• Activity
  • Votes
  • Comments
  • New
  • All activity
    1. What have you been listening to this week?

      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...

      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.

      7 votes
    2. What have you been listening to this week?

      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...

      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.

      5 votes
    3. Kings of the losers

      Kings of the losers Incels imagine a world in which they can only lose. The result: no girlfriend, ever. We met them in the saddest places of the internet— and in real life. A report by Philipp...

      Kings of the losers


      Incels imagine a world in which they can only lose. The result: no girlfriend, ever. We met them in the saddest places of the internet— and in real life.

      A report by Philipp Daum: https://www.zeit.de/autoren/D/Philipp_Daum/index
      Translation of the online version, last updated May 30, 2026 08:55 UTC+1 by @Grzmot.
      Originally published in German in ZEIT am Wochenende, issue 22/2026.

      Gifted link to the German original: https://www.zeit.de/digital/2026-05/incel-bewegung-internet-maenner-depression?freebie=84491b05


      1. Rejection

      The boy was new in class. A shy teenager, interested in hiking alone and watching anime. He had the telephone numbers of two classmates to talk over homework. No friends otherwise. One day, a girl asked him in front of the entire class if they wanted to do something together. He was immediately suspicious. He thought: if I say yes, everyone will laugh. Later, it turned out that the girl lost a bet.

      He said no. The class laughed anyway.

      This boy is a man today, 29 years old. To this day, he hasn’t forgotten this story with the girl. In this text I’ll call him sprixxles, by his username on Reddit. No one in his analog life knows,that he is an incel, and that shouldn’t change.

      Sprixxles remembers when he came across the term incel online. He remembers thinking, “I hope that doesn’t describe me,” and how he slowly and painfully realized that it did.

      Incel means involuntary celibate. Men who can’t find a woman and believe they never will because they are too shy, too ugly, not worth loving, but also because they believe that women today have way too high standards. In the past, men hid their virginity. From that the internet forged a collective identity.

      Incels carry within them something shameful, apparently full self aware. They gather in online forums, Discord servers, and on reddit. They have usernames like subhumanDNA or invisiblebeta. Scroll a bit through those forums, join some discord servers, and soon you’ll see someone celebrating Adolf Hitler’s birthday. Someone posts a video where a woman is beaten up. The incels do everything they can to enrage the normies, which is what they call us.

      But their world also contains surprising places. Essays and philosophical debates, where incels respectfully debate feminists. The American journalist Naama Kates once described the incel world as “multi-layered, eloquent, incredibly funny, enraging, and deeply heartbreaking.”

      When I was a teenager, I let my hair grow down to my shoulders. I listened to sad music and played The Dark Eye with my other long-haired friends. We sat at big tables, imagining, in week-long planning sessions, dwarven warriors and elven mages, and rolled dice with twenty sides to play out their complex battles. The dark eye is the German variant of Dungeons & Dragons, on which the musician Marilyn Manson once commented: “If a cigarette shortens your lifespan by seven minutes, then every game of Dungeons & Dragons delays losing your virginity by seven hours.” We played every weekend, sometimes three parties spaced out across two days.

      What exactly differentiated incels and me? At which crossroads of life did we take separate paths?

      2. The revelation of FaceandLMS

      In 2016 the user FaceandLMS uploaded a video to YouTube, that “changed the internet forever and which very few people ever realized.” At least, that’s what a comment under the video says.

      Hailing from Britain and identifying as an incel, FaceandLMS disguised himself as an attractive man on the dating platform Plenty of Fish. He named this persona Carl. He used pictures of a male model. With this experiment he wanted to contradict what society tells shy men, and what my mom always told me too: women like someone who’s friendly and confident, someone with good character.

      Quickly, Carl is overwhelmed with requests to talk. He chats with many women at the same time and tries his best to do everything wrong. He writes that he is on antidepressants, that he is incredibly insecure, that he’s broke. He is unfriendly, sometimes racist (”ching chong chang, do you want to bang?”)—and still successful. The lesson appears clear: women pretend that they care about character, but really they only value good looks.

      At the end of the video, FaceandLMS reveals what makes a male face attractive, with drawn in lines, angles and squares that should show the ideal proportions of different parts of the face:

      • Short philtrum (the tiny valley that connects the upper lip with the nose)
      • Predator-animal-like eyes
      • A high facial width-to-height ratio; the higher the value, the more attractive the man is
      • Defined maxilla (upper jaw), mandibule (lower jaw), and chin
      • Body fat percentage between 10 and 12 percent

      A commenter under the video is impressed and writes: “The true godfather of the black pill.”

      The black pill is the ideological core of the incel movement. Summarized, it means: forget status, forget money, forget confidence. Good looks are everything, and for those that aren’t attractive enough, the search for a partner is over before it’s even begun. The metaphor is a reference to the film The Matrix, where protagonist Neo has the choice between a blue and red pill. Blue means he keeps living his life, happy to be lied to and naive. Red is harsh. Brutal. It means looking reality in the eye.

      Black is the pill of the incels, because black is the color of hopelessness. Destiny and your bone structure can’t be changed. Or can they?

      The first who told me of the black pill was Luis. 23 years old, he was the first incel I talked to. I met him on the subreddit DebateIncelz. The interview was conducted via video chat. He lives in Southern California, in his parents’ house. The sun shone through the window; a cat prowled through the room behind him. Luis was one of the few incels who showed me his face. Most disable the camera.

      Luis has a fine, slightly feminine face and long, wavy hair. He reminded a bit of young Keanu Reeves, if Reeves had parents from middle America. A lot better than I imagined meeting my first incel.

      He grew up in a working-class home. His mother comes from Mexico, his father from El Salvador. “I love my mom very much,” he says. “I love my sister very much. I do not despise women.” Luis didn’t appear hateful at all, a trait he shared with many incels I would later talk to. He appeared defeated.

      He was an insecure, overweight child. He was bullied a lot in school for his looks. As a teenager he discovered FaceandLMS during the pandemic. Luis was fascinated by his clarity and logic. He told me: “It offers me a framework to understand how dating and life even work.” The well-meaning advice from his immediate surroundings (“go out and be around people,” “talk to a girl if you like her”) didn’t land. “I need numbers,” he says. “I need logic.”

      Luis says that he spent a lot of time on Looksmax.org, a forum where men rate each other’s looks. There he was graded as a high low-tier normie. So fairly average, which surprised him in a positive way. He also learned that his philtrum was too long, that he had a receding chin, and that his upper incisor teeth covered his lower ones too much.

      Incels really only see two ways to react to the revelations of the black pill. Either they accept that they have a low chance of success as unattractive or very average men, or they try to change their appearance.

      Luis chose the latter. He started looksmaxxing. He lost weight. Bought medication against hair loss. Bleached his skin. “On one hand I couldn’t believe what I was doing to myself, but I knew that looked better afterward.”

      Luis finished every step possible when softmaxxing. He took all the options of changing his appearance without surgery. Now hardmaxxing was supposed to begin. Luis had a whole list of planned surgeries: multiple jaw surgeries, hair transplants, transplants of his own fat, correcting his ears. And then? “Then I’ll look for a partner.”

      Luis did what many women already do: he looked at his own appearance without mercy.

      Why is Luis so convinced of his own bad appearance? I am fifteen years older than him and grew up at a time when beauty standards for girls were hard, but less so for boys. No boy from my school class went to the gym. I wasn’t on any social media that bombarded me with rock-hard abs daily. Back then it was impossible to inject Hyaluron into your jawline on your lunch break.

      Like Luis, I was insecure; I didn’t feel pretty. But I was not reminded every single day, how much more beautiful other men were.

      3. The scientist

      For a long time, the public and academic researchers talked about incels, not with them. That changed a few years ago, when Andrew Thomas, an evolutionary psychologist from the University of Swansea in Wales, found a way to talk to them. Until that point, researchers had stuck to analyzing online forums where incels met. When I talked to Thomas, he said that approach is like looking only at the tip of the iceberg. A majority of the posts in forums stem from a few super-users. If you only base your research on those, you won’t understand what’s going on in the heads of most incels, only what their most extreme representatives write about.

      Thomas interviewed 561 men from the United States and the United Kingdom for his study. He learned that incels are pretty diverse: some are working class, some upper class. About half of them are people of color: Latinos, Black Americans, Arabs. Politically they placed themselves slightly left of center. They were pro-gay equality. They supported a well-equipped welfare state. On one point they held similar views: the overwhelming majority of incels rejected feminism. Many made light of rape.

      How dangerous are incels? Thomas says that the highest danger is in the digital space. Some incels abuse women online, sending them hateful emails or comments on social media. Most of them are so repressed, they rarely become violent outside the internet.

      Deserts of love

      There are exceptions. Incels have produced terrorists. The most infamous example was Elliot Rodger. He killed six people in 2014 in Santa Barbara, California. He left a manifesto behind, where he complained that he was still a virgin as a 22-year-old college student. He wrote: “I will punish all women for keeping sex away from me.” As if women owe men sex. It’s an ancient pattern: a man talks to a woman, is rejected, and feels ashamed and hurt. He channels those feelings into hatred against women.

      But most incels, Thomas says, internalize their emotions: they develop immense hatred against themselves. Terrorists form a vanishingly small part of the community. Even men who commit sexual violence are rarely incels. “Many studies show: it’s the sexually most successful men that commit the majority of sexual violence,” says Thomas.

      Then Thomas talks about the suicides. Incels who participated in his study were often deeply unhappy. Forty percent of them reached the threshold for a clinical depression in questionnaires. A fifth thought about suicide daily.

      4. 80/20

      I talked to a user called bright spring. An Indian man, 20 years old, he told me he studied English and lives at home to take care of his ill father. Bright spring is the name of his latest Reddit account; the previous were banned. In the past, he moderated some subreddits, which also got banned. It wasn’t easy to convince him to do an interview, but at some point he wanted to talk. He wanted to, he said, correct the record on “what most incels think.”

      What he thinks: dating apps changed everything. An overwhelming amount of matches went to a few percent of the most attractive men. Those not attractive enough—too small, too dark, too autistic—had no chance. That’s not an opinion, he says, that’s a fact. The entire incel worldview is built on data. Statistics. “Brutal statistics.” He only hinted at his personal story in our conversation. Supposedly he’s very social; he just doesn’t fulfill the minimum standards to even be noticed by women.

      At some point he complained. It’s a “softball interview.” He wished for more confrontational questions. We agree to a second round. I show him posts from the community that he supervised as a moderator. In them, men disparage women as “foids,” “female humanoids.” He says that it’s a loud minority and that I’m cherry-picking four cases out of thousands of posts. He overlooked those posts, or he would’ve deleted them. He is strictly against dehumanizing women in posts. It does nothing for the cause. Then I show him a post which he wrote himself. Women are incapable of loyalty. Romantic love is an invention of men to humanize women, like how many people humanize their pets. He laughed nervously when I read him the post. He said that he gender-swapped a misandrist post from a feminist subreddit. He couldn’t show me the original.

      He was angry back then, he says, about the posts in which women complain about white men, about Indian men, about neurodivergent men, and are celebrated for it. He wanted revenge.

      This dynamic rules many parts of Reddit. Many incel subs are dedicated to posting screenshots of women that denounce men on Instagram or TikTok. Places like inceltears in turn live off sharing the most hate-filled comments from incel forums. I ask him: you keep this vicious cycle going, right? He responds: “I try to avoid it. Sometimes I don’t succeed.”

      All incels I talked to told me of their experiences with dating apps. The digital rejection seems to be a core building block of every incel biography. One tried it for one week only: “I got a single match, and she never responded. I guess she matched by accident.” Another one told me he needed years to get a match. “You swipe for hours and nothing happens. Dating apps are a wonderful way to hate yourself fast.”

      In 2015 an anonymous author wrote a blog post detailing the spread of likes on dating apps. He described Tinder like a national economy based on attractiveness. He surmised that the most attractive 20 percent of men receive 80 percent of all likes of women, while barely anything is left for the remaining 80 percent of men.

      The post’s factual basis is very narrow at 27 female profiles analyzed. But even more dependable studies show that attention is very unevenly divided on dating apps. According to a study from Queen Mary University of London (PDF), likes from women are seventeen times more likely to lead to a match than likes from men. An analysis by the dating app Hinge (which was later deleted off their own blog) came to the conclusion: if female Hinge were a national economy, then wealth there was divided about the same as Western Europe. Male Hinge would be among the top ten worst performers in regard to wealth parity. Put differently: dating apps are great for attractive men. For average or ugly men, they are deserts of love where nothing ever happens.

      The Medium post was canonized into the 80/20 rule, made it into the Wikipedia article on inequality, and appeared in the Netflix incel drama Adolescence, a story of a student radicalizing on the internet and murdering a female class mate. Many incels believe in the 80/20 rule. They’ve constructed their entire belief system around it: a majority of women is into a minority of men, whom the incels call Chads. The less attractive men, the betas, can hope for a lukewarm relationship without real passion. Unattractive, shy, neurodivergent men are damned to a life as incels. There is no hope for them.

      And, as it so often goes with viral things on the internet, sometimes they contain a grain of truth.

      5. Men as office staplers

      The scientist Andrew Thomas told me of the matching hypothesis. Men and women try, when it comes to long-term relationships, to find partners that are similar to them: similarly attractive, intelligent, similar sense of humor. Attractive long-term partners are friendly, potentially good parents, financially stable. Men and women look for identical things.

      It’s different for flings. Thomas says: “Women become pickier and men the opposite.” Traits desirable in long-term partners are less important for one-night stands. It’s not that important how nice someone is, and completely irrelevant how good of a father he’d be. What matters: how attractive someone is.

      Women, on average, are less into casual hookups than men. For them, casual sex is also less casual and more dangerous: they can get pregnant. They are often weaker than men and expose themselves due to that. They can also contract sexually transmittable diseases that lead to infertility much more often than in men.

      Andrew Thomas told me: “Because casual sex is connected to more risks, the thought goes: I’ll only accept this risk for someone that is exceedingly attractive.”

      The exact opposite happens for men. They lower their standards, because they’re more into casual sex on average. So they’re fine with sleeping with women they wouldn’t marry.

      “The 80/20 rule has a grain of truth.” says Andrew Thomas, but the crucial mistake of incels is that from this strategy of selecting short-term partners they create an immutable psyche that all women supposedly possess, and in that one move exclude all women who did not meet their partners through apps. Who were friends first, who met them through mutual acquaintances, where they meet regularly and first impressions can change. That is also an important finding of psychology: attractiveness is not static. The more time people spend with another, the more attractive they find each other.

      Dating apps complicate everything. They are, no matter what they try to market themselves as, apps for casual hook-ups because their basis is the optical first impression. Women there get so much attention from men, they have to radically filter. Andrew Thomas hints that this isn’t moral calculus; it’s not even a matter of taste; it’s simply a strategy to deal with an oversupply.

      Andrew Thomas also works as a therapist. He has incels as patients. Sometimes he conducts an experiment with one. He asks him to search for office staplers on Amazon and narrate it step by step. Okay, says the patient, there are ten thousand results. So he filters; 4 or 5 stars, not too expensive, fits at least two hundred tacks, only in the color red. “And then I tell him: you picky bastard! What’s wrong with the blue staplers? How can you be so narcissistic and have such high standards?”

      6. Digital cutting

      The incels disappear. One user called fuckitall responds to my interview request: “Go fuck yourself.” Another does the same and appends that I should get a real job. Another posts a photo of me and calls me a soyboy: a man feminized by the overconsumption of soy products.

      I had about the same experience as an average-looking man on a dating app. I sent a lot of messages, got few responses, and in the end got only one meeting in reality: with sprixxles.

      I had huge expectations. Then I see him standing at the entrance gates to a park in Vienna and think again: that’s how an incel looks? (He had his camera off during the video interview.) He waits in front of the gate, in a shirt and sneakers, well dressed, a little grungy, a little hipster. He has a narrow chin. He wears designer glasses. He appears friendly.

      We stroll through the park, and he narrates. He was a shy kid, a teenager with “nerd hobbies.” No friends in school. He moved for college, from the rural farmsteads into the big city, where it was equally difficult. He had time. A lot of time. A lot of time he spent on the internet.
      It was, he explains, the peak of his inceldom. His days spent on the 4chan board r9k, where anonymous users share pictures and texts. It is one of the most culturally influential places on the internet. A favored way to express oneself there is so-called green texts, short stories about failing in social situations, filled with sarcasm and self-deprecation. The mood is extremely negative, but the place had a strange pull on him, says sprixxles. “This form of negativity can be addicting.”

      One motto of r9k is: you are here forever. If you’re a young student reading posts from men in their 30s saying that it’s just not going to get better, you think, “Fuck, that could be me.” He felt something similar to an adrenaline rush, excitement over how pointless it all was.

      “Sounds like digitally cutting yourself?” I ask.

      “One way to put it.”

      During those times he visited a therapist a few times, but she couldn’t really help him. Looking back, he likely was already severely depressed.

      That’s behind him. He’s 29 now and works in a big company. He spends barely any time in the incel community. At some point the constant bemoaning and complaining became too much. “At some point it’s annoying.” He doesn’t have any time for it anymore. He rarely visits, mostly out of sentimentality. He never understood the hatred.

      He lives in a small apartment in one of those old but well taken care of Vienna buildings. The center is a large kitchen. Against the wall, a vinyl record player. On a shelf, old game consoles he collects. On a large desk, filling out the entire wall, two computer screens.
      He loves getting lost in details. He taught himself Japanese to better read manga. He also says that he has “autistic tendencies.” Sometimes it seems like our conversation tires him out a great deal. He swings his legs back and forth, runs his hands through his hair and wipes across his eyebrows. He never looks into my eyes for long. He yawns a lot.

      Hope is vulnerable

      He’s been living in this apartment for ten years. He can’t imagine living with someone else any more. Alone he doesn’t have to care about anything. He can cook at night, if he wants to. Freedom, it appears, is something he cares about a great deal. Maybe it’s also a shield.

      Sometimes colleagues ask him if there is someone in his life. He responds with sentences that sound good in colloquial Austrian. Nothing right now. or You know how it is. Face-saving words making it sound like there was something, or that there could be something again.

      I meet him three times, in the evening after work. He’s stressed and tired. Problems at work; he has to work overtime. I see him rush through his life, which he fills, like many of us, mainly with work. In the evening he quickly goes to the store, cooks, eats. If he has time, he plays some video games, reads, takes care of his Pokémon card collection. Then he sleeps.

      Soon, he’s 30. If it keeps going like this, it’ll all be fine, he says. By now he’s noticed that life is more than missed-out-on relationships. He has his hobbies. He can travel. He makes money and doesn’t have any worries. He doesn’t plan on dating.

      But sometimes, something flashes through. A life, how it could be. Eight years ago he kissed a woman; it was the first and so far last kiss of his life. She was a little smaller than him, dark hair, nose piercing, wearing a cardigan over a striped dress. They didn’t know each other; they started talking because she found his drinking choice of gin and tonic unconventional. She leaned against him. He was drunk. I’ll try, he thought. So he kissed her. “With tongue?”

      “Yeah, like one does, first time round. Not very elegant.” He imagined his first kiss as a more romantic one. Not drunk in the club. “But it was beautiful.” He says, “It was great.” He went home without asking for her number, and was happy and relieved to have put this milestone behind him.

      7. Crab bucket

      I realize that dealing with incels and the black pill changes something within me. Within the editorial staff at work, I begin studying the faces of my male colleagues. Who has the most defined chin? Whose eyes look the most like a predator animal? At some point I uploaded a selfie to a website that determines the facial width-to-height ratio. It answers with a 1.7. My face is too long, like a horse.

      I reduce men to their looks. What did Hamudi say, one of the most famous incel YouTubers? I don’t see people anymore, I only see genetics.

      When you deal with the incel definition of attractiveness, you will develop an inferiority complex. You keep comparing and keep getting smaller and smaller.

      There’s a discussion within the scene: who is a real incel? Who belongs? Is someone fucked enough to qualify? Multiple times my interviewees mentioned that they might not be “real” incels after all, because they have been on dates, for example. Because they don’t have an autism diagnosis, because they, god forbid, kissed a woman before. Online, men accuse each other of being fakecels or nearcels. Only who has tried everything without success is a real incel, a truecel. A subhuman.

      Aside from this social Darwinism, there’s also surprisingly woke vocabulary in the community. Feminists are accused of gaslighting lonely men, talking them into believing that their solitude is their own fault. There is talk of “privilege,” like female privilege or sex-privileged men. Lonely women who want to belong to the community are accused of committing cultural appropriation. My culture is not your costume. I even discovered an inceldom pride flag. Lots of black and shades of gray.

      Boys find each other on the web, the boys that in their class are at the bottom of the hierarchy. What do they do? The same that groups always do: build a status pyramid. They just invert it. The guy on top is the king of the losers.

      They protect this inverted hierarchy too. Occasionally there are stories of incels developing hope or believing in themselves, and they are kicked off the forums. This phenomena has a name: the crab bucket.

      Throw a few live crabs into a bucket and they begin to crawl up the walls. They step on each other. In their attempt to climb, the lower crabs pull the upper ones down. The same thing happens in incel forums. Those who hope are ridiculed, those who develop a strategy insulted, and those who make progress banned.

      Incel culture is growing. Its engine is hopelessness.

      I once talked with an incel that embodied this well. He lives in the north of Germany, his user name on Reddit is remarkable box. It was a joy to talk to him. He didn’t mention any studies; he talked of his “boys”: his friends, his sisters, college sports, loving parents.

      I noted: “Happy incel?”

      Then he said that if you put a thousand men into a room and him next to them, he’d surely be the ugliest.

      Remarkable, 23, has stopped talking to his parents or friends about his relationships with women. They’d only encourage him. They’d tell him that he’ll find someone, that he’s attractive enough. He says it hurts him.

      Hurts?

      Remarkable fights with himself a little. If someone encourages him, it only causes the opposite. He could grow hopeful, which in turn leads to trying again—and getting disappointed again. To be sure of the future, that’s got a worth of its own.

      He explains with an example. “The winner of the silver medal always looks sadder than the guy with bronze on the photos, right? I’m the guy with bronze. I’ve accepted how my life is.” With “his life” he means his friends, his sport, the good relationship with his family, and the fact he’ll never have a girlfriend. “If I start believing now that I could truly win gold and fail in the attempt, then I would be the guy with the silver medal. I’d be less happy than now.” So he doesn’t try. He keeps his bronze medal.

      Remarkable exchanged hope for security. That’s the promise of the black pill. It protects: who doesn’t try can’t fail. Incel scientist Andrew Thomas told me that incels share a psychological disposition. They posses, what psychologists call “external control conviction”: the idea that what happens to you in life doesn’t have anything to do with you, but that outside forces are responsible, immutable forces: your own ugly bone structure. The impossible-to-fulfill standards of modern dating culture. That’s why incels collect hoards of studies. That’s why they built their own wiki, with an entry titled “The scientific black pill.” If you copy it into a Microsoft Word document, it’s nearly 300 pages.

      All this work just to prove that they will fail, no matter what they do.

      The black pill isn’t really a collection of studies. It’s not science; it’s not even ideology. It’s just the conviction that it’s safest at home. It’s depression, disguised as a way to view the world.

      8. Intelligent, empathetic and cute

      In Vienna, while meeting sprixxles, I started talking to a Russian woman on Reddit called pristine cost. Months back she dove into the incel world, seeking to understand these weird, unhappy men living in the privileged West. They are a puzzle her: how can intelligent men believe such a thing?

      The smart and empathetic posts from sprixxles impressed her. She messaged him. They chatted. They became friends.

      I wanted to talk to her, so we called on Discord. She told me she really likes sprixxles, that there are a lot of good things about him. His biggest problem is that he’s locked up emotionally. “He doesn’t show anyone how great he is.” It’s really difficult to break out of this pattern. He needs a helping hand. A shove. In the conversation it became clear that she understands herself as the woman to shove him. She encouraged him to buy new clothes. She’s gradually encouraging him to follow his dream of a doctorate thesis.

      Believing in yourself doesn’t happen through thought, but through experience. By leaving your room and doing things that are hard and wonderful. By achieving things that could also fail and learning that you are stronger and more attractive than originally believed.

      My roleplay friends and I, we once were crabs in a bucket. We tried for a long time to climb out of it. We even started a band; I was the bass player, because everyone knows how to play bass. A friend taught me the guitar and told me that I have a beautiful voice. On some weekends we no longer played role-playing games, but guitar. We sat around camp fires, in large groups that weren’t just boys. With one of my friends, we went on holiday, where we met two women, nearly thirty, both telling us how they had had enough of men. The hotel was otherwise full of old pensioners, and we had brought our guitars, so we helped make their evenings more interesting. After one such drunken guitar evening we both lost, as elderly men at the start of our 20s, our virginities. As if we had agreed to a pact to make it all appear like the plot of a high school comedy.

      We climbed out of the bucket, but we offered each other our shears.

      After my conversation with pristine, I met sprixxles a last time. I told him that pristine finds him intelligent and empathetic and nice. “She also said that you’re cute.”

      “Okay,” he says and laughs in a shy fashion.

      “And that it’s insane that a woman hasn’t snagged you yet.”

      “Okay,” he says again.

      Recently he hung up a full-length mirror in his living room. Pristine told him to work on his style. Could this perchance be a careful small step back into dating?

      “Probably,” he says.

      “Maybe,” he says.

      “Let’s see,” he says.

      In the near future he has to solve problems at work.

      Of course, pristine said, one can live life without romantic love, and be even satisfied with it. But with sprixxles, she says, it’s just a question of time till he finds a woman. “It’s just impossible not to, with him,” she says.

      Let’s wish him luck.

      48 votes
    4. What have you been listening to this week?

      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...

      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.

      3 votes
    5. What have you been listening to this week?

      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...

      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.

      5 votes
    6. What have you been listening to this week?

      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...

      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.

      9 votes
    7. What have you been listening to this week?

      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...

      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.

      4 votes
    8. What have you been listening to this week?

      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...

      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.

      13 votes
    9. What have you been listening to this week?

      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...

      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.

      3 votes
    10. What have you been listening to this week?

      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...

      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.

      3 votes
    11. How to find (a) new music (community)?

      i'm a huge lover of music. i listen to music, i collect music (digital and vinyl) for 25 years now. i organize and go to festivals. i play music as a dj (mostly cumbia, afro and house). i looove...

      i'm a huge lover of music. i listen to music, i collect music (digital and vinyl) for 25 years now. i organize and go to festivals. i play music as a dj (mostly cumbia, afro and house). i looove pop, but as a genere. just everything that is authentic and makes me feel and groooves.
      my heart beats to the beat of this amazing hip hop beats. jazz-funk-house and everythig around and in between. and mexican music, be it traditional. modern traditional or pinche rancheras que escuchaban los abuelos. but fuck generes, if it grooves and makes me happy or a special kind of sad, i love it.
      but as i get older, it just seems to be getting harder and harder to find and connect to music.
      i think part of it is that i just know soo much already. but in comparison to what exisit... thats just bullshit, is it me taking less time and love for music or is it that i get less sensitive to music as i grow older?

      i dont know where i'm going with this. but i think i want to connect to other people who i can share music i love with. but its so hard to find people who share my kind of taste.

      whatever this post nothing structured, but if you like some of the following please reach out.

      Natalia Lafurcarde

      Fat Freddy's Drop

      Lineli Concept

      or Griz, or Gramatik, or St.Germain or ASM or soooo much more i can not even grasp what i like., its just too much and diverse.

      i just miss discovering music.. maybe its my process.. i dont use any streaming sites, exept for youtube sometimes for its accesibility to share. i pirate and buy and go to concerts. but it seems everybody arround just shares spotify playlists... and i'm just not getting into that, fuck algorithms deciding my taste. fuck big music.

      what do i do? can i find back to the joy of finding a new album i like and loose myself for days and weeks in it? is this a possibility? do i need to find a new way to enjoy and discover music?
      is it me? or is it getting harder?

      just as a disclaimer, i like what happens here on tildes music wise, but it mostly feels quite far from my tastes. no bad feelings, i like you anyways ;-)

      edit: the covers topic going hot atm is just the best in a long time.

      26 votes
    12. What have you been listening to this week?

      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...

      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.

      12 votes
    13. What have you been listening to this week?

      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...

      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.

      4 votes
    14. What have you been listening to this week?

      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...

      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.

      15 votes
    15. What have you been listening to this week?

      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...

      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.

      13 votes
    16. What have you been listening to this week?

      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...

      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.

      3 votes
    17. What have you been listening to this week?

      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...

      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.

      7 votes
    18. What have you been listening to this week?

      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...

      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.

      6 votes
    19. What have you been listening to this week?

      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...

      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.

      4 votes
    20. What have you been listening to this week?

      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...

      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.

      2 votes
    21. What have you been listening to this week?

      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...

      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.

      3 votes
    22. What have you been listening to this week?

      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...

      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.

      11 votes
    23. What have you been listening to this week?

      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...

      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.

      5 votes
    24. What have you been listening to this week?

      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...

      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.

      7 votes
    25. What have you been listening to this week?

      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...

      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.

      6 votes
    26. What have you been listening to this week?

      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...

      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.

      12 votes
    27. What have you been listening to this week?

      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...

      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.

      12 votes
    28. What have you been listening to this week?

      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...

      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.

      7 votes
    29. What have you been listening to this week?

      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...

      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.

      4 votes
    30. Want to get in the gym? Here are some tips from a beginner.*

      I wanted to hit the gym all my life, but I never really made it until this year. Granted, I do have a sports background and have been active most of my life, but going to the gym was never really...

      I wanted to hit the gym all my life, but I never really made it until this year. Granted, I do have a sports background and have been active most of my life, but going to the gym was never really for me, until I decided to really do it this year. After years of shoulder and knee problems, I thought adding some muscle to my frame was definitely needed if I didn't want to be in pain all my life.

      Since I had thought about going to the gym for years now, I feel like I gathered a good bit of information that REALLY helped me to go now. Here they are:

      • The routine is more important than the results; regardless of any information I give you about macros, weights, sets, proteins, whatever all that, going to the gym one more time is going to be better than not going. Results take a LONG time. You will not see progress after a month. You may not see progress after 2 months. You may start to see some progress after 3 months. Real progress takes many months, years. That's why your number one priority should simply be to go to the gym, even if your workout is the worst ever and you use two machines in 30 minutes. Going to the gym 4 times a week is better than 3, going 3 times a week is better than 2 and so on. It takes about 3 months to a year to have the routine set in your life. After that and during that, you'll have all the time in the world to think about how to optimize your training, but just going and sticking to the routine of going is more important than anything else.

      • Choose the easiest, most accessible gym option; the goal is to go. You should make this the easiest for you. Choose a gym that is easily accessible, before or after work. The closer, the better. Heck, your gym can even be your own home! Make some place for you to workout if you want to. You can easily do very good home workouts with maybe 100-150$ worth of equipment.

      • Stick to a simple workout plan; There are some easy plans: target 2 muscle groups per workout, or alternate upper lower body; try to hit the muscles two times a week (2x biceps, 2x triceps, etc.). 3-5 exercises per workout is fine. 1-2min rest, take more if you feel like it, take less if you feel like it.

      • Listen to your body for reps/weight; Going for 5 reps or going for 15 reps, it doesn't matter that much at the start, as long as you can do 2-3 series of that. Try to aim for anything from 6 to 12 reps, if you feel you can do more, do it, if you feel like you cannot, then don't. Some times I do 6, sometimes I do 12, but I try to aim for 8. The routine is more important than the results, all you need to do is go to the gym, the perfect workout can come in later.

      • The movement is more important than the weight; building muscle is simply your muscles tearing and healing. As long as your muscles tear, you've done a good job. But that tear must come from a movement done well, or else you'll tear something that was not supposed to. Go for slower reps if needed, less explosion in your movements. Watch a video on how to do specific exercises if needed, some are mandatory to make sure you don't injure yourself (squats, deadlifts).

      • Don't overdo it, progressive overload is the key; getting injured is EASY, the goal is to go to the gym, not be hurt. Go lower on the weights at first, it's not a competition. I started my dumbell press with like 10 pounds, shaking like crazy, it's normal. We've all been there. Don't ego lift. The routine is more important than the results. The big weights will take a while to reach, but it'll happen progressively.

      • Have some kind of goal that is not tied to a number; I guess this one is more personal, but I feel like it's way easier to stick to the routine when you don't "care" about the results as much. The true goal is to be fit or to be lean or to be muscular or to be healthy, no? I feel like those are achievable long term and are guaranteed to come from the routine. I think if you're a beginner and set some kind of arbitrary number, you're not an expert to know if that goal is realistic or not and it makes the whole working out thing to be dependent on a result that you don't have the slightest idea how difficult it is or how long it takes to reach it. I think goals with a number should come after the routine is set in, not before going to the gym, but hey, that's just my two cents.

      • Eat enough, drink water, get more protein; protein shakes are easy and not that costly, just having a protein shake is fine. Not having it is fine too. If you want to build muscle, you should aim for 100-150g of protein per day. Make sure you eat enough and well, but in the end, the routine is more important. Remember, getting fit happens at the gym, getting lean happens in the kitchen. Weight loss and weight gains both happen in the kitchen. Realistically, a normal genetic male will gain AT BEST 10-12 pounds of muscle the first year of working out (assuming optimal results), so you can aim for that, but just know that your weight gains might not be muscle.

      • Use ChatGPT to help if needed; When I started going at the gym, I followed all these tips, but I didn't really know that to do. So I asked ChatGPT to make me a 4 days a week workout plan, 5 exercises: pull, push, legs, full body. I tried what it gave me for about a month, but I used that month to just replace exercises I didn't like and I slowly started making my own program to fit what I wanted. But I was super happy that I at least had a starting program. I realize that's what's stopping a lot of people and you can use AI to help you out with that, especially if you don't have money to buy a program or pay a trainer to make one for you.

      • Be disciplined, but be kind to yourself; There will be days when you will not be able to workout. There will be days when you will not want to workout. There will be days when you will feel bad about working out. It's ok to miss a day, it's ok to miss a week. Remember, the routine is more important. Just make sure to go back to your routine as soon as possible. Missing one workout after going 20 times in a row feels a lot less bad than missing 2-3 every week.

      Finally, if you have any questions about starting the gym, feel free to ask. I'll gladly help.

      52 votes
    31. What have you been listening to this week?

      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...

      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.

      4 votes
    32. What have you been listening to this week?

      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...

      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.

      7 votes
    33. What have you been listening to this week?

      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...

      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.

      5 votes
    34. I created my own audio player, here is my experiences with the process

      Overview If you want to see just the final result, check out my TiMaSoMo showcase post. This post does minimal amount of showcase of the final project, although it does include some pictures. If...

      Overview

      If you want to see just the final result, check out my TiMaSoMo showcase post. This post does minimal amount of showcase of the final project, although it does include some pictures. If you want to see a showcase of the software, the original author has made a great video showcasing it that is worth checking out: YouTube videoBlogpost for those who prefer reading. Instead, this post is more a discussion of my experience developing a device.

      Initial Planning

      The goal of this project was to create a dedicated audio player, to separate that capability from my phone. The main source of audio will be streaming Spotify, not local files. Although unfamiliar with them, I felt that a Raspberry Pi was a good baseline device. For audio, I had an old USB DAC/amp that I wanted to repurpose. Using this DAC/amp would allow for some of my harder to drive headphones to work, as well as just getting cleaner audio. Then, I was planning on just using an eInk touchscreen. The rationale for eInk was so that it would feel different than my phone, and just feel like it was intended for music instead of scrolling. The logic was if I put a regular LCD screen on, it would not differ from a smartphone, and therefore I might as well just connect my DAC to my phone and use that. For software, the plan was to just use either Android or some lightweight linux distro. The initial plan for batteries was to just use rechargeable AA batteries, so that I can easily swap them out. One major reason I wanted to go with the DIY route was for repairability, especially with batteries. If I got an existing Digital Audio Player (DAP) on the market, I knew that the Li-Ion battery would eventually go bad, and existing devices on the market may not be easily repairable.

      Hardware Sourcing

      My hardware approach was to buy one component at a time. That way, if I ran into an issue with the feasibility of the approach, I could pivot without having wasted money on all the components ahead of time. This approach did slow down development as I was frequently waiting on hardware, but was more fiscally responsible. In January I got a Raspberry Pi 3a+, and played around briefly with some different operating systems. The next part that was needed was to source the screen.

      Initial Plan for eInk

      The original goal was to try and get a touch eInk screen, roughly 5” for a reasonable price. I spent a few weeks trying different places to try and find one, but could not find one. Since I could not find one I started thinking about pivoting to an LCD screen. With this pivot, I started defining goals of the project more. If I were to just use an LCD touchscreen potentially running Android, what makes it different from using my phone? I spent a few weeks trying to define the goals of the project, and was not able to come up with satisfactory answers if I went with an LCD screen.

      Clickwheel design pivot

      In the process of trying to figure out my approach, I stumbled across this YouTube video. I felt like this would be a good starting point. It seemed to solve the issue of it not being another Android device, which was my main problem I was trying to solve. However there were a few parts of the implementation that I did not like:

      • It relied on using old used Apple hardware. This works for now, but over time it would become harder to source replacement parts.
      • I did not already have the hardware, so I would have to buy an old used iPod and strip it for parts
      • It was a bluetooth implementation, so I would have to figure out how to fit my DAC into an old iPod, which seemed unrealistic
      • The battery while replaceable, was a non-descript battery so getting a new replacement with the same form factor would be harder.

      Luckily, for the clickwheel, someone on the weekly programming project on Tildes pointed out this new clickwheel. Since that seemed to be a reasonable approach I ordered one and also got a small LCD screen from Amazon. Unfortunately, the screen used up all the GPIO pins and had non-existent documentation or drivers. I was unable to get the screen to work, so I returned it and ordered a Waveshare 2” LCD. I was intentional on finding one that could be a regular display without using too many GPIO pins. The Waveshare screen had significantly better documentation, and with a bit of work I was able to get it working. With that solved, I started wiring in the clickwheel, and creating basic code to detect basic inputs, which I then used to modify the original code for the Spotify player to handle my clickwheel (see below for comments on code modification). Once I had the screen and clickwheel, I could also develop the software while waiting for parts. Image showing the early iteration of the device

      The last main part I had to solve was batteries. Another helpful comment on the weekly programming thread on Tildes told me about 14500 and 18650 batteries. I sourced a 14500 charger and some 14500 cells from Amazon. I had some issues with the first charger I got, and since they were shipping directly from China, it meant the second one would take another few weeks. Picture of using the 14500 battery. The cells I sourced said they were 2500 mAh. I tried one out, and had playtime of about 30mins, not enough to even listen to a full album on a single charge, which is inadequate. I used a portable battery bank rated at 10000 mAh to set a benchmark, and that lasted significantly longer (I was probably around 50% after about five hours or so of playback). This indicated that the 14500 cell was falsely claiming capacity, which is apparently a common issue on Amazon. It also seemed like 14500s rarely have capacity above 700mAh, so I realized that a 14500 would not work. So I decided to upgrade to an 18650 cell, which I could source the actual battery locally from a reputable vendor, with a capacity of 3400mAh. Since I realized that small hobbyist electronics like this on Amazon were shipping directly from China, I started ordering from AliExpress for the charger, which saved me some money for the same part (and even picked up a spare just in case). Picture of me using the 18650 to listen to music on my balcony during the summer. Since I did not need the extra power of the RPi 3a+, and the battery was taking more space, I ordered a RPi Zero 2w+. I also ordered some micro USB ends to solder to to make internal cabling, as well as a USB-C port to use for charging. By May I had all the hardware parts I needed, and all that was left for hardware was to design a case to 3D print, which is detailed below.

      Software Development

      The first thing I tested was installing Raspotify which this project used, and set it up with my DAC. Since that worked, I started to program the clickwheel using GPIO pins. I had never used a RPi before, but found some easy tutorials on programming the buttons of my clickwheel in Python. Once the buttons were programmed, I had to figure out the rotary encoder, but was able to find a Github repo that had a working Python code to process the inputs. I was able to add that, and created a Python class that would handle all the inputs of my clickwheel. Once that was coded, I just had to incorporate that into the code for the Spotify player frontend. I forked the repo, and was greeted with at the top of the main file this comment:

      # This code is a mess.
      # This is me learning Python as I go.
      # This is not how I write code for my day job.”
      

      This was not an encouraging comment to read, as at the start my Python skills were relatively low. I was able to quickly find where the inputs from the clickwheel were being handled. The original code had clickwheel inputs being handled in a separate C program and then communicating to the Spotify frontend via sockets. Since my clickwheel code was handled via a Python class I was able to simplify it, and not require sockets to be used. With that working, I just had to set up all the required steps to get the project working. Unfortunately, the documentation for deployment was extremely lacking. I was able to find a Github issues post that provided instructions so was able to get it all set up. I was able to get to this phase by the end of March.

      Once I had it all working, I could start on expanding the software to fit my use case as well as start working on any bugs I encounter. I felt a good starting point in handling this was to start addressing the issue of “this code is a mess.” Cleaning up the code would be a good way to gain familiarity with the code as well as make it easier for me to address any bugs or future enhancements. I started work on creating a class diagram, but it was really tedious to do it from scratch with such a large codebase, so I deserted that plan quickly. I am thinking of creating some sequence diagrams from some features I implemented recently, which would help in general documentation to refer back to in the future. I did find some classes that would make more sense in separate files, so did do that. I also started adding in new features as well. The first was to implement a “hold switch” which turns off the screen and disables the clickwheel input. Before, the screen would be on a 60sec timer to turn off, but I felt that sometimes I would want to have the screen stay on (like if I am just sitting in a chair listening to music). This was a relatively easy feature to implement. One bug that kept on appearing is that the screen would frequently freeze on me, normally about 60sec into a song, but would update once the next song started playing. I spent several weeks tracking down this issue, thinking it was software related, as the screen used to timeout after 60sec. I also thought it might be a configuration of my OS, so did some debugging there as well. Finally, I plugged in my main desktop monitor, and realized when the small 2” screen would freeze, my desktop monitor would not. This lead me down to investigating the driver for my screen. I found an issue with someone having similar issues with the original driver that Waveshare forked. I then realized that there was a setting that the screen would stop updating if less than 5% of the pixels were changing. Once I changed that in the config file, the screen freezing issue stopped. I was able to solve this major issue by late July.

      The last major feature I have implemented is to create the ability to add new WiFi networks from the app itself. This was a needed feature if I wanted to bring it anywhere outside of my home, since 3rd Party Spotify apps cannot download music. Luckily, there was a search feature, which gave me a baseline for text input using the clickwheel. I was able to create a basic page that prompts for the input of a SSID and the password, and then adds that to /etc/wpa_supplicant/wpa_supplicant.conf and then restarts the wireless interface. I added this feature into the overall settings page I added, which also included other useful dev options, like doing a git pull for me to avoid having to SSH into the Rpi to do it. The settings page features were a part of my project for TiMaSoMo.

      Case Design

      I started work on the case in late May roughly. The plan was that I was going to design the case and have my friend who owns a 3D printer print out my design for me. To continue with the project goal of repairability, I wanted to avoid using glue for the case. Instead, I wanted to use heated inserts to hold all the components. I had not used any 3D modeling or CAD software before, so it was a learning experience. I settled on using FreeCAD, which I was able to learn the basics of what I needed relatively quickly. I started with a basic case design for a prototype, to help plan out how I would lay things out. On my computer screen, having the device be 40mm thick sounded fine, but after receiving the prototype I realized I would need to be aggressive in thinning out the design. However, this protoype in early June was very helpful in getting a better understanding of how I needed to design it. Case prototype pictures.

      The first iteration I was able to get down to 27mm, which was a significant improvement. I received this iteration in mid July. However, there were parts that did not fit properly. Most of the mounting holes were not aligned properly. However, the bigger issue was that at 27mm the device would not be thick enough to hold the DAC and screen stacked on top of each other. This iteration still had the DAC keep the original metal housing, so that I could easily remove it and use it as originally intended if I did not want to continue using my audio player. First case iteration pictures.

      The second iteration I decided to remove the metal housing of the DAC, which freed up a lot of internal space, with the main limiting factor of thickness being the 18650 battery. So I kept the thickness around 27mm, but had more internal space. Removing the metal case of the DAC was relatively straightforward, except figuring out how to secure it to the print. Luckily, there were two roughly 2.5mm holes in the PCB, that I was able to use to secure it. I also started to do a more complex design, since I was getting more experienced with FreeCAD. I also moved the RPi to the top of the case, so that the two parts of the case could easily separate, with only micro USB connectors being used between the parts in the top and bottom part of the case(Picture of third iteration showing this feature). For anyone who has had to repair electronics that did not fully separate due to ribbon cables (laptops are the worst for this it seems), you understand the quality of life improvement of having the two parts easily separate. I got this iteration of the case in early September, and found a few issues of parts conflicting. However, with the use of a dremel, I was able to modify it to get it to roughly fit (although janky in some parts).In this picture you can see the power switch, which I had to modify to sit outside the case. I wanted to fully assemble it, so that I could start using it and figure out where it needs to improve. The biggest issue aside from conflicting parts was that the top of the case was bulging, so I wanted to add another point of connection to prevent it. This bulge was partly caused by the screen cutout causing a weak point in the top of the case. Second case iteration pictures.

      The third iteration was part of my TiMaSoMo project. This was a relatively simple minor tweaks, as well as fix some minor pain points of the previous iteration. I reinforced the top significantly to prevent bending, as well as add a fifth point to secure it. I also added a recess to make accessing the switches for power and hold easier to use (although I think I messed up the hold switch one). Overall, this print worked well, and there is currently no plans for a fourth iteration. Fourth iteration pictures.

      Here is all four cases compared side by side

      What I learned

      The first lesson I had to learn was how to define project goals. Not being able to source an eInk screen had caused me to pivot, and in doing so I had to reflect on what truly mattered for my project. I knew that DAPs existed, so why build my own rather than buy one? Most DAPs on the market seem to be Android devices where they removed the phone functionality and added in quality audio components. Part of a dedicated audio device was to not have my phone be the everything device that they are, but a second Android device with an LCD screen and better audio components is not the solution. Luckily, I encountered the clickwheel based approach, which did solve that issue (and probably better than an eInk would have). Also, I wanted the device to be easily repairable. Li-Ion batteries go bad, which was another major concern for me with the current options of DAPs. Repairability was something that mattered to me, but I had to embrace what that meant for the form factor. If I went with a non-descript Li-Ion pillow battery, I could probably significantly reduce the size. Understanding that I wanted to avoid just being another Android device and have repairability and replaceable parts as the defining features were useful to keep in mind. That approach did result in compromise though, primarily in physical size at the end.

      The second big thing I learned was just the process of sourcing parts for a project like this. The closest project to this that I have done in the past is create a DIY cable tester. That simply just involved some switches, resistors, LEDs, and some AA batteries that I could all source locally. So having to buy more complex electronics where the documentation mattered was a learning curve for me. Luckily, early on I was ordering from Amazon, where returns were relatively easy. The problem with Amazon though was false advertising for batteries and some components were shipping directly from China. So, switching to AliExpress saved me money without adding any additional in shipping.

      Learning 3D modelling and getting stuff 3D printed was also a huge learning curve for me. I am glad that I got a very rough prototype printed early on in the process. In designing the prototype, I just was not concerned about saving space. However, once the prototype was printed and off my screen and into my hand, I realized how aggressive I needed to be in compacting things. The other thing with using FreeCAD is I learned too late in the process about part hierarchies, and I still do not fully understand them. Not using part hierarchies properly led me to have to do a redesign on each iteration, as moving mounting holes over a few mm would shift every part added after it. Luckily, my designs were relatively simple, but having hierarchies handled properly would have helped me iterate quicker. On top of getting prototypes in hand quickly, using imperfect prints and just adjusting the parts that didn’t work with with a dremel was useful. If I didn’t do that with the second iteration, I would not have dealt with the issue that the top of the case would bend out over time. Spending time using the imperfect device helped me figure out the issues to make the next iteration better.

      Future Goals

      The first goal I will add in future expansion is to add better documentation and create a better development workflow. Right now, my process includes pushing any changes I do (luckily I am using Github branches now), then pulling the updated repo and starting it on my Pi. However, I never test if it compiles properly before pushing, so I end up sometimes doing five pushes in ten minutes, playing whackamole with compilation errors. Being able to run a dev version on my desktop with keyboard emulation for inputs would be beneficial.

      Another big issue that I want to solve is that I need to clean up the audio on lower resistance headphones like my IEMs. There appears to be some electrical noise, that only sensitive devices like IEMs detect. The solution I am currently considering is to add in a capacitor on the voltage rail between the Pi and the DAC to hopefully get cleaner power.

      Another issue is that I currently have no indicator of battery life. Since it is an 18650 Li-Ion battery, I should be able to just detect the gradual decrease in voltage, and calculate battery percentage. However, GPIO pins appear to be unable to do that natively, so I may have to add in a small controller board to do it. I have not looked too much into this.

      There are a few UI/UX decisions that do not match my preferred way of listening to music. So over time I plan on gradually tweaking the UI/UX to match what I want it to be. A prime example of this would be that when I select an artist, I want it to present a list of their albums, instead of playing their most popular songs.

      I want to be able to use Spotify Lossless, since that has rolled out near the end of this project. Unfortunately, it seems that currently it will not be supported. Seems like Librespot (which is the basis for Raspotify) does not currently have a solution that does not involve working around Spotify’s DRM.

      Conclusion

      Overall, I am really glad I took on this project. It took a long time for me to get it to a finished state. However, the experience has been really fun, and I have learned some new skills. Also, having a dedicated device that all it does is stream Spotify is really nice. I always found myself whenever I was listening to music ending up scrolling on my phone for a bit more stimulation, and then realized I have not been paying attention for the past couple of songs. Having a device where all I do is just listen to music and leave my phone behind has been nice. Also, modifying the code to fit my preferred use case has been nice. There are points where I realize I do not like how something is laid out, but then I have agency to change the layout. Here are some pictures of the final device.

      If you want to build the device yourself, I will warn you that it has some rough edges. Also, the DAC/amp is discontinued, so sourcing that to fit inside the case would be tricky. However, my Github repo has all hardware listed, the code needed, and easy to follow software deployment instructions.

      30 votes
    35. What have you been listening to this week?

      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...

      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.

      16 votes
    36. What have you been listening to this week?

      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...

      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.

      9 votes
    37. What have you been listening to this week?

      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...

      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.

      3 votes
    38. What have you been listening to this week?

      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...

      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.

      3 votes
    39. What have you been listening to this week?

      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...

      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.

      8 votes
    40. What have you been listening to this week?

      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...

      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.

      4 votes
    41. What have you been listening to this week?

      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...

      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.

      7 votes
    42. What have you been listening to this week?

      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...

      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.

      7 votes
    43. What have you been listening to this week?

      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...

      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.

      10 votes
    44. What have you been listening to this week?

      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...

      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.

      10 votes
    45. What have you been listening to this week?

      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...

      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.

      9 votes
    46. What have you been listening to this week?

      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...

      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.

      6 votes
    47. What have you been listening to this week?

      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...

      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.

      14 votes
    48. What have you been listening to this week?

      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...

      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.

      5 votes
    49. What have you been listening to this week?

      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...

      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.

      13 votes
    50. What have you been listening to this week?

      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...

      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.

      8 votes