Libby and Hoopla: free books, audio books, movies.
Just to add: Kanopy gives you 15 free movies per month. Not enough for binging TV shows but certainly enough for 15 quality movie watching sessions per month.
PSA: in the US you can get a free account at https://www.kanopy.com/ by just joining a local library. Kanopy is my preferred streaming service, it has a big collection of quality movies (not Netflix-type trash).
Many psychedelic-era personas expressed this sentiment as well: you don't need psychedelic drugs to reach that state, you could also spend 10 years practicing meditation daily.
This view ignores the major application of these substances. Ketamine-induced self-therapy is accessible instantly and acts as a major reset. When you are experiencing long-term depression and/or anxiety, the advice to "just meditate" or do deep introspection is wildly counter-productive. Depressive state is very frequently accompanied by an unhealthy focus on the internal voice and on over-analyzing own life/motivations/purpose/etc. Having an "introspection session" in this state is a borderline dangerous advice.
I don't see a contradiction in that. Books are knowledge. If you want to learn how to do something better - reading a book is one way to do it. Could be a video, or a longer article, but the point is the same.
Another good way to develop a healthier relationship with our content consumption habits is to meditate. It's not contradictory to suggest to read a book on the benefits of meditation.
That's a good observation. I tend to over-index on challenges and often end up distracting myself for long enough to completely drain myself of all energy to be creative.
Creativity requires space. Can't remember who said it (paraphrasing): dedicate at least 4 hours to the process, you might end up being creative for only 10 minutes of that time.
While there are undoubtedly new genres since this was last updated, wonder if in general electronic music has entered an amalgamated stage with innovative producers blending genres into very idiosyncratic music that does not fall into a distinct genre.
E.g. Clark, Max Cooper, Rival Consoles, Jon Hopkins, Arca are often described as "techno" or "electronica" but in a very broad sense. These descriptors are just umbrella terms. It's like describing both King Crimson and Blink-182 as "guitar music".
Did you even look at the content of the pages you posted?
From [1]: "The 15 fastest-declining cities from 2021 to 2022 and 2020 to 2021 were different, with major cities like Boston, Washington, D.C. and, most notably, San Francisco falling off the list."
San Francisco was #1 in 2020-2021 (i.e. the tech industry employee exodus at the beginning of the pandemic), and isn't even on the list for 2021-2022.
For [2]: while SF prices did decline, they are now at the level of Nov 2021 and are steadily recovering. (Not dissimilar to cities like Las Vegas or Austin.)
Yes, for sure. Don't know if being acquired by MS resulted in this reputation (MS has had the same reputation for decades) but they are well known as a chill workplace.
Even then, I think Bandcamp fills the niche for musicians who want to continue doing it for the love of music and want to better serve their community. E.g. they can offer downloadable lossless music for free.
I am really worried about Ableton. Feels like music production industry is going through a consolidation stage (NI/Izotope) and Live is absolutely the prime real estate in the business.
I do believe that the original founders had a fantastic vision that they mostly realized. But at some point they decided to sell the business and move on. Unfortunately that meant that the vision, and, more importantly, the full control over that vision have vanished. Don't know what the solution is for businesses like that... A worker owned co-op? A non-profit? Some legal structure that is capable of withstanding investor pressure and just existing as a fairly successful business.
What are you talking about? They work with a ton of labels. The landing page is tailored to discovery... they are long past the sexy branding stage, having millions of users and being the most loved independent music platform.
The vast majority of profession artists I know and love have a Bandcamp account. Maybe in the early stages musicians just want feedback on their new "beat". However, at some point they want to have a professional looking profile with releases that they can sell, with a community they can reach out to, merchandise they can roll out at their own pace, etc etc.
You are probably talking to very early stage musicians who would enjoy using Soundcloud over Bandcamp for feedback reasons.
Because it's a different business? No one needs to run anything. Bandcamp offers an easy way for musicians to have a fairly customizable online presence with a flexible pricing model, a merch store, and, importantly, plug into a larger platform's discoverability mechanism.
This is a conspiracy level explanation. Do you really think middle aged Americans are surprised by taxes every time they buy groceries? "Oh, darn, the total cost is unexpectedly higher, how could I forget about the sales tax... that I see on every check every day for 50 years."
Just to add: Kanopy gives you 15 free movies per month. Not enough for binging TV shows but certainly enough for 15 quality movie watching sessions per month.