Uriel238 [all pronouns]

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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: June 25th, 2023

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  • The short answer, I don’t know.

    But from my own observation there were a lot more general key changes in 1980s-era rock, which may have been the result of fewer other ways to escalate a song for the final chorus and outro, which is to say, yes, new tech (mostly sampling, looping and higher-fidelity recording) reduced the need for creativity much the way that movies had a lot more stage effects before they just filmed actors in green-screen and added everything with CGI.

    Last year I went to a SGMC concert of mostly Queen, and was noticing how much their tunes bounced around, often having two or three key-changes per verse+chorus.


  • I’d expect the Waymo video to have captured footage of these guys. It might not be that difficult to track them, and street harassment might well qualify as assault if the DA of San Francisco were interested in prosecuting.

    That said, it’s telling that they freely and openly harassed a strange woman on the street once the threat of being run over was not a factor.

    ETA: One short-term workaround is to tint the windows so that passengers cannot be seen from the outside, but there might be causes to harass occupied Waymo vehicles regardless of the passenger (say, to mug them). I’m curious if this is going to lead to equipping autonomous vehicles with anti-riot ordnance.




  • In the aughts George W. Bush signed an executive order instructing the IRS not to enforce the restrictions on churches regarding political speech non-profits are not supposed to endorse parties or specific candidates, though they can talk about issues).

    After that dozens of right-wing political action committees and activism organizations redefined themselves as churches, what are now called parachurch organizations that are tax-free and political.

    So yes, it is already a laundering business taking advantage of Christian nationalist leadership who believes in loyalty over principle.




  • Here in the states, the social norm of taking personal responsibility for all our misfortune and lack of career opportunities allows our industrialists to take credit for propelling themselves to greatness (even when their inherited wealth did the heavy lifting).

    So yeah, a latchkey kid childhood (in which I was home alone, because all the adults in my house had to work) figures largely into my lifelong major depression. I suspect our intergenerational mental health epidemic here in the states is informed not only by intergenerational dysfunction (each generation taking the abuse of the previous and then abusing the next) but also by the isolation created by nuclear families without strong communities.

    Then there’s the matter that we humans tend to blame ourselves for trauma, as seen by studies of mothers who endured a miscarriage, and the disproportionate tendency to blame themselves for circumstances that could not have been affected by behavior (diet, attitude, whatever). Also people who survive the recently deceased often will look to themselves to see how circumstances of the death might have been changed.



  • Newton’s Long John Silver was a solid enough performance to warrant a sequel / spin-off, so TTAPD would be like a day to honor Bela Lugosi’s Dracula or even James Earl Jones’ Darth Vader.

    These people have absolutely made their mark on American culture.

    Black Friday, the shopping day is a gimmick taking advantage of an already popular shopping day. Not necessarily the most popular or most profitable or even the worst day for shopper shennanigans and violence. But then, it’s difficult for capitalist phenomena to not be turned into gimmicks used to market more sales.



  • In the rurals, we had need of a truck. Of course, it was an old beat up GM, and as a boy I got in trouble when I tossed a log of firewood into the bed of a shiny new ES truck (bigger than the GM) and missed, damaging its otherwise pristine body finish, which I’d later learn was costly to repair.

    It informed how I would eventually compute I, a suburban kid, was too unfamiliar with strange rural conventions for heavy labor.