u/angryapplepanda

I wouldn't mind using a more traditional browser if I could just slice out everything except the page. Of course, I would still need to have key commands for basic things, which I think these browsers do.

I would need to still have access to at least the URL box for it to even function, I assume. (Would be cool if I could bring the URL box up with a right-click, but at this point, I'm just daydreaming. I feel like I should just start looking into building my own browser. 😆)

Obviously, the solution for my tiling window manager is to use qutebrowser, but if I could just use something like Brave or LibreWolf and then wrangle the configs to make them closer to qutebrowser, I would.

(Brave would be ideal. I always turn off the AI features, I kill whatever it has to do with crypto...I just like the ad-blocking.)

Thoughts on getting browsers to have the most minimal UI possible? I've cut out as many of the toolbars as I can via normal settings, but I'm wondering if there's a deeper setting somewhere I can play with.

Thank you!

I have pretty much slept on Blackmore's Night for a couple decades, even though Ritchie Blackmore is my all time favorite guitarist. He is the guitarist that shaped my own playing style the most, alongside people like Michael Schenker, Andy Powell, Martin Barre, and Andrew Latimer.

I decided to check out their catalogue the other day, and I was shocked to hear it wasn't just Renaissance music. I mean, it definitely is mostly that, but having been a big Jethro Tull fan as well, much of this isn't terribly far off, especially when, on the third Blackmore's Night record, Ritchie starts playing electric again.

There's lots of songs on their albums that essentially sound like forgotten Rainbow songs, less so the Graham Bonnet and early Turner era, but moreso the Dio era, late Turner era, and the Doogie White album. If you like the baroque, harmonic minor playing on Rainbow's most arcane and dark tracks, you'll probably dig a lot of Blackmore's Night, I'll be honest.

It's not for everyone, but I'm actually really digging it.

I'm still learning Linux. I had used Xubuntu for about six months, but wanted to switch to a non-Ubuntu distro and go as minimalist and hobbyist as possible. I wanted to build it from the ground up and learn about what really goes into a distro, without excessive bloat. I also wanted a more privacy-oriented distro.

So, a friend suggested plain Debian, because it has an easy to use encryption system. Great. I did a bare bones Debian install and just put i3 on top. Had a lot of fun customizing my empty canvas, knowing exactly what tools and paints I was putting into it. Polybar, picom, rofi, alacritty, feh, all the fun stuff. I started getting really into terminal-only stuff, getting excited to tinker. I had Thunar as a legacy item from the XFCE days, but I eventually learned lf, which felt a lot faster and more fun. Terminal = fun, it seems.

When I ran out of essentials to install, I started drifting towards meaningless slop like cmatrix and hollywood (I'm pretty sure hollywood almost overheated my poor stupid laptop at one point).

And then a security update the other day broke some things in a very dumb way, and I confirmed that, if I had XFCE, there would have a been an automated background task that would have been smart enough to take care of this. Because I just had i3, several of my primary apps temporarily broke until I made awkward extra scaffolding in the config files. And then it hit me—I really don't know Linux very well yet. I'm learning every day. But right now, I think I just want stuff like this to just work, until I'm more self-sufficient as a tinkerer. Does that make sense?

I decided to reinstall XFCE. Once I discovered that I could just replace the XFCE window manager with i3, there was no turning back. This hybrid of both that I'm using now is everything I wanted before with none of the downsides. Incredible. I'm equally as efficient with solo i3, but now with XFCE in tandem, I got extra foundational support under it.

Literally don't know why I didn't do this initially, but I suppose you live and learn. Has anyone else here had a similar trajectory? Do you use i3 and XFCE as well? Any extra tips and tricks when using this combo for a noob?

Pretty much every song in this soundtrack is a banger. It's great for midnight driving on the coast, like the best of OSTs written for the Sega Yamaha FM sound chip. It very much tops my list of Genesis/MD OSTs, although Langrisser II edges it out here and there. What are your fave Genesis/MD OSTs?

Just rediscovering how awesome Shark Island's debut Law of the Order (1989) is. Great songwriting, great melodies, great singing, awesome guitar solos.

Hell, that guitar tone is pretty great, too...who's that guitarist? Spencer Sercombe? Reminds me of Doug Marks from Hawk a bit. The guy is just laying down these effortless, weirdly complicated guitar riffs, made all the better by a great late eighties production, all the usual corporate bells and whistles. Cool band that should have gotten more press.

Making Contact is so good. Maybe there wasn't enough room on MTV for an older, diverse hard rock band with Phil Mogg's weathered voice and well-traveled lyrics at the time, when other genres were crowding the airwaves, but I don't know—I sometimes imagine a universe where UFO scored a few American hits with this record. Of course, that's really how I feel about all of Chapman UFO, but I digress.

I keep thinking "Blinded By a Lie" and "Diesel in the Dust" would have made excellent music videos. Maybe even a ballad like "You and Me." There was just something so good about these wartorn UFO songs by this point, Mogg fully settled into his hard rock Springsteen persona. "Blinded" would have a video about unscrupulous execs making the band sign away their rights, "Diesel" feels like it should have had western vibes, or maybe Mad Max. "You and Me" feels nostalgic, maybe black and white footage of old flings.

Maybe 1983 was a little late for this. At this point, if they were going to make a hit record out of this sound, it would have been with Wild, The Willing and the Innocent or Mechanix. 1983 was a lot of things, but it wasn't the soulful gunslinger hard rock UFO had perfected by this point, even with the awesome Neil Carter trying his hardest, bringing in AOR, extra keyboards, even a sax, of all things. They were too heavy for the '80-81 AOR crowd, they were too soft for the NWOBHM, and by '83, new things were around the corner. They had some regional success in the UK, just enough to keep the lights on.

And the band was in bad shape, too, by this point. Pete Way was out. The band were tattered by drugs and relentless effort without big dividends. I think you hear that in the songs on this album, something about Making Contact sounds desperate, emotional, like this is our last chance, make or break. And I think that's to the album's benefit.

I just regularly turn to this record more than any other in the catalog lately. Maybe it's because I've listened to it the least over the years, and so it all sounds more fresh, but I think that's only partially right. I'm a huge fan of the Chapman era of UFO, and people don't talk about Making Contact enough. It's definitely risen In my top UFO records list. It ain't perfect, but it's better than the reception usually allows it.

As a trans person, it makes me happy to see some people come out of the situation in a better place. I've lived in cramped situations that went weird, before aomehow making a living and moving into an apartment with my partner and two dogs. Obviously, this situation of hers went weird by several orders of magnitude higher, but I understand the general sentiment. After all of the madness involving the Zizians, I'm glad that somebody escaped.

A lot of us have probably heard Anders say things in interviews like, "Well, there's really not that much difference between the old sound and the new sound" and while I think both obviously share some core sonic tropes, there's obviously a difference in feel between the two. What are these differences, exactly?

In my opinion, I think there are two distinct differences that separate the early sound from the latter sound. One primary difference is the death and black metal influence, which is much more prominent on Lunar Strain through Whoracle. You see this in their melodic choices, in the blastbeats they occasionally use, and the twiddly tremelo picking that is such a huge part of early Swedish death, melodic death, and black metal. I think what set In Flames apart was obviously their choice to go beyond the typical black-death sound and include more melodic passages and Iron Maiden style harmony riffs, helping to create the Gothenburg "melodeath" sound.

But I think this second difference is more fundamental: the influence of traditional Swedish folk music, giving In Flames almost the aire of a folk metal band. This is so foundational to their early sound, you can see it everywhere: the 3/4—6/8 sea shanty shuffle riffs both fast and slow, the acoustic outros and instrumentals, and even the melodic choices themselves, giving In Flames a baroque, medieval vibe on the early records.

Combining these two traits together, we get a band more aligned with Scandinavian death and power metal bands of the era, and this is directly evident in Jesper's shared history with HammerFall.

The newer sound is no longer based in death and folk influences, and while it does incorporate similar riffs—the third harmonized syncopated leads—it begins from a completely different framework, one of more traditional rock and roll structures. The early sound was almost progressive at times, and most newer songs, even on Foregone, have a verse-chorus-verse-chorus-solo structure, despite still incorporating more trad In Flames riffage. The melodies are also often different, lacking in the same minor mode sound with a medieval folk flair.

Wrapping things up, I think the foundation of the latter day sound is a post-millennium metalcore, post-hardcore and conventional metal aesthetic—not death, black and folk—with early trad In Flames sounds peppered on top. The old sound had a death, black and folk base with a new melodic sensibility peppered on top. Both sounds have different fundamentals, but similar accents.

This is not to say that I dislike the latter day stuff, of course. I'm just trying to see where the conflict is between older fans and newer fans, and I want to try and understand the actual change in sound, despite Anders claming there is little change. I personally like their entire career. As a black and death metal fan, it tend to prefer the early stuff, but I've grown to appreciate the newer as well.

Is there anything you disagree with? How do you think In Flames has actually, fundamentally changed over the years? Would love some opinions.

I almost feel dumb posting an Alice Cooper song in r/yachtrock, but this album is produced by David Foster, and this song has Steve Lukather, David Hungate, Jay Graydon, Bill Champlin, Steve Porcaro, it goes on.

This album is bonanza personnel. It's kind of weird for the boat, and hops around styles a little, but it's clearly an intoxicated Alice deciding to get into the west coast yacht sound. The main riff IS a Doobie bounce. Also, I mean, he hired THE crew. Haven't kept up with the podcast as much as I should, so I don't know if this has come up, yet.

What y'all think?

QUICK EDIT: The songwriting here is elevated by the presence of Bernie Taupin. Pretty rad. Not one of Cooper's better albums, but I kinda like the yacht influence.

For example, Dreamy Creamy Summer, which partially influenced me to eat more ice cream that July and August, for which I quit cold turkey in September. No regrets.

The show at the time was peaking. It was full tilt boogie and it felt like it would never end. KF would always be there to keep me entertained during my long jobs in the sun.

Some shows don't even get an ending. I'm happy with what was accomplished. Looking forward to listening to the live show. 🍦