Enthusiastic sh.it.head
Actually, I have one at the ready, mostly because my dad used to call my brother and I by our feminine equivalent names to bug us as children (different time, young army guy).
Have not given thought to preferred choices, though, just that one.
Say It Ain’t So - Weezer
Don’t Let Me Down - The Beatles
Are You Gonna Be My Girl - Jet
Living on a Prayer - Bon Jovi
Sometimes You Can’t Make It on Your Own/Beautiful Day/Sunday Bloody Sunday - U2
Patio Lanterns - Kim Mitchell
Every Sperm is Sacred - Monty Python
Mama Tried - Merle Haggard
Anything from Marty Robbins’ Gunfighter Ballads and Trail Songs when I can get away with it.
You Oughta Know - Alanis Morrisette (and it’s a mistake every time)
Big on my maybe list:
Earache My Eye - Cheech and Chong. Aka as a straight cis guy, the only thing that would get me to perform in drag (preferably good drag, with help from people who know what they’re doing)
Puppy Love/Put Your Head on My Shoulder - Paul Anka (been on a Paul Anka kick recently, and one of the karaoke spots I like is really close to where the restaurant his parents ran eons ago was)
I’m a Gun - Lorne Green (similar reasons as Paul Anka)
Why would there be a scale suitable for humans at a bank (I’m assuming customer side of the counter here)?
I mean, nothing life-saving or earth-shattering, and I don’t put too much stock in it now because memory’s a funny thing in general, but I’ve had ‘premonitions’.
Biggest one was the period when I went to boot camp as a reservist. I had a dream several months prior about a guy saying ‘Welcome to [specific base], welcome to hell’ in a thick French accent outside of a barracks. I wasn’t thinking about joining at the time. After I decided to join, got sent to boot camp and went to have a smoke on my first morning. Lo and behold, members of the Quebequois platoon that arrived the week prior were out there, and take a wild guess what I heard?
Idk, brain’s making predictions all the time and sometimes it gets an eerie hit. We don’t think about the ones that don’t come to fruition as much.
My kid’s in their early 20s and they will be getting at least a stocking until the day I can’t fill one or die.
I’m in my mid-30s, and my parents still fill a stocking for me every year (even when I’ve said they really don’t have to do that).
It’s possible that this never stops, though it might change a little bit (more practical stuff, slightly less of it v. legit childhood).
To the larger question: oftentimes it doesn’t change - they’re just seen as children with the full rights, privileges, and responsibilities of adulthood. If you did your job right, you shouldn’t have to worry about that too much - but you still will.
Maybe something like Patreon
Well we do have Liberapay. It’s not perfect in that it only addresses the payment angle (with the issue around processors noted by the other reply still present), and doesn’t allow for subscriber only content, but it’s something.
I think between something like this and a few other things (dunno much about PeerTube etc. or if ‘private’ posts are a thing where you could maintain a ‘mailing list’ of donor accounts and grant them access to exclusive stuff), it’s possible to cobble something together. Lot of management would be required in the backend compared to more mainstream approaches at this point, though.
Just thinking outloud, there’s probably stuff I’m not considering here. Re: an eStore…idk, only thing I can think of is a DIY webstore relying on emails and money transfer services if trying to avoid mainstream eCommerce stuff like Shopify or whatever (same way people used to sell pot on the clearweb back in the very early days, lol).
100%. It’s why (when I take a look at things from my bottom-up god POV, which is a key stumbling point here re:implementation) I think a Christian movement that interprets the fucked system behind such outcomes as ‘Satanic’ corruptions to be cast aside would be interesting and possibly pretty cool. Or it’d just continue the cycle of fucked up shit with new window dressing, idk.
Satanic in quotes 'cause there’s lots you can unpack with that term/figure, but you know, popular broad strokes version - evil force trying to keep us from what we can be. It’s really just us getting in our own way IMO.
I can’t say that I disagree with anything here. What bugs me about it is that at an idea at the core of many religions is that all us humans are of one kind, some particular expression of the universe (however that’s conceptualized), and can/should act in that fashion, towards each other and the world around us.
But it’s almost always turned into a footnote among a bunch of other bullshit that perpetuates tribalism, subjugation and violence. Going to use words that are easily poked apart, but I hope the idea comes across: we all contain something of the divine. It’s a miracle we exist at all, and maybe it’s possible we can all act like it and set aside meaningless divisions. One ‘tribe’, the world over, created by mutual recognition and respect rather than force and othering.
Literally all the bones are there, you just have to cast out the outdated divisive bullshit. But doing so also involves actively rejecting some ugly facts about humans as a group, which is, well, hard - to put it mildly.
Idk - this is all why I don’t talk about my beliefs (such as they are) too much, and just try my best to act with the good stuff above in mind as much as possible.
Just a general reminder to people that college stations still exist, blow most other stations out of the water if you want a better variety of music, and the one closest to you would love your support. And lots of them would also love volunteers from the community!
Religion and spirituality, broadly considered, are not inherently evil. That organized religion can justify great evils is a function of human weakness, nothing more.
Then again, this is coupled with a ‘there is no god but that we create ourselves/god has no material existence, but is no less powerful for that’’ POV, which is admittedly a weird one that I’ve been pulling at for a bit. Nothing to do with the nature of our reality or first causes, everything to do with our relationship to reality.
That people take issue with this point of view speaks to a general stigma around ‘mental illness’ as a category. Some strides have been made but we’re still not where I’d like us to be.
Yes, gender dysphoria is a psychological condition. Yes, in many cases acceptance of identified gender and medical transition can reduce the suffering caused by the condition. It’s not like there’s been resounding success/better ‘patient’ outcomes for the alternatives.
It’s just such an obvious line of reasoning to me that I have a hard time understanding how some people don’t grok it, unless they’ve been poisoned by shitty preachers.
It was a woman in her 20s who had been having a much more minor argument on the phone up to that point. I’ve seen the scenario you’re talking about too, but this one seemed like an actual phone call.
Then again, who knows?
The one that stands out is someone on a call in a packed bus who started shouting “I didn’t tell no one you got raped in prison!” into the phone repeatedly.
They made themselves a liar. Felt bad for whoever was on the other side of the line.
Something to think about: a request to take politics off the discussion table is not an infringement on your friend’s rights. What you’re doing is offering a choice: keep talking about other stuff, which will likely make you want to talk with them more frequently, or keep talking about politics, which is draining and makes you less likely to want to talk to them.
There’s definitely other people who they can talk politics to death with if they so choose. You don’t have to accept that yourself if it’s burning you out, unless the other party has literally nothing else to talk about and you want to retain their friendship.
There’s a balance that can be struck here for a better relationship/better shooting the shit experience, but you have to take your own boundaries seriously (said the kettle).
The older I get, the more I understand that old “never discuss politics, religion, or money” adage. Obviously ‘never’ is too far, but in casual discourse too often these just lead to people feeling shittier after the discussion. Save 'em for when there’s a real purpose behind it - supporting change or increasing understanding. Otherwise it’s just bitching, and drains pretty quick.
I think it comes down to finding the specific activities that allow you actually channel this, which are likely different between folks.
I mostly hear about it in terms of physical exertion (working really hard at the gym, sporting particularly hard, whatever) or artistic expression. Dunno that cleaning your house does it for most people (though it might for some, particularly if you go hard and fast enough that it meets the physical exertion criteria).
Trying to find stuff like that for myself - not because there’s anything wrong with a daily jork, but because a weekly to bi-weekly jork is fucking awesome.
What I think is funny is every time this gets reposted, people start talking about food orders when it’s obviously* a Canadian weed dispensary.
This was 100% bound to happen.
*To Canucks who stopped buying all of their weed from Steve.
There’s merit to this. One of the beautiful things about this era is it’s cheap as fuck (compared to other eras of history) to make and put out cool shit. Hell, we had a kid in town a few years back make a feature-length horror film with their phone that got screened at the indie theatre here. But you’ve got to dig and deal with the Sturgeon’s Law factor to find gems among all the cruft out there.
Also noted that folks may want the mainstream entertainment of old, but real talk - once you’re a certain age/level of experience, there’s a good chance you’re not part of the mainstream audience. Large groups don’t make the stuff you like because you’re not the target audience anymore, and four-quadrant approaches are dealing with a very different audience than they used to.
Been thinking about this quote from Terrence McKenna a lot recently (might seem a little quaint in the face of today’s media landscape, but I take away a good message):
We have to create culture, don’t watch TV, don’t read magazines, don’t even listen to NPR. Create your own roadshow. The nexus of space and time where you are now is the most immediate sector of your universe, and if you’re worrying about Michael Jackson or Bill Clinton or somebody else, then you are disempowered, you’re giving it all away to icons, icons which are maintained by an electronic media so that you want to dress like X or have lips like Y.
This is shit-brained, this kind of thinking. That is all cultural diversion, and what is real is you and your friends and your associations, your highs, your orgasms, your hopes, your plans, your fears. And we are told ‘no’, we’re unimportant, we’re peripheral. ‘Get a degree, get a job, get a this, get a that.’ And then you’re a player, you don’t want to even play in that game. You want to reclaim your mind and get it out of the hands of the cultural engineers who want to turn you into a half-baked moron consuming all this trash that’s being manufactured out of the bones of a dying world.