Yup, it’s “The Room” of music

Corey Feldman’s Angelic 2 the Core is without a doubt the worst album I’ve ever listened to. It is not just mediocre or underwhelming, it is not just a “miss,” it is actively and unforgettably horrible. Definitely worth checking out.

These right wing-ass fuckers ruin everything you love, and now they’ve come for LOTR.

I discovered Mastodon the night the Wagner group started marching toward Moscow, and was seeing live updates. From telegram or something. That was crazy.

I don’t know, unfortunately. GF watched it on Netflix while she was in Portugal. Then we watched it together in the States, by means of the high seas. Matey.

My GF recently introduced my to a show called Please Like Me. It’s out of Australia from a comedian named Josh Thomas.

Don’t look at the IMDB score or anything like that – this show is pure art. It’s got a lot of heart and the cinematography is better than it has any right to be.

Please Like Me is honestly better than Fleabag in that it is a dramedy that covers real issues, but it resolves more satisfyingly and feels more grounded in reality. It is so good and nobody has heard of it.

I love Ted Lasso season 1, and season 2 to an extent is also very good, but it kinda lost its footing in season 3, IMO.

The longer episodes are not as tight, writing-wise, and the story suffers a quite a bit because of it. Still a good show, but it went from “This might be one of the best shows I’ve ever seen,” to “Yeah it’s not bad, but…”

Hey! I’m not on the toilet.

right now…

Dude. I found a working baratza preciso at savers for $11 a couple days after I realized the same thing and decided I’d start hunting for an espresso grinder.

It was the perfect confluence of timing, interest in making different style coffees, and unwillingness to spend a fortune.

Undoubtedly my best thrift store find.

Now I can get pretty much like 75% of the way to real espresso (won’t get crema, but whatever) with my free secondhand aeropress and my $11 grinder. It’s amazing. Another $15 for a milk frother and I’m making yummy cappuccino style drinks easy peasy

Problem is usually wars are justified by money or lies or politics, not by things like “defending democracy” or “stopping a genocide”

Those justifications are usually made up at the time it becomes convenient or politically necessary to enter a war.

First heard that in The Boondocks. Lol

Obviously this article is meant to cast the Pope in a bad light, but honestly I’m not going to fault the dude for invoking historical figures who proved to be beneficial to his own order.

I mean, how many times do people invoke the image of Teddy Roosevelt in the US? Dude was hot for war, all the time. Or Abe Lincoln, who, prior to freeing the slaves, would claim that whites were still superior to blacks (depending on his political audience), and would advocate for the relocation of blacks to another country, similar to the US government’s efforts made against Native Americans.

Invoking historical figures is so often a bad move, but how can you fault a person for not knowing these things? Roosevelt and Lincoln are gods in the US. Andrew Jackson was the king of the free man, a paragon of libertarianism, rose straight up from the ground to the presidency. But I’m sure the Native Americans felt otherwise.

As for the Pope thinking the attack was provoked by NATO and not wanting to condemn Russia, well that’s kinda horseshit. Because Russia deserves condemnation for preemptive war in the same way that NATO deserves blame for outfitting more bases along the Russian border, and the US deserves blame for their interference in Ukrainian politics in 2014.

Hell yeah. I just read Guards, Guards! by Pratchett and I’m working through LotR again. Dune is amazing, but I haven’t continued past the original so maybe I’ll read those next.

If you’re into history, I’ve been listening to The People’s History of the United States by Howard Zinn, it focuses on each major historical event from the perspective of the regular individual person rather than focusing on the people who happened to be in power during them, and it’s pretty good so far. I also read Understanding Power by Noam Chomsky, and that was life changing. Those are two pretty political ones, though.

In terms of fiction Id recommend Cormac McCarthy – either The Road or Blood Meridian – The Road is a post apocalyptic story about a father traversing through the ashen environment with his son, while Blood Meridian is a brutal Western set in the 1800s. With both of these, it’s not as much about plot as it is about the poetry of the writing.

I haven’t read a scifi book in a minute, but I haven’t seen a lot of people recommend A Canticle for Leibowitz. It’s three separate-but-connected short post-apocalyptic stories that follow the gradual resurgence of humans after a nuclear event. It’s really subtle in that it doesn’t slam you with like a whole universe and systems like Dune, but it’s expertly written and hits some pretty thought provoking topics. Def underrated.

Me too:) do you have any recommendations off the top of your head? No genre preference, just your favorite book or video essay?

I started preferring long form media recently. Audiobooks especially. Social media allows anyone to say a single thing that may or may not be legit, but since it’s bite sized information units they don’t need to back it up. Long form media requires a person to back up what they say, and having that barrier of entry filters out those who probably aren’t worth listening to.

Your Honor, years ago I recognized my kinship with all living beings, and I made up my mind that I was not one bit better than the meanest on earth. I said then, and I say now, that while there is a lower class, I am in it, and while there is a criminal element I am of it, and while there is a soul in prison, I am not free.

• E.V. Debs

I live in a small city about an hour away from a major city. I’m also an hour away from what I would call the boonies – rural, remote areas where owning guns and open carrying is normal. In fact, I’ve seen open carry around here, in the city, quite a bit. It’s pretty normal around here.

I heard a shooting happen in the suburbs near my house when I was a kid. It’s what’s considered the “nice” part of town. An old woman walking her dog was killed. I heard the shot through my bedroom window. Only til I moved into the inner part of the city did I witness guns being shot in the city more often. Most of the times you hear pops, it’s fireworks. A couple times, it’s been guns. Those couple times are pretty freaky.

Every once in awhile I’ll walk past a crime scene downtown, usually something happened like a stabbing the night before. One day I scrolled through reddit and saw a video – a point-blank execution had occured outside the club down the road. That one was disturbing. I think the kid is going to jail for a long time.

The inner part of this particular city is not as safe as the suburbs, but for the most part you should be okay, as long as you’re not looking to start trouble. When I’m walking around town, especially the immediate area I live, my eyes are open. At night, they’re wide open.

Its just a lack of consistency, I don’t know what to tell you. You can’t tell me the US sends military aid to Ukraine in order to “defend democracy,” when in numerous other cases of sovereign countries being occupied, we do nothing, or we even support the occupiers, in Palestine’s case.

This lack of consistency lends itself to the idea that there are further interests besides “defending democracy” for which we send Ukraine weapons. I’m not sure how else to put it. If it were about the moral imperative of defending occupied people’s, you can pick out numerous similar examples where we have not acted, and you just have to conclude that there are other factors behind the US sending aid to Ukraine. One is the perceived threat the country feels from Russia, which I think is probably exacerbated by the press. One is the perpetuation of the constant war economy we have, and one is the increased political unity that war brings.

But I’m curious about your position, you’re dismissing my arguments as “whataboutism,” but what exactly would you assert instead? Do you think that Ukraine deserves our aid more than Palestine does? Is it that Russia is a grave threat to the United States? I’m genuinely curious

I don’t think they should be condemned to genocide, but I don’t think we should be sending them weapons. I think Biden should be talking to Putin in some capacity, which he is not. Radio silence. I think that exacerbates the war.

I don’t think this weird moral imperative is real, like we’re America so we ought to do something. I don’t think that it’s real because, just like in Russia, where you’ve got an active conflict and you’ve got some Russian propaganda calling for the denazification (what you’ve correctly referred to as genocidal) you also have, in Israel, active conflict of genocidal nature between Israel against Palestinians, but we do nothing.

So you’re saying, we, America should condemn Palestine to genocide? Or how about the Uhygur peoples? Should we engage in a proxy war with China? Certainly, according to your claims that otherwise we are dooming them to genocide by their occupying country.

That moral imperative you’re talking about is fabricated, because if the US government actually cared about these people – Ukrainians, Palestinians, or Uhygur – we’d be sending military aid to all of them, or else we’d be “condemning them to genocide,” as you say.

This aid is not going to Ukraine to help them endure genocidal forces. It’s going there to perpetuate our constant war economy that is reliant on conflict. It’s going there to unite the political party against an outside evil and to further the US geopolitical and global free-market goals.

I never claimed the revolt itself was a result of their actions, I claimed that we were actively involved in installing their new government, which we were.