These dickheads always think they can translate the power they hold in civilized society to the wild post aoocalyptic free for all. Makes you wonder what will be going through their heads when some brutish psycho decides it’s his turn and is about to stomp their heads into the tightly packed wasteland dirt.

Shrek is love, Shrek is life, Shrek is high fashion.

That sounds like it was a drag, for real. If you ever have any “dumb” questions, feel free to DM lol.

fair enough and fwiw, that’s what i was kind of echoing. “we’re” in mud slinging territory as a culture, but journalists/opinion-piece-writers/whatever are massive drivers of it.

I think in a lot of cases, it’s less about them having a lot of money and more about how they’re able to effect change using that money or the power/influence associated with that money. Unfortunately, this can often happen at a relatively large scale, like by upending a popular social media platform or disrupting the automobile industry (for good or ill) or discussing futuristic public transportation ideas to take the wind out of the sails of more realistic/attainable projects and efforts.

All things considered, I wouldn’t mind hearing less about these people - a lot less. We’re well into mud slinging territory and some of these dickheads absolutely thrive on that. I’m sure the worst of them feel egged on when the media talks about them so they say or do more crazy shit very publicly to draw attention from fanboys and detractors alike. Call it a vicious cycle… or a hyperloop or something.

exactly. a little bit of elbow grease and greed is what got us all to the fairly awful future we find ourselves in, who’s to say it can’t get worse? never let the hope die. lol

I think there are a combination of factors intermingling, situations like the API backlash just jostle things a little harder and that’s when you see big spikes. Once a platform like Lemmy begins to see more and more traffic and, in turn, content, it starts to become a viable alternative.

Lemmy existed for at least a couple years before I joined, for instance, and I came with what I would guess was the biggest wave so far (June 2023). Provided the userbase can keep up a respectable momentum generating discussion and content, the next wave could be bigger or it could be more resistant to leaving because there’s enough content here to consume and interact with.

Reddit could take years to lose substantial portions of its userbase or it may shed some and stay solid, but Im not one of these people who obsesses over it’s ruin. If they survive long term, God bless, whatever, who cares. What’s interesting to me is seeing an alternative sprout up and actually generate traffic and start building a community, whether that’s Lemmy or something else built on ActivityPub or something else built on a different federated framework or even something else entirely that’s centralized… I think Lemmy is one permutation of this and it has undoubtedly got some traction.

I sometimes wonder if/when I’ll start getting random Lemmy links from people instead of ones to Reddit.

edit: I should also add that considering reddit is trying hard to get value on paper and probably still hoping to ipo, we probably shouldn’t put it past them be shitty once again at some point in the future.

That’s basically where I’m wedging myself in now. Ansible and Python, higher value but lower stress projects. Bigger wins, but ones that are able take the time needed to put them together, test, and refine.

It’s almost a back-to-my-roots kind of thing for me, but with a fresh twist in terms of approach. I’m basically writing automations that make life easier for ops guys, to boil it down to it’s essence.

Yeah, they all definitely seem quite polished. Sometimes I get the itch to play a MUD, find one or return to one I’ve played before, and get hooked for a few months. Other times, I’m done after a few days… they’ll always be an option for me though. IRE games are just fine for my purposes in that regard.

exactly this right here. we saw the same phenomenon with threads and mastodon before it inre twitter annoying its userbase. depending on how engaged each wave of incoming users ends up, i’d guess you could expect it to look something like:

• spike
• drop off
• plateau
• spike
• drop off
• plateau above the last plateau
• etc etc

sometimes the drop off is really bad. sometimes its just people getting bored with the initial hype while others stay. rinse and repeat until the platform succeeds or dies.

Ah, alright, not quite me - I’ll be 14 years deep in November. Honestly, one of the things that kept me motivated over the years was moving around - I stayed at the same company, but I started out doing QA (by hand, no automation), then got moved to handle release management, then moved to IT as a general Linux admin and spent a few years doing that, made friends with an infosec manager and he offered me a spot on his team working remote and doing container/docker security which morphed into a cloud security thing after he left the company (I hated the cloud). A couple years back I moved back to non-cloud/non-infosec work doing automation stuff with Ansible mainly, and for the time being only for our on-prem infrastructure (this may change in the future and I’m not really looking forward to it all that much).

At this point, nothing is really helping get my head back into the game 100% but I can still put out work and I’m just trying to find the joy in small victories and chasing the high you get when the code you wrote works flawlessly. I’m blessed to have a solid management structure above me who a) know me, b) like me (and the feeling is mutual, they’re all great people), and c) are happy with my output.

I don’t envy you working with kubernetes - my time in container security came during the early days of large companies trying to move to turning everything into microservices. It was a wild west kind of vibe and I basically had free reign… nowadays, I don’t think I’d enjoy any of that in its current form.

I have great soft skills and I write pretty well, but outside of that my skillset is basically a degraded/decayed technology one because I’ve been treading water for a while now and not actively keeping up with all the shit in our sector that changes on a constant basis.

I’ve also seriously weighed moving into development, but I’m not sure if that’s just going to fix anything for me. I like writing Python, but I don’t know how that would feel full-time. Sucks, man.

Same, back when I played a lot more. There was a period of time where I felt completely unfulfilled and unappreciated at work. I was a Linux admin at the time so I spent 90% of my time in a text environment. One day, I installed TinTin++ which has a non-GUI version and I’d just keep one ssh connection opened to a VPS I pay for and would just MUD throughout the day (mainly just running quests over and over). This was years before “quiet quitting” was cool lol

oof its like you’re either me or i’m you. hope you find your way past the burn out or out of it if you end up sinking into it. i’m going on like 3.5 years of battling it and there are better days and worse days, but i have no idea what else to even do. managing infra and writing code have been my entire career up to now.

If you’ve never tried a MUD, there are still a few out there that are alive and kickin’. Funny enough, I’ve been scratching that itch over the last few days and seeing whats out there. They’re something like a pre-cursor to MMOs - online, text-based games. If you get really deep into stuff like PVP, you’ll like wind up writing scripts that trigger actions based on what’s happening since its quicker than typing out commands when things get hot and heavy.

If I had to guess, I’d say Aardwolf is probably the most populated and has the most users online at any given time. I have an old char on there that I occasionally log into and run some quests on:

Aardwolf

I just created a character in Alter Aeon and it’s alright so far, but I haven’t spent more than about an hour logged in:

Alter Aeon

I don’t know how people generally feel about Iron Realms Entertainment. Some or all of their MUDs end up with you kind of having to spend some money if you get super engaged, but I’m pretty sure most of their games are perfectly fine without paying for casual players. They have a handful of MUDs that cover different themes (classic fantasy, vampire stuff, etc). I actually tried out Starmourn recently which is a sci-fi themed one, but I think they’re no longer developing it actively - the servers remain up (for now, at least, I guess). Regardless, all of their games seem pretty polished and thoughtfully made.

Iron Realms Entertainment main site

Starmourn

The cool thing about IRE is that their games are all playable in a browser and the browser-based apps include some QoL UI stuff like maps and stuff. The others generally require a (free) MUD client like Mudlet. Aardwolf has a highly customized version of Mudlet that has frames/windows within the client that show you your characters stats, maps, a chat window, and some other stuff.

I’ll leave you with one piece of advice: cherish whatever energy you have now, at the beginning, before you’re bogged down with a bunch of technical knowledge. Some of the coolest ideas I’ve had came in the second half of 2020, within the first 6 months of me starting.

There’s a freedom that comes with the percieved ignorance you might have due to “just starting out.” You just run around, fearlessly diving headlong into all kinds of ideas without taking the time to consider whether they’re good or bad. You’re not locking yourself into restrictions based on mixing rules or music theory or whatever it is. These things will turn into a prison if you let them. Three years into this stuff as a hobby, I’m realizing this is where I’m plateauing/struggling - but I’m glad I’ve been able to identify it because now I know what to beat on and attack to try to get back to that childlike wonder when everything seemed so possible and open-ended.

A lot of musicians and producers I’ve spoken to will say shit like “music theory is a guideline, not a hard rule” or “mixing is subjective and the ‘rules’ you see in every blog post can and should be broken when it makes sense” - they’re not bullshitting you when they say it. “Rules” in a creative outlet like music production aren’t meant to be law. What ultimately matters is that it sounds good.

Peter Santanello’s videos are usually really enjoyable and pleasant. He has a calm, respectful demeanor and he just goes to random places you usually don’t think about and just kind of shoots the shit with people. He did a couple videos a while back where he went to a couple of native reservations in like one of the Dakotas, I think, and they were an intensely interesting look into that life and culture.

His titles can feel kind of click-baity sometimes and I don’t always agree with his take on things, but I find him a really likeable and honest-seeming guy.

Glad I could help. I’m pretty much the same way inre targeted/structured learning. Creative stuff should always be exploratory as far as I’m concerned. You pick an aspect that attracts you, start digging into it, and everything else should just fall into place as you get deeper and more obsessed with it.

Good luck to you! There’s a lot to learn and it goes in every direction. Perfect for people like us. :)

Most of the other replies have you covered on DAW and free plugin suggestions (and they’re all good/valid ideas), so I’ll come from the perspective of mindset. I picked up production/sound design/synth patching/etc as a hobby in mid-2020 so I’m nothing more than a hobbyist, but one of the main things about the overall subject of music production that has kept me in it (vs. dropping it within a few months like most other hobbies) is that its so varied. If I get bored with trying to make catchy loops, I can go try to build some interesting synth patches that i can save for later, or I can spend some time building drumkits so that doesn’t bog me down when I want to actually make something, or I can play around with drum patterns, or whatever.

The main draw to all of this - for me specifically - is the ability to explore and the huge amount avenues I can explore. This method of approach has probably slowed me down as opposed to like… a targeted/structured way of learning the things, but I’ve found that I have the freedom to deep-dive all sorts of sub topics without any constraints.

What I’m trying to say is: have fun, explore, dive down rabbit holes as questions come up. We’re living in a time where there are more resources for music creation - both in terms of educational resources and tools, both free and paid - than any other time in history. Pick something that feels most interesting to you and just start running with it (for me, it was synthesis/synth patching that really pulled me in - Vital would be an outstanding free software synth that will help you understand what the knobs are doing because its very visual and there should be a number of youtube videos going over it out there).

As you learn more (independent of what you’re specifically learning about on any given day), you’ll start wondering more and that’ll allow you to ask your preferred search engine better and more detailed questions.

Once your have your feet under you and are feeling comfortable with the tools (your DAW, synthesizers, etc), if you’re absolutely dead set on learning a genre, you’ll be able to pick up the knowledge you need by watching genre-specific production videos, of which there are plenty, especially in regards to the genres you mentioned in your OP.

EDIT: I’ll add that I didn’t come from a musical background other than a short stint taking piano lessons when I was a kid and about 6 months of trying to self-teach myself guitar in like 2015 or so. I find the piano layout much easier to understand than the guitar and much easier to plonk around on to come up with interesting melodies. If you’re a genuinely a curious and driven person and music production really ends up resonating with you, you can be cranking out music in a matter of months… and within a year or two, it can even sound good (once you get some time with mixing and everything that goes along with that).

I ended up just flipping to T1 to get past it so I could finish the story (and then flipped back immediately after and never had an issue again). Since then, I’ve gotten some legendary gear that would have probably carried me (specifically, a piece that gives me a pretty big barrier as soon as I hit an elite or higher that lasts 10s and can pop every 30s - its gotten me out of a few scrapes already; got another piece that bumps my skeletal mages by 2 and they freeze shit near instantly if they actually focus on one target)

I’m actually starting to look at other classes for when I wrap the main story (so I can just skip it with subsequent characters) - sorc looks really interesting, but I’m not sure how well it’ll play with the controller. Or, rather, how happy I’ll be personally with it on controller.