Siempre Nube

Sunday, March 2, 2025

Hard Truths and Shogun

Sunday, March 2, 2025

Two new reviews at LB

Hard Truths by Mike Leigh was a challenging watch, you know, by design 🙄

Shogun (2024) was an unchallenging watch also by design 🤷‍♂️

We also watched Drive Away Dolls by Ethan Cohen (is he the tall one?) and couldn’t muster a review.

Keeping score : 0 for 3

Everyone is OK

Thursday, February 27, 2025

The car… not so much.

What we did learn is that our neighbors are the best people. Maybe ever. (more on them later)

I mean… siempre bien

Monday, February 24, 2025

Taking a break to pose at the Ritmo con Señas retreat in Pan de Azúcar, February 2025. I am filled with love for each of these beautiful and talented people.

Shallow Seek

Sunday, February 23, 2025

This is what happens when you ask Deep Seek about Chinese dissidents.

“Let’s talk about something else.”

For the gingoistically challenged: this is NOT the price of open source. In fact: limiting speech (no matter how gosh darn polite) and lack of transparency is the exact opposite of every ethical pillar of open culture. It’s in the name: Open Culture.

Why I Don't Trust or Like BlueSky

Saturday, February 22, 2025

Regarding Trust

BlueSky is a for-profit enterprise. While its charter includes a commitment to balancing public good with profit, that’s not the same as a true public-interest project like Linux, Mozilla, or Mastodon. At some point, it will need a monetization model—ads, selling user data, subscriptions, or some mix of all three.

You can decentralize the servers all you want, but without a real safeguard (akin to Copyleft), there’s nothing stopping Bluesky from becoming ripe for acquisition by Microsoft or Meta once it reaches critical mass.

The Politics of BlueSky

What bothers me politically is how dominated it feels by North American liberals and neo-liberal Democrats, constantly dunking on the other half of the U.S. electorate. (There’s probably a name for the non-stop “Look What Nazi Thing Elon Did Today” posting.)

This isn’t about false equivalence—Trump’s America is a disaster, even by the standards of the Clintons, who everyone assumed perfected the art of selling out their own base. Fuck Trump and his ever-rotating cast of henchmen. But at the same time, the so-called “left” in the U.S. has convinced itself that it can rebuild America into a compassionate, inclusive society while simultaneously balls-out openly hating half its own population. Nobody seems to seriously question or even challenge this line.

There’s no moral equivalence between the two sides, but both have a deep aversion to nuance and both are equally performative (MAGA vs. Woke). The theatrics dominates the public discourse, and BlueSky has become the staging ground for anti-Trump outrage. BlueSky is being used by people making the problem worse. 

Why I’m Uninterested

I have no patience for a platform where the majority of accounts are trapped in perpetual hand-wringing. They live in a constant state of shock, never once taking responsibility for their own failure to read the room, their own miscalculations, or their own ongoing ineptitude at resistance. They demand accountability from others but never acknowledge their own role in the society they helped create.

Instead, platforms like BlueSky could be used by anti-Trump types to organize actions, and if they did, that could turn the whole thing around in 2 weeks, a month tops. Only organizing works. Just ask the multitude of free democracies today who were full-blown dictatorships 50 years ago, but overturned by peaceful organizing. 

BlueSky feels like where you go when that sounds like too much work for you, and you’d rather complain and be shocked by the consequences of your inaction.

Support

Saturday, February 22, 2025

[LANG=EN]This is a ladder supporting Tato supporting Ani by touting the fact that my local bookstore happens to have Ani’s book of poetry on the table because they want to support local artists.[/LANG][LANG=ES]Esta es una escalera apoyando a Tato que apoya a Ani al promocionar el hecho de que mi librería local tiene el libro de poesía de Ani sobre la mesa porque quieren apoyar a los artistas locales.[/LANG]

Ebert on Lynch

Tuesday, February 4, 2025

“…compulsively watchable while refusing to yield to interpretation.”

Why I Deleted My Instagram (Meta) Account

Monday, February 3, 2025

Elle Feingold (website) is my favorite living guitarist. I’ve taken lessons with her and intensely studied her playing. She has a Patreon page, a YouTube channel, and other social sites, but her most active (and rewarding) interactions and posts are on Instagram (@ella_rae_feingold).

Ella is constantly assaulted and harassed on Instagram because she is trans. She is incredible at responding to the hate, maintaining a level of poise and humanity that is everything you want from humanity. 

Two weeks ago, the company that runs Instagram changed its policy and explicitly gave permission for hating specifically trans people. 

I don’t need Instagram. My work doesn’t depend on it. If my work and livelihood were tied to Instagram, then I would definitely stay on the platform (though I would probably make sure to let people know I was doing it out of support of my family, not the platform). I always say if the Mafia controlled the water supply in my town, I would still use the water and pay the water bill. But I don’t need Instagram.

So because they are a platform for hate, I have severed an already tenuous relationships with them. They kicked me off the platform 4 years ago without ever telling me why other than I “violated the community standards.” Well, now, the community standards include hating the people I love, so fuck off.

Support Ella at Patreon.

Why I Deleted My Spotify Account

Saturday, February 1, 2025

In the beginning record companies took advantage of older artists’ contracts that did not mention streaming or subscriptions by becoming stakeholders in Spotify. This way, they could collect 100% of the streaming revenue and take a chunk of the subscription.

Now that artists have finally started writing streaming and subscription royalties into their contracts, the record companies sold their stake in the company and the industry has settled back into just plain old toxic and no more.

Except no, it turns out new lows are being mined.

Spotify has been accused of recording original music and stuffing popular playlists with their fake (verified) artists in order to deny real artists royalties. In response, the company said it was 100% false, “hard no.”

That denial turns out to be 99% false. According to Harper’s a major VC that raises funds for Spotify, also raises $450 million for a company called Epidemic, which whaddayou know is one of the biggest suppliers of generic, factory-produced fake (verified) artists’ music that is played on Spotify. 

Meanwhile Suno  is an app where you can generate music using AI without any humans involved. The music sounds… great. I prefer to make music that is rougher and “sloppier” than what it does, but just as a hobby, I would love to have the discipline to produce music as clean and consistent as Suno.

Benn Jordan scraped 560 songs from Suno and found that 549 of them had been posted to Spotify, etc., including as verified artists. (YouTube) Benn had previously made the case that Spotify  can only make a profit by increasing subscription rates and decreasing royalty payouts. In other words, it can only succeed, their entire business model depends on screwing the artists.

Why I Deleted All My Streaming Accounts

Friday, January 31, 2025

Over 20 years ago, I signed up for Netflix’s DVD mail service ($19.95/month) and was pretty thrilled with it. A few years later, their streaming service launched—no ads, no screen limits, no restrictions—and I jumped on board. At $5.99 per month, my annual cost was just $71.88—not free, but too convenient to pass up.

Since then, other streaming services have popped up, and FilmStruck became my all-time favorite. It was bundled with the Criterion Channel for $11.99 per month, but honestly, I would have paid way more. Still, my annual streaming costs jumped to over $210—not nothing.

Because we have a short-term rental house in Palm Springs, I wanted to load the Rokus with a wide variety of channels. So, step by step, I started adding more—HBO, Hulu, Mubi, Apple TV, Prime, Paramount, Peacock, etc. Since it was all tax-deductible for our rental business and our renters were “paying” for these through the rent, I never stopped to do the math. I just kept adding, stupidly stumbling along.

Well, now it's tax time, and I finally crunched the numbers. In 2024, I spent over $2,000 on streaming services. That’s a fuck ton of guilty pleasure. Tax-deductible or not, that’s completely obscene, especially considering the number of films and TV shows I actually liked and was glad I saw—probably fewer than ten.

So, I’m canceling them all. All. Of. Them. And it feels great. Like, really awesome to be free of all that.

They all tried to guilt me into staying, but Netflix—the first one—had the nerve to remind me of the day I signed up, as if nostalgia would keep me paying. LOL.

I feel like a jerk for letting things get this out of hand. Because, honestly? I was a jerk.

Anticipation...

Friday, January 31, 2025

This is me and Pablo a few months ago on stage for Nuestra Jam in Buenos Aires. I’m very excited to see him, Nati and many others at the Ritmo con Señas retiro in a few days.

Return to Zero

Friday, January 31, 2025

Today I resume blogging after a 15-year hiatus.

I’ve chosen micro.blog as my primary platform, crossposting content to Mastodon and BlueSky. The latter I especially don’t trust.

Micro.blog offers an incredibly minimalist interface, denying me to access a range of features that I’ve assumed, such as pinning posts and direct messaging. Hey, maybe all I truly need is text and basic media to express my gratitude.

Also missing: money, particularly ads and algorithms.

I’m here to log and casually share with friends and family. Remember blogging? I like taking pictures, sharing takes, and writing. So that’s what I’m doing and nothing else.

Don’t follow me.

Looking back, moving on

Friday, January 31, 2025