Mark my territory

Man, the long earth series is so fucking good. It isn’t as well known as his discworld stuff, obviously, and it isn’t fantasy based in the usual sense, but the story arc over the series is just so well built, and the world building is a delight.

No shit, in my first book, there’s a zombie bigfoot. Well, not the standard bigfoot, a variant, and it wasn’t “just” a zombie, it had other powers and stuff.

But hybrid beasties are fun

Yes.

I dunno, OP’s mom comes to mind. And to my cock

The butsecks

Happens every damn year.

It’s also going to be great for people with health issues that impact thermoregulation. And there’s a ton of diseases that do so. Currently, the typical cooling vest is a glorified ice pack holder, and even less comfortable than that sounds

Dude. Don’t be a dick.

First, you don’t have to test every day, just frequently. And I was because two people in my household are immune compromised. Since my kid did get covid, there was a span where I was testing every day, as were the two adults with immune system compromisement.

Second, I’m disabled and was dealing with my own medical issues which necessitated regular trips to the doctor, so it wasn’t just home testing being done.

Third, I’m not a fucking moron, and I was in the medical field back when I could still work.

So, I know I didn’t fucking have covid, or I wouldn’t have fucking said so.

Maybe not starting from a place of condescension would be a good thing for you in the future@

Luckily (less luck an more a nigh religious isolation and mask use habit) I missed getting covid. The timing of me quitting and covid starting was a wonderful thing though. I can’t imagine trying to maintain that addiction with all the risks being increased and supplies of the cigarettes being lower.

I had started chantix well before the first reports started making it into my awareness, and by the time the first waves of deaths here in the US were puckering buttholes, I was done smoking, and had moved over to zero nicotine vape pens to handle the habits of having something to do with my hands and mouth (other than trying to suck cock at glory holes, which didn’t seem wise with covid raging anyway).

The masks originally muted the allergies when out in the world, but this house is old as a Neanderthal dick, and at least twice as dusty, so I was often tempted to just wear a mask at home too lol.

Fuck, that was a wild couple of years. Covid was fucking traumatic even though I never caught it. My anxiety spiked just now remembering how bad it was.

Selling stale parsnips

Gods, I quit smoking back in 2020, and my allergies have been brutal ever since.

Like, it’s freaking winter here, can I not get a month break at least? No? So it’s snotty nose and itchy eyes for me then.

hype? Pretty much any because hype is almost always artificial.

But fans? I can’t say any band/performers don’t deserve their fan base. You pull the crowds that need what you’re making, so you inherently deserve them.

I can say that some fans do over hype the talents of what they like. It’s perfectly okay to be a middle range musician, and it’s perfectly fine to like them and recommend them exactly as they are.

Like, backstreet boys. Solid pop boy band. Had some great songs, but most were just okay pop. None of the members can really be compared to someone like Freddy Mercury, or Pavarotti, or Marvin Gaye, but they all had good voices to some degree or another and used them well. But their fan base back in the day was all about the hype, the fannishness of it. So they got hyped way beyond what they were.

That’s the curse of a lot of pop performers, and it is the curse of teen/tween targeted pop for sure.

A lot of that kind of performer has to totally undo their family friendly (which is a bullshit term to begin with) focus to ever really grow musically. Look at pretty much every Disney escapee for examples. Timberlake, arguably the best example of someone escaping that trap without having to piss off the original fan base, still drags some of that curse with him while producing some very good pop music.

Now, KISS? Since that’s the example in the post, I think you run into the trouble of hindsight. At the time they gained their initial popularity and success, they were a damn great live band. A KISS show back then was something most people had never seen, and the hype was justified

But they suffer from the success curse. Other people took what they did and did it better. So now the hype is essentially all nostalgia, so it feels out of place. Legit, go back and check out footage of their live shows and compare it to the standard rock bands of the same eras. It wasn’t until they went full idiot and tried to abandon the makeup (and all that went with it) that they lost the thread. At that point, they kept trying to summon up what they’d lost and never regained their mojo. At this point, a KISS show just doesn’t do justice to what the hype says. It can’t, because it isn’t the same band despite being mostly the same people.

But they were always mid tier songwriters (even the ones I fucking love were mid tier compared to a band like The Band that I tend to enjoy less).

So, that kind of thing is why I don’t jump on hype or shit on hype. It’s usually artificial, and it’s also usually generated by dint of numbers. So hype never carries well.

But it’s also why I never object or care about someone like Taylor Swift having a massive fan base either. She writes and performs for her target audience. She does that very well, no matter what else anyone thinks about her. Any pop performer is trying to do exactly that. Even niche subgenre performers that are actually trying to sell their music try to find a way to target a fan base (even if it’s only people that would object to being called a fan base).

I would, at this point in my life, also say that at least checking out hype can be worth it. Even if you don’t like whatever it is, you’ve shared something with other people, and that’s a net positive. Plus, you might run into a few songs you do like from someone you don’t otherwise enjoy (like shake it off from Swift for me)

Legit, this isn’t that shitty a question.

However!

I met your dad at the glory hole, and he was pretty good on his knees

Oh damn! That was a fun ride lol

This is the first I’d heard of skype a scientist, but holy shit am I in love with the project. Fucking brilliant!

The “wook” thing? What is that, a typo?

Don’t worry, by the time you hit fifty-ish, you won’t have energy for rage any more lol.

Tbh, even the least well designed apps are a better experience overall. Lemmy via browser is often a drag.

Because it’s not a website. It’s a connected network of sites that requires a bit of a learning curve to really use.

Carson McKee