As with all digital services spotify has begun to suffer from enshitification. Outside of price hikes this has come in the form of advertising even on premium plans. Now this isn’t product advertising for other companies, this is spotify pushing notifications about new podcasts that I have expressed no interest in down my throat. This upset me enough to cancel because:
I was very fortunate to discover I still had all of my old mp3s on an external HDD, so I already had music, I just needed a way to serve it. Enter Navidrome, a music server supporting subsonic clients that runs on a raspberry pi.
With Navidrome set up I started looking for a way to cache my music on my phone for when it was in airplane mode, which for me is 95% of the time as I trust my witch brick far less than I can throw it.
There’s probably a whole segway here about phones and privacy. For now I’ll stop with saying I can’t root my daily driver for reasons and since airplane mode has an actual purpose it’s possible that android might respect it in most cases. At any rate, it’s sufficient for my threat model.
I solved this particularly problem with the Symfonium app, which supports subsonic and allows automatic caching of files. Honestly it’s not often I like android apps, but this one is the bee’s knees. It does what I want, it’s configurable and free from cruft.
One word: bandcamp.
You probably won’t find big names on it, but if they’ve got a big name you’ll hear about them somewhere else anyway.
Another big plus here is that if you buy music on bandcamp artists will generally get a bigger cut of the profits. On top of that downloading stuff from bandcamp is nice, it comes in a zip file. Which doesn’t sound like much but when other sites make you download files individually it really makes a difference (I’m looking at you qobuz, no link ‘cus this site falls into the necessary evil category).
Another small step to reclaim the digital world from the rent seekers that have cannibalised it. It’s not as hard as they want you to think it is.
rpgs homebrew journal
The other week I ran the first session of a post apocalyptic hex crawl TRPG I’m calling, for lack of a better name, Dominion of the Sword. I transplanted some of the lore I’d written for a post apocalyptic wargame to come up with the seed for a setting and then fleshed out the local area and set the players loose.
osr rpgs review
Mausritter is probably the cutest TRPG I’ve ever encountered, players take on the role of mouse adventurers on a quest for treasure in the giant and dangerous world. I picked up a copy of the boxed set, primarily because I thought it would fit with some of players wishes for a more light hearted and fantastical game. However, once I’d read through the rules I realised that this is one of the best written systems I’ve ever read and played.
rpgs
Prophecy and destiny are fairly common tropes in many fantasy settings, and they can produce very compelling storylines. However, weaving them into a TRPG requires reconciling the forgone conclusions that prophecy implies with player agency, and the often random nature of a games mechanics.
alien rpgs review
Chariot of the Gods is the introductory scenario for Free League’s Alien RPG, it comes as part of the starter set and is a relatively lengthy cinematic scenario that casts the crew in a similar situation to the crew of the Nostromo in the original Alien film. I’ve run this scenario for two different groups and have a few thoughts about what I think it does right and what I think could be improved.
tech
As with all digital services spotify has begun to suffer from enshitification. Outside of price hikes this has come in the form of advertising even on premium plans. Now this isn’t product advertising for other companies, this is spotify pushing notifications about new podcasts that I have expressed no interest in down my throat. This upset me enough to cancel because: