I’ve made it 82% of the way through this series. Twice. Still my favorite fantasy of all time. One day I will finish.

It depends on the sock, but if you’re rolling the tops of each pair together they’re easier to stack if you alternate between folded end away and folded end towards you. Then swap the pattern for additional layers.

Or just skip folding, throw them all into a small basket and cast off the shackles of social norms! Embrace mismatching your socks!

You haven’t failed until you quit.

Failure is not an option.

Gotta show her I can be stable before she’s gone.

www.metal-archives.com, search by genre, list by release date. Disclaimer; must love metal.

Please, detail the differences you see between redacting and doctoring.

I think you have a misguided sense of what empathy entails. Empathy is the ability to recognize another person’s feelings and to understand how their life circumstances and experiences influence those feelings. Acting out of empathy is selfless, is motivated by a desire to help someone else. Empathy is not self-preservation or self-soothing, though there is nothing inherently wrong with preservation or soothing as motivations.

Your first example is an anxious response rooted in past trauma; you are hyperaware of the other person’s feelings, yes, but you aren’t taking their perspective into account. You’re still in your own shoes (albeit children’s shoes) and exhibiting a trained response to other’s emotions designed to de-escalate a situation you read as dangerous. That is an act of self-preservation and is motivated by a desire to redirect and defuse emotions you feel threatened by, to ensure your own safety.I don’t fault nor judge you or anyone for acting this way but those actions do not stem from empathy.

I’m not entirely sure how to interpret ‘empathy-inspired unhappiness.’ I think I’m familiar with the concept you’re aiming for; I feel a sense of injustice and unhappiness when seeing people who have been failed by society, with homeless people and their children as the most apparent example. The action I have taken to improve the lives of those who have fallen between the cracks that I perceive as motivated by empathy has been to share food with them. I don’t have much money myself and I recognize that money (in some cases) may be used to enable behaviors that are ultimately damaging to the individual, but everyone needs to eat.

The examples you gave, however, read as reactions designed to assuage personal guilt (PETA) and fear (moral panic), not as responses driven by an understanding of others feelings and history. That leads into ‘action to [self-]soothe’ - this is a selfishly motivated reaction as well. Coercion and manipulation are inherently self-serving tactics of influencing the emotions of others as well. Empathetic actions stem from desire to improve another person’s circumstances, not from a need to feel better about yourself. The mother buying her TV back from the pawn shop is a little closer to the mark, I think. While her motivations come from a place of love, however, her actions are misguided and ultimately only serve to mitigate conflict rather than improve her son’s real circumstances. The addict’s mother, the PETA fanatic, even the person reacting to a perceived fraying of morality are not (necessarily) devoid of empathy but their actions are not motivated by empathy, either. Self-preservation is instinctual, a reaction engrained by millenia of evolution and is not an inherently bad or negative emotion. Empathy requires overcoming that instinct in order to act in a way that improves the circumstances of other people.

You are not bad for trying to de-escalate or appease those around you; those reactions were taught and reinforced by people who were utterly unconcerned with anyone’s well-being but their own. Their actions lacked consideration for their victim’s feelings or the circumstances leading their victims to those feelings. Their actions were borne entirely from a selfish desire to get ahead at the expense of those around them.

Empathy tends to require some form of self-sacrifice and always requires you to (briefly) hold someone else’s interests above your own. Empathy is acting to improve someone else’s life. I refuse to believe that actions motivated by a desire to actually help those around us, even and especially at the expense of our own comfort, is toxic. Those proclaiming the toxicity of empathy have likely never experienced actual selfless empathy and those who shout the loudest against it almost always have self-interest as their core motivation.

This won’t stop with migrants. I’m in that database with a long record of treatment for ADHD and a shorter record of treatment for autism. RFK is gonna send me to camp to learn how to concentrate sooner or later.

Jeffrey Epstein (Jewish)

Why does this matter?

JFK’s head just…did that.

Are you familiar with Edward 40-Hands?

Participants have a 40oz of Steel Reserve (or similar) duct taped to each hand. You may not remove the bottles until both are empty. The tradition is to watch old kung fu movies but this movie is absolutely acceptable. I advise wearing gym shorts; you WILL need to piss before you are done.

Cloudberg is a she! You are absolutely correct that she is an excellent subject matter expert though.

Hey dude, I do appreciate the thorough and thoughtful response. I respect where you’re coming from and largely agree with most of what you’ve said, but I think a key point where we differ lies in our respective interpretations of homo homini lupus.

I’ll have to simmer on it for awhile myself to develop a more nuanced argument, but my first instinct is two-fold; there have always been wolves among us eager to rip our throats out, yet humanity continues to grow and progress despite (and frankly to spite) them. Man may be a wolf to man, but ape together strong and we are capable of overcoming the wolves in our midst.

Secondly, I think you’re letting the misanthropy in too deep. I think the injustices you and I and many others are witnessing, both in the music industry and the world at large, are the product of small men wielding outsized control, power and influence over those without. The music industry is a prime example of capital alienating the worker from their labor and that, I think, is the true root of the issues informing your disillusionment. I won’t go too deep down the anti-capitalism rabbit hole (this time) but I will pose to you a question; who benefits more from generative AI, the wolves or the apes?

As I said, I’ve got more thoughts to distill into coherency but that must needs happen in the light of day, not the grey of dawn.

That said, I’m absolutely capable of coherency when it comes to discussing heavy avant-garde and especially saxophone. Frankly you are likely the only person I’ve interacted with who is capable of appreciating this story;

I emailed Jørgen about…15 years ago at this point? After Ihsahn released After but likely before/around Blackjazz dropping. I was playing tenor sax in high school at the time and wanted to know if he’d transcribed any of his work on After. He replied! And told me “Sorry I made it all up on the spot” which was disappointing but also made me respect him all the more. I was on the barrier for the Nightside Eclipse anniversary tour a few months ago when I recognized the man setting the synth up. You should’ve seen the doubletake he did when I called out his name! Emperor obviously slayed, but that little interaction with Jørgen is my favorite memory of that night. His work has inspired me for a long time and I absolutely agree that saxophone as well as other traditionally orchestral/symphonic instrumentation is capable of fitting into metal and other non-traditional genres. Ne Obliviscaris is another prime example with their violinist.

The level of deconstruction (shoutout Hevy Devy) required to dismantle a genre and piece it back together in new ways, with new instruments and concepts and to make it all coherent is human creativity at it’s finest. You mentioned the sax to voice transition in Pho Que as an example of emergent creativity, but I posit (and insist) that those pieces already existed within the realm of humanities creativity. Vocoders have been in use in some form or another for a very very long time (Cynic’s Focus being my personal favorite) and connecting the dots between them and saxophone isn’t much of a leap IMO.

True musical innovation, true creativity comes from connecting much more disparate dots in new ways and our current socioeconomic systems are more than happy to replace those qualities with generative AI trained on stolen human creativity in order to line their pockets further. You’re absolutely correct that the machines aren’t killing us; their owners, however, are more than happy to build orphan-crushing machines. The wolves are absolutely the problem and they are shoveling slop at us to make us slow, stupid, and fat. Don’t fall for it.

I see where you’re coming from and will concede JMSL’s ability to algorithmically create music.

I still maintain an artist using that or similar software (Guitar Pro, etc.) to translate their own ideas into a more manipulateable form for composing/practicing is fundamentally different from prompting a genAI that has been trained on ideas stolen from actual artists.

That said, music written via formula to cater to the lowest common denominator and generate the greatest possible monetary return is certainly closer to how genAI is/will be used, but the human element involved in writing, recording, and performing that music still distinguishes it from the sort of slop showing up on Spotify. AI generated works are an exemplar of derivative beyond that of even the blandest pop. The only human involved is the prompt writer at best; lyrics, melody, the recording itself are statistical approximations and entirely devoid of human creativity and that is an utter tragedy.

I’d much rather the record companies be replaced with systems that don’t alienate the artists from their labor and creativity. Embracing slop is playing into the execs hands and removes all artistic merit from the process.

Quick edit; Generated slop training on generated slop is already a problem and will get exponentially as more platforms are flooded with it. That will only alienate and divorce it even further from reality. It will only get worse.

I created the scores in JMSLscore

He created the score. If you equate using scoring software, MIDI and synths to creating slop with genAI we’re done here my dude.

And I took that personally

Jørgen is my spirit animal and Arctopus fucking rules but this take is hot as fuck my dude. Real people making real music with real instruments is art. Generative AI takes our art and makes emotionless, sloppy approximations out of it. If you despise cookiecutter pop now you’re going to be blown away by the absolute drivel that is already being pumped out thanks to genAI. The only reason the song you linked is ‘imaginative’ is because a real human already imagined it only to have it tossed into the slop pile for a computer to root through. Wouldn’t you prefer the ‘actual’ musicians making ‘actual’ music be recognized instead of being buried even further under exponentially growing pools of emotionless notes arranged into emotionless music? The musicians you and I both appreciate for their creativity and skill are having that skill and creativity stolen from them and you’re cool with it because pop doesn’t innovate? Because musicians with decades of knowledge of their instruments and a variety of styles want a paycheck? Record execs have leeched off actual creativity for a solid century now and you want to end them with an even more soulless product that still doesn’t pay artists? It might start with pop but if you think avante-garde, cerebral music will be ignored you’re mistaken.

I pursued an engineering BSc with the desire to emigrate but got distracted by the success of SpaceX and wooed by the challenge of Mars colonization. Then the US health insurance industry got in the way, I failed out and didn’t make it back until COVID. I graduated in 2022 with the first university degree in my family but was crippled by student loan debt and unable to save to leave. Was finally able to escape the rural Midwest a year ago and made it to a city with plenty of aerospace companies right as everyone stopped hiring. The cherry on top was the CEO of the company whose engineering feats initially inspired me throwing fascist salutes at inauguration.

Odd jobs and parental support have mostly kept me afloat, but they can’t help forever and I am a few months out from having to move back. The military industrial complex slid into my DMs recently with the offer of a fat paycheck and loaded resume in exchange for my ethics and morals. They even dangled a carrot of potential transfer to a NASA climate science project after the contract is up, but I’ll be surprised if it’s still funded by then. Frankly, I broke down when I realized the project I’d be working on.

I’ll hear back about the position early next week and I’m desperately hoping it’s a no and I’m back to the drawing board, but if it’s a yes I’ll be starting in a couple weeks. The BBB will very likely lead to losing the best, most effective and enabling healthcare I’ve received so far, and the salary would cover the insurance plan I’d need to maintain that care. Its a short contract and the salary would also enable me to save enough to emigrate but I already feel compromised. I’ve dreamed of contributing to space exploration and am instead being bullied into contributing to it’s militarization by a country I’ve opposed for the entirety of my adult life.

I’ve looked into joining the Ukrainian Foreign Legionnaires and would much rather contribute to European defense against Russia, but I honestly just want to pursue an MSc or even PhD and turn my brain towards mitigating and adapting to climate change. I’ve worked so fucking hard, dreamed so fucking big and bounced back from defeat time and time again for this? Fuck.

Tl;dr: Masters/PhD in Sweden or Germany but barring that I’ll work for any European defense company that will take an american immigrant.

Also, good luck sourcing salt water in Illinois.

Actually this year is “Nobody reaps what you’ve sown and it rots in the field” but that’s not as succinct.