I think that if you didn’t have any arms, nobody would judge you for not making your bed. I don’t have that excuse, I’m just lazy.

Our wedding budget was small, so we blew it on a great vacation, and got married on the beach in St Lucia. Neither one of us has a single regret.

One of the only thing I miss about Reddit was their very active Guitar subs. So I Googled Lemmy Guitar to search for some active forums, and was disappointed that all I got were Lemmy Motorhead links.

If anybody knows any active guitar forums on Lemmy, please let me know. The only ones I found are extremely quiet, with days, weeks, or even months between posts. I can’t be the only guitarist on Lemmy, so where are they all hanging out?

More like a GIF.

Generally, my tactic is to not engage directly, but address the rest of the audience, essentially pointing at the subject and mocking him (“Can you believe this MAGA Traitor?..”). When he tries to respond, again ignore him, and just point and laugh.

They get really frustrated being made fun of, without having the satisfaction of creating liberal outrage.

That was then, this is now. The Nazis don’t respect the law, nor court decisions, and do whatever the fuck they want. The law no longer exists, and states can do anything they want. If the serial killing insurance companies want to sue over interstate commerce, then the states can simply prohibit them from doing business in the state - problem solved.

Besides, who cares if they sue? Ignore them, ignore the decisions (unless its a win), and do what serves the PEOPLE, not the corporations. Then raise the state corprate taxes to 100% of revenues.

Fuck the corporations, fuck the Sociopathic Oligarchs who own them, and any MAGA Nazi traitor that supports them. They are the enemy, and we have no obligation to do anything that serves their interests in the slightest way.

One way to fight the corporations is to stop worshipping at the altar of blind consumerism, and embrace the concept of “Reuse, Repair, Recycle.”

Stop buying stuff you dont need. Keep using what you have, sell/buy used items, repair things, and if it cant be fixed or repurposed, then recycle it.

Repairing things is a big one. Often repairs are remarkably easy. My wife has been ready to replace numerous appliances over the years, and I figured it was worth taking a shot at fixing it, if I can save a few hundred bucks, and successfully extended the life by years.

Very satisfying, and it forces your wife to rethink her conclusion that you are an incompetent dolt.

Just being “alive.” We become alive, some sort of “spark of life” pulses through us, and at some point, that “spark” leaves us, and we are nothing more than a rock. What is that “spark?”

Everything is either animate of inanimate, so how did things become animate? At some point, something had to get that “spark,” and become alive, then spread that life around. How did/does that happen?

Is this “spark” unique to Earth, or is is possible to exist elsewhere? Did some nearly impossible combination of factors all happen to line up and cause “life” to emerge, like a room full of monkeys randomly typing Hamlet, or do those factors exist in other places?

Of course, many people would assign a religious explanation to that “spark,” our Soul or whatever, but that’s just making up a silly story to explain something we don’t understand.

12 years, 900K+ karma, Permabanned soon after the inauguration for repeating a statement I’d made many times before.

Came to Lemmy and found lots of recently banned veterans. Many of us were high volume posters for over a decade, and never got banned, then suddenly we all turned into monsters that had to be permabanned in the same month.

I prefer Lemmy in many ways - no puns, fewer trolls, no bots, no Russian propaganda farmers, etc., but some of my favorite subjects are badly lacking. Reddit has several very large and active guitar subs, for instance, while Lemmy’s guitar forums are small and barely used.

On the other hand, the political subs are far more radical, and allow real discussion of political options more than Reddit. They are not doing themselves a service by suppressing radical speech over there, they are only driving it underground, where it will become even more radical. When it happens they’ll be surprised because they buried it instead of addressing it.

The Conservative Propaganda Machine.

Another interesting example is a story by singer and Gershwin scholar Michael Feinstein. When he was a teen, he fell in love with George Gershwin’s music, and discovered that his brother, Ira, the legendary lyricist who supplied the words to most of George’s songs, lived nearby.

He went to Ira’s house and knocked on the door, and introduced himself. Ira was happy to talk to the kid about he and George’s old songs. During the conversation, Ira opened up the piano bench, and it was filled with old manuscripts in George’s hand of totally unknown songs that had never been published.

Feinstein ended up being the annointed by Ira as the unofficial Gershwin scholar, and he later recorded many of those unknown songs.

He also told this story on NPR’s Fresh Air:

In 1982, there turned up in Secaucus, N.J., at the Warner Brothers Music Warehouse, which is the place where Warner’s kept all of their stock of their published music that they would sell. Suddenly somebody who was working in that warehouse, a guy named Henry Cohen (ph), found these boxes and boxes of music that looked like manuscript material of not only George Gershwin but of Victor Herbert and Leonard Bernstein and Arthur Schwartz and Cole Porter and Vincent Youmans and on and on and on. And we were called - we, being Ira Gershwin, for whom I worked in 1982 - he was - what? - 83 or 84 at that point. And they said, there are these manuscripts of George’s here and lyric sheets of yours, and somebody better come and look at them. And Ira said, oh, no, that stuff was destroyed long ago. There’s - that’s a mistake. So he sent me to look and see what was there only because of the insistence of the folks in New Jersey, even though Ira was convinced that we would find nothing. And it turns out that I found, amongst all these boxes, 87 original manuscripts in George Gershwin’s hand plus copies of scores that had been lost for 50 and 60 years. For some reason, they were all there, and it turned out to be one of the greatest musical theater discoveries of the century.

I Googled “Unknown Stravinsky Work Discovered,” and found a bunch of articles, including these:

https://stringsmagazine.com/igor-stravinsky-work-found-amid-stacks-of-hidden-manuscripts-after-100-years/#%3A~%3Atext=Russian-born+20th-century+composer%2Cold+manuscripts+at+the+St.

https://www.newyorker.com/culture/cultural-comment/a-rediscovered-stravinsky-work-from-before-he-made-his-leap-into-the-unknown

A few years ago, a researcher started going through a large stack of dusty old music manuscripts in an east European archive, and discovered an unknown work by Stravinsky, over 100 years old. I wonder what was in the rest of rhe stack.

Thats supposed to be cautionary, but to the MAGA Nazis, its a Game Plan.

Booker’s speech was an audition for Schumer’s job. He laid out his vision of the Democratic agenda, and showed strength doing it, contrasting with that craven, corrupt, simpering, weak, vile, weenie Schumer.

Schumer is in the way, and needs to retire immediately, and make way for AOC to take his seat.

If Schumer leaves, Booker become Minority leader, and AOC goes to the Senate, that speech will have acvomplished a lot.

My mom loved Schwann’s mostly because she liked the driver. Then they changed their delivery model, and she quit.

The stuff was pretty good, but it was about the same quality as the frozen stuff in Publix, and Publix is about half the price. I’m glad she stopped buying from Schwann’s, and is saving money. There’s still a lot of stuff in the freezer, some we’ll never eat - why would she order frozen fried rice? She hates Chinese food.

That’s his “number.”

Funny, thats what I call conservatives - A Plague of MAGAs.

Half of America are horrified by it, and the other half think it’s something to be proud of, because they’re ignorant neanderthals.

A lot of times its too much trouble to fiddle with the highlighting to catch the right spaces, and then drop it in the right spot. Its easier to just grab it, drop it, then edit the spaces.