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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: June 26th, 2023

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  • I have all of the Billboard Top 100’s for every year from 1950 to 2009. When i downloaded it i thought that litterally every popular song i’ve heard of would be on there.

    Not only are there a lot missing, there’s so so much crap. It turns out bland generic love ballads have sold really well throughout the decades, and genuinely memorable songs are a lot fewer than 100 a year. Not even to mention all the ones that don’t chart. Sure 1957 had Elvis’s Jailhouse Rock, but you know what else it had? Elvis’s Loving You, Elvis’s Love Me, and Jerry Lewis’s “Rock-a-Bye Your Baby with a Dixie Melody”. Cool. Thanks for that, Billboard.

    Overall there’s a tremendous survivorhip bias. By definition we only remember the memorable songs, which gives the illusion that everything was memorable.

    But also, having grown up in the 2000’s, i really think it’s one of the worst decades for music. So much so that i was into 60’s rock back then, and in the 2010’s i was into the new wave of thrash metal, literally one of the most regressive genres there are. I wasn’t alive for the 80’s, i didn’t like the video games or the movies and didn’t participate in virtually any of the 80’s nostalgia that was trendy at the time, but i did prefer the music to anything my current decade had to offer.










  • Yeah, but the further back you go the less useful it becomes. If you look before Israel you find the British Empire, the Ottoman Empire and the Roman Empire; two of these don’t exist anymore and the last doesn’t really exist anymore.

    The choice of which time range to include isn’t that arbitrary, there are pretty significant markers that make the previous state of things a lot less relevant. When studying french politics, it’s not useful to go back further than the 1789 revolution because that event changed so much that the previous reality doesn’t matter anymore; similarly, the foundation of Israel changed the power dynamics in the area significantly enough that you can start there. Remembering the previous events is useful for context but won’t change the conclusion.



  • This is comical because Israel is the attacker, and has been for its entire existence. Their goal is to conquer and ethnically cleanse more territory in order to create an enthnostate.

    Hamas only exists as a reaction to israeli colonialism. That’s litterally the only reason for their existence.

    So, to be precise:

    • Israel is finishing a war they did not start

    Maybe not in the narrow sense, but the colonial efforts of Israel are responsible for the broader conflict lasting since the 50’s, which the current conflict is a chapter of.

    • There is literally no way around it

    It’s not necessary for Israel to conquer Gaza. It would be enough to just not expand their territory and respect human rights and international law, which they never did at any point in 70 years, leading to the current situation where there are no good options anymore.

    • The terror attack was the proof that restraint didn’t do anything

    The terror attack is a consequence of lack of restraint. (i wouldn’t normally word it like that, i’m just using the same words for rhetoric effect)


  • Yeah but look at all the stuff you do besides showering, the shaving and hair care and such. I’m genuinely just talking about the shower itself. There’s convincing myself to shower, then there’s watching youtube videos with my clothes off, then there’s spending too long in the hot shower because i don’t want to step out into the cold bathroom, then there’s drawing shapes on the fogged mirror, etc

    I think my expectation for quick showers comes from my upbringing? For a few years growing up we had the toilet, sink and shower all in the same bathroom, and that bathroom was being used by like 6 people. So every minute spent in the shower was inconveniencing someone else. idk


  • I never talk to anyone so i have no incentive to other than my own comfort. I do feel more comfortable when i’m clean, but my mere comfort often doesn’t feel like reason enough when executive dysfunction makes a shower is a 1-hour affair, plus i have a weird anxiety around thriftiness so i don’t like to “waste” the warm water and soap.

    Same reason why the house isn’t as clean as it could be. It would be cleaner if anyone came in here ever, but no one does, so the only reason to vaccuum is my own satisfaction, which isn’t worth the time and effort.

    All told i end up showering every ~5 days in winter and once a day in summer, and i never touch the perfume bottles. I actually don’t really get the point of perfume or deodorant tbh, seems like the solution to BO is a shower.




  • This is not a valid argument ecause everything surrounding us is designed and facilitated by capitalism, and certainly all our electronics, there’s no such thing as computers independent from capitalism. There weren’t even in the soviet union. So it’s not possible for this anon to actually live what they preach unless they went full anarcho-primitivism.

    Not that it would matter anyway, because you’re allowed to criticize a system that you participate in.



  • Shifting the power from a CEO to an instance admin is a massive improvement.

    One has autocratic control over the entire site, potentially hundreds of millions of users, investors breathing down their neck, server infrastructure, and other systemic pressures; meanwhile, a fediverse instance admin has autocratic control over nothing but their own instance, a few thousand users at most, with the only money and hardware involved being their own.

    The fediverse is incredibly more horizontal and decentralized than any corporate social media, the improvement is massive. And i’m a believer that vertical structures and concentrations of power are at the root of a lot of problems in society, so this is gravy to me.

    But yes, it’s worth remembering that it’s not completely decentralized, and admins still have absolute power over their instance. My Mastodon instance admin doesn’t want us to use the name GIMP to refer to the open source image manipulator; they say “gimp” is a slur aimed at disabled people, which i’ve never heard before in my life.