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Thegn

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Accelerando (2005) 2 months ago

At the time I read the story, Economics 2.0 and its effect on humans that installed the upgrade paralleled with some stuff I had read about sociopathic behavior. Stross later wrote about the same ideas in Rule 34.

‘Pride is all very well, but a sausage is a sausage,’ he said.

- Terry Pratchett

The poor have ethics just like the rest of us. They just can’t afford to keep it.

I have mild tinnitus, and I don’t really notice it at all when my hearing aids are in. (Phillips, got them at Costco) Sadly, it’s a lot more noticeable once I take them out. I am still waiting for that electrostimulation therapy I read about a few years ago to pan out.

I can speak to this - the main variations are in the kind of butter you use. Using salted, unsalted, or margarine result in similar yet different cookies. I personally use unsalted and feel like it creates the most “cookie” like experience. Flour brand and texture also makes a difference. You will get a very different result based on using the store brand vs (for example) King Arthur flour.

Well, we could always just set up solar panels and use it to capture output from the massive fusion reaction 8.5 light minutes away from us. Does that count as a successful utilization of fusion?

I also moved over to PopOS over a year ago and have been quite happy with the end result. Between Steam and Lutris I’ve been able to run everything I want to, and I don’t have to play whack-a-mole with Microsoft’s “features” that I’m not interested in.

Bonus points: I’m having fun with my computer again!

I'm personally a fan of the old stuff (Count Basie, Duke Ellington, Cab Calloway, Chick Webb, Jimmie Lunceford, Slim Gaillard, Ella Fitzgerald to name a few) but the best thing you can do is go to dances and lessons, and when you hear a song you like, go up to the DJ and ask them what it was. The best music is the music you like and that makes you want to dance, regardless of who made it.

I moved to PopOS about a year ago; I've tried a few times to move to Linux and until this most recent jump I've had to move back. It's gotten a lot better than it used to be, although I have to acknowledge that it's still got some rough edges. In a vacuum I'd probably go back to Windows, but Microsoft has been actively making the Windows experience worse as well to the point that I'll deal with the occasional Linux hiccups.

(Well, that, and I'm actually having FUN with my computer again...)

I admit I'm uncomfortable explaining it by skin color, but I've never found anybody who has been able to explain to me what the difference is, and I will admit lacking the musical knowledge to explain it. I fell into that style from dancing Lindy Hop; I was loving the music I was hearing when I was out dancing, so I went and bought an album from the only name I knew at the time - Glenn Miller. It was some of the most boring and trite music I'd ever heard in my life, and did not inspire me to dance.

For me (and I don't judge people for thinking differently) there's a certain joie de vivre in the music that is just lacking from what white musicians released commercially. I know they were capable of it (I once found a recording of Glenn Miller swinging it just as hard as anything Basie put out) but they were playing to their audience at the time. As I've learned more about the history of Swing and Lindy Hop, this was a specific choice made to "civilize" (as the white people of the time would have said) Jazz's savage rhythms. There's actually posters from the Arthur Murray school in the 1940s saying this exact thing.

(Aside, I had a friend who played a radio show in the 2000s playing old Jazz music. She told me once that if she put anything from a black musician on the show, she'd get hate mail from the listeners. Go figure.)

What I find curious about it though is that it's obviously recognizing the style - it plays 1-2 musicians from the "black" group, then circles into only playing Miller/Goodman/Rat pack and never comes back around to playing the music that I originally was trying to play. If it was behaving the way you are thinking, I'd expect it to mix the two styles.

One problem I've run into with the music services is with older styles. For example, I'm specifically into black musicians from the 1930s-1950s who played swing style music. I have yet to find a service that actually will play more than 2-3 songs in that style before deciding that what I really want to hear is rat pack or swing by white musicians. No matter how much I thumbs down it, I get Glenn Miller/Frank Sinatra/Benny Goodman instead of Count Basie/Duke Ellington/Slim Gaillard. The services have that music (I can find the songs and seed stations from it) but for whatever reason all of the ones I've tried (Spotify/Apple/Amazon/Pandora, and I have a feeling I've tried others and forgotten) just don't want me to listen to the style I'm looking for.