MaximumCuddles
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User ID: 58
MaximumCuddles
1yr ago
Or with an extremely long pause. Best version of this is to freeze your face and let the pause hang until the person starts thinks your having a stroke or something then hit ‘em with it.
That or just kind of walk away and start doing something else then say the punchline at a distance.
Really stupid, really funny.
MaximumCuddles
1yr ago
Most of the music, 95% or so, I listen to is new music, and I’m getting close to middle age so that makes me a bit of an outlier.
I use Spotify and pay for premium. It’s one of the best purchases you can ever make. It has a ton of features that help you find new music, and a lot of good personal algorithms.
They have some playlists that are automatically generated for you specifically, which mix in music you have listened to with music you haven’t in a similar style.
One of them is “discover weekly” which is all music that’s new to you based on your listening habits.
Another is “release radar” is new releases from artists you follow. Make a habit of following artists you are interested in and this playlist becomes very useful for finding new music.
Going into artists pages that you know you like and going to the similar artists page and just go to their latest album and give it a listen. I’ve stumbled across a bunch of new artists I enjoy because if that.
You can also go a favorite artists page and they have a “radio” section which is an curated playlist containing music from the artist and similar artists.
Whenever you find something you like, save it into a playlist categorized by style or mood. You can enable a setting called “smart shuffle” which threads in new songs based on your taste.
It even has an AI radio dj which just runs through short personalized playlists for you and can switch it up at will.
They also have concert suggestions for people playing in your area, just go to a concert alone. Going alone is extremely fun and allows you to focus on the music and the atmosphere and maybe make a friend while taking a smoke break or getting a drink or two. I find that often trying to round your friends up to go to a concert of music in a style they are unfamiliar with can be a bit of an ask, and for smaller new artists the time and money commitment isn’t much more than an expensive movie ticket with snacks.
A lot of it is simple discipline, make a habit of constantly looking for new music with all the available tools at your disposal and soon it becomes a self reinforcing feedback loop. It’s exhilarating, it refreshes the soul.
Just like keeping other matters if taste updated and fresh, like food or fashion or cinema, you have to really like it and stay in the loop. But luckily with modern technology it’s easy to do so.
Happy hunting!
MaximumCuddles
1yr ago
First season is the weakest although I still love it. The most common criticism of the show is how hardcore its tone is, but in the second half of the first season it finds a much more harmonious emotional tenor. It’s still very intense.
The second and third seasons are basically flawless as far as I’m concerned. And it ends at the right time, it’s only three seasons long and each season is very distinct.
MaximumCuddles
1yr ago
Thank you! I knew someone here would either know the answer or be able to figure it out quickly.
That also explains why they are fairly popular as well despite not being easily searchable. Four Tet is huge and it seems like Erased Tapes was a big project that got a ton of buzz.
Doesn’t hurt that the music is good.
MaximumCuddles
1yr ago
While that’s very interesting, I find it very improbable with the two examples I’ve listed above
Firstly because these artists have millions of streams but also because the names of the artists are too weird a bespoke, they aren’t even in any English characters let alone any language on earth, one is all weird symbols and the other is clearly Morse code or something akin to it.
That and the music is not genetic enough to fit the hypothesis. The one artist linked with the more code incorporates it into the songs themselves.
If you were faking artists you wouldn’t put this much effort into it.
[A musical mystery]
There’s a pair of artists I love that I discovered on Spotify a ways back, and both have entirely opaque un-googleable names.
I have some guesses as to who they actually are, mostly based on their “related artists” but I can’t find anything concrete.
Rather than let it stew I figured I’d ask around at my favorite online hangout for people with “special” brains, so to speak.
Also I’m very interested as to two aspects of these artists;
1.) These songs are very highly streamed, with more than a million streams on their biggest hits. they aren’t exactly obscure, how have they gotten so much attention if you literally can’t search them anywhere?
2.) What compels an artist to produce art under a name so utterly baffling and incomprehensible? There’s at least a dozen more artists that I’ve run into on Spotify that have the same schtick going on, and they seem popular.
It was probably me, it continues to be my favorite TV series of all time.
Its exploration of belief and non-belief and the social dynamics they engender, of myth-making, of grief and hopelessness captivated me.
I’m a universal darwinist, a materialist atheist but this work of art produced something very similar to a crisis of faith in me and changed the way I feel about my relationship with Reality because it forced me to contend with Mystery with a capital M.
I’m a better person for engaging with it. More confused, more layered, more fearful, more comfortable being afraid, and more comfortable with ambiguity. I was humbled by the experience.
MaximumCuddles
1yr ago
Employers already have minimal ability, inclination and interest in dictating how their employees vote or use their private property, why would that suddenly change?
Not only that, it’s often illegal and/or incredibly taboo to do so.
Most people aren’t using using their voting privileges on a consistent basis already, thus artificially inflating the importance of the people who do vote. Once again, disproportionately the middle class and wealthy.
If anything, this would have the opposite effect of lessening disenfranchisement by making it easier to actually use your voting privileges by introducing a proxy mechanism.
It’s not some utopian vision though, some constant of people will never be interested or can’t be bothered to vote, or even transfer their voting power to someone else.
MaximumCuddles
1yr ago
I debated including that bit for this very reason, there’s a bog standard response that relies on a bunch of assumptions that don’t stand up to much scritiny.
Poor people already vote at much lower rates than members of other classes, and I don’t imagine a single vote would be worth very much at all.
When I was poor, and I my case was rather typical, the thing I lacked more than money was time and energy. Politics requires quite a bit of both. Lots of my poor brethren had the instinct that they didn’t have the time, inclination or knowledge base to make a very informed decision at the ballot box, and so would forgo the whole process. There’s certainly something to that instinct, people want to use their power responsibly.
But even very poor people generally have someone they can trust in their lives, someone who is either more informed or more inclined towards political action.
I honestly think the ability to vote by proxy would rather increase turnout among the poor, especially for local politics. From personal experience when I was poor and living somewhere where I was unfamiliar with the local political scene I would have gladly gave my vote to a trusted friend who is similar politically to me and has my interest at heart.
Now that I’m financially stable and more informed I vote more regularly. And members of my social circle are also more interested in asking about my politics.
And for those people who will likely never be interested in politics for one reason or another, they still have the ability to directly benefit from their voting privileges as a citizen.
MaximumCuddles
1yr ago
I think the idea of “Voting Gangs” by Moldbug largely accomplishes something similar without explicitly being gendered.
The idea is that your vote, like a share in a company, is 100% your property and completely transferable. So people would naturally transfer their voting power to interested parties they feel aligned with.
The simplest example is my wife simply allowing me to add her vote to mine in the interest of time since I follow politics more closely than her and she trusts my judgement and ability to represent her.
And if I have friends or family who trust my judgement or vice versa I could sign my vote off to them, or them to me, etc etc.
This would also allow households to vote together, one good thing from a pro-natalist perspective would be to give children the vote but in the stewardship of their legal guardian until they come of age. If a household had two adults and two children they would have four votes in total.
I suppose the effect over time is that it concentrates political power in those interested in wielding it in a transparent, traceable way. Many people want their interests protected but find politics incredibly dull or simply unfathomable. Some dude wants to sell me his vote for an ice cream? That’s fine, he clearly wasn’t interested in it, and I am.
This creates a natural, scalable democracy with basically infinite parties joined together.
It sounds like a radical pipe dream but I’m becoming less convinced it’s unrealistic over time, and I’m becoming more convinced it’s the natural evolution of a liberal democracy if it seeks to survive and overcome it’s obvious deficits.
MaximumCuddles
1yr ago
Well, if we could somehow return to the legal status quo of the national guard not being deployed outside of the homeland, that would wrap things up rather nicely, yes?
In that case mandatory military service could be fulfilled without being sent on far flung imperialist adventures, and would be more like a militia / police force of last resort as was originally intended.
Professional army stays professional, the militia stays home and learns the basics of military affairs and life and kindly fucks off back to their normal civilian lives with a valuable skill set and shared cultural experience for life. Plus then they are actually around if serious shit pops off in the homeland.
MaximumCuddles
1yr ago
Yeah, basically.
It’s a psychological problem. It’s generally best to address a psychological problem through… psychology. If that doesn’t work, add psychopharmacology on top, because then you know there’s a neurological element.
All of which has a goal of restoring healthy brain function.
I think the “identity bits” is where, from my perspective, an alien morality gets smuggled in.
No one suggests that if you give someone suffering from eczema a lotion that they are committing “genocide” against the “eczema community”. But wave the magic identity wand around and everything becomes moralized.
If we could make gender Dysphoria disappear tomorrow, from the perspective of alleviating real suffering the answer should be a no brainer. The fact that answering this question causes any consternation is indicative of a bait and switch.
I’ve suffered and continue to suffer mental illness in my life, if I could make it go away and restore my brain to full function I wouldn’t hesitate. I’m not part of a “community”, I just have a condition. The fact that people build a wall called “identity” around their maladies is at best an understandable cope, at worse adding fuel to the fire.
I think the primary mission of medicine should be the restoration of natural function of a person. Much like “Free Speech” has a strict legal definition but also heavily implies a cultural attitude, same with the Hippocratic Oath; “First, do no harm.”
Helping people take care, love and accept their bodies should take complete priority over modifying a healthy, functioning body. If you have to modify, do so only with the goal to restore healthy, natural function.
To me that’s the expansive vision of the Hippocratic oath as regards to body modification, and I find it goes into direct conflict with the transhumanist / cyborg vision of (un?)humanity that to my mind, includes transgenderism.
Someone out there coined the term “trad-humanism” and that more or less seems accurate to describe my view on this.
MaximumCuddles
1yr ago
I think that’s rather dramatic, do you feel the same way about depressed people taking SSRIs? Adult ADHD sufferers taking adderal?
Focusing on the “identity” aspect as opposed to the clear suffering of a painful & debilitating mental condition is a mindkilled framing from my perspective.
It’s one of the most bizarre and dysfunctional aspects of (post)modern society.
MaximumCuddles
1yr ago
Wouldn’t therapeutics to simply cure gender Dysphoria or any underlying conditions be the straighter line from A to B from a technological point of view?
The idea of an “anti-Dysphoria” vaccine makes more sense than a totally lossless surgical gender swap.
I swear, bringing this up in the debate makes TRAs and their ilk more incensed than anything than anything I’ve ever written. I’ve gotten banned and sent viscous DMs for even suggesting it.
But in this theoretical, transhumanist future with shiny happy people is it not simpler and more likely that no one feels the need to transition at all due to high quality therapeutics than the 24/7 all you can eat Barbie doll body part swap meet that the medicalists seem to assume is going to pass?
MaximumCuddles
1yr ago
Yeah but then you’d have to increase wages and benefits until those on the margins of the labor market return to a state of employment.
Which is exactly what was happening pre-pandemic under trump with that ultra tight labor market.
But firms don’t want to pay for that so they just pay people to call you a racist if you point this out.
MaximumCuddles
1yr ago
MaximumCuddles
1yr ago
Sex isn’t everything.
Not having it is.
MaximumCuddles
1yr ago
Hyup. That’s pretty standard from the US legacy media.
Good news is that these types of outlets are absolutely getting their lunch eaten by alternatives and will likely die out as the boomers die out.
MaximumCuddles
1yr ago
Medium and long term HRT use can cause permanent sexual dysfunction and sterility.
Although no cutting or crushing is involved I’d still classify it as “mutilation” in the sense that you are purposefully permanently damaging healthy tissue to the point of dysfunction.
For example, if you purposely induced a fever in a baby for long enough to cause brain damage, you’ve certainly “mutilated” that child although no scalpels came out.
MaximumCuddles
1yr ago
underwater hockey
I gotta be real, I was the DM of my DND group in college and this somehow seems nerdier.
MaximumCuddles
1yr ago
Amusing aside but I remember reading about pre-revolution Russia and the anti-Czar fever pitch leading up to his deposing.
At one point it was so extreme that during a medical conference, the presiding doctors came to the conclusion that the Czar was directly responsible for the outbreak of syphillis and that the panel’s primary recommendation for responding to the public health crisis is getting rid of the Czar.
Look how well that turned out for them.
Kind of reminds me of BLM in 2020. Rly makes u think.
I had two small children with special education needs entering the education system right as the lockdowns started, and I’m more or less working class without the resources for private education and therapy, so naturally as the lockdowns went on I was filled with white hot nuclear rage at those responsible for them.
You ever seen a toddler do speech therapy with a mask on with masked adults?
Trust me when I say it’s one of the most frustrating, pointless exercises you could witness. Especially when it’s your kid.
That and the fact that my industry was completely devastated by the lockdowns as it was all in person work.
And I live in a heavily blue state.
So me and mine were absolutely the type of people sacrificed at the altar so that overweight, CNN addicted middle age office workers could have the perception of safety.
Same, the bottom right quickly became nightmare fuel
Also, the way the wording on that question gave me pause, specifically on what constitutes “interest”. There’s certain things that I would possibly fantasize about or find fantasies of arousing, but would straight up never indulge in IRL even with an enthusiastic & willing partner.
Even as an atheist, I think a lot of this stuff is bad for your soul. And I don’t even believe in souls.
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