A Phlaming Phoenix

Isn’t the core of jazz improvisation and breaking the “rules” of music? If that’s what they’re doing, why would we disqualify it as jazz? A lot of folks had this opinion of Miles Davis doing jazz fusion in the 70s on Bitches Brew and Live/Evil with his squeaky, borderline abusive trumpeting, or of Herbie Hancock doing weird space synth stuff on Sextant and funk fusion on Headhunters. I don’t see how what you’re saying isn’t just gatekeeping that’s not really in the spirit of jazz.

Awful take. Last weekend I saw Mike Dillon with Phunkadelick playing with Brian Haas on the Rhodes organ. They played a wild punk-jazz show that is one of the best shows I’ve ever attended. There was a mosh pit at a jazz concert where a primary instrument was a vibraphone.

In recent years, I’ve greatly enjoyed things like AKU!'s album Blind Fury (drum/trumpet/baritone sax trio) and Ambrose Akinmusire’s Origami Harvest. A lot of modern jazz is blending in electronic influences, like Sungazer. Maybe you don’t like these things, but I can’t imagine calling jazz dead.

Really, the media finally realized millennials don’t care if we killed Applebee’s or whatever, and they’ve moved on to the next thing to scare boomers with. “They hate us because we buy bags of paper napkins” becomes “They hate us because we can use old style keyboards.” Generations are not a monolith. You can compare them, but it’s stupid to pass judgment in that way.

God damn you.

I stand corrected on that one. I assumed it was sumac bark, and you know what they say about assumption. It makes an ass out of u and mption.

Cinnamon and sumac are two common spices that are made from grinding up tree bark.

I really dislike superhero movies in general, especially this non-stop Marvel/DC stuff, and a primary reason for that is the way they tend to go in and out of live action and animation. There’s an uncanny valley thing that happens in that transition, and you can obviously still tell that large portions of the live action stuff is shot on a greenscreen. It all looks fake as a result. My suspension of disbelief is shattered.

But when a movie like this admits it’s animated, things improve a lot. I watched the first Spiderverse movie the other day with my kid, and I absolutely loved the art style. I had other problems with the movie, but the visual style was not one of them. I wish there were more animated movies targeting older audiences with unique art direction like that.

I don’t want thinner. I want more functionality. Don’t expect me to pay 2 grand for a laptop with no external USB or HDMI ports, for which privileges I can pay an additional $100 or so. I’m frustrated enough by the lack of Ethernet jacks on my Lenovo. The last time I had a Mac (work shipped me one), I was even more frustrated by how bad the built in trackpad and keyboard were and the fact that using an external device to replace them came at a premium price.

The article quotes extensively from the study about this and gives examples regarding what kinds of tasks qualify for those levels.

There was a post here a while back about how younger generations often don’t understand concepts like file system structures because concepts like that (which are still relevant in a lot of contexts) have been largely stripped out of modern user interfaces. If your primary computing device is a cell phone, a task like “make a nested directory structure and move this file to the deepest part of it” is a foreign concept.

I guess my point here is that I agree with yours about this being cyclical in a sense. I feel crippled on a cell phone, but I’m also in my comfort zone on a Linux terminal. Using web apps like MS Teams is often difficult for me because their UIs are not things I’m comfortable with. I don’t tend to like default layouts and also tend to use advanced features which are usually hidden away behind a few menus. Tools built to meet my needs specifically would largely not meet the needs of most users. A Level 1 user would probably have a better experience there than a Level 3 like me. It’s hard (maybe impossible) to do UX design that satisfies everyone.

Gnome is a desktop environment, which you can install into virtually any distro. It’s the default for Fedora, which is a good enough place to try Linux for the first time.

The article asks what is the politically neutral answer to the question of whether a trans woman is a woman. I wonder why this is a political question at all. Send like a question for scientists - biologists and sociologists and such. Seems they have achieved something like a consensus on the matter. I don’t see anything inherently political about that, except that folks of a certain political bent have made it political. It’s not a matter of “what do we do in public policy about trans people” but “fascists refuse to accept trans people in society and have decided to lambast and punish them”.

In case my position isn’t obvious, trans people are people and trans rights are human rights. If there wasn’t a group of people trying to make them into a second class group of citizens (or a group of “eradicated vermin”) we wouldn’t be having a political conversation about this at all.