We really need to start asking ourselves what a "future-proof" social media could or should actually look like.
Does any media company actually think about it? I know there are some big tech ideas like Meta or whatever but I'm serious, it feels like no one running anything has any real thoughts about the future except for in terms of propaganda or advertising. No one actually cares about the social part of social media which is why people have to build it on their own... Hence, the fediverse.
I learned cursive but never practiced beyond 5th grade so it never developed...
Instead in high school and university when I was doing a lot of handwritten notes I ended up creating my own version of cursive which is just visually schwa'ing some letters. My writing and typing has always been a mess so it doesn't matter much.
The more times you listen you'll end up developing your feelings more.
Apparently according to Spotify I was in the top 2% of Pink Floyd listeners in 2022? I only listened for 751 minutes though, which isn't that much. Mostly listening to The Wall on repeat.
There is a movie that goes along with The Wall, of you didn't know. I think that it kind of narrows the ability of people to interpret the songs in their own way but it's still excellent. It's part love action part animated. If you haven't seen the hand drawn animation that goes along with Goodbye Blue Sky and The Trial, you should definitely check it out. It's absolutely insane.
My fav part of The Trial animation is when the mom is introduced with her long "baaaabbbbbyyyyyy" and she is like a fighter jet bearing down, whose wings open up into vulva and from the core an umbilical cord shoots out to grab the rag doll Pink into her arms as she embraces her son... It's just a moment but holy shit. It really adds to the scene. The ex wife is characterized as a praying mantis in two songs...
I saw The Wall Live in like 2011/2012 and it was an incredible show. The 40 foot puppets torturing Pink were awesome. The mom puppet appears in the song Mother and her eyes glow red, the words "big mother is watching you" splays across the wall set as her head swivels back and forth over the crowd...
I'm not sure if there is a Wall Live recording online but I'd really recommend watching the original movie and then watching a concert version. It's probably the most insane set ever built for a musical show (they build up the wall over the course of the first half, the last brick is placed as the character bids the audience goodbye... We return from intermission and Pink is easily corrupted by the worms into a fascist when his mind is blocked off - then they literally explode the 40 foot wall set at the end... So awesome).
Listen to Wish You Were Here! It's generally about the loss of their dear friend and band founder Syd Barrett, a musical visionary lost to the challenges of schizophrenia/the origins of the band. It's very very good. Some of David's best guitar is in the Shine On You Crazy Diamond songs.
Hehe. Depends on if you're too busy to flip or not. Opening up the gorgeous album with the double wide purple jungle scene and slipping the sleeves out is sexy in its own way.
NotJustBikes is honestly a force of nature I think. His content is so awesome he's basically created a new generation of urbanists. We need people like him because his content can actually change the world.
Of you don't know where to start on his channel, the Strong Towns 4 part series is essential viewing. It's a summary of the Strong Towns research project/community and it basically presents decades of expert research as a tidy little series. Everything else is window dressing to the core messaging of that - crappy spread out suburbs are financially insolvent and cannot sustain themselves. Towns and cities die without a reliable tax base. Everything boils down to that. There is a 30 year cycle where new suburbs pay for the old ones and in 30 years they become a net negative to city budgets.
Mississauga in Ontario recently ran out of municipal land... Their strategy has been suburban expansion for decades. Now they're out of room. It wouldn't have been a very exciting headline except now we know that new suburbs must be built to pay for the financial drain the old ones place on the city... So they MUST become more dense or else the city will become bankrupt.
There is also a video on the channel about how Guelph did a financial analysis on what parts of the city are financially productive and which are net negatives on the budget. I'm sure you can guess the results! Really cool 3D bar graphs of the city divided up into blocks/sections. it's just interesting because politicians always always pander to suburban voters and people think suburban tax money pays for inner city programming or whatever and the reverse is the truth. The inner cities are the ones subsidizing the suburbs. Density = people = economy. Population density = productivity = money.
Imagine if politicians ignored homeowners and focused on the people actually funding the budgets? Suburbs are a financial drain only kept alive by the Ponzi scheme of creating new suburbs to find the old ones. Until you run out of land like Mississauga. Then you get slashing of budgets and lack of programs, decaying infrastructure, etc... Then cities just die like so many have across north America.
I predicted forcible demods...
But like, I feel like the one thing that would work is the one thing no one has been talking about.
A mod strike!
Maybe it has been suppressed because it would seem too radical but like, if the communities are going to die anyways might as well go out with a bang. Mods should all go on strike and spammers can run free and burn the site to the ground. That's basically what happened with Twitter, right? Has Spez seen what has happened to the valuation of Twitter this past year or what?
I went on Reddit during the blackout and on the front page there were shitty tattoos of bdsm furries with their dick and balls out... If the front page could all turn into that and the enforcement of NSFW tags was lost due to lack of mods, I can't imagine that the shareholders would be happy about what the site has become.
Mod + user direct action - everyone should post spacedicks/porn and mods should refuse to enforce the rules. Reddit wants to destroy the mods? Then reddit should see what a world without mods on the internet actually looks like... Especially before the IPO. Plus, the internet can get VERY active when it comes to participating in mischief instead of watching things slowly fall apart. I'd upvote spacedicks for the cause.
I have no idea why no one is talking about this unless posts/comments like that are being suppressed. Since it seems like most 3rd party apps have the best mod tools and most mods won't keep up their work if they don't have the right tools, the end result will be the same anyways.
Edit: they can't afford to pay people to replace enough mods. Spez deserves a look at what reddit will become BEFORE the IPO in my opinion.
Sitting on my record player as we speak! 😂
The vinyl sleeve is absolutely gorgeous.
It is incredibly coherent and each song very much fits into the theme they were building. I love the theme of the Island of Dr Moreau (sp?) and the Jabberwocky nonsense word stuff. It's very sensual. It's not mind-blowing or anything but it is a perfect album for what they were trying to accomplish (sensual, kind of dangerous but whimsical, alluring, smooth, playful, sexual). It makes a good album to buy on vinyl because with vinyl you don't really skip songs and it favours albums that are more thematically coherent like Zaba is.
The Wall is the best Pink Floyd album in terms of amount of hours you can put into dissecting every single line of lyrics and using the themes to understand why people are being radicalized into right wing authoritarian movements even in 2023... It has deep narrative staying power about the cycles of trauma, abuse, self-hatred, grief, violence, losing yourself and then the power to decide for yourself to stop hurting people and try and find your own redemption, if you can... There's almost nothing like it in existence! It also has what has been argued to be the best guitar solo of all time (in Comfortably Numb).
David is the most emotional guitar player of all time because he grew up listening to jazz saxophone and you can only play one note at a time on the sax - he took that philosophy to his guitar so instead of shredding he knows how to use musical phrasing to build up to just single notes that rip your heart out...
Animals is of course excellent but I find myself wanting to only listen to Sheep and Dogs more than anything else. It's like a sandwich - best stuff in the middle.
Wish You Were Here is a more perfect album than Animals imo, and probably more accessible to new listeners. Welcome to the Machine is a bit intense but if people could handle the random sounds section of Dark Side of the Moon then I'm sure they can handle it 😂 Dark Side of the Moon is overrated to me tbh. Time is one of the best songs of all... Time... For sure though. Us and Them and Great Gig in the Sky are also amazing but the rest of the album is just me waiting to hear those songs tbh. The guitar solo from Time is also one of my most favourite guitar solos - David is just finding his signature sound on that album and Time is just the perfect encapsulation of Pink Floyd's overall genre which is nostalgic grief/longing for times you can't return to. Comfortably Numb is also very heavy on those themes but the raw emotion in that one is much stronger as it is about personal grief and loss and the anguish of finally accepting/succumbing/letting go of what you can't get back. That solo is basically the musical representation of the 5 stages of grief... That's my personal interpretation at least (have a listen and let me know what you think). Childhood's End is a precursor song to that theme before they find their signature sound, and nearly the entire album of Wish You Were Here is about that same theme but from the perspective of an outsider. Later on in The Division Bell and Sorrow carry on that theme, even though the post-breakup stuff is less thematically coherent.
Totally agree with you that the fewer cars the better, and using cars and trucks as specialty tools.
Have you seen the YouTube channel NotJustBikes? His entire channel is a gold mine for this kind of stuff. He actually has a video on Canada's only car-free community (Toronto Islands) and there is a very small number of transport vehicles available. Otherwise people just use those cart bike attachments for moving stuff around. The roads were built decades ago and basically have never need to be replaced because the bikes are too light to damage asphalt...
I'm studying in a medical profession where I frequently attend to people in their homes, sometimes urgently (midwife in Canada). We are all required to have private cars to drive to people's houses and meet people at the hospital for births and assessments.
If the medical system would give me a free car to use for my profession that would be cool... But I'd also have to use it just like a private car because you can get called to a birth while grocery shopping since you're on-call 24/7 as a primary care provider.
Home care does actually take others off the road which is a fun bonus though. The first week of birth and postpartum assessments taking place in the home saves clients about 8 car rides which is great because riding in a car or driving during labour is no bueno and postpartum riding sucks. After a C-section you can't drive either. Even in a hospital delivery postpartum care occurs in the home which people find an absolutely fantastic experience. Those appointments aren't emergencies but there can be emergencies...
I know of one bike midwife. But that's extremely rare and all students must drive.
Yeah, makes sense. I've had a variety of errors, wasn't sure if the server was down and I should come back later or if something else was going on that I needed to figure out.
I think that begging the mods for refederation will be a common occurrence in the newly emerging fediverse, but I think we'll all just have to get used to the idea that the fediverse is about voluntary communities and you'll have to forge your own path using multiple accounts/etc. The entire point of defederation is that Beehaw doesn't want certain communities or people with certain viewpoints congregating here - that's the choice of this community and the use of multiple accounts does get around that but it's just what will have to be done if you want to be someone associated with defederated communities.