internet community, we’re always bound to narrowly see what’s happening. Because:

    • We can only see the posters, never the lurkers—which far exceed the former;
    • Posters, by virtue of taking the time to post, are most often than not highly opinionated;
    • Our reading is always selective. We’re either misguided by the way the comments are sorted, by our mood at the moment, by chance, or simply because we’re really bad at reading;
    • Our reading is always biased. Either by our mood, our current situation in life, our upbringing, our milieu, whatever;
    • the list goes on and on and on.

    This results in a very reductive view that, although very teasing because very personal and idiosyncratic, is ultimately an exercise in futility. To those already biased, it simply supplies them with fodder to confirm what they already believed.

    From afar, it’s just noise. Any view on what the community is is but a poor reflection of what the community ultimately is.