"Ah, but they choose to act on it! You see, my old preacher struggled with gay thoughts all the time because of Satan. He told us so nearly every Sunday. But did he act on them? No! He was straight, just as god intended.

So those people having gay thoughts are CHOOSING to be gay when they could pray and get a wife and have children like the lord said."

-Some dipshit I know

5g is fine (not great, but fine) on my phone until I get millimeter wave. The mw in the HEB parking lot down the street is amazing. If I get into the city proper it’s a crapshoot if I am able to get on the Internet.

I know it’s fairly pervasive everywhere, but I’m in Houston. Most of the restaurants here would have to go out of business.

often are looking for fleeting pleasures to mask trauma or other mental health challenges.

I thought I told you to stop reading my journal.

Oh, they’re trying to project authenticity?!? Have they tried, you know, being authentic?

I love curse words, they’re half my vocabulary. That won’t turn me off. But strong language alone will not move the fucking needle. You’ve got to meet people where they are and really give a shit, not just try stunts.

Sword and pistol by my side, baby.

Oh, he gets butt nekkid.

What is a juggalo?

I would bet good money that when we’re closer to November and one of them drops out we’ll see a bunch of Republican money pouring into the campaign of whichever one is left. They want to split the Dem vote and install a Republican. Failing that, they prefer to work with an establishment Democrat than someone who can prove there’s a better way.

Combining flour, water, and an egg isn’t difficult. If you told me that was the second thing that happened after figuring out how to make flour I’d believe it. Like flat bread, proto-pasta, leavened bread in that order makes the most sense to me.

This is exactly it. I’m glad you could explain it better than I could. I still don’t understand it necessarily, but I don’t understand a lot of what I lived so I’ll survive.

I mean I really only solved it by having accounts I don’t look at (emergency fund, retirement), accounts I use regularly (bill pay, “entertainment”) and an accountant who helped me set it up so I wasn’t spending every dime. It can be done by yourself but I wasn’t psychologically prepared. I’m also the only employee of my LLC so there’s a business account but it’s just taxes, my salary, and enough for a new computer every few years. That’s not my account and I never personally touch it.

I was planning on a good afternoon of crying anyway.

Struggling taught me that if I don’t use my money right now it’ll be gone.

And I’m not saying that to contradict you. It’s funny how different people learn different lessons from the same experience. I grew up dirt poor. If I didn’t spend my money as a kid it might be called upon. And that’s the lesson I took for years. I didn’t really start saving seriously until I was closing in on 40. I have money in retirement now (and will likely retire early), but it’s because I did without for a few years trying to play catch up while making good money. It’s not a tactic I recommend. If I had started it back when I was 18 I could be really close to retirement right now.

Depends on the day. Between a few hours and a few days. If I’ve got something due at work later in the day, hours. If I have no hard deliverables for a few weeks then one of the bars where I’m a regular and play music would be the first to figure it out. All the bartenders and sound guys know how to get in touch with me.

Mom would figure it out in a month or so.

I drop off the earth pretty frequently but I always keep my gig and work commitments or call if I can’t. So it depends on my next commitment, which happens pretty much weekly.

I saw one where someone said something like “You’re making yourself look like what the crazy left says about you!”

Here’s my unmedicated and completely idiotic take.

I’m glad he’s doing these tests, but it’s pretty obvious in this case. The lyrics are very obviously AI generated, first of all. The overuse of certain words (smoke, boots, multiple song titles with the word dust, shakes, whispers, echos) are a strong indicator. Not every song using those is AI generated, obviously. But it’s like they said “see what words an LLM overuses when trying to write songs and put as many of them in a verse as possible”.

Ok, so maybe they just use it as a songwriting tool because they have no lyrics but they’re great musicians and want to put something out. Even without splitting stems most of it currently feels unnatural. But he makes a great point. Just listening without splitting there’s weird reverb. There are strange vocal artifacts. The guitar transients don’t make sense (which is part of why his splitter tool couldn’t split things properly). For a while everything sounded underwater and there are still traces of that. I see they moved past the country voice that was all over the place for a while. There’s a “shimmer” (I wish I had a better word to describe it) that sounds wrong.

It sounds like they took a human track and put every free plug-in they could find on it and dialed it up past the point of good taste. There’s no dynamic range. There’s too much (or just flat out wrong) reverb. There’s digital artifacts. A lot of that doesn’t matter if you’re listening on a Bluetooth speaker because you’ll never hear it. Vehicle systems hype and mask certain frequencies and may not reveal it. But if you listen on any halfway decent system it’s currently pretty obvious.

The real question: will enough people care? I do. Even if they could perfectly replicate session musicians and if they didn’t sing about whispering to your boots and shadows echoing through the dust but were able to really write in the style of my favorite artists I would care. Because the people making new music, trying new things, and pushing boundaries wouldn’t get the funding. So we would eventually end up with homogenized rehashes of what currently exists. If this had happened when all we had was orchestral music we’d all just be listening to AI rearranging that instead of having rap, rock, blues, metal, EDM, country, and all the other genres and their endless subgenres. We’ll never get to moon stank or whatever the next big iteration of music is. And that’s a loss for humanity because art is important.

But did you do it again at half past 2?

In Trump’s letter to the Persians, chapter 14 verse 88.

Many credit cards also offer virtual cards for this exact reason.

I’m thinking that’s what he’s doing here. He’s threatening to fracture the furthest right to get what he wants and he’ll spend a pile to do it. I’m convinced this is his play to buy the Republican party.