Music and other stuff
This is not new; this is on par with the usual behaviours of desperate despots. Their time will come.
More about this is found in an article by Balkan Insight.
Aleksandar Vučić, the despot in this case, will be gone soon but not soon enough. The people of Serbia know the score.
#Serbia #despot #dictator #politics #AleksandarVucic #repression
All of those points are spoken by my twelve-year-old metal self (who never existed really because I discovered metal in my forties).
There's an interview with Father Tabakis here. Maybe there's no reason to fear the priest?
On 2026-04-26 a critical bug was registered to show that anybody could create a user account even if the administrator of a WriteFreely instance disallowed the registration of user accounts. The person who logged the bug added this information:
PS: not sure if it's actually a security issue, but we tried to reach out to security@writefreely.org beforehand, but haven't received a reply
The fix was merged into code two weeks ago.
The release to fix the problem was published ten hours ago. At the same time, WriteFreely posted this on Mastodon:
Most importantly, this fixes an issue where malicious actors can create accounts on closed-registration #WriteFreely instances running the previous v0.16 or below. We've heard reports of this ACTIVELY being exploited today across many WriteFreely instances — multi- and single-user. We advise ALL WriteFreely admins to upgrade immediately. You may also notice many unwanted accounts on your instance that need to be manually cleaned up. We'll be adding admin tools to make this quicker soon.
Two days ago, a person commented on the bug fix. The person made some points:
[...]
Today, I discovered more than 150 automatically created accounts on my instance, which was configured with registrations closed and invitations restricted to administrators. Each account immediately published a spam post.
We are talking about a complete bypass of the registration access control, which allows attackers to:
- Create unlimited accounts without authorization.
- Publish spam or malicious content under the instance’s domain.
- Consume storage and server resources.
- Damage the domain’s reputation.
- Potentially access private content on instances where authenticated users have additional permissions.
This issue was reported months ago and acknowledged as unintended behavior:
“This isn't by design, and did need to be fixed.”
However, it was deferred to a future release, without publishing a security update, notifying administrators, or providing an official mitigation. In the meantime, the vulnerable endpoint is actively being exploited.
A vulnerability of this severity should not have to wait for the next regular release. A corrective version, even if it is simply
0.16.1, should be released immediately, together with a security advisory warning all WriteFreely administrators.[...]
Please release a security update immediately and clearly notify administrators. It is not acceptable to leave a publicly exploitable endpoint available for months when it completely invalidates the closed-registration setting.
I just had to manually connect to my instance and use mysql commands to manually delete a number of users.
Don't get me wrong: I'm grateful to use WriteFreely and I'm grateful to its makers. However, the critique should be taken seriously. WriteFreely does generate money for its maker. To wait nearly three months to fix what WriteFreely themselves seem to infer to as a 'critical security fix' is extremely bad. I'm considering to migrate from WriteFreely to a static site generator, for example, Mataroa, where I host another blog.
Gold Panda's latest album, TON UP, is exactly what I need this morning: hi-energy house that deeply reminds me of the old Paris is Burning style of life.
This album is a lot of fun and high-tempo throughout. Somehow, this album makes me think of SebastiAn's recent DJ session at Peacock Society.
#music #MusicTips #GoldPanda #EdBanger #SebastiAn #HighEnergy #house #techno
In a few months, it's election time in Sweden. The Tidö parties are probably going to lose, which is the best thing for anyone. They're a pack of xenophobic power-hungry political parties that engage in power, disguising their desires as ideology.
Tomma Intet are a Swedish indie-rock collective. Imagine a Californian sect that've been forced to sing choral hymns and gorge themselves only on music by The Radio Dept. Here you are. This song is sweet and dreamy. Kind of like something that George Harrison would have made and added a prog drive.
The chorus goes like this:
Själlösa jävla parasiter ni kan dra åt helvete
...which translates to something like this; translation by yours truly:
Soulless fucking parasites go to hell
If that's not love, what is.
Today dear Will Sheff releases his sophomore album, Extra Mile. It's a good leap from his first album, Nothing Special.
Will once co-founded Okkervil River and Shearwater, two bands that I love. He's now making thoughtful, visceral, and lovely music to which we hum and swing our hips.
I love Jackass. Most of the contents. There's no real negativity in the series. There's pranks, stuff that would usually be embarrassing, many gut-laughs, a lot of pain.
Steve-O is a Jackass cast member, well-known for performing some of the more painful and stunts that would be embarrassing to most people. I'm reading his first memoir, Professional Idiot: a Memoir. His dad was an absent and careless extremely-high-up executive at Pepsico; Steve-O's mom was a stay-at-home alcoholic.
One of the more interesting things about Steve-O is that he's a classic twelve-step alcoholic: he's a person who's made his way through the Alcoholics Anonymous twelve-step program.
I think that the charm of Jackass is in us being able to not take ourselves too seriously. You can't be super-macho in Jackass: you have to embrace the fact that you look uncool. That ability to not take ourselves seriously and be OK in compromising situations, I think, is endearing. —Steve-O
There's a lot of immediate shit about Jackass that puts it aside to a lot of pop-culture events. It's naturally not only about laughter, fear, and pain; it's about friendship and love. It's easy to see that those guys like and even love each other. In a larger perspective, Jackass is a story about what happens when regular people become world-famous. Drugs, alcohol, sex, addiction, money, jealousy, hate, falling to pieces, trying to pick oneself up.
It just so happened that Johnny Knoxville and some of the people in our Jackass world staged an intervention: they locked me up in a psychiatric ward, and I was locked up long enough and exposed to the right kind of message that I realised, 'Wow, I have to do something.' I've been sober ever since. —Steve-O
One of the more wonderful things about Steve-O is that he's fairly erudite about life, like a lot of other AA peeps; you get to know what's truly valuable in life when everything you 'valued' is bullshit, when your 'friends' are really parasites and vultures or buried deep in addiction, like yourself. Getting your head out of that instead of trying to find out what barbecue coal to buy is real.
Before Twitter collapsed completely (due to Elon Musk being forced to buy the platform, something he didn't want to do, I was lucky to be allowed to reproduce an email that was sent by David Berman, the musician and writer, to a guy who asked him for advice on sobriety. I love that letter.
Jocelyn West was previously named Jocelyn Montgomery. She is one of the founding members of the wondrous band Miranda Sex Garden.
West's song on this album is wonderful. It floats, it builds, it takes great care of Hildegard von Bingen's work and legacy. David Lynch's work is also evident, making the voice float and carry through. That said, I'm not sure how much work Lynch did on the album.
From Lynchnet:
In 1998, David Lynch completed work on a new album by Jocelyn Montgomery, the Scottish fiddle player seen in Pretty as a Picture. The album is based on 12th century verses by Hildegard von Bingen. The album was released in the US on August 25, 1998.
Jocelyn Montgomery: The experiences I've had singing Hildegard and performing it, is that it's always been a very natural and instinctive thing. I've always deeply identified with it. It's the most beautiful music I've ever come across ... ever sung.
#MusicTips #music #JocelynMontgomery #DavidLynch #JocelynWest
From the Bandcamp page:
ABADIR, known to his friends as Rami Abadir, is a music producer, sound designer, DJ and music critic born in Cairo, Egypt and based in Berlin, Germany.
When I started listening to this EP, I thought Omar Souleyman had a child with Zuli.
This is Egypt, jungle, and intense percussive movements. I dig this stuff.
This is one of the most weird metal-music releases I've heard in 2026. Here's what I wrote on Record Club after I heard the EP:
Vocals seem to be by that little guy who's chained to Jabba the Hutt.
The synths and piano breaks do my little head in.
Imagine Elton John collabing with Darkthrone.