Looking at this with adult eyes, no I don’t think you’re a jerk. It sounds like you’re trying help him see the reality of the situation before it causes him any undue emotional (or financial) suffering. It’s not, however, very hard to imagine how from his point of view he might feel like you’re being jerk, or maybe a bit hypocritical.

Is there any way you can get him playing with kids who are good enough to go pro? If he can start playing against people who genuinely have the goods, it’s probably not going to take him very long to figure out for himself whether he can keep up or not. And that way you don’t have to set yourself up as the bad guy as much, and you can play a more supportive role and be there to guide him to an alternative path once he gets sick of the other kids running circles around him. At least that’s how it worked for the couple of kids I knew growing up who were good enough at basketball or American football that they really thought they could go pro. It was playing against people who were the real deal that made them realize they didn’t have the shot they thought they did. It was pretty obvious that these other kids had something extra, and were playing on a level my friends felt they were probably never going to reach.

Legend has it they ain’t nothin’ to fuck with.

The story behind this band is actually pretty crazy. The Shaggs were sisters who grew up in a house where there really wasn’t any music. Then their father was told by an astrologer (or some kind of fortune teller) that his daughters were going to be famous and influential musicians, and he got completely obsessed with the idea. He bought them all instruments and forced them to play (but for some reason didn’t bother to spring for actual music lessons). If I’m remembering correctly, he even pulled them out of school at some point so they could focus on music full-time.

So basically these sisters were basically locked in a basement and forced to invent the concept of music from scratch. It’s like some crazy thing an anthropologist would study.

The only reason we still know about them is because people (not the least of which being guys like Kurt Cobain and Jello Biafra) found the record in thrift stores and bargain bins and began passing copies around, and it became kind of an underground obsession among punk, indie, and experimental musicians. So they did actually end up being famous and influential in a way, but not in the way that makes anybody rich, which is probably what the dad was hoping for.

Not even a year. It’s only his first fiscal quarter.

If it’s a person at all, and not one of those shit-disturber bots that get unleashed on non-MAGA spaces to start arguments over innocuous things and just generally sour the vibe. BlueSky was infested with them last month. They tend to swarm around celebrities, and posts about celebrities. Either way, a quick glance at their post history shows they’re only here to start shit with people.

There’s going to be a lot of that. I live in the Southwest, and the number of Trump-voting Latinos is shockingly high. There are a lot of conservative Latinos who straight up consider themselves to be white. Gonna be a real shock for them when it finally sinks in what the rest of their party thinks about that.

I got a 14" Novafoam mattress a couple years ago. It’s probably a really comfortable mattress if you don’t have back problems. I do have back problems though, and I had to return it after a few days because it was making them worse.

That’s the nice thing about Costco though, returns are super easy if you end up not liking it.

There needs to be a worker’s party. It doesn’t have to be the Democrats.

That there are only going to be two viable parties in this country is a mathematical inevitability of how our voting system works, but there’s no reason why the Democrats have to remain one of those parties. If what they’re doing right now is the best they’ve got then they shouldn’t be difficult to replace. A damp sandwich could do a better job.

I saw a cooking or travel show that featured the guy who grows those a while back. Apparently they taste absolutely amazing, but I can’t imagine justifying spending that much money on a strawberry.

Systematically driving down the wages of the people you expect to catch a bullet for you by gig-ifying their industry seems like a pretty terrible idea if you’re someone who depends on armed security for your continued existence.

I guess I’ll go make some popcorn.

Do you think when he went to the barber he specifically asked to look like a ventriloquist dummy who is also a sex criminal, or was this just the best he could do?

Not off the top of my head, but the paint color is called “TV Yellow.”

I think a big problem is a lot of the explainers for new users, at least the ones that were around back when I first joined Mastodon, were or are absolute dog shit. They were all existential explanations rather than practical ones. I was trying to figure out which instance to join, and why one might be better for me than another, and every explainer I saw was basically a variation on, “iT’s JuSt LikE EmAiL. wHy Is tHaT hArD? sToP bEiNg So sTuPid, DuMmY.” None of them really explained the user experience, and how different instances might affect it, let alone the existence of the local and global feeds and how your instance choice affects those. It was like asking someone how to use chopsticks and them telling you, “It’s easy. Just put food in your mouth with them. Works just like a fork.”

Technically true, but it omits some pretty crucial information.

Once you’re into it and have the lay of the land, it seems really simple in retrospect. But if you’re coming in cold with no idea how any of it works, and the only help you get is some dickhead shouting, “EmAiL! iT’s LiKe EmAiL!” then the learning curve seems a lot steeper than it actually is.

Those old black and white television cameras had a lot of limitations. For instance, things that were white and glossy would cause an extra-bright flare effect that would leave trails across the screen whenever it moved, and it was even worse on video. Guitar companies had to invent a brand new shade of yellow for musicians who performed on TV that still looked white on camera, but didn’t light up like a road flare under the studio lights.

Which is a long way of saying that when it comes to those old cameras I would expect the light from a blowtorch to cause some weird artifacts.

Got suspended in 8th grade for “smoking on school grounds” because I stood outside the front door finishing my fruit snacks before I walked into the school (we weren’t supposed to have snacks outside designated food areas). Some rocket scientist of a teacher saw me standing by the door with my hand occasionally going up to my mouth (I think it may have been cold enough outside to make my breath steam) and said, “AHA! This child is smoking!”

She literally grabbed me by my collar and dragged me to the assistant principal’s office. Multiple other kids, and an adult who must have been someone’s mom, told her I wasn’t smoking, but she wasn’t having any of it. And the assistant principal just believed her out of hand. Wouldn’t even let me finish a sentence to say something in my own defense.

They had the security guard escort me off school grounds. And I just stood there for a while looking back at the school, still holding my fruit snacks, trying to figure out wtf just happened.

I pretty much checked out mentally after that. That kind of stuff ended up being pretty much par for the course. I hung out with the metal/punk/skater/stoner/goth crowd, and that was some kind of unforgivable sin at that school. My friends and I were constantly being singled out for minor or imagined infractions and never believed or given the benefit of the doubt. I went from a 3.8 gpa to something like 0.6 that year. I’d have to sit through all these meetings about how I was “so smart,” and how “I could go so far if only I would apply myself.” And I’d straight up tell them what was going on, and they’d be like, “It’s just a mystery why you won’t apply yourself.”

It’s been like 30 years and I’m still mad about that shit.

Much like the word “woke,” MAGA conservatives have stripped DEI of its original meaning. As conservatives use it now it’s basically just a socially acceptable stand-in for the N-word (or the F-word, depending on context). Like just a couple of days ago I was at a burrito place and the guy a couple spots ahead of me in line said, “This DEI cashier better not fuck up my order again.” It was very clear what he meant was, “This N-word better not piss me off.”

Any time you hear conservatives say “woke” or “DEI,” you can almost always mentally swap it with the N-word or the F-word and what they’re saying will make a lot more sense.

What A Life by The Meffs was a good one. Lotta good stuff happening in the UK punk scene right now. Australia too.

CFPB = Consumer Finance Protection Bureau

It’s not plagiarism. The songs themselves are obviously completely different. Making an engine noise was one in a pretty standard set of whammy bar tricks that was pretty ubiquitous when guitars with Floyd Rose tremolo systems became popular in the 1980s. So many people discovered this trick independent of each other that nobody can credibly claim to have invented it. It was so common at the time as to be generic and kind of hacky.

In other words, it’s a piece of guitar technique and not an element that can be copyrighted. Which is good because music would become insufferably boring very quickly if musicians weren’t allowed to learn and iterate on each other’s technique.

Yeah, black weirdly tends to be easier to see in the dark than some other colors. It often ends up looking darker than the surrounding darkness. Slightly lighter colors like brown and gray don’t contrast with the background as much and are much harder to pick out in the dark. People who have owned a black dog and a brown dog at the same time will have probably noticed that effect. At least that’s where I noticed it.