What have you been listening to this week? You don't need to do a 6000 word review if you don't want to, but please write something! If you've just picked up some music, please update on that as well, we'd love to see your hauls :)

Feel free to give recs or discuss anything about each others' listening habits.

You can make a chart if you use last.fm:

http://www.tapmusic.net/lastfm/

Remember that linking directly to your image will update with your future listening, make sure to reupload to somewhere like imgur if you'd like it to remain what you have at the time of posting.

As part of a weekly series, these topics are a place for users to casually discuss the things they did — or didn't do — during their week. Did you accomplish any goals? Suffer a failure? Do nothing at all? Tell us about it!

I'd like to hear your stories of things your parents did with good intentions that went wrong. This is mine.

When I was very young – old enough that I can remember it, but young enough that I wasn't going to school full time yet – my mother would volunteer at a local nursing home. I never met my maternal grandmother. I think she died a year or two before I was born. I have a vague memory of meeting my maternal grandfather, and there are photos of it, but he died when I was still quite young. Maybe 4 or 5. I don't believe either of my grandparents were in ill health before their deaths. But I think that their deaths affected my mother and she wanted to help other elderly people, so she started volunteering at the nursing home.

I have 2 older brothers who by this time were in school most of the day, leaving my mother and me at home alone. I think she also got bored of doing housework and wanted to do something useful with her time. (I can't say I blame her!) I suspect she also thought that the residents of the nursing home would enjoy interacting with a child, even if it wasn't their own grandchild. So she took me with her. I think she wanted me to learn to value elderly people and to learn to value community service.

Unfortunately, she failed miserably. What I learned was that old people are scary as fuck and I didn't want to be anywhere near them. You this was a nursing home. This was not an "old folks home" where they play canasta, have dances, and engage in elderly hanky panky. This was end-of-life care for people dying of cancer, and the now-preventable diseases like polio. The entire place reeked of vomit, and the old people were hard of hearing and weird. They were almost always in a bed or wheelchair, and usually in hospital gowns. There were often sounds of screaming from other rooms where some patient was in terrible pain from whatever ailment they suffered.

The residents were all old and gray haired except for one. He was a young man. He had to be younger than my mother who would have been in her early 30s. He was probably 20-ish years old. His hair was not gray - it was dark black and close cut with electric clippers, though not quite a crew cut. He was always in a hospital gown and always in a wheelchair that had an IV pole on it (though I don't recall there ever being anything hanging from it). And while he looked normal, he had some sort of mental deficit where he could only grunt and moan. I would often see him loudly moaning and gesticulating as if trying to point at something to say, "give me that," or "take me over there."

The one bright side to this place was that there was a woman in a red and white striped uniform who pushed around a cart full of every type of candy imaginable! I wanted so much to get a peanut butter cup or a chocolate bar from her, but no. Her candy was strictly off-limits to me. (I don't know whether it was cost or health that made my mother refuse to ever let me have a piece of candy.)

I'm pretty sure my mother was trying to teach me the value of both old people and volunteering to help our community. But as a ~4 year old, it was too much. It instead taught me that getting old meant pain, suffering, and eventually death, and that old people are scary as fuck. I didn't want to get old or be around old people. (I eventually got over it and now am nearing being an old person myself. 😉)

I really don’t have much to say, that’s 100% an honest question about something I truly fail to understand. I’m not opposed to having children if it seems right for some reason, but this is not a dream or project of mine. When I ask people about it, I get vague answers or stuff I cannot relate to at all. And some people seem to want to get married and have children just because they think they’re supposed to.

I’m really not in a position to judge, but I will probably politely ask further questions for my own education.

If that’s a sensitive topic for you and you don’t wish to indulge my curiosity, maybe this post is not for you! Everything surrounding parenthood tends to generate gratuitous animosity, so please be patient with my earnest ignorance.

I don't know about you, but I love reading about other people's dreams and occasionally sharing my own.

Let this be a place to share your dreams, whether they're super mundane or absolutely wild. Reply any time you feel like sharing to your last comment, so we have a thread where each top level comment is a different individual.

Apple Music - https://music.apple.com/us/album/backyard-bastards/1532748158?i=1532748159
Spotify - https://open.spotify.com/album/5pdpC268ZugcBl48WGVe4j
YouTube - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=X3Rnppk23jI

At the risk of just posting every new Wargasm single as they drop, UK duo Wargasm is back with a new single that continues their genre mash-up goodness. Backyard Bastards evokes feelings of Treats era Sleigh Bells. Like Sleigh Bells, the programmed drum beats sound like the fall out of the sky as the punctuate some super distorted guitar riffs. But noise rock is just one layer of this track, which includes Sam Matlock's growls and shouts along side Milkie Way's super smooth cleans.

Lyrically, the band seems to take a step into politics just a bit rather than just the general rage of their past efforts with selections like

When you're tired of living for these bastards
I'll teach you how to kill your gods
and hunt your masters
I'm sick of feeling but this feeling's too strong
I wanna kill somebody but I know it's wrong

A section that may speak a lot to fellow young people like them, who feel they've been dealt a raw hand by a generation that swam in comfort in excess in pervious decades.

For fans of Sleigh Bells, My Ticket Home and Papa Roach.

At my day job at a non-for-profit, I direct the digital services and platforms (among other things). One thing that I've seen in my org. is the widespread use of the Bitly URL shortener (free plan/tier) for the sharing of our many online and offline campaigns. The myriad departments in the org. for the most part operate quite autonomously, though I can influence the use of digital platforms (at least the majority of the time). I'd like to get away from using Bitly. Would anyone kindly recommend alternatives to Bitly? Self-host and open source options would be preferred, but not required if the price is right (read: low enough for a non-profit).

I've used YOURLs many years ago, and it worked great; did everything that I needed and was straight-forward to install and use. (The only cost was a cheap $5/month Digital Ocean droplet, that I happened to run other things on too.) However, I have also heard of - but never used - the following other options:

• Kutt
• Polr

So...Are any of the above worth considering (or avoiding)? Are there any other, perhaps better alternatives not listed here? I'd appreciate any suggestions and recommendations! Thanks in advanced!

This topic is part of a series. It is meant to be a place for users to discuss creative projects they have been working on.

Projects can be personal, professional, physical, digital, or even just ideas.

If you have any creative projects that you have been working on or want to eventually work on, this is a place for discussing those.