As a fellow Jew, I agree, but it’s worth noting. I wouldn’t ever call someone an antisemite for referring to someone as a lizard-person, because at this point no one intends it that way. I have a friend who’s pretty receptive to social justice issues and mentioned it to her recently just as an interesting point of conversation.

The reptilian conspiracy theory can be considered at least antisemitism-adjacent, which makes its popularity with respect to Zuckerberg… interesting.

Also, they had one of two songs in Crazy Taxi for PS2.

YA YA YA YA YA

Last.fm says my top 5 artists are, in order, Vampire Weekend, Billy Strings, The Beatles, Sufjan Stevens, and Green Day. There’s a lot of context missing there, though, lol. If you go down the list, you’ll find a lot of punk & punk-adjacent stuff with some folk, pop and alt/indie rock interspersed. There’s one metal band in my top 50, two if you count Porcupine Tree.

Okay, I’ll be that guy… TOOL

My mom was way into his music. I think it was a lot more interesting in the 70s before the whole folk-pop singer-songwriter thing had been done to death.

Still…

I’ve seen fire and I’ve seen rain

I’ve seen sunny days that I thought would never end

I’ve seen lonely times when I could not find a friend

But I always thought I’d see you again

Lyrics don’t do it for everyone, but I think they’re one of the main draws of his music.

I figured my boy Johnny was a comrade, but I never had proof until *checks video description* 12 years ago? Shit, where have I been?

Also there’s lead in perovskite! This stuff is sounding better by the minute.

Hah! It didn’t even occur to me that someone would not have listened to Zeppelin before. They’re so foundational in classic rock. Incidentally, a lot of people accused Zeppelin of ripping off earlier blues and blues rock acts when they first blew up. To me, all art is just people riffing on what came before, and you’re bound to encounter artists across space and time that have very similar aesthetics to each other. No one owns an aesthetic.

Oh I definitely hear a ton of Rush in them too, as well as more diverse 60s/70s influences, and even some 90s alt (Mountain of the Sun in particular). It’s basically just Highway Tune and Safari Song that have gotten them branded as a Zeppelin ripoff - understandably in the case of those two songs. The singer is definitely heavily influenced by Robert Plant (although as you say his voice has more of a Geddy Lee timbre to it or something) and the guitarist by Jimmy Page for sure.

Thanks, yeah, it’s not unbearable. The worst part is just the limitations it imposes on me. Doctors haven’t been much help so far, but I need to try again.

The drummer in Clowncore is widely believed to be Louis Cole. His band Knower is very cool.

Heh, not to disappoint you, but that’s some of Swans’ newest music. Their discography goes back to '83. Killing for Company off of The Great Annihilator (1995) is my favorite song of theirs. Then again, I haven’t listened to To Be Kind & Glowing Man, so I’ll have to check those out.

To get this one out of the way, The Caretaker - Everywhere At The End Of Time.

My personal recommendation would be Kayo Dot. Here’s their album Dowsing Anemone With Copper Tongue.

Oh jeez, there’s so much on Bandcamp… Pinegrove, Kishi Bashi, Sleepmonster, Miss Grit, Black Midi, Unturned, Particle Kid…

If you’re looking for something that I’m about 99.999% sure you haven’t heard, check out this local (to me) boy who does original folk tunes, Conor Ryan Hennessy. Here are some of my favorites by him:

All In This Together

Millennial Mesmerism

My People Look Tired

It’s kind of hard to explain. There’s some level of constant pain and certain activities will cause it to flair up. Some of those activities it doesn’t really bother me while I’m doing them, but the next day I will feel it and it takes weeks of rest, medication, stretches & exercises to get it under control again. Guitar is one of those, did a bunch of yard work recently that I think aggravated it. Oddly, typing doesn’t feel great while I’m doing it, but it doesn’t seem to cause the problem to flare up the same way more strenuous activity does.

I’ve basically stopped playing guitar, and I try to stick to gaming with a controller, which sucks because my favorite genre for my whole life has been city builders.

Was playing guitar on and off for a decade and then started seriously practicing around the end of 2019. Got to the point where I was fluent enough that the melodies and chord progressions started just appearing out of the ether as I was noodling. I wrote one full song and have stubs of a few others, but now my hands have rebelled against me after 3 and a half decades of abuse. Don’t know if they’ll ever get back to normal, as I can’t even figure out what exactly is wrong with them.

Interesting quote from the article… I’m certainly of the opinion that the fediverse is the way to go, but I’ve seen misgivings on lemmy about the complexity of the multiple servers. Maybe it’s just an issue of unfamiliarity? Or is it truly too complicated? It doesn’t seem that Byzantine to me, but then I do have a background in IT.

It started in October with a wave of defections to Mastodon, an open source, ad-free, decentralized community that was hosted on an archipelago of independent servers. For the briefest of moments, everyone seemed to agree that this brainy successor was destined to save social media. But the enthusiasm quickly waned as people struggled to navigate the platform’s sprawling “Fediverse,” and the Twitter exodus flowed elsewhere. Media obsessives gravitated toward Post, a news-heavy platform founded by Noam Bardin, the former CEO of Waze. “Mastodon is complicated and unsatisfying,” tweeted Kelda Roys, a Democratic state senator in Wisconsin. “Post could be a winner if there were a critical mass there.”

Can’t wait to hear what the dealership has to say when I ask them how to access my telematics data.

I could see using this as a replacement for a monitor, keyboard & mouse. The resolution is there unlike in other VR headsets to date, and the eye tracking and other controls seem slick. The price tag is high, but considering the tech in this thing, understandable.

Of course comparisons to the iPhone abound, but the iPhone launched as sort of a “better Blackberry” at a starting price of $500. The world was more than ready for it, and Apple’s timing was perfect. I’m not sure you can say the same for XR.

The suffering makes it taste meatier.