Or at least I haven't been.  Too many blogging platforms, too little energy to write.  I moved my Livejournal over to Dreamwidth, posted there a few times, and that was it.  Tonight for some reason I decided to click on the email reminders I still get, and here I am.  Read a little bit, but decided not to go all the way back.

If I want to keep posting and not get daunted, I guess I should write something quick off the cuff on some random topic, or a few.

Simon (eldest son) is now 18 and just finishing his first semester of university, taking computing science, but he's still at the stage where he's mostly taking other stuff, like physics and statistics and calculus.  And he's having more trouble with the calculus than the other things; luckily I remember a fair bit of calculus myself so I can help.  They're using this system called WebAssign or something where they submit answers online, and apparently it's both fairly capable of scientific notation and fairly forgiving of unreduced forms.  But it also only allows a certain number of tries (in this case three), and it doesn't give you the right answer when your guesses are exhausted (and it sounds like they didn't discuss them in class, either)...and usually he only comes to me after his first two guesses were wrong.  Hopefully he does okay in his final exam.

I was quietly happy to see him sitting with Jinian (his nine-year-old sister) on the weekend, working on a programming project.  I gather there's some framework for building Bullet Hell games (he told me the name, but I've forgotten) which features some programming, and he was patiently explaining the programming bits to her.  So that's nice.  Jinian's been struggling with math a little, but programming is easier than math, isn't it?  Or maybe it just seems that way.  I saw someone write recently that "talent" is just that stuff that you did a lot of when you were young because it seemed fun and easy...

I got a message the other day informing me of an appointment on Monday 02/Sep/15.  Corrected swiftly to Wednesday 02/Sep/15.  Which got me to wondering how far in the future it would take before 02/Sep/15 was a Monday.  (It turns out that it'll only take 100 years, until 2115.  Isn't it nice how two-digit years have slid back into common usage as memory of the Y2K panic fades?)

But I noticed something as I was checking through the centuries, and that is that September 1st ??15 will never be a Monday, and it's all because of Pope Gregory.  Moving forward 100 years from 2015 to 2115 moves us back two days in the week, because 100 years = 100 * 365 + 24 leap days (which would be 25 if not for the Gregorian calendar rule where 2100 doesn't get one), or 36524 days total.  36524 days is 5217 weeks plus five extra days, or 5218 weeks minus two days, so the weekday moves back by two (or forward by five, which equivalent in modulo-7 arithmetic).  So the same thing happens going from 2115 to 2215, and 2215 to 2315.  We've now gone back six days.

And then we go from 2315 to 2415.  This time, though we have our full 25 leap days, because of the 400-year rule from the Gregorian calendar, so we only go back one day.  So now we've gone back seven days, or a full week.  If we started on a Tuesday in 2015 (as September 1st will be), we'll go back to Sunday in 2115, Friday in 2215, Wednesday in 2315, and back to Tuesday in 2415.  And 01/Sep/15 will never be on any other days of the week.

The Julian calendar didn't have this problem (problem?  Maybe that's a bit strong; it's really more of a characteristic), because it always had 36525 days per century, and always went back one weekday in the same interval.  So any given date would hit every day of the week for a given two-digit year suffix.

Who is it we have to blame for the seven-day week again?  Babylonians?  Wonder if we'll ever be able to get rid of it...

Thought this might be a fun thing to get into the habit of doing.  Though I'm already doing this from memory a few days later; the game of 7 Wonders we played before this has already pretty much faded from my memory.

For a while, we tried to use negotiation to settle on a game that everybody wanted to play, but by now we're doing more of a cycle.  We put all our names into a hat (a pink cloth cowboy hat of Jinian's, to be precise), and then pick out a name; that person gets to pick the game (though not with infinite latitude, but objections have to be purely procedural, not preferential), and then their name doesn't go back into the hat until it's empty.  And having said this, I can't quite remember who it was who got to pick Talisman; I was the one to pick 7 Wonders, so it wasn't me...maybe Simon?  We've been playing the digital version on Steam on the computer, but it's mostly one human player vs. three AI players, and sometimes they can be mind-numbingly stupid, so beating them isn't always that much of an achievement.  It does mean that I've gotten more familiar with the rules...but I think not quite the same rules as our boardgame version uses.  (The computer version uses "Fate", which allows you to reroll dice, and our boardgame has none of that; the other changes tend to be more minor.)

Anyway, I ended up as the evil Wizard, Nicole as the Minster, Luke was the Prophetess, Simon was the Monk, and Jinian the Warrior (we let her pick, but the rest of us chose randomly).  Simon quickly got the Orb of Knowledge, so both him and Luke got to draw an extra card all the time.  I rarely got any spells that I actually needed, so I didn't get much chance to draw new ones.  Nicole drew most of the monster cards, and didn't win a lot of battles, but she did get three Dragons (who didn't attack her because of Minstrelness); the only animal she got to charm was a Wild Boar, though (she was disappointed that she didn't get to charm dragons, but she was happy to be able to discard the Hag).  Three people got turned into toads, between Witch, Enchantress, and the Random spell; this was how I lost my mule and a ton of stuff (including the Unicorn and the Ring) in the Inner Region, most of which Simon picked up later.  Jinian ended up with a Poltergeist, but made great use of this going back and forth between the Oasis (which had a Pool of Life) and a Desert square next to it (luckily she had the Holy Grail).

Simon got to the Crown of Command first, and nobody else really managed it.  In fact, I don't know if anybody else got past the Crypt/Mines.  So it was a bit of an unbalanced game, but at least it didn't drag on forever.  We normally play it in the afternoon, and on the table in the basement, where we can leave it set up during meals; this one we let the kids stay up late (with a break for book-reading), but it would have gone on longer if Simon had had any real competition.

And that's pretty much all the bits I remember at the moment.  We'll see if I do this again next family game...

For most of my life I have endeavoured to be continuously immersed in music.  In recent years that has been sliding a bit, but there are still times when I insist on it, such as when I am driving alone in a car.  It makes commuting almost tolerable.  I do vary this sometimes with spoken-word stuff--I've gone through a lot of Goon Show, Frantics, I'm Sorry I Haven't A Clue, and Welcome To Night Vale.

But it's often a challenge to actually get music of my choice in a car.  Radio, that's easy, but it's hardly ever suitable.  Still, for a long time most of my music was on cassette, and car tape decks are easy to get, right?  Well, I don't tend to have good luck with them.  Sometimes it just wasn't in the budget.  I recall some trips with a battery-powered ghettoblaster on the passenger seat, including a particular night-drive from Edmonton to Grande Prairie where I really gave Tori Amos's "Little Earthquakes" its first good listen.

My first car with an actual tape deck lasted less than a year before I got into an accident, and the body shop wouldn't give me the tape deck unless I could replace it with the car's original stereo system.  I actually bought a tape deck for my next car, eventually, but after a few years it became very spotty, and it might take ten minutes or longer before it would connect to the speakers and actually start making sound.  And then there was the Jeep Cherokee I got from my mother, which had a lovely tape deck, but it was already hard-used and rusted out after a couple of years.

After that, the next vehicle had a CD player, but I was never satisfied with those--they skipped, and had trouble with the 80-minute CD-R's I was burning at the time.  Then I got my first knockoff MP3 player, but I didn't have speakers for it, and I didn't want to actually wear headphones while driving--it seemed like a bad safety idea.

But then I found out that you could get these little mini radio-transmitter things that you plugged in to the car lighter.  That's been my mainstay for the last few years, but they have their frustrations too.  The transmission isn't that clean, there's often static, particularly near certain places, and once or twice I've driven close to someone who's obviously using the same frequency, which can be annoying.  The cable hookups are flaky, too--often they end up fraying right at the base of the plug, and sometimes replacement cables are hard to find.  I have one which is in perfectly good shape, but I had trouble finding a cable that went from my iPod Touch to mini-USB, and after I did find one which was crap, I gave up.

At the moment I'm switching back and forth between two less-than-ideal arrangements.  I have a Bluetooth speaker which is not too bad, but a couple of months ago the Bluetooth volume dropped out on it, so it was nearly inaudible; it still has a headphone-jack to micro-USB cable, so it's still usable, but it's a bit less convenient.  I also got a second-hand iPod radio adapter from a friend, but it's a huge awkward white plastic thing that has trouble wedging in behind my emergency brake handle, and it's still got the radio transmission problems.  I tend to switch from one to the other based on which one annoys me most--the speaker by running out of battery power (it does give a five-second warning before dying, at least), or the transmitter because of the things I already said.

Some of you are probably shaking your head, wondering why I don't just get one of those modern car audio systems that has USB ports right in them.  Well, one of these days I might, but, you know, budget.  I don't think I've ever bought a car younger than five years old, but maybe the next one will ascend to that level of technology finally.  I have tried it out in a few rentals, and it's nice.  One day...

One day I'll probably have a chip implanted directly in my head that contains every terabyte of my music collection, mentally controlled and transmitting sound directly into my brain because I'll have lost my hearing by then.  Or not--brain surgery gives me the willies a little bit.  Maybe a Bluetooth hearing aid?

Watching: One more disk of Twin Peaks episodes left, plus another one of special features.  Started on Doctor Who Series 3, with "The Runaway Bride"...not sure if that was the best start, but it was okay.  Currently half an episode behind on "Outlander"--seriously, who does 90-minute episodes?  We also watched "Guardians of the Galaxy" and "The Winter Soldier", so we're almost caught up on Marvel.  I'm still conflicted over the "Days of Future Past" X-Men movie, though.  TV shows return next week, so I predict epic falling behind.

Reading: Finished The Talisman, it was okay; since then have reread David Gerrold's Bouncing Off The Moon (second in the series; a lot of lunar travelogue, not a lot of plot advancement), read Brandon Sanderson's Alcatraz vs. The Knights of Crystallia (third in the series; still amusing, but it had some slow spots) and Diana Pharaoh Francis's Bitter Night (first in the series; kickass start and excellent tension and pacing, with the exception of one "characters captured too easily" sequence, will read more).  I also did a reread of Buffy Season 8 comics, and discovered I had the first collection of Season 9 but not more, so I picked up a second Season 9 collection today.  The plot had some serious "Oh, really?" moments in it, though.

I've just started S.M. Stirling's The Sword of The Lady, sixth in its series, and having a little trouble getting back into the series, since I read the previous book in 2008.  (Coincidentally, it seems like I may have bought it at the same time as Bitter Night...)

Listening: The usual random stuff.  Nothing really notable for new stuff, a few albums from eMusic that sounded okay based on samples (Lore, Black City Lights), plus an EP from Eliza Rickman heavily featuring toy-piano instrumentation.

Playing: On the computer, I've been going back and forth.  I had a big surge of Morrowind a few months ago, where I finished the main plot with my Character #3 (the Argonian mage, Speaker-to-Animals) but started to bog down in the expansion pack plots.  I've also just recently finished the main plotline in Skyrim for the first time (I was very close), but again, bogging down in other quests.  Rogue Legacy is good when I want to kill a few minutes here and there, and I've still got old standbys like Spider (where my win rate is about 31%, by the way), Sherlock, and Solitude (a big card-solitaire pack).  A few weeks ago I even dug deep into the past and played a couple of games of Empire--the old one, early 80's, from when it had just been ported to the new IBM PC.  I still enjoy that from time to time, even though by this point it's almost zenlike.

But if I do pick a big game to play, at this point it's like to be either Crusader Kings II or Europa Universalis IV.  I got started on CK2 a while ago, and have just finished my third game of it.  It's occasionally highly frustrating, but I love the scope of it, and also the scale, where I can get down to the level of individual people, and then arrange their marriages for them and stuff.  It's been very educational history-wise, too.  In my first game, I started as Earl Godfrey Ivaring of the Isle of Man, and followed the Ivarings through to the peak of their success, King Pridbjorn of Scotland and Ireland...and then back down to a single county again.  My second game was somewhat better--I started as Count Aner de Marsan from southwest France, and ended up growing more steadily up to becoming things like Duke of Brittany, King of Castile, and finally Emperor of Hispania...which I kept until the very end of the game.

My last game (the third, or at least the third I finished) I was trying to play in "Ironman" mode, which is a) designed to keep you from tampering with your save files, and b) the only way you can get online "Achivements" on Steam; I picked, at random, Count Radislav Kometopoulos of Dorostotum, on the northern frontier of the Byzantine Empire in modern Bulgaria.  This game also had some ups and downs--in fact, I actually "lost" at some point as my only heiress had foolishly not married matrilineally, and so my titles passed into the hands of another dynasty.  I was able to keep playing as that dynasty, though, and the Shishmans had a little more success, at one point even managing to become Kings of Bulgaria and achieve their independence from the Empire.  Being independent from the Empire while enclosed by it was a little bit stifling, though, so I stupidly decided to rejoin the Empire, even though the Empress hated my guts, and so she systematically stripped everything away until I was left with very little, and was unable to regain much of it before the end of the game.  I've just tried starting one with the "Old Gods" expansion, as Estonian pagans back in 867, but I'm still on my starting character for that one.

This being me, I also had chracter naming schemes for each game--well, for the first game, I let it pick the names for me, just to see what I would get.  But the second one, I went through an alphabetical list, first using standard Occitan/Frankish/Basque flavour names, and then using some custom ones (which is how I ended up with a King Azpiazu and an Emperor Ornigan).  To some extent I'm fascinated with the names different cultures use (Boson, for instance, was a well-known Occitan King, and "Eudes" is their form of "Otto"), I do like using my own, and I'm tickled when the built-in code for naming children after their parents or grandparents causes my custom names to be passed on for several generations (like the several Queriches descended from my original).  So for the Dorostotum game I used strictly names drawn from Steven Brust's Dragaera books, because some of them are vaguely Slavic, and I'd just been through them not that long ago reading them to Simon.  My new one, I was feeling whimsical, so, based on a recent conversation about the Order of the Stick "Polearm Shop Sketch", I'm naming my children after polearms and/or types of cheese.  (Having just finished one of Brandon Sanderson's Alcatraz books, I anticipate moving on from there to prisons and mountains when I get tired of those.)

I'm not quite as fond of Europa Universalis IV (EU4, henceforth).  It doesn't do as much on a person level, being more nation-oriented.  I enjoyed my first game of it as Castile mostly because I got to colonize large chunks of the world.  Castile ended up with most of northwest Africa, Australia, a lot of South America, the Pacific Northwest, bits of the African coast, islands in the Indian and the Pacific...  It was almost as interesting to see what other nations got.  Mexico was British; a lot of Canada was Breton (which is great, I love Brittany); Florida was Norwegian.  None of the colonies actually became independent, but then I don't have that expansion pack yet.  I never got to unify with Aragon, though; I skipped the obviously-planned "Royal Marriage" event, and I never got that good a chance again.  So no Spain, just Castile.  (Aragon didn't get any colonies.  Ha!)  I've started a second game as France, which is not quite as fun, especially since I discovered how severe an advantage Portugal and Castile have in getting a head start on colonization.  Plus the religious wars are kicking my ass, as Catholic and Protestant and Heretic armies keep rising up and laying waste to the countryside.

But then I got the plugin that lets me export CK2 games as EU4 mods, so you can basically continue your games...and that's been more interesting.  I took my Emperor of Hispania game and have been playing as Emperor of Spain, which has been fairly fun.  My Spain started out with all of the Iberian peninsula, as well as Aquitaine, Brittany, most of the rest of France, and little bits here and there in the Holy Roman Empire, and even bits of the British Isles.  I get to do the lion's share of the colonizing, because there's not even a Portugal or France to compete with.  There was Scotland, but it was mostly concerned with winning the rest of England back from the Aztecs.  Oh, yeah, the Aztecs conquered England, thanks to a CK2 mod called "Sunset Empire".  And then I ended up King of Scotland too, through a royal marriage, and now that's all part of Spain too.  So the poor Holy Roman Empire has been getting squeezed between me on the west, Lithuania on the east, and Byzantium in the south, so it's really starting to fall apart.  Flanders and Holland have been doing a little bit of colonization (as well as scattered bits like Hwicce and Orkney, but I've engulfed those too.)

I also had a CK2 game where, through the use of extensive cheat codes, I managed to conquer most of the map with the Empire of Brittania, just to see if it was theoretically possible.  I bogged down when my only remaining opponent was the Mongol Ilkhanate, because I kept having to wait ten years for truces to expire...  Anyway, I exported that map into EU4 as well, and now I'm trying to make the rest of the world British too, without further cheat codes, to see if that's possible.  It diverts me, and I don't have to worry about losing battles all that much, just dealing with overextension as I try to integrate my new possessions...

Watching: Just finished the second episode of Babylon 5 Season 2.  After a full season of Commander Sinclair, it's always a bit jarring when we get to Captain Sheridan; mostly it's the voice, I think, probably an octave higher and rough instead of smooth.  But Sheridan's already got more depth to his character, and the writing seems much better; the plot has hit the ground running.

My wife and I also watched the first episode of "Outlander"; she's a big fan of the Diana Gabaldon books they're based on, and I have read and enjoyed them as well.  It seemed okay to start with, not as off-putting as I found "Bitten" or "True Blood", so I'm sure we'll keep on.

Reading: Slogging through The Talisman by Stephen King & Peter Straub.  Never read any Straub, but I've read a fair chunk of King by this point, and I frankly can't point to anything that doesn't read like him.  But I'm not enjoying it that much; our main character is a little too hapless, and just when he seems to be ramping up his confidence slightly he gets saddled with a hapless companion.  Part of this book almost seem like a dry run for the Dark Tower.  Not sure if I'll keep it when I finish, or if I'll want to try to the sequel I seem to recall they came out with a few years ago.  Also inching through What If The Earth Had Two Moons?, which is fitfully interesting, but today I've been trying to catch up on Cracked.com columns, which I seem to have become a dedicated reader of.

Listening: Mostly Rush's "Vapour Trails" recently.  I skipped over this one when it came out, mostly because on first listen it seemed horrifically noisy, something I'd been afraid of since "Stick It Out".  It became available on eMusic, though, so I thought I'd give it a try.  A fellow Rush fan that I met at my wife's family reunion said they had come out with a less noisy version, so maybe I managed to get that one by chance.  (I did like "Snakes & Arrows", which gave me the impetus to try again, and one of these days I should try "Clockwork Angels", too.)  I also have Sloan's "Between The Bridges" coming up soon; Sloan's a band I find hit-and-miss, but I read a gushy chapter on them in a book on Canadian alternative music a few months back, and since they're on eMusic too, I thought I'd give them another try.

Playing: For several months now my brain has been mostly dominated by Paradox Games's offerings, specifically Crusader Kings II and Europa Universalis IV.  I could write a big long blog post about my games, but let's just say that at the moment I am experimenting with EU4 games created from my CK2 save files, and having a lot of fun with it.

I've also been spending an embarrassing amount of time playing with Akinator, a guessing game with a genie, bad English, and a bit more than twenty questions.  It only guesses characters--both real and fictional--but I've become caught up in the question of which characters it knows about, and then which ones are most popular (because it tells you how many times it's been guessed before...).  I now have several pages of numbers, character from different sources and their respective popularities.  Akinator the genie itself is at the top, followed by Hitler and Jesus, unless there's other obvious ones I haven't tried yet.  I'm sure it'll pall eventually, but at least it keeps from playing more Candy Crush Saga on my iPod.

In my continuing effort for completism, despite having finished watching Series Two of Doctor Who on DVD, I'm not letting myself start Series Three (which I also have on DVD) until I've finished watching the contents of the last disc of the set, "Doctor Who Confidential".  Because apparently they had a show which was talking about Doctor Who stuff related to each episode.  Even cut down (the original 45-minute format was apparently edited down to closer to 15 minutes for the DVD release), it's taken me three separate sessions to get through them.  And then there's another item in there, David Tennant's Video Diary, which I started on before noticing how slowly I was progressing; apparently it's closer to 90 minutes long.  Not enough time for that tonight, though what I watched did seem interesting.

After I finish with that, I suppose it's on to Babylon 5 Season 2 rewatch Disc 1.  I already watched the special feature disc for B5S1, you betcha.  I feel less self-conscious going through the Special Features like that when it's just me watching on my computer, which may be why I've been doing it perhaps more than I usually would.

Last month I downloaded Davíd Garza's "A Strange Mess of Flowers" on eMusic.  As I sometimes struggle to use up all 90 of the tracks I'm paying for each month (which, as I mentioned, I'm getting a deal on), I actually leapt at the chance to download a 71-track "four-disc box set" or tracks, on the basis of a bunch of 30-second samples.  (I can't remember if I listened to all of them or not.  Because that's over half an hour right there.)

I was not a huge Davíd Garza fan, though I did like his "This Euphoria" album, which was at the top of my Amazon wishlist for some years, mostly because I happened to add it first after listening to it from the library, so it was mostly the convenience of not having to think as much about my eMusic downloads for the month.

But I'm getting tired of the album now, and ready to go on to someone else, even interspersed with bits of my other playlists as it's been.  The songs are okay, but few of them are standing out--well, I just heard one called "My Sister" that seemed interesting, but I can tell that I'm not retaining them in my head, and a week from now I won't get any snippets of remembered music when I look at the titles.

Ah, well, it's not the worst eMusic download I've done.  A few months ago I took a chance on a double album by a band named Science Fiction, which turned out to be basically AOR--occasionally quite bad AOR, with lyrics written by someone whose first language was not English.  (The best songs were thus the ones which they sang in their native language, because I couldn't tell how bad the lyrics were.)  I'd take Garza over that any day.

And, let's be honest, if I actually spent the time to listen to the album and get to know it, it may very well grow on me.  But who has the time to do that any more?

I've been dabbling in the boardgame culture over the last few years.  Well, I've been playing them for years.  I remember whiling away time playing boardgames as a kid, mostly with myself, as is appropriate for an introvert.  Monopoly, Payday, Sorry, Stock Ticker (where I was mostly just fascinated by watching the commodities go up and down)...Clue, alas, was too hard to play alone, but I did once in a while talk other people into playing with me.  Then there was the more role-playing like ones, Divine Right and Dungeon and the ones we clipped out of Dragon Magazine (of which File 13 was always my favourite, although I found King of The Tabletop tantalizing).  Talisman, a few years later.  Or the minigames, Demonlord and Illuminati (and a few real solitaire games, Barbarian Prince and Star Smuggler).  Wow, that was more than I thought.  I also remember reading a number of reviews in Games Magazine, and some of them sounded interesting, but I never sought them out.  But it was still mostly role-playing games and computer games that dominated my attention.

Then there was a lot of family card games, Hand & Foot Canasta being the most common, with a side of Cribbage or Gin, or maybe Uno.  The party games, Balderdash and Taboo and Scattergories.  Maybe a little bit of Yahtzee.

But one day there was that copy of Settlers of Catan.  What was that?  It looked kind of intriguing.  We picked it up, tried it out...it was interesting, but we didn't take it out that often.  We had young kids, after all, and they'd probably swallow the pieces; they were certainly too young to play it.  Let's drag out the Sorry instead, or the Monopoly.

When they were older, though, I thought we'd try out some of these other games I kept seeing around.  Runebound was interesting, though full of little pieces that did mostly end up getting lost.  Cosmic Encounter...was a little disappointing.  Carcassonne, well, that was interesting, building maps with little tiles.  (Except when people were mean and didn't give you the last tile you needed to fill in that one hole that was driving you nuts...)

At some point, not sure when it was, I ended up invited to a party with some friends where there were going to be boardgames.  I got to watch the end of Ticket To Ride, and then...I don't even remember what was next.  Cards Against Humanity, perhaps.  Or Dominion and Pandemic.  But I was beginning to realize that maybe there were other people out there who might like to play games to.  I didn't always feel like going out, but once in a while I did.

And then this web-series came out, I don't know if you heard of it?  Okay, fine, I'd been following Wil Wheaton online off and on since he was first blogging back in the early 2000s, and this Tabletop thing sounded like fun.  So I watched it, often with my kids, and I began to realize how much was out there.  I can't buy everything, of course, but it's great to see this stuff and get more of an idea what the game's like than just peering at the bottom of the box.

So now we've got some Munchkin and 7 Wonders (my current favourite) and Killer Bunnies and Apple To Apples, and the Order of the Stick boardgame (another favourite, but one that requires more of a time investment), and it's not unknown to have a family game weekend where we go through almost everything in the cupboard.  And a few more regular game evenings with friends, with Elder Sign and Shadow Hunters and Star Trek Catan.  Even tried a few of the advanced-level ones, like Tzol'kin and Power Grid; supported a Kickstarter for Machine of Death.  There can still be weeks that go by where the games don't come out; there's still computer games, and books, and other things to do, and sometimes the negotiations get a little wearying.  My youngest is getting close to being able to play without help; she plays Ticket To Ride on her own, though we quietly overlook the fact that she doesn't know how to complete her routes.  It's not an obsession.  But it's still a lot of fun, from time to time.

What am I listening to these days?  Not as much as I used to.  At work I still have to use headphones, and I don't bother that often, so that playlist has slowed to a crawl.  Even at home, though, since we moved, I feel inhibited from playing my music out loud too late at night, because Simon's bedroom is in the basement with me; less so in the summer, and now that he's getting into high school, but still.  Also, some of the games I play have their own incidental music, and while I often turn it off to listen to my own tunes, sometimes I don't.  Plus, more watching TV on the computer.

I'm still using Winamp on the computer (though from time to time I consider writing my own personal media player program, which would be optimized for the tasks that I want, but I haven't even considered how to begin yet), and I have a number of playlists, most of them themed (such as Female Artists, or music I acquired in the past year, or Canadian Artists, or whatever else I can come up with), including my long-term effort to listen to my entire library of songs in alphabetical order (started in 2009; almost done the M's).  However, I'm also acquiring music at my usual rate--90 tracks a month from eMusic, plus occasionally buying other stuff from iTunes or other sources, or acquiring free downloads from various sources.

What I had been doing was doing one screenful (35 tracks, generally) from my alphabetical ordering, then one from another playlist (cycling through in sequence).  But when my "New" playlist started piling up, I made it come up more often like Alphabetical-New-Alphabetical-Other, or Alphabetical-New-Other.  And recently I've been falling behind enough that it's just been Alphabetical-New-Alphabetical-New, with no time for any of my other playlists.  Maybe that 90-tracks-a-month thing is a little excessive, but I got grandfathered into it at a very good rate years ago and I feel like I should keep up with it.  Probably classic Sunk Costs Fallacy there, eh?  At least it keeps me from buying much on iTunes.  I do still get CDs from the library, once in a while, but I've started just ripping them and leaving them sitting around until I can try them out...which can be months.  Forget about trying to keep up on what's current--I haven't done that for years and years anyway.  (How long ago?  Does the word "Tubthumping" mean anything to you?)

More consistently, I tend to listen to my "favourite songs" playlist, various ordered, while I'm driving to and from work (or anywhere else alone in the car), or while I'm doing the big dishwashing push on the weekend.  My "favourite songs" list is up over a thousand songs right now, so close to 1/40 of my entire collection; these are the ones I can easily sing along to, or would like to be able to.  It amuses me to come up with different ways of sorting it--alphabetical by title, alphabetical by reversed title, increasing order of length, etc.  Currently I'm listening in decreasing order of song length, which is interesting, though I anticipate a lot of Beatles and They Might Be Giants as I get down below three minutes.  (Next up, sorted in order of the anagrammed form of the title...)  In between the complete scrambled list, I tend to pick a shortlist, plus any new songs I want to audition, and do them in a plain scramble.

I've also become a fan of the "Welcome To Night Vale" podcast, as so many others have before and since.  It's gone up and down in quality, some of that no doubt happening around the time I caught up and had to start waiting for new episodes.  The recent resolution of the Strexcorp plotline was pretty good, though.  I've started only listening when I've got a couple of episodes accumulated, so I haven't listened past that yet; Simon and I did go to see the live performance when it came through town, though.

What have I been buying recently?  I started tracking down artists featured in the "Weather" section of "Welcome To Night Vale", and downloaded a bunch of their albums (a lot of them were on eMusic, which makes sense because eMusic focuses on indie artists, and so does WtNV), including Eliza Rickman, who was at the live show.  I used to avoid albums with lots of tracks, but now I appreciate them because they help me burn through my monthly allotment faster, so recently I downloaded the extended version of [The London] Suede's debut album (most of the bonus tracks were a bit too noisy for me, but I did like their cover of "Brass In Pocket"), and Davíd Garza's sprawling "box set" "A Strange Mess of Flowers".  (If you're really curious about what I listen to, of course, you can check me out on last.fm.)

I've been debating getting the new Weird Al album on iTunes; I watched all of his videos, and I confess that the only one that really won me over as a song was "First World Problems".  Normally I like his single-artist pastiches, even though I was never a big fan of the Pixies (as he is apparently paying tribute to with this one).  His straight song parodies never did as much for me, and even less so these days when I've rarely even heard the song he's spoofing.  I had heard "Blurred Lines", but "Word Crimes" unfortunately runs afoul of my preference for descriptive over prescriptive grammar.  I'll probably get the album eventually--after all, I have all his others--but I'm not sure when I'll get around to it.  (I haven't bought the last TMBG album, "Nanobots", yet either, partly because I kept waiting for it to show up on eMusic, where most of their albums are available, and partly because I never got around to actually listening to any of the songs from it.  Again, probably one of these days.)