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Sweet Seals For You, Always

blake kathryn

Origami Around
Mike Driver
One Nice Bug Per Day

Kaledo Art

titsay
KIROKAZE

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let's talk about Bridgerton tea, my ask is open
will byers stan first human second
Aqua Utopia|海の底で記憶を紡ぐ
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Discoholic 🪩

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wallacepolsom
"I'm Dorothy Gale from Kansas"
Today's Document

#extradirty

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@brownaham
I think one of the funniest abortion stances I've heard was from my parents neighbor. He's a like, hard-core libertarian viking larper guy who is very tall and very fat and very bald.
He believes a fetus is human with a soul, but also its "basically attacking the woman's body" so if she wants to get rid of it, that's "basically self-defense". He compared it to shooting a home invader. So he supports abortion not as healthcare, but as killing a baby in self-defense
No IDs, but these tags got me in a huff:
So ok look. The point is not the flared leg by itself. These cannot be yoga pants. These are, and you have to understand this if you are too young to have worn them, BLUE JEANS. And this was the last years before all jeans were 70% spandex.
They were denim, and they weren't bell bottoms. They hung loose from the knee in a way that would make a wizard envious. We all walked around like we were wearing hakama. And they dragged on the ground. That was important. Ragged cuffs. If your jeans weren't so long that they had ratty cuffs, they were embarrassingly short.
And the thing about denim is that it's a twill weave and it's cotton. So not only does it hold a lot of water, it wicks. Walking around in these suckers on a wet day could get you wet to the knees even if you never stepped in a puddle.
Then you'd go inside and take off your shoes and try to avoid letting your freezing, wet, filthy pant legs touch your skin.
Yoga pants. Hmf.
people in cold climates would have a tide line of white marks around their knees (if they were normal height) in the winter.
From wicking up road salt.
The visceral memory of that time is something that never leaves you. Everyone's jeans were many inches higher in the back than the front because you kept stepping on the hem and ripping it off. Your lower legs were so very cold. Every new pair of jeans literally enveloped your entire foot, they were so so long re: leg-to-waist ratio. Walking on a rainy day was a legitimate workout. You have no idea.
My favorite part of spring is watching the birds with juveniles who are fully feathered and able to fly just follow their parents (usually the dad) around and relentlessly scream to have food put directly in their mouths. I think you can actually pick up that nut on the ground in front of you. It isn't that hard.
lesbian scifi is so easy. here’s a woman in cargo pants and a tank top on a spaceship. are you with me
maybe it’s not even cargo pants. maybe it’s coveralls rolled to + tied around the waist. maybe she even has fuckoff boots
I just want everyone to eat well and get old
every single one of us should have the chance to get old and bald and wrinkly and fat. I mean that sincerely
really underrated part of the LotR films is when gollum gets exposition lines. like can you imagine? you're travelling with the most fucked-up evil little murder greyhound creature imaginable and he lives in a cave and doesn't know about potatoes but from time to time you have to ask him about local geopolitics. and he answers you
She played bass on 10,000 songs, including the most-played track of the twentieth century. She was paid $55 per session. Her name never appeared on the albums.
Gold Star Studios, Los Angeles, 1964. A woman in a cardigan walks past the receptionist, a Fender Precision bass in her hand like a briefcase. She doesn’t sign autographs. She signs a timesheet.
Her name is Carol Kaye. In three hours, she will record what will become the most-played track of the twentieth century. She’ll pocket fifty-five dollars and head to another studio, on the other side of town, for the next session.
The record label will never put her name on the album.
Between 1957 and 1973, Carol Kaye took part in roughly 10,000 recording sessions. Not as the featured artist, not as a guest, but as a hired hand. She was part of an anonymous collective nicknamed The Wrecking Crew—elite studio musicians who actually played the instruments on your favorite records while the famous bands posed for promotional photos.
The work was relentless. Three albums before the day was over. Stale coffee in paper cups. No rehearsal. The charts arrived minutes before the tape rolled. If you couldn’t read a chart and nail the take in two tries, you didn’t get called for the next session.
Carol could do it on the first try.
She started playing guitar in grimy bars at fourteen because her family couldn’t pay the electric bill. Music wasn’t a romantic dream for her. It was survival. It was a job—factory work with better acoustics and lower pay.
But she was faster and sharper than almost everyone else. She corrected charts in pencil while the producer was still explaining what he wanted. In one session in 1968, she told a famous producer his arrangement sounded like a dying dog. She chose her own line. They kept her version.
That descending bass line that drives the Beach Boys’ “Wouldn’t It Be Nice”? Carol Kaye. The propulsive groove of “These Boots Are Made for Walkin’”? Carol Kaye. The acoustic-guitar intro to “La Bamba”? Carol Kaye. The iconic theme from Mission: Impossible? Carol Kaye.
She invented techniques on the spot, out of sheer necessity. When the bass sound was too muddy for AM radio, she stuck felt under the strings and used a hard pick instead of her fingers. The tone cut through the static like a blade. It became the sonic signature that defined 1960s pop.
Bassists spent years—decades—trying to crack the secret of the Beach Boys’ gear to get that sound. They were studying the wrong people. They should have been studying Carol.
She received no royalties. No residuals. No gold-record ceremony. No credit on the album sleeves. When “You’ve Lost That Lovin’ Feelin’” hit number one, Carol was already back in a studio cutting a soap jingle.
The biggest bands mimed her bass lines on TV variety shows. New York marketing departments decided a mom in classic clothes didn’t fit the rebellious-youth image they were selling. So they simply left her name off the album credits.
For thirty years, almost no one cared. The truth only began to surface in the late 1990s, when music researchers found the same union contract numbers on thousands of hit records. The very documents meant to preserve studio musicians’ anonymity betrayed them.
Think about it. Every time you heard “Good Vibrations,” “River Deep – Mountain High,” the Righteous Brothers, Nancy Sinatra, or Sonny and Cher, you were hearing Carol Kaye. She composed the soundtrack of an entire generation’s youth.
And yet the records still say nothing. She’s now over eighty. She wrote instructional books. She trained countless bassists. She is finally starting to be recognized by music historians who uncovered the truth about The Wrecking Crew.
But she never got what she deserved: her name on those albums. Credit for the music that defined an era. Recognition that those bass lines everyone associates with the “Beach Boys” were, in fact, Carol Kaye’s.
Fifty-five dollars a session. Ten thousand sessions. The most-played track of the twentieth century.
And the world didn’t know her name.
She was admitted to the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame in 2025 but refused, fuck yeah, Carol. Her official website is incredible.
obsessed with the fact that the welcome to night vale guy thinks he invented "welcome to [blank]" and gets really indignant and thinks other people who use that phrase ripped him off. its amazing. its a level of confident i aspire to be.
another one... david lynch you're a dead man
He's so pleased with himself, farting in my face... Stinky as hell
A few weeks ago, I visited my parents out in the suburbs---and, as any dutiful granddaughter would, I also trekked over to my grandparents' house to bow obeisance and exchange polite small talk.
(To be really clear, I don't actually object to this. Their world is small, hemmed in by my grandfather's profound memory loss and my grandmother's mobility issues, declining cognition---visiting with them costs me nothing and makes them happy. But....well. Getting old is not for the faint of heart.)
Anyway, while I was there, my grandmother pulled out an old photo album of hers. There are a handful of pictures from her and her siblings' childhood, others from the brief period when she was a single gal in the city (she interned for a branch of a federal agency, spent time in Washington DC); plus a handful from her marriage, and when she was a young school teacher. She can name every person in every photo, even the schoolkids! It's an amazing map of her memory.
But what stuck out to me---and sticks out to me now, as I look through/edit my sister's wedding photos---is that the less-than-perfect feels realer, truer, and more emotive than the perfectly staged shots. I have lovely shots of my sister and brother-in-law, perfectly posed; but what I love is the slightly blurred, too-flushed photo of them about to kiss. I like the photos of my grandmother poised and well-dressed at someone's wedding---but I love the photo of her with her girlfriends, perched on a wooden fence beside a cliffside and them laughing, squirming, faintly fuzzed around the edges.
"Grandma," I said to this 80+ year old woman who only mostly remembers who I am, "you're so cute!"
"Oh, well..." she tried to demur, though I could tell she was pleased.
My mother likes posed phone camera pictures---everybody smile, hold it! type shots. What I love are the photos where the subject has not figured out that you're about to immortalize them. They're just laughing, or teasing; their mouth is open, things are flushed, there are folds. To look at images of human beings being human is worship, in my opinion. It doesn't make a difference whether that image is a bunch of 20-something women in 1950s Washington DC or a 20-something Midwestern couple in the 2020s. Either way, the humanity is unchanged.
for the record im not technially 100% anti-AI, in the sense that its a broad category of tech being lumped under one umbrella term so it feels over-zealous to say i hate all of it all the time forever. but i also think trying to discuss what it actually IS good for is difficult right now when i cant take one step without something trying to convince me to use chatgpt to summarize my life and speed up my hobbies and turn my friends into chatbots and optimize my life into oblivion. i am certain there is nuance to the topic but can we stop cramming the square peg into the round hole before you start trying to sell me on the legitimate benefits of the square peg. please.
Neural Nets have existed for decades and are genuinely useful. It's a form of AI that recognizes patterns, and can do stuff like identify cancer cells, tell whether an egg is fertilized or not, detect fraud, and optimize routes.
Those are Expert Systems, tuned to do exactly one thing. If you (say) ask a medical expert system a question about financial law, it's useless. The autopilot that flies a 787 has no idea how to drive a truck on the freeway. A Coulter Counter is excellent at identifying lymphocytes in a blood sample but can't predict the next card in a blackjack game.
And so on.
The problem with so-called generalized AI (AGI) is that we don't have that yet. It doesn't exist. It MIGHT some day, but AGI has been "10 years away" since the 1980s. The goals keep moving as we learn more about how people and machines process data.
But the current crop of AI techbros have been selling generative Large Language Model AI (LLM) as AGI because generative systems do a good job of faking it. There's no actual thought going on, merely the illusion of thought via predicting the next word in a sentence accurately.
If you let a human toddler listen to 800 hours of YouTube car influencer videos, that toddler might end up sounding like a car influencer. They'd parrot horsepower numbers and 0 to 60 times, mention EV range and MSRP numbers.
But they wouldn't understand any of it.
That's ChatGPT.
And yeah, it's worse than useless because it doesn't even know when it's lying or hallucinating. It just babbles convincingly until you stop it.
But for techbros to make money selling that as "AI"? It's the perfect scam, especially if you don't understand how it works.
I fucking hate it.