Llanoland

Hey everyone, just a rambling general update today.

https://www.last.fm/user/Professor_Steve/listening-report/year/2025/week/2

Seems that the second week of the year saw me falling off in my listening habits, but still pretty good. I'm recovering from a cold this week so not a lot going on. 

I am thinking of recycling a lot of my YouTube videos for class this semester as I do have a lot of good ones about debate and argumentation. Is it ethical to make students watch YouTube? There are advertisements there. Is it ethical to make students watch ads for a course they are paying thousands of dollars to attend? 

I would think at best we'd have a good video platform at the university level like Vimeo or something that all students could use. I guess we have Panopto, but most students use the Canvas Studio or they just upload the file to Canvas.

Maybe I'm over thinking it. 

https://open.spotify.com/track/3LfZkFQpwt9q2xfXIw2FHC?si=d7ce48ef8ddf4336

We are a week away from classes starting and I'm about a week way from being fully ready. So that's really something.

I'm going to try very, very hard not to care too much about what goes on in there. Offering the best possible class I can and then evaluating evidence presented by students that they are understanding (i.e. forging a relationship with the material) is about all that can be done. 

I'm really wondering if I'm actually going to get away with this 2 sections at the same time = 2 sections for your contract obligation. I really hope so and I certainly expect it to fail but I think I can whip up a mighty fine public speaking course fairly quickly.

It really has to be a spring focused on pumping out some of these drafts. The backlog is too big. The opportunities are there. It just requires a bit less social media and YouTube time. That's really it. Not too much. 

I've been going to the gym; hired a trainer. She told me the smallest caloric deficit with regular short sets of exercise is all you need for massive transformation. Same can be said with writing except the deficit is in other activities you do during the day and short sets refers to typing away (or scribbling with that favorite pen). 

I had a dream involving a creature that looked like this but I haven't run across this creature ever in my life, not even on social media or internet reading. It's called the Antarctic Scale Worm, and it's apparently a deep water predator. 

In my dream, people were wearing this as a living stole, something like a living fashion accessory-pet. I don't remember much else about the dream except it involved a grey-green futuristic research facility that was in the woods somewhere. It was very dark. 

I should try to write down dream impressions when I wake up and see if they lead me anywhere, because this was totally too strange to find this in my feed today.

SCENE 1

Old Man sitting on a weight machine using an old iPhone. He is listening to the handset staring into space.

OLD MAN: Ok well I have to go but if you keep this up you're going to end up in jail just like your mother. Bye!

SCENE 2 - young man and woman walking down the stairs after finishing their workouts

YOUNG MAN: I just don't think that's how you are supposed to run a business.

YOUNG WOMAN: And he has this Polish Flag hanging up in there, like, how is that going to help?

YOUNG MAN: *shaking head*

SCENE 3 - an old man MIKE is vigorously using a rowing machine way too fast. A second old man FRANK enters and walks by him.

MIKE: (shouting): Hey Frank!

FRANK: (stops) Mike, how ya doing?

MIKE: I have some bad news for you Frank

FRANK: (beat)

MIKE: I'm not moving to Massachusetts!

Both begin to laugh the old man muppet laugh and become louder and more animated so much so that a woman who was slowly rowing next to them stops and joins in on the laughter, looking around the gym as she does so.

THE END

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??

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!

Maybe this is too much for some of you but I'm obsessed with the data generated about my listening habits. 

Here's the full annual report of my listening from Last.fm. I've also included the pictures from the playback. Sorry for the screenshots, but there really wasn't another way to share it. 

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.