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

Programming note: remember link roundups? Well, I'm deciding to call them by a different name now. Why? So I can make a silly pun. I wanted to go with "Cool Stuff Sunday" at first, but I'm not fooling myself in thinking I'll stick to posting these on Sundays.

Let's get to it, there's a lot of stuff to talk about.

Social Media meta

For better or worse, I still think probably far too much about social media, so I can't help but be into articles about it.

Tom (Date 'em Ups): I want you to dream

You can have dreams, Cohost. And when you're finally done making one come true, you can go on and have more. Dreams are why I'm here, why I've survived, and I want you, all of you to have them, too, more than anything else. Wherever the winds take us all after this, I hope you hold onto those dreams. Don't let go of them for anything. Anything. No matter how crushing the world gets, no matter how tall the barriers to entry are, nothing whatsoever. I had to hold onto mine tightly for over two whole decades, but damn it, I willed it into reality and I'm going to keep doing the exact same thing with what's in my sights now or die trying.

Another cohost-related post, it will happen again, I'm not sorry.

Luna: Online following and Starter Packs

I want people to follow me naturally because they enjoy my posts in particular, I don’t want a tech/demoscene/gamedev/etc audience showing up in bulk just because someone else decided to put me on a list without my prior consent.

It is not a secret that I am not exactly fond of Bluesky. I use it, but I tolerate it. Bluesky's "starter packs", much like Twitter's "Follow all"^[1] feature, are... misguided? I see where they're coming from, it's hard to "build a feed" when you start on a Twitter-like website but, like Luna here, I can't help but feel this will produce Some Weird Results.

I think following a starter pack is doing yourself a disservice because you're just injecting people into your feed without getting a feel of what their posts are like, and people who are added to them have little way of doing much about it. You can "just block the creator of a pack" but this isn't a great solution. Some people might prefer to never be put in the spotlight at all, sometime it might be awkward for people to block a starter pack's creator. The fact there isn't an "opt me out" button is bonkers to me, but ultimately doesn't surprise me coming from Bluesky. But I'm just a hater, so what do I know.

Build your feed slowly but…Read more

Well, it turns out I was pretty lucky because Justice's show last night (September 29th) was a very very good one in terms of pictures! I got literally as close as one could realistically be, even if I was slightly off center!

As I got out of the show, I was pretty worried because Justice's light setup made it much, much harder to get consistently good shots. Don't get me wrong, those very quick color changes in the lights look amazing in person, but they are challenging to shoot with a smartphone.

But I think I managed to get some pretty damn good pictures given the situation. Like those taken during Gesaffelstein's performance, all of them were shot with Halide and in RAW with "Process Zero" enabled. The only adjustments I made (if any) are cropping and slight tweaks to the exposure/contrast.

Everything else is straight out of the iPhone 13 Pro's camera system. Which, for some of them, is outstanding to see, honestly. As always, click the thumbnails to get the JPEG at 100% quality.

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I just saw Gesaffelstein last night at Portola and boy that shit ripped. I had already watched his set from Coachella earlier this year, so I "knew" what to expect. But as always, watching a live performance is one thing, being there in person is another.

A true banger of a show, the combination of the minimalist set design and the hard hitting music really really worked.

As I often do in concerts, I took plenty of pictures/videos. It took me a few hours to triage everything (because Darkroom on macOS kind of sucks) but I managed to trim it down to a reasonable amount.

All of these were taken on my iPhone 13 Pro using the 3x telephoto lens. The first three ones were taken with the stock iOS camera, all the others were shot using Halide in RAW with "Process Zero" mode enabled.
And honestly? It produced incredible results given that: this is a phone camera, at a music festival, taken by hand^[1] in a low-light environment.

Halide (in RAW mode) was already a killer tool for concert photography in my experience but Process Zero really takes it to the next level. The capture speed was more than enough, turns out when your camera doesn't try to capture hundreds of frame for one shot, you can go pretty wild with it. The focus was a bit hit or miss but that's expected given the environment (the fog machines really didn't help haha).

I only had to adjust the exposure/brightness on a handful of shots! It's incredible, really. I hope to be able to take good shots of Justice tonight 🤞

At any rate, here are the pictures (click to load the full, uncompressed JPEGs):

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