zdl

zdl, 11 hours ago

@angiebaby Are there any other shows anymore? (Genuine question: I haven't watched broadcast television for ages.)

zdl, 11 hours ago

@jemmesedi The paper isn't wrong. A lot of "fusion" works feel to me like "western music with fetishised foreign instruments". They're valuable as a way of gently introducing people to new sounds, but they're not a sufficient introduction to entirely different musical traditions.

Not everything fits on 12 notes. (Not even all western music fits on 12 notes...)

zdl, 10 hours ago

@jemmesedi I've lived ... in many places. My ears got tuned into hearing "weird stuff" since I was in my early teens. So I've loved kunqu (and other Chinese opera forms) for ages already, among other forms.

This doesn't mean I don't ever get challenged, mind. I attended a concert at the Hubei Conservatory that used authentic ancient instruments and modern recreation/compositions and ... yeah. That was a "do I actually like this?" reaction at first.

(Spoiler: I eventually decided I did!)

zdl, 7 hours ago

@jemmesedi I'm not a huge fan of pop music (any culture), true. Some limited stuff I like, but as a genre it is the one I least pay attention to by proportion.

(That being said, I liked a lot of Brown Eyed Girls' stuff back in the day, and in China I love "Rollin" Wang.)

British artists are represented a lot because I had my breakout of elevator music back when a lot of British stuff was breaking out into the world scene. My first punk: The Adverts, first metal: Judas Priest, etc.

zdl, 7 hours ago

@jemmesedi Oops. Long-belated postscript: don't be too sure that Black Kirin uses the same musical language as westerners. Listen to the suona, erhu, and pipa that interlace with the metal and you'll hear some truly alien stuff mixed in behind the familiar-to-westerners facade.

Black Kirin is astonishingly creative.

zdl, 12 hours ago

@thepoliticalcat @cyrus The worst part is that the yucks aren't even very good ones.

We could pay actual artists producing actual comedy as well.

zdl, 23 hours ago

@jens @catileptic That sounds like a problem with how finance is handled in your country, then, not cash vs. cashless.

You're blaming a lack of cash for what is really a fucked-up system that stabs you in the neck. Fix the system. Don't force everyone to carry their purchasing power with them where it can be easily stolen or lost.

zdl, 23 hours ago

@jens @catileptic And I'm saying fix the financial system so that cashless is accessible to all instead of forcing, for example, every small business to have two separate systems for paying (one of which puts them at increased risk for criminal action), and other such matters.

The problems you're talking about aren't related to cash or the lack thereof. They're social organization issues that forcing cash on top of is at best a band-aid solution.

zdl, 14 hours ago

@catileptic @jens It's weird to keep hearing about how using cashless (nobody mentioned a card on this side of the conversation) will "change" me.

It's true. Going cashless did change my purchasing patterns.

I have easier access to goods that match what I actually want because of online purchasing and can buy expensive items without worrying about being robbed.

But the claim that this would somehow change what kind of stuff I buy because "SURVEILLANCE!!!111oneoneone!" isn't panning out….

zdl, 14 hours ago

@zeh @wendyg @catileptic @jens Again, that sounds to me like a social disorder unrelated to cash or lack thereof.

Fix your society.

zdl, 14 hours ago

@zeh @wendyg @catileptic @jens I've been living cash-free for over a decade now. Further, I'm in an at-risk group, given that I live here only while the government chooses to allow me to live here.

Yet strangely, over a decade, living cashless as an outsider in a literal police state, I've seen none of the problems that westerners insist must happen in a cashless society. What an interesting contradiction.

It's almost as if there's some kind of societal difference that explains this.

zdl, 12 hours ago

@zeh @wendyg @catileptic @jens My argument has been made already. You're just ignoring it because it doesn't fit with your preconceptions.

The problem isn't "cash" vs. "cashless". The problem is that your society is structured such that you're handing the keys of power to sociopaths.

You're treating a sign, not the problem.

It's like the people who think Trump is the problem in the USA. It isn't. Trump is the sign. The problem is a deep societal rot.

Work on the real problem.

(1/n)

zdl, 12 hours ago

@zeh @wendyg @catileptic @jens All y'all so adorably believe that if you use cash you've got some element of power. You don't. Want some evidence for that? Go try to buy something illegal with your cash (like, let's say, cocaine). Notice how hard it is? Notice how likely it is that this works out badly for you?

It seems that even with the magical power of cash to free you from tyranny ... you're still being controlled.

Maybe the problem is that control, not cash-free society.

(2/2)

zdl, 6 hours ago

@jens @catileptic The crime rate was fixed.

Since nobody carries cash and most businesses (begrudgingly) have a small amount of cash, robberies, pick-pocketing, etc. have basically vanished as an entire category of crime.

(Other crimes are also on their way out, but for far more troublesome reasons.)

That being said, your parallel doesn't really work. You want to keep cash because your society is broken. The crime rate dropping wasn't the goal of going cashless, it was a side effect.

zdl, 6 hours ago

@jens @catileptic I have had cash stolen from me.

In Germany.

I'm not sure when it was: might have been picked while I was outdoors, might have been stolen from my hotel room while I was out at the pool. But it was stolen. It's happened to me here too. Indeed small property crime is commonplace in most places I've ever lived in or visited; I've been fortunate enough to have it happen only a small handful of times in my life.

So this is a real problem, directly experienced.

(1/2)

zdl, 6 hours ago

@jens @catileptic Something very strange happened in the slightly over a decade of me not using cash, though: nobody has stolen money from me at any point. Hell, I'm not even at risk from the kind of weird ways people have stolen from credit cards (double-imprints, say) or bank cards (apparently some way of capturing the PIN when paying?; I lack technical knowledge of how that works).

It seems that going cashless has solved a problem that has been around since I was a teen.

(2/2)

zdl, 6 hours ago

@jens @catileptic (P.S. Would you care to guess who the most common victim of small property theft, like cash, is? Sadly it's not the rich fucks who deserve it. It's the poor folk.)

zdl, 12 hours ago

@skinnylatte Sadly that wasn't merely "forgotten", it was the end result of active disinformation.

zdl, 12 hours ago

@skinnylatte I go hard analogue on quite a few things myself. I play RPGs. I refuse to let a computer sully that experience (outside of sometimes using it for the rule book since getting rule books to China is prohibitively expensive). Physical table. Physical dice. Pencil and paper. Friends sharing the same physical space.

I use fountain pens for all my writing needs, eschewing even ballpoint, and I even sometimes use dip pens in anger. And I play woodwinds, not electronic instruments.

zdl, 12 hours ago

@johnmark @skinnylatte I just mute them as they cross my stream.

Sometimes I use the trigger words to out them so I can mute them earlier on in the cycle.

zdl, 12 hours ago

@12thRITS @skinnylatte This is the wire recorder staring at you with puppy dog eyes: 👀

zdl, 12 hours ago

@fifilamoura @skinnylatte As someone who still uses dip pens for writing sometimes, I agree with this entirely.

Sure more modern pens (like fountain pens) are more convenient for just writing non-stop, but a dip pen forces a rhythm to the writing with a little physical ritual of dipping, writing, and blotting that gives you little bursts of time to think while you're writing.

It literally changes the outcome because of the medium, despite it being superficially the same activity: handwriting.

zdl, 12 hours ago

@12thRITS @skinnylatte I think there was some (I'm positive I've heard of a Tom Lehrer recording on wire), but it wasn't that common. The home entertainment wire recorders were mostly used for people to entertain themselves. Those who wanted to be entertained bought discs.

zdl, 12 hours ago

@12thRITS @skinnylatte And here it (supposedly) is! (I'm having network problems so can't get to it right now to verify.)

ww3.haverford.edu/physics-astro/songs/lehrer/physrev.htm

Apparently the only known live recording of Woodie Guthrie is also a wire recording.