Lorindól

Lemmy only. I quit Reddit when the third party apps fell.

I do miss some of the niche hobby subreddits, but fuck Spez. If I need to find some info, I can access it via search engines.

Otherwise I’m perfectly happy with Lemmy, people are generally much nicer and there’s more than enough content. Reddit was so overbloated that this smaller universe is quite enough for me.

Hell, they would get unconditional surrender just by promising to send a few battallions of unarmed female troops over.

I’ve had the honor of competing with air rifles against one of Häyhä’s grandnieces. Häyhä never had any children of his own.

I can assure you that the talent was NOT genetic ;)

It would not hurt to try. Using your phone to record your singing may not be the best idea, the microphone is so small that singing even with normal volume gets the recording easily distorted.

USB-connected microphones are pretty cheap and will perform much better, just hook one to a laptop and use any simple recording software.

And I recommend starting small with children’s songs. “Twinkle Twinkle Little Star” with it’s straightforward ascending and descending melody is a great starter, or at least for me it was.

That is the reason I practiced the first two years in my room at lullaby volume.

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Practice. A lot.

In my teens I wasn’t able to carry a tune at all. Our music teacher marked me as “hopeless” after hearing a me singing a few lines.

This pissed me off royally. I had no desire or illusions of becoming a great singer, but I would not accept being “hopeless”. So I started practicing with simple children’s song melodies and recorded my singing with an old cassette recorder. It was indeed pretty awful at first, but I slowly got better. Then I got my driver’s license and could sing along the songs from the radio and my cassettes while driving alone, it was a big step up from singing quietly in my room.

I also started playing the guitar to get a better understanding of musical theory, which was helpful. After I had learned the basics of playing rhythm guitar firmly I learned to play the piano. I believe that singing the melodies while playing them on the piano was essential to my development, since I could instantly hear if I did not hit the correct note.

By my mid-twenties I could already carry tunes easily and even got a complements about my singing voice. Key changes and modulations were still pretty challenging, but I kept on practising whenever I found the time.

Now in my forties I can repeat a melody correctly after hearing it once or twice and I consider myself a decent singer. I don’t sing karaoke or any solo performances, but I do love singing backup or as part of a group.

If my music teacher hadn’t embarrassed me publicly all those years ago, I most likely would have never put any effort in getting better at singing or learning to play instruments. I started this lifelong project purely out of spite, but it became a major and very dear part of my life. I even owe my marriage to music, while we were still dating my wife confessed to me that she most likely wouldn’t have even noticed me if I hadn’t been playing the guitar at that one summer party. Thankfully I wasn’t too hammered at that time ;)

I had this before my hearing was damaged in my mid-thirties. I could hear if any electrical device with large filter capasitors was turned on, even from another room. I discovered by accident that the high pitch noise was emitted by the capasitors when I was fixing old audio gear, I guess they vibrate while doing their job or something like that.

I talked about this with my friend who was specializing to be an ear/hearing doctor, his theory was that my upper hearing range was a bit higher than average. He also talked about how brains filter sensory data and it could just be that my filters weren’t blocking these frequencies.

It was also impossible for me to sleep in a room if there were any mosquitoes. The whining of their wings even in the far side of a room was maddening, so I had to kill them all every night before hitting the bed. The one good thing that came out of the damage to my hearing was that the mosquitoes bother me no more, unless they fly right in front of my ears.

Yeah, “Time Enough For Love” ended up on that list mostly because it’s so different. That made an impression on me when I read it in high school, in the way of “Huh, I guess it’s actually possible to write a book like this”. It had a lot of interesting ideas but the narrative sprawls around pretty wildly.

Riftwar Saga basically takes Tolkien’s Middle-earth setting and mixes it with our own world’s Middle age cultures, plus magical stargates and an invasion from an another world. It’s not a ripoff in any way, it carries it own story proudly but the similarities with names from Tolkien’s works was a bit distracting at first. These were the first books I was able to read entirely in original English in my early teens.

There are so many, but here are a few from the top of my head:

The Silmarillion, J.R.R. Tolkien.

The Lord of the Rings, J.R.R. Tolkien.

Time Enough For Love, Robert A. Heinlein.

Starship Troopers, Robert A. Heinlein.

Don Quijote, Miguel de Cervantes.

Divine Comedy, Dante Alighieri.

Dune, Frank Herbert.

Paradise Lost, John Milton.

Childhood’s End, Arthur C. Clarke.

The Riftwar Saga, Raymond E. Feist.

Ukraine has lots of valuable natural resources, but Russia has much more of everything. The biggest reason for the invasion is most likely that Putin could not let a “brother nation” prosper and drift towards Europe and being a functioning democracy.

Russia’s population might get wild ideas if they saw that their Ukrainian cousins’ standard of living starts to rise rapidly while they have to endure living under a fascist dictator. And substandard and underdeveloped infrastructure, due to the rampant corruption and a government who doesn’t give a shit about the areas outside the larger cities.

Few years ago I did a full rebuild of a top-of-the-line tube radio from 1958 and use it daily in my living room. My stereo tube amp is from 1963 or 1964. Both sound astonishing.

My binoculars are from WW II - era. I had to realign the prisms when I got them but the optics are about as good as you can get.

I also use an iPod Nano 2Gen almost daily, I think I bought it in 2008 and the original battery can still hold enough charge for 4-5 hours of continous play. Incredible device with a neat perfect UI. The physical jogwheel can be operated through pocket fabric, so I can switch songs or adjust volume while running without even having to remove the iPod from my pocket.

A fellow connoiseur! I too am a master of this delicate art and I have passed this gift on to my children.

After the selection has been made it is quite entertaining to look back the aisle and watch the other shoppers cautiously tap the remaining melons, trying to make sense of what they just saw.

I’d go for a continuation instead of remake. And I just checked, just last year there have been discussions with Jim Henson Company and Rockne O’Bannon (Farscape’s co-creator) about continuing the story. Nothing solid, but there is hope…

Farscape.

Modern visuals, Muppets, a team of good writers and the core cast returning could be really good. Black and Browder wouldn’t be too old yet to make the characters work.

That chaotic universe could provide so many posibilities to explore if done right.

That was pretty wild development, yes. But still, we will not make any territorial claims. Doing so would effectively render the protection provided by NATO’s Article 5 null. We would once again be alone against a nuclear power with much larger resources than we could ever have.

So we won’t be doing that.

Finland won’t make any claims. This much is certain.

The only way we would even consider restoring the stolen lands would be IF the Russian Federation falls and IF the initiative for reunification would come from the Karelian Republic.

The intranet at my work is a near-useless dumpster fire. Everything is disorganized, all the important documents and instructions are hidden behind completely chaotic branches and layers of creatively named folders.

I have used the wretched thing only once. I instantly downloaded everything I thought I would ever need to an encrypted USB stick, so I would never have to use it again. This was 7-8 years ago. Everything important is always delivered by email and apparently stored to the intranet afterwards. The intranet has been hacked at least twice, but the real number is most likely much higher. For “reasons”, all the personnel info has also been kept stored on the intranet, despite the successful hacks.

HIM’s demo-version of “Wicked Game” is even better than the album version. I remember how disappointed I was when the original cover wasn’t on their debut album.

Perfumes or scented products are not a problem for me at all, unless of course someone uses way too much. Like I said, I kind of block all the unpleasant stuff unconsciously and focus on the good ones.

It’s kind of like listening to radio, all the channels are broadcasting all the time, simultaneously, but you still tune in to listen only one at a time.

And when I’m intoxicated, theyre all blaring at the same time and cannot be silenced :(