Aldi has such awesome chocolate! Thanks for pointing out the reason.

Yes, so I am overwhelming myself with good stuff so I don’t have as much time to let that stuff bother me.

I joined an animal rescue that I work at every Sunday and busy my butt there. I also started participating in community events with other people through my music teacher, so I’ve always got new songs to work on. These national protests also have a more uplifting vibe than I’d expected, so I’d like to participate in more of those too.

So I’m feeling better about my own actions, developing more skills, helping my environment, giving entertainment back to my community, and seeing hundreds of other people that also want this place to be a bit better.

Sure the news is still a total buzzkill, but I can only dwell on it so long. I put off doing these things for so long saying I didn’t have time or energy, but now they are wonderful healthy distractions, and even if we do pull out of this tailspin, I’d love to keep doing all these things anyway.

Don’t let jerks keep you down. We can’t stop all of it, but we can all find some way to be useful and successful, and other people seeing you carry on will keep them motivated too!

I’ve seen a few ideas like that posted before and people had always ended up calling it things like “the spider hole.”

As a broad shouldered side sleeper, I would like to test it out, but I can only imagine what things would disappear down that hole…

Same for me. It didn’t even click in the beginning, I just enjoyed that the show seemed to be ultra relatable, and as things went on it started to feel all ooooo this isn’t good I can identify with this many things.

It’s just way easier to identify problems in others than in yourself because you have all these internal justifications and false ways of remembering events to your own benefit, but seeing it laid out neatly in a show and where the consequences are much more immediate and spelled out, it made me start self-reflecting on my own life.

It got me to the point of understanding and admitting that the depression I had carried around most of my life wasn’t normal and that I was the main destructive force in my life at that point.

It was also nice the show covered a lot of different types of depression and anxiety. I feel most shows wouldn’t have handled Princess Caroline, Mister Peanutbutter, or even Todd the way that they did. And nobody was up or down the entire time, which was another thing letting me tell myself I didn’t have severe depression, because I had plenty of good moments too.

The show handled everyone pretty respectfully and gave them all realistic but positive outcomes, but didn’t smooth over anything that would be pretty irreparable in real life. Things like Hollyhock needing to keep her distance or Dianne still being glad they met but knowing that she can’t be around him felt very real and sincere, not placating by having everyone make up at the end.

I will say I just finished a rewatch, and parts of the last season did trigger me in a way I hadn’t had to deal with in years now. I’ve been feeling more depressed this year than I have in a long time, and while a lot of the show made me glad of how far I’ve come, there’s still plenty in my life I don’t want to own about my past and it still makes me feel sometimes that I don’t deserve to be happy and that I’m a bad person. It really put me in a dark spot for about a week.

Tuca and Bertie was another great one and carried on a good bit of what Bojack did, and I’m upset it got cancelled right as it was getting into the traumatic stuff. I would have liked to see that get the same chance to tell its story as it was telling a similar story but from a female perspective and having something similar for people dealing with the fallout of sexual assault could be helpful in the same way BJH helped people understand depression.

If you like animals, I’ve almost 2000 owl posts you can look through at [email protected].

A lot of it isn’t just random pictures, they’ve got stories to go with them and I’ll add facts or answer questions and there’s often more pics in the comments, so you can kill a lot of time there.

Doing it for so long got me to volunteer at a wild animal rescue this year so I’ve been learning more about all kinds of animals and I love to read and research so feel free to ask as many questions as you want. I try to respond to everything.

I like your very targeted responses!

With money in the billions, I agree that I couldn’t not help fellow humans first.

Your proposals also have some fairly immediate benefits to a number of different groups of underserved people.

And then you even came back in the end to include some of the critters as well!

I like your style.

Glad you enjoy all the different owls!

I did join up with the local rehab center this year. After promoting it every day, it didn’t feel right if I did not participate directly myself. Last year I also had another commenter tell me the community got them to join their rehab center, so we’re making a small positive change in the world.

I’ve been learning a lot there and get to see many adorable animals up close. Here is our newest owl patient:

I’m sure a good deal of it is just that like being lazy and complaining. 😁

I got some good posts added to the queue today and planted some more stuff in my container garden and made some bread, so now to clean dishes and laundry and try to focus on some piano.

I think I’ve been lost since the gf has gone to a very fluctuating schedule, as it really throws off my routines. It’s like if the sun came out at a different time every day. There’s still the same amount of time and opportunity to do stuff, but you’d feel off after a while doing stuff at what feels like the wrong time of day. I dunno. I’m weird. 😝

My pleasure!

That’s the drawback of there being so much great free music stuff these days! You can get lost playing and never actually finish anything.

I haven’t used Cakewalk. It seems very powerful, but I see people say it’s one of the harder DAWs to learn.

I also hear Sonar discontinued Cakewalk Free and is moving to a paid license, though that was 2 years ago and Free is still available I think, but I don’t know if it’s being maintained any longer.

As hard as it may be to imagine, I feel I’ve been getting a bit behind from where I’d like to be with owl stuff. With so many owl babies right now, it’s been hard to get some of the variety I’d like, and between being sick and depressed, it’s hard for me to focus on owls or music the way I’d like.

But between all those links I’ve shared, you should have years worth of experimentation ahead of you. I hope you find lots of good stuff.

Gotcha, now I have a better idea of what you’re trying to do.

Watching this video about looping in LMMS shows it can sorta be done, sometimes with some help from Audacity.

If you’re adding in more stuff like VST plugins and vocals, you may want to try out Waveform Free, which I checked is for iOS also, so you get a full modern DAW. It’s the same product as their paid full version, just like 2 updates behind.

For more premade loops, check out Looperman if you haven’t already.

It’s not free, but I think I under $20 for the program and all the upgrades, if looping and sampling is something you want to focus on, check out Koala Sampler. I downloaded it the other week and have been sampling vinyl recordings from YouTube, it has an AI stem extractor to separate the instrument tracks, and then chopping and looping that.

It has a built in simple synth now as well, and you can use a midi controller with it. Lots of videos are out there if you want to see how that works. You might be able to incorporate that into your setup.

I do have some other hobbies! 😁

If you’re looking for instruments, effects, etc, the YouTube channel elektronickmusick demos a few each day and many are free or free trials and they run the same midday track through all of them to give you an indeed what they sound like.

I don’t think they’re the best demos because it’s a generic track through all of them, not necessarily something that fits perfect with each unique instrument’s strengths, but it gives you some ideas of the sound before you search for it, download it, and find out it’s not for you.

If you want some nifty and weird sounds with fun back stories, David Hilowitz searches out obscure old instruments, fixes them, and samples them in his Decent Sampler plugin and rotates giving away different ones for free.

I’m still really bad at making my own music, but I like experimenting while I’m learning to do better.

Like in this video?

I haven’t used LMMS in a long time, but he’s manually editing the piano roll (where the notes are stored) but I see a record button here where it should record what you play on the keyboard.

Oh, glad to help! Any other music tools you’re looking for? I’m not good with any of them, but I like testing them out. I’m still just learning and experimenting.

I get a little sad when I don’t see anything new for me on threads like this, but then I’m a bit grateful since that means I’ve already spent a long time enjoying all these things!

And if you need some free virtual instruments, Plugins4Free and Vital.

Other free, though not FOSS DAWs are Reaper and Waveform.

I get what you’re saying. I’ve made that mistake before.

We were a remote team and never even got a new manager when the old one left, and me and the supervisor are friends IRL.

Good times.

I’m not a programmer, but I learned how to write a number of Excel macros to automate repetitive and tedious tasks.

There were quite a number that really saved a ton of time, but the best were a pair took about 3 full days work for 3 or 4 people and made it into 10 minute jobs for 2 people.

It freed up so much time every month, and the job went from miserable and error prone to being much more reliable and let us spend time improving related processes rather than trudging through piles of data to get it formatted and sent to the right people.

Also how many people will potentially suffer before another one comes forward and gets taken seriously? 🤨

Nevertheless, the judge refrained from passing sentence. “It is undeniable that he passed the line of what is permissible. The man showed a lack of respect for the victim’s physical, psychological and sexual boundaries.

I don’t know how they do it over there, but where I’m from, those are 3 things someone should probably respect if they’re going to be placed in a position requiring great trust like a doctor…

In Stephenson’s “Diamond Age” novel, even the super poor had basic access to in-home replicators. They were limited to pretty basic items, but they were available.

With everyone having access to basic goods, the rich people would go to villages of artisans that would hand make items to get unique, one of a kind things, as most crafts were now basically lost skills to most of society.

Throughout the story, the tech is explored and eventually hacked to upend society by removing limits on what can be generated by the replicator.