I don't know? A part of me does feel a tad like I'm spinning my wheels.

The thing is, I'm actually doing well, though. Anyone looking at my life on paper would throw up their hands. At work i'm constantly being told I'm doing a good job, but, in reality, I've been going through the motions for the past month and a half now. As far as I'm concerned I'm barely putting any effort into it as compared to earlier this year. I like my job, I'm just feeling unmotivated

Maybe I should make some changes. Just don't know where to start and how

The most exhausting thing in life is to be caught in a loop, no matter how good it looks on paper. Loop is a loop, meaningless automated repetition that drains the life's energy away. Maybe you should go out more, go on a small trips now and then, workout a bit, ride a bike more often, invest some money in good gear and go hiking, go to an unexpected gig (classical music or jazz even). Breaking routine is extremely hard, but it can be hell of rewarding process in the end.

That's some good advice Xymosys. Mixing things up can't hurt, though I find if I'm going through an unmotivated phase then it can be hard to find the energy.

It kinda sucks that we're not allowed to feel unmotivated at work. I mean that's gotta be normal for any human yet the way we're brought up and schooled teaches us we're not "allowed" to feel certain ways. So by the time we're adults we're fighting internal battles unconsciously on a range of levels. Just to keep ourselves "together".

Something I really hope dies in my lifetime that was inflicted on me is teaching kids they're somehow wrong for however they feel. And bosses who don't respect their employees feelings.

I recently had a "man they don't make them like they used to" moment. I scratched my little speaker in my stereo and I managed to fix it with superglue. The speaker has not lost power or bass at all!

It is a 70$ Philips stereo that I have owned since 2006. This fucker has pulled off more than 10 parties playing for hours at maximum volume, has been kicked, thrown to the ground etc. But this little boy is still alive and kicking.

I even once spilled water on it and the only thing that got blown was the fuse!

This thing has been my music companion for the past 16 years! Man time really flies away.

Sort of silly, tech-challenged question, re. music storage...

I've always collected CDs, and only about a decade ago did I (reluctantly!) adopt the habit of storing them as music files via iTunes. Now my primary music player is an iPod, though I still collect and import everything from CDs. Right now I have about 85 GB of music on iTunes, all from ripping my CDs over the years, one by one. Yes, I will gladly accept a medal.

But this gets to the obvious point about my nightmare scenario. I have an old (Windows 7-equipped) PC laptop which I use at this point for the sole purpose of importing music into iTunes and moving it to my iPod. This PC has held up remarkably well...but what happens when it finally craps out? I want to have all those music files on hand, but how do I avoid having to rip all those hundreds of CDs again on another computer?

What ideas come to mind (preferably not involving a cloud subscription)? Would something as simple as a flash drive do the trick?

I've also seen this program (name escapes me) that enables a computer to receive music files from an iPod. I've used it a couple times in the past when replacing computers. It's okay, but naturally the drawbacks are paying for the program (~$20, IIRC) and waiting however many hours for all the files to transfer. It'll probably take a while to move those files no matter what I do, but I'll gladly deal with that if it means I don't have to rip all my CDs again.

I bought this connecting cord thing with USB ports that transferred everything between laptops last time I had to change computers. A flash drive works too. It may take a few hours but it's doable and you don't have to manually reupload all your music.

As a plus I also never have to pay Spotify any money doing it like this.

https://draculabyte.com/products/the-first-hunt
Does anyone know what band this logo is based on? Nobody seems to be able to figure it out, me included.

Entombed?



It's kinda close...

Nah, the store also has an Elden Ring shirt with a logo resembling the Entombed logo more. The Bloodtorne logo reminds me a bit of Dethklok's logo.

Thanks for the suggestion, Empyreal.

On another note: The Archives as of this writing has 168,813 bands. This strikes me as a pretty big number. But the thing about big numbers is that it's hard to sense how big they are without having some point of comparison from everyday experience. So, what would be some interesting ways to represent 168,813 bands?

For example: If a music festival featured a single, three-minute set from every band in the Archives (including broken-up, deceased, etc. bands), with no breaks between sets, then the festival would last a bit shy of a year (~351.7 days).

Suppose you own one CD per band (and don't bother with cases). One standard CD is about 1.2 mm (0.05 inches) thick. Arranged in a single stack, your Archives CD collection would reach a height in excess of 200 meters (~700 feet).

Meh, surely someone can do better than these.

Suppose each band were a peanut. The National Peanut Board estimates it takes about 540 peanuts to make a 12-ounce jar of peanut butter, which gives us 313 jars. The average American consumes about 4 jars of peanut butter a year and has a lifespan of 77 years. That's just enough peanut butter to last one person an entire lifetime.

Assuming we can trust the National Peanut Board.

Nicely done!

Er, what else... 536,619 total albums in the Archives. If you had to review all of these by the year 2100, you'd need to complete about 20 reviews a day. Not sure how to look at that in terms of peanuts.

I'm copying and pasting from the musicians thread, but following up/piggybacking off of what some of you guys said about making a change and switching things up a bit in life. Might help coax me out of this funk I'm in

I'm very seriously considering making another attempt at starting a black/death metal band. Last time I attempted was back in high school and it failed miserably, took all the wind out of my sails, especially since I was very young and passionate about it at the time. Maybe it's worth another shot and rebuild again. Can't remember where I put my old tabs at. Might have to pay my parents a visit and dig it out of the basement, assuming they haven't thrown it away lol

If you listened to one song from each band, and it averaged to 3 minutes per song, it would take just over 3 years.

In terms of peanuts, well, a quick Google search states that one serving size is 35 peanuts. If you ate 1 peanut per song you listen to, you would eat 1,609,857 peanuts, which will be ~49,995 serving sizes of peanuts.

The first band I was ever in was in my senior year of high school, and only lasted a few months. I tried forming another band in my early years in college, but got no responses.

I finally tried again in my mid 30s and actually succeeded in forming a band, and it is probably the best thing I have done for myself in my entire adulthood. Ever since my teens I've been a depressed loner (not necessarily by choice) and forming a band got me out of the house and making friends with similar interests. This has done wonders for my depression and general attitude.

Methods I have successfully used to find bandmates since 2016:

Hanging flyers in the local Guitar Center on the musicians wanted bulletin board.
Replying to others' posts in the musicians section on Craigslist.
Messaging musicians on the musicians' networking website bandmix.com.

I'll second this. Just started making music again in the last year and it has been so cathartic. Life isn't easy nor is it perfect but having a medium like music (metal in particular) to channel your ideas, stressors and emotions is both important and liberating.

Even if you're not good at it (I'm certainly not), just doing something to express yourself can be helpful in a lot of ways. Even if only to just clear your head and be able to focus.

Had a disturbing dream that call for the priest was retroactively erased from Sin after Sin and I couldn't find it anywhere except as a live bonus track on one of their other albums.

Bats are the death metal singers of the animal world, research shows

Håkansson, Jonas, et al. "Bats expand their vocal range by recruiting different laryngeal structures for echolocation and social communication." Plos Biology 20.11 (2022): e3001881.

I thought the journalists made a comparison with death metal growls, but if you look at the actual paper, it's written in the abstract. Cool!

Use iExplorer, it would do wonders for you. PM and I'll help you.

This site was mentioned (with an embedded link) in a Bandcamp article:
https://daily.bandcamp.com/bandcamp-nav ... -july-2023

Goes to show that Bandcamp is cooler than other platforms. I can't imagine Apple Music or something directing people to other sites such as this.

Just bought myself this little nice acoustic guitar:

https://musicshop.hr/21616-thickbox_def ... sticna.jpg

Got any beginners tips? I could surely use some...

So Fornever Laid to Rest must be a typo right? But if so why is it Fornever on the song name and the lyrics too? And why is something so inconsequential from a band I haven't even listened to in years doing my head in? - is probably the bigger question...

Just read it like this:
For Never Laid To Rest

Typo fixed.

A Five Guys opened in Gangnam a few weeks ago so I went all the way down there for lunch today to try it, and that was the most expensive hamburger I ever had. For comparison, I had the 20 stacker at Lotteria in Tokyo before and that was cheaper. This is one of those fancy burger chains from America, but with other foreign chains like Burger King or Shake Shack I can always get a meal under 15 thousand, but here it was over double that. I'm sure some licensing crap is a reason for it being overpriced, but even for Gangnam it's steep.

Shake was good but burger was on the small side 2/5

Yeah I remember going to Five Guys in Sydney (only a couple of locations in the whole country) and 2 burger meals for me and my girlfriend was I think $60. Insane price. To be fair the burger itself was quite good, but wow.

If God or Satan has pissed in your cornflakes, just watch this.

I keep a list of all the fast food chains I wanna try when I will visit the USA. The list will eventually force me to gain some 50+ pounds should I try them all.

Finally got around to drinking the Prime drink everyone's been hyping up. Got a Blue Raspberry flavor one, and it's got a bit of an odd aftertaste, can't really explain it. It was fine overall, but I think I'll just stick with Gatorade.

It's interesting to see foreigners so intrigued about American food chains when, as a yank myself, I've actually shunned chain restaurants for years now save for a few super convenience stores like Wawa or Sheetz or Rutters around where I am or very rarely Dunkin Donuts. The area I live in has a respectable number of local restaurants and beer breweries that I'm still steadily exploring, and when I'm travelling on the highway I try to search ahead of time for either breweries or bbq joints to try along my way.

There actually is a Five Guys around here, but I haven't gone there in like ten years or more. There's a local burger joint I just like better since it has fresher ingredients and a particularly amazing combination of ingredients for one of their burgers that I skeptically tried and fell in love with - (cheddar, carmelized onions, bacon, and topped with chili made in house). I haven't checked Five Guys' prices in a while, but I think this local joint might be cheaper too with their combo - and even then I can get it a bit cheaper by skipping fries (which I generally can't stomach anymore if they're super greasy).

The reason Five Guys is so expensive is because the toppings and condiments are free. So yeah 16 bucks for a double cheeseburger is bonkers if you want it plain, but if you want to concoct some whackadoo frankenburger with ten toppings and three sauces it's a steal. I tend to like my burgers to be more workmanlike, and if I'm assembling my own I'll rarely get more creative than bacon and onions, but if you wanna go hogwild then Five Guys is a decently good choice.

I live in the suburbs so I don't really have too many options outside of the big chains but there are plenty of good options if you go anywhere more urbanized. Kuma's Corner is a staple for any metalhead in the Chicago area. I haven't been there in a few years now and it seems like they got rid of my favorite (the Pantera) but the Plaguebringer is pretty much the same thing except without roasted poblano. Their Burgers of the Month are always a coinflip though, either being a strange novelty that winds up being excellent, or something excellent with one extra ingredient that completely dumpsters the whole thing. Case in point, their current BOTM:

Great - great - great - great - what the god's unholy fuck

The worst thing is I'd still eat it and enjoy it despite the gummy bears

I don't know, BH. Those mango gummy bears might actually taste good

Still has to be better than a bunch of fast food shit anyway.

That neon green relish better glow in the dark or I want a refund.

Im from Rockford but my dad used to live in Oswego and Naperville when I was a teenager, so I remember hearing about five guys and never heard anybody even remotely criticize it, I still drive out that way every couple years when I get really bored I just go out there driving for a day, I might have to finally check it out

Not sure if this is the right place for this (or if there even IS a right place for this on MA), but I just had a new collaborative ambient album published and wanted to share it with the community here, maybe get some feedback from anyone who likes this sort of work.
I feel it's strong material, so hopefully some of y'all might enjoy.

https://reversealignment.bandcamp.com/a ... -s-embrace

Thanks for listening, and admins, feel free to delete this if it's in any way inappropriate

Here's an excerpt:

Speaking of weird things in food... We went for pizza with Razakel and his wife last night, and he had a "Rudolph" with smoked reindeer, cloudberry jam, and cranberries. It was surprisingly good, TBH. I've never really considered sugary sweet things in a pizza an actual option, but it was pretty good.

Mine was the classic "Hangover" of the same place, as always. Bacon, salami, pepperoni, sweet BBQ sauce, and pickles. Damn good, every time.

My 4 years old cat died at home this morning. She had a stomach surgery yesterday and all went well, she went back home and today she is gone. I'm devastated.

That's rough, man. I love my cats, even if they annoy the living Hell out of me occasionally. My sincere condolences.

RIP to your cat