It feels like I’m starting to see a pattern where I post something about my life and then a program I use falls under controversy or gets temporarily stunted not long after. This week’s case is Spotube, a #FOSS program that emulates Spotify Premium. It does this by taking information from your Spotify account (your liked songs, playlists, etc.) and pulls the music for those songs from YouTube.

It wasn’t a perfect tool. The load times could be frustrating, especially if you skip a song, it would sometimes not be able to retrieve your music so it would just kind of sit there idly, but when it worked (and it usually would) it helped me better understand why people use Spotify: the sense of discovery. I could just pick a song I wanted to listen to and Spotube would ready a playlist of similar songs to keep with the vibe, and I liked a lot of them.

So much for holding to a resolution, right?

This past February was a very taxing month. Around the beginning of 2024, I wound up injuring myself and underwent surgery fixing that up. While it was thousands out of pocket to cover such because of my high deductible– I figured being relatively young I wouldn’t have needed it–, it wasn’t until that November I realized that I had been paying for accident insurance as well. I contacted the agency immediately, sent over my paperwork, and was absolutely surprised to be award more than twice what I had spent for my injury.

The past few months have made one thing consistently clear: building websites is the easy part; putting content into them, a-whole-nother story. I figured my obsession with so many things would just make me primed to splatter creativity all over the screen, but instead I’ve just stared blankly at it. So void of ideas that I could count the fibers of the canvas (or in this case pixels on the screen).

It’s already getting half way through the decade and half way through my twenties. While I’m more than comfortable where I am and with where I’m heading (assumptively), there’s still a part of me that continues to feel like that’s not enough- like it’s never enough. Sure, part of that is to be expected: the quarter-life crisis is essentially a staple of really becoming an adult, but it feels like I’ve had that emptiness since even before starting college. Maybe not emptiness; more so, absence.