@guerrillarain Or maybe noir is of gothic fiction, and shares a lot of its spirit, but qualifies as a descendent genre.
Like second-wave goth music, relative to post-punk.

Of all the profound quandaries I might be facing, I have this question on my hands: is Blade Runner a gothic movie? And what are the crucial criteria, anyway?
I'm thinking the Ultimate Cut qualifies, but the original theatrical release with the voice-over is canonically noir.

This raises the additional question of whether noir is a sub-genre of gothic fiction - now that it's occurred to me, I find it hard to argue otherwise. You have doomed, often desperate people trying vainly to escape their broken-down and decaying environs, but with added betrayal and ultimately no romantic love. Or if there is love, it's doomed.

Crimson Peak is as gothic as it gets, and The Crow isn't far behind. Angelheart definitely qualifies: it's doom and decay all the way through, with a big helping of desperation.

The Addams family has gothic styling and family relationships, but the story? Not even distantly.

Why am l only just now creating this collection on our Jellyfin server? Listen, I'm slow but I get there eventually. And I'm waiting for a tradesman to come in and prepare a quote to fix our decaying and partially broken-down environment.

I'm sure @guerrillarain will have opinions about these questions.

Victory! NetBSD is installed and running, thanks to fast and precise help from the mailing list.

The UX really is like Linux of about 20 years ago, but I can work with that. At least I didn't have to hand-calculate modelines for a fixed-scan monitor :)

Next challenge: do it all again, but this time with encrypted storage.

Clarification: I already have this setup. I've had this setup for some time, complete with a row of instruments right behind me. Somehow, it just never occurred to me that it's equally valid to use a DAW as a sketchpad, as it is to use it as a canvas.

Hence the epic facepalm.

I finally made a psychological breakthrough. Sometimes it just takes a while to internalise something you already understand intellectually.

Having a DAW and a permanently set up recording/practice space means you can just sketch ideas, and check whether they even work, before committing the work of trying to get perfect takes for each track.

It's an obvious fact, but actually working that way in music is new to me.

The fact that a DSLR did this for my photography 20 years ago, apparently went nowhere 🤦‍♀️

Once again looking for examples in movies of women of style, refinement and presence, to draw on. Intensely frustrated that they're invariably villain-coded, or outright evil.

The mildest of them is Morticia Addams, and even she's presented as a freak to be gawked and laughed at.

My partner and I just had lunch at a local place. The waiter, who has a fabulous mince, addressed us as "chicos" when we asked for the bill.
For those not familiar with Spanish, that indicates that at least one member of the group is male.

By the time he'd returned with the bill, I'd refreshed my lipstick and put on a hat that would look right on Servalan.
Suddenly it was "chicas," and I like a boy who can pick up on a hint.

Also: now that I've basically stopped drinking, a single tinto de verano is enough to make me tipsy.

OK, you've made your point. Enough with the low-altitude fly-overs of the city.

One of the limitations of guitar synthesis is that you necessarily lose some of the subtleties that can be wrung out of the pick-attack, especially with overdrive in the signal path.

It has taken me until just now to realise you can split the signal, apply a slow attack to the synthesised portion, and combine them. I'm both delighted at the realisation, in a way that my bank-account isn't, and exasperated at how long it's taken me to catch on.

I also find myself objecting less to the idea of how far you have to modify your playing to suit the synth, than previously. Apparently I'm becoming less stubborn and fixed in my ways as I age, which is not what I'd been led to believe is the normal order of things.

Oh dear.
I just tried calling to mind the riff from Bittersweet Symphony, and it segued straight into the Hall of the Mountain King.

I'm not unhappy about this.

New endocrinologist is lovely. Professional, but not so much so as to lack a sense of humour. Also reassuringly quick to point out the limits of his own knowledge.

He's also the first to have asked about bottom surgery, and to have pointed out that until/unless I get at least an orchiectomy, I get the best and the worst of both worlds. Apparently there are checkups I should already have had at my age, and I'm a bad girl for not having done that. Yes, he actually wagged his finger at me (while smiling).

No pushback whatsoever about method and dosage of HRT, just a desire to have a complete and accurate picture. Then he set up my recurring prescription on REMPe (online centralised prescription system) and gave me a printed one to get me started back on gel.

...and the two pharmacies nearest my home are out of it. And so are the warehouses they order from.
Good thing I just received my backup stash of pills. You know, the method we're trying to get me away from, before my liver starts exhibiting signs of damage, but that so far has been my only reliable option.

On one hand, you have to expect to draw some attention when you leave the house looking like this.

On the other: am I really the most interesting thing these people have seen? This is a large, cosmopolitan city with plenty of stylish people, not some backwater like Christchurch. Even there, we had plenty of alternative types.

Trying to figure out whether these people are terminally beige, or whether I've really changed so wildly.

Now watching: The Black Hole (1979).

Why? Because I need more practice at listening to dialogue in Spanish, and it's the first thing in my collection with a Spanish audio track.

I just caught some epic foreshadowing in the first scene, too: "every time I see one of those things, I expect to see some guy with horns and a red suit." Okayyy, now part of the ending seems... if not any less bizarre, at least more explicable.

I'm not apologising for any spoilers here, for two reasons:

• It's been out for 47 years (owww, that really hurts).
• If you haven't already seen it, I recommend you don't. It's bad. Very bad. Like, if I hadn't seen it as a child too young to understand how bad it was, I would not be coming back for more punishment.
  • One exception: if you're putting on a bad-SF-movie evening, preferably involving something mind-altering, this might actually be a good choice. Just... don't take acid such that it'll peak for the ending; this is not 2001, and you will not enjoy it.

Funny thing: part of me wants to give the poor thing a hug.
Another part of me is not going anywhere near that guy. Ew.

Old photos can be a trip.
I'm in search of reference photos for a drawing, and I was certain I have some on my phone.

One pic I did find was of Deadname with a beard, and that thing about pre-transition people having dead eyes? This one gives distinct vibes of "necromancer is just out of frame."

RE: https://social.treehouse.systems/@Elizafox/117270900494459969

I know this is a shitpost thread, but this line is genuine gold.

This is the way to design your automation and tooling, and a good reason to automate as much as you can in the first place. Increased speed is just a happy side-effect.

On a related note, the scent of engine oil... mmm.

Not to give anyone ideas, but if a mechanic turned up for her date with me smelling of hot 15/50 I'd be in danger.

Kat actually went outside, and it was an expedition!

We went to the train museum (Museo del Ferrocarril) for the mercado de los motores, and now I just want a language tag for Spanglish.

I'm posting only this bad photo for now, as bait to encourage autistic transfems to come here and see it in person.

Quite a few trains are packed in there, one of which is cut away like the cutaways you see in books, which is a great way to directly see and understand just how that kind works.

Are the markets good? We walked home with a hand-cranked sewing machine from 1900, so yes, I'd say so.

This might sound odd coming from me, but I think I just spotted a good use for LLMs: identifying equivalent colloquialisms across different languages.
This would be immensely helpful for learning, especially when you're asking "how do you express this idea?" more often than you're looking up individual words.

Or did I miss something, and does this already exist?

I ordered a kitset guitar pedal from Germany, to help me ease back into this soldering lark, while also adding a type of pedal whose lack I'm finally feeling (tremolo).

Being me, I created my account under this name, and I'm sure I requested its delivery via courier, not via post.

They've posted it to me, and its current status is "at local post office, ready for collection." To collect something from Correos, I need to show government ID with the name of the recipient, and Kat does not yet officially exist.

:insert most unladylike cursing:

I see exactly where this will lead. I'm going to look up a schematic, figure out a bill of materials, and breadboard it before soldering a prototype (I've used veroboard before and I will do it again).
I'm going to start hand-making my own circuitboards, aren't I?