Yep. Land where I grew up was notoriously cheap if you didn’t get the mineral rights. You could be poor as fuck and have a tar paper shack on 10 acres and have zero time to produce anything useful on the land. Horses aren’t expensive to buy. You can get used tack and hay and oats were inexpensive where I grew up. Maybe a hundred bucks a month to own a horse (this would have been over 30 years ago, definitely more expensive today)? This was not for racing, heavy work, or horse girl stuff, but you could take care of one for not much if your hobby was riding or if you just liked having a horse around. Or you have zero land and help your neighbor with chores and your horse lives next door.

I do pretty well for myself but I’ve got an arrangement like that right now. I go help out on my buddy’s small ranch every year during the summer. I help enough that there’s a horse out there that’s mine, on paper at least. He gets the same treatment as the rest of the horses and I own all the gear. Costs me some time, but in all honesty it’s time I want to be outdoors anyway.

I prefer meat missile or love truncheon.

I just feed my vehicles trees and children and black smoke comes out the back. Runs great.

The problem with the conservatorship was that the person in charge of her life also stood to gain from her.

I don’t know enough about the whole ordeal to comment more about whether it was right or wrong, but I feel like a big issue is when there’s no separation from who stands to gain and who is in charge.

Ok, I’ve discussed this in brief before and I’m not going through the entire unfiltered rant today, but I agree with this to an extent for some of them. You see the same things when a certain personality type gets power. They start off proving that they can get away with little things. Eventually they become so enamored with the idea of being “above the law” because they’re so special and righteous that they are out there doing shit like raping kids and eating people. It’s literally just about the power.

Now there’s a whole lot of steps in between jaywalking and being a cannibal. Lots of sexual stuff (regular shit that they see as taboo like threesomes and sucking dick as well as bad shit like cheating or forcing people to do whatever thing if is you like, you know, rape). Non sexual stuff (light embezzlement, harassment, bullying). That’s where the pure, uncut rant is. One of these days I’m going to ramble across like 6 comments to get the whole rant out.

I do know Cowboy Bebop haha. And yeah, that’s definitely jazz. But I listen to a lot of older jazz. Ella Fitzgerald has been one of my favorites since I was a kid and I really dig a lot of Coltrane. Louis Armstrong. I like a lot of the slow lovey songs and a lot of the sad ones. It’s the opposite of what I like in rock hahaha.

I do like old Bakersfield country. Buck Owens, Emmylou Harris, Merle Haggard, and those guys. You can draw a line from them to outlaw country to Alt country. And from them to a lot of Southern Rock, roots, and swamp rock.

I could talk about this all day haha

I think that you and I could have been very good friends in real life. I went through my bigotry phase because it was just everywhere around me. Escaped through music and food. A playlist that goes from Sabbath to AIC to Mark Lanegan to Black Pistol Fire to 21 Savage to BigXthaPlug to Whiskey Myers to Amigo the Devil. And that just scratches the surface. That doesn’t even get into the 1920s folk blues or 50s jazz and soul. Pretty much the only thing I won’t listen to is Nashville country.

I had to go back and look to see if I wrote this comment.

Alt-country and dark Americana are my jam. Whiskey Myers is from my neck of the woods and actually calls out the titty bar that was down the street from where I worked (I passed that thing at least 10 times a week) in Broken Window Serenade. Used to go watch them play local shows in the late 00s and early 10s before I moved to Houston. They are all pretty good guys.

I feel like a few weeks ago I called out Cocaine and Abel as being one of the saddest songs I know somewhere on Lemmy.

I’ll also say that smack gave us a lot of grunge music.

I don’t use them but I follow the news about them loosely. The reason for this is epistemic humility. Claude has a pretty good idea of what its capabilities are and where the ceiling is. Chatgpt has no clue what its limits are so it believes it can do everything. Basically chatgpt has a lot of info and no idea where the gaps live and Claude has a fair idea when to search or use some external function to handle something. Gemini has less than Claude but more than chatgpt. Grok has little to no epistemic humility, but it did manage to accurately portray Musk as a world champion piss drinker, something none of the others were able to do.

I say that, but it’s been a few months since I looked. That could have changed because shit moves fast. By the looks of what it’s trying to do with the timer chatgpt has less than it used to. Possibly because of the way the model is trained to be helpful and confident.

Augustine of Hippo did a huge amount of damage to the Western world because he was so terrified of his own turgid member. Without his dumb ass ramblings about how much he hated all the orgies he was having we wouldn’t have

• Original sin through sexual reproduction
• The Just War
• Irresistible Grace
• All sex being impure except for baby making
• Purgatory

People were afraid to go against what Augustine had to say to the point where one of his teachings (the filioque) was a major part of The Schism. The current war that we (the US) are in and our whole puritanical bullshit can be traced to this man whose most famous quote is “O Lord, make me chaste, but not yet!”

Some of it has some basis in the bible. If you read it sideways. A lot of it was just his own hangups that the western church said “Welp, this is our shit now!”.

Not that he wouldn’t have been able to do it without “be nice to your slaves” Paul, and not that he’s the absolute originator, but he’s the prolific source of a lot of the views espoused by a bunch of shitty people and used to treat others like shit.

It’s weird that Macaroni and Cheese is closer to Kraft Dinner than Kraft Mac and Cheese colored. They should rename it to Dinner.

I don’t do it anymore, but back when I was a young man I had a short metal straw, a metal credit card looking thing (not sharp, it crushed things more than chopping them), an aluminum tray, and a snuff vial with a tiny spoon.

I remember those days! I used PdaNet because whoever I was with (AT&T? Cingular?) sold tether data like it was being brought to me by a parade of half nude sexy folks bit by bit.

I remember the on-hook and off-hook commands, and I remember calling the cradle that old land lines sat on/in being called the hook. When was the tether called the hook?

Don’t get me wrong, I’m not being rhetorical here as a gotcha. My memory just ain’t what she used to be and I’d like to remember.

You said more than I did in my whole fucking rant. That’s exactly right.

Abso-fucking-lutely. I don’t think it’s quite there yet, it puts too many strange artifacts in the music currently, but it’s getting damn close to “good enough”.

Too many people think the danger is that it’s awful. The danger is that it’s mediocre. Because cheap, easily reproducible, and mediocre beats excellent, expensive, and messy every time because AI doesn’t get tired. It doesn’t go on a bender or get caught doing something reprehensible or burn out. It’s never late. It just sits there waiting to be told what to crank out next.

So you’ve got this thing that can’t move art forward. It can’t inject that one really fucking cool thing in there that changes everything. AI can’t hate a song it’s creating so it emphasizes things in a weird way.

Compare it with Max Martin productions. He didn’t invent manufactured music but he created a hell of a pipeline for folks to rhyme fire with desire. But even that relies on people who can sing with the timidity of youth and the confidence of a person who has been told the world is theirs. Or someone with no real understanding of a song singing it in a way that gives it a different meaning than the original intent. Or someone barely hanging on and pouring their entire person into their performance because they have nothing else.

AI can’t do any of that. It can’t turn a word into a god damned grenade. It’s going to remix everything that came before. Not in new and exciting ways. Not in thought provoking ways. But in algorithmic ways. It’s flat. The lyrics will tell a story that resolves. The rhymes will be perfect. You won’t get a banjo in metal or a calliope in video game music unless it’s a game about a clown. It’s not going to give you soul and wit. It will give you a snapshot of where music has been and is up to the point of its last training data.

I have an entire tangent about how it’s being used politically currently (go look up Danny Bones) and how it does not get tired or embroiled in controversy and being “good enough” makes it the perfect propaganda machine. But that’s for another day.

I didn’t know my band was anyone’s favorite band!

Gonna find my baby gonna hold her tight

Gonna grab some afternoon delight

I updated above, and the other commenter is right that legal language is (I think purposely in a lot of cases) confusing. Judge ruled it was filed in the wrong country.

This is pretty accurate. When I came up I worked in an MSP. So I had to deal with customers. It taught me a lot about being able to say anything to people. You can break any news to anyone, it’s all in how you present it. So I gained people skills.

After I passed through that gauntlet and gained a breadth of knowledge, I went internal and gained a depth of knowledge. And I started out breaking the news in a way that I would break news to a customer.

Later after I proved my depth of knowledge I started being able to be blunt to any CIO or CTO I came across. And most of the time they’d send me reqs or tell me something was happening that required my skill set then would leave me the hell alone to handle it without kibitzing or bumping my fucking elbow.

When I started my own one man consulting shop I stopped giving shits at all. I found a good client and we have a good contract and most of the C levels like having someone on staff who just says what they’re thinking instead of sanitizing it. The CIO doesn’t necessarily like it but he’s outnumbered.

All this really only worked because I did go through a few years of soft skill hell though. Price you pay and all that. Well, price I paid for this path.