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Joined 2 years ago
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Cake day: July 3rd, 2024

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  • For me good country music is about growing up rural poor and making rebellious music with heart and soul. You can’t authentically make that music while hating people (be they women, brown, queer, trans, foreign etc.). You can’t make that music without being against cops and corporations like Nestle and United Health.

    I had typed out an overly long rant about modern country losing its soul and just being pop music with a guitar twang veneer and classic country shit heels like David Allen Coe who still managed to make some memorable songs. Instead I’ll just list some contemporary artists that I’d put on the same playlist and call it country.

    In no particular order: Jesse Welles, Sturgill Simpson, Lil Nas X, Robert Ellis, Father John Misty, Old Crow Medicine Show, Courtney Barnett, Kurt Vile, The Texas Gentlemen, etc. I’m sure others can suggest more and some will dispute some of these. I make no claims that any of these people won’t turn out to be bad guys later. After all, I do still kind of like that David Allen Coe song about being drunk the day his mom got out of prison and he went to pick her up in the rain, but before he could get to the station in his pickup truck she got run over by a damned old train.



  • You seem to have almost completely missed the point of allegory and metaphor in TOS. “Time after humanity has dealt with” as you put it is just a literary device to soften the impact when the show was inevitably confronted or viewed by real racists. It was never a really view of the future. It was always a reflection of our present through the lens of futurism, a clever narrative framing device. That narrative framing device could not possibly remain unchangeable through multiple generations without loosing everything that made it work. Attempting to do so, i.e. keeping the storytelling framework completely unchanged and not adapting to new generations and new social dynamics, would have shown a lack of creativity and imagination.

    The show was from a time when the U.S. thought they had beaten fascism (past tense, done, a part of the past) and would soon beat racism, classism, etc. From a time when imperialism was seen as a fundamentally good social force by most of the imperialist public. Today we (mostly) know better. We will probably never truly erase any of them. They are things we’ll have to remain vigilant for. A show today patronizing us with their perfected utopian society which remains VERY imperialist without shining a light on that contradiction just would not work. A show lacking any interpersonal drama also would not work and it’s not even something that was really true for TOS, just a weird kink Roddenberry got into when producing TNG. That’s the context of the way Star Trek has changed and it matters.


  • Autocorrect seems to have gotten noticably worse for me in recent years. I regularly find that the entirely correct words which I type out get changed to something completely different because the autocorrect decided that I couldn’t possibly mean that word. It regularly helpfully replaces entire words after I hit space and have moved on to the next. By that time, I’m usually focused on the next word, so slip-ups that I almost never make at a dumb keyboard (like its vs. it’s, there vs. their, your vs. you’re, or were vs. where vs. wear) happen with shocking regularity unless I proofread the entire comment. As a perfect example, I had to proofread and fix multiple instances of such while typing those examples.





  • It is a basic ingredient in mirepoix, which is used as a base for a variety of sauces, soups, gravies, and stews. It’s just one component of what is basically just a fresh vegetable mix. You can always just substitute whatever you have on hand or local that fits, just like you would with a stir-fry or fried rice. It’s less about the specific vegetables than it is about the way they are prepared and what they contribute. Onions and carrots add sweetness. Celery balances those with its saltiness. Celery and garlic feel to me like a bridge to the other proper herbs like parsley and thyme that usually go in the mirepoix I combine with a good roux to make gravy.