Recent content in the homepage of Kylie McClain on somas.is
A few years ago now ( in 2021 ), I wrote about how I managed my music library. I still use beets years later, except now, I use it quite happily. This is different from years ago, because, if read that old post, there’s quite a lot of kvetching near the end in which I do the usual dance of suggesting that beets does too much, and that I wish I could just write my own music organizer.
Once, I used Flakes . Then, I realized how much they actually complicate things. Which is to say, this week I decided to rip out all the Flakes stuff from my dotfiles . This is a big event, I suppose, because Flakes were the first thing I had an opinion about when I started using NixOS in 2022, and I figured they were the way of the future and that they’d not be experimental eventually and…
Recently I studied an exerpt from Dialectic of Enlightenment , by Max Horkheimer and Theodor Adorno in class, and recalled something from a past transgender history class. This is adapted from a writing for that class that I feel particularly good about. I will draw some comparisons that may appear crude on the surface, because the comparison between someone’s transition and their death has…
2021-W26 lookie: sfizz : Open source soundfont player using the .sfz format. I like it! qutebrowser : Maybe the most promising alternative to major browsers. Keyboard-driven, but not restrictively so; I’ve started using it as of late, coming from being a long-time Firefox user, and I’ve really gotten into it. XMascot : The most adorable program I’ve seen yet. I’ve tried to…
I was talking with a friend a few days ago because they posted about how much space storing music takes up, when I decided that I ought to write down how I do my music library’s organization. Now, ideally this might not be that interesting, but I don’t have much storage space, and I don’t wish to store lossless music on everything. I just don’t have the storage space across…
I seem to keep allowing my gender studies professors to become part-time therapists. probably not a great thing; however, in my defense, reflection is therapy and they’re asking for reflection. sometimes I feel a little proud of what I wrote, perhaps because the things I read helped me to work through some of the things troubling me. so, I figure it could be worth sharing. androgyny as a…
2021-W02 Should we stop? , a really beautifully put together piece thinking about how maybe the world must change before software is good. The Default Router , an article about how the Linksys WRT54G got famous. 90ssamplecds , a collection of questionably legal sample packs popular with producers in the 1990s. Drink each time you hear the Amen break being passed off as a royalty-free sample!…
I make music . I think that even makes me a musician™ . So, I thought I’d make a post about the tools I use to make music. Occasionally I’m asked, and usually it means I have to go retracing the steps I took to get a hold of the things I use, so it might be worth it to write down these things for the future. Just for the record: there’s obviously no sponsorship here, this is my…
it is the beginning of december, the worst month of the year relationships take on an almost conciliatory role during quarantine, during late capital even. its almost as if facing the world alone, scary as it is, can be hard to bear, even with one partner. there’s a certain perceived prevalence of polyamorous relationships among trans people, mostly trans femmes I believe, and I think this…
2020-W47 lookie: catclock , an adorable xclock fork with a cat… unix50.org lets you ssh into old UNIX systems going all the way back to UNICS, from the summer of '69. The Unix Command Language , the first paper ever published about the Unix shell. written by a certain ken thompson in 1976. usand , an unshare(1)-based sandbox. things I’m up to: I started this lil blog thing. I got…
Talking with Violet tonight I realized how scary things are sometimes. I’ve spent the greater portion of my life talking to people online. I’ve been on IRC since I was 10, younger than anyone really should be, and I’ve been using Discord for a few years now. IRC is a plain text protocol, you keep the logs and it isn’t really the responsibility of anyone else. Had I been…
In my project to assert gender studies and philosophy and being one in the same, with the help of my professor, we discovered a line of thought coursing through this concept that I myself didn’t really pick up on until it was put into words by her. What I was aiming at was to try and reconcile two different fields I had an interest in. In this reflection though, I want to explore that…
In class this afternoon, I began to realize these thoughts and wrote them down frantically into my notebook, because something was bothering me that I couldn’t quite grasp fully. We were discussing Stoicism, but in particular, Marcus Aurelius’ Meditations . Discussing the use of nature in it, my professor started to speak of Aurelius’ ideas of nature. Our class was taking issue…