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The asshole filter

Periodically I come across a reference to, or am otherwise reminded of Siderea’s 2015 essay “The Asshole Filter”. It’s about boundaries: making them, holding them, the people who don’t respect them, and what happens when you don’t deal with people stepping over those boundaries. It’s an important concept:

“An asshole filter happens when you publicly promulgate a straitened contact boundary and then don’t enforce it; or worse, reward the people who transgress it.”

Am I noting this here, today, because of events happening on the world stage right now? Because of things happening to people close to me? All of the above? Because of stuff happening at work? Maybe?

Am I good a making and enforcing boundaries for myself? No. I need to be periodically reminded of the consequences of transgressiveness, to help give me the courage to better enforce those boundaries. As Siderea also says in the essay:

“”Enforcement” is an idea with which plenty of agreeable people are uncomfortable because they have a certain vanity in their agreeableness: if they have to refuse somebody something, their self-concept as an agreeable person takes a ding. (The single best advice I have to give is never identify with your virtue because that way lies madness, or at least neurosis, but that’s a topic for another post.) If one can disentangle one’s ego from being agreeable even momentarily, one quickly sees there are many highly agreeable ways to refuse people things. This, indeed, is what diplomacy is for. And there’s less diplomatic responses, too, if one prefers.”

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Detunesification

I think I might be about to embark on “A Project”.

Until about 2015 I was diligent about maintaining a local music library (in iTunes) with playlists for each new album that I bought/downloaded, and for each gig I attended. Then Spotify kind of took over, and I just don’t have that kind of historical record for the last ten years. I do have playlists in Spotify. A lot of them. But they’re more likely to be themed, or copies of a Discover Weekly that was particularly good, or copies of a collaborative playlist that I contributed to along with other folk.

A couple of posts last month added weight to a growing sense of dissatisfaction with Spotify: “Here’s how much money Los Camp! make from streaming…” by Gareth from LC! and “How to quit Spotify” by Brian Merchant.

Earlier in December I spent some time with a trial of Qobuz, but I didn’t like it. The app is bad, and their catalogue is too small. Tidal, however, seems fine. Their catalogue and app are both good enough for me. But I’ve been buying a lot more music on Bandcamp this year, and I like that. I like knowing that more of my money goes to the artists than to the platforms. Also, Alex doesn’t use a streaming service at all; he uses Bandcamp all the time, and VLC for playing his music locally.

So this itch has been developing. I don’t like knowing that I’ve got a 20000+ track library (of mostly albums) sitting on my hard disk as well as an entirely separate library (consisting of lots of single songs as well as albums) in a cloud service.

The cloud service will — almost inevitably — become enshittified over time. But the local library is in the App Formerly Known As iTunes, which Apple has already shat all over. What a cloud/streaming service has got going for it is consistency across multiple machines. Having the same library, with the same set of playlists and ratings on all my devices is trivial.

The same can’t be said for a local library. My personal (not work) computing is split over a desktop machine (Mac Mini) and a laptop (MacBook Air). That’s not going to change any time soon. I use both machines interchangeably depending on context, and I play music on both of them. Ideally they’d share the same files, and the same library/metadata. But local music library apps don’t seem to play nice with that kind of setup.

I’ve been trying out Swinsian, which is really nice. But it uses a SQLite database for its library management, and (from what I remember), SQLite isn’t built for a multi-user cloud-synced scenario.

So after thinking it through, and discussing it with Alex on our road trip to see the flamingos today, I’m thinking: just a Bunch of Files on Disk. The music files I have are already on disk, and nicely organized.

The library management is the interesting part from a syncing perspective…but this could also be a Bunch of Files on Disk, I think…? m3u playlist files are a near-universal standard, and they’re just Files on Disk. Almost every music player can import and export them. m3u playlists can use relative paths to music files, so if I configure everything right, I could move the music library around wherever I wanted to, and use whatever player I like. 🤔 (This will also be helpful for when I — SOME DAY — abandon MacOS for Linux. Current Martin might not need the platform independence, but future Martin will probably appreciate it.)

So, yeah, “A Project”.

I thought I was “just” going to move from Spotify to Tidal. But now I think I’m going to (a) de-iTunesify my old iTunes library, and (b) reconstruct my last 10 years of Spotify listening in a platform-independent, Bunch-of-Files-on-Disk way. This is going to involve spending a lot of money buying single tracks that I had previously only streamed. That’s fine. That’s good. I can do this over time.

My secret weapon here is Last.fm. I’ve been using it (mostly consistently) since 2005. It powers the “Listening To” section in the sidebar of this blog. It was there in the iTunes era, and I’m glad that Past Martin had the foresight to keep using it in the Spotify era. I’m honestly amazed that it still exists. It feels like a throwback to a more innocent web.

A second secret weapon is this little tip: https://apple.stackexchange.com/questions/44333/how-do-i-transfer-music-ratings-from-one-computer-to-another In the iTunes era I used ratings a lot, and iTunes stored those ratings in a big bucket o’ XML along with all of its other metadata. But ratings (and other attributes) don’t have to be stored in a proprietary library format. They could just be indicated by the song’s presence in a specific playlist. (And therefore back to a Bunch of Files on Disk again.)

We’ll see how it goes… If it works out, I’ll try to describe the solution here.

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Dam tot Dam 2025

Two weeks ago we took part in the annual Dam tot Dam Wandeltocht again. When you register for the event, the form asks how many times you’ve taken part already. It was so long ago since the last time we did the walk that I had to go back through my blog, old photos, and old emails to remind myself. We first did the walk in 2013, but I didn’t blog that occasion. We did it again in 2014 and 2015. I had a vague inkling that it was a while ago, but that’s a long time. As I seem to keep saying these days, it’s been a hell of a decade.

Dam tot Dam walking routes

The route distances this year were 10, 20, 27, and 42km. We did the 27km one – and Alex joined us for his first Dam-tot-Dam! In the morning we took the bus to metro station Noord (which didn’t exist last time we did the walk), took the metro to Rokin, and walked to Damplein where we picked up our stempelkaarten and the first of several free snacks.

The weather forecast for the day was mild (around 20°), with rain around 16:00. I’d hoped we’d be done by then, but we got a late start, we weren’t on a super fast pace, and the rain arrived sooner than estimated. It started to drip after the Barkpad rest stop, and by the time we hit the Molenwijkpark stop it was full-on raining. I hate walking in the rain. Alex had sensibly brought a rain jacket, but Abi and I were just wearing thin layers. We got soaked. So many other walkers had disposable ponchos that I wondered if there had been on sale at the start…but it was too late to get one. At least it wasn’t cold, but there was a long stretch from Amsterdam Noord to Zaandam that I didn’t enjoy at all.

The rain did take a break as we crossed the Zaan at Spiekeroog, and we dried out a bit on the last stretch to the finish line in Burgemeester in ‘t Veldpark. The rain radar said we could expect more, and we were all tired, so we didn’t hang around to indulge in the festivities at the park. We got a bus part-way back, and picked up another kilometer walking back from Poelenburg.

Made it! The three of us at the finish line. Damp and tired.

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Lifting stones

A couple of weeks ago I was looking around for a hotel somewhere in the Highlands, for Abi and me to spend a weekend away. The booking sites showed some interesting offers in Nairn. I don’t remember ever being in Nairn before, so I pulled up a map and starting scrolling around to see what’s there, and what’s nearby. My eye fell quickly fell on ain interesting-looking location nearby: the Barevan Lifting Stone.

Location of the Barevan Lifting Stone, near Nairn.

Google Maps lists this as a “tourist attraction”, and has a link to the Barevan stone’s page on LiftingStones.org. I had no idea that lifting stones were a thing! According to the site:

Like other traditional lifting stones, the five stages of lift are used here:

  1. 1. Break the ground (put wind beneath the stone)
  2. 2. Bring the stone to waist height
  3. 3. Bring the stone to the chest
  4. 4. Bring the stone to the shoulder
  5. 5. Press the stone overhead

LiftingStones.org is a lovely web site dedicated to documenting these lifting stones and their histories. There are stones all around the world, although most of them seem to be concentrated in the British Isles. The site is a classic piece of the good old-fashioned web: one person (Dave Brown) has staked out a topic for themselves, and they’re going to build the best damn resource you can find for this niche. Are you going to get a new article every day? No. Are you going to get a fascinating tidbit a couple of times a year, well-researched, and accompanied by cool photos? Absolutely.

The Barevan stone weighs 105kg. Yeah…no. Not trying that. In the end we booked a hotel elsewhere, and there is another pair of stones nearby (the Auchernack Stones: 100kg and 130kg). I’m not going to try them either, but we might pop round and have a look.

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Roman Mars on the curse of efficiency

99% Invisible has been going for 15 years! I’ve been listening to it since 2015, not quite from the beginning, but quite a long time, and it’s undoubtedly one of the favourite things I listen to or watch.

To celebrate the anniversary, they did a special episode where Roman Mars answers 15 questions from listeners and staff. The answers are all good, but one of them really stood out for me, and I love it. The segment starts about 17:06 minutes in. I’ve transcribed (and lightly edited) the key part of Roman’s answer here. Producer Vivian Le asks, “What’s a design-related hill you’re willing to die on?”

The march to make things more and more efficient makes the world a worse place. I think of this in terms of advertising. The idea that we were going to efficiently measure how effective advertising was through clicks and eyeballs and stuff erased all of the extra money that made all of the journalism and all the pop culture that you cared about in the twentieth century. It made it all possible.

The inefficiency of the advertising system made everything good in this world. I think that the idea that you’re trying to get things to be as efficient as possible is actually a terrible, world-destroying idea. The most efficient restaurant is a ghost kitchen that has no storefront. Because that’s inefficient, because it could be empty sometimes! It’s a ghost kitchen that just ships you a thing, and has an underpaid delivery person that brings it to your door, and you never leave. And this is stripping away all the goodness of the world and of cities.

I think efficiency is absolute garbage. And that is the design-related hill I’m willing to die on. I feel like you should be always allowing for great deals of inefficiency to make a nice-designed city, a nice-designed system and make it work. I really hate the focus on efficiency. Not only does it destroy all these good things, it takes money and gives it to the worst people. Like the platform creators and the tech people, instead of… change and tips and things. It’s not like things are cheaper, or things are better. Just, money is being transferred to the wrong people instead of creators and people who make the world a better place through community and creation.

[…]

You need friction, you need the space of creation. That open freedom of an inefficient system where money sloshes around inside of it. These frictions and inefficiencies are what make everything good about the world. So if you can handle that big abstraction, that is the design-related hill I’m willing to die on.

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Roxane Gay: Civility is a Fantasy

Roxane Gay, writing in the New York Times about “civility” in discourse (via Kottke; paywalled, but there’s a gift link in his post):

“Calling for civility is about exerting power. It is a way of reminding the powerless that they exist at the will of those in power and should act accordingly. It is a demand for control.”

The context of the essay is the degenerating political environment in the US, but it applies elsewhere as well. In workplaces, it’s not uncommon to see management call for “civility” when they introduce policies that make staff justifiably angry.