Top albums of 2021


But let's not get ahead of ourselves. My top 14 albums of 2021, including FOUR bands I've never heard of, three at 10, 9, and 8:
14. Sting - The Bridge

Sting is back! He's always been all over the map, up and down: whether solo or with The Police, sometimes I can't stand what he's doing, sometimes I love it. This album is pretty good!

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13. The Neal Morse Band - Innocence and Danger

Neal Morse and friends make their first appearance...

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12. Transatlantic - The Absolute Universe

#12 is... Neal Morse and friends! some of the same friends as #13. Some different friends. and they recorded TWO VERSIONS of this one! So that's actually... > 3 hours of Neal Morse and friends :)

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11. Magnus Karlsson - Heart Healer: The Metal Opera

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10. Wheel - Resident Human

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9. Metalite - A Virtual World

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8. Slizard

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7. Gamma Ray - 30 Years Live

This is also #3 from "Top 3 Live or Collections of 2021" is Gamma Ray's amazing new live album.

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6. Helloween - Helloween

The triumphant return of both Hansen and Kiske!

\m/

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5. Joe Bonamassa - Time Clocks

How does this man put out so many albums?! And why are they all great?!?!

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4. Liquit Tension Experiment 3

In any other year this would surely be #1. We had to wait 22 years for LTE3 but it was WORTH IT. >This is also Mike Portnoy's third appearance in the list!

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3. Dream Theater - A View From the Top of the World

Dream Theater actually produced a good album for the first time since Portnoy's long-ago departure.

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2. Iron Maiden - Senjutsu

Iron Maiden in 2000: Hell, we're Iron Maiden! We can have three guitarists from now on!

Iron Maiden in 2021: Hell, we're Iron Maiden! We can release double albums from now on!

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1. Frost* - Day and Age

Never heard of these guys before 2021 but this was ALBUM OF THE YEAR. (I had to make my own playlist for this one because youtube corrupted the official one)

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link dump

Programming topics Decentralization and subsidiarity Must read Twitter thread ((thread reader)) on the 2018 Camp Fire, the most destructive in California history:
[A C hook] has been swinging back and forth for a very, very long time. How long was it rubbing against the hangar bracket? The answer is that we don't know. we think it is about 97 (!) years old, but we're not sure because PG&E (the electric company that owns the lines) didn't keep records about it. [PG&E] kept no records.

link dump

Programming topics Decentralization and subsidiarity Hosting Bootstrapping
  • Stage0 Bootstrap
  • GNU Mes is a Scheme interpreter and C compiler for bootstrapping the GNU System. Since version 0.22 it has again helped to halve the size of opaque, uninspectable binary seeds that are currently being used in the Reduced Binary Seed bootstrap of GNU Guix. The final goal is to help create a full source bootstrap as part of the bootstrappable builds effort for UNIX-like operating systems.
  • mrustc - Rust compiler written in C++
ZFS I finished a rewatch of Taxi not too long ago, or at least those episodes Hulu hadn't manged to lose. They even lost all the Tony Clifton appearances! These are a few moments I thought could be internet-funny