Harvest Complete:

A longstanding goal of mine was to bring up to par the number of times I would listen to newly-inducted 5-star songs compared to old school 5-star songs.  There's no use promoting music to equality if, in reality, I'm still not treating the new songs equally.  Therefore, I set the benchmark at 200 listens.  I would listen to every 5-star song 200 times, whether old or new, and at the end of the project I'll have listened to all self-rated superior songs the same amount.

Since I had flipped about 120 songs from 4-star to 5-star recently this project took months, but today it's finally done.  I can now proudly say that all my 5-star songs, whether newly minted or old as time, have received a proper loving tribute and also a strict test of endurance.  If a newly minted 5-star song wasn't actually as good as I thought it was, there would be no way I could listen to it 200 times, but the fact is I did -- except in two cases where I decided my new ranking was wrong and flipped the songs back down to 4-star:  The Edge of Dawn and Marco Polo.  In their place I promoted Lenna's Theme and Here With Me, which is about as old school as one can get.

Now all my 5-star ratings are 'genuine.'  Not hypothetical but battle tested.  I've listened to them almost twice as often as the 1-4 crowd and have no regrets doing so. :).

Now that I'm confident in my ratings I can say my ultimate music playlist, which has 1 copy of 1-star songs, 2 of 2-star, 4 of 3-star, 8 of 4-star and 16 of 5-star, is also ready for listening, so I've switched back to it.  Now I can enjoy all my music proportional to their quality, so I can make use of all 5500 of my favorite songs but also make use of my knowledge of which are better than the rest.

It's taken endless years to construct this ultimate music playlist, it wasn't even possible to finish until the Sea of Stars soundtrack came out, but it's finally happened.  I can rest easy until Granblue Fantasy Relink comes out and messes all my ratings up again.

In other news Andrew Anglin reports having some sort of physical and mental breakdown due to an unknown illness.  He suspects fever dreams, but then the question becomes what caused those?  My guess is a brain tumor, but your guess is as good as mine.  The larger point is this guy has been giving guru-like health advice about diet, exercise, soap, vaping, testosterone-building lifestyle techniques, and so on, and after all that he collapses and nearly dies upon turning 40.  So as it turns out all his advice was total bullshit.  It turns out that my advice, to avoid vice, including overeating, but enjoy your life and take it easy, worked out a lot better and at a far lower price.

As usual everything I say is objectively superior to Andrew Anglin, but as usual he's the one with millions of readers while I languish in obscurity.  It's like a metaphor for this messed-up world.  If meritocracy is the bright center of the universe, we're on the planet that it's farthest from.  I wish Anglin the best, he's fighting the good fight and is more often right than wrong, but I still think a lot of people's lives could have been improved dramatically if they'd listened to me instead of him.

Plus it's rather fitting for him to be struck down by seemingly God at the very moment he endorses a terrorist slaughter of babies due to being obsessively anti-Semitic.  Again, I'm in perfect health and in perfect spiritual health, because I still recognize evil when I see it, and it's Hamas, not Israel, that's intentionally slaughtering civilians.  (It's also Ukraine, not Russia, that's intentionally targeting civilians, but at least Anglin can see that much.  Sadly the number of people who can hold both of these obvious facts in their mind simultaneously seems to be vanishingly few.)

Typically speaking, a sound spirit rests in a sound mind and a sound body.  When a spiritual guru mentions he's hallucinating and has headaches so bad he can't eat for the past six days, that's generally the right time to assume his spiritual advice might be a little shaky too, and it's time to back up slowly so as not to startle him.  Just my two cents, which could apply to the drug addicted, depressed Jordan Peterson as well.