Harmuffin

six months later i re-read the essay prior to the final exam, went 'ohhhh yeah i remember this', got a question on that topic, and aced it.

one of my biggest soul-defining passions! physical music! this is a part of music that has been taken from us with streaming platforms, and I am very driven to take it back. my collection means something to me, and that has worth. I love to go to record/CD stores, I love second-hand media, and I love to listen to music and feel what it is meant to be. record store day is april 12th! give it a try!

I recently started doing something that feels really dumb at first, but... it's totally changing the way I view myself, y'all.

It's called Belief Work and basically, it's taking your old shitty beliefs and turning them on their head 100%.

So instead of "I will never make it," I now tell myself intentionally "I will definitely make it."

The process is simple:

List out all the negative beliefs you have about yourself, whether about work, relationships, money, life, etc.

On a second sheet, list the exact opposite belief.

These are your new sets of beliefs. Repeat them as often as you can remember, preferably once per day.

watching broadcast television.

now I've never been a huge TV person - when my younger sibling and I were kids we had a very clearly defined TV sharing schedule, in which I would watch whatever I wanted whenever it was on unless my sibling wanted to watch something else in which case Endreal was shit outta luck. by my mid teens it was just easier not to be interested in TV shows. but this new experiment of my spouse's has shown me three significant things from the last time I was watching broadcast TV with any regularity -

first, there's a lot of shit out there, and like 80% of it appears to be reruns of stuff I ended up never seeing in the 90s and 00s.

second, commercials are worse. like the quality of commercials is worse, and also there are more of them. I remember when a primetime drama on broadcast TV was ~47 minutes accounting for ad breaks and now new stuff seems to be keyed to roughly 42? that's basically 36 seconds of ads for every 2 minutes of programming! is youtube even that bad yet? genuine question - I exclusively use an ad blocker so I have no idea. and on top of that I've witnessed a nefariously sneaky thing - end of episode split screen with the credits running on one half and another ad running on the other half.

third, PBS (we currently live in the US) is solid gold. like yes the programming seems to be all over the place and I have no idea what the rhyme or rhythm of it is but it's so cool that I got to a) learn facts about ospreys from a cartoon guy in a hummingbird suit, b) watch a vegan cooking programme hosted by a woman who was charmingly annoying in a way that seems uniquely achievable only by Italian-Americans, and c) a bipartisan discussion of local current events including a proposed teacher pay bill being discussed by the legislature of the state I live in. and all in the same day!

🖤💛🤍❤️

My friend pointed it out first, and then I started noticing too. Why would books that multiple libraries definitely, 100% had digital access to a couple of months/weeks/days ago disappear?

Amazon is invoking exclusive rights to them.*

Ebooks that the public library once had digital copies of are now only available through Amazon. Audible boasts on their covers about Audible-exclusive audiobooks that did not used to be Audible-exclusive. Entire series and collections are disappearing overnight.

Keep your eyes on the privatization of media and your libraries.

*earlier versions said "getting"; Amazon has likely always had these rights, but in the face of boycotts they're tightening the leash, so to say [source 2] [source 3] [source 4] [source 5] (sources indicate that Amazon is refusing to sell to libraries)