Local media tagging and organizing in the digital era

2026-05-17T00:00:00+00:00

As someone who grew up in libraries, and then went on to work on the youtube cdn for a while, my opinions on digital media organization have evolved pretty significantly. I'll be outlining my personal media organization principles, some observations on the differening nuances between media types, physical media ripping & tagging, and some more here.</p>

The hope here is to show people that their own, local media server is accomplishable with just a bit of intentful organizing underpinning it. I'll also have a little bit about some miscellaneous playback hurdles of UHD blu-rays and audio formats, as a treat.</p>

Music</h1>
My general thought here is that most users turn to Streaming Music providers due to scaling limitations with the "traditional" music organization structure: `{artist}/{album}/{track}</code>. Once you get into the 1000 - 10,000 artist range, it becomes difficult to interact with the library, outside of perhaps some specific few artists. The first problem to tackle is: how do you organize your music files themselves? Certainly not like that.</p>`

Organization Principles</h2>
I'd been lugging around a folder full of .mp3s and .wavs and .oggs for upwards of a decade, when I made the mistake of using beets to try and manage it. After beets crashed mid-run, I found myself needing to re-build my library from scratch. The easiest way to do this 'data warehousing' was to organize all my music by "where did this come from". My directory structure looks something like this:</p>
- audio
  - physical
    - bd
	- cassete
	- cd
	- vinyl
  - digital
    - archive.org
	- bandcamp
	- indie
	  - nielcic
	  - msx
	- rips
	- sets
	- steam
	- takeouts
	  - itunes
	- misc
</code></pre>
Astute readers will note the load-bearing misc</code> folder as the holding bag for all the old/legacy files. The goal is to largely de-duplicate those against the other, better organized source directories over time. Dumping your entire library into a misc folder is a great starting point going forward, at the least.</p>
Broadly, this enables a few different long-term strategies:</p>

rebuilding after data loss becomes easier to batch</li>
you can handle duplicates/overlaps cleanly, especially by picking at the top-level "source" level, e.g. bandcamp over steam as sometimes steam releases are poorly tagged mp3s.</li>
source/file progeny are usually not tagged, but this way the information is persisted</li>
</ul>
The flip side is that the relatively flat {artist}/{album}/{track}</code> structure is</em> useful as a 'browsing catalogue' of a library. Thankfully, this is also cheaply accomplished with hard-links.</p>
Hard-linking and libraries</h3>
If you're not familiar with hard-linking and inodes, the gist is that an inode is the underlying "file" full of bytes, while the "link" is just the full path in the filesystem, e.g. /mnt/pool/library/soundtracks/Takeharu Ishimoto/すばらしきこのせかい + The World Ends with You/13. Three Minutes Clapping.flac</code>. Hard-linking is just a way to provide access to the one file at two (or more) paths in a file system. Sym linking or soft linking are weaker versions of this.</p>
I ended up writing my own lil solution, which lets me configure a directory (and its descendents) to be hard-link deployed to one or more libraries - e.g. my Steam directory goes to Soundtracks, while bandcamp and indie go straight to music (with some soundtrack-releases overridden manually).</p>
Ripping and Tagging</h2>
I really like navidrome's tagging guidelines</a>, particularly the parts around multi-value tags.</p>
Ripping CDs is pretty straightforward in this era: Musicbrainz exists, and you can look up discs by hashing their Table of Contents and matching with the track lengths of the ToC. Whipper has been my preferred solution here; on the occasion a disc doesn't have a Musicbrainz match, Whipper gives me a nice URL to just go do some data entry at. Some stuff already has releases on MusicBrainz (but no TOC hash attached), some stuff needs data entry.</p>
For digital releases, things get a bit less clean. Chromaprints exist as a way to roughly fingerprint files, and AcoustID exists as a service for mapping chromaprints to musicbrainz recoridng IDs. However, this is insufficient for identifying a track confidently: a single recording may have numerous releases (e.g. tracks appearing in compilation albums), so the appropriate pipeline looks something like:</p>

chromaprint all files locally</li>
run them through acoustID for musicbrainz Recording IDs</li>
for every Release that our recordings might</em> be a part of, run Kuhn–Munkres</a>, picking from files in the same directory (or neighbor directories, if a release has multiple chapters/mediums/whatever you want to call them), forming potential</em> optimal packings of each release.</li>
do some rounds of graph-theory MIS</a> to achieve the most coverage of all of our files</li>
</ul>
There's a good bit there I'm glossing over. The takeaway is that really, no off-the-shelf software besides Musicbrainz Picard does all of that pipelining close to properly, as far as I'm aware.</p>
Local Musicbrainz & Sonic Analysis</h3>
I've found that a local musicbrainz replica</a> is both really easy to set up, and just generally critical for doing any local tag-matching. The rate limits on the public replicas are pretty low (due to scrapers etc, afaik).</p>
My disc-ripping pipeline is still set up to do the disk TOC-hash lookups against the public instance, as that way I can do data entry on previously-unmatched discs and then re-rip without needing to wait for my local replica's hourly sync. The rest of the tag-matching pipeline work works off of the local replica after getting acoustID matches. Unfortunately, there's no easy way to run an acoustID local replica last I checked.</p>
On the sonic analysis side of things, I use audiomuse-ai</a> for doing local analysis, with their navidrome plugin to complete the loop and glue things together with the instant mix/radio mix results. It's pretty alright - the musiCNN</a> and LAOIN-CLAP</a> stuff is okay; I'm not going to pretend to know the most about either, but I've been thinking about trying to hack something together using MERT</a> or MuQ</a> to see how they stack up.</p>
For now, the audiomuse parts are totally fine for giving me a spotify-like shuffle through my Very Large Music Library. It's a bit much for my purposes - I found the playlist generation etc to be of poor to mid quality, and at some point they enabled a local Whisper lyrics-transcription feature that massively slowed down my analysis steps.</p>
Misc Notes</h3>
For all the non-musicbrainz-matched files (e.g. long tail of indie music, bootlegs, mixtapes, live set mp3s, etc), there's still plenty of work to do. The classic problem I encountered was small levenshtein distance</a> differences in tags, e.g. DragonForce vs Dragonforce, but there's a handful of locally-bulk-fixable tag issues:</p>

Emitting navidrome-style multi-value ARTISTS tags from a single 'flat' ARTIST tag (e.g. keeping ARTIST=deadmau5 vs Melleefresh</code> and adding ARTISTS=deadmau5 ARTISTS=Melleefresh</code></li>
Same thing for GENRE tags, as a lot of released music or other tag managers will mis-render Electronic Metal as GENRE=Electronic, Metal</code> rather than GENRE=Electronic GENRE=Metal</code></li>
Albums with inconsistent ALBUMARTIST tags between tracks, preventing them from rendering as one album in clients

Navidrome-styel ALBUMARTISTS for individual credits vs ALBUMARTIST for the overall rendered string, is one again to the rescue.</li>
</ul>
</li>
</ul>
The whole problem of identifying genuine duplicates is an entire other can of worms. Again, the organization strategy at the directory level helps immensely in tackling these problems at scale.</p>
Videos</h1>
Videos are the relatively easy category when it comes to organizing and tagging, as most of the cost comes from the actual storage overhead. Filenames alone are largely sufficient for mapping to a given Movie or TV show episode - as the production floor is much higher, and there's both a good quantity of data available in TMDB, TVDB, etc. The problem is actually getting</em> those files.</p>
The organization side of this house is much easier: again, by progeny (dvd, blu-ray, uhd-blu-ray, web), and sonarr/radarr are pretty reasonable for managing the hard-links side of things.</p>
Ripping and Naming</h2>
The hard part here is producing correctly organized rips from local media. DVDs and Blu-Ray discs only really give you a Disc Label and 'titles' to work with - and the list of titles isn't necessarily in any sensible order related to episode order, nor will the first title be the full movie, etc etc. Thankfully, identifying the correct title to rip on a movie disc is pretty easy, as duration tends to be sufficient.</p>
There's a couple ways to consistently identify and match titles to episodes:</p>

take existing subtitles, pull down (and cache) reference subs from opensubtitles</li>
do local transcription iff no subs are in the file, but reference subs exist</li>
</ul>
Generally, the hard-er part is determining which titles to rip in the first place. TV episodes are usually of a relatively consistent length, but double-length feature episodes (season premieres, season finales, etc) are both plentiful, and typically inconsistently tagged on external DBs. Additionally - and particularly in the case of my BSG box set - there's uncut / non-broadcast editions of episodes, which don't show up in online listings at all. My solution here was to simply rip the uncut editions and use those as 'upgrades', rather than try and rip both and try to fit htem both to the existing Season structure.</p>
A note on formats</h2>
Playback of video formats tends to have two main problem cases: hardware decode of video codecs, and audio format licenses.</p>
The video playback side of things is pretty fine. AV1 with trueHD might cause some problems down the line, but I suspect most BD players only really barely support HEVC (H.265). H.264 (AVC) has thankfully achieved widespread compatibility. HDR and Dolby Vision passthrough largely have just worked without any consideration.</p>
As it turns out, most/all blu-rays will use TrueHD for their 'best' audio stream. This is especially relevant for Dolby Atmos. Both my smartTV and Apple TV refused/were incapable of simply passing through the trueHD audio bitstreams to my AVR - from what I can tell, purely due to licensing reasons - since they could pass through E-AC-3 and basically every other format available. My old Nvidia Shield TV (2019) does the direct passthrough to my AVR just fine, though, as does any sensible Linux HTPC, as far as I'm aware.</p>
Swapping down to the basic 5.1.0 E-AC-3 will usually work fine, but I regrettably have noticed the mixing just isn't as good and dialogue volume is distinctly quieter when I switch from the 5.1.2 mix to a 5.1 mix on the same disc. To put on my "please be patient I have autism" hat for a moment, I've regrettably kinda found the full 5.1.2 to be necessary for a good home listening experience - partially due to the amount of audio that is "lifted" out of the main sound plane, and partially due to the resulting volume mixing being, well, better.</p>
The thing about Dolby Atmos is that it is</em> unfortunately the only real meaningful improvement beyond 2.1.0 mixing that isn't just about "having an audible dialogue channel in the center channel" - the whole jazz about how individual snippets of audio get spatially placed into the room, is pretty meaningful of an advancement, in my opinion. Dialogue audio comes from the middle of the room, while weather noise is overhead, and crowd audio is a bit more distant or otherwise coming from the edges of the room. I usually struggle a bit with auditory processing on media and am incredibly reliant upon subtitles to follow along, but, for example, Game of Thrones is much</em> easier to audibly parse.</p>
The frustrating part is that it requires 7 speakers (or 6 if you just, don't have a subwoofer?) with two of them being ceiling-mounted or upfiring. The floor for entry here is tremendous, and then you hit the fun problem of "the appleTV and the tv itself only support the netflix-tier codecs and not the UHD blu-ray raw TrueHD". Proper HTPCs shouldn't have an issue with any of this, though, afaik, since their HDMI drivers pretty consistently handle bitstreaming out the audio formats if the AVR advertises the capabilities - which largely, they do.</p>
Closing Notes</h1>
Trying to combat tag-and-ID entropy feels like an impossible struggle, but I believe it's reasonably accomplishable in this day and age. TV/Movie organizing is easiest - with the hardest part being the actual rip-from-disc step - espeically thanks to jellyfin's front-end "identify" button for re-classifying anything that was mis-classified on the first step.</p>
Music remains the hardest, especially when it comes to genre tags and identifying the exact correct release. Thankfully, we live in an era of doing local bulk-computations, so I think the hardest part is the UX of tag-correction tooling more than anything else.</p>



Dragon's Domain
2026-02-23T00:00:00+00:00
Dragon's Domain</h1>
no dragon's lair is complete without a nice mountaintop cave :)</p>

why the trans flag emoji uses the codepoints it uses

2026-01-06T00:00:00+00:00

2026-01-07 correction: I incorrectly asserted that the 5 codepoints took 6 bytes to represent. Brainfog moment; thank you Peter for the pointing this out!</em></p> </blockquote>
Back in 2018, I was an intern at facebook1</a></sup>. I was also very early into my transition, so I was very in-the-loop with my trans collegeaues - and I heard about how one of the messenging teams (messenger? whatsapp? maybe both?) was going to be rolling out a trans pride flag emoji, and was encouraging early testing.</p>
My first and immediate find? Copy-and-pasting the emoji into any other text field would result in a singular unknown glyph (like, say, �) - these clowns wanted to map it to a private use area codepoint! Fair enough, I suppose, for a corporation that wishes to ship on their own timelines - so I did some digging.</p>
some background</h2>
I found no good prior art to go off of - I believe that the eventually-accepted proposal</a> was circulating as a draft at the time, but I haven't been able to find any references or records of it from that period of time; I did find reference here</a> to the unicode consortium rejecting a proposal for a trans flag that year - I think it might have been an earlier version of the proposal, it might have been an alternate proposal; I do know that I recalled seeing requests for a new codepoint to be issued for a trans flag emoji glyph, and a proposal without all of the requisite U+FE0F's.</p>
The initial approach and codepoint mapping taken a day or so later was 🏳‍⚧ - [U+1F3F3, U+200D, U+26A7]</code>. That's pretty close to what the approved codepoints ended up being, and it likely displays correctly now, but it's lacking a couple U+FE0F's that were necessary at the time. Here's where things get into the weeds.</p>
U+FE0F: Emoji Presentation Mode</h2>Nowadays, if you go look at the listed codepoints</a> for 🏳️‍⚧️, you'll see five</em> codepoints2</a></sup> (characters) that make it up, with two of them being U+FE0F</code>. FEOF can be slapped after a symbol - without a ZWJ! - to indicate that the preceding codepoint should be interpreted for Emoji Presentation, and not textual mode - her sister, U+FE0E, does that. If you want to see this in action: [⚧︎⚧️] is [U+26A7 U+FE0E U+26A7 U+FEOF]</code>. Same codepoint, two render modes!</p> There was some prior art</a> on how to approach the trans flag codepoints - emoji presentation white flag, zero width joiner, and a rainbow emoji. So, just swap the rainbow emoji for U+26A7 and we're good to go, right?</p> U+200D: Zero-width joiner my beloved</h2> There's a lot of technical details about what is and is not technically valid to do with zero-width joiners. I'm not here to say that there is a wrong</em> way to use the ZWJ to combine codepoints, because language is always-changing, but I was there</em> to ensure that there is no technical</em> reason to deny the trans flag proposal. The existing and eventually accepted proposal L2/19-080 that I linked earlier, proposed a four-codepoint approach, but it lacked the trailing U+FE0F for ⚧.</p> You might see where I'm going with this: at the time, U+26A7 was a text-mode-only glyph. Including it in a ZWJ sequence was not valid without a following U+FE0F</a> at the time:</p> fully-qualified emoji zwj sequence — An emoji zwj sequence in which every default text presentation character (ED-7) is either followed by an emoji modifier or followed by an emoji presentation selector, and there are no other emoji or text presentation selectors in the sequence.</p> </blockquote> At the time3</a></sup>, ⚧ was a text-mode only glyph; thus, it must be followed by an emoji presentation selector. I suggested the 5-codepoint mapping, and also advised that there should be an emoji-rendering glyph for U+26A7 U+FE0F. To my utter amazement, my feedback was followed!</p> The end result of this, was the 5-codepoint version of 🏳️‍⚧️ was the first one to be out in the wild. You could send it on fb messenger, or whatsapp, and it'd render as a nice emoji; you could copy/paste it to another client, and you'd get the fallback render of a flag and a symbol, similar to the lag time between 🏳️‍🌈 being an accepted sequence and vendors supporting rendering a couple years prior. The next year, the trans flag emoji proposal was accepted, citing the sequence already existing on whatsapp and rendering as a first-class emoji - no new codepoints or allocations needed; it only needed the blessing of its codepoint sequence, and an update to U+26A7 saying that it is valid to use it in emoji presentation mode (and emoji presentation sequences).</p> This does actually mean that now, the four-codepoint sequence for 🏳️‍⚧️ is now</em> valid, since now that ⚧︎ can</em> be displayed in an emoji presentation, it doesn't have</em> to be specified as needing emoji presentation in a ZWJ sequence. It is unfortunate that the transgender approach to acceptance feels like it necessitates being technically correct beyond all reproach in order to force acceptance - looking back, I think it's a bit of a shame that the advocates pushing for 🏳️‍⚧️ through the appropriate mediums were being rebuffed for not being totally technically accurate (as they weren't including any details about U+26A7 needing emoji presentation), and that no one technical would actually work with them on getting those details corrected earlier. It wasn't until a corporation, a vendor, whatever broke ranks and just had a technically unassailable implementation, that it was included into the fold.</p> if there is one mark i am glad to have left on this earth, it is this 5-codepoint sequence</a>. 🩷🏳️‍⚧️🩷</h3> ^{1</sup> early transition, included health insurance, enough money to unshackle me from my family, and also the only SRE-type internship offer I could secure at the time. I spent the whole summer being repeatedly misgendered by my manager :)</p> </div>}^{2</sup> a unicode codepoint is just a single character, glyph, etc that can take up a variable number of bytes to represent. the tl;dr is that utf-8 accomplishes this in a really cute way, using up to 7 bits per byte for the codepoint. Conveniently, this means that the low 128 of ascii (0-127) are all valid utf-8, giving us a convenient 1-byte codepoint set that's backwards compatible. Every codepoint in 🏳️‍⚧️ takes a minimum of 3 bytes to encode in UTF-8, with the first codepoint taking 4 bytes, giving us a total count of 16 bytes to encode 🏳️‍⚧️ into utf-8.</p> </div>}^3</sup>now, U+26A7 has an emoji presentation mode. If my understanding of the current writing</a> is correct, then [1F3F3 FE0F 200D 26A7]</code> would be a minimally qualified emoji, as the 26A7 is unqualified as it is still a text-mode-presentation by default.</p> </div> ^{4</sup> The thought here was that if you sent 🏳️‍⚧️ to someone on a device that doesn't support rendering it, they should see 🏳️⚧︎, but if they copy/paste that ⚧︎ back to someone on a device that can</em> render ⚧︎ as an emoji, it should. And also that it just simply makes sense on a technical level, to have an emoji rendering of every character making up a ZWJ sequence in case the ZWJ mapping isn't available yet - there just wasn't prior art of a new sequence mapping and new presentation mode of an existing character at the same time before.</p> </div>}
mistborn 2025-10-29T00:00:00+00:00 mistborn</h1> misty and I, garbed in mistcloaks, doing some friendly sparring >:3</p> sapphic cuddle pile 2025-09-29T00:00:00+00:00 sapphic cuddle pile</h1> left to right: keea, fern, hecate, rythmyr, lavs. cozy......</p> sapphic flaunt 2025-09-03T00:00:00+00:00 sapphic flaunt</h1> left to right: keea, jill, rythmyr, hecate, fern, lavs. all of us just havin a good time :3</p> begone, windows! 2025-07-19T00:00:00+00:00 it's year of the linux desktop baby!!</h2> Like any good blog post [[citation needed]], I'll be starting out with an unneccesary amount of context.</p> I have long since been a linux user. However, I'm also (unfortunately) a gamer with standards1</a></sup>, so I strive to make no compromises about the performance</em> of my system's output compositing first and foremost. And so it was, I unfortunately used Windows from 2020 onwards, due to the hardware I had - my old r9 290 from my very first computer was not sufficient, my Radeon VII had hardware flaws that led to it continually falling off the bus, and a 3090 fell into my hands through good fortune2</a></sup>.</p> ^{1</sup> I am extremely sensitive to eyestrain, especially as it pertains to migraines - I frequently suffer them, and eyestrain is a significant factor. Choppy refresh rates, tearing, ghosting, and chromatic abberations are some of the worst offenders/contributors, but suffice it to say that I like it when my frametimes are low and when the picture is clear and crisp.</p> </div>}^{2</sup> keep in mind, this was in the summer of 2020 - a friend of mine was trying to check out with at least one gpu from microcenter, and ended up with a spare. So I want to use this 3090 for at least a decade - it's 5 years old now, and I sincerely doubt more performance will ever be actually needed or appreciably available from a GPU.</p> </div> Prior to my Nvidia days, I was daily driving linux. i3 was fantastic and performance was reasonable. Then, I got a freesync monitor out of an e-waste bin on campus some time during my undergrad, circa 2016ish. A few things became immediately clear to me:</p>} high refresh rate was much</em> more impactful than increased resolution</li> tearing was much more of an issue with a higher refresh rate</li> vsync was woefully inadequate at addressing this without potentially tanking performance</li> X11 was too much of a dumpster fire</li> Wayland was not yet the high-performance compositing solution that desktop linux needed</li> </ul> My migraines also ramped up in frequency around this time3</a></sup>, which was another contributing factor. So, I primarily used Windows at home for high-performance tear-free gaming that would not make my eyes/head explode.</p> </p> credit: cinnamonspots</a></h5> ^{3</sup> partially estrogen, partially family history, and later, being subjected to the sun at 100% brightness all the time in california</p> </div> Fast-forward to 2021ish, and Wayland is looking much better. I was still using Linux every day, albeit at work, and I had switched from i3+compton to Sway, and was very happy with just how much more sensible everything was from the ground up. I kept going over to my linux install at home every 6 months or so to update package and evaluate if it was usable yet with my 3090. Those vibe checks progressed roughly as follows over the next few years:</p>} initially, I was just chilling with a text session and no functioning graphical session. I was not using X11, and I was still stuck with my 3090, and sway --i-understand-nvidia-is-not-supported --i-promise</code>4</a></sup> would not yield a functioning graphical session.</li> (lots of grumbling about eglstreams & no gbm allocator in the nvidia drivers)</li> ...until suddenly, it did have a gbm allocator! there was no hardware cursor support, and graphical errors were a-plenty. Still unusable, but it was a step in the right direction.</li> [several years of weird flickering/buffering issues]</li> </ul> Then, one day in late 2024, I updated all my packages and rebooted into a new kernel and driver, and.... everything seemed fine?5</a></sup> I still had some issues in Sway, but KDE was working pretty much perfectly - it served as a fantastic comparison point from Windows, and the performance was better</em>. Windows 11 had found its way to my desktop, and I was not happy about that.</p> So, some time last fall marked approximately when, from my perspective with my wonderfully powerful 3090, everything on the kernel, driver, and compositor stack on linux on my system outperformed Windows, noticably.</p> There were still a few classic holdouts - I no longer was bothered by Spotify's dogshit linux client, but I still used discord in my day-to-day (because I am, again, unfortuntely a gamer). I wasn't really keen on using a custom client or web-browser versions of it, because that also removed my ability to use push-to-talk/deafen keybinds/etc. However, discord on Windows was also busy being janky in its own ways (leaking lots of vram, which'll come up again shortly), so I took that L, and was pleasantly surprised by Discord managing to get functioning6</a></sup> wayland screensharing into their canary client in late 2024. And that brings us to....</p> 2025: YEAR OF THE LINUX DESKTOP BABY</h2> It is 2025. Windows 11 is widely regarded as bogged down by AI shitware that no one really wants, in addition to the 'usual' amount of ads, and the new ads-disguised-as-news-stories on the lockscreen. I edit my rEFInd config to make it just boot linux by default, instead of last-boot for seamless reboots. However, NVIDIA is still managing to make the experience kinda</em> annoying, but not in any unresolvable way. Just classic hostility towards the entire non-enterprise-linux ecosystem:</p> There's the proprietary nvidia</code> driver, and the new nvidia-open</code> driver. They are not</em> interchangeable; you need nvidia-open if you're on a new enough gpu. Thankfully, this is documented</a>; critically, the Bazzite</a> install flow makes sure you get the correct -nvidia-</code> or -nvidia-open-</code> variant (assuming you know your gpu model.) Basically everything after the RTX 2000 series (and the tail end of the GTX cards, 1660 and later) need</em> nvidia-open</code> for correctness, generally, even though the proprietary nvidia</code> module supports them and works.7</a></sup></li> Wayland compositors are still affected by a VRAM usage issue, where the heap does not return freed buffers to the nvidia driver. However, there does exist a poorly documented solution</a> that solves the issue. I personally saw my compositor vram usage drop by exactly 2.5GiB once I emplaced the config file that adjusts heap behavior based on process name</em>. Quietly, a bit under a ago, Nvidia added some default profiles into their driver that apply this to KDE's and GNOME's compositor processes; users of nicher compositors, such as sway, or niri, or river, were silently affected by this. For a lot of people, the extra ~2.5GiB of vram usage was quite significant - the nvidia driver is not actually able to page vram out to system ram, unlike (I believe) every other graphics driver on every operating system, I think due to reasons relating to cuda performance on server compute loads preferring allocs to fail & run at their ceiling. Typical nvidia behavior of highly prioritizing the server compute & not providing appropriate config, or properly documenting anything.</li> </ul> That all being said - presently, my niri</a> process is sitting at a reasonable 190MiB of ram, and things do largely Just Work. There are still some lingering minor issues - there will always be some bugs, and the lack of (consistent?) vram-to-system-ram paging is a negative mark - but largely, linux is presently the minimal, high-performance alternative to Windows.</p> I'm not saying you won't have to make some consolations or sacrifices or compromises if you completely ditch Windows and embrace Linux as your desktop operating system - I've had to give up on having a good mouse with an unlockable scroll wheel and</em> 3+ thumb buttons that are trivially configurable on linux, unfortunately - but it is worth it</em> to be able to use an operating system with transparent and sensible logs and centralized package management and isn't trying to shove ads down your face.8</a></sup></p> I am saying that it's possible for The Computer to feel like a pleasant control that you own, instead of something with a license you are allowed to use & subjected to rent-seeking landlords. You will be subject to bugs, and weird errors, and gaps in your knowledge - but there are fixes, there's man</code>ual pages, there's documentation and wikis, there's tutorial videos, there's the steam deck. There's all the friend(s)-that-uses(^H</a>)-linux folks that love answering questions, who would probably kill</em> for someone to ask for their help installing linux.</p> I haven't touched windows a single day this year, and reclaiming the NTFS partitions felt fantastic - it's not every day that you get to free yourself from the shadow of a megacorp, after all.</p> ^{4</sup> I do not recall what the actual flags were, but I do recall it was mildly annoying in a funny way. No shade; I also do not want to receive bug reports for a hostile hardware manufacturer.</p> </div>}^{5</sup> much credit to everyone working on Proton and Wine, as these were huge! A lot of this is complaining about nvidia (and discord, etc) barely having their shit together, but that is because so much else</em> works, and works wonderfully</em>.</p> </div>}^6</sup>BARELY. It grabs your entire desktop audio (as opposed to the old reality of "no audio") by attaching a capture sink to every audio source in the pipewire graph, except for its own webrtc source (call audio). Except it also</em> still grabs its own application audio, so everyone listening to the stream will hear double join noises, will hear your client mute/deafen noises, etc through the stream. You can maybe futz with the pipewire graph manually to un-fuck that, but the couple times I tried to do that, it just broke all</em> capture audio. I really wish there was any competition in this space9</a></sup>.</p> </div> ^{9</sup> yes, I'm self-hosting the latest teamspeak6 server binary and have tried that out. The UX is still incredibly noncompetitive; the people do yearn for being able to read at least a couple text channels without first connecting to that one server and being present in a voice channel. Discord is functionally teamspeak+matrix, and nothing else has replicated that.</p> </div> ^{7</sup> But because this heavily leverages offloading functionality to firmware blobs on the gpu, it's not available on the older cards, which is there are still two versions. afaik the amd drivers are not dissimilar, except that their old driver was open source and in-tree.</p> </div> ^{8</sup> There's even general HDR support, which was one of the last remaining barriers - at this point, Adobe and fortnite/COD/riot's kernel anti-cheats are the main application-level considerations, I think. Aside from discord being kinda shitty on all platforms in different ways.</p> </div> ^{10</sup> I don't feel like I can do a good job of talking about the intersection of my migraine susceptibility and how otherwise-seemingly-insignificant things impact my day to day computer usage a ton. The issue of tearing or flickering displays, be it in the display hardware or the graphics hardware or the computer software, is something that can potentially make my brain hurt immensely for 6 to 18 hours and make me have to exist in a dark quiet space for a while. It's not a fun model to have to operate under, and it's why I do care deeply about the performance and correctness of the rendering+compositing pipelines on my computer.</p> </div>}}}} hecate's weavings 2025-07-06T00:00:00+00:00 hecate's weavings</h1> hecate with her reaper wings, working her magic :3</p> plushie hoard! 2025-07-06T00:00:00+00:00 plushie hoard!</h1> hecate's most treasured plushie hoard 💜</p> slime time! 2024-04-15T00:00:00+00:00 slime time!</h1> who among us hasn't wanted to be engoopened sensually tbh</p> Garden of the Gods 2024-02-14T00:00:00+00:00 Garden of the Gods</h1> headspace scene of the everyone :)</p> eyeclipse 2024-02-02T00:00:00+00:00 eyeclipse</h1> hades-styled portrait of Pandora. looks best on OLED monitors thanks to the #000000 accenting!</p> vibrator go brrr 2023-10-06T00:00:00+00:00 vibrator go brrr</h1> just pandora being a typical fox :) honestly kinda ideal fox treatment/situation....</p> witch's boom 2023-08-29T00:00:00+00:00 witch's boom</h1> gun-witch commission from kabewski! pandora is wielding an MK14 EBR, my favorite marksman rifle - I grew up in the south and won every marksmanship competition I entered - it's just a well engineered tool ma'am</p> goopy dwagon.... 2023-07-14T00:00:00+00:00 goopy dwagon....</h1> gloopy....</p> Ethereal Portrait (Hecate) 2023-07-07T00:00:00+00:00 Ethereal Portrait (Hecate)</h1> TODO</p> heckie's digital hoard 2023-05-18T00:00:00+00:00 heckie's digital hoard</h1> big ol blob o data</p> cult of fox 2023-01-22T00:00:00+00:00 cult of fox</h1> cult of the lamb inspired system art :)</p> Ethereal Portrait (Pandora) 2022-09-09T00:00:00+00:00 Ethereal Portrait (Pandora)</h1> TODO</p> night owl 2022-07-25T00:00:00+00:00 night owl</h1> no one ever looks up</p> Neon Pink? 2022-07-22T00:00:00+00:00 Neon Pink?</h1> pandora as Neon Red of Neon White, with her signature 50-cal, in the first & prettiest region :3</p> persephone char page :3 2022-07-22T00:00:00+00:00 persephone char page :3</h1> char page of persephone being a dog-wizard :3</p> selene, digital regent 2022-04-29T00:00:00+00:00 selene, digital regent</h1> early piece of selene wielding a staff, ft. the old experimental tendril-feathers :3</p> Ethereal Portrait (persephone) 2022-04-18T00:00:00+00:00 Ethereal Portrait (persephone)</h1> TODO</p> Ethereal Portrait (Selene) 2022-04-18T00:00:00+00:00 Ethereal Portrait (Selene)</h1> TODO</p> the cheetos (tm?) aisle 2022-01-21T00:00:00+00:00 the cheetos (tm?) aisle</h1> originally a YCH (specifically a cheetos YCH). later found out angiewolf vaguely based it on the wonderbread guy/trope for kicks xD</p> Dr. Persephone Kills Rorsharch 2021-11-27T00:00:00+00:00 Dr. Persephone Kills Rorsharch</h1> sometimes you just need to explode a guy with your mind</p> persephone art nouveau frame 2021-09-06T00:00:00+00:00 persephone art nouveau frame</h1> art nouveau framed portrait of persephone and some of her motifs :3</p> disaster they 2021-07-13T00:00:00+00:00 disaster they</h1> absol is a harbinger of disasters; just because she's around them constantly doesn't mean they're her fault, though.</p> pumped up kicks 2021-07-13T00:00:00+00:00 pumped up kicks</h1> it's always about the paws</p> celestial fox 2021-03-20T00:00:00+00:00 celestial fox</h1> macro creatures can end up on the galactic size scale sometimes, as a treat</p> Pandora's Box 2021-01-14T00:00:00+00:00 Pandora's Box</h1> a 'vague but menacing angel' commission of pandora :3</p> pink witchy vulpine 2021-01-04T00:00:00+00:00 pink witchy vulpine</h1> touch da fat fwuffy tail 2019-12-28T00:00:00+00:00 touch da fat fwuffy tail</h1> collab between foof n ten! pandora's so caked up from the waist down she almost looks like a taur of sorts.</p> starlit beach 2019-09-07T00:00:00+00:00 starlit beach</h1> old piece with my ex inkh. pretty, though.</p> the conjurer 2019-08-14T00:00:00+00:00 the conjurer</h1> YCH of pandora conjuring up a lil spirit dragon :3</p> cyber thots 2018-12-13T00:00:00+00:00 cyber thots</h1> piece inspired by events at a convention</p> Pandora Cantus 2018-11-24T00:00:00+00:00 Pandora Cantus</h1> the kitsune noise in TWEWY were always my favorite :3</p> cyber tentacles 2018-08-09T00:00:00+00:00 cyber tentacles</h1> everyone wants to see the hacker girl get taken down a peg, right?</p> surfin da web 2018-04-23T00:00:00+00:00 surfin da web</h1> this was when I switched to putting every piece of art in an ISO 8601 timestamp folder. Thank you for the prescience, past me.</p> touch fluffy fox tail! 2017-10-24T00:00:00+00:00 touch fluffy fox tail!</h1> this was one of the first transitioned pieces of art we got!</p> murr~ hewwo! 2016-10-24T00:00:00+00:00 murr~ hewwo!</h1> one of the first pieces of art of pandora. obviously pre-transition! also the first piece (of many) that I got from foof!</p>

Local media tagging and organizing in the digital era

Dragon's Domain

Dragon's Domain</h1> no dragon's lair is complete without a nice mountaintop cave :)</p>

why the trans flag emoji uses the codepoints it uses

mistborn

mistborn</h1> misty and I, garbed in mistcloaks, doing some friendly sparring >:3</p>

sapphic cuddle pile

sapphic cuddle pile</h1> left to right: keea, fern, hecate, rythmyr, lavs. cozy......</p>

sapphic flaunt

sapphic flaunt</h1> left to right: keea, jill, rythmyr, hecate, fern, lavs. all of us just havin a good time :3</p>

begone, windows!

it's year of the linux desktop baby!!</h2> Like any good blog post [[citation needed]], I'll be starting out with an unneccesary amount of context.</p>

hecate's weavings

hecate's weavings</h1> hecate with her reaper wings, working her magic :3</p>

plushie hoard!

plushie hoard!</h1> hecate's most treasured plushie hoard 💜</p>

slime time!

slime time!</h1> who among us hasn't wanted to be engoopened sensually tbh</p>

Garden of the Gods

Garden of the Gods</h1> headspace scene of the everyone :)</p>

eyeclipse

eyeclipse</h1> hades-styled portrait of Pandora. looks best on OLED monitors thanks to the #000000 accenting!</p>

vibrator go brrr

vibrator go brrr</h1> just pandora being a typical fox :) honestly kinda ideal fox treatment/situation....</p>

witch's boom

witch's boom</h1> gun-witch commission from kabewski! pandora is wielding an MK14 EBR, my favorite marksman rifle - I grew up in the south and won every marksmanship competition I entered - it's just a well engineered tool ma'am</p>

goopy dwagon....

goopy dwagon....</h1> gloopy....</p>

Ethereal Portrait (Hecate)

Ethereal Portrait (Hecate)</h1> TODO</p>

heckie's digital hoard

heckie's digital hoard</h1> big ol blob o data</p>

cult of fox

cult of fox</h1> cult of the lamb inspired system art :)</p>

Ethereal Portrait (Pandora)

Ethereal Portrait (Pandora)</h1> TODO</p>

night owl

night owl</h1> no one ever looks up</p>

Neon Pink?

Neon Pink?</h1> pandora as Neon Red of Neon White, with her signature 50-cal, in the first & prettiest region :3</p>

persephone char page :3

persephone char page :3</h1> char page of persephone being a dog-wizard :3</p>

selene, digital regent

selene, digital regent</h1> early piece of selene wielding a staff, ft. the old experimental tendril-feathers :3</p>

Ethereal Portrait (persephone)

Ethereal Portrait (persephone)</h1> TODO</p>

Ethereal Portrait (Selene)

Ethereal Portrait (Selene)</h1> TODO</p>

the cheetos (tm?) aisle

the cheetos (tm?) aisle</h1> originally a YCH (specifically a cheetos YCH). later found out angiewolf vaguely based it on the wonderbread guy/trope for kicks xD</p>

Dr. Persephone Kills Rorsharch

Dr. Persephone Kills Rorsharch</h1> sometimes you just need to explode a guy with your mind</p>

persephone art nouveau frame

persephone art nouveau frame</h1> art nouveau framed portrait of persephone and some of her motifs :3</p>

disaster they

disaster they</h1> absol is a harbinger of disasters; just because she's around them constantly doesn't mean they're her fault, though.</p>

pumped up kicks

pumped up kicks</h1> it's always about the paws</p>

celestial fox

celestial fox</h1> macro creatures can end up on the galactic size scale sometimes, as a treat</p>

Pandora's Box

Pandora's Box</h1> a 'vague but menacing angel' commission of pandora :3</p>

pink witchy vulpine

pink witchy vulpine</h1>

touch da fat fwuffy tail

touch da fat fwuffy tail</h1> collab between foof n ten! pandora's so caked up from the waist down she almost looks like a taur of sorts.</p>

starlit beach

starlit beach</h1> old piece with my ex inkh. pretty, though.</p>

the conjurer

the conjurer</h1> YCH of pandora conjuring up a lil spirit dragon :3</p>

cyber thots

cyber thots</h1> piece inspired by events at a convention</p>

Pandora Cantus

Pandora Cantus</h1> the kitsune noise in TWEWY were always my favorite :3</p>

cyber tentacles

cyber tentacles</h1> everyone wants to see the hacker girl get taken down a peg, right?</p>

surfin da web

surfin da web</h1> this was when I switched to putting every piece of art in an ISO 8601 timestamp folder. Thank you for the prescience, past me.</p>

touch fluffy fox tail!

touch fluffy fox tail!</h1> this was one of the first transitioned pieces of art we got!</p>

Dragon's Domain</h1>
no dragon's lair is complete without a nice mountaintop cave :)</p>

mistborn</h1>
misty and I, garbed in mistcloaks, doing some friendly sparring >:3</p>

sapphic cuddle pile</h1>
left to right: keea, fern, hecate, rythmyr, lavs. cozy......</p>

sapphic flaunt</h1>
left to right: keea, jill, rythmyr, hecate, fern, lavs. all of us just havin a good time :3</p>

hecate's weavings</h1>
hecate with her reaper wings, working her magic :3</p>

plushie hoard!</h1>
hecate's most treasured plushie hoard 💜</p>

slime time!</h1>
who among us hasn't wanted to be engoopened sensually tbh</p>

Garden of the Gods</h1>
headspace scene of the everyone :)</p>

eyeclipse</h1>
hades-styled portrait of Pandora. looks best on OLED monitors thanks to the #000000 accenting!</p>

vibrator go brrr</h1>
just pandora being a typical fox :) honestly kinda ideal fox treatment/situation....</p>

witch's boom</h1>
gun-witch commission from kabewski! pandora is wielding an MK14 EBR, my favorite marksman rifle - I grew up in the south and won every marksmanship competition I entered - it's just a well engineered tool ma'am</p>

goopy dwagon....</h1>
gloopy....</p>

Ethereal Portrait (Hecate)</h1>
TODO</p>

heckie's digital hoard</h1>
big ol blob o data</p>

cult of fox</h1>
cult of the lamb inspired system art :)</p>

Ethereal Portrait (Pandora)</h1>
TODO</p>

night owl</h1>
no one ever looks up</p>

Neon Pink?</h1>
pandora as Neon Red of Neon White, with her signature 50-cal, in the first & prettiest region :3</p>

persephone char page :3</h1>
char page of persephone being a dog-wizard :3</p>

selene, digital regent</h1>
early piece of selene wielding a staff, ft. the old experimental tendril-feathers :3</p>

Ethereal Portrait (persephone)</h1>
TODO</p>

Ethereal Portrait (Selene)</h1>
TODO</p>

the cheetos (tm?) aisle</h1>
originally a YCH (specifically a cheetos YCH). later found out angiewolf vaguely based it on the wonderbread guy/trope for kicks xD</p>

Dr. Persephone Kills Rorsharch</h1>
sometimes you just need to explode a guy with your mind</p>

persephone art nouveau frame</h1>
art nouveau framed portrait of persephone and some of her motifs :3</p>

disaster they</h1>
absol is a harbinger of disasters; just because she's around them constantly doesn't mean they're her fault, though.</p>

pumped up kicks</h1>
it's always about the paws</p>

celestial fox</h1>
macro creatures can end up on the galactic size scale sometimes, as a treat</p>

Pandora's Box</h1>
a 'vague but menacing angel' commission of pandora :3</p>

touch da fat fwuffy tail</h1>
collab between foof n ten! pandora's so caked up from the waist down she almost looks like a taur of sorts.</p>

starlit beach</h1>
old piece with my ex inkh. pretty, though.</p>

the conjurer</h1>
YCH of pandora conjuring up a lil spirit dragon :3</p>

cyber thots</h1>
piece inspired by events at a convention</p>

Pandora Cantus</h1>
the kitsune noise in TWEWY were always my favorite :3</p>

cyber tentacles</h1>
everyone wants to see the hacker girl get taken down a peg, right?</p>

surfin da web</h1>
this was when I switched to putting every piece of art in an ISO 8601 timestamp folder. Thank you for the prescience, past me.</p>

touch fluffy fox tail!</h1>
this was one of the first transitioned pieces of art we got!</p>

murr~ hewwo!</h1>
one of the first pieces of art of pandora. obviously pre-transition! also the first piece (of many) that I got from foof!</p>