I’m (well, I like to think I’m) a very stable person, and it freaked me right out.

Yeah, I didn’t say I trust them to do it right, just that it could be done tastefully.

Good thing I haven’t bought a game from a big name studio since, uhh, does Elden Ring count?

Anyone remember the early Windows 10 update that booted back up with a black screen that said “Don’t Panic”?

That was the most panic inducing moment I’ve ever had with any PC.

If they’d just be smart about it. Make the ads in-game. Like a Nike poster on a wall or a can of Pepsi on a table or something. I wouldn’t have a problem with that. Making them the entire focus - however brief - just makes me hate them immeasurably.

If I made 3 cents a stream, I’d have a quarter of a million…

Not sure I’d use one of the most iconic sexy lead singers in history as an example. No matter much how much he looks like shit now.

Yep.

Another one of my most popular tracks is an atonal hour-and-twenty-minutes of cubic spline curves, granular synthesis, and other assorted noises I programmed in Csound.

I’m in a similar boat, but I never feel fully satisfied to release a song (probably cuz I am a hobbyist and I suck lol).

There’s never a better time to put yourself out there! I resisted it for twenty years. My most “successful” release is one of my least polished tracks. I recorded it just out of university on a Pentium with a stolen microphone, pirated software, a freebie guitar, and a ZOOM 505. It’s got 4 million listens and is responsible for half my income. By comparison, I’ve released stuff that I think sounds like it was professionally recorded in a studio that no one listens to.

I release everything as “Underwaterbob” - my username. You can find me just about everywhere. If you don’t have a subscription, it’s all on YouTube, too: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCQ_MZ9yX0STsY1l2Ml2zBFw

I make a wide variety of music.

It’s not really just Spotify. I’m a hobbyist music producer. I uploaded my entire catalog through Distrokid about two years ago. Distrokid serves just about every streaming service. It costs $20 a year for the most basic package. I’ve got ~8 million listens according to Distrokid, and that nets me about $40 US. So, I made my money back. Not bad for 20 years of work. Haha!

I don’t really care about the numbers, like I said, I’m a hobbyist. I make music because I enjoy making music. It would never be my career unless I dropped everything and struck out touring trying to make it in an industry that traditionally chews up and spits out hopefuls. I’m not exactly the age or attractiveness that most people expect in a touring musician, either.

It was pretty bad. He missed a lot of school. I think he ended up repeating grade six. I never saw him much after that, but I did hear that he got married to another person I went to school with eventually, so presumably his life wasn’t ruined or anything.

There was a solar eclipse when I was in grade six. One of my classmates was riding his bike home, and was stupidly looking at the eclipse, and got hit by a car. The irony.

Yes! I slapped Lubuntu on an HP Stream 13 not long ago. Works like a charm.

I bounced around a few different distros about twenty years ago. OpenSuse, Mint, and Ubuntu. I settled on Ubuntu (6.0X I think) because the others had a lot of trouble with hardware in my Korean laptop at the time. Ubuntu was the only one that had the track pad working right away, and also the only one I managed to get Korean keyboard input working in. I never did get the webcam working in any of them. I used Ubuntu in some form or another up until a few months ago when I switched to Mint. Largely because of Lemmy.

Doesn’t less demand mean cheaper gas? That sure hasn’t happened here.

While I also feel like the past is better left in the past, I am certainly not above a little schadenfreude, either.

Eventually every chat gpt request will just be answered with, “I too choose this guy’s dead wife.”

This could make for some hilarious, alternate history satire or something. I could totally see Key and Peele heading a group of racially diverse nazis ironically preaching racial purity and attempting to take over the world.

Sounds better than my method of having the first ten-fifteen years of collecting arranged neatly by artist names in folders labeled alphabetically followed by a few different folders labeled by the year I downloaded (not the year of release), a few genre folders, and a a few, uhh, folders sorted by how I acquired the music torrented or through Soulseekqt. Yeah, mine is a complete mess. Pulsar player for Android makes it incredibly easy to sort through stuff anyway. I did conveniently fail to put a lot of the stuff I rarely listen to on my current phone anyway. I’m not too egregiously awful. I do at least listen to everything I download at least once or twice. I had a friend in the 00s who just downloaded everything whether he listened or not. Yeah, I’ll keep comparing myself to his 20+ year old standard of digital hording.