---
title: "2023-11-02 // three albums - october 2023"
date: 2023-11-02
---

howdy reader! i haven't been active on here for a little while, but i've had a million ideas bouncing around my head on things that i want to write. this blog post is going to be a bit of a catch all on what i've done in the last few months on this site, what i've been doing offline, as well as sort of bundling my top three albums for the month

### three albums
i've known that spotify's payment plan makes it basically impossible to make money as an indie musician for years, but they recently [really sunk the boot in](https://www.billboard.com/pro/spotify-changing-how-pays-artists-stream-thresholds) by adding new stream limits to smaller artists. i'd believe that this move was made in somewhat good faith, as it's target was ai generated noise tracks, but it also attacks field recordings, a genre i happen to really enjoy

my plan from here was twofold. i've switched to tidal, which has a better model that gives more to artists, but is priced almost identically (my tidal family subscription is 2aud more than my spotify couple's plan); i also started hoarding my favourite albums locally. my first port of call was bandcamp, which has [also recently enjoyed a bit of drama](https://www.billboard.com/pro/bandcamp-employees-layoffs-sale-to-songtradr/), but at least guarantees to give the vast majority of money to their artists. a five dollar album isn't very much for me to cough up now that i have a real job, but gives the artist more money than all of my streaming to this point would have paid out

my backup move is the excellent (but less legal) [zspotify](zshttps://github.com/jsavargas/zspotifypotify). zspotify can download an absurd amount of money in a super short amount of time, and doesn't actually require that you use a premium spotify account to use it

with all of this local music handled, i redownloaded foobar2000 and musicbee, two old local music tools i had in my (short) pre-spotify days - foobar provides a more customisable experience, which was why i used it as my primary player for so long, but musicbee honestly surprised me at how nice it has become. it also has really solid auto-tagging provided by musicbrainz, which helps to fix some of the formatting screw ups provided by zspotify

in any case, because of all this back and forthing my october [monthly playlist is looking a little bit gaunt](https://open.spotify.com/playlist/3Txr3rv2geMLw1XWzxSXCG?si=98ef2e5955954335), but i can still drop in some albums i enjoyed, sans any big cereberal criticism and analysis. 

<iframe style="border: 0; width: 100%; height: 320px;" src="https://bandcamp.com/EmbeddedPlayer/album=708339886/size=large/bgcol=ffffff/linkcol=0687f5/artwork=small/transparent=true/" seamless><a href="https://nobonoko.bandcamp.com/album/music-for-animal-caf-s-2">Music For Animal Cafés by nobonoko</a></iframe>

<iframe style="border: 0; width: 100%; height: 320px;" src="https://bandcamp.com/EmbeddedPlayer/album=68305864/size=large/bgcol=ffffff/linkcol=0687f5/artwork=small/transparent=true/" seamless><a href="https://haroldbudd.bandcamp.com/album/avalon-sutra">Avalon Sutra by Harold Budd</a></iframe>

<iframe style="border: 0; width: 100%; height: 320px;" src="https://bandcamp.com/EmbeddedPlayer/album=3618997054/size=large/bgcol=ffffff/linkcol=0687f5/artwork=small/transparent=true/" seamless><a href="https://sevdaliza.bandcamp.com/album/ison">ISON by Sevdaliza</a></iframe>

### home servers
on the note of having a great deal of music stored locally, i was looking at a corporate auction site while looking for a spare monitor and stumbled across this beauty for a whopping 70aud:

![](/_assets/img/blog/m710q.webp)

these old pcs are prized for their low power usage, and while their 2017-laptop-spec hardware would make for a pretty miserable desktop experience, it has more than enough power to run a minecraft server and some \<LEGAL\> file management. i have spent more time than i care to admit fiddling with it for the last couple of weeks, but it's doing a great job of streaming my \<DVD RIPS\> of adventure time, bee and puppycat and this season's anime to my tv, as well as a discord bot and a couple of other nice-to-haves

### art
i haven't been posting as much stuff as i would like due to the aforementioned distractions (although i'm very proud of [this fun doodle](/art/my-art-2023/#img_22) i whipped up mid-workday). i've still been doing some croquis' and gesture drawings when i get a chance, but my real project was inspired by [this cool vid](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kw7I3tUXgG4) by zephyer about their process of pursuing art as a career. i'm not 35, and i don't think i'm pursuing art as a career, but i really took his advice of "working towards a project" to heart, so i've tasked myself with creating and fleshing out three original characters, and making some short stories or comic strips with them. it's still slightly aimless, but there is a distinct *general* direction, which is a great start. i've been having a lot of fun with the three characters: i'm giving them distinct silhouettes which i have dubbed 🔺, ♦️ and 🔻, and have given them different adventurer archetypes in a medieval setting. i'm not happy enough with the designs to put them up publicly yet (the bulky armor on one character is giving me a lot of trouble) but keep your peepers peeled

### the site
i recently learned how to use data files and shortcodes in eleventy which means that i can keep a page like the [infinite nightmare](/infinite_nightmare) super simple, and push all its contents off to a json file. this means that A. the data in the page is actually stored as data, but also B. i can use pagination if these pages get too big. i'm always keeping an eye on [pagespeed](https://pagespeed.web.dev/) to make sure this site is as light as i can manage, so i need to be able to trim pages down if they get too big, especially if theyre full of images

![](/_assets/img/blog/shortcodes.webp)  

the shortcode is [here](https://github.com/uuupah/11ty_neocities/blob/1456018494d7e6ece2f678d509ebd05ba7d00ec4/.eleventy.js#L26C3-L61C6) and i think it's pretty east to understand. having stuff like this is a godsend if you want to paste multiple similar blocks of html with the same formatting without having to actually _worry_ about the formatting

i also have a bunch of posts in the works, including blogposts on sea of stars, the witness, iconoclasts, and the film mars express. i've spent way too much time on this particular blogpost, so hopefully i can keep the momentum up and finish them soon

### media
i've poked my head into a lot of different stuff over the last couple of months, and i would like to talk about a lot of it in more detail, but heres some snappy summaries:

#### baldur's gate
![](/_assets/img/blog/bg3.webp)  
<sup>this is literally the only screenshot i have from the game - i'm on the left</sup>  
i'm lucky enough to know enough people with beefy enough pc's for us to play baldur's gate 3 in 4 player co-op, which has been an absolute delight! the going has been slow because a couple of us (me included) are the kind of people to pore over every nook and cranny before moving forward in a game, but it has a very similar vibe to playing tabletop dnd, especially if you put everyone's facecam up on another screen

bg3 has also been a really nice experience in playing a non-binary character who really _feels_ androgenous. a rarity, and a feature that it doesn't quite share with the next entry in this list:

#### starfield
![](/_assets/img/blog/starfield.webp)  
<sup>i couldnt imagine spending a hundred bucks on this</sup>  
i put away an absurd amount of time on skyrim and fallout 4 when i was in high school, so i was cautiously optimistic about the new bethesda offering, but once i got my hands on a /<LEGAL/> early copy i was a little disappointed. i learned later that this was partly due to me doing the classic skyrim experience of running in a random direction and seeing what you find; the vast majority of open space in starfield is somewhat limply procedurally generated, and it seems that the general consensus is that these areas aren't really worth visiting. besides this, i was still taken aback by how shallow the small slice of story i experienced felt, and how characters truely just feel like cardboard standees pointing you towards a scavenger hunt or a shooting gallery. i'm not sure if this is because the design has got worse in the last ten years or if i've just been exposed to enough "good" games that i can sort of tell the difference now. like cyberpunk 2077 i should probably give it another go once it's had some time to improve a little, but given the noise my poor ailing 2070 super is making that might have to wait for a gpu upgrade, and _that_ might have to wait till i get a payrise

#### iconoclasts
![](/_assets/img/blog/iconoclasts.webp)  
i'm not even sure how i stumbled on to this one when i first grabbed it, but iconoclasts is a super nifty metroidvania with lovely animation and a colourful artstyle. the puzzles are legitimately challenging, everything feels really punchy, and the story actually had me super intrigued - i'm going to do a full blogpost on this one in the future, so watch this space

#### enslaved - odyssey to the west  
![](https://images.igdb.com/igdb/image/upload/t_original/lczixkjyrps4mkgwdk1q.jpg)  
i picked this one up on an absolute whim - i remember watching a tv review on abc's good game when i was quite young, and had always meant to give it a go. enslaved is pretty unpolished as both a story and an experience, but there is something kind of special about the games that came out after uncharted 2; every game in this era had (very simple) climbing mechanics, brawl style combat and a narrative story with plenty of scenery-chewing. enslaved leans _extremely_ heavily on the 16th century story Journey to the West but set in a post apocalyptic world, but the ending leaves a lot to be desired. it screams early deadlines or tight budgets to me. despite this, it was pretty fun to go through a game where the required inputs are unambiguous and the story and world are colourful and in your face. i knocked it out in a couple of sessions

#### splatoon 3  
![](/_assets/img/blog/splatoon3.jpg)  
this game continues to kick so much ass i love it so much