obombration

I loved my manual transmission cars, and wasn't even that bothered by the "1st-2nd-1st-2nd..." highway congestion that I'd encounter every now and then. But when my driving got to be a little more adventurous (lane and a half wide gravel forest service roads on steep hills) I reluctantly gave in and got an auto. Some day I hope to own another fun manual car...

Very nice designs. It's been interesting to see the explosion of headless, fanned-fret guitars over the last few years. Kiesel and Strandberg seemed to be the only places to reliably find them a few years ago.

As a midwesterner, I would certainly appreciate it if people would focus on the other 95% of what I said, and not that I said "bag" ("bay-g").

Since someone already mentioned electric guitar, I'll go with: Petzl Grigri 2[1]

I was initially pretty skeptical of Grigris. Climbers have used far more primitive devices for a long time, why do I need a big, bulky hunk of metal and plastic to catch falls? But now that I have one, you'll have to pry it from my hopefully not cold or dead hands. I don't need to have a death-grip on my rope if my climber is hanging for a while. I can go hands-free on rappel to get stuck gear. Most importantly, it has certainly helped prevent some accidents that could have been catastrophic--one particular incident left me with a broken foot, but without the braking assistance from the Grigri, I may have instead walked over to a cratered climber. Best $99 I've ever spent.

[1] https://www.petzl.com/US/en/Sport/Belay-devices--descenders/...

If there's a YouTube playlist for the course, you can easily grab them all with youtube-dl.

[0]: https://rg3.github.io/youtube-dl/

Do you use an audio interface? What have you found is supported well by Linux? Saffire Pro 24 + Addictive Drums + Logic is what is really keeping me tied to macOS at home.

At work, it's probably JIRA. Tons of UI noise, text markup isn't what I expect it to be and nobody around here can seem to agree on what features should be used for a particular scenario.

Past work, it would have been Identity Finder by a landslide. Awful UI, awful support, super intrusive, a total pain to administer, just bleh. Glad I was able to wash my hands of that.

Personal stuff, iTunes. I genuinely like the interface (at least on macOS) but it's huge and bloated and doesn't do some of the things I want it to. If they ripped out everything that wasn't related to listening to your personal (local) music library, I'd probably like it quite a bit. I wish it would write metadata to file tags rather than its own database, but I forgo that if it got rid of all the other crap.

Agreed. I taught a CS club to 4th and 5th graders during college and they all loved Scratch. It's very easy to get going with audio, images, animation, etc., which got them really interested quickly. Even for older (middle school aged) kids I'd probably start with Scratch because it teaches most of the CS concepts you'd use in any other language, but doesn't require the tedious environment setup (editor, compiler/interpreter, etc.) that "real" languages need. Spark their interest using the concepts, then sprinkle in the boring parts.

I really like the Steelcase Leap I use at work. I find it much nicer than the Aeron I was using before.

> You're citing Darkthrone, for instance, which is basically the poster-child band for teenagers using metal as an excuse to shoot people and burn things.

No, they aren't. You're thinking of Varg Vikernes of Burzum, and maybe Faust from (early) Emperor. Fenriz, Nocturno Culto and most of the rest of the Norwegian scene had nothing to do with Varg's 'black metal politics'.

As for getting around how "overtly racist" those bands are: you can't, at least with releases like Fullmoon's United Aryan Evil. If the subject matter bothers you, you simply don't listen.

"Black Metal: Evolution of the Cult" is a great introductory book on early black metal scenes around the world. Most black metal works focus on the Norwegian scene (Mayhem/Burzum/Darkthrone primarily), but Evolution of the Cult has chapters on Rotting Christ from Greece, Sigh from Japan, the Les Légions Noire bands from France and a whole host of others.

https://www.amazon.com/Black-Metal-Evolution-Dayal-Patterson...

> This one's a bit unique as it all began with a small group of teenagers in Jessheim in Norway in the late 80s/early 90s. They wanted to be 'evil' and 'extreme' but they lacked the musical ability to rival the predominantly (at the time) Swedish and American Death Metal scenes. So instead they did what anyone would do (not) they started burning down churches, proclaiming themselves 'Satanists' and killing each other.

That statement ignores a big part of the black metal aesthetic and does a huge disservice to the many great musicians in the scene. The raw production values were in response to the rising popularity and commercialization of death metal around the late '80s and early '90s and the 'plastic' production that came with it. Listen to Soulside Journey and then A Blaze in the Northern Sky and try telling me it wasn't absolutely intentional. Then listen to anything Emperor released and try telling me "they lacked the musical ability to rival the predominantly (at the time) Swedish and American Death Metal scenes."

Euronymous spent tons of time perfecting the production of De Mysteriis Dom Sathanas. Whether it sounds harsh to the average listener or not (it does), he went out of his way to have 1) audible bass (check it out on headphones sometime), 2) thunderously huge drums and 3) cacophonous guitars, true to his playing style. These were all calculated, intentional decisions, meant to drive the cold, bleak aesthetic.