Oh, cool, an excuse to trot out two of my favorite videos:

How to Be a Pirate Captain

How to be a Pirate Quartermaster

I switched to Qobuz about six months ago after also trialling Deezer, Tidal, Apple Music and YT Music. Highly recommended. Their curated playlists are excellent and I can’t believe what a different the higher quality and lossles bitrates makes. They pay artists way more than the other platforms though, remarkably, they’re the only (major) platform to actually publish per-stream figures, even if they’re only averages. Based in France if that matters to you. They only offer paid plans but do have free trials and provide users with a code for a third-party migration service to bring your playlists over.

These people are actively willing George Orwell’s nightmare into being.

The Ministry of Plenty’s forecast had estimated the output of boots for the quarter at one-hundred-and-forty-five million pairs. The actual output was given as sixty-two millions. Winston, however, in rewriting the forecast, marked the figure down to fifty-seven millions, so as to allow for the usual claim that the quota had been overfulfilled. In any case, sixty-two millions was no nearer the truth than fifty-seven millions, or than one-hundred-and-forty-five millions. Very likely no boots had been produced at all. Likelier still, nobody knew how many had been produced, much less cared. All one knew was that every quarter astronomical numbers of boots were produced on paper, while perhaps half the population went barefoot.

Yeah, you know what, I’ll say it and I’ll say it right to you: “fascists” shouldn’t have a “c” in it. It just doesn’t look right when I read it and seems to unnatural to type. I get that it’s a loan word, but still.

Yeah, fuck due process. Enemies of the establishment don’t deserve to be treated fairly.

Back in the eighties my parents (British) bought a villa in Spain, all on it’s own on a mountainside. Over the following ten years fifty - yes, fifty - other villas were built, all independently, all by Brits, all on top of each other, most without planning permission. A group of busybodies formed a HOA-style association and took over the area, building an English Shoppe with a red phone box outside where you could buy the Daily Mail and Tetley Tea, an English pub, replacing the road signs with English ones, even an English radio station. The last time we visited and decided to sell, we arrived to find they’d illegally installed a gate across the road - the PUBLIC road - and were only giving the remotes to certain worthy residents, which apparently we weren’t.

But it’s okay. Because they weren’t dirty migrants forcing their culture on others and refusing the integrate; they were expats just looking for a little bit of sun.