I have a stable job and secure housing, yet I have an indefinite longing to achieve something greater outside the confines of New Jersey, somehow involving motor vehicles in some way.

Yup, but you can always decamp to other instances and other places. Once you’ve made the transition from Reddit to Lemmy, there’s much less friction transiting to your next watering hole.

I agree that people seem to be the same everywhere; the problem with reddit is that there get to be SO many people there that

a) moderation suffers b) you need upvotes in order to be VISIBLE–this has some nasty knock-on effects.

As Agent K says, “a person is smart; people are dumb, panicky, dangerous animals and you know it.”

All the smarmy boasting about the superiority of the lemmy style and its users is, as far as I can tell, mostly masturbation. It is better than reddit solely because it is less populated, because I can write a comment on a day old post and still get replies for a week, because I have to be careful not to be to total and complete of a flaming asshole because it wouldn’t take many people putting me on their blocklist to make me invisible, etc…

Yeah,but you won’t be able to get a job with it for five years.

I only breathe smoke from domestic wild fires and AI data centers.

On guitar you have to learn each key SEVEN times, though, through all the different positions.

But my point is this: it SEEMS like a lot of work, but it really isn’t if you understand music! If you can sing Do Re Mi Fa So La Ti Do and know that every step up is a whole step except between Mi & Fa, and Ti & Do, it’s trivially easy to build the scale on the fly, and if you screw it up, your ear will guide you back on course. And I do use note names as a guide posts.

On any instrument, you can play completely by ear (eventually), but a little knowledge goes a long way.

On guitar, you can play a whole major scale octave with the pattern 0-2-4-5-7-9-11-12–which you can figure out yourself either by ear or by applying the major scale formula. That immediately gives you access to an octave in A, D, G, B, and two octaves in E (open strings). Then you can start playing around with a low E drone and a high E melody, and the fifth, B, is happily always one string below you. Then maybe you notice the A, the fourth, is the next string below the low E and you can hit that every once in a while, maybe while playing the notes of the A major triad, A C# E; you don’t need to memorize them because you know the fourth starts on the fourth note of the scale, which is the 5 fret, and then you skip every other note to get the triad–5-9-12. And for a little flavor, you can throw in a major seventh, which you know is one fret below the root, 4. And you would also know that the octave starts at again as 12 so you can also use the 16 fret (12+4).

If you keep yours wits about you, maybe while you’re noodling, you try to keep note name in mind, so pretty soon you know where E B and G# are on the high E string, and merrily you go along, experimenting, and playing, and learning, and having a good time.

Contrast that with the traditional learning method of: ¨THIS musical note corresponds to THIS string at THIS fret position. Keep drilling until it sinks into that thick skull of yours. I will be judging you on your performance of this scale next week.

No wonder people think learning a new instrument is an incredible chore!

Edit: My FAVORITE isomorphic keyboard are the button accordions: French and Bayan (they go in opposite directions). Basic version is a a stack of three buttons, each one a semi-tone higher than the last. So you really only have to memorize three scales, for starting on each of the three different buttons. Fancier version add duplicate rows for ease of fingering.

That said, it’s much less of a hurdle if you have a good ear and can immediately correct yourself and say, “ooops, that ain’t right.”

I find that things that don’t make sense in American history and politics suddenly become perfectly rational when you consider racism.

And if you look at conservative attacks on social welfare policy, it is often and most effectively done simply be associating welfare with “undeserving” black people. Reagan’s cadillac “welfare queen” was racially coded, as was the “young bucks” eating steaks with food stamps (steak is a food, go figure).

This is the Southern Strategy, how the Republican Party flipped confederate slave states from D to R after the passage of civil rights.

If you can convince the lowest white man he’s better than the best colored man, he won’t notice you’re picking his pocket. Hell, give him somebody to look down on, and he’ll empty his pockets for you. ― Lyndon B. Johnson

I think if you’re trained musically, it’s not that big a jump. For instance, if you have developed a good sense of pitch, the violin’s intonation will come much easier to you.

If you know how chords on constructed, you can hop on a piano pretty easily.

I think the issue is a lot of “music education” (in the US, anyway), is really just about translating sheet music to an instrument and lots of people never learn musical sense. So to them, learning a new instrument is almost starting from ZERO.

I forgot to add: violin may not be a percussive instrument, but fiddle certainly might be! Check out some fiddlers in bluegrass bands. Things get chonky.

Yeah, musical saw.

Don´t have the sound plugged in, but this looks right:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=njO_AH10bB0

I watched some of her videos on Newpipe, where it seems like Freya India is an EXTREMELY popular men among older conservative men that want women to get married and start bearing children (preferably Christian children).

I appreciate that she sees the rot in modern culture, but I think she’s mistaken when she associates it with “the left” and her prescription of returning to the status quo ante of traditional gender roles isn’t going to fly with most people.

Time for my daily Britt Hartley mention. Remember that scene in Platoon when the new recruits pass the returning veterans on the runway? Well, Britt Hartley is the returning veteran to Freya India’s new recruit. Britt was raised very mormon and inculcated in traditional gender roles and struggled to escape.

Some of Brtitt’s videos that might be part of this conversation are the one about why women want to become tradwives. I hear Freya validate a lot of what Britt says for she mentions anxiety as a big motivation for her to return to traditional values. Britt’s whole thing is analyzing existential anxiety, and, yeah, the modern age is rife with it, and returning to traditional values is one antidote (though it comes at a cost, obviously).

But, again, I do appreciate anyone that might validate what I think the core truth of our age is: “Being well in a profoundly sick society is no sign of health.”

Feel free to link Freya’s video, the one you’re talking about, and ignore the downvotes. Thanks for sharing.

Dogs do the same! When big dogs play tug, there’s a certain percentages of times they have to lose if they want to keep playing, no matter how much bigger or stronger they are.

What do you mean?

You don’t understand American politics until you understand American racism.

Plenty of Americans would rather die of a treatable disease than have one penny of their hard-earned taxes go to a black person’s healthcare.

The American experiment with socialism died the instant it could no longer legally exclude black peopde.

Absolutely! But I think if you stay within in the same family, you’re refining the same skills more than expanding on new ones.

Have you tried mandolin? It’s just a violin with frets and doubled strings.

Yeah, equal temperment is sort of annoying. It’s nice to be able to just play the exact right note on strings. I think reed instruments are pretty good about intonation, too, but I’m not good enough to play with other people yet.

How long do your homebrew cards last? It’s hard enough to make good cards at home that I think CardsAgainst Humanity has them publically available since it’s still cheaper for them to print than you would spend for a small batch.

And how do you keep your decks from being overpowered?

It’s funny to me that the same crowd of people that rail against the continued fucking over of the public by manipulative corporations are the same people who fork over hundreds of dollars for the artificial scarcity and manufactured demmand of collectible cards.

Every time I think of getting into that hobby, I get the same feeling I get when I go to the casino… like I’m just a mark.

For me:

Voice: First stop for learning any melody. Not bad for learning harmony, either, theoretically–I still suck at singing and recognizing harmony notes.

Guitar: Rhythm and a bit of intuitive harmony. Most importantly it’s given me something to accompany and support my singing.

Clarinet: Really makes you think about what notes you’re playing because the layout is not intuitive at all! Also forces you to think about phrasing because you have to breath. Also gives you a lot of options with the envelope I don’t have on guitar without a pedal.

Piano: King of theory! Very easy to read and construct chords. Guitar: “flat 5? what is the fifth of this chord again? where is it? ok, so it’s this, and i move it down a fret, but now I have to move my pinky here, but shit, then I have to grab that with, what, my index finger? no, I need that there…” Piano: “boop! flat 5!”

Wish list: drums, accordion, lap slide guitar, saw, fiddle.

Off the list: most other single-note instruments; might mess about with more reed instruments like sax or some folk reeds, but I feel like I’d be investing a lot to duplicate what I can do on clarinet (expressive single note playing on wind instruments).

To my apartment neighbors: I’m sorry.

To the builders of this building: thank you for using so much brick.

Cool, thanks for the recommend.

I think I’ll stick to Voyager for now and compose my longer drafts offline.

Yes! At least as far as information goes. From the nostupidquestions lemmy (see post history), Voyager isn’t a proper Android app but basically a web page (???), so it doesn’t have the same granular system access an app might and its behavior might be more limitted in that regard, so, yeah, lean on OS solutions here.

I also got a recommend to try Interstellar.

But what the heck, let me open a few tabs and get back to you in two minutes.

Edit: I saved this comment, opened a bunch of stuff, and came back to Voyager saying it closed and that it noticed I was editing but to just “begin composing.” So, yes, I’d say avoid leaving Voyager at all costs while writing or compose in an editor.

Not by accident, no.