Lý sự pclouds

Your first hangover, enjoy it! I remember my first hangover... well, actually that's not true. If I remembered it, it wouldn't be a real hangover.

When someone says "I'm day dreaming". Are you sure that is a good dream? Nightmares are dreams.

When people listen to The Winner Takes It All. How many think about the loser? The song is not about the winner.

Why is hitting rock bottom a bad thing? The future is bright. All you can go is up! Well, that or die. Either way, happy ending.

The singer is vocal. Just another instrument. The voice is not center of the song. Listen to the music, the drums, the guitars, the keyboard (and yeah occasionally the voice).

Shut the lights. Close your eyes. Swim in the ocean of sounds. Lose yourself. But don't get drown.

Strange day.

Coming home thinking about the transition of most metalheads, turning more mellow as they age. Mid-life metalheads gravitate towards more classic, traditional heavy metal rather than the extreme subgenres. Some even turn back to Rock.

But I still haven't. Perhaps I'm still as angry and rebellious as I was, ten, twenty years ago? Or maybe that happened already? After all I stopped caring about genres a while ago. You listen to what you like, who cares what it is. And there are some non-metal songs and bands showing up...

Though, the noisy and loud music still seems so calm and comforting. Or perhaps that's just the familiarity of the songs that I have been listening to for close to two decades now. The music collection more or less froze around 2010... What else wasn't frozen since then?

Limon Cello still tastes sweet. Black Label sweet too, something I didn't realize (or rather, feel) until just a few months ago. Drinks can be social lubricant. Drinks can be to get drunk. Or drinks can be about the taste. The first two are wasted drinks.

Back home, but the mind seems still stuck in office. Light bulb pops! Hey is that really what he meant? Brilliant solution! Really want to just log in and try to do it.

Why, Air Supply does not sound bad at all. Oh wow I am getting soft... Or hopefully I was just too excited about that idea. But again, who cares?

Early fall and temperature already hit 4. Huhuhu. Winter is coming. Ah darkness my old friend. Welcome back.

The main problem is actually broken ID3 tags, but fixing it is probably even more painful

00000170: 0054 504f 5300 0000 0200 0003 3054 534f  .TPOS.......0TSO
00000180: 5000 0000 0100 0003 5450 4f53 0000 0000  P.......TPOS....
00000190: 0000 5445 4e43 0000 0000 0000 5758 5858  ..TENC......WXXX

Here in the TPOS tag in the second line, the field size (for bytes after TPOS) is zero but it should not be. In the first TPOS line we can see the field size is 2.

The follow hack helps skip over that broken tag and assume value zero. Now we have two duplicate TPOS tags, not sure how libid3tag deals with that, but that's problem for another day.

From 4de329b00b7985b7cb7ed673464c29bf11673cc0 Mon Sep 17 00:00:00 2001
From: =?UTF-8?q?Nguy=E1=BB=85n=20Th=C3=A1i=20Ng=E1=BB=8Dc=20Duy?=
 <pclouds@gmail.com>
Date: Sun, 18 Sep 2022 10:33:33 +0200
Subject: [PATCH] Fix parsing id3v2.4 TPOS in some tracks

---
 field.c | 5 +----
 1 file changed, 1 insertion(+), 4 deletions(-)

diff --git a/field.c b/field.c
index 7897e98..2196555 100644
--- a/field.c
+++ b/field.c
@@ -197,10 +197,7 @@ int id3_field_parse(union id3_field *field, id3_byte_t const **ptr,
 
   case ID3_FIELD_TYPE_INT8:
   case ID3_FIELD_TYPE_TEXTENCODING:
-    if (length < 1)
-      goto fail;
-
-    field->number.value = id3_parse_uint(ptr, 1);
+    field->number.value = length >= 1 ? id3_parse_uint(ptr, 1) : 0;
 
     if (field->type == ID3_FIELD_TYPE_TEXTENCODING)
       *encoding = field->number.value;
-- 
2.29.0.10.g9f608dc33b

of good news. It does not look like Yakaza fans can handle all of this.

(from Slow River)

I drank more cold wine, thought about the heat in Belize, how I had been cool in my hotel room, cool and unconcerned about the fate of those people in Caracas.

"I was in the jungle once. I lay on my back in the middle of a clearing while insects crawled over my hands and under the small of my back, and looked up. Up through the endless greenery." I spoke slowly, remembering. "The jungle isn't just one place, you know, it's a dozen, all in layers. And the animals and insects of each layer are utterly oblivious to what's above them, or below. They don't even know anything outside their world exists. So I lay there, covered in bugs, and tried to imagine what the world looks like to the white hawks and harpy eagles soaring over the canopy hunting for their food --- troops of howler and spider monkeys. A green carpet, maybe. Something flat, anyway. They float about up there and have no idea that lower down anteaters ramble about, clinging with their prehensile tails to thin tree trunks, leaning down and licking out termites from the high-up nests. Sloths live there, too."

I had seen them, fur slimed with algae, hanging upside down, creeping from bough to bough. "Did you know that the sloth's claws are so well adapted to hanging upside down that if it fell off, to the forest floor, it would die because it couldn't crawl away from predators?" I had been born to soar above the canopy, oblivious. But humans were adaptable, weren't they? "The eagles don't know the sloths and anteaters don't know that underneath them are other layers. Little, quick things that flit from bloom to bloom, like bees and hummingbirds. And kinkajous and geckos and insects. All scampering about, oblivious." The layers I had seen that day were endless. "The bottom layer is the forest floor. Big things, slow-moving. Heavy. Jaguars, herds of peccaries, tapirs. Where things squeal and run." Bright crunch of blood. Shrill screams. "Layer after layer, each separate, each teeming with life..."

They were looking at me oddly.

"Don't you see? Everything works in layers: jungles, cities, people. Each layer has its predators and prey, its netwok of ally and foe, safe place and trap. Its own ecosystem. You have to get to know the land." I wondered if I was making sense. "We don't always know what we're getting into. And we don't always know how to get out. We can't understand everything. We each have a niche." I remembered Paolo, saying, I'm nothing, a nobody. I thought of Spanner, her amusement when I had suggested a job: Now, why would I want a job? "If we fall out of it, like the sloth, we're not equipped. We can die. Others can see it happening, but they can't help. They can't climb down the tree and help us back up. We have to do it ourselves." I was crying. I couldn't seem to stop.

Once upon a time there was a nuclear explosion. No, not one, it would be lonely. Multiple nuclear explosions. Many many many. One may even call it a holocaust.

What's left is total destruction of civilization, a bunch of mutants here, a few cannibals there and the rise of the Rangers to keep peace. Welcome to Wasteland 3!

Oh wait this is about A Canticle for Leibowitz, the book not the game. Rewind, rewind.

What's left is more or less the same as in Wasteland 3, with the exception of the Rangers. As if the current situation with radiation sickness and lack of resources not good enough, man started the simplification to bring it back to really stone age. Here we have an abbey trying to preserve the last bits of knowledge from the last time...

But Man is stupid. Man always is. But not dumb enough to not doom themselves. So Man gradually redevelops everything over the course of 1800 years. Man develops nuclear. Man makes the first shot. Man retaliates. Man goes back to the stone age. With plenty mutations as souvenir.

The concept of circle is not new at all in science fiction, either literature or motion picture. The closest example is probably the "moties" from The Mote in God's Eye. But they are in a pickle. Their nature forces them to procreate. At some point they run out of resources. Boom, back to the beginning. At least the know, acknowledge, and manage to keep stable cycles. And their total destruction does not render their place uninhabitable.

The story telling is interesting. You can't just go on over every day for 1800 years. That would probably take 600 years to read and 3200 years to write. Three stories, 600 years apart. It reminds me of The Foundation series which also goes on a grand plan to reduce 30000 years of anarchy, after the fall of the Galatic Empire, down to 1000 years. Stories are also about 50 years apart, until the Mule appears.

The preservation of the Memorabilia plays the same role as Hari Seldon's plan to shorten the destruction period until the next civilization. But what is the point, if the same thing is bound to happen again? Perhaps one day Man will wreck themselves for good and nothing is left to built on. One may hope.

It's interesting that the Earth in Foundation is also a nuclear wasteland. Well, it's a common theme that Earth ends up as a radioactive rock. The projection is there that many science fiction writers just can't resist. Oh well... on the other hand, 40000 years into the future, there is only grim darkness.

At least religion is there. It always is.

First take a small pan out, pour some water in, heat it up. Throw an egg in way before it boils, you don't want a cracked egg because of the sudden temperature change from the fridge to the pan.

Heat until the water boils. Stop and leave the egg in for 5 (maybe more?) minutes. Pour cold water in a bowl. Take the egg out to cool. Start heating up the pan again.

Peel the egg. Throw the cold water out of the bowl. Throw the egg in. Pour water from the pan in. Throw instant miso soup paste (or powder) in. Eat! Wash the bowl.

Looks like about 15 minutes. Not as fast as without the egg...