abbub

Not only all of the above, but for Paul in particular, a genius who was in the midst of one of the largest creative highs of his entire career. I mean, some of the snippets of ‘half-baked’ songs he plays are songs that will figure well into his solo/Wings career. I honestly don’t know how you can come out of watching Get Back with anything other than admiration for human creativity as personified by Paul McCartney during this amazing month that got captured on film.

I mean...it kind of depends. As a history buff, I love the French plantation scene in the long version of Apocolypse Now Redux... I totally understand why it was removed from the original theatrical release, though. I think director cuts tend to play to the more 'hardcore' fans of a piece, and sometimes serve to make the work less accessible to more casual viewers.

Full stack dev checking in (Django on the backend, Angular on the frontend). Also have no difficulty with modern development (web or otherwise) despite having cut my teeth on 8-bit BASIC. ;)

I think the fins on the back of a batmobile set I have are from a dragon in one of the 'castle' sets...

"...you have practically unlimited entertainment."

This is a tangent, but I feel like I enjoyed things more when I didn't have practically unlimited entertainment. Video games before the digital era with Xbox Game Pass, PSNow / PSPlus, etc were limited to a few games that you bought and really invested in. Videos before streaming where you were limited to what was sitting in Blockbuster or in your physical collection. Music was limited to what the radio was playing (which you had no control over) or what you had in your tape/CD collection. Because physical media was something of an investment, it sort of led to a sort of 'automatic curation' that's much harder with having just about every game, movie, tv show, and album at your fingertips.

Maybe it's an age thing, but now I have 'back catalogs' for all of this stuff, and there's a constant feeling of 'missing out' if you choose one thing from your unlimited supply over another thing. It's exhausting.

I mean...based on what? We have more stuff, that's for sure. Our healthcare (when we can afford it) and nutrition is probably better and more consistent. Are we any happier? I'm not sure.

I guess I just don't care enough about whether or not a person, party, or politician has contempt for me. Whoever has the policy that will be best for the country and the population overall. (With the understanding that my best interests are not always the best interests of the overall country / population...)

I mean...it's not 'The Left' that's pushing the 'fake news' and 'alternate facts' agenda when they come up against anything they disagree with...

Hrm. We have Apple Music and Spotify. As I mentioned, my wife and kiddo use Spotify and have never complained about music gone missing, but my experience with Spotify is probably a few years out of date.

I use Apple Music and only have about five playlists which are sizable. I haven't seen any music go 'grey' in any of them (I just checked). Some of that might be that my music tastes arent' particularly obscure, some of it might be Apple Music's licensing relationships with the record labels.

CDs are currently the best bargain in music at the moment. I can hit a thrift store and find about 10 discs that I'm interested in. Of those, about 5 are usually in mint condition, which I buy for $1-2 a piece. If there's a disc that I'm really* interested in, I can usually pick it up on eBay or Discogs for $3-5, shipped. It's almost always me looking through the discs which tend to be about 10% CCM, 15% country, 15% classical, and about 60% rock. There's always at least one other guy sifting through the Lenny Dee, Herb Albert, and Lawrence Welk records that are all that remains of a thrift store vinyl section these days (though I think Herb Albert is becoming harder and harder to find... :P ).

* We get Spotify for free with our phone contract, but I prefer the interface / integration of Apple Music on my phone.

Is this really still an issue? I have a feeling that 'collecting music' (with the intent to listen to it) is probably something that only Boomers, Gen-Xers (myself), and older millenials still do.

(The (strange) exception being vinyl, and I suspect that a fair amount of the albums that get purchased don't actually get played. The records are really more 'collectables' than an actual means to listen to music for many people...audio funko pops, if you will...)

I've got a hard drive full of FLAC rips of my CD collection, which I listen to when I'm at the computer working. (I think I have about 600 discs.) I have plex serving the FLAC files, so I can listen to my music collection on my devices, but other than at the computer while working, I never do.

In the car and away from the computer listening is almost entirely music streaming services, with titles downloaded to my phone when I know I'm going to be somewhere with spotty internet.

My wife is 100% Spotify. My daughter (12) uses streaming services or youtube (!) to listen to music.

"I have no interest in setting up a bunch of engineering equipment to listen to a bunch of 60-70 year olds broadcast their uncensored perspective on things."

That was my take on it, too. I have one cheap Chinese radio in a box somewhere, but I got rid of all of my decent radios a few years back. I can just imagine what our local repeater devolved into during the Trump years. :/

The once-a-month meeting at the Village Inn was filled with laments about how there were no young people involved, but the repeater was filled with conversation that no young people would possibly want to be a party to.

I've discovered that it's unpopuler to point this out, but a big problem with amateur radio as a hobby is the current hobbyists involved.

Meh. In the grand scheme of things, Apple doesn't even make the top ten list of shady businesses this modern lifestyle forces me to engage with. :/

I love that the 'deepities' wiki page has a link to the page on Deepak Chopra... lol

I loved loved LOVED our three week stay in Morocco in 2019, and their cellular infrastructure was pretty decent (like, traveling all over we were never without cell service and at least some level of internet), but the internet in the places we stayed was pretty terrible across the board. Having said that, the food was so amazing that I'd be tempted to deal with the slow internet. :/

So the ‘few bad apples’ argument is valid for police force that they’re protesting, but not for the protestors?

There are no PPP solutions for A/UX. I also have a SE/30 with 6.x, 7.1.1, 7.5, and A/UX on it (8 GB is a LOT of hard drive space on a SE/30) and the PPP solution works for everything except A/UX.

How many times do I have to buy the same software, though?

Yeah, I spent a couple hours today trying to get pleroma installed on a pi4. Pleroma unhappy about the elixir version, elixir unhappy about erlang version. What a mess. Simple is not a word I think can be associated with it.

Meh. The last three and a half years have pretty clearly demonstrated that a large part of the foundation of America that we’ve always believed was held in place with ‘checks and balances’ were actually ‘gentlemen’s agreements’ that don’t mean shit if one side of the agreement decides to ignore them.

Within reason, sure? The idea that that compensation should exist in perpetuity is nonsense, particularly when the people who most often are the ones getting compensated aren't actually the one's responsible for the 'creation' in the first place. But let's be clear, people very seldom 'create' knowledge, they extend existing knowledge. That's one of the main reasons why the human race has gotten as far as we have. It's something Newton understood very well, and but modern hubris seems to disregard.