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Weekly notes 22/2023

··820 words·4 mins
Life Sydney Weekly notes weekly-notes gaming music concert Diablo IV
Table of Contents

What’s been happening #

  • We started the week with a concert - something that I booked just two days before! It all began with me sending a message to my brother-in-law, asking him to check out the bass on this Lanie Lane cover of ‘Gold on the Ceiling’ by The Black Keys. He’s a bass player, so I figured if he hadn’t seen it, he’d enjoy the performance. And that led to him telling me that he’s heading for the Victor Wooten and The Wooten Brothers gig. As soon as he mentioned that, I started looking for any shows, and incredibly enough, not only was there a show two days later, but the tickets were still available! I wasted no time and bought the tickets right away.

    • The gig was awesome - the venue was the Manning Bar - and the venue was just perfect for an intimate gig. It was opened by Frank Sultana, and then followed by the Wooten Brothers. It was just incredible to watch them play live. I don’t have any words to describe how amazing they were, and neither will the photos/videos do justice to their performance, but here’s a small video clip of it.
    Victor Wooten and The Wooten Brothers Concert

  • And at the end of the week, we went to a Candlelight Concert (well, not real candles, sadly, but I suspect it would have been too hot or a fire hazard to have real candles). The concert was an orchestral tribute to Queen, featuring some of their popular and not-so-popular songs. The orchestral reimagining was done pretty well but could have used a couple more instruments. Overall, it was a good event, and if you’re on the fence, I would recommend checking it out. Since we were only allowed to record during the final piece, here they are performing “Crazy Little Thing Called Love.”

    Candlelight Concert - Tribute to Queen

    Townhall - the venue of the Candlelight Concert

  • Coming back from the concert, we walked over to Darling Harbour. It looked really good, especially with the Vivid lighting in place! As we reached there, the Vivid Elemental show was going on, and I managed to capture the last minute of the show.

    Darling Harbour

    Vivid Elemental Show

  • Diablo IV is finally here. I’ve played about 9 hours of the game and have been having a good time with it. I’m currently playing a Sorcerer, focusing on fire. I’m at Level 21 and beginning to run into trouble clearing the mob at World Tier 2. I’ll probably drop it down to World Tier 1 and see how it goes. I’ve also installed it on the Steam Deck, and it has been running pretty well, so I should be able to play it for the next few weeks when I’m away.

  • Reddit seems to have pulled a Twitter and has outrageously priced their API access with a non-negotiable price at a rate of $12,000 USD for 50 million requests. This is a fairly steep tariff, and many app developers have mentioned that it would be nearly impossible to recoup this amount, even with a stiff subscription price, and therefore, most of them are likely to shut down their apps. The reason I say they have pulled a Twitter is that Twitter did exactly this, albeit they outright killed API access for all apps, and it doesn’t seem like it has troubled people - they still use Twitter’s first-party app, and I suspect Reddit knows this would be the case for them as well. I mentioned this on Mastodon that most people don’t really know or care about third-party apps.

    • The one thing going against Reddit’s plan is that a lot of Reddit’s power users are often contributors to the content (or moderate it), and they might end up causing Reddit to reconsider their decision. A lot of subreddits are going dark in protest. Let’s see how this turns out.

  • I’ll be out of Australia and visiting the US for the next three weeks. I’ll try to keep the weekly posts going, but if I can’t, now you know why. 😉

If you’re looking to augment your news feeds, Ask HN: What other news feeds do you read besides Hacker News? has you covered.

Also bonus read: Enshittification

Here is how platforms die: first, they are good to their users; then they abuse their users to make things better for their business customers; finally, they abuse those business customers to claw back all the value for themselves. Then, they die.

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