What Could Possibly Go Wrong?

Yay! I have 5 months of podcast music organized!! And one more episode just needs a single song to be ready. That is great! The next episode is episode 200, and I really wanted to play the song by my favorite group (the Russian band DDT), since I have permission. However, it is an intense song about ending war, and I wanted to find music that fit thematically. Happily, I've been gathering permissions and had enough songs that I was able to find ones that really work. At first, I thought I would play a song by two of my friends here, but their song just doesn't fit this episode. So, I've bumped them to next month, which will fit a zillion times better, and put in a couple of songs that have more serious themes. I also feel like these groups all fit together a bit more too, since they are all serious musicians. I didn't want my friends to feel awkward (since this is their first time making music together) if I played them in the same show with the most famous musician in the Russian-speaking world.

I really need to get my shit together, though, and have some time when I guarantee that I will listen to music for the podcast. I've been really focused on books, which is great. However, if I have 13GB of music to listen to, I need to get on that.

Today was supposed to be rainy, but so far, no rain (which is fine). Joel's bike tire patch worked, as I was able to bike up to the bus stop and back. It is a lot of work to get out of the valley, but I did it. I'll continue to do it daily to try and build up those muscles.

In other news, I have a lot of socialization that happens over Skype, and now Skype is going away. It looks like with groups of friends that I'll be meeting them with Google Meet, and I'll try using Signal (a phone messaging app that also can be used on the desktop) for talking to just one other person. We'll see how that goes. * crosses fingers *

I finished up the last of the podcasts last month that I had organized music for, so I've been working hard sending out requests for new songs. I was anxious, as I've been focused more on listening to books recently than music, but it turns out to have been less bad than I thought. First of all, I have maybe 100 songs that I only sent out one request for more than 500 days ago, so I can send out requests to all of those (if it looks like the contact info is still good). Plus, I've listened to many more songs than I thought, so I have maybe 30 new songs to send out requests for. I only need 60 songs total for the year, and it looks like I need to send out about 100 requests to get those permissions. Of course, with blanket permission from 5 record labels now, that is a bit easier. On top of that, a lot of musicians have given me blanket permission. A lot of musicians have gotten back to me overnight, which is heartening. All this activity with permissions reminds me that I need to clean up some of the database stuff (if I have requested a song twice with no response, then I give up and mark the band as unavailable, which I haven't been doing). Happily, I'm nearly at the end of another round of listening, which means I should be able to squeeze a few more song requests out of that. I'm also trying to organize statistics so that I can predict approximately how much music I need to download to find enough songs to request. When I finish this batch, I should be able to do it.