Saw Justice two times in Paris last week, which makes it four times this year^[1]. While my spot for the first Paris show was not great (literally the highest, furthest from the stage), I had a much better spot the night after.

Like in September at Portola, I managed to get a pretty good spot on the floor, which netted me some pretty good shots, despite not taking nearly as many as I did back then. I also lucked out and managed to get high-fives from both Xavier and Gaspard (I missed both last time lol) so I still feel pretty good about that lmao.

Like last time, all of these are shot on my iPhone 13 Pro using Halide in "Process Zero RAW" with only exposure and contrasts being adjusted after the fact.
The pictures below are thumbnails, but you can/should click on them to get the full-size JPEGs if you want to pixel peep and taste that sweet-sweet noise 😄

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Ever since I first tried it shortly after its introduction, Dolby Atmos on Apple Music felt, to me, gimmicky at best and counterproductive at worst? It's like, either the effect is too noticeable and it's distracting or it just doesn't add anything when it just doesn't make a whole song fall flat? If that makes sense?

At any rate, I was having a normal evening and randomly decided to give it a try again, and boy do I have thoughts.

A little setup note: all my listening is being done on Apple Music on macOS 15.1.1, with AirPods Max, with the "Lossless (ALAC up to 24-bit/48kHz)" preset, "Dolby Atmos" set to "Always On" like so and "Spatial Audio" set to "Fixed" in macOS.
I also used the "Music Library Tracker" app on iOS to even find which tracks in my library were available in Spatial Audio! Truly bonkers that I need a 3rd party app to do that, but whatever.
Also, I'm putting embed codes for each track. I'm going to assume Dolby Atmos is not available when playing them from the web, but at least it'll be easy to open them in a native Apple Music app if you have that.

Anyway, here are my thoughts gathered after listening to a few Spatial Audio tracks from the ~630 available in my library. I will try to gather a relatively broad range of genres, but it's my own library, so there will be a clear bias lmao.

Kraftwerk - Trans-Europa Express / Metall Auf Metall / Abzug

I could write a poem about Kraftwerk's Trans-Europa Express, it is genuinely one of my favorite electronic music albums of all time, I think. And to be clear, I do not mean Trans-Europe Express, Kraftwerk shall be listened to in German…Read more

Last month definitely has been something, huh? Globally and also personally because, man, time has been flying these past few weeks. What started as a small list of links at the beginning of November morphed into whatever will happen in this post, welp!

playing

• Webfishing!! What a lovely little game.
• UFO 50, which has been made so much more enjoyable by my recent purchase of an 8bitdo Pro 2 controller
• Tetrachroma.

I think I want to use my upcoming Christmas break to play more video games, especially ones I've had on my "backlog" for a hot minute 😤

listening

November was great for music, at least!

• The new Kendrick Lamar album has been on heavy rotation for me. I need to dig into more West Coast rap...
• I finally found what the fuss was all about and checked out Mercurial World and Imaginal Disk by Magdalena Bay and, man, music rules, y'all.
• The year is 2024, and I only now found out about Together's (Thomas Bangalter and DJ Falcon) version of "Call On Me" and watched this excellent documentary about the whole situation about this track.
• I also listened to a lot of Justice and Gesaffelstein because they both released banger albums this year, so I'm allowed to be normal about both. It will happen again.

And now, the links.

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I keep telling myself I should stop thinking about social media so much, especially in the "current moment", but it keeps happening. This post started as a bunch of posts on Mastodon until I stopped myself and decided to Blog About It instead.

Mastodon is fine

Eugen being the BDFL of Mastodon (the project) might have been beneficial in the early days, but it feels more and more like a liability at this point.
If Mastodon is to survive for another 8 years, it cannot be run as a pet project anymore. And it also should not be run as "just" a Twitter-like anymore because Bluesky is effectively winning that battle with more resources than the Mastodon project could ever get.

A lot of the good ideas for the Fediverse aren't coming from Eugen or Mastodon at this point, and they rarely involve just "being another Twitter". Which leads me to my next point.

"Who is the new Twitter?" is a boring question

I really do not like this question.^[1] This isn't me being salty about Bluesky "winning", by the way. I would be bothered the same if Mastodon was being declared a "winner" because:

Why should we have only one website, exactly?

Why is this all we care about? Why is this the focus? Why do we obsess over who has the most (active) users?

Are we constantly arguing about decentralization, who does it and who doesn't, and complaining about monopolies only to want (effectively) a monopoly for our online spaces? Really?

Sure, it's more annoying, but I think it's healthier to have different spaces for different people.
I've been on Twitter since 2009, Mastodon since 2017, and Bluesky since early 2023 and at this point, I can say that all of these are true:

• I know people…Read more

You know, it always surprises me in the best way possible to see my website's button on other people's websites. I have literally no way of knowing who does it otherwise (because the file is hosted by GitHub so I don't have analytics, and I'm sure some folks re-host it themselves) so every time it happens it's a surprise. It's great.

Always appreciate it <3

- damien