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)

Well, yeah, it’s normal.

When you find goodness in the world, and it shares a common denominator, it is perfectly normal to develop some degree or another of affection/attachment for that common denominator. You don’t have to be depressed for that, it just makes it easier.

It can turn into an unhealthy obsession, and it’s possible that the motivations may not be without strings (cults and such), but those aren’t going to be the case every time.

Like, for me, I have a deep and abiding love for gay culture, specifically gay male culture, because of how much love I have received from that subculture. That has expanded over the years to embrace the entire rainbow of the LGBTQ+ community (with some extra affection for my trans folks). You go for a while needing acceptance and open appreciation, you’re going to end up returning it when a specific group is where you find it.

Truth is that the more sub a subculture is, the more likely the people in it are to be outsiders in some way. Maybe marginalized, maybe just atypical; but whether they were individually outsiders that found solidarity, or they became such by joining the subculture, outsiders have a tendency to be at least a little more accepting of other outsiders (though you run into some weird shit where you get schisms sometimes).

And it can be local. As an example, I’ve had universally great interactions with juggalos in my area, but they can be major dicks in other places. As another, furries tend to be really chill with non furries that accept them but can have bitter faction wars with each other.

Don’t let yourself get sucked into any cult shit, but otherwise find the goodness of humanity wherever you can, and enjoy it. Nothing wrong with that

Of course, at least under normal circumstances.

Like humans or wild animals, a pet is going to have their full sensory array available. Even a blind and deaf animal can pick up vibrations as someone approaches then, feel changes in air movement, etc.

Since hands are different sizes, even if they were asleep at the moment of contact, it wouldn’t take long to figure out whose hand was on them. Obviously , that might be negated if the hands are similar enough, but I would suspect that even then the differences in how a person pets them would be useful.

You could likely create a situation to bypass everything and “fool” a pet, but that’s what you’d have to do.

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

It always kinda amazes me how little interaction there is across generations.

The hippies and such that were part of the pre-eighties boomer counterculture movements are still there. Most of those don’t look the part, but still hold the same beliefs.

Some just grew the fuck up, had families, and no longer had the energy to sustain a life of protest. A lot of what drove that era’s visible counterculture was youthful energy. Young idealists eventually hit a wall where no matter what their beliefs are, they’re limited by reality in how much time, effort, and resources they can put towards their cause.

But there’s also the fact that every generation is diverse. You’ll have the edges, where you find the most vehement people, but the majority are going to just not give a fuck as long as they can live with acceptable levels of hassle. In that laundry majority, you’ll find the folks that agree with a given principle, but can’t/won’t do anything about it. They will, however, give lip service.

That’s boomers, Xers, millennials, Z, Alpha, whatever age range you want to point at. You’ll still have the vehement and loud, but as they age up, there’s less of their age peers jumping on the bandwagon.

Then, the next age group comes along and wants an enemy. That enemy is going to be the establishment because establishment is the thing we all are forced to live in. It’s the default, the status quo. And that means the previous generations that are in that majority that are just trying to live and survive are part of that establishment. So you get the bullshit generational warfare. Which, once you live long enough, and/or look back at history enough, you discover happens every generation. There’s always a struggle of some kind because there’s always some degree of power imbalance created just by surviving long enough to accrue knowledge/resources.

This is phenomenon relied on by power brokers. The 1%, if you want to look at it that way. The folks that have control of enough resources that they essentially control everyone’s lives.

It isn’t about killing the idea. It’s about making it known that some shit erases you as being allowed to exist.

That way, even when it does crop up, everyone knows exactly what will happen.

The only good nazi is a dead nazi.

Not important to me. I dig the skullet I have, and the shape of my head works for me overall.

Plus, my beard is fucking epic :)

I love that reference :)

Used to be my grandfather.

The man had magnificent salt & pepper hair right up to his death, though the salt was well into taking over in his late seventies. Absolutely amazing hair. Alas, the genes for male pattern baldness hit me because that’s how it works.

Nah, as long as it isn’t significantly different, all that matters is that it isn’t going to irritate and rub.

Mind you, the more of a difference there is, the less comfortable it’s going to be in shoes, no matter what material it is.

You might run into the patch job wearing the surrounding fabric out faster if there’s a decent difference as well, but it isn’t like something that thin is going to last very long once a hole appears anyway.

Pretty much, yeah, though it doesn’t have to be low, iirc. It can come from higher in the throat, and thus sound higher pitched as well.

Isn’t that a version of fry?

Yeah, it’ll be a while yet

Mostly only instrumentals. I suck at singing, but it brings me joy, So I do it anyway.

That being said, there’s a few I can’t really sing along to most of. If we were vampires, by Jason isbell is one. There’s parts I can follow, but most of the song, my voice just breaks on, so I more just hum along with, or mouth the lyrics.

Fuck, I don’t even know for sure.

I think it was for a patient back in the early to mid nineties. I’m dubious on which patient, and whether or not that was the first time or just the first I remember.

If it’s the one I think, the guy had a stroke, and I knew pretty much right away what was going on, so I was dialing before I got to him (this was pre-cell phone ubiquity, so it was a cordless phone via landline). It’s kinda muddy in memory now, what with about two decades of other patients in similar situations, but I recall thinking “fuck, fuck, fuck” a lot while I was moving to him, and my heart pounding with the adrenaline of it.

Dude survived, and even partially recovered before another took him out.

However, it’s possible he wasn’t the first, and I’m mixing things up. But I’m mostly confident that I had never needed to use the service until I was working home health. Those early years blur really hard nowadays. I used to remember most of the patient’s names, stories they told, etc, but there’s rarely been opportunity to call on those memories, so they’ve faded.

Until I started having health issues of my own in my late thirties, I had never called 911 for anyone but a patient that I can recall. Even when I would witness something like a car wreck, someone else was already calling by the time I’d have been able to.

Generally though, since it was on the job, I was mostly focused on giving clear, concise information to expedite a fast and appropriate response. You default to training and let things go on autopilot so you can handle both the call and whatever help you’re providing. Like, you can’t think through CPR while also giving info to a dispatcher, monitoring the patient, and stuffing the emotional side of things down. There’s no room for thinking in any appreciable way.

I did have the fucking Beegees running through my head at one point though lol. Caught myself almost singing underneath the panting I was doing while trying to keep the pace up because all the instructors back then would use “staying alive” as the perfect rhythm for chest compressions.

That was still better than the first time I ever had to do CPR, but that’s a different subject.

Anyway, yeah, that’s what it was like that time, and I think it was the first.

I also remember the dispatcher having to ask me to repeat things because CPR is hard fucking exercise lol.

Thing is, most of the times i had to call 911 on the job were kinda dull? Heart attacks, falls, strokes, when you’re following procedures and are providing the kind of care you trained for, it doesn’t hit the same as when something is outside your training. Something like a plane crash, I’d have no clue what to do, so I expect I’d be wound up like a stolen watch. But basic first aid, CPR, that kind of thing, there’s not usually a reason to get worked up. It’s one of those things where the knowledge and familiarity really do make something that’s a major event on one hand just another day at work. You do the job, you do CPR and get EMS on the way, and then you go home.

There’s stuff that happened on the job that I never even mentioned when I’d get home because why would I? It was “just” another bad thing that got handled and was over. My best friend, it was only a few weeks ago that I mentioned having had human flesh fly in my mouth and get swallowed. You’d think I’d have had a story to tell when I got home, but nope. It happened, it was over, and I just wanted to chill and watch some tv, or play some d&d.

It’s fucking weird how my brain compartmentalized/s stuff like that. There’s this section that got labeled “weird work shit” that would only get pulled out when story time happened, and that wasn’t very common by that point.

It took really heavy shit for me to get home and want to talk about it. And by the time I was doing home health I had burnt out once or twice already in the nursing homes, so my threshold for heavy had shifted. You see enough death and misery, you don’t really get het up over a heart attack or stroke. So I don’t have many clear recollections of the 911 calls on the job.

Now, some of the other ones? Like when my parents had their heart attacks, or when I thought I was, those hit different. Mind you, I still compartmentalized the fuck out of it during the event, but I broke down hard once things were out of my hands. The 911 calls though, I was icy as fuck.

Tangential, but in the ER when a nurse was taking me back to my dad, she said that I seemed to be handling it really well because I cracked a joke of some kind. I didn’t even think, and said I was faking it until I could fall apart, which was the truth. I had crammed all the fear and worry down into a box in the corner so I could handle shit. And handle shit I did.

Then I went home and fell apart lol.

Human stupidty and arrogance.

Even when I share the purported beliefs of someone, the vast majority of people are so fucking smug and insistent on being right, that discussing politics ain’t likely with me.

Then, you run into the fact that people tend to treat it like an identity and just mouth what they think they’re supposed to believe without ever actually thinking about it. It isn’t even just the people that are raised in one party/bloc/whatever and stick with it. Even the ones that change allegiance tend to treat it as some kind of granfaloon, but not the harmless kind. Shit, that’s that case with unaffiliated people too, it isn’t limited to party members.

Like, yeah, we all think we’re right, but when that turns into smug self aggrandizement, fuck that.

That’s the shit that bothers me about politics, that people can’t just fucking chill and vote their conscience, they gotta be right, and feel superior about it.

That may not seem to be the kind of thing you’re asking about, but it’s one of the sessions those abysmal laws happen.

So it goes