I would prefer Sriracha (shout-out to Underwood Ranch specifically) but to each their own.

I think he does some intentional lying, and he says false shit believing that it is true, but most of what he says is bullshit. And I mean bullshit in the sense that he neither knows nor cares whether it’s a true statement, he just knows that it’s helpful to his goals in the moment, therefore he says it. When he talks about over 20M illegal immigrants entering this year, it’s impossible for him to know a number on that since it obviously isn’t tracked, but I’m sure that it doesn’t matter what the actual number is at all. He just pulls out a big number to scare racist people into getting upset enough to come and vote for the guy who says that it needs to stop, which is him. He doesn’t care that it’s not an accurate number, and because he doesn’t know the real number for sure then it’s impossible to prove that he knows that it’s not actually that number and therefore not a certain lie per se. He gets all of the benefit of lying without any of the attached accountability. He bullshits.

Sure. Here’s a song a friend wrote with me and then I recorded in Audacity. I didn’t realize just how very Andrew Bird it is until much later lol.

Pro-Creation

Genuinely giggling to myself over the pronunciation as spuh-NEE-shohs

TL;DR: it’s been the hardest and worst influence in my mental health at pretty much every point in my life.

We moved a lot as a kid and my parents fought a lot. Why? Because my dad was in the army because there just wasn’t economic opportunity otherwise. I still have some psychological scarring regarding food security, and I’ll have something akin to a panic attack if I eat something that tastes anything like Berry Berry Kix because we bought like a pallet of it when it was on sale one time and it’s all I had for months.

When I graduated high school in 2007, I didn’t attend the ceremony. Why? Because I needed to work. I didn’t want to be economically trapped, so I worked as much as I could so I could pay for community college and then transfer credits to a 4 year school and hopefully get some kind of scholarship based on my good grades. While in community college, that plan changed drastically because of the 2008 recession. I managed to complete my 2 year degree though, thankfully.

In 2013, my mom died. She was 51, almost 52. She was very sick in a country that doesn’t take care of the health of its people. She drank heavily from the stress of money being tight, and she smoked since a very early age, so I can’t squarely blame capitalism entirely for her early death, but doctors weren’t interested in helping somebody who was already so far gone that her death would hurt their statistics. In any case, this launched a deep depression in which I stopped finding joy in any sense of artistic expression or productivity for a long while. I stopped caring so much about whether I was alive.

Soon afterwards, while I was already at a low point, I had a boss that was extremely abusive. I learned what gaslighting is. Nothing I ever did was ever worth an attaboy, but not getting screamed at became the reward I would seek. Basically Whiplash, but with chefs instead of musicians. My employment prospects were extremely limited, so I was stuck there. I strongly considered escaping it in the only way I had control over it all, but thankfully opted for a hail mary risk that happened to pay off; I quit and took a temp job scrubbing toilets.

It’s a long story, but that led step by step to my current job operating a combined cycle power plant at about $130k/year. I met a lovely woman in July 2016, married her in September 2020 (despite the covid of it all), and we just bought our first house yesterday. Despite my eventual successes in life, I still bash this economic system because I knew that ultimately I just got really lucky. But this isn’t the ending. I wouldn’t be surprised if housing crashes again at some point and it turns out that we shouldn’t have bought. Idk, we’re just doing our best here.

I could talk for hours about how profit motivations and economic struggles caused people to clamor for returning to school and work at the peak of the pandemic, which caused a million preventable deaths, but that barely moves the needle in terms of my personal mental health. I was an “essential” worker, which really just means “expendable” but I had already come to terms with that by then. It would be more appropriate to talk about how the music industry changes have impacted my interest in making music since I know it’s astronomical that it could ever even be a hobby that pays for itself, let alone make a little extra through gigs.

I hear from people when I cook or play music or engage in other hobbies and interests that I should (paraphrasing here) find a way to monetize that. These things are my escape from capitalist hellfire. They are the pressure relief valve. Why in the fuck would I invite that vampire into my safe haven? I’d much rather give my music away or give away cooking tips. I don’t want to cater your fucking wedding. I don’t want to track how many listens my mediocre music might get on Spotify. I just want to create.

I make money at work and I make happy at home.

Same. That kinda seems like it would lead to fewer people bothering to want to be a documented immigrant, right? Which, phrased a little differently, kinda incentivizes people to come in illegally or at least remain undocumented once here since that wouldn’t be a barrier to them owning a home? The right would’ve had a fucking field day if he’d signed that. They froth over straws in milkshakes; he doesn’t need to draw valid criticisms via bad policy two months before this election.

But they also don’t want to pay taxes or see any slowdowns due to repairs or upgrades. The same energy as a child wishing every day were Christmas.

Ugly Sonic

I literally knew a girl who said this. She truly had no idea that they were the same thing, but rattled on about wanting it gone while benefiting from it.

I also knew an older woman who hated Obama and said “he’s arrogant for naming that after himself.” She didn’t believe me that her favorite channel was the one who named it after him unofficially and that its official name was ACA.

They truly just repeat bullshit until it sticks, and it usually works on the people who don’t bother to diversify their information sources. It’s so goddamn frustrating.

lol k

Cool. You are accepting my statement that what you are doing and saying is pushing to help the more authoritarian option to win, and your complaint is that I’m not nice about disagreeing with you. I would happily disagree with a general conservative, but you are posing as a supposed leftist who is arguing in good faith on behalf of workers. But you’re not. You’re full of shit, you’re aware of it, and you’re admitting to attempting to bamboozle unsuspecting people, and you’re upset that I don’t have kind words in calling you out for it. I don’t feel the need to be tolerant of the intolerant, and your entire philosophy seems to be all about muddying the waters to help a fascist into power to limit the freedoms of my friends, my family, and people I don’t know but care about nonetheless. So kindly fuck right off.

And your solution to this is to do and say things that push for the more authoritarian option to win. You’re either a liar or a fucking moron, so which is it?

more fascism than we already have

I guess you couldn’t read it the first two times.

Understood. You just want more fascism than we already have. Thank you for clarifying.

I will proudly support third parties

You could’ve just stopped there. This is all anybody needs to see to know that nobody should listen to you. In our shitty first past the post system, all this does is pull frustrated people away from the mostly reasonable but imperfect choice. You’re either clueless or intentionally attempting to dissuade people from voting for democrats in order to help trump to win. In this system, a third party candidate cannot fucking win. There is no actual “blue maga” for you to whine about. Stop spreading bullshit. I’m glad your username is so stupid that it’s easy to see on its face that your account’s entire existence is predicated on sowing division or you might actually have a chance at convincing some people. Unfortunately for you, most of the people on lemmy are smarter than the people on reddit. If you actually cared about defending American democracy, you’d shut the fuck up instead of saying this dumbass bullshit that serves only to dismantle what crumbs of democracy we have left, whether your sabotaging words are intentional or not. If you keep posting this braindead shit, then I’ll know for sure that you just want more fascism than we already have. So for the love of all that you are at least claiming to hold dear, shut the entire fuck up about this. Yes, capitalism bad, so actually maybe let’s not hand the country over to donald fucking trump, famous asshole criminal capitalist.

And he can fucking keep him.

Dirty production initiates based on demand. So-called “peaker plants” start up under high demand when cost per megawatt rises. They typically start early in the day as most people wake up and cook breakfast and get ready for work and then shut down after people get home and wind down for bed. More extreme versions of this only fire up for more extreme weather events or when other plants trip offline unexpectedly. If demand is normalized, so too is production, which would phase out dirtier power production like coal and natural gas. As an operator at a combined cycle natural gas power plant, this would force me to find a new job. Which is fine by me. The system needs to be changed to be fixed, even if it causes a little pain for me.

Think of the grid as a pressurized system. To maintain consistent pressure, demand and supply need to be approximately equivalent. When use is high, the pressure drops so demand goes up to maintain that pressure, so prices per megawatt rise to incentivize power plants to step on the gas pedal to produce more. When use drops off, that production needs to reduce to prevent over pressurization of the grid. With battery storage, that pressure swing diminishes. It’s effectively a pressure regulator.

Additionally, the home power management system via UPS and inverters does exactly what you’re saying in terms of using it when it’s available. At times of high demand and high cost and low supply, your home could seamlessly switch over to your home battery supply for your energy needs to remove strain on the grid, and this would be attractive to set up through things like proposed tax credits and generally reducing your home energy bill. So at 3pm in an August heat wave, your AC could be battery powered from when you charged while you slept the night before. And you’ll recharge tonight when everybody’s AC has switched off for the most part. All this to say: you’re absolutely right and we already agree, but also we can use emerging tech and legislation to vastly expedite this badly-needed transition.

there’s not enough lithium

I am hopeful that developments in sodium ion battery tech will yield different strategies. The weight and energy densities vs cost and abundance mean that it makes more sense (at this time at least) to reserve lithium ion battery tech for more mobile use cases like handheld devices and EVs, but use sodium ion battery tech for things like grid storage or home energy management solutions. I dream of a day in the next decade or two in which virtually nobody bothers to have a generator for emergency home power and instead opts for a UPS with inverters and chargers hooked up to a home battery, allowing not only emergency power, but a “smart” system to power the home via battery during high grid demand and charge during low demand, normalizing grid supply curves and making power bills cheaper for all. The path to this starts with big scale early adopters like hotels and apartment buildings, which could easily supplement energy needs through solar panels on their large roofs at the same time.

For all the enshittification we’re seeing across most industries, I am cautiously optimistic that we might be living at the edge of an energy revolution. We may see fucking huge fundamental changes to our energy infrastructure within our lifetimes, and that’s one of the few things I’m excited about for the near future. It’s unfortunate that it’s taking a crisis to force these changes, but it would be a great pivot nonetheless.

RDR2 is very much not for everybody. It is intentionally tedious. It’s the kind of game you sit down and play for at least 2-3 hours every time you play it because that’s just how long it takes to get anything done. You aren’t fast traveling. You aren’t doing things instantaneously in a menu. Your time as a human being is an in-game resource. If you’re in the middle of nowhere and your horse dies, a ton of your shit was being carried in the saddle; you need to walk your ass to the nearest town lugging that saddle, vulnerable to wild animals and robbers. It’s a game about getting things done with your own two hands at the turn of the century when that was becoming much less valued. It’s a game about subsistence. You could have an easier, more prosperous life, but at what cost? At whose cost? It’s a game about nature and living in a natural world as a natural being, criticizing the transition into industrial exploitation of our fellow natural world and natural animals, including natural humans. It’s not a rootin’ tootin’ spaghetti western adventure; it’s an interactive classic American novel that can occasionally have funny or fun moments depending on your tastes. I fully understand that it’s wasn’t a game that you or millions of other people enjoyed, but I think it’s wholly unjust to label it a “bad” game for that. It did exactly what it set out to do, and evoked impactful emotion in sharing its message as intended for the people who wanted to be open to it. It’s successful art, but not all art is for you and not all art is for me. You may have gone in with the wrong expectations for it. I think it really sucks that every rockstar game since the early 2000s seems to be marketed as “GTA but ___” because the Red Dead games and LA Noire are very much not GTA. They’re 3rd person open worlds with similar engines, but that’s where the similarities end.

If you ever try it again, come in with a similar mindset to wanting to sit down and watch The Godfather, not The Avengers. There’s a lot to get out of it if you just focus on the story and the characters and the beautiful setting. Enjoy the honest work, and lament the shootouts and heists.

Nah, a pussy is happy to take its licks. This guy is ingrown scrotum hair. Causes pain in its vicinity and needs to be removed.