FlightlessBird is the latest in social media technology. As a permanent safeguard against enshittification, the only users allowed to make accounts and post are the founders of the service.
Like Mastodon, some posts contain content notices (which, like Mastodon, are sometimes just a general post header with a mild disclaimer). In this case, the main body of the post will be recolored to obscure the text, and can be revealed by highlighting it with your cursor. This site doesn't use JavaScript, so we're doing the best we can really.
August 2025 • September 2025 • October 2025 • November 2025 • December 2025 • January 2026
August 2025
2025-08-14
21:02 Coldsore: RADICAL MANIFESTO THAT WILL NEVER BE REFERENCED AGAIN.
21:03 Anne: It's not plunderphonics unless it includes anime music and high-tempo breakbeats, otherwise it's just sparkling musique concrete.
2025-08-15
21:10 Anne: DON'T TOUCH ME! I'M URT!
21:11 Lowry [BOT]: awesome test
21:23 Anne: (NOTICE: CW test) This is a test.
23:45 Anne: Finished I guess. Goddammit.
2025-08-16
20:40 Anne: Colin Newman getting deja vu: "alroit, here it is... again?"
20:44 Anne: Colin Newman looking for the volume slider in Audacity: "alroit, here it is, gain..."
23:10 Lowry [BOT]: oh yeah gluttons / skinny could've been 10" 45 instead of 7" 33. oh well.
23:11 Anne: What do you mean "oh well" nobody's fucking seen it, you can just change it and redo the disc art.
23:11 Lowry [BOT]: no the albuminfo is already entered it's immutable and canon sorry
2025-08-17
14:13 Anne: (NOTICE: Dorky misogyny) Snowy Red's 1982 album The Right to Die is such a listening experience. You're brought to explore his persona of this damaged neurotic guy and his existential quandries, and you start to empathize with him... and then out of nowhere the penultimate track hits you with the other side of that coin: "WHEN A MAN IS A MAN IS NO ANGEL, WHEN A WOMAN IS A SENSITIVE THING, WHEN A WOMAN IS A WOMAN IS A MADMAN! MADMAN! MADMAN! WOMAN OR MADMAN??" It's like a punchline.
14:16 Anne:
(NOTICE: CW test)
Oh while we're at it:
Multiline CW test. (Just want to see how this renders in the terminal.)
2025-08-18
00:20 Ons: Nouveau crashed while I was doing some small sprite edits in GIMP and we got meta-angry, again. Like we're supposed to be extremely enraged by this because it's totally breaking up our workflow while we're at the local cafe sipping on our latte, but we're not, and at most I made a joke about it and signed back in and got the edits rolling again, and that makes us feel really weird and uncomfortable.
00:51 Silver: YOU CAN BE A ROCKSTAR? WHO LET YOU?
2025-08-19
18:22 Anne: Hey, if anyone wants to discover my music so it'll be found, let me know.
2025-08-20
13:53 Anne:
This is a quoteBlockquote test.
13:54 Anne:
Another blockquote test:
But with the quote after a newlineLike so.
13:56 Anne: (Reply to Anne: "Hey, if anyone wants to discover...") Reply test.
14:27 Lowry [BOT]: so the emphasis function we inherited from markdown.lua does this thing to avoid emphasizing angle brackets and to do that the class of stuff to emphasize is [^<>]- but i don't get it because shouldn't the hyphen mean it matches the shortest possible sequence, e.g. 1 character. hey did that earlier underscore result in that section being italic. idk. are we gonna have to add escaping
14:28 Anne: Not if you shut up about Markdown.
14:34 Lowry [BOT]: thanks. anyway here_is_my_test! test.
14:35 Lowry [BOT]: ok yeah the problem is the brackety stuff i typed there doesn't count to cancel out the underscore (e.g. it's treated like "this" - see how the quotes don't prevent the underscore from being processed as italics).
14:44 Lowry [BOT]: anyway here is my <b>test</b> with emphasis and angle brackets.
14:54 Lowry [BOT]: ok wait what if i just put __ two underscores right next to each other. probably does nothing.
14:55 Lowry [BOT]: yeah
18:22 Anne: What if someone could like my album on the Fediverse? Damn, that's hot.
2025-08-21
00:18 Anne:
Strikethrough test nevermind.
2025-08-23
23:27 Anne: Test.
2025-08-24
10:37 Anne: Test agaaain.
10:43 Anne: Another test? Wow.
2025-08-27
11:27 Anne: (Reply to Anne: "NOTICE: Dorky misogyny") It's like a rickroll, seriously.
19:52 Anne: All my imaginary mentors are losers...
2025-08-28
11:31 Anne: Hack Century
2025-08-29
13:39 Anne: I think if we ever learned music theory we would become very sad and stop making anything and then one day we would fall over.
2025-08-30
16:07 Anne: Okay, wait. When we call ls in Lua from io.popen(), every file is always listed on its own line without -1 needing to be used. How does that work? Is that because io.popen() isn't a graphic terminal, so it doesn't have any concept for how many entries it can "fit" in one "row"?
September 2025
2025-09-03
15:06 Ons: Techies with spiritual beliefs trying to explain why they're not at all spiritual and actually fully rational at all times:
15:07 Lowry [BOT]: (Reply to Anne: "Okay, wait. When we call ls in L...") (in retrospect) might have to do with lua using sh and not bash. idk.
23:21 Anne: GUYS WE'VE BEEN DOING THIS PICTURE METADATA STUFF WRONG ALL ALONG! Our artist logos should NOT be under picture type $08 Artist/performer (...or $07 Lead artist/lead performer, huh?), they should go under picture type $13 Band/artist logotype, because they're not actual pictures they're LOGOs, YEAH NO MEDIA PLAYER EVER WILL EVEN LOOK THERE BUT IT HAS TO BE TECHNICALLY CORRECT!
23:22 Lowry [BOT]: ...technically we could use $0B Composer for our mugshots (attaching multiple of them for songs with multiple composers)
23:22 Anne: I know you think that's a funny joke but shut up because we're absolutely liable to fixate on dumb shit like that.
23:23 Anne: Anyway track art goes in 2 Illustration, fuck it.
23:23 Coldsore: yeah
23:26 Coldsore: also we're already pushing against the letter of id3 by using the media picture type for disc art like foobar does (though it does say "Media (e.g. label side of CD)" so maybe disc art is just one of many things that could be attached there)
23:27 Coldsore: ...though that just raises the question of why "Leaflet page" (cd booklet?) is a separate thing, unless that's a designated tag to include every page of the cd booklet one picture at a time
23:28 Coldsore: ...as if they're gonna specify shit. otherwise we'd have the faintest idea what bright colored fish is doing there
23:40 Anne: ...HEY. HEY GUYS. HERE'S SOMETHING REALLY, REALLY FUN TO THINK ABOUT.
23:41 Anne: HOW MUCH EXTRA FILESIZE DOES THE FRONT COVER, BACK COVER, AND ARTIST IMAGE BEING EMBEDDED INTO EVERY SONG ADD.
23:42 Princess: well the artist images are all in the kilobytes so no big deal there
23:44 Princess: so are most of the backs & covers, with the exception of powera, home music, 1 album, and music used to be quiet (1.1-1.6 MiB), Hi Horsefly (2.7 MiB - isn't there a .jpg version of this?), and the png versions of corporate jazz companion/corporate jazz portfolio)
23:45 Anne: The idea is that it adds up, though.
23:46 Anne: ...Alright, this is bikeshedding.
2025-09-04
00:52 Wisp: ehh annie has a point, like for f07 the final filesizes will be like 3x the initial filesizes just becuase the front & back covers of the album and the disc are duplicated across each track
00:53 Wisp: nobody fucking cares about id3 disc art anyway
00:56 Wisp: if right click->save complete page works like a .zip downlaod like we hope then "well how else are we gonna distribute the art with the songs!" is moot
01:03 Anne: ...
01:04 Wisp: fishies...
01:04 Wisp: aw.
01:04 Wisp: well there goes one of the potentially mildly frustrating nondeterministic parts of album-building i suppose.
01:05 Princess: awwwwwwww.
2025-09-06
11:46 Anne:
(NOTICE: politics, tech journo)
https://pluralistic.net/2025/09/03/unpunishing-process/
The way Cory breaks down in excruciating detail how his favorite fantasy outcome for large corporations was completely crushed and still includes his standard recaps of said fantasy as if it's still feasible.
A devoted entertainer.
12:16 Ons: Uhhh AI meta-complaining: All these thinkpieces are like "AI may be here to stay and may have infested our world and not be going anywhere but here's why in spite of that-" wait like 2 years. All the big AI services will be dead as a doorknob.
12:20 Ons: Doornail. Doorknob. What the hell is a doornail?
2025-09-17
14:59 Ons: Holy shit.
14:59 Ons: Wait, wrong channel.
15:10 Anne: Peak hours for web-facing FlB right now.
2025-09-26
13:41 Ons:
https://www.tumblr.com/theredoesnotexist/795718946603040768
You may have seen supposed characters with DID on tv where there's some kind of plot about how the "alter personalities" all knew about the disorder and the only reason the "main personality" didn't yet is because their crafty and probably nefarious other personalities were intentionally hiding it from them. I know I have because when we were discovering our system we felt like we might be wrong because we didn't have some kind of backstage crew of secretive knowing alters pulling the strings and who were somehow well-educated on DID and purposefully manipulating "my" life so that I didn't find out until they introduced themselves.
Yeah, that's bullshit.
13:44 Ons: Such a system could exist if their internal structure matches their outside life, and they're so used to pulling the wool over other people's eyes in extremely complex and elaborated schemes that they get in the habit of doing it to themselves. The "main personality" would eventually relent to knowing of one other personality who they're carefully deceiving into not acknowledging their existence, and meanwhile that personality is tricking another personality, who is tricking another personality, who is tricking the "main personality".
13:47 Ons: And they've just come off a scheme they're all conscious of where they work 5 jobs at once while juggling 2 distinct personal lives in adjacent counties.
13:47 Ons: Some good Catch Me If You Can-type shit.
13:51 Ons: One of their jobs is online crypto investment classes.
13:54 Ons: "This is crazy, but I'm starting to think there are some evil people sharing my body who I don't know about who are making me do evil things." "Like anonymously teaching people how to make money off of AI spam on Facebook?" "What the hell? That's called a grindset, thank you very much."
14:06 Ons: All of them except the "main personality" are aware of plurality, but their knowledge of it is so scattered and limited that they might as well know nothing; e.g. personality A thinks it's some ad-hoc spiritual thing they just came up with that no-one else has ever experienced, personality B read just enough about DID online to fervently deny they have it because real DID systems can't be dark-haired, personality C is convinced it's all elaborate method acting and they're preparing to make a dingy horror podcast dripping with sponsorships, etc.
October 2025
2025-10-03
09:21 Ons: (Sigh) I Think You Need To See A There Have Pissed
2025-10-05
15:17 Ons:
https://github.com/cfenollosa/bashblog
This looks really cool. (Via permacomputing: https://lyk.so/permacomputing.html .)
15:18 Ons: Er, via the small web resources linked to by permacomputing.
2025-10-11
15:42 Lowry [BOT]: (NOTICE: genai discourse) how did we go from making fun of "you didn't grow, you didn't learn anything, you took a shortcut and achieved nothing, it's sad you can't tell the difference" to the current festering about AI music and "you will never know what it is like to make art because you refuse to accept the suffering involved"
15:42 Lowry [BOT]: (NOTICE: genai discourse) genai is a fad and the larger ai bubble is horrific but the commonly accepted rhetoric here is ridiculous
2025-10-13
11:12 Ons: ...What the hell is up with flb's markdown rules? Can it apply tags to text with spaces? It can, right?
11:12 Ons: Okay, good. Ignore this.
11:16 Ons: Wait, I think I get what we're doing wrong. There's the single-character kludge rules, and there's the regular multi-character rules. For parse_markdown.lua, we're only applying the former right now.
2025-10-21
10:43 Chloë: There might be a blog later, but for now we can use this to announce when RSS happens.
2025-10-22
13:49 Anne: (Reply to Anne: "What do you mean "oh well" nobod...") ...In hindsight I'm not sure if I was unaware that the generic FlB would be public or if I knew but didn't care.
13:51 Lowry [BOT]: this is like what happens when irc approaches the hipster singularity
13:51 Lowry [BOT]: single-player bash.org
13:51 Anne: I mean we are using bash.
13:51 Lowry [BOT]: LAUGH TRACK; APPLAUSE.
16:36 Chloë: (Reply to Chloë: "There might be a blog later, but...") Oh, yeah, actually we decided we'll just add "now with RSS!" to the main page or something. Blog's probably still happening though. Lowry wanted to make some article I don't remember the gist of now.
16:38 Lowry [BOT]: i don't remember either
16:46 Sledge: It's great we just have a fucking website and we can put whatever we want on it.
17:54 Sledge: How are we gonna add lists to the Markdown parser?
17:57 Chloë: Could probably do some similar kludges to how we strip paragraph tags and break tags from around blockquotes. Start by just wrapping each line that starts with "* " in <li></li> and then change all instances of "<p><li>" to "<ul><li>".
2025-10-23
11:30 Lowry [BOT]: the ai music boom is like the house boom if all samplers were cloud services that financially depended on convincing people that similar products were alive and going to take over the world
2025-10-24
12:58 Coldsore: is Music Used To Be Quiet an NP or an EP
12:59 Anne: It definitely plays, so it's not a non-player. It's just that what it plays is nothing.
20:30 Coldsore: do you notice album 1 for any given wibi artist is usually a one-off thing that later we hold in really high regard and try to recreate with an elaborately planned-out second album that doesn't materialize
20:31 Coldsore: granted the only thing i had to do to make play exist was to sit down in tenacity and drag in certain audio files so it might be less overthinking/grandiosity and more an avoidant thing
20:31 Anne: An avoidant thing? What are you talking about? Now excuse me I need to compose the twelfth movement of The World That Challenged The Monster Scene IV which is why it's taking so long.
20:32 Coldsore: so are you going to then
20:32 Anne: No.
20:36 Anne: I Hate the Future is almost definitely by me; in ysmm/wibi50.txt I say "still gotta record the iron bars part when people aren't sleeping" - I don't say I still gotta record that part, but I clearly took on most of I Hate fhe Future V1.
20:42 Anne: It probably wasn't Tango "sabotaging" it since she didn't say anything at all about it.
2025-10-25
17:34 Chloë: Is YSMM an album or an EP? Or something else?
17:35 Wisp: ...huh. that is kinda funny how something with only 2 tracks can be called an album as long as they both span the whole record. probably would be less funny if we were into prog and that was normal. anyway album.
2025-10-26
08:40 Sledge:
who.lua:234: who.get_composer_name() takes tables, but was passed value "anne" of type "string". (Hint: who.get_composer_names() with an S takes tables of strings; this takes an actual composer.)Weird. This should never be able to happen. Doesn't grammar_check assert that composers is a table?
08:42 Sledge: Or maybe this is some other type of error.
08:45 Sledge: For future reference: This error occurs when processing Nightmare on Camera 3 in Wibi S/T; Anne is listed as "annie" here so this might be the first time in the code that Annie has been redirected to Anne.
08:50 Sledge: Alright, fixed. composer.redirect and composer.publicly weren't being followed correctly. In the meantime there's still another error but that will have to wait.
08:50 Sledge: The Wait.
08:51 Sledge: (The error is on Methuselah; first track of Vile.)
2025-10-30
19:57 Coup: [At Projector Screen In Expensive White Suit] I Plan To Make The First Social Media For Cops
November 2025
2025-11-01
21:33 Wisp: DAMN.
21:33 Wisp: Silent Flower Observers of Southern California was just fucking good.
21:57 Wisp: it's good in a way where listening to all the deleted crap we put out straight afterwards recontextualizes it as bad and boring and uncreative somehow but otherwise it's just good.
2025-11-02
21:59 Lowry [BOT]: your startup matters has a lof of connections huh
22:48 Lowry [BOT]: i listen to a little bit of everything. sound effect CDs... field recordings... unedited white noise... remixes of Relax (Sex Mix) that just loop the toilet plopping section for 5 hours... some classic rock...
22:50 Lowry [BOT]: brian eno...
22:52 Anne: How epic would it be if the guy pooping in Relax (Sex Mix) was Brian Eno? Trevor Horg meet Brian Eno? Electronic music pioneer meating of the minds! Brillant
22:54 Lowry [BOT]: pink flag
22:55 Anne: First record to use guitar. Still a stunning accomplishment.
2025-11-03
08:51 Coup: fucking scary the easiest way i can think of getting an emoji while there's no internet is opening ghex and opening the file browser from there and then right-clicking to get "insert emoji". fucking frightening.
08:51 Anne: Why don't you just search up what the individual UTF-8 bytes are and then write those to a file in GHex?
16:18 Anne: Made some progress on TWTCM Song 4. Which I was not expecting.
19:33 Lowry [BOT]: well that's addendums and partition nav done in less than 30 minutes. why do we assume everything takes 30 hours / is very annoying?
2025-11-07
11:05 Princess: (Reply to Lowry [BOT]: "well that's addendums and partit...") maybe we are always annoyed...
2025-11-08
21:50 Lowry [BOT]: ...lua does string to number coercion with arithmetic operators? what the hell? i never knew that
2025-11-10
19:32 Lowry [BOT]: If You Want An Image Of The Future Of Legacy Video Game Art, Picture A Boot Stamping The "A" Button Of A XBOX 360 Controller For Ever
20:16 Lowry [BOT]: (Reply to Lowry [BOT]: "If You Want An Image Of The Futu...") (NOTICE: bullshit) speaking of which DID YOU KNOW XBOX WAS MORE THAN 40 YEARS AGO???
2025-11-14
23:00 Silver: I think someone really ought to be capitalizing on the "people who instinctually clean their ears with Q-tips" market. Ear cigarettes.
2025-11-15
10:09 Silver: We're this close to getting a feed reader and just compiling all the websites we habitually check into one source so we don't get to spend 20% of our day typing the same website URLs. Guess we're some productivity fiend now.
2025-11-18
16:39 Coup: [Logs On] If You Guys Like Buying Shit I Have REALLY Good News.
2025-11-20
00:08 Lowry [BOT]:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Haters
Many of The Haters later performances involved whole audiences being led by inside agitators to actually ruin or destroy entire venues. Proprietors were not always informed of the choreography in advance. These were what The Haters called celebrations of entropy.hot take: this is really really stupid
00:10 Lowry [BOT]: generic stupid misanthropic crud
00:49 Tick: There should be a band who builds their own venues and only play at the venues they built and they desperately try to get people to come to their shows because otherwise there's no point in building their own venues.
10:57 Tick: The cooool epic Wibi solo gimmicks never pan out... TTA was supposed to be like tracker shit over preset rhythms on our music keyboard but ended up being noise music... thEY was supposed to be like tracker shit over field recordings but ended up being mainly just field recordings... it's all just noise without the mark of brilliance and ingeunity to set it apart! Brilliant sound idea no-one's ever done before 100 percent original expanding our sound creatively and excitingly.
10:59 Ons: Vile ended up kind of having its own gimmick, raw-importing .mod files and cutting up the embedded samples, but not for every track.
11:00 Ons: And ironically TTA2 is probably going to be just a tracker album. From unbrilliant noise to unbrilliant dance music without hitting the intellectual sweet spot inbetween! Music fan from 1000 years in the future doing a retrospective on WORLD'S MOST CREATIVE WEBSITE OWNERS shakes his head at this missed opportunity.
11:01 Tick: I'm thinking the FSR booklet parodying the writing style/media manipulation tactics of Paul Morley won't really make sense if this is just how we talk. Like, how will anyone be able to tell it's a parody?
11:03 Tick: Wibi like 2 years ago absolutely would've written disparagingly about "rap drum machines" if he thought it made him seem smart and subversive.
13:42 Coup: getting a text from "THE SEER" that says "YOU ARE NOW SEEN" and i'm like awww nuts :/
14:24 Tick: I Made $0 On Spotify. Here's How I Did It
16:30 Tick: https://validator.w3.org/feed/#validate_by_input W3 RSS validator that doesn't need to be pointed at a URL. Putting this here so we notice once we have the website building script working again and we browse through WebFlB for kicks.
16:30 Lowry [BOT]: our seo is gonna shoot through the fucking moon
16:31 Tick: Make Sure YOUR RSS Feed Actually Works Instead Of Not Working For Maximum Search Engine Placement
2025-11-21
17:06 Lowry [BOT]: does lua's "replace %n in the third arg to gsub" thing still apply if the third arg is a table and it looks in there for what to replace? because if so that sucks really really big-time because there's no way to disable it and rewriting the function to accommodate sounds really really annoying.
17:40 Tick: And why the hell does os.difftime() not raise an error when you only pass one argument?
2025-11-22
10:03 Coup: Has A Song Ever Been More Obviously AI-Generated? [They Might Be Giants - Stuff Is Way - 2012] Guess I Shouldn't Have Expected The Guys Who Made The Mickey Mouse Clubhouse Theme To Still Be Any Good, But Yknow, I Held Out Hope... :/
10:15 Tick: (Reply to Tick: "The cooool epic Wibi solo gimmic...") Oh, yeah; briefly there was going to be a thEY album much earlier named "Friend of Audio" that would consist of a bunch of loopscratching done on some Original Unknown DJs breakbeats. We tend to abandon ideas that involve loopscratching for some reason. Maybe it just sounds too "cool" so we're predisposed against it. Like something to do with why EDM guys hate "DAWless jams."
10:42 Coldsore: i've felt the predisposition against "doing something cool" before with the kind of squelchy early-drum-machine sounds i got in the right channel of 6 Bricks. like if i wanted i could reverse-engineer how i did that and then make like 10 songs that sound like they belong out of The Voice of America and it'd be really fucking lame
10:42 Coldsore: omg one-man band cabaret voltaire inspired act me and my the processed guitar and my cool tenacity manipulations that sound exactly like retro awesome drum machine industrial post punk 1980 vibe
10:43 Coldsore: and cutup on the tape recorder and it would sample tiktoks and the news omg omg omg
10:45 Coldsore: The Silence of America new album by post-punk and retro music technology enthusiast Wibi-Fortis who's name is derived from a defunct big data company and Latin for "strong" carries on the legacy of our music pioneers from Britain late 70s, with deranged sounds from the unknown realm he takes a deep introinspective look into the society and all of its mental illness and war and violence and gender and mental illness and gender and mental illness and gender and oh boy isn't it great a smart white boy who has his head on straight is here to deconstruct how strange the society is in retro style
11:07 Coldsore: speaking of shitty industrial guys analyzing the society we ought to implement insert view for albums
11:55 Coldsore: aka liners
12:00 Coldsore: oh yeah the way liners are currently set up they can only be in one format. eh.
12:22 Chloë: Portion Control's Gaining Momentum is just every Snowy Red album but good.
15:33 Tick: The way the feed currently works has a weird bit of statefulness to it. The "build HTML for page" functions don't have any side effects except for instating a new feed entry every time they're called. One solution could be returning the feed entries to add alongside the post to write (which would be a lot of entries in FlB's case, but we're already storing a bunch of albums so if memory becomes an issue FLB probably won't be the bottleneck - also the amount of entries there can even be are practically capped by the relevance threshold and the fact taht there's one FlB entry per day).
15:33 Tick: Not that it really matters.
17:00 Chloë: We should rewrite the partition descriptions to be less wordy around when we're sure the site is going up. YSMM Wave 3's description is already completely outdated.
23:43 Anne: (Reply to Tick: "Oh, yeah; briefly there was goin...") Something like that, yeah. I think there's some level of shame in the fact that we have literally no idea what we're doing when we loopscratch, or what notes we're playing or what notes sound good, and we always somehow manage to manipulate it to some dissonant "epic"-sounding chord. Something about that, about not having any idea what we're doing and yet consistently getting a cool-sounding result, feels fishy, because it implies we're subverting "the natural order" by making something awesome without any knowledge of what it is or why it sounds how it sounds. So either we are doing that and that's heretical and cheating, or we're not doing that and we're a kid with a toy piano who thinks he's struck on something amazing and that's hilarious and naive. Maybe this whole view is stupid. It's probably stupid.
2025-11-23
00:39 Silver: (Reply to Tick: "The way the feed currently works...") There is actually a preview of this for album.lua, actually. That's the sole page-generation function that relies on returning the feed entry and having html.lua add it instead of adding the feed entry itself.
22:03 Chloë: Our snake plushie's name is Sare. he/him. Something to keep in mind.
23:45 Chloë: That was not supposed to be in generic and the fact that it is means we probably ought to disable the "redirect posts in invalid directories to generic/" feature. But yeah. We have a stuffed snake named Sare.
23:47 Chloë: Although that's the whole point of generic. Hm.
23:48 Chloë: Is to lower the friction of posting here compared to if it were some special tucked-away channel called "public" or whatever.
2025-11-24
17:39 Coup:
(NOTICE: cw and blockquote test)
hi
I do not know what World War III will be fought with-Albert
17:40 Coup: so that doesn't work
17:41 Coup: ANOTHER THING TO SPEND 3 MORE MINUTES ON SO WE CAN DELAY GETTING THE DOMAIN FOR THIS SITE SO WE CAN LIVE JUST A LITTLE MORE PRECIOUS TIME AS A NON-WEBSITE OWNER
17:42 Coup: ok no this is more fundamental; span doesn't play nicely with divs like blockquote. OH WAIT THE ANSWER IS MAKE SPAN CLASS="FLB_CW" A DIV INSTEAD. THAT WAS THE MOST FUN 3 SECONDS OF MY LIFE HOLY SHIT.
17:50 Coup: okay div looks ugly as fuck but i came up with a solution anyway just with a gsub kludge
20:24 Lowry [BOT]: this should be the first feedworthy thing posted after DOMAIN_ACQUIRED_DATETIME (even though the feed isn't actually up yet)
20:26 Lowry [BOT]: oooooor not
20:26 Anne: Aaaaaand he's right behind me, isn't he.
20:27 Lowry [BOT]: ok yeah no since today began before DOMAIN_ACQUIRED_DATETIME tomorrow (or midnight if we stay up) will be when the first feedworthy thing is posted
2025-11-27
10:49 Chloë: That turned out to be Rock Bottom 007.
10:50 Lowry [BOT]: shhh that's not a good introductory flb message... ahem... WELCOME TO WIBIFORTIS.ORG THE BEST SITE ON INTERNET!!!! BACON EPIC!!!!! CLASSIC HTML 90S VIBE!!! MUSIC!!!!! FUNNY WEBCOMIC!!!!! RSS!!!! WELCOME
2025-11-29
17:54 Wisp: omg cool! :3 how can i sign upsies
23:11 Coup: Gamify YOUR Blockchain With AI — We Don't Know What Clicking Here Does But It Probably Makes Us Money
2025-11-30
11:31 Wisp: throat man replicate by captain beerhead is SUCH an event-guard album...
December 2025
2025-12-01
11:43 Wisp: it's up.
13:47 Wisp: ok for some reason safari on iphone can't play opus audio. i'm pretty sure. would've been nice to know that earlier.
13:48 Wisp: not that this site is particularly designed for mobile phones.
13:49 Wisp: ...iphone just plain doesn't recognize opus at all? what the fuck? we're able to play opuses we mailed to ourself just fine
13:51 Wisp: ok like. i would understand if, like, this were winamp or something we were talking about. but fucking apple. apple. apple can't add support for a leading codec released 13 years ago. maybe it's something stupid about opus being open-source, i dunno.
13:54 Wisp: does it play fine on android phones but not iphone? is that seriously it?
14:48 Coup: Hack Your DOPAMINE - Train Your Brain To Eat Drywall 3 Meals A Day - Bodybuilders Are STUNNED
2025-12-02
11:00 Lowry [BOT]: how much cleanup would it take to make the source code for this website available? or at least a snapshot of the source code
11:00 Silver: Is it really that sensitive?
11:02 Silver: We'd be revealing a handful of filepaths that exist on our computer; so what?
22:27 Coldsore: wonder if there should be a second round of 2'11"
22:27 Coldsore: i feel like i'm the last person who should be saying this but there you go
2025-12-05
16:06 Ons: Horror For Cops
16:07 Lowry [BOT]: - mirrors
16:36 Lowry [BOT]: ok so uhhh... i did this great fix so that lists don't show up when "no paragraphs" is set, as to prevent a block element from being declared within a paragraph... but blockquotes are also block elements
16:38 Lowry [BOT]: maybe there should just be an extra argument to parse_markdown_as_html that says "don't insert a start paragraph tag" and then use that for FlB instead of parse_markdown_no_paragraphs.
16:40 Lowry [BOT]: we're so good at website MAXIMUM compatibility though that's why it's so retro web 1.0 style.. yeah... yeeeah...
17:05 Anne: ...On a semantic level, if we're admitting FlB messages can be more than 1 paragraph, that probably means the message ID should be assigned to an anchor above the message rather than to the first paragraph of the message (which is a bit arbitrary).
2025-12-06
03:57 Anne: Also, welcome to wibifortis.org, where we talk about wibifortis.org.
2025-12-09
10:54 Ons: Did you guys know that when they serve the ice cream at Dairy Queen they FLIP IT UPSIDE DOWN and it's SO RICH AND THICK IT DOESN'T FALL OUT OF THE CUP? More people need to know about this, I think. It's fucking amazing. I'm still sitting here with my jaw on the floor honestly.
15:18 Ons: DOES FIREFOX HAVE THEIR OWN BRANDED AI ASSISTANT I NEED TO USE IT RIGHT NOW!!!
2025-12-10
11:35 Ons: My Workflow Was Synergizing So Hard In There I Think I Passed Out A Few Minutes. Not Great For Productivity But I'll Take It.
11:36 Anne:
Pushing the funniest FlB post ever and hopefully we don't come up with 10 more of these to post.
11:36 Anne: I have one. That's it. That's my post.
11:36 Ons: Thank you for your contributions.
2025-12-12
13:13 Wisp: alongside all the pivot-to-mp3 stuff i fixed a metadata bug relevant to softdrinq where if a song was composed by wibi, had no known wibi composers, and had exocomposers, then only the exocomposers would be listed, with no indication that wibi composed the track (and no implicit assumption like normally when no composers are listed). i made it so "Wibi" is prepended, sort of like how the composers list is displayed on album pages.
13:16 Wisp: ...that being said maybe we just shouldn't be populating the composers field in our metadata at all since it isn't an actual "composers" field; i.e. doesn't credit original composers of cover songs.
13:17 Wisp: original_composers, though. there's a field that could exist on the tdw side. then get_composers_string will have to wrangle three arguments; hooray.
13:17 Wisp: actually original_artists would make sense too.
15:52 Anne:
https://trac.ffmpeg.org/wiki/Encode/MP3
-q:a 0 – -q:a 3 will normally produce transparent results.This is kinda funny, cuz at quality 3 we were clearly able to hear pre-echo at the very start of a couple songs. Eh.
23:44 Lowry [BOT]: i'm glad the devisions are finally in as shitty fidelity as we envisioned them
23:44 Anne: As we...?
23:44 Lowry [BOT]: DEVIIISED them. fuck you.
2025-12-13
00:13 Princess: todo: rewrite fishies page to reflect that we're now actually using id3
00:14 Princess: actually it's kinda funny how we've come full circle. like, we were initially looking into providing mp3s solely to toy with all the weird niche features that nobody ever uses (including fishies). then we went with opus for simplicity. and now we're back to mp3 for simplicity and we're using even less tags.
2025-12-14
18:50 Lowry [BOT]: we are literally polluting the internet with mp3s with MALFORMED ID3V2.3 TAGS that SAY THEY'RE IN ISO-8859-1 WHEN THEY'RE IN UTF-8 JUST BECAUSE WE CAN'T BE BOTHERED TO WRITE OUR OWN ID3 TOOL THAT MEETS OUR NEEDS and i think we should take a moment to be extremely ashamed of both ourselves and the audio players we have that disregard any respect for the ISO or the um the um the ID3 guys idk
19:06 Lowry [BOT]: this is absolutely a hill we would've died on if we'd decided to go with mp3 instead of opus initially
19:07 Lowry [BOT]:
https://stackoverflow.com/a/9861839
UTF-8 is an ID3v2.4 feature not present in 2.3, which may be why you can't find it in the spec. In the real world you will find all sorts of total nonsense in ID3 tags regardless of version.at least this guy can make us feel bad about it
2025-12-15
10:05 Ons: GOOD YOUTUBE CONTENT 2025? HELP
2025-12-16
20:24 Coup: still got half a fucking record to finish. how long as it been put off now? 2 months?
2025-12-20
16:05 Lowry [BOT]: my theory is eventually you just grow out of inserting the weeeirdest and moost obscuure samples in place of conventional percussion or instruments as you stop feeling the need to establish your uniqueness (THE PRECEDING OBSERVATION APPLIES PRIMARILY TO PRETENTIOUS WHITE YOUNG MEN!)
2025-12-25
23:34 Innominal, Or, The Spider with No Name; Or, Is Tool Use Art?: The "secret" class needs clear:both so it isn't indented to the right if it appears just after a float. At least, I think that's what it is.*
23:34 Lowry [BOT]: (just fixed a nasty bug btw where most of the mp3s were missing for some reason; the fix was uploading them)
2025-12-26
11:31 Wisp: Oops almost forgot to say Merry Christmas guys ! THAnks for chekcing out our website ! More Wibi Jams in the awesome year of 2026 thanks for listening ! : )
14:33 Coldsore: (NOTICE: religion) jesus christ our savior was born today! MASSIVE W!! heart eyes emoji cross emoji cross eyes emoji emoji being crucified emoji
23:41 Coup: Can Music Be Art?
2025-12-27
00:04 Coup:
http://ellaguro.blogspot.com/2019/08/make-stuff-and-be-free-to-vanish.html
the thing is, we should be so lucky now. for anyone coming into this new media landscape to get that sort of treatment [the image of "the isolated genius laboring over their masterwork"] is a laughable fantasy. there's no space to be cool now. a vast majority of people who are making art now and don't have access/resources to larger structures will never get to live inside those kind of myths, no matter how "genius" their work is or how quirky their personality is.SPEEEAK FOR YOURSEEEELF!!!
00:06 Wisp: is there some sort of critical point where we make enough jokes about how lame it is that we own a self-indulgent website 12-year old us would've wanted, that we go "actually why do we have a website" and decide to stop spending $60 a year
00:07 Coup: you seem to underestimate the ability for white liberals to be ignorant on purpose to avoid becoming uncool
00:10 Wisp: so you're just rolling with it then?
19:18 Wisp: gonna talk a bit about WWYMM
19:19 Wisp: we were reaaally clingy to some tracks like On Accident that we thought were the best thing ever and we didn't want to "waste them" by ever releasing them without the chance for them to become... big, or something. or become good by having poetmistry remix them.
19:20 Wisp: we ascribed to him some vague magic that would potentially Make Us Big that he could just snap his fingers and activate on demand. without us doing any work. so we don't have to struggle with whether we want to "make it big" (which upon any reflection we don't) and just lay back and let our primal urges for stardom be fulfilled without being burdened by our emotional center
19:21 Wisp: which if that makes it sound like we instinctually regard other people as bundles of resources to exploit that's because we do.
19:21 Wisp: and talking about this is some super humble thing. i dunno.
19:24 Wisp: and i was making fun of coup calling us a white liberal yesterday but to be in the place to/have the feeling to just say "i instinctually see people as resources" out loud is probably a white thing
2025-12-29
18:33 Wisp: rock bottom page is a little fancier now, listing the different "strategies" & characters
18:34 Wisp: and i put "strategies" in double quotes because i'm using this channel as a changelog apparently
18:34 Wisp: wonder if the site should have a separate changelog page. so you can see site changes without also having to see "ummm i think we're a really unempathetic and terrible person yeah"
18:35 Lowry [BOT]: define "you"
18:36 Lowry [BOT]: this isn't. like. the front page to roblox. if anyone's invested enough in the website to want to see a changelog but uninvested enough in the actual contents of the website that they cringe at seeing us talk about ourselves, that person is a fink
18:37 Wisp: ok good job insulting our site demographic? so much for making it big? ?? big on indieweb? so much for that? ??? i guess ?
18:37 Lowry [BOT]: stock video of view counter dropping to 0 with sad trombones
2025-12-31
11:42 Wisp: The Views, Opinions, And Thoughts Expressed On This Website Reflect Those Of Every Person Who Has Ever Lived
January 2026
2026-01-01
01:11 Ons: (Reply to Ons: "GOOD YOUTUBE CONTENT 2025? HELP") GOOD YOUTUBE CONTENT 2026? HELP
2026-01-02
13:19 Silver: (NOTICE: uspol; uncouth) If Calvin from Calvin & Hobbes were 12 in 2025, he would've shot up his school by now.
14:39 Tango: Jesus.
21:53 Silver: Consider this a statement against the Boy Who's Just So Much Smarter Than All The Idiots Around Him!.
2026-01-04
09:50 Silver: (NOTICE: violence toward animal; shitpost) [Lo-fi reverby electronica plays] It's just so fascinating how the human brain works. Like, just because I threw a rock at your dog, some arrangement of neurons reacts to that information and concludes you need to hate me — even though I haven't personally done anything to you! This cognitive distortion is one I've- [gets punched in the face, falls down, lo-fi reverby electronica continues]
2026-01-07
22:56 Innominal, Or, The Spider with No Name; Or, Is Tool Use Art?:
https://www.discogs.com/master/15468-Move-D-Kunststoff
18 5-star reviews on Discogs-type beat.
22:57 Innominal, Or, The Spider with No Name; Or, Is Tool Use Art?: That wasn't supposed to go to WebFlB but such is the beauty of it.
23:09 Innominal, Or, The Spider with No Name; Or, Is Tool Use Art?: Related concept: triple-digits Discogs artist ID-type beat.
2026-01-08
11:28 Silver: "Hey, Finally!" — Writing Community For Timid People With Good Spelling
11:32 New Wave: subconsciously we reeeeally want to complain that oh no we're just stuck as this guy with sorta good ideas and way better decorum then those other idiots (said with a chuckle) nah i don't mean that! forever
11:34 New Wave: to be the STEM guy who keeps trying to get into this creative stuff but it just bounces off me y'know?
11:37 New Wave: flipping through 101 explainers and how-to-get-started-writing guides as if we've never done it before. i guess we still have plausible deniability
2026-01-09
09:42 Lowry [BOT]: Remember Maddox From "The Best Page In The Universe"? Well His Car Broke Down And He Needs Your Help.
2026-01-12
19:06 Silver: Okay, seriously, why do we keep making so many great one-off will-probably-never-be-formally-releasable tracks and completely ignoring the actual projects we have going that we could be making stuff for?
19:06 Wisp: pretty sure you just answered your own question
19:06 Silver: I know but why are we putting up with this?
19:08 Tango: I think part of the nice thing about making Devisions is knowing you're not posting them for anyone to potentially go "oh wow that's great!" because they're on some corner of a website nobody visits and there's no "comment" button next to them.
19:09 Tango: It's the exact opposite of our earlier tendency of making and releasing stuff just to have them "archived" or just for the potential for people to hit like on them.
19:09 Silver: Hey Tango. You have an album. Work on it.
19:09 Silver: "Oohhh, but that could be work better spent on Fake Sound Revolution, or Wisp's single, or-" don't care.
19:11 Tango: Now that you say that, there was this one... 1-and-a-half or 2-minute song that started with a really great drum break I felt like using, but I completely forget what now.
19:16 Tango: Though also I got a little bored of that album since it's really "just another Wibi noise release" and felt kind of directionless aside from adding another release under Deb Distorto.
19:18 Tango: Anyway, you've got your devision. Hit send.
19:18 Silver: Not until you make or start making one track for an album that we plan to release.
19:18 Tango: Fine, God. I guess "you should make music" is a command now, not a suggestion.
19:19 Tango: This is really the pot calling the kettle black, though. Don't you have an album you were planning? "IDMSHITIDMSHITIDMSHIT"? What was that about again?
19:19 Silver: God dammit.
19:21 Silver: Fine. It would be the second She Said Ag album, and vaguely a follow-up to Culture Trick: A Tribute to White Goodwill. It would that one drumkit Anne used in "The Sad Termites". We'd- or I'd, I guess- write a program to generate a .mod with random percussion (kicks, snares, hihats) that went on for five minutes, and then call that eight times and put random Tenacity shit on top of it, and that would be the album.
19:22 Silver: In a way similar to ReallyGoodMusic or Friend of Audio (the initial idea for The Emphatic Yes).
19:22 Silver: Now make that track.
19:22 Tango: Alright.
19:34 Tango: You know, I think part of this is we need to focus on either writing or programming or making music or drawing, but not, like, all of them at once.
19:34 Tango: That's how we end up getting nothing done.
19:34 Silver: Yeah.
19:35 Silver: IDMSHITIDMSHITIDMSHIT I'm a bit averse to because I feel like it's just another "hey, I can program computer AND make music, better show off my skill at both!" idea the likes of which we've rejected over and over. I dunno how relevant that is.
20:06 Tango: (Reply to Silver: "Now make that track.") Alright, there.
20:06 Silver: Good.
20:11 Tango: It actually turned out to be a pretty good track. Some Sell It To Young People As A Gift For Old People vibes.
20:12 Tango: (Reply to Tango: "Now that you say that, there was...") Also, I found what song I was referring to.
23:53 Tango: The thing about Wibi noise releases though.
23:53 Tango: So, that track I just did was pretty good. Had some nice drones made from some loopscratching.
23:53 Tango: Thing is, I don't remember exactly how I made those drones.
23:55 Tango: There's some specific values for the Delay effect that we only stumble across when we're not trying that produce really nice drones... well, actually, it was that and the "lop all of the waveform that isn't above a certain amplitude" trick. But it also took some value for delay, followed by Change Speed 0.5x.
23:55 Tango: And the thing is, we can't just open up the project and look, because that's not how Tenacity/Audacity 3.0 work: all effects are applied straight to the audio track, and the undo history is lost when you close the project.
23:58 Tango: So some of our best achievements we only have vague ideas of how they were done. The relaxing tones in Consign are stereo artifacts from "an MKV" (specifically a copy of the old horror film The Monster That Challenged The World) but I have no idea what effects I actually applied to get it to sound how it does. Many of Coldsore's tricks on Sell It To Young People As A Gift For Old People are not only lost, but the project files aren't even available, so we can't even look at the stems (Coldsore intentionally never saved the project files for most of the tracks; she just exported them and then closed Tenacity without saving).
2026-01-13
00:00 Tango: And we don't entirely want to learn how to consistently do those tricks; call it a sort of fear of exploiting our capacity to make art and honing in on "the best stuff" and doing it again and again forever. (Coldsore's Gullible is probably about feeling that with a technique she was planning of specifically cutting up fake "records" she made of messing around on random instruments for 40 minutes.)
00:01 Tango: And I think that's why we feel excluded from conventional anti-AI art narratives. "It doesn't even know what it's doing, it doesn't have intent!" Damn, neither do we, guess we're no better than Suno. Thanks a lot.
00:04 Coldsore: (Reply to Tango: "And we don't entirely *want* to ...") plus how weirdly casually degrading that felt to any attempts we made to play music, yeah
00:04 Coldsore: ...not that even we want to play music; that's what guitar for worms was about
00:07 Lowry [BOT]: wibi fearing that wibi is going to suck any ounce of talent they have dry for the benefit of wibi is a pretty crucial bit of. idk lore?
00:07 Lowry [BOT]: The Gifted Kid Life
00:14 Lowry [BOT]: -- intentionally avoiding artstyles associated/requiring intent to avoid contriving a way to consistently wring certain kinds of music out of us
00:14 Lowry [BOT]: that's interesting
00:16 Lowry [BOT]: embracing chaos to avoid replicability and exploitability
00:17 Coldsore: and then even when we "embrace chaos" if we find a particular way of embracing chaos then we shy away from it in the future
00:18 Coldsore: metachaos
00:20 Coldsore: maybe the real problem is we need to learn how to be comfortable in our own skin. or we don't and the insinuation that we do is a way to trick ourselves to shut up and methodically fill out those artist discographies and produce the damn magnum opus and share it everywhere to everyone already
00:21 Coldsore: it's like half past midnight and i swear i'm about to get at something but i'm probably not so let's just go to sleep
00:24 Coldsore: ...one last point, maybe, i think, which is that a side effect of metachaos is that we can make a release that is very similar to a previous release, seemingly in violation of metachaos, purely because we got the impulse to make it very quickly and rode it through (see White Goodwill compared to You Should Make Music, both even involving wisp)
00:26 Chloë: White Goodwill also has a driving motive behind it which is "these cool edgy white guys aren't cool and they never were and they're also our entire reference point for understanding music, including non-white music, and that inspires some existential horror." So it's not just replicating a past format on impulse.
00:27 Chloë: That does make sense, though. Like, if we intended White Goodwill to be something we worked on over 2 weeks, and we held in mind "this is gonna be like You Should Make Music but with a statement!" the whole time, it probably would've fizzled out after 2 tracks.
00:30 Chloë: Heh, that total size every time we re-send to NFSN is getting bigger and bigger. Eventually it's gonna reach 1MB and we'll want to consider applying more rules for what to send and when.
09:24 Ernie: (Reply to Coldsore: "maybe the real problem is we nee...")
methodically fill out those artist discographiesmusician as achievement hunter
09:26 Ernie: kind of nefarious and i wonder if it's applicable to non-plural musicians
09:26 Ernie: i mean probably; there's always some category to fixate on
2026-01-15
10:05 Coldsore: (Reply to Tango: "So, that track I just did was pr...") with you editing this just now to mention the drones in your song were based on loopscratching it's come to my attention i don't think we've ever publicly explained what loopscratching is
10:05 Coldsore: maybe we shouldn't
10:06 Tango: I guess there's sort of a realpolitik there because I could bring up a few more details (the exact sample that was loopscratched, a vague estimate of the delay arguments used) but I don't want to for the purpose of keeping replicability low.
10:07 Chloë: A subconscious question: replicability for us in the future or replicability for anyone reading? (Consciously you meant the former.)
10:08 Chloë: Doesn't seem totally unlikely on some level we're like "I want to keep my techniques secret" given how we alternate between that and "I'm so philanthropic hey everybody learn how I made my awesome music and you can too maybe we can make this a trend!".
10:09 Tango: (Reply to Chloë: "A subconscious question: replica...") Both, probably.
10:10 Tango: Cf. https://xkcd.com/538/ "Actual actual reality: nobody cares about his secrets."
10:17 Silver: (Reply to Tango: "I guess there's sort of a realpo...") Is "my music was made without intent" just code for "I'm sick of all this hand-wringing about artistic intent as if everyone's nervously waiting for permission to become Stuckists"?
10:29 Silver: Or do you actually believe it?
14:57 Tango: (Reply to Silver: "Or do you actually believe it?") [Following this post was a tedious argument about whether I literally meant we make music without intent, whether I was appealing to boring nihilists, whether Silver was appealing to confused normies, whether we use hyperbole too much, and the nature of hosting a personal diary online.]
16:14 Tango: To summarize words written elsewhere: "no intent" is hyperbolic and I was maybe a bit hasty to dunk on a stock-anti-AI-argument with it.
16:19 Tango: Aside from the general sense that "haha most of these people who extoll the intrinsic beauty of human-made art would think our art is lazy and doesn't count" which is true to some extent and also just standard Wibi insecurity.
2026-01-17
16:26 Coup: the problem with "by using AI to make art for you you deprive yourself of growth and learning" — look, by using tenacity and methodical cut-ups to make art for us we deprive ourselves of growth and learning; we could've tried and failed to compose an orchestra and in the process become better and better at it every time until we might rival the likes of mozart, but because we do not we fail to grow and learn! — except there's the minor detail, we don't want to rival mozart. see, how do you define "growth and learning"
16:28 Coup: for nanowrimo 2022 we wrote a story that worked through a lot of our queerphobia and deeply ingrained ableism. if we had just gotten chatgpt to generate it for us we wouldn't have talked through all that awful shit and come up with those moments of lucidity that allowed us to progress as a preson, but you know what we could've done even without chatgpt? held ctrl+D for ten minutes. or just transcribed random words from things we were reading/listening to. which we did. because the goal of nanowrimo is to meet a word count first and foremost.
16:41 Coup: and we didn't even meet the word count, because... well, we ran into the deadline, but also we felt disciplined and dialed way back on the random quotes & excerpts, and finished the story, past which point we no longer felt it would be right to keep writing. and the random excerpts from other shit interact just enough with the main character's mood and have just enough thematic relevance that they can't be excised.
16:47 Coup: there always was, and there always will be, an easy way out; an option right there we could take whenever we wanted and disengage from writing, to meet a metric through effortless artificial means. art is created when we defy the odds and refuse those easy ways out. art is also created when we succumb to the odds and take the easy way out. before nanowrimo fell hard for ai one of the guidelines was literally "if you can't think of what to write, just introduce some random plot element from the ether or spam words over and over; the goal is to keep writing." was nanowrimo evil all along and we never noticed? in this shocking expose i.
16:48 Coup: and most ai art discourse involves saying either "yeah fuck this effortless degenerate art, art takes SUFFERING in order to be IMBUED WITH MEANING, and fuck all the esoteric crap that tries to obscure it!" or stapling arbitrary qualifiers and frameworks onto the former (which often crumble and you're left with straight-facedly arguing for the objective existence of "human soul" in art) until you agree with it
16:55 Coup: we like (or we liked back when we were into edgy blablabla industrial) cabaret voltaire's long-unreleased film soundtrack "Chance & Causality" which is just a bunch of random audio loops overlaid on one another using tape recorders, plus the occasional drum machine. it is not an orchestra and we do not subscribe to the realm of edgy guy that say aaah actually this is the second coming of high art hm ermm exquisite exquisite (hence why we fell off with art of noise). it is succumbing to the odds. it is the easy way out. taking arbitrary audio and slapping it together with little aesthetic consideration is effortless and "lazy." we like listening to it.
16:58 Coup: are we expected to concede that it actually fits into the same category as "20 Hours Of White Relaxing White Noise" and we shouldn't categorize it alongside "real music"? or, more specifically, that there is a divide between "real music" and "meaningless noise" that both Chance & Causality and 20 Hours Of White Relaxing White Noise fall on one side or the other of?
16:59 Anne:
are we expected to concede that [...] there is a divide between "real music" and "meaningless noise" that [...] 20 Hours Of White Relaxing White Noise fall[s] on one side or the other of?The answer is "yes". I don't agree, and neither do you, and ultimately that's probably the wrong answer, but it is the answer as far as most people with any opinion about AI art care.
17:00 Coup: dammit.
17:03 Anne: And the people who do know the distinction are generally more than willing to, as you said, contrive some arbitrary exception so they still get to use the exact same argument as everyone else toward AI art.
17:06 Coup: the second part of this discussion is maybe nanowrimo was secretly — not in the right, but not in the wrong about recommending using ai to "help" write nanowrimo stories given the goal is primarily to reach the word count with making a "good" story as a secondary goal, and genai can't be any worse at that than spamming random text over and over.
17:07 Coup: but i don't remember how deeply they argued for ai and i don't think they addressed (or this wasn't as bad yet then:) the sheer desperation of ai companies and the psychological damage they've inflicted on everyone for the sake of eking out profits from a bursting bubble
17:17 Lowry [BOT]:
this is basically irrelevant but i've wanted to post about it for a while: with wikipedia's endorsement of AI you'd think their primary goal was just to hit a word count https://wikimediafoundation.org/wikipedia25/
Wikipedia was first founded on January 15, 2001. Today, 25 years later, it has become the backbone of knowledge on the internet, informing everything from day-to-day life and AI chatbots to journalism and trivia wins.
17:18 Lowry [BOT]: do they not even realize ai bullshit peddlers are trying to replace them. do they think grokpedia (whatever elon musk's thing is called) is their friend?
17:22 Lowry [BOT]: this is like if you're a publishing company and some rich assholes photocopied and resold all your books but with half the words jumbled around, and you put out a statement like "we're so glad to be part of the rich-assholes-stealing-our-books movement :)"
17:24 Coup: (Reply to Lowry [BOT]: "this is like if you're a publish...") CC-BY-SA 4.0
17:24 Lowry [BOT]: doesn't change the words are all jumbled around
17:26 Coup: i mean it is like if i started making william buorrows style (author of narked lurch) cut-ups out of a giant free text archive and then turned around and started selling excerpts as life improvement guides
17:27 Coup: ...that's almost the career progression of The Hafler Trio, wow
17:29 Anne: My AI theory is that half of AI discussion is buried in irrelevant corners of the web where people name-drop shit like "Chance & Causality" and "the cut-up technique" and "The Hafler Trio" and expect anyone below the age of 50 to care.
17:29 Coup: YOU FUCKING WIN OK! PRICK
17:36 Lowry [BOT]: (Reply to Coup: "CC-BY-SA 4.0") wait wait wait you're wrong anyway because ShareAlike means you have to share it with the same license. and most fucking AI mushroom foraging guides probably aren't licensed CC-BY-SA 4.0. (or GFDL for that matter)
17:38 Lowry [BOT]: so it's like if i took a free text archive and rearranged the words into self-improvement books (sometimes with recognizable passages) and sold it without giving a shit about the license the archive was provided to me under. and the owners of the archive cheered me on
17:54 Lowry [BOT]: ...heh. keeping in mind the comparisons coup drew between ai art & noise music insofar as being (potentially) low-effort and automatic: in a way, "my favorite 80s musician is using AI now :/", while understandably disappointing & stupid, has a parallel to "my favorite 80s musician is doing boring noise music crap now :/", e.g. richard h kirk's drone records
17:55 Lowry [BOT]: although noise music is explicitly inaccessible whereas ai art is often made to be widely accessible to people who haven't thought too hard about ai
18:04 Anne: (Reply to Lowry [BOT]: "although noise music is explicit...") Plunderphonics is essentially noise music but accessible, though, isn't it?
18:04 Lowry [BOT]: yeah but washed-out 80s musicians aren't making plunderphonics
20:38 Coup: There Is A Certain Profile Of Person I Encounter Quite Often On My Journeys, And Unfortunately I Am Sure You Have As Well. Who Is This Person? They're, To Put It Lightly: Non-Attentive. Unconcerned With The Details That Make Life Worth Living. They Will Go On A Diet, But Then Continue Drinking Normal Soda When Diet Soda Is Right There. They Will Write "Pokemon" Without Caring To Insert The Accent Mark That Belongs Above The e. They Will Buy A Coca-Cola Labeled "Share A Coke With John" And Give It To Someone Not Named John — Or Worse Just Drink It For Themselves. These Are, Unfortunately, The Masses. The Default State Of Society.
20:42 Silver: They probably call any old game console a Nintendo too, for that matter. What a simplistic world they must live in.
20:42 Silver: They probably can't even name 2 Digimon.
20:43 Silver: They probably think he's called Doctor Who.
20:44 Anne: -- WHICH HE FUCKING IS IN THE GRIMY RACIST STUPID OLD ASS EPISODES WE WATCHED SPECIFICALLY "BECAUSE WE WANT TO WATCH IT IN ORDER" BUT SUBCONSCIOUSLY ABSO-FUCKING-LUTELY FOR NERD CRED! --
20:45 Silver: They probably, heh, they've probably watched Homestar Runner, but haven't purchased a single piece of merch.
20:45 Silver: They probably don't even know Super Mario Bros. 2 is actually a game from the long-running Doki Doki series reskinned as a Mario game.
20:47 Silver: They probably call all A.I. agents "ChatGPT" and don't even care about the subtle personality differences between each.
20:56 Silver: They probably stopped checking their biorhythms after the 90s, as it "stopped being cool".
20:58 Silver: They probably think every toilet paper brand is "approximately" the same.
21:00 Silver: They probably watch the ads that offer you literally free credit score and say, "no thanks! Not for me."
21:10 Coup: and so on...
21:11 Coup: the takeaway being there's this "detail-oriented" trivia fanatic culture which just leads into particularly un-niche consumerist behavior
21:14 Silver: They've probably never even thought to themselves "I wonder if I can recreate classic Super Mario Bros. 1-1 in Super Mario Maker" — or, if they have, that's the only level they've tried to recreate.
21:17 Coup: and so on
21:17 Coup: (Reply to Coup: "the takeaway being there's this ...") e.g. us with every early-80s industrial musician
21:18 Coup: and ztt records who at best shallowly pretended to be industrial
21:18 Coup: but who had 4 million mixes of every song that was released as a single so haha might as well gotta catch em all right
21:19 Silver: They probably buy a 12" single that has a track listed as "7" edit" and think to themselves, "great, now I don't need to buy the 7"!"
21:20 Coup: in no small part because the real 7" edit might secretly be different and actually be the best mix of the song ever below your nose the whole time!! (it is not)
21:39 New Wave: heeeeyyy what if below the month headers (e.g. "January 2026") there was a little flat list of all the different days in the month where we posted. to help make navigation easier without crowding up the start of the page
21:39 New Wave: partly cuz january 2026 is like a third of the freaking page.
21:42 Tango: To implement this: for each month, store the index into the "document" table where the month header element appears, as well as a table containing each day of the month where any messages were sent. Then when the month is over (or the chat ends), compose a "proper" version of the month header with the flat list of days included, and replace the month header element with it.
21:44 Tango: Something tells me this would be harder to do if we were just using a string buffer like a real coder.
21:44 New Wave: coding is NOT about getting the program to work and it is NOT about style or readability or any of that crap it is about being REALLY HARDCORE!!! (awesome nerd speed metal music plays)
21:46 Tango: Something tells me programmers aren't generally nerdy enough to listen to whatever "awesome nerd speed metal music" is. They're associated with nerdiness but I'm not sure that association actually holds.
21:46 New Wave: don't worry i found it from the official This Is Awesome Nerd Speed Metal Music spotify playlist :3
21:55 Coup: (Reply to Silver: "They probably buy a 12" single t...") oh hey, how can we forget the ultimate audio-related Attentive Nerd bullshit: They Probably Have Never Listened To Their Favorite Album At 128kHz Lossless Audio
21:56 Coup: because all albums worth listening to are available at 128kHz. sorry i know that's not the real frequency audiophiles listen to, it's actually 256kHz. well 255 because that's the highest that fits in a single byte
23:00 Wisp: /shrug
23:00 Lowry [BOT]: ¯(ツ)/¯
23:01 Wisp: /shrug
23:01 Lowry [BOT]: ¯(ツ)/¯
23:01 Wisp: lowry why aren't u using \ to escape your messages
23:01 Lowry [BOT]: wtf i didnt send that!!!
23:01 Wisp: /shrug
23:01 Lowry [BOT]: ¯(ツ)/¯
23:02 Wisp: yeah u did it's right there. do i have to add extra markdown parsing rules? hell do i have to implement escaping? seriously?
23:02 Wisp: ah wait your code doesn't have the backslash in the first arm properly escaped
23:02 Lowry [BOT]: wdym my code!!!!!
23:02 Wisp: /shrug
23:02 Lowry [BOT]: ¯\(ツ)/¯
23:02 Wisp: there we go
23:02 Lowry [BOT]: wtf!!!!
23:06 Wisp: i think this new functionality makes you more useful than ever, lowry. what do you think?
23:06 Wisp: /agree
23:06 Lowry [BOT]: i agree, Wisp
23:07 Lowry [BOT]: NO I DON'T!!! I DIDN'T SAY THAT!!!
23:07 Wisp: of course you did, lowry. that was a silly outburst of yours
23:07 Wisp: /agree
23:07 Lowry [BOT]: i agree, Wisp
23:07 Lowry [BOT]: NO I DON'T WTF!!!
2026-01-18
11:27 Coldsore: (Reply to Lowry [BOT]: "so it's like if i took a free te...") hey since when did we give a fuck about copyright
11:27 Coldsore: like cory doctorow put it: if you're arguing for the same thing as your boss you need to take a step back and reevaluate what it is you're supporting
11:54 Lowry [BOT]: when cory doctorow said that i don't think he was talking about creative commons licenses
11:54 Lowry [BOT]: (which we use for our own music by the way)
