Mysterious Giovanni

Who is Giovanni? 

I was given a CD collection today and there are some amazing things in it but none more amazing than this collection of Giovanni CDs. 

Look at him. Can you have a more disinterested look? He looks like his parents are forcing him to take a photo. 

This collection must be the largest Giovanni album collection in the US right now. These are just a few of them. Why so many?

I also inherited a Bose radio CD player so what better way to test it than a Giovanni CD? There was already one in there when I opened it. It’s just piano music no vocals, which was disappointing. 

Then I started thinking about this from a Stephen King perspective. What if Giovanni is an ancient spirit and playing his whole album allows him to escape his CD prison (like the prison in Superman 2) and then he takes over my body and plays average piano with it? 

That wouldn’t be terrible now that I read it. Maybe even an improvement. But who is he?

Does anyone know or has anyone been to a Giovanni concert? 




Frog Bog

I'm watching GDQ and for some strange reason the sounds of this ancient Intellivision game I used to be addicted to entered my head. Here is Frog Bog, a childhood delight of a game that is also a fever dream and perhaps more. Now you too can enjoy the sounds that are suddenly with me after watching some speedruns.

I just got my Steam Deck; is there an intellivision emulator??


Minecraft

I'm still pretty obsessed with Minecraft. Visiting with my nephews over the winter holiday got me thinking about it a lot more. 

I am trying to play more games on the computer as it's just nicer than a console and more economical. I already have a nice computer, why not game on it more? 

I bought a Steam Deck that should arrive this week as part of the plan. I hope that it allows me to play more computer games in more locations around the house where I won't feel cooped up in the computer room which really is a home office for doing work for university and all that. 

Anyway, this video came across my YouTube this morning and it really got me excited to play some Minecraft later today!


The Real Music Stats for 2024

Today's the day where last.fm shows you your annual listening stats in much more detail than Spotify. They also consider December part of the year which Spotify doesn't for some odd reason.

Looks like I can't figure out how to make the replay public, but here's a link to my profile and pretty much everything I have listened to since 2007. You can look at annual track counts, and even down to daily on there if you like.

Some thoughts:

I felt my longest streak would have been 100+ days but I only had 85 concurrent as the longest. 

Last.fm tagged most of the Yellowcard tracks incorrectly, something I missed out on when looking over weekly and monthly reports. These are all meant to be the new joint album with Hammock. Spotify had these correct but somehow last.fm missed it. I wonder what happens if I correct the tags now? Technically it's still correct - it is Yellowcard - but it's not the actual track I listened do which was the remix with Hammock and a very different song. Plus, no credit for Hammock listening!

I really like all the other detailed descriptions of things in the report. I hope you consider getting last.fm and tracking your listening habits too! I've been at it since a student showed it to me in 2007. I have a lot of information about my listening including being able to tell when I heard a track and got obsessed with it to when I last listened to it. It's a lot of fun, as long as you aren't embarrassed by everyone seeing you listened to the same song like 20 times in a row. 

The image of the annual replay should be here in this post! I'll share more when I figure out how to do it. Might just be some screen shots.