My recent ex girlfriend would take certain things we were about to do together (traveling, going to the spa, going to a particular restaurant close to my house, spending the day at a museum, etc.) and would just automatically assume that I had already done that same thing with some unspoken past ex of mine, and get preemptively sad, upset, and self-conscious that she wasn’t “the first”… What? Life isn’t all about firsts, why even get upset about that? So what if I’ve already done something before with someone else, I am still going to enjoy it with YOU right NOW. Maybe a lot of people do compare past experiences to current ones, but I don’t find that very fulfilling, so I just don’t. It’s a lot easier to just live day to day.

I do agree that Agusa has been more consistent. I am not a big fan of Leker For Barn or Intetnett from Tusmorke, but their older stuff will always hold that special place in my heart as the albums that just totally captured me. Hestehoven and Dawn of Oberon were welcome returns from whatever the hell was going on in Intetnett lol

I’m not actually super familiar with anything outside the few bands I’ve mentioned, do you have any other suggestions? This genre/style is really an island by itself in my normal music rotation, but it’s a happy little island that I visit pretty often.

Spotlights are so good. I saw them live recently, it was a great show.

If you like Spotlights, give Graywave a try if you don’t already listen. A little less doom, more electronic. I don’t think there’s any harsh vocals, and if there are it’s very, very few. Dancing in the Dust is one of those songs I can always listen to at max volume under any circumstance.

If you use Android, check out “Distraction-free Instagram”. It’s an app that lets you disable various parts of the app like your home feed, stories, etc.

I really wanted to stop scrolling on Instagram, but I also really wanted to keep posting my photography, as the interactions I sometimes get on my posts are fun and I enjoy sharing my craft. I also have some friends who ONLY interact via instagram messaging.

I downloaded the app, and disabled everything except messaging, and it’s been great. It’s definitely made me happier overall.

But that’s none of those genres…

I would like their stuff so much more if the nu-metal parts went away.

I am unsure what makes something “Swing”, but I absolutely adore The Roar of '74 by Buddy Rich. I discovered it via my dumb rule of “See vinyl record with car on it, buy vinyl record with car on it”

I desperately wanted to be on Figure It Out (With your host, Summer Sanders)

I reference the secret slime action fairly frequently, and it seems that maybe I’m the only person in my area who watched/enjoyed the show, because most people have no idea what I am talking about.

Don’t even get me started on Figure It Out Wild Style.

All the browser settings are also stored there, too. I turned all the AI stuff off, then the next time I booted up my PC the AI was back. Turned it off again. Same thing the next time I logged back on…

I finally looked into it and it was because I had firefox set to clear the cache on shutdown.

It can fall under the same umbrella. Unrealistic beauty standards being set by the “rich”, who some people look up to as role models. If there were something that you could do that you might be able to afford, like botox or lip fillers, that you believe would make you more beautiful, closer to your role model… If that sort of thing matters to you, then yeah, you might go for it. I can even take the same analogy of watches above, because there are definitely cheap imitation versions of the gaudy diamond-encrusted ones.

I was sort of thinking more like this though with respect to extreme alterations…

It’s definitely a status thing, but I think the extreme it’s been taken to has more to do with an erosion and warping of reasonable beauty standards than anything. More of an act of “because I can” than anything. I think a lot of the people who you look at and think “what the fuck” actually think they are making themselves more beautiful and attractive. I don’t think someone who has everything and can get whatever they want would purposely make themselves look grotesque, but I’m neither rich, nor a psychologist, so maybe I’m totally wrong…

It’s kind of like how there’s a gaudy stupid looking hyper-expensive version of everything, like those giant hideous watches with diamonds encrusted on every surface… Someone think’s it’s beautiful or shows status, but most of us probably just think it looks stupid.

The Bogdanoffification has been happening for a while…

Pub cheese would like a word.

Also, I think you might be hard-pressed to find anyone who would consider sugary cake sponge to be “bread”. (Something something Ireland’s supreme court ruled that Subway’s bread isn’t legally bread for tax purposes due to its high sugar content)

It’d be like layering up some sourdough slices with sweet sugary icing slathered between them, most people probably wouldn’t call that a cake.

It wasn’t super relevant to the story, but yeah, I could just browse the files right on their PC, definitely a “Not intending to share it for free” kind of situation, completely devoid of any authentication or security.

I’ve actually taken note of my navigational skills over the last couple years… I grew up in one state, and then a few years after graduating college, moved to a different state. When I was growing up, phone navigation didn’t really exist as it does now, cars didn’t have built-in navigation, and standalone navigation devices were slow and not all that great (at least the ones I could afford).

I find that when I return home, even 10 years later, I am able to navigate all the places I used to go unaided with ease, back-roads, niche routes, able to travel for hours without getting “lost”.

When I moved, though, I had very recently gotten my first smartphone, and google maps was very convenient to “learn” the new area. I ended up just continuing to use navigation since it was convenient. I’ve found that beyond the major main routes, I don’t have the same kind of “built-in” navigational skill that I do for my original home-turf. I never really learned the area.

I am moving towards a smart-phone-less life, and I’ve been able to let go of a lot, but GPS navigation remains a sticking point. I need to start training myself to navigate unaided in my current area.

Many many years ago in the paleolithic era when 2.4GHz was king, a neighbor in the next unit over had an unsecured wifi network… I connected my old laptop, figured out where the connection was best (turned out to be beside the stove in the kitchen?), piped the connection out the ethernet port and into the WAN port on my router, and set up my own “secured” network lol. I’m fairly certain anyone with a straight-up unsecured wifi network doesn’t have the skills or knowledge to detect someone leaching their bandwidth. I did that for like 3 years without a single hiccup until I moved and finally had to start paying.

Ah the good ol’ corner-of-a-building shot. I know it well.

I interact with nostalgia by using the actual tools that are the focus of said nostalgia., so like kind of a more difficult round-about way of achieving a similar extreme result… (All of those are SOOC, no editing, from various mid-to-early 90’s cameras)

(I also really like your shot of the stick “levitating” over the lake.)

I think it was just an odd way of making him seem more human and normal. Also the fact that he doesn’t mention anything about it also happening in his previous lives leaves an interesting open question that could either lend credence or hinder his whole backstory… At least that’s how I interpreted it.

All in all, though… one of the less awkward and more impactful sex scenes in a science-y book, which is much better than the usual ones I remember because they’re terrible and awkward and don’t fit in with the surrounding plot lol

It’s ironic that I have an anecdote that I recently read that feels very fitting here.

Permutation City by Greg Egan. Post-human digital consciousness via uploaded brain-scan becomes possible, and there are interesting questions about how the “sense of self” is derived, and how much someone can change themselves before they are no longer the same person. There are many different characters that deal with a newfound immortality in different ways, and either embrace, or shun, the ability to change themselves at a whim to fit their needs or wants. It’s a very prominent part of the overall plot and is prevalent right up until the last sentence.

Also, separate from that, I have the exact opposite feeling as OP. When I’m reading a book, I feel like my world is expanded in new directions. I tend to see certain things from slightly different perspectives in the context of what I’m reading. I’ve been reading Greg Egan’s entire body of work (after reading Diaspora and absolutely fucking loving it), and some insight and thoughts I had about the book Quarantine actually pushed me to make positive changes in my life that have been really hugely impactful, and I don’t think I would have had the courage or drive to make them had I not been thinking about my life in such an abstract manner.

While I haven’t seen him the most times, I am unequivocally a massive Dev-head. I’ve seen Devin Townsend 3 times (4 if you count the virtual concert during lockdown in 2020), but one of them was to travel from the USA to the Netherlands this March to see the one-time live performance of The Moth (I was right in the second row, I get a lot of peripheral screen-time in the live-stream). It was such an amazing experience, I’m going to count that as 10 or 20 normal concerts. I probably also haven’t cried that many happy tears in at least a decade or two. It was also my first time ever leaving the USA, and I really REALLY didn’t want to go home. I’d have happily lived the rest of my life on the Dutch train network.

I’ve been meaning to get to one of their shows, but just never had the chance, or always learned about it right after it happened.

I really wish Грай (Grai) would tour somewhere in North America…