at least someone in the family knew some psychology

mostly the first one, the vast majority of new music i listen to these days is recommended by someone. it's either that or they're doing a show or a festival with someone i already listen to. a distant third is the radio, especially after a move

if it's a new-to-me artist, then i'll drill down into their back catalog, but that's only after the recommendation. if it's a new-to-me genre then i do a lot more independant research but that's fairly rare these days because i've already plucked all the low-hanging fruit.

even before The Algorithm became the mighty spectre it is today, i've never been happy with random or algorithmic feeds. Pandora for example would always play songs and artists with the superficial connections to the artist i build the channel off of instead of actually similar-sounding artists. and the same ok-at-best cover of The Guess Who's "American Woman" every five or so songs, not sure what was up with that. i tried Spotify as an alternative years before it was the mighty spectre it is today and i remember logging out after the third song and never logging back in

something very similar in mainframe land where they call files "datasets." if you call a dataset a file, get ready to get an earfull!

which is ironic considering IBM themselves often call them files and one of the most popular dataset utilities is called FileAid. but if we acknowledge that, we lose a valuable opportunity to belittle and exclude newcomers

they tried to get people from Oceana but between Farscape and the Star Wars prequels there weren't any actors left. the latter had 6.2 million characters portrayed by someone from New Zealand

i know nothing, therefore i am nothing

i only recently read the Heir to the Empire trilogy and am flabberghasted that they didn't try to adapt those. you'd need to recast the heroes or modify it to explain a longer time gap, but still- you already had the trilogy written! and people already love it! it's free money!

two words: mirror universe

I thought everyone liked it.

at least here on the fedi that was never the case in my experience. right out the gate they were seen as an Embrace-Extend-Extinguish scheme that skipped step one by bypassing ActivityPub entirely, and since then their abysmal moderation and questionable sources of funding have only hampered that reputation further

i would honestly have bought them saying that Nick Locarno is a pseudonym he used at the academy to not be known as an admiral's son. like Mariner not going by Freeman in the show that ironically now makes this impossible

yeah, that elevator pitch is BASIC as we've known it for 25 years. it has some other neat QOL features though like the C-style string printing

Doctor Who always ending up in London destroyed my sense of disbelief almost every time after the first few, until it hit me like a brick how wildly hypocritical I was being as someone who grew up close to NYC

yeah i think this would cure me