I have exciting news for Linux musicians: it's now possible to run Xfer Records' Serum 2 (and the OG Serum) under Wine! But the relevant information is scattered across GitHub issues and repositories, and the total effort required is substantial, at least at the time of writing. I'm going to do my best to explain the setup process here.

Don't freak out, I'm not sounding the alarm bells on anything in particular. Take this post as an outstretched hand, here to guide you into the world of truly secure & private communication. It won't be perfect, but there are fewer compromises involved than you might've been led to expect, including some options for personalization that are easily overlooked. I think the tradeoffs are more than worth it in today's world.

Long ago on this blog, before I started primarily talking about software & music production, I wrote about life. One such post was titled "Growing up". I've decided it's due for a revisit — not as a progress update on my own growth, but as a re-examination of the topic from new perspectives.

When I redesigned this blog 2 years ago, I decided to give the Tailwind CSS framework a spin. Fast-forward to today: Tailwind is now entirely gone, replaced by some simple, well-structured Sass code. This was not an easy transition — it took me over 8 hours of dedicated effort, with no way to automate the task at hand. I think that in and of itself might be an argument against Tailwind, but that probably sounds like circular reasoning if you don't understand the why, so allow me to elaborate.

Every Sunday evening, a couple of music-making nerds join the IRC channel #mod_shrine, download a ZIP file of ~20-30 samples, and spend the next hour using only those samples to make a song. Then they listen to all the songs people made, vote on their favorites, and find out who got 1st place.

My music library is a fountain of memories I'd otherwise have forgotten by now. I can tell you which Monstercat compilation I was listening to the first time I played hooky from college, driving 2 hours to visit my first partner. I can picture the hotel room I was sitting in while listening to Rossz Csillag Alatt Született that one time. And Mouth Silence was the unofficial soundtrack of my senior year college job. But those are just a few sparse anchor points. What if I wanted to know what else I was listening to around these times?

I wrote some custom CSS to bestow Jellyfin's web client with a blurred backdrop on detail pages. The code is mildly cursed, but I'm quite fond of how the result looks. You can use it too if you want!

About 20 years ago, Google shook the world with its newest product: Gmail, a free email service with an entire gigabyte of storage attached. It was the start of a beautiful, connected world. Apple then casually dropped the most revolutionary computing device of the century, and Microsoft remembered how to make a good operating system with Windows 7. Streaming services like Netflix and Spotify completely reshaped how we consume media, while social platforms like Facebook and Twitter did the same for our online conversations. Consumer technology was taking over our lives, and we ate it up. Guys, the free market works! It really works!!

Today is Undertale's 10th anniversary. In case you weren't aware, this game used to be a cornerstone of my online identity; I used its sprites as my avatars and cherry-picked its flavor text for my social media bios. I cared about this game a lot, and I still feel the shockwaves of its emotional impact on me when I revisit it. So, today's anniversary seems like an appropriate time to write about the thesis statement that's been brewing in my head: Undertale was a good enough game to become my all-time favorite game, at least for a couple years.

As of today, I've pulled my music catalog from Spotify. I refuse to be an accomplice to the murderous whims of a CEO who's gotten far too comfortable flaunting his stolen wealth and moral bankruptcy. If you publish music on streaming platforms, I think you should follow suit. Compromising on human rights isn't worth any amount of money, but especially not the table scraps Spotify pays artists like us.