I’m with you on this one. There are lyrics on almost every single track for crying out loud. Throw us instrumental lovers a bone won’t you? Songs that are lyrically driven but are otherwise super-repetitive instrumentally tend to put me to sleep.
What I love about concerts is when the band goes off script and just starts jamming. Even a 5-minute drum solo will have me grinning ear to ear, and that’s what I’ll be remembering on the way home.
The city where I live has a musical instrument lending library. I don’t know how common these are? Ours started when a cherished local musician passed away and his eclectic collection became the library. Over the years, more people have donated instruments and there is an annual festival to raise funds for their upkeep. (As a local musician, I’m actually playing at said festival today.)
Anyway, it works just like a regular library. You get your library card and check out an instrument and it doesn’t cost you a penny. And there are all kinds of videos online these days to give you pointers on how to play. I guess if you get really serious, you’ll probably want some one-on-one tutoring, but if you’re just doing it for kicks and don’t have any plans to join a band or whatever, you can just have some fun and see how far you can get on your own?
I don’t live in Scotland, but I can’t even imagine what it must’ve been like to have that close referendum followed by Brexit only a couple of years later.
What I’m wondering about right now though is Irish unification? That seems to be building up some serious momentum from everything I’ve been reading.
1st reaction: lmao
2nd reaction: hey wait, this is pure genius!
Oh yeah, I remember CompuServe. I believe it was its own separate network from the Internet, though they had an email gateway at least. Maybe towards the end they became an ISP like AOL did? My memory is fuzzy on that.
I do remember they invented gif files which then of course spread to the Internet. But it was a mess because the compression they use was patent-protected. CompuServe had paid royalties on it, but the Internet was, well, the Internet…
Can’t remember the exact year but I imagine it was sometime in the mid-90s?
I used to play MUDs on a community BBS and one day the admins said they were testing out an Internet portal. Before long, they became the first ISP in town. It was weird because until they eventually upgraded to DSL, they had this quirky dialup script you had to use that navigated past the BBS part to get you on the Internet. For all I know, the BBS may still lurking around somewhere to this day?
For me it often goes one step further. I remember a song or maybe hear it somewhere and think what a great tune! Haven’t heard that in forever.
And then what happens is it triggers a flood of other memories from that same time period when it was popular. Then, just as I’m starting to get all wistful, I suddenly recall how I used to hate that song! Like wtf?!?
Lemmy, in its current state, reminds me of a university online forum. It has a university-ish population of active users who seem reasonably well-educated, and you run into people with disproportionately varied interests and passions compared to the general population.
I joined last summer when I became annoyed by the reddit shenanigans and have never looked back. For me, at least, lemmy already has the critical mass needed to occupy my attention. After the initial reddit wave, the active user count dropped steadily from around 70k to 40k, but seems to be slowly rebounding now as it has climbed back to 50k or so recently.
I think one thing of note is that when people flood into the fediverse for whatever reason, there is a tendency for them to congregate at whatever is perceived as the most central instances. This can be devastating if the servers in question are not up to the task of a sudden influx. I am guilty of this myself. I initially opened an account at kbin.social which was swamped. As I learned how the fediverse works, I eventually settled on lemmy.ca, which is a middling size instance that seems quite stable.
I guess my worry, then, is if lemmy goes viral at some point, it may not be up to the task of dealing with all the people flooding in? Viral trends have an exponential growth pattern, so it only takes a few doublings before you’re looking at a million users and beyond. At the moment, scalability worries me more than social concerns in terms of the future of lemmy. But I suppose that may, to some extent, be because it’s much harder to predict how the latter will play out with a much larger network, so I am giving it the benefit of the doubt?
Personally, I would get an external SSD and try it on there first. At least it’s new enough to have USB3 ports. If you’re comfortable enough with it under the circumstances, you can put it on your main drive. But you may find you need to upgrade the RAM or that it’s just too much of a resource hog in the end? But even if you back away from 14, it’s always nice to have an external SSD kicking around. :)
Yeah you nailed it! It’s generally not a problem at the primary colour level. For example, I have no trouble distinguishing the red and green of a traffic light. But there are, like you say, a lot of ways to mix colours and that’s where we get into trouble.
There is a type of colourblindness that affects your perception of yellow, but the red-green types are far more common in the population. It is also much more common in men than women. This is because the trait is carried by X chromosomes, and for a woman to exhibit it, she must have the gene on both X’s. Men only have one X and one Y, so if you have it on your X, you’re doomed! lol
One thing you may or may not have noticed is colourblind people tend to be more sensitive to subtle differences in shade. This is a compensation the brain works out, similar to how fully blind people develop a sharper sense of hearing. The military even noted that this can help in spotting camouflage on an air photo, and it’s one of these rare cases where colourblind individuals were specifically sought out. It usually goes the other way, though. Like we are steered away from careers as electricians, pharmacists, etc. and I totally get that. It’s not discriminatory. It’s just common sense! :)
My favourite colour is yellow mainly because I have red-green colourblindness but yellow never steers me wrong. It’s always honest with me.
I don’t generally go out of my way to have everything yellow, though when work moved into a new location and offered me a choice of paint for my office, I did choose it, which raised some eyebrows. But it was north-facing and I’m in Canada where winters can dark fast. I wanted something to counterbalance that and the offices next to mine where people chose neutral grey and blue looked kind of dingy and cave-like to my eye at least. I think yellow was a win!
Irish pubs are good for both of those! 🍀
Aw give him a hug for me. We have a rescue cat who had to get all his teeth removed after a severe infection from living on the streets. We fostered him for a bit during his cone-head convalescence, fell in love with him, and wound up adopting him.
I was at church today also, playing music with my wife. I’m not particularly devout to be honest, but I believe in the community which got me settled into a new city and hooked me up with people who helped me live out my dreams. I owe these guys big-time. The priest is an old guy who came out of retirement to say all the stuff he’s bottled up for years. He’s super-progressive with a great sense of humour and he keeps things short. It’s great! Today was his birthday and we all sang to him.
I’m not quite sure what you are after here. If it’s about how to motivate other people to learn, those are teaching skills, and I am pretty lacking in that regard.
In terms of self-motivation, I think it is important to take stock once in a while of how far you’ve come. For example, say you’re learning a musical instrument. It’s so easy to get frustrated. You can’t figure out how to play that new song or master a technique. And then you see some other guy playing the same instrument in a different band and they’re killing it.
What I find helps in that situation is to think back to where you were a year ago. You’re doing stuff you couldn’t before and it shows. Give yourself some credit for putting in the work and getting results. Pat yourself on the back and be proud for once.
I like that end of the day bath too. Must be the Japanese in me. I feel some guilt over the water usage, but then again, I’m soaking in there for half an hour. If I did the same in a shower, I’d probably use even more water right? Also, the more you weigh, the more water you displace, meaning you need less to fill the tub. So it’s a rare case of weight gain actually reducing resource consumption. Thank you Archimedes!
I’m trying to picture this. You eat it like cereal?
The first time I met the dad of the woman I would eventually marry was when I flew out to have Christmas with them. He was a big-shot lawyer, and I was a little scared of the guy. Not gonna lie.
I thought I gotta bring him a gift. But what? I had very little money, having just graduated. What could I get lawyer dad that wouldn’t seem tacky? I went to a book shop and got around to the true crime section. He’s a lawyer right? Maybe he likes true crime? So I read a few back covers and found one that looked sort of interesting. It was about a murder on a college campus, but looked like the investigation had lots of twists and turns with a big trial at the end? Would he like it?
Anyway, I meet him and give him the book and he sort of tosses it aside and grills me, as expected. I kind of shrank in the chair, but my to-be-wife and her siblings said I did okay.
Now fast-forward several weeks. I’m back home and get an email from her dad. Oh boy! What did I do? But he’s like, “I just finished the book. It was set at the college where I got my law degree. I even knew one of the profs who’s a character in it! How did you know?!?” I didn’t. “It was so nostalgic. The author mentioned landmarks, some of which aren’t even around anymore. But I remember. That was the best book I’ve read in years! I couldn’t put it down!”
We were all good after that.
I guess the idea is that as in plying the oceans, you are looking at lengthy journeys in space requiring large vessels that can stock whatever supplies you need while protecting you from harsh elements with thick hulls. And they do talk about space fighters, which is more of an aviation term, but these are typically launched from the space equivalent of an aircraft carrier.
First I’ve heard of it. On first glance, gemtext looks to me a bit like markdown except… it isn’t. Frankly, I would love it if browsers had built-in markdown rendering since I’m using it more and more for readme files and what not.
We need to watermark insert something into our watermark posts that watermark can be traced back to its origin watermark if the AI starts training watermark on it.