This is the album that I put the most work into re-releasing "correctly" by far, and I'm probably going to backport that effort to other albums. If you're one of the theoretical readers who subscribes to my RSS but not my other comms channels, now you know!

So what's this extra effort? Well, before, I offered music in just whatever format I happened to have it, which was a wild mix of MP3 and OGG (thankfully not WAV at least), with whatever frakked metadata the files happened to have. _No Merit_ is consistently transcoded to Ogg Vorbis. I also put a lot of effort into metadata: songs that have individual track art have it embedded correctly, and everything else has the front cover.

I even published lyrics for the first time, which I've historically omitted. These are not only encoded in metadata as the "Comment" field, they're also easily readable on the music page itself.

The final bit of effort was updating the back cover to have the full track listing. I was actually nervous to publish this, not for the reasons I was nervous when I first designed the back cover in 2011 (it's intentionally very personal and vulnerable), but because I was scared it was going to be harmful for some people to read! I still think it might, but one of my partners told me today, essentially, this:

> It's really cool. It makes me feel more normal and less alone about the feelings I had when *I* was queer but didn't know I was queer. Even though we were different ages, that was about the same year I was having similar feelings, and it really is a time capsule of that era. It's also very you, which I love!

Which... yeah, damn. I wish the girl staying up at night doing that cover design could have known the radical acceptance she was going to have later in life.

![[no-merit-back.png]]

You can listen to every track, right now, as free as always, [here](/music#nm)!

A few final notes:

* My new site deployment tech works like a dream even when uploading a bundle of heavy media files, so that's nice!
* _No Merit_ is the last album I ever got to a point of being completed, but I still have other old music to republish, so I'm probably going to give myself an easier time and do _Daybreak_ next. That buys more time for me to archive my Soundclick material and compile it into an album format for the first time, which will be... work.
* I have previous and next links on my blog now, finally! And also, my topnav "blog" link just goes to Fuller Stack now, as I don't yet have other blogs concurrent to this one as I originally planned. Huge QOL improvement that I'm glad to have finally gotten done.