january 2026
new projects
- crumbmark - just started: a fully local attribution tool that's simple-snazzy. i am already quite fond of it.
- vinyl-collection - this project! experimentally mirrored to github and modularized. now i get a now page. neat!
project updates
- tidal-bitperfect - my personal tidal player. v0.2.0 is slated to be a big upgrade over the last release! you can, of course, try it for yourself early by using main. i only advise against it because if you need a dedicated tidal playback frontend, you probably already built your own or use a far more mature project, let's be real.
listening
been absolutely thrashing to the hellaverse soundtrack. i've been remarkably boring this month, as i've been busy with wild happenstance. instead, we can talk about Die With a Smile[1] by Lady Gaga and Bruno Mars, released as a standalone single on August 16, 2024. It became Spotify's most-streamed song of 2025[2] and is still topping charts here in january.
in my opinion, it's about damn time the dinosaurs went mecha-mode and wiped the charts clean of the slop[3] that plagues modern billboards. the only other noteable thing from 2025 that's continued charting into 2026 has been the k-pop demon hunter's stuff.
toki pona
have you heard of toki pona?[4] i hadn't until November 5, 2025, when i (like many others) was introduced to the simple language by a certain RobWords video.[5] suffice it to say, i've garnered a deep respect for constructed languages as a whole since then. the complex interplay of community, creator, language, context, and interactions is enough to keep anyone's mind busy for at least 3 months. or longer.
thoughts
github pages lacks the file size limits of neocities. granted, that was never a problem. the original neocities site used jsdelivr. but.. since we're here now, and jsdelivr is probably placebo quicker anyway.. might re-encode everything at higher bitrates just because i can.
also, because i want to see what i can get away with, this new level of freedom might end up being very funny. more likely: i forget about all of this in a week!
sources
- Lady Gaga. (15 August 2024). "Die With a Smile". YouTube. Retrieved 25 January 2026.
- Spotify. (3 December 2025). The Top Artists, Songs, Albums, Podcasts, and Audiobooks of 2025. Spotify Newsroom. Archived from the original on 8 January 2026. Retrieved 25 January 2026.
- Leslie Monter-Casio. (28 August 2025). Viral by Design: The TikTok-ification of the Music Industry. The Cornell Daily Sun. Archived from the original on 14 January 2026. Retrieved 25 January 2026.
- Toki Pona (official site) tokipona.org. Archived from the original on 21 January 2026. Retrieved 25 January 2026.
- Robwords. (27 January 2024). "The world's smallest language". YouTube. Retrieved 25 January 2026.
