Introduction to Nuzlockes

This is new project documenting my blind Pokemon Platinum Nuzlocke run. It would have been cool to track my progress but I know I wouldn’t record enough clips to make a cohesive video. I decided that blogging it and taking pictures as I go would be a fun way to record the story… except I thought of blogging it after I started the save so the pictures will begin starting from the next one! I will be summarizing the story as I play and I may mess up some of the details as I recount them but thats okay!

Over the last few months, I’ve been grossly aware of the how algorithms have been shaping my life. Content being directly streamed to my brain with no friction whatsoever. It’s been taking away from my attention span, my focus, my enjoyment and my well being. When I got into homelabbing and self-hosting, I thought it was going to be my solution to this. No more corporations, no more algorithms, I can collect the content I want to watch and listen to. But something felt missing, I think I was missing the core of the issue. Yes part of the issue is algorithms made to keep me consuming, but another piece of the puzzle is the over abundance of content available. Since there is no end to the content stream, there is no time to reflect on the content consumed. There’s always something else to watch. This is where I went wrong, instead developing a curated collection, I pirated all the music I’d ever want. Yes, the access was nice but it left me with the same decision paralysis from before.

Overview

We live in an age of software as a service (SaaS). For a monthly fee, these software give their users access to the conveniences of their product. Services like Netflix and Spotify give their users access to petabytes of content without the struggle of hosting or carrying that content themselves. The convenience is undeniable, but not without their concerns. Focusing on Spotify, their revenue stream for their artists isn’t small artist friendly, mainly benefitting labels and popular artists. Nothing wrong with convenience, but if you are looking to support artist, you are better off buying the artists music directly and listening to the files off your phone. Unfortunately, given a large enough collection, it is not feasible to save thousands of songs along with photos and apps on a phone anymore. There is the option of getting a dedicated music player like an iPod or music player, but that poses its own inconveniences. The goal is to have something almost as accessible as Spotify, and with selfhosting it is now possible. This post will go over the steps to create your own music service using Navidrome as the music server. To track your listening, this will also show you how to connect Navidrome to Last.fm.