Has fond memories of the Yahoo Answers Etiquette section.

Back when I had a two bed flat I used to joke about hosting political escapees from the US. Best I can offer now is space in the back garden for a tent. The council insists on calling these cottages “amenities housing”, but that only works if you consider a walk in shower because there isn’t enough room for a tub an amenity [lolsob]

If you can manage a visa though, I’ll be your nana. Can you cook? I gave up on account of the number of pots I was ruining.

Might try a month’s sub to Netflix for some Korean drama this winter. Will keep this in mind if I do. Thanks.

Thank you for the suggestion. This is another reason to get a better computer :)

Thank you, I will give this a go :)

This does sound very good. I’ll need something better than the weak laptop I’m using just now. Something to think about. Thanks for the suggestion.

Ad blockers are my best disability accommodation. The things they do with ads to capture attention f with my brain. I’m really going to struggle if this happens. And I’m dependent on the internet for so many things, from groceries to prescriptions to people.

Something with environmentalist and sustainability goals and principles rather than forms of destruction. I don’t want to kill things or chop down trees or blow stuff up. The world is difficult and I am tired.

Bifocals that I don’t get on with. Then a downturn in my health which affected my concentration. Only upside to middle age is that my eyes have changed such that I can read without glasses now so that’s what I do.

Narrow, literalist readings of Jewish writings collected in the Ketuvim (Writings) section of the Tanakh (Torah, Nevi’im, Ketuvim) fit that.

There wasn’t a hard distinction between learning and leisure like we pretend there is today. A story could have a kernel of historical truth, or perhaps a lot, or none at all; convey important truths about society, the world and our place in it; and be told dramatically to capture attention (ie entertaining) so listeners pay attention to those truths and remember them in difficult situations.

Jewish tradition is to look for 4 levels of meaning in a text, including allegorical and hidden meanings as well as the general plot. Even those who believe the surface level as literally true spend most of their time working with interpretation, what lessons we can learn from the stories.

Then along comes a Greek proselytiser who insisted the particular salvation religion he followed was literally True and therefore better than other salvation religions. And that literalness got read back into a different people’s texts, came to be seen by most of the world as the only way to read them and here we are today.

Sitting at a bus stop near a stop light. Police car stops at the light. My brain’s first reaction is to think we should hijack it. Cause GTA of course.

I didn’t even play that much. It was just a good game to fail at. Spectacularly. Its police cars were especially useful in that regard.

i like traditional musics from around the world so when i fancy something new i start with wikipedia articles on instruments i like and rabbit hole through links to get terms and countries and things to put into search strings on youtube. One day i started with tar (precursor for both sitar and guitar) and ended up grooving to Philippine boat lutes, which are brilliant. https://piped.simpleprivacy.fr/watch?v=K7hYfnG7mJM

Trad musicians tend to play in several groups so that’s another source of rabbit holes to explore. And just keeping an eye out for interesting things other people post. Mostly individual clips but sometimes happen into treasure troves like at the start of the first lockdown when someone I followed on Twitter posted about Met Opera in NYC streaming a different opera each day for free. It was a great opportunity to learn about a new-to-me type of music so I grabbed it, thinking it would be a couple of weeks at most. A year and a half later they finally stopped and I was an addict :)

Also libraries. Libraries can be fantastic for exploring new musicians and types of music.

Even when algorithms are good, there’s still a lot more out there waiting for listeners ❤️

For probably 99% of the music I listen to, I vastly prefer live over recordings and live recording over studio. Big band jazz is my oldest love, trad (instrumental folk) my deepest, opera my newest. They’re all genres centred around live performance. It’s the way music has been for most of human history, people playing for themselves and other people. Studio effects can be interesting but they don’t have the same immediacy. While it may be a shared endeavour for the musicians and producers, we as an audience can only give them our money, not our energy.

Top is (Duke) Ellington at Newport, from the 1956 Newport Jazz Festival. Superbly talented geniuses who were on fire and we’re so lucky it was recorded. The gem amongst gems is the sequence of Diminuendo in Blue and Crescendo in Blue with an Interlude from Paul Gonsalves. Both group and solo work are excellent, everyone on top of their game. Starts out mellow, and then builds, and builds, and builds. Listen to the crowd loving it. They know they’re experiencing something truly special. https://piped.simpleprivacy.fr/watch?v=wIX7fnYANak

Lau Live Lau (word for a particular quality of light in Orkney) is a Scottish & English experimental trad band who are phenomenal live, especially in tunes like this where they build and build the energy. They crank the musical tension and when they let it go, it’s visceral. Being in the room and feeling the vibrations is the best, but this album (good headphones mandatory) will do. https://piped.simpleprivacy.fr/watch?v=hoEYutpgnuQ

That said, the last time I heard them play was a double bill with a young Danish trio called Dreamers’ Circus and they out-Lau’ed Lau.

Trad music is great like that.

More mainstream, I’m also very fond of The Allman Brothers Band at Filmore East.

I have photosensitivity. I need to get animated emojis off my screen as quickly as possible since they bring me closer to my seizure threshold.
Think of it like a cup. Skimming quickly past a few animated emojis won’t fill the cup on their own, but if it’s already full from other things, even that little bit is a risk for it spilling over into a seizure. If I were to try to read a lengthy post with animated emojis, forget it.
Laugh at me if it makes you feel superior. You probably are.

Yes, I understand you weren’t talking about the techniques and it was social commentary.

So identification WAS from examination of the pelvic bones? Where did you see that? Might you have a link you could kindly share or any information to help me find it? I love archaeology and search is turning up the now usual mass of sensationalist articles. Thanks :)

I’m confused by your comment. The new technique better identifies skeletons without a Y chromosome, which correlates largely (not 100%, very little is 100%) with AGAB.
As far as I can glean (given the dire nature of internet search these days and the amount of noise because of this discovery), the initial identification of the skeleton as male was little more than sexist presumptions about status: the grave was superlatively high status, ergo it had to be a man.
Is your comment simply that mistakes have been made by archaeologists in identifying sex? This isn’t the first, won’t be the last. They come from researchers reading their own society-based assumptions about gender roles & presentation back onto other times. I don’t see how the new findings are a slam against transphobes; this new technique appears to give a far more reliable way to identify a skeleton’s chromosomes and thus (in the majority of cases) its likely AGAB.

Maybe it’s how far along I am in life, but I certainly have plenty of pain and sadness for comparison purposes already.
I don’t really do schadenfreude, but clearly other people do, so I suppose maybe that’s part of it? Bit scary if it is, if seeing other people in pain is a positive experience for many.
Either way, this is different to the idea of “better”. Yes, books about difficult things are important. They’re part of how we learn about ourselves and each other. I think we’ve gone too far in that direction and we really need more emphasis on models of positive emotions and interactions.

I don’t have a “competing explanation”, except that it’s not likely to be as simple as laying it on a particular demographic or certain professions. Very little ever is.

Read back, I asked a question - is there a trend/tendency towards. Everyone who’s responded has gone straight to reasons why.

I’m also not inclined towards your snarky extremes, equating fanciful and enjoyable and setting them against the saddest and hardest to read.

I get stuck because of physical health reasons. My three things I try to kickstart it again are:

1. dark mode on my tablet, can make a huge difference for me
2. reading free page turner crap I get from the online ebook store (in dark mode of course)
3. reading novels I already know the general plot of

The built in reader on my tablet keeps track of time read. It’s set at five minutes, so I try to at least get to that target with the free page turner crap.

Reading fluff for five minutes is easier than taking on something substantial. And if it doesn’t happen on that day, that’s ok, I can always try again later.

This is what works for me. There will be something which works for you, so try and keep trying until you find it. If something doesn’t work for you, that’s ok. You’ll find one that does.

(Have you tried short stories? Easier to complete than a novel.)

I haven’t read Stephen King in probably two decades so this might no longer apply. Family members are BIG fans and I started every one I read expecting to love them. But it turned out how much I liked them was inversely related to the death count. The higher the percentage of characters who died, the less I cared. There’s a novella where they’re trying to get to Hartford CT (I think it was Hartford, anywhere somewhere around there which is the last place you’d think of as being salvation), I liked that one.

Yes, I realise I am not the norm in this but you did say everyone ;)