• 24 Posts
  • 543 Comments
Joined 2 years ago
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Cake day: February 15th, 2024

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  • I will wax a little poetic, then. ;-)

    Nashville has had a machine since at least the late 60s for harvesting songs basically provided for free by writers desperate for a break, and routing them them through overproduced studios full of controllable singers even more desperate than the songwriters. Now, to be fair, the occasional gem slips through, more when the model was less refined, and then there’s folks like Dolly Parton who infiltrated it like a virus and then took it over to explode with decent music.

    Still, other than what Steve Earle called “The Great Credibility Scare of the 80s” when he, Dwight Yoakam, Lyle Lovett, KD Lang, and Melissa Etheridge (among others) were allowed to bubble to the top of the scene, there’s always been a grifter business mindset that’s somehow worse in country because, as a direct outgrowth and expansion of certain varieties of folk music, audiences ask for authenticity when all they really want is cultural validation (hint: for country-adjacent music, authenticity usually looks a lot like it does in other genres). Bubblegum country therefore somehow feels dirtier than bubblegum pop, and it gets even worse as product categories ossify and Nashville country gets targeted to a more and more specific segment of the public.

    I’m fully aware that even the stuff I like, the “Rockabilly [and] other various fusion efforts” broadly called “Americana,” is subject to its own tropes and business pressures, but being smaller and targeting a different niche, there’s at least room in the conversation for artistry and risk, and thankfully good music isn’t as hard to get made as some other forms of entertainment, so there’s a lot of it out there waiting to be found.

    Also, nothing wrong with some nasal vocals in the right context, LOL. I do grow weary of “High and Lonesome” bluegrass vocals after about two songs, though.










  • I finally started watching Resident Alien, and I’m about halfway through S3. I am a sucker for both sci-fi and Northern Exposure-ish shows where a fish out of water is dropped into a quirky and isolated community, so I don’t really know how I waited so long, but it does mean I don’t have to worry about it getting canceled on a cliffhanger.

    As an aside, I watched S1 on a TV with “soap opera vision” motion interpolation turned on, and JFC I forgot how cheap and awful it makes everything look.




  • Like, she was cool with the slaughter of sand people, sorta.

    I mean, that’s kinda enough… 😬

    “I killed them all. They’re dead. Every single one of them. And not just the men… but the women… and the children too.” Followed immediately by “To be angry is to be human” and a few scenes later by “I truly… deeply love you… and before we die, I want you to know.”

    If the meme fits, wear it, Ms Padme…



  • I’m deep into my 40s, and I’m one of those. I can get up to 70 words per minute for short stretches, but it’s still a weird dance that combines muscle memory and hand-eye coordination.

    I did learn just enough to know to hover my hands and keep my arms at a good posture, so I’ve never had any RSI from typing. That also may be partly because that I’m so inconsistent that I don’t get enough of the R for RSI, LOL.


  • It’s not exactly the same as an express line, but IIRC Starbucks already has a process where if you order brewed black coffee, the cashier dispenses it for you before taking the next customer, rather than turning it over to the baristas’ queue. There are so many things you can say about Starbucks, but failing to understand efficiency is rarely one of them.