on spotify recommendation is just a euphemism for 'we are being paid to promote this'

so yes

oh, you've been listening to antichrist siege machine lately? check out sabrina carpenter!

that's not been my experience with the "discover weekly" feature

I used this to add back a bit of 'personality' to a gig poster I upscaled. Thanks - it worked great!

Glad it helped bring back some personality to your poster. Thanks for trying it out!

Please post more pictures of your moon, I would like to see them.

This sounds interesting, would you please consider elaborating so I could give it a go?

If you pay for RateYourMusic premium then you can use a service they offer called Sonemic. It gives you customized recommendations based on the ratings in your RYM account. You connect your Spotify account to link their track/album data to your Spotify library and then it gives you several playlists of hundreds of songs. Afterwards you can deauthorize the connection and keep your playlists. Only downside is you have to spend a bit of time adding all your ratings but you get both "recommends" and "out of comfort zone” lists.

I've found some excellent picks I wouldn't have heard of otherwise from this service. Plus RYM alone is good for manually browsing user-generated lists. Also their genre categorisation is community-driven and by far the most detailed I've come across. Unfortunately their API is not open yet but they're making headway into officially releasing it this year. Hopefully by then I'll be able to auto-add all my curated to-listen albums.

A few isolated incidents?

There have been more than 70 arson attacks on tobacco stores and other businesses believed to be involved in the sale of illicit tobacco since March 2023, according to the Victoria police assistant commissioner Martin O’Brien.

Very well. You are correct, and I will admit my own ignorance with respect to the situation in Victoria as it appears to be wildly (in the literal sense of the word) different, and I used the NSW situational numbers.

ABC[0] reports following numbers for arson attacks on tobacconists across Australian states:

NSW: 14

Victoria: 130

Queensland: 30

South Australia: 12

Western Australia: 8

Whilst 14 (NSW) is more than a few, the order of magnitude difference compared with 130 (VIC) is a bewildering revelation, indeed, especially considering that NSW has a larger population. I do not know what makes NSW and VIC so different with respect to the matter at hand.

[0] https://www.abc.net.au/news/2024-11-29/two-men-arrested-over...

I suggest vetting your service providers more thoroughly next time...looks like you were saddled with a company stuck 10 years in the past :)

Which techniques would you say are worth persuing at this point?

Do you think Discord should be free? Strange hill to die on..

I literally had to tell their customer support I had cancer to get them to cancel my sub. Will never get them another cent.

Wow, that’s a lot. I didn’t do that, but I did get very angry in a chat to convince them to partially refund subscription costs I believed were cheated out of my pocket.

I paid a stupid amount for a subscription I never used because Abode has annoyingly effective dark patterns in their trial/cancellation flow.