While I remain in very good touch friends from way back, of which I am very grateful, it’s been much harder to keep in touch with college/grad school friends. We are scattered all over the country, now middle-aged with many different threads pulling at us, demanding our attention.

I went to college in the email/IM age. We got some social media in grad school, but it wasn’t until I was doing my postdoc that Twitter, Flickr, Facebook, and all the rest really started to take over.

Email has all but died for anything other than work, online ordering, and spam. IM is long dead. It’s quite possible that some of my college/grad friends are on Facebook, but alas, I am not. Anyway, it’s not like anyone posts there anyway. I only know of one friend from that era that actually posts on social media (Bluesky). Two others are on Instagram but haven’t posted in years. The only place I can actually find many of these people is on LinkedIn. Yuck.

How did these potentially wonderful means of communication turn into such shit?

Roughly one year ago, I wrote some thoughts about music.¹ Shortly thereafter, I finally paid for PLex Pass. I had asked Mike and Tom if it was decent and they seemed a bit on the fence; if I didn’t have a big Plex collection, it probably wasn’t worth. I broke down and bought the lifetime version to fix some annoyance I was having.²

Little did I know, Plex Pass gives you access to Plexamp, a music playing app. Plexamp plays music files in your Plex library and will stream to your phone if you are away from home. It has some nice features like per output device EQ and nice metadata display, if you are into that. But otherwise, seems like just another music app. Big deal.

The killer feature though is the sonic analysis. This takes forever on a big library, but once it’s done, Plexamp can ‘autoplay’ music in your library keeping to a similar genre or sound. It’s much like any of the algorithmic playlist features on Spotify and the like, but it’s for your music. It also enables rotating playlists made up of a few similar artists, so you always something kind of fresh. Obviously, on small libraries, this probably isn’t that great, but on mine (around 1700 albums), it’s pretty cool. If you have a Tidal subscription, there are certain autoplay lists that will also mix in music that you don’t have in your collection.

The other great feature is that it can cast from your Plex server to other endpoints, like Airplay, Sonos speakers, or other Plexamp installs. I have a raspberry pi headphone setup running Plexamp by the couch. I can play music from the server to the pi, while using my phone as a remote browser. It’s pretty reliable and seamless.

I highly recommend Plexamp for the few of us who still have large music libraries. I’ve tried a bunch of different apps on the phone that all have some nice features, but Plexamp seems like the most comprehensive and polished of them if you are willing to break away from the Apple Music paradigm. While I still use Apple Music (quite a lot actually), Plexamp is pretty low commitment since it uses a server as the hub. A server I’m already running.³ It also stacks up quite nicely against apps like Roon. Roon does have some attractive features but it also has a MASSIVE price. I’ve played around with the demo and am not really tempted.

It’s weird to me that Plex is sinking money into this niche app while at the same time slowly ruining their mainstream app by pushing weird social sharing shit and live TV, features that no one wants. But here we are.

Somehow I missed a ton of great music in the last decade. I blame it on a couple of things:

• The decline of radio. It got so bad that I just stopped listening around 2012. Thus it became much harder to discover new stuff that way.
• I moved to Ohio in 2012. This is coupled with the above point. I knew of a couple non-mainstream radio stations in Philly, but the decent ones in Cleveland didn’t quite broadcast to where we lived on the far East side.
• The rise of streaming music. I have a ton of ripped music in a carefully curated collection. When Apple Music came out, there were lots of stories of it screwing up your local library in various ways. As a result I stayed away for a long time.

As a result, I got in a rut where I was purchasing music from bands I was already aware of, but finding anything new was getting difficult. During the early pandemic, I finally finished ripping the last of my CDs in a lossless format and tagged everything right. I also bought a new drive for music backup; if anything happen I would be good.It was time to try some of the streaming services. I tried Amazon Music for a tiny bit. I tried Spotify for a bit longer and finally settled on Apple Music. We have a lot of Apple devices so it just made sense.

Long and short of it, I’ve gotten recommendations for a bunch of albums that came out in the 2010’s that are really great. I’ve added a number of new bands to the rotation. I’ll write about some of them at some point.

It’s clear each service has its own algorithm for recommendation. They suggest different bands; they also get stuck in a rut sometimes. I’m starting to branch out to some streaming radio and curated playlists to keep things fresh. I’m also playing around with last.fm.¹ We’ll see it goes.

It still blows my mind that I have access to all this music so easily. 1995 me would be so very jealous.

Roughly 30 years ago, at the age of 11 or 12¹, I was in the library looking for books in the fantasy/sci-fi paperback section and The Eye of the World by Robert Jordan caught my eye. I think the only reason I checked it out was because it was massive.²

Over the next decade, I continued to read the series, never quite knowing how long it was going to be or when it would be finished. In the early years, the books came out quite quickly, and I’d just read the new book. As time progressed, the cadence slowed to every other year, and I’d start to forget details in the preceding novels. I’m sure all the distractions and changes associated with highschool and college didn’t help. As a result, I would periodically have to start over from the beginning. I’ve probably read the first novel 5 or 6 times by now.

Sometime in graduate school, I decided to shelve the series and reread it from start to finish when it was all over. I’m not sure how far I actually read; I own the 10th and 11th books, but do not recall reading them. My copy of the 10th book doesn’t even have a cracked binding.³ Around this time, Jordan became terminally ill and passed away before finishing the “final” novel. Another author was chosen to work from Jordan’s notes and finish the series, though it was understandably delayed for a few years.

It must have registered at some level that it was finally completed in 2013, but, I guess time got away from me. A lot has gone in the last 8 years, and I never got around to picking up the series again. Recently, I decided to finally read the whole thing from start to finish. Approximately 270 hrs of reading later, I am now done.

It’s a bit strange to finally be done with it. I have been reading this series more or less since I was 11–I’ve been carrying it with me most of my life. It’s always been there as this thing I’m reading, either actively or passively. I have to say, I thoroughly enjoyed the reading of it straight through. I loved the series when I was younger, and for the most part, it holds up. It will always hold a special and unique place for me, due to how it bridged so many different parts of my life. I’ll never be able to start another series at the age of 12, only to finish 30 years later…

Now, I’m not saying the books are all amazing or everything in them is perfect. In one of the volumes around the fifth,⁴ some of the characters, descriptions, and phrasing get a little monotonous. The story remains good though, and things smooth out in the next book or two. They can also be a bit verbose in certain places as well–who would expect that in a series that spans 14 novels?

On the other hand, the first few books are really good. I remember Mike taking the first novel on a trip to England one summer and loving it so much that he had to purchase the second volume overseas to continue reading. He was too impatient to wait the two weeks to come back home and read the copy we had there. This is the same person who leaves bookmarks in unfinished books like a squirrel burying acorns before winter.

Another quality of the series that was mostly lost on me is Jordan’s weaving of many bits of myths and legends into the world and storyline. One very obvious allusion is Callandor (the Sword That Is Not a Sword), which happens to reside in a fortress called… the Stone.

Callandor resides within the Stone of Tear at its heart, just as the sword which Arthur first draws resides within the heart of a stone, and just as Excalibur resides within a lake which surrounds the heartstone of Avalon. Excalibur was returned to the lake after the battle of Camlann, and Callandor is apparently left behind in the Pit of Doom (formerly a lake of lava) after the Bore is sealed.

—The Thirteenth Depository

Details like this make for a very rich reading outside of the face value entertainment value. It goes much deeper than a simple retelling of Arthurian legend. Much, much deeper.

It is kind of amazing that the story is captivating or coherent at all. After all, this work spans almost 12,000 pages and over 4.4 million words. Is it a bit derivative of Tolkien? Sure. Is everything perfect in it? No. But it is still very enjoyable, and I’m glad to have finally finished it.

Approximately 47 years ago, back in May of 2020, during the ‘early days’ of the pandemic, we had a bird strike. This was the most exciting thing that happened that week—most definitely the most exciting thing for the cats.

I noticed a small bird on our 2nd floor balcony. We called the local Dept. of Natural Resources, who informed us that we should let the bird sit for about an hour. They usually recover in that time period. If not, chances were slim that the bird would survive. They also gave us some locations we could take the bird to if it needed some sort of care, though the guy asked what type of bird it was. His reasoning was that if it was a nuisance species, whatever bird sanctuary we took it too would probably kill it. Merlin Bird identified it as a Brown Creeper.

We decided to let birdo sit on the deck, and sure enough, about an hour later, it started moving around. It hopped across the decking a bit, pooped, and then decided to scale the screen door. When it started to move, the cats noticed it. They lost it. It was quite humorous, as both cats wanted to get the bird, but when Neutron got too close to Alice, Alice would swat Neutron, and Neutron would get offended that she didn’t have unfettered access to the window to watch the bird.

The bird rested on the screen a bit, pooped again, and then flew off.

Sometimes it amazes me that one of the biggest rock and roll bands of all time, The Rolling Stones, on one of their definitive albums, Exile on Main St., released a song called Turd on the Run.

Turd on the Run…

I guess I should not be surprised that in the 48 years that have passed since that song was released, it has never been played live on tour.