So, I’m in the process of rebuilding my music library so I can finally get away from music subscription services. One of the things that I’ve noticed is that I download albums, but I don’t really listen to albums. I used to, obviously. Back in the CD days (and before that cassette tapes), you listened to one artist at a time, and usually you did so one album at a time. Unless you made mix tapes, which was fun. Mix tapes were the first playlists.

So, for the last few months, I’ve used Hyvor for the comments on this blog. This was after trying a few times to get it right with free and open source options. I like Hyvor a lot, but it has one HUGE problem: it’s expensive. And I’m not talking like 30 bucks a year, it’s 140 bucks a year. That’s absurd for a blog commenting system, at least for a small blog that only a handful of people will ever even want to comment on.

If you look at the end of this post, you’ll see that I now have something new on my site. I can now assign a blog post to a series, and it will put a series map at the end of the post. It really just uses something similar to tags to do this, but it will allow me to create groups of posts that were written in series about a certain topic. In this case, it will be Blog Updates.

I was watching a video today typecraft, and he used a word “idempotency” that I’ve never heard of before. So I asked what it meant.

Idempotence (UK: /ˌɪdɛmˈpoʊtəns/,[1] US: /ˈaɪdəm-/)[2] is the property of certain operations in mathematics and computer science whereby they can be applied multiple times without changing the result beyond the initial application.

You’d think, with as much as people talk about NixOS and “immutable/automic” distros, I’d have heard of this word before. But this was a first for me. So I learned a new word. Always a good thing. If I were a real programmer, I’d have probably heard of this before, but I’m a pretender of the highest order.

Well, two weeks in a row is a streak, right? Good.

Work

Our year is almost over, and my time is wrapping up. The last of the writer’s work will be handed in on the 14th, and then next week we’ll edit and audit the last articles of the year. Those will be my last chores before I’m done at the end of November. Technically, I’ll be employed through December 31, but we have all of December off.

So, when trying to come up with a topic for today, I had several in mind. One thing I’ve taught myself to do, however, is check my Archives page to ensure I haven’t written about a topic before.

Now, I don’t see anything wrong with talking about a topic more than once. Goodness knows, I’ve talked about notes on this blog a lot. But I don’t want to basically write the same blog post over and over and over again. So I always check.

I’ve been trying to read the Dresden Files for over a year now. I love wizards. Harry Potter is one of my favorite series of all time, despite the many qualms I have with it. I’ve read many other books with wizards. Why? Because magic is effin’ cool.

So, I thought I’d be able to pick up the Dresden Files and have a good time. But I didn’t. I really, really, did not. Let me explain.

I’ve finished my reread of Ready Player One, which was this month’s book of the month for The Bookies, so I’ve moved onto another book on my list. I’m still very much starting The Priory of the Orange Tree by Samantha Shannon, and I’m actually kind of getting into it. I’ve blatantly ignored all the reviews that are trying to stir this book up as “too woke”, and just trying to enjoy it as a fantasy book about dragons. I can always get behind a book about dragons.