I’ll build on your 2nd and 4th ones. I truly do not understand the appeal of the TikTok aesthetic. Vertical video is already really ugly. But now we’re doing incredibly bad green screen of a floating head talking at me like I’m holding up the self-checkout line at a grocery store. And then the auto subtitles that I cannot turn off that change colors or some other nonsense rather than focusing on readability that are autogenerated and contain numerous errors (subtitles are very good, but should be VTT or the like files that can be turned on and off so the platform can place them properly on the screen). Then there’s just an ugly UI laid over it along with seeing reactions pop up on screen further just making a mess of styles and crowding the screen.

I feel like some old guy that loves paintings seeing these new fangled moving pictures everyone is talking about and not understanding how anyone can willing fry their attention span on them.

Just to add:

Bears Among Men - album

I am a bike guy. I don’t own a car. Haven’t for over a decade. But I’ve been hit by cars a couple times (only one major one that luckily only put my bike out of commission and not me) and had close calls way more than that. I live in a city with decent, for America, infrastructure with 100 miles of protected bikes lanes. And I get why safety wise, people aren’t ready to do it. I am taking my life into my own hands in a way every time I get on my bike and try to share the road with motorists, who are insane.

Like, I think the term ‘carbrain’ has gotten over used a bit by urbanists and anti-car folks because it is such a tantalizing term. But it’s certainly not without its use. Something happens to people when they drive cars. They become impatient and entitled on a way that borders on psychological transformation. I’ve never seen an average American more entitled to break the law than when they are a motorist. The speed limit is a suggestion, if you’re not going at least five miles over it, you’re not really driving. There is almost no other activity in American culture I can think of where people suddenly become rule breakers like this (and there should be many times where it would actually be good to break the law and they don’t!), but they suddenly think the most important thing in the world is for them to get where they are going and literally fuck everyone else.

How many times have any of us seen people double park or otherwise put their car in everyone’s way and just throw on their flashers as if ‘fuck everyone else, my shit is more important’ than we do with motorists? I can’t really think of any other situation where this happens so publicly, so nakedly as it does when people drive.

And the anger driving causes in folks, I think mostly comes from the cognitive dissonance of their behavior in their car and knowing, deep down, that it is wrong. That they shouldn’t be doing a lot of things they do in their vehicles. Stuff like pedestrians and bikers, who they literally have license to kill (look at the average criminal punishment for murdering someone with a vehicle versus literally any other way one can kill another human being and notice how little consequence there is for ending a human life while driving), remind them of the fact that their decisions are bad. Similar to how certain people get so angry about vegans/vegetarians. It’s the guilty that drives fear and turns it into rage. And that rage, in turn, makes them even more deadly.

Driving is hard. It’s demanding. And honestly it should have a much higher bar for who can do it because it is so dangerous. But, we’ve completely destroyed people’s ability to get to most places in our society without cars. So, until we make it safe and easy for folks not to drive, we’re stuck in this hellish predicament.

Rambling today, I guess.

This whole album, front to back, is perhaps my favorite release of the year so far. Just non-stop hits for each track. I can see why they basically released half of it as singles ahead of time, every single song is probably worthy of being one.

Nice. Cool thing about MBT is that it basically runs along the red line of the metro, so if you get tired of walking/biking, you can just grab the train on the way back. Enjoy. It’s honestly a cool city and I think most people that hate it confine themselves to the politics part of the town, which is not a small part, but there’s so much more to the city than just the strivers on the hill and the neighborhoods they live in.

Definitely take advantage of the fact that all the museums and the zoo are free. Few major cities with this level of amenities just let you walk in and pay nothing. The art galleries on the mall are very good if you’re into that sort of thing. The zoo is reasonably good if that’s appealing as well.

Rock Creek Park is a pretty uniquely rustic park for being in the middle of a city. Good hiking/biking paths. You can use capital bike share easily enough to take a scenic ride. Especially down Beach, which the southern half of was completely closed off to cars. The zoo can actually be got to off of Rock Creek Trail very easily.

If you like urban bike baths, the Metropolitan Branch Trail is also very good. Goes from Union station up to neighborhoods that aren’t often seen by tourists. You can hike this too, of course. On Saturdays, there’s a brewery on this path that has good BBQ set-up outside.

I second the Air and Space museum that’s way out in Virginia, near the Dulles airport. It’s kind of a pain to get to and you have to pay for parking, but you get to see some seriously historical craft including the space shuttle Discovery.

Get some Ethiopian and El Salvadorian food while you’re in town. Sadly, most of the good ethnic food in the area is in the suburbs, but those two have great representation in the city and are a bit unique as well.

Oh, I haven’t thought about The Browning in a minute. I should go back and listen some. They seem ahead of the curve these days given all the electronic elements in the new Bad Omens and Bring Me the Horizon albums that just came out.

Enjoy, man. Knocked Loose definitely putting the hardcore element of metalcore back at the forefront and it rules.

I agree the lyrics rule, but I just don’t get that stank face, ready to run into a brick wall feeling I get from a lot of the other tracks and the first Slaughterhouse. Maybe that’s not what they were going for and it’s a me problem.

Slaughterhouse 1 goes so hard, one of my favorite gym tunes. Maybe it’s because of that or just because the rest of this album fucks so much, but I found this track to be a bit of let down by comparison.

This had to drop over a weekend I’m out camping. Really excited to listen to this when I get home.

I tend toward hardcore, metalcore and punk. A little bit of industrial, electronic stuff.

Singles:

thrown - Backfire. PVRIS, Tommy Genesis & Longyu Gao - Burn the Witch. Kublai Kahn - Low Tech. Make Them Suffer - Epitaph. Better Lovers - The Flowering. Nero - Draw Energy. Bad Omens, Poppy - V.A.N..

EPs:

Greyhaven - Stereo Grief.

Albums:

ERRA - CURE. SeeYouSpaceCowboy - Coup de Grace. Knocked Loose - You Won’t Go Before You’re Suppose To.

Strauss and Howe are the two guys that really supercharged it with their book The Fourth Turning. The (edit: Bill) Clinton campaign actually attributes some of their success to looking at generational cohorts through that lens, which also gave it a lot more purchasing power in culture in general.

So glad this is Windows only, because this is tempting as fuck and I think I would get addicted all over again to this style of expansion to WoW.

Agree. Elden Ring is the only one I’ve liked personally. And a big reason is being able to fuck off and go do something else if you find a boss battle or section of the game too difficult. There’s so much to do and explore and check out that it didn’t feel like I was “grinding” ever.

This song makes me think of playing Rock Band so much. In regular rotation for sure.

Like a lot of cis folks, I never even really had to think about it. Privilege of being born in a body that matched what I thought of myself, for the most part. Once my hormones starting rocking in my teenage years, I hit the gym pretty hard, really wanting to embrace my masculinity. Probably helped I had positive masculine role-models in my life, especially my dad, who was a farmer for most of my childhood. Big man, rough hands, dependable, always made time for his family and community, informed a lot of what a “man” is to me without me really realizing it until I reflected on it in adulthood.

I really didn’t give it much thought until the 00s when a friend of mine came out as trans. She was incredibly brave, this was long before even cis gay people had a lot of purchase in culture, especially the rural area I grew up in. Her announcement of it on social media post (sorry for vagueness, trying not to dox), was of the effect “I’m Trans. This is Not a Joke” because that’s kind of how trans issues were seen, even among us relatively left leaning folks (I remember John Stewart making fun of Kucinich during the 2008 primaries for saying he would put a trans person on the Supreme Court). Crazy she had to frame it that way.

When she came out, I did have a bit of self-reflection about it. She actually was already talking a lot about gender in blog posts and stuff like that leading up to that point, she was who taught me about the concept of privilege, for example. And I realized pretty fast that I had a lot of that privilege stuff for being born male and feeling comfortable in not just being a man, but even a lot of traditionally masculine things like being big & strong, watching sports, being attracted to women, etc.

It was cool to have that influence in my life kind of early on, helped me not be a chud about gender stuff, I think. Or at least not struggle with it, like I did for a while with say, abortion. My only early life influence on that issue was being raised in the church, I never knew anyone that, publicly known anyway, had an abortion. Even if I left the church at 17, it took me into my 20s to get right about it through reading and getting more in touch with feminism and what not.

JT’s vocals are so massive.

Music video worthy of the track: https://youtu.be/RAuuVY__KQ0

They’re so good. Rare band that seems to get stronger with each release. Check out their pair of singles they released as “Upon Loss”, I think that may be peak Knocked Loose. But their whole discography is face melting. Great gym music. Kind of amazing the mainstream success they’ve had lately, happy for them.