For me good country music is about growing up rural poor and making rebellious music with heart and soul. You can’t authentically make that music while hating people (be they women, brown, queer, trans, foreign etc.). You can’t make that music without being against cops and corporations like Nestle and United Health.

I had typed out an overly long rant about modern country losing its soul and just being pop music with a guitar twang veneer and classic country shit heels like David Allen Coe who still managed to make some memorable songs. Instead I’ll just list some contemporary artists that I’d put on the same playlist and call it country.

In no particular order: Jesse Welles, Sturgill Simpson, Lil Nas X, Robert Ellis, Father John Misty, Old Crow Medicine Show, Courtney Barnett, Kurt Vile, The Texas Gentlemen, etc. I’m sure others can suggest more and some will dispute some of these. I make no claims that any of these people won’t turn out to be bad guys later. After all, I do still kind of like that David Allen Coe song about being drunk the day his mom got out of prison and he went to pick her up in the rain, but before he could get to the station in his pickup truck she got run over by a damned old train.

My favorite is to stuff dates with blue cheese and bacon. So much sweet, rich, fatty, salty, and umami that it is almost unbearable. But, it’s also kind of like chewing on the toes of a fresh mummy if blue cheese isn’t your thing.

Those sun visors (and pretty much any soft case or sleeve type holder) absolutely devoured CDs. I had one too, everybody did, but I only let mine eat my burned CDs (mostly mixes I crafted with cross-fades and normalized levels using foobar2000 and a pirated copy of SoundForge) and carefully curated MP3-CDs. Scratched? Who cares, I burned multiple copies to pass around and trade with friends anyway.

This reads like an LLM with a large vocabulary failing to understand the actual context of the conversation. Lots of big words hurled with reckless abandon, lacking any real meaning and having little to do with the actual point.

You are wildly misinformed about how language works.

Pachelbel’s Canon is probably the most widely familiar forgotten song/melody that nearly everyone alive today has probably heard in some form, most without ever realizing it.

migrants took over [an area] they took refuge on and made an apartheid for them.

That sounds familiar.

You seem to have almost completely missed the point of allegory and metaphor in TOS. “Time after humanity has dealt with” as you put it is just a literary device to soften the impact when the show was inevitably confronted or viewed by real racists. It was never a really view of the future. It was always a reflection of our present through the lens of futurism, a clever narrative framing device. That narrative framing device could not possibly remain unchangeable through multiple generations without loosing everything that made it work. Attempting to do so, i.e. keeping the storytelling framework completely unchanged and not adapting to new generations and new social dynamics, would have shown a lack of creativity and imagination.

The show was from a time when the U.S. thought they had beaten fascism (past tense, done, a part of the past) and would soon beat racism, classism, etc. From a time when imperialism was seen as a fundamentally good social force by most of the imperialist public. Today we (mostly) know better. We will probably never truly erase any of them. They are things we’ll have to remain vigilant for. A show today patronizing us with their perfected utopian society which remains VERY imperialist without shining a light on that contradiction just would not work. A show lacking any interpersonal drama also would not work and it’s not even something that was really true for TOS, just a weird kink Roddenberry got into when producing TNG. That’s the context of the way Star Trek has changed and it matters.

When I call a fern (or wolf, crab, crow, whale, shark), at that level of syntactical broadly used common word I’m mostly talking about the phenotype, not the genotype. If someone was saying something about a specific fern, then we can argue against those romantic idea of deep time, a little. I mean, we’re probably all descendants of some ancient panspermia event anyway if you want to feel some connection to the ancient forgotten past.

Yes. I’m assuming your just some dude and not a telecom with teams of lawyers.

That’s not what pedantry means.

The effects of subatomic particles, even high speed ones, are apparent even if you are unaware of the cause.

No, I didn’t. We can perceive electrons in various ways.

Explain to us how we don’t interact with electrons in everyday life.

Autocorrect seems to have gotten noticably worse for me in recent years. I regularly find that the entirely correct words which I type out get changed to something completely different because the autocorrect decided that I couldn’t possibly mean that word. It regularly helpfully replaces entire words after I hit space and have moved on to the next. By that time, I’m usually focused on the next word, so slip-ups that I almost never make at a dumb keyboard (like its vs. it’s, there vs. their, your vs. you’re, or were vs. where vs. wear) happen with shocking regularity unless I proofread the entire comment. As a perfect example, I had to proofread and fix multiple instances of such while typing those examples.

Despectacled.

Nancy Reagan just laughs at this take.

Reading on an ebook reader makes it really easy for me to highlight sections and annotate them. It can be fun to note my various suspicions about the killer as I read an Agatha Christie for example, see if and how early I can guess the killer. Getting those notes back out of my ebook reader and into a format I can preserve has been a bit of a challenge.

Absorbent towels. I guess if you’d always used fabric softener, you’d never know how much more effective towels are when they haven’t been abused by fabric softener or drier sheets.

I added the sound of a disconnected land line to the beginning, a short pause, and then my voicemail message. Has done a pretty decent job of weeding out spam, scams, and impatient idiots.

Now. That’s pretty much the situation now. If you don’t believe me, try and completely remove Edge and Copilot from an updated Windows 11.