• 8 Posts
  • 34 Comments
Joined 11 months ago
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Cake day: December 24th, 2023

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  • I hoped that 2016 was a fluke, that Americans weren’t that dumb and hateful but rather we got caught unprepared by a personality we didn’t expect to run for president.

    I hoped that 2020 was the true thoughts of Americans, that the insurrection represented the dying grasp of an extreme minority.

    I don’t think Trump stole the 2024 election. I think it proved that yes, this is America. Whether you think America has changed into this or was always this, it doesn’t take away the fact that a majority of Americans will believe anything so long as it makes them hate. Good news doesn’t drive votes. Fear and anger drives votes.

    I’ve tried so much to try and be a middle of the road voice of reason and moderation with my friends and family. I didn’t want to be a knee jerk conspiracy theorist, I was always patient with people, listened to them, told them the places they were right, and asked them questions hoping they would ask themselves. I’d say “be like Mr. Rogers. And if someone isn’t acting like Mr. Rogers, be like Mr. Rogers.”

    It started to hit when a friend of mine who is very left wing told me that people with college degrees are brainwashed by the deep state. I had just told her I had a degree in political science.

    I ordered another drink and changed the subject but it hurt. Now I know she is representative of a majority of Americans. I’m worried civil war is all but inevitable when facts just don’t matter as much as anger.

    Edit: Lord grant me the strength to be like Mr. Rogers in this comment section.




  • meep_launcher@lemm.eeOPtocats@lemmy.worldHalp
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    1 month ago

    Thanks so much for your kind words.

    I’ve taught at a private school as a long term music sub, which while being the job that put me in the red (I kept asking when the normal teacher would come back, they never gave me a straight answer until I walked into my office one day to find her stuff there. After that they kept stringing me along in hopes that they’d start a full band program- I spent weeks putting together a proposal for it to be rejected for “various reasons”).

    I’ve been thinking about the regular job, but I have no idea what I can do to get me out of the red. Anything that would pay $80k+ just seems out of reach since those tend to be senior positions or for people who can code. I’ve tried coding many times but just can’t seem to get it. Sales has burned me time after time and marketing just doesn’t stick. I can do it for myself alright, but it’s just not something that wants me around in the corporate setting.

    Sadly so much of the music industry is for creating commercial music to be used for businesses. When music is a commodity to be bought and sold, humans aren’t really necessary. Why would I pay a human to create a catchy tune for my advertisement when Ai can pump out something that does just fine? AI is also breaking the music tech side. It’s not 100% yet, but Ai mixing and mastering is taking off. If I’m an artist, especially one on a tight budget, an Ai mixer could do just fine for my album when normally I might pay someone with the experience to do so. This might seem great for the artist, but once they have their album, they can get paid $20 a year from Spotify.

    The tech spokespeople keep trying to convince us that Ai won’t steal our work and livelyhoods. The thing is everyone in my industry, me included, don’t buy it. These are the same people who said tech would bring Seattle jobs and prosperity, but all it did was raise rents and push out the artists. Tech bros will disagree and say Seattle is just fine, but they weren’t the ones negatively impacted by the industry that allowed them to move there. There’s a group of us in Chicago who call ourselves Seattle’s artistic refugees.

    We aren’t the only ones- San Francisco, Boston, Austin, Denver- so many cities are losing their artistic communities that made them worth living in. There’s still music in these places, but you’ll notice those performances are taken by big names for people who can afford those $60+ tickets.

    Hell, even Death Cab for Cutie wrote an absolutely heartbreaking bop.

    Digging for gold in my neighborhood

    For what they say is the greater good

    But all I see is a long goodbye

    A requiem for a skyline

    💔💔💔

    I’m not trying to be doom and gloom, but I can’t keep living like this.




  • I think a huge misstep of the original argument is “career politician bad”. Biden is seen as a one man “dynasty” because he has ~50 years of experience. Obama and Clinton are only seen as dynasties because they had active First Ladies so there’s a “power couple” image.

    I think it’s fair to say there are political dynasties- the Kennedy’s, the Bushes- and it makes sense that they will tend to happen naturally. If my dad was president of the United States, at the age of 12 I’d have a much better understanding of the Washington Political Machine than most people.

    Usually when we think of “Outsider” candidates, we think of people who have 0 government experience who enter the arena. Notice that Trump isn’t mentioned in the post. Ofc Trump was as embedded in the Washington establishment as much as anyone else when he ran in 2016, having ran for president previously and using the ol’ “wine and dine” method generously to help him get a leg up in business.

    I personally don’t think it’s a bad thing to have a ton of experience in getting a lot of people to do one thing together- oddly enough that’s an INCREDIBLY HARD THING TO DO. We need all sorts of people in politics in order to represent the people accurately. The Tim Walz’s and AOC’s in congress brought so much to the table- they know what it’s like to grow up as the everyday American. The Biden’s and the Pelosi’s have been removed from that world for so long it’s understandable they might not have the most accurate picture of modern American life, but they do have the deep understanding for how to get things done. In Biden’s single term, he has outpaced most presidents in getting legislation passed. I remember being optimistic in 2020 hoping Biden would be a modern LBJ, and by gum I think ol’ Joe did it.



  • meep_launcher@lemm.eetoMemes@sopuli.xyzInstruments
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    2 months ago

    The amount of times people have called my trumpet a saxophone, or my trombone a saxophone, or my clarinet a saxophone, or my melodica a saxophone, or my saxophone a saxophone apauls me.

    Never call someone a saxophone; not only is it rude, it’s a slur and against the law.




  • And if I were guilty, I would not trust him because he was my partner who turned me in and got away before he was identified. He’s smiling because he knows I know what he’d do to my parents if I snitched, and he’s getting away with my half of the fortune. I also know he’s most likely going to marry my girlfriend because the love triangle was so plain as day.

    If it hadn’t been for Willem Dafoe, I’d be married a long time ago. Where did you come from, where did you go? Where did you come from Willem Dafoe?







  • This reminds me of when I was in college and was undiagnosed Bipolar disorder, and my roommate was undiagnosed OCD. I was up and bopping at 3 am and decided to help my OCD roommate with the dishes since he was up and bopping but for very different reasons. I was drying a dish when our third, neurotypical, roommate came out to ask us to stop since we were being loud.

    I looked at the dish I was washing and shushed it and told it to be nicer to my roommate.


  • Right? Like we all saw that Iran was going to for tat, and their attack was pretty much neutralized. At this point Israel is just accelerating the conflict.

    I don’t want to believe our media is biased either, but like let’s take a moment and remember that we’ve been told the reason Iran and the Taliban hate us is because we have and love freedom. Like seriously, take a moment if you were alive and conscious in 2003 and what messaging we got then. It’s so stupid.





  • Israel is defeated like the US was defeated in Afghanistan. It’s not that the Taliban managed to get tanks rolling through DC, but they killed our international image and took away prescious time, money, energy, and lives. They suffered magnitudes more than us, so just like in any war, there were no winners.

    We keep saying “we don’t negotiate with terrorists”, but I’m starting to think that we should consider negotiating with terrorists*.

    '*Understanding the definition of terrorist is very subjective