Internet Radio Sucks Syphilitic Donkey Dong

How the fuck am I supposed to avoid my life by losing myself in my work if I don't have a good soundtrack?

Last.fm: I now need to restart Spotify and Last.fm (in that order) after five or six songs.  And it's now impossible to skip something when the YouTube selection is some fucked-up cell phone-recorded live performance of an artist who consistently does awful live performances.  Anyone who has had the misfortune of seeing J.G. Thirwell (Foetus) live knows what I mean.

Spotify:  No equivalent to Last.fm's randomly playing my library.  The closest I get is playing it in alphabetical order or by length of song.  It keeps dropping songs I've repeatedly added.  Is there an upper limit to the number of songs you can have in your library?  Not only do they have a shitload of ads, they have a shitload of ads featuring people using Auto-Tune, so I have to keep turning off my speakers.  Upgrade?  With what money?

Pandora:  Sounds like a CD player on permanent skip.  Plus huge gaps in their database of artists.

KEXP and other stations that still stream now that iTunes doesn't carry them: The CD-skipping effect isn't as bad as Pandora, but it's still bad.  And more talented idiots are using Auto-Tune when they don't need to, so I have to turn off the speakers.  But the taskbar doesn't show me the song title unless the cursor is on it, and that is delayed anyway, so I keep missing parts of other songs.

Satellite radio: It comes with my satellite TV service, so, radio on the TV.  Not Internet radio, but close enough.  In addition to being mostly genre-specific, and I like a lot of variety, I'm stuck with things like nostalgia and jazz stations because of the increasing use of fucking Auto-Tune.

What's my problem with Auto-Tune?  It physically hurts.  Fingernails on chalkboards don't bother me.  Sirens don't bother me.  Auto-Tune causes eardrum-shredding pain.  It has to be an autism thing because my daughter and many of her friends have a similar reaction.

I don't understand how someone singing in an empty room with bad acoustics while failing to harmonize with Stephen Hawking is supposed to sound pleasant.  Especially if they're singing off key, because it doesn't fix that.  Why the fuck do people like Megan James (Purity Ring) and Lauren Mayberry (CHVRCHES) use it?  Their voices don't need any help.

Fucking #whitepeopleproblems #firstworldproblems

Sleepwalking in Saint Regis

Sunday night / Monday morning (05 October / 06 October) I was on another nocturnal mission.

I awoke yesterday with a really bad headache and overall sense of malaise.  When I let the cats out I saw the side door to the shop/outbuilding/garage was open.  It was pretty obvious what happened.

I couldn't tell if I had driven anywhere, as I no longer record the mileage - that served its purpose by determining I do sleep drive.  I had rolled down the driver's side window - something I often do when sleep driving, or just sitting in my pickup while in that twilight state.  I suspect I did drive, as the truck seemed to be not quite where parked it.  As I no longer trust my memory all that much, I can't be sure.  It would only matter if I kept a diary of these events, continued to log mileage to know for sure if I drove anywhere in my sleep, and attempted to match hangover symptoms with activities.  Perhaps with the help of strategically placed webcams.  But to what end?  I don't do this nightly.  It happens once a month, if that. 

Regardless of driving or not, I didn't hide the garage-door opener this time, and that's what really matters.

One thing I have been tracking is how my sleep pattern is really different when I sleepwalk, even if what it typically is changes.  These days I usually wake up 2-3 hours after going to sleep, drink some water, go back to sleep anywhere from one minute to over an hour later, and repeat the process every 30 to 60 minutes after that.  When I wander around at night I don't wake up for five, six, even seven hours.  The only other time I'll sleep for six or more uninterrupted hours is if I take a benzo.

Interrupted sleep is normal for me.  For most of my life a typical night was four hours of sleep, 5-60 minutes of being awake, two hours of sleep, 5-60 minutes of being awake, an hour of sleep, then waking up and figuring out if I need more sleep our not.

If my now-unreliable memory is to be trusted, I slept through the night as a child only when I woke up with a bad headache and otherwise feeling sick.  As opposed to all those times I woke up, sometimes on the floor, after a night of the normal sleep pattern, feeling really sick after the scary dreams and having wet the bed.  Now I know those to be signs of having had one or more severe nocturnal secondarily generalized seizures.

That stopped when I was nine or ten.  The partial seizures when I was awake, presenting as visual distortions, continued until I was 24 (that was 1986) and took lithium.  The generalized seizures returned, the partial seizures got worse, and nothing has been the same since.  But I was also flipping the fuck out with bipolar disorder and other stuff was going on, so it's not entirely lithium's fault.