Was this the best metal album of 2023? Not by a long shot.
Was it the best Metallica album in 25 years? Absolutely. They tried new things and pulled it off well.
The Grammys have very narrow criteria. Basically you are going to get top 40 radio friendly songs and they choose from that. Looking at the list of nominees, they were the only metal band actually nominated in this category. The rest of the nominees are what people who drive in to “easy listening soft hits” think metal sounds like. 2023 was a pretty weak year for metal anyway.
In my 30s, I’ve come back around to appreciating Metallica. We don’t have many years left of them being around. Enjoy them for the time that we still can. One of these days, soon, they will play Master of Puppets for the last time.
Yes. I moved in third grade and I was the only Asian boy in a public school system in the American south, in a very small town of less than 250.
I got picked on relentlessly. I never had friends. Every slur imaginable from everyone. People ganged up and fought me on the playground. At least once a week. I got a reputation for always getting into fights in third grade and so I was always in timeout because I was new and obviously the problem. I gave up on teachers because they always favored the white kids.
At one point, they spray painted swastikas and KKK on our house. Then the sheriff deputy showed up, they said it must have been me, because I had a bad reputation. A black lady cop and a white guy cop. The lady cop took the lead and insisted because nobody had any motive to vandalize our house like that, we were not black. It must have just been me, the twelve year old who was in school when it happened. Case closed boys, pack it up and let’s head home.
I ended up associating with the kids who also got bullied for things far behind their control. Being poor, having bad teeth, ill-fitting clothes, for example. My best friend had a physical disability. Although eventually, he decided to pick on my ancestry when he thought it would make him friends, and so I stopped hanging out with him.
In high school, I was vocally mean to bullies because they picked on my friends. Bullies also had significant overlap with the “Young Life” crowd, and so I associated it with their religion. I did very well with grades so the teachers did not intervene. I bullied the bullies. People were scared of me. I was kind of like a stick of dynamite, I could go off on anybody. I did not care because getting in trouble was no better than not being in trouble. I was also very physically fit and played basketball, but I was not friends with anyone on the team and had no social life with them. They were greedy with the ball and when we lost in the tournament, I laughed because I thought they deserved it.
I do not talk to any of those people, except my girlfriend who is now my wife. She had a similar treatment being Hispanic, until she had her glow up and everybody who had picked on her started chasing after her. That is gross because guys thought they were entitled to her as a brown girl. That is her story to tell.
I never felt accepted anywhere until I moved to California and suddenly I was not always conscious of being the only brown guy, I was just another person, and I was like is this how other people live?
Our kids go to a very accepting school now and it’s different for them.
Like live and let live right? I am not vegan but I’m not going to complain about it, or equate eating meat with manliness. And even if I had issues with veganism, work isn’t the appropriate venue to be ranting about it.
I’m an older millennial. My take on the GenZ entering the workforce: Super accepting of people of color, LGBTQ, vegan diets and green initiatives. Just really fun, pleasant people to be around.
I just changed projects recently from an office that skewed younger and it’s like I ended up in 2003 again. The office is just slightly older than me and it’s just a weird vibe…people randomly ranting about EVs and how they would never own one as if anybody asked; dancing around asking what my ethnicity is as if it matters, etc. Talking bad about Asians and then looking my direction and stopping mid conversation. Ranting about vegans like it’s physically hurting them. It’s disheartening. There’s no positivity and no small talk; it’s just dead silence unless you are hating on something that has no bearing on your life.
It’s kind of terrible now. Since late 2023, when I go to search technical specs of hardware, I am presented with a view that looks like browsing an online shopping catalog. It’s weird and unwanted. For personal use, I went back to DDG.
Man locks the front door to his house after refusing to answer the question, “Why do you beat your wife?”
Looks like Meta is using some of the stock price increase from the past few months to fund their media marketing campaign again.
It’s an election year. We are going to hear more about this and omg China.
Just remember that unlike Insta and FB the far right doesn’t go viral on TikTok. The platform that supported insurrection, the company that has allowed the far right to flourish and led to a direct assault on representative democracy, remains unpunished and is bigger today than 2020.
The truth is that a lot of loyal customers are boycotting Starbucks right now over unionization and their stance on Palestine. So Starbucks is trying to bring them back physically into the stores and are using the balance on their cards as leverage. Starbucks has already uncharacteristically been running several promotions to get people back to their stores, with the red cup and the Stanley thing.
If Starbucks has to return the customers’ unused balance without bringing them into the stores, then they may have lost those customers for good.
Whatever system76 decides it will be, I guess. That’s really the unexplored area of my keyboard because it’s so wildly inconsistent from one laptop manufacturer to another.
I do, however, recognize Microsoft’s leveraging power over laptop manufacturers. They are the reason we got the Windows/Super key to start with (although ThinkPads held out until 2007) and later why everyone was forced to go to 6 row chiclet keyboards in 2013. So I’m certain the community will standardize this key for something useful across all distributions.
Some additional context about Curry in college: he was great, we just didn’t know how well the talent translated. Our conference would get maybe 2-3 games a season against top tier teams (UNC, Duke) and it would always be a blowout. The player of the year was a guy named Kyle “Sir” Hines at Greensboro who was a 6’6" (1.98m) center setting all sorts of historical records. And he even did well against those top caliber teams. And Curry was also setting records, but I think Kyle graduated first and then didn’t even make an NBA roster and didn’t do well in the Summer Leagues.
So we expected Steph Curry to end up somewhere in that range, maybe he would make a roster but probably not have a long career because he was smaller and didn’t have great handles for a point guard. A lot of things broke open for Steph at the right time, from the NBA changing to an easier scoring softer rim and relaxing defensive rules, to teams money balling the sport and figuring out that 3 points at 40% was much easier than 2 points at 60%. And even then it was a difficult choice for Golden State to stick with Curry those first six seasons, over Monta Ellis. They gambled, and it didn’t work until they changed coaches to the first time coach Steve Kerr, which tells how well Golden State was respected. And the rest is history.
Kyle Hines ended up in Europe and had a very good multi-decade career there.
I haven’t been to many football games in my time. Maybe I can count them on two hands and that includes situations where I was part of some promotional event.
But in undergrad, I got to watch Steph Curry play a lot from the student section and it was a delight. We knew he was special way back then, he played with a chip on his shoulder and we thought maybe he would do okay in the NBA. I had no context because there were no other NBA caliber players in the entire conference, so we thought he was good and maybe good enough to make the NBA and stick around a while. But I never thought he would become the hall of famer, record setting player he is today.