Money and time. I was on the grind for 20 years and poor as shit for the great majority of my life. I didn’t have the time to go do all the things I do now.

So I’m the middle aged guy riding a motorcycle, playing in bands, drinking too much in public as long as I’m not driving, going to every concert of nearly every genre I can get to…you know, living. I’m not in crisis, I’m having the time of my life. I’d say the last 8ish years have been the absolute most fun of my life.

Football can be described in so many fun ways.

Years ago when my rep was cosponsoring some bill about how video games were killing children my buddy sent him a letter. I don’t remember the exact contents but it pointed out the rich history in Texas of folks wearing different colors violently defending their turf from rivals. Schools are training high schoolers to how to be in a gang as a sponsored activity every Friday evening.

I guess it does depend on what you call a circle. There are maybe a dozen of us in one. In the other there are probably three or four dozen. I don’t know everyone. I got invited because I like genre bending. We’ve got a private forum where we share things.

Even outside of that, there is a place that used to be less private but has now gone private (guess why) where we would do Sunday songwriters. We’d get a topic, record a little something before the next Sunday, then share. After sharing we’d critique, do mashups, genre hop, create genre crossovers, and generally just have fun with each other’s music.

I do not know how prevalent this is. I know of two private places, one of which is very small, and a third place that used to be public (with no expectation of anyone actually seeing it) but went private because of Suno.

There’s already mystery music out there. Small circles of folks putting things out that they don’t expect or want people outside the circle to hear. I’m a nobody and I’m part of two different groups who share music with each other, build on each other’s works, try genre mashups and new shit that may never get done again, many times because it’s a mess but sometimes just because it was a fun one time thing.

I think short term, yeah, I think so. Medium term and I think we’ll see a bunch of model collapse or people will get tired of the same story line repeatedly so it won’t be profitable (or won’t be regaining the money they thought they’d save on actual creative folks). Long term, I have no fucking clue if they’ll get around the fact that training AI on AI makes it even weirder.

I was mad when they got rid of our local Video Zone. That place had the best ridiculous horror movies. Blockbuster had only the most middle of the road bullshit.

I saw somewhere (ok, I probably didn’t imagine it) that they believed pigmentation was linked somehow to adrenaline production. But it wasn’t proven at the time.

An adult or a pup? That’s going to make a big difference. You’ll never be able to domesticate it in one or two generations, but depending on temperament and dedication you could probably have a coyote that allows you to live in proximity to it after a year if you spent all your time working with it. But never turn your back on it.

A pup would obviously be easier. But I still wouldn’t turn my back on it.

They worked on domesticating foxes in Russia for decades. Selective breeding for less aggression and fear. It’s funny, the domesticated ones start looking slightly more like dogs, with some even getting floppy ears and little curly tails. I assume it would be similar for coyotes.

Reaper, Studio One (although we’ll see what Fender does to it, we all remember the Gibson Cakewalk fiasco), and Bitwig are all native. Kind of depends on what your workflow is and what plugins you’re using. Yabridge is workable for a ton of stuff and not difficult.

I assumed they were sending them to APO addresses and that’s how the military knew.

That means there are at least 3 of us. My best friend was also a nuke and is also out here with us. He doesn’t comment much but you’ve probably run into him. I don’t know what he’s shared about himself so I’m not giving away his username.

ETN. Then I went on to get a BS in Nuclear Science and Engineering, but to be fair ACE let me skip a whole lot of shit. So my knowledge is a couple of decades old, slightly obscured by years of alcohol abuse (that didn’t start but kicked into high gear at NTPU Ballston Spa), and not focused on bombs. As I recall there’s a way to make a nuclear weapon that leaves everything a nuclear wasteland rather than just a bombed out husk that involves carbon or cobalt or something. But the best I could do is try to remember formulae while someone is getting bombed to hell by it.

I don’t play a lot of video games that involve that. But I did work on nuclear reactors in the Navy. To be fair that was a long time ago so I may not remember the specifics.

And to be clear I don’t condone the actions (I think it’s fucking abominable). They just don’t seem to be far fetched from my armchair.

Because from a bomb it’s not really radioactive that long from my understanding. Less than 2 years until an area is habitable again, but it would need to be monitored. Add to that the distance between the capital and where the oil reserves are is a few hundred km. Bomb the capital, get the surrender, steal the reserves. No need to send your people where the radiation is.

Depending on the position I could see any of them, but I can’t imagine why you’d need all three for one application. Social Media Director of Programming Middle Management?

About 15 years ago there was a company I did some work for (I was at an MSP at the time) who wanted to virtualize certain systems. Great. No problem. Except those systems needed to read floppies. Ok, I can pass it through. Except they wanted to get away from floppies. Great, let’s get you a newer system from a different vendor because this one went out of business when NT4 was still the big dog. Nope, too much money and the process would change.

So I had to reregister every DLL by hand because the installation didn’t work on Server 2008 r2. And every few months it would have to be done again because one of the guys thought himself a genius and kept messing up the janky ass workflow we put together to download info from thumb drives to a virtual floppy.

So plug in the drive, janky ass script creates a virtual floppy in drive A of the server, and manually (eventually I just wrote a script because I didn’t want to get that call on a Saturday) register each DLL every so often. And they’d rather pay the company I worked for several hundred dollars a month than pay a couple of grand one time that would have paid for itself in less than a year.

To add to your point, Xiaohongshu has plenty of people on it who aren’t Chinese as well. Loads. It’s not like they’re in cultural blackout.

I’m already a cowboy skeleton, just with a few extra layers.

Plaid is great in all seasons. I have many pearl snap plaid shirts ranging from thick and warm flannel to super thin beach flannel to just the cotton shirts.

Not always true (never long enough is true, I mean the other part). I can attach to an animal but what I don’t want is to be put in charge of its wellbeing. That’s a lot of work and responsibility. I hated every second of that growing up when we got animals and suddenly I was in charge of their care and feeding even though I never asked for a pet.

So I can love your dog/cat/rat/horse/whatever. You may find us both snoring on the couch together or heading out on adventures or I may bring it a treat/toy on its birthday. But I do not want to be the guy making sure it’s alive.