Country music is locked in an ideological valence, it has no room for anything other than right-wing dogma, usually expressed through bro-country anthems of drinking and pretty girls and pick-up trucks. The genre basically kicked out progressive singers like Kacey Musgraves, even as she released multiple critically acclaimed and successful albums. And there isn’t much room for female country artists right now; in 2022 there was one ONE female solo country artist (Miranda Lambert) that managed to crack the top 100 country songs on country radio. Only two others scored hits by recording duets with male country singers. All the rest were male acts. There just isn’t a future for female country artists right now.

Maren Morris has a good voice and great songwriting chops, she already proved she can cross over with “The Middle,” so this seems like a logical move.

small indie games

Same here, they’re like a palate cleanser, and they fit a busier schedule better than a 200+ hour open-world immersive experience. There’s a place for each, but I really have become fond of pleasant little indie games.

This was a pretty weird article. I understand her frustration in learning the language, I’ve done it before and it’s rough. And I understand her frustration with not having support from the military due to her status, as well as the natural human experience of being far from family and missing home. But those aren’t Germany problems, those are either universal in any place you might move to, or they are the products of her own choices.

It also seems obvious that she brings her North American assumptions with her and is partly disappointed that Germany isn’t more like what she’s used to. She mentions driving, but yeah, it’s expensive to drive in Germany. If she chose a small town to live in that didn’t have good access to transit, that might be necessary, but it’s part of the cost of living there. She mentions big box store shopping, which made me laugh out loud, that’s a very North American perspective and even in the U.S. a lot of people would disagree.

Are there cultures more welcoming than Germany? Probably. My German isn’t great, I’ve definitely been criticized for my accent and lack of vocabulary. It felt harsh, but it was also true, and they weren’t impolite about it. Is it a reasonable expectation to land in a place and get free language lessons and be welcomed with open arms? Not really, and I would note that Americans probably wouldn’t do that either. Heck, in some parts of the country, your welcome would be considerably less polite.

It really was unlike anything made then or now. The hand-painted backgrounds were so campy and fun, and the costumes and colors were just as outlandish as in the comic, but it went full-bore on the violence and stunts. The case is phenomenal—pretty much everyone but Warren Beatty is amazing—but even Beatty deserves the credit for bringing it to the screen, it was a labor of love for him. I love that it was made, I saw it again last year and it was better than I remembered.

I don’t know if that’s something that can be done in one session, but I have a group of friends that have been playing Divinity: Original Sin 2 every week for a couple months now, and they really enjoy it.

Man, this is deeply dystopian. While state and federal regulators are having a conniption about TikTok/ByteDance gathering information on Americans, that same information is hoovered up by all the other social media companies and freely sold by data brokers. The response should be sweeping privacy legislation and regulatory reform, but I have very little confidence that will happen in the near future.

It’s the niche stuff that made Reddit useful. For example, Amazon reviews are no longer trustworthy, but there were really good recommendations in reddit threads about which devices or products worked. The DIY subreddits were incredibly helpful. I got good recommendations for motorcycle tires and ultralight backpacking gear and Android apps and hotels in particular destinations from reddit. I got walkthroughs on how to set up a Plex server or do a particular project with a Raspberry Pi on reddit. With so many subs, there was almost always a thread for what I was looking for. That was the value. I expect it will take a while to rebuild that elsewhere, but I’m sure it will be recreated.

My amateur opinion: Apple makes beautiful and thoughtful devices that are tightly integrated into a system of services that work well. But I don’t use them, mostly because of the closed nature of that ecosystem, and also because they are consistently more expensive. Back when you could jailbreak and sideload apps on iPhones, I had a series of iPhones and they were pretty good phones, although iTunes always sucked. While they were around, iPods were clever. But I preferred to buy music from a variety of places, I wanted to install apps that I wanted and not what were available on the App Store, and I really didn’t like the user-hostile decisions Apple made to sell more hardware. Getting rid of the headphone jack was one of the worst decisions to me, as was Apple’s dogmatic refusal to use USB-C until European regulators recently forced the change.