Oh, and speaking of Charley we were lucky enough to have the Charley Crockett/Leon Bridges show come through, holy crap, I’d seen both of them live before but getting TWO great performers in one night, wow. And that intersection between county and R&B is such pleasant music.

I saw Joshua Ray Walker open for Marcus King and didn’t even like his show but looked him up and found his recorded work to be incredible, THEN he found out he had cancer and that was part of why the live show was weak, nothing to do with his music, and says he is recovering now, but I felt so uncharitable thinking the show sucked when he was dealing with something so awful.

But anyway - I do use streaming but like you find bands other ways, opening acts, radio, sometimes Brooklyn Vegan, that site posts about bands I’ve never heard of, I listen and find stuff I like (and a lot I don’t).

Ooh a debutante. Does he get a fancy dress and a coming out party? How exactly do you get jumped into that club?

Yeah I wish only for a few things that need a bigger base, sub for my city on Reddit was so helpful, and I miss Normal Nudes and Naked Progress, the NSFW stuff on Lemmy is more onlyfans girls & AI stuff, Reddit had such a massive reach they had everything, more people means more niche stuff.

Overall though? So much nicer here. And I am not sure you can have both, it’s probably nicer because it’s smaller.

Clone Wars

Sure, but we also drank in parking lots because there was nothing to do, had guys physically grabbing at us instead of just yelling stuff, got bullied in school more, and the violent crime rate was something like 10x what it is now. Oh, and our friends were dying of AIDS as well. And the bay was polluted, and downtown was so dead we could walk around it like a ghost town.

I will never understand nostalgia. There are good things and bad things about every time. But even with the fuckers trying to pull us backwards now, there has been progress.

Not just couples. I was aghast to learn that my fellow parents at work track the location of their teenage kids. All of them, except me. What the fuck? If I want to know where they are I text and ask.

What’s more - half of them also have it turned on in the other direction.

This is crazy to me. I want my kids to grow into adults and I’m not going to surveil them all the time. I think a kid of teen age has some reasonable expectation of privacy. We are close, I have a good relationship with my kids but not THAT close, I don’t need to know if you stopped at Wawa on your way home.

You know, when I got my current job, the people in my department said"we tried to find your Facebook but couldn’t" and I said 'yeah that’s because I don’t have one."

13 years later, still don’t.

Though honestly even our work teams chat would probably be too spicy for these motherfuckers. They just want a pretext to keep out anybody. Like some law impossible to follow, that they can selectively enforce.

Google assistant was already a good listener, it seems to have gotten worse, but compared to anything else I’ve tried to do with voice it was & is still the best at understanding, and can be set to be bilingual.

I honestly don’t understand this but it’s very Google to push the change before the replacement is fully baked. They did that with YouTube Music too.

Better to leave your phone at home (or better, in the pocket of someone who lives in your house and takes the same daily path as you do) if you are doing something that’s currently illegal. Or in any situation where you are doing something legal that the cops are likely to break up.

The juror going home thing is terrifying but I don’t think the government would be after you for fulfilling your civic duty.

Well then, what are we waiting for? Let’s go visit Alpha Centauri!