If drum nerd stuff interests you, I humbly recommend EMCProductions on YouTube. He has several Guiness World Records related to drumming.

The wage slavery became very obvious when they tied health insurance to our employers, if not before then. There's a throughline of chattel slavery, feudalism, indentured servitude, wage slavery. Obviously some are far worse than others. But it's the same basic idea, "we own you".

The duck thing was a cute little idea someone had that was kind of nice and organic and then of course the internet does what it does and turned it into some weird competitive flex.

Car stereotypes are a little questionable. I mean, some of them make sense. For example, why spend all that money to buy and maintain a BMW when it's just a kinda-sorta-OK car and not considered at all special in Germany, its country of origin. I've heard they handle great, and maybe that's true, but how much 'sporty driving' are you doing stuck in traffic, really?

And way too many Americans drive pickup trucks. I estimate maybe 20% of them actually need a fucking pickup truck. 80% of them are a waste of gas and are passing far inferior collision safety rules. Ford was maybe on to something with the EV F-150...but then dealerships didn't want them because they are greedy and knew that EVs require far less maintenance. Is there anything more 'Murican than that kind of bullshit.

Nissan drivers catch a lot of hate. But it's just a cheap common car, so naturally there are a lot of them on the road. We tend to remember the ones that do something stupid, and don't remember the ones that drive normally and are boring (selection bias). I started paying attention to this for a while, and for every Nissan with a busted bumper / fender I see, I see a lot more of them that don't have one of those.

As for Jeeps, I don't have a lot (of intelligent things) to say. Back in the day it was the "outdoorsy" people and "mudder" weekend warrior types that mostly drove them. Some of them were genuinely those things and some of them were just pretending to be on Facebook. I don't know who drives them now. I will say one of the most arrogant & useless people at my last job drove a Jeep. It had the ducks, and a some douchey "attitude" type stickers, and a vanity plate.

You could make your page what you wanted. You could browse and search it the way you wanted.

Modern platforms do things to you while pretending to do them for you.

I attempt to only talk about these things with IRL friends. When our opinions disagree, we're all nice about it. When we agree, it's really fun to geek out on it together.

Even when we disagree, it can be fun to hear the reasons why. Because we don't attack each other over personal preferences.

But trying to do that online? Nah. Tis a silly place.

That really did seem like a major cultural turning point, and I was watching it from the outside.

I already watch 3 of those, so I will definitely check out CuriousMarc next. Thanks for the recommendation!

Been calling him out as a creep to my friends for many years. He still has his Flavor Aid drinkers, and probably always will. Some people are suckers for his fake positivity and dude bro tech enthusiasm. It's refreshing to see the hate.

Rise and grind...a stump.

If Thanos snapped his fingers and sent all of the marketing MBAs to "Planet Marketing"...nobody would fucking miss them. Nobody.

Aprons are great.

I should probably get one.

2009 = "two thousand nine" (or "twenty oh-nine" if you're a time traveler from a previous century).

2026 = "twenty twenty-six".

If you say "two thousand AND twenty-six"...I assume you probably write your name in your underwear.

There's a restaurant I go to once in a while (it's out of my way) that consistently makes excellent fries that are a magical. They thick, are long-cut fries with a bit of skin and a hint of edge crispiness. But overall they are kind of limp and soft. The occasional smaller "runt" fries are very crispy, but the longer thicker fries are wonderfully limp and they taste like actual potatoes.
They are not greasy.

Too many fast-food French fries don't taste like actual potatoes to me. They taste like some kind of synthetic starch compound, almost like a Pringles or some shit.

If you like the Beatles and trippy/weird song lyrics, check out Klaatu

And then he did a line of cocaine with Hegseth, the two of them held hands (no homo), and they drove off a bridge in a Humvee.

Agreed. And at this point people should say all recent years as "twenty-twenty-six", etc. The few people who still insist on saying "two-thousand and" make me grind my teeth.

It's Trump-fuckery all the way down.

Olive Kitteridge by Strout. The Things They Carried by O'Brien.

Whoever came up with this has probably always used 'optics first, actual results last' in their shitty career so far.