@NovaPrime @popheads There’s some more details about Alessia Cara’s forthcoming album in an interview she recently did with People Magazine.

It will lean into her '50s and '60s soul influences. Also, a guest appearance from John Mayer on one of the tracks:

"On Friday, July 19, Cara released “Dead Man,” the lead single to her soon-to-come fourth studio album with production from Mike Elizondo. It’s a song she describes as a “jam” with a jazzy touch, an in-your-face horn section and the feeling of “all the music that I loved growing up.” There’s splashes of her favorite material from the ‘50s and ‘60s, a “little bit” of 2000s, and it of course features Cara’s distinct , always-commanding vocals.

…

" The album itself, which Cara has yet to reveal the title of, is set to arrive in the fall. She says it’s not a jazz album by any means, but rather “feels like a collection of all the things that I love." And she loves a lot of music. Over the last few years, she’s tapped into some music from the ‘60s and ‘70s, African funk, bossa nova, and primarily what she described as material created in “eras before my time” — the Lijadu Sisters, Billy Joel and some old Red Hot Chili Peppers records.

"Recorded between late 2021 and the top of 2024, Cara’s new album process started “very slow,” when she was ‘in a little bit of a rut lyrically and conceptually’.

"‘I wrongfully felt like I said everything that I needed to say, and I was just stuck on what to say. I was actually in a good place, and I don’t really tend to write well when I’m in a good place because you don’t really need to vent when you’re happy, I guess. So I was like, ‘What do I do? I’ve never been a writer from this perspective.’ So I had to readjust my mindset and readjust the way that I approached songwriting, which is kind of a fun exercise and a fun challenge because you have to, I don’t know, put yourself in a different position or exercise a different muscle that you don’t typically exercise,’ she says.

…

“During one song in particular that’s yet to be released, Cara features a minute-long John Mayer guitar solo, something she calls ‘one of the coolest things I’ve been able to make happen in my life.’”

https://people.com/alessia-cara-interview-dead-man-single-exclusive-8680099

@PeelerSheila @melbaboutown Unfortunately, they’re going out of business. But, if there’s still a Body Shop still open anywhere near you, their hemp honey lip balm works well.

(If there isn’t one still open near you, various online stores that also sell them…)

@naught101 @lost_faith It predates the internet.

Back in 2000, a guy named Robert Putnam wrote a book based on his research into why there has been a breakdown in community in America: http://bowlingalone.com/

(If you ever hear someone use the phrase “social capital”, they’re alluding to his research.)

@calhoon2005 Haha Any kind of buffet or all-you-can-eat situation doesn’t count!

@Seagoon_ Wifey is trying to claim that it’s really not that uncommon to mix Crunchy Nut Corn Flakes, Nutra Grain, and Weet Bix together. And to eat this particular cereal combo for dinner.

I’m not doubting her… I just haven’t come across this combo before.

Anyone else here mix three different breakfast cereals?

@Seagoon_ Loud crashing sound in the bathroom, then cats come sprinting out.

Do I even want to look?

@Duenan @Thornburywitch Hawthorn is currently on 7 wins, with games still to come against West Coast, North, Adelaide, and Richmond.

On recent form, percentage aside, I could definitely see them ending up in the finals…

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@DavidDoesLemmy @Zagorath Here’s an article about a company named RedFlow, that has sold its fourth grid-scale long-duration zinc bromine flow battery to California:

https://reneweconomy.com.au/redflow-tapped-as-preferred-battery-provider-for-a-fourth-major-california-project/

Where’s RedFlow based? Brisbane.

An alternative to bromine flow batteries is grid-scale lithium.

And where is one of the world’s largest lithium minjng regions? Western Australia.

The Coalition’s policy is to ban any further investment in grid-scale batteries from RedFlow or with WA lithium, along with banning further investments in wind and solar.

Instead, it wants to hand roughly half a trillion dollars to largely foreign-owned multinationals to build nuclear power plants in Australia.

Assuming the Coalition can deliver 7 large-scale first-of-its-kind infrastructure projects on time and on budget in Australia, it will take 10 to 15 years to build them. In the meantime, Australia will continue burning coal and natural gas.

And all this for an energy source that costs substantially more per megawatt hour than renewables, coal, or gas.

@Baku @Seagoon_ I’m sorry, but you really need to throw in the steak knives: https://youtu.be/iiATDMHU7gc?si=QPDgNRlgjUhUssSx

@wscholermann @Seagoon_ Mining companies, mostly…

@wscholermann @Seagoon_ And when politics is covered by most of the media, it’s basically presented as a clash of personalities and a footy game.

This Labor MP says this. This Coalition MP says that. Minister refuses to confirm. Party room sources say. This shadow minister made a gaffe. The opposition leader made comments attacking this. The prime minister responded by saying that.

And according to the latest opinion polls…

It’s really irrelevant to the everyday lives of most people!

Meanwhile, the thing that really matters from politics is the laws we live under. How government departments go about their job and deliver things like schools and hospitals. Which new train lines do or don’t get built. What the government funds, and who pays how much tax for it.

The focus should be on what issues people in the community are facing.

What kind of society do we have right now? What kind of country, state, and city do we want to live in?

What are the laws and policies right now?

What’s their impact on those issues? Are they helping or harming?

And how could they be different?

@sunzu @dvdnet62 Oh come now. If there’s one thing Mozilla doesn’t need anyone’s help with, it’s shooting itself in the foot with its own gun.

Now excuse me, I have some Pocket articles to read on my Firefox OS phone…

@just_kitten @Thornburywitch Many of the OG hipsters have moved west to Footscray and Yarraville.

Or they decamped during the pandemic, and migrated to one of the towns around Castlemaine or Belgrave.

There’s also a steady cross-border migration to Newtown and Marrickville in Sydney.

@makeasnek On a broader note, I think possibly the best approach for decentralised, open-sourced web search might be an evolution on the SearXNG model.

At the top of the funnel, you have meta search engines that query and aggregate results from a number of smaller niche search engines.

The metasearch engines are open source, anyone with a spare server or a web hosting account can spin one up.

For some larger sites that are trustworthy, such as Wikipedia, the site’s own search engine might be what’s queried.

For the Fediverse and other similar federated networks, the query is fed through a trusted node on the network.

And then there’s a host of smaller niche search engines, which only crawl and index pages on a small number of websites vetted and curated by a human.

(Perhaps on a particular topic? Or a local library or university might curate a list of notable local websites?)

(Alternatively, it might be that a crawler for a web index like Curlie.org only crawls websites chosen by its topic moderators.)

In this manner, you could build a decent web search engine without needing the scale of Google or Microsoft.

@makeasnek @schizoidman YaCy is still around.

And https://searx.space/ is an open source metasearch search engine with many instances. (Try https://searx.be/ if you want to test it out.)

SearX/SearXNG allows you to aggregate results from a number of different search engines. You choose which ones, and they’re stored in your browser without setting up an account.

@sabreW4K3 Plume doesn’t appear to be active, unfortunately 🥺

There’s a notice on the official Join Plume website saying the former developers don’t have the time to maintain it anymore. Most of the former public instances now throw up errors of various kinds.

WriteFreely ( @writefreely ) is alive and well. I was seriously toying with the idea of setting up a blog through its main instance, which is called Write.as Professional. The sticking point for me was that the official on-platform monetisation tool (Coil) appears to be dead, and doesn’t support members-only posts (like Ghost).

Ghost, when federation goes live, looks like it will be the best option for my blog.

WordPress plus @pfefferle 's plugins is another great option, depending on what you want to use it for. (There’s no shortage of WP plugins!)

As for Lemmy, I could see a blogging-focussed front end being created for it, in the same way FediBB put a traditional message board front end on it, but one doesn’t appear to exist at present.

@tombruzzo @Gibsonisafluffybutt I’m in the process of switching over — I downloaded Firefox quite literally this morning.

I’m also playing around with NextCloud as a possible substitute for a number of Google’s other services.

Unfortunately, it looks like Google jumped the shark at this point.

The accountants and managerialists are well and truly in charge. The people who actually cared about building a great search engine, or a great open mobile operating system, have been cast aside.

Panicked decision-making about LLMs and enshittification for profit seems to be the new norm.

@StudChud @Pilk He may now have softer, more supple and youthful skin, but he’ll always be awful on the inside.

@trk @TassieTosser Knox City Council in outer-eastern Melbourne did exactly this: https://www.knox.vic.gov.au/whats-happening/news/keeping-your-cats-safe-and-secured .

The council did it because some of its suburbs (The Basin, Ferntree Gully, Upper Ferntree Gully, parts of Boronia, Lysterfield) border national parks and the Dandenong Ranges.

Younger cats can adapt to living indoors.

But the challenge was with older cats, who are used to roaming around.

The happy medium would be to phase it in over five to 10 years, where any new cats registered or adopted after a particular date have to stay indoors, but older cats can continue to roam.