Quick Blog and Personal Update (That Ableism Post I Promised)

I can’t remember exactly how long ago it was, only that it feels like it was in 2016, when I promised a blog post about ableism and words like “stupid”. Of course, that never materialized, but I kept posting here about how it would be “soon”.

In one blog post I put up a tiny bit more recently (back in August of 2017), I talked about how I actually had a private deadline. No one will believe it, but that deadline is actually approaching. It’s Monday.

Yeah, I did honestly give myself that long.

Why?

[Read more…]

Streaming Service for Rare, Hard-to-Find, and Out of Print Music

I’ve already posted most of this on Facebook, so it will be familiar to some or all of y’all. But here I’m gonna expand a tad…

First, like I said on Facebook… I’ve been going over the take-down of What.CD, a private torrent site that, yes, shared official material (music, audiobooks, e-books, etc… no video, though).

Now, before I continue, I’m going to quote what I said on Facebook:

No, I don’t want to talk about how or why I know as much as I do about it, and yes, I agree that piracy is wrong, it’s right that piracy is illegal, people should support artists they love with money, and blah blah blah… we’re not having that conversation here.

And I’m gonna stress that here. We’re not here to discuss the relative morality of torrenting sites, question why I know as much as I do about the site, etc. So that’s the commenting policy. And that includes you, too, NSA, CIA, and FBI.

So anyways… I called What.CD the Library of Alexandria of music, and one of the reasons for that is because What.CD amassed an amazing collection of out of print, rare, hard to find, and/or prohibitively expensive music you basically couldn’t find anywhere else. It was incredible what could be found on What.CD, what new music you could find that you never heard before, and so on. And now that’s gone. Sure, torrent sites are like a massively exagerrated Hydra (shut down one site, a thousand more will pop up in its place), but it’s going to take a seriously long time to rebuild the What.CD Library.

But there could be another way, too… a… perhaps… more legal way… to rebuild a part of that library and make it accessible to everyone…

[Read more…]

Some Stream-of-Consciousness About Nazis

I haven’t posted about Nazi invasion and terrorist attack in Charlottesville because I’m feeling… well…

You can easily see my thoughts and things on Facebook, where I let loose a tad with the re-posts…

But anyways…

I don’t really have much to say, to be honest. I’m grappling with my feelings, because, at the moment, I have to deal with the fact that I genuinely feel fine seeing these Nazis killed… and I’m not okay with that. That does not make me comfortable or happy. It seems like a betrayal of my ethics, considering I’m against the death penalty.

But these are also Nazis. I don’t think there’s another group in modern history that can be considered as evil as Nazis. And now they’re here, in the United States, in 2017, marching in our streets and killing citizens.

[Read more…]

Quick Life Update

I apologize for the massively decreased posting here. I’m not leaving. A lot of things are in the way right now. So there’s a few reasons for my seeming silence here…

The first is the fact that the publicize feature is broken. In the past, when I published a post, it automatically got sent out to Facebook, Twitter, Tumblr, Google+, and even LinkedIn. Now I have to do all that manually. I don’t have a problem with this for APotW and GGS, but for more in-depth posts I want people to dig into, the extra step of manually putting these out on my social networks is kinda annoying.

The second is that things in my life have taken an… interesting… turn. I work at Teavana, and Starbucks has announced that it will be closing all Teavana’s by Spring 2018. Unless I’m working at Starbucks by that time (they will have to hire me as whatever their equivalent of a team lead is, or as an assistant manager, and at a higher hourly wage than what I’m making now, which is $10), I’ll post my thoughts on all of this, on Teavana, and stuff like that. I’d call it a “tell all”, but it’s just going to be my opinion, others will disagree, and, well…

Teavana is, perhaps, not the most popular place in the tea community, and there are good reasons for that. But there’s a lot of good at Teavana, as well, not the least of which is that it has actually served as a reliable stepping stone for people interested in giving up soda and coffee and the like and want to move beyond the bagged stuff… so it won’t all be bad.

As for the third thing…

[Read more…]

I’m Heading Back to New York

My flight back to New York is scheduled  for 3:30pm. Assuming it isn’t delayed, I’m probably boarding now. And that’s it…

The end of my awesome vacation with my brother in Georgia.

Back to…

New York, Teavana, parents… life…

I think maybe I should move back to Georgia…

Sorry for Today’s Silence

I kind of accidentally chose today as a day to do absolutely nothing. The increase in pollen has my allergies on high alert, which means I’ve been through two boxes of tissues already today, and I didn’t get to bed until 4:30am this morning, and had to be up at 9am. So I’m exhausted and sneezing.

Today’s my lazy day. I’ve got a recipe going up tomorrow, and I’ll get back to the regularly scheduled Astronomy Picture of the Week next Wednesday.

Spoilers!

Another post from my old blog, from November 28, 2013. I’m very curious if anyone else feels similarly… note that there’s some major editing (consisting of a section being moved up) to make this flow a bit better, as well as an addition.

I remember back when Batfans were getting amped up for The Dark Knight Rises. It was an exciting time. So many rumors and theories and tantalizing glimpses and…

The argument over spoilers gets very heated in pretty much every fandom ever. I think most forums dedicated to a TV show, a character, a book series, an author, a movie franchise, or a comic series has a subforum dedicated to spoilers, and often that forum will have at least one thread dedicated simply to compiling spoilers into one place for easy reference. These same forums will also contain a subforum dedicated to the same discussions about future work, but where spoilers are simply not allowed. And furthermore, even in a spoiler subforum, you still have to provide huge warnings and find a way to hide the spoilers so that people who may want to be surprised don’t have to read those spoilers.

Now, this seems like a great compromise where everyone gets what they want, right? People who enjoy having spoilers get them, and people who hate spoilers are free to avoid them.

This seems perfectly reasonable, doesn’t it?

[Read more…]

You’re Selfish!

In a desire to have a discussion that isn’t about infuriating current events, I decided to resurrect this post from my old blog. I hope you’ll join the discussion.

So I’ve been thinking about this a lot and I wanted to put it to all of you, awesome readers, to discuss.

Is “selfish” really an objective measure, or is it, as I believe, “in the eye of the beholder”?

Consider the following fictional scenario:

[Read more…]

Wow…

Looking back at my blog recently, it is literally just me sharing stories of how terrible the current administration is, interspersed with Self Care posts.

I’m basically just posting angry, while attempting to lighten things up with nonsense. I haven’t really even provided ideas for resisting.

In my defense, everything is horrible, and everyone already knows how to resist. You all already have the tools, and know the protocols. Call, write, sign petitions, protest, vote… these are the vanguards of resistance. Worse, it so far looks like resistance isn’t fucking working…

And sadly, it’s not going to get better. Because I get a daily round-up of everything that happened that day in Agent Orange’s US-America (quick side-note: I first heard Agent Orange on TWiBPrime… I think Dara M Wilson was the one who I heard use it first; so it’s not mine), I blog about most of those. Every once in a rare while, there’s only one or two things, and they aren’t worth blogging about. But more often, the round-up is long, and there’s a lot I want to highlight.

[Read more…]