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loops

@ipsomaniac

i dump stuff here

Everyone may *think* they hate country music, but when Jolene, Before He Cheats, Take Me Home Country Roads, or Life is a Highway comes on, everyone is suddenly a liar.

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I know this is a funny post but

There are a few major points in Country Music’s history that got the entire genre labeled as ‘annoying’

  • Post 9/11 nationalism
  • A term that I couldn’t make up “Bro-Country” which intensifies themes of booze, objectifying women, and partying that were present in past decades but not to such an extent
  • This is Gospel Music But With an Accent

Now looking at the songs op listed there is

  • A woman pleading to another woman
  • A woman wrecking a shitheads life
  • A guy loving the scenery of where he lived
  • A song that could easily be mistaken for a number of other genres

But it is easier to say that one hates country while privately enjoying select songs than explain why one doesn’t like the current market oversaturated with our nation’s problems of nationalism, sexism, and so on

see also jhonny cash/willie nelson era songs which were deeply emotional stories often about painful and deep subjects. prison, loss of loved ones, hard labor, facing despair, passion. ‘ghost riders in the sky’ and the like are also deeply satisfying as they bridge more into folklore then ‘murica fuck yeah im sponsored by bud light yall’ another example- ‘midnight in montgomery’ where hank williams junior sings about the ghost of his father

“ … And felt the wind die down, And a drunk man in a cowboy hat, Took me by surprise, Wearin’ shiny boots, a nudie suit, and haunted, haunted eyes, He said: “Friend, it’s good to see you, It’s nice to know you care” Then the wind picked up and he was gone, Was he ever really there? ‘Cause when the wind is right, You’ll hear his song, Smell whisky in the air, Midnight in Montgomery, He’s always singin’ there, “ the reason we ‘hate country’ is because we know its supposed to have FEELING and its infuriatingly absent now

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ultralaser

70s country - bluegrass traditional

80s country - power ballads

90s country - pop crossover

00s country - white supremacy

it’s about the folkloric story-telling tradition of oppressed poor folks vs marketable capitalistic ass-kissing.

Yes. So much yes. See Dolly Parton and Wille Nelson and Johnny Cash sing about something real and they mean it and they are amazing. Modern country with some rare exceptions doesn’t start with something meaningful to say, it analyzes the market trends to figures out what will sell and then they do that. That or it just plain caters to white nationalists.

But there’s some damn good country out there. It’s just crowded out by utter garbage written and performed by sell-outs.

Can confirm.

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“Curses” by The Crane Wives is a great song, and I legitimately have trouble singing along to it because I choke up at a couple lines.

…though I do tend to listen to it at 125% speed.

Oh I love that song!

Colter Wall and Corb Lund also understand the assignment! Dig Gravedigger Dig; Horse Soldier, Horse Soldier; The Devil Wears a Suit and Tie; Sleeping on the Blacktop: all bangers. Even Poor Man’s Poison, who got really popular for a minute via memes, consistently puts out good songs because they mean something!

I have new music added to playlists now

I would like to add a recommendation for my close personal friend and amazing musician, the First Lady of Queer Country, Cindy Emch aka the Secret Emchy Society.

anyone here heard of ageism 

it’s just wild how this society with its industries and culture so blatantly fear and abhor women who get older! and how terrified ageing women ourselves are of simply existing. the language of anti-ageing is inescapable. if i lost my career and needed one of the low-wage jobs i worked throughout my 20s and 30s, it would be nearly impossible to get hired into one. this is so obvious as a facet of misogyny, but it really hides in plain sight until you experience it yourself. (and i’m only in my early 40s! not yet discarded by this society to the extent that elderly people are.) i’m afraid this baby got thrown out with the bathwater of second wave feminism 

girls. they want to us to feel terrorized by “premature ageing” (this is such a funny nonsense phrase) while the ruling class burns our world down

Oh, I love this an inordinate amount.

This guy covers children's songs in the style of various artists, and he's incredible.

I'm weirdly emotional about it?

This is amazing!

This is the exact opposite energy of the "what happens after the camera cuts and you've destroyed you labtop for 5 seconds of entertainment"

This guy not only wrote a whole song but dressed up and FILMED it! For what! For 1 and a half seconds of MY entertainment! That must have been HOURS of shooting and editing! I'm touched, this is art

Anonymous asked:

I know I'm very late to this compared to everyone here (I'm 30) but I just finished reading the odyssey for the first time and I'm... my heart can't handle it. I already want to read it again. Why did I get to this this late? Anyway, I wanted to ask if you have any recommendations for interesting articles or other books about Odysseus, apart from the Iliad? And Penelope, of course. I just love them. I'm asking you 'cause I saw your posts about Odysseus and Calypso / Circe, and found them very interesting and insightful! Thanks in advance

There's no bad time in your life to read the Odyssey for the first time! I'm so glad you found your way to it and enjoyed it!

In terms of books and articles about the Odyssey, I've been out of the academic world for long enough that I feel like I'm no longer a particularly good source of advice, but I'll toss out a few old favorites:

  • the film O Brother Where Art Thou - a retelling of the Odyssey set in the Deep South during the Great Depression
  • the novel the Penelopiad by Margaret Atwood - a feminist retelling of the Odyssey from Penelope's point of view
  • technically it's more about the Iliad, but Somewhere I Have Never Travelled by Thomas Van Nortwick is a scholarly work that's informed my thinking on Homeric storytelling a lot

And I found some articles on the Odyssey that look fascinating freely accessible (no login needed) on JSTOR! Since some of these are public domain, they may not closely track modern scholarship, but if you're just kinda vibing with the Odyssey right now and are looking for more food for thought on the subject, this ought to get you going in interesting directions.

Rose, Peter W. “Ambivalence and Identity in the Odyssey.” Sons of the Gods, Children of Earth: Ideology and Literary Form in Ancient Greece, Cornell University Press, 1995, pp. 92–140. JSTOR, http://www.jstor.org/stable/10.7591/j.ctvn1tbcw.6. Accessed 14 May 2023.

Coulter, Cornelia C. “The Happy Otherworld and Fairy Mistress Themes in the Odyssey.” Transactions and Proceedings of the American Philological Association, vol. 56, 1925, pp. 37–53. JSTOR, https://doi.org/10.2307/282883. Accessed 14 May 2023.

KAMUF, PEGGY. “Penelope at Work.” Signature Pieces: On the Institution of Authorship, Cornell University Press, 1988, pp. 145–74. JSTOR, http://www.jstor.org/stable/10.7591/j.ctt207g60p.11. Accessed 14 May 2023.

Bassett, Samuel E. “The Proems of the Iliad and the Odyssey.” The American Journal of Philology, vol. 44, no. 4, 1923, pp. 339–48. JSTOR, https://doi.org/10.2307/289255. Accessed 14 May 2023.

Gregory, Andrew. “Circe: An Extract from Homer’s Odyssey (c. 900–800 BCE).” Women in the History of Science: A Sourcebook, edited by Hannah Wills et al., UCL Press, 2023, pp. 23–34. JSTOR, https://doi.org/10.2307/j.ctv2w61bc7.11. Accessed 14 May 2023.

Also, if you liked the Odyssey, I think you'll love Greek tragedy! I recommend starting with Sophocles' Electra, Sophocles' Oedipus the King, Aeschylus' Oresteia, and maybe Euripedes' the Trojan Women.

Thanks for the ask, and happy reading!

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“Three swans in flight”, 1945, by David Lloyd Evans (b. 1916)

signed and dated 'I Lloyd Evans-1945' (upper left)

coloured chalks on buff paper

24 ½ × 18 ½ in. (62.2 × 47 cm.)

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We wanted to have that ending of: is the man flying or is he falling? Thomas always wanted to see me dance. I haven’t done that for 25-odd years, maybe 30 now. I was very lucky from the get-go. I don’t mind dancing, that’s not the case, but I wanted it to be heightened like a magical moment, like a dream sequence. Like he saw himself dancing immaculately, but when the rest the rest of the crowd saw him it was not that cool. It was kind of pathetic.

Mads Mikkelsen in Another Round 2020, dir. Thomas Vinterberg

hey i just wanted to say thanks for still expressing positive sentiments towards homestuck even after all this time. most BNFs aren't creating fanworks as much anymore (no one could maintain that intensity forever tbh!) but when they completely divorce themselves from that part of their life it's just... those creations brought a lot of joy, and it's extra sad when they feel the need to go scorched earth. i'm happy your works are still around and i really do wish you all the best going forward!

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i think a lot of us abandoned homestuck because of two factors: the first was the collapse of the proudly sex-positive fandom space that let us be weird and creative without fear or shame, and the second was the fact that homestuck ended, then launched several epilogues, in a way that seemed specifically designed to mock fans for caring.

like, some very dark, sad, awful things seemed to happen to hussie, and he certainly did not have a good time with his own fandom. but from the perspective of someone in the audience, if a show i love turns on me and starts directly insulting me for loving it, caring for it, and hoping for the best, i get up and leave the theater.

'isn't it horrible to be the hero? aren't stories just prisons? isn't love ultimately meaningless? isn't hope the main driver of tragedy?' sure, fine. yeah. you're not the first man to ask these questions. they're big damn questions!

'aren't you stupid for sitting there and watching me ask these questions? because the answer is that i'm an idiot for asking them and you're twice an idiot for thinking that the answers might be worth the wait.' now you're just being an asshole to yourself, your story, and your audience. im taking my toys and going home.

homestuck was a brilliant, fascinating, unprecedented monument to storycraft... and it ended like a sandcastle getting kicked over by a toddler. that, to me, is the central tragedy of the piece.

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One idea for a potential solution (though I’m not sure what we’d do until then as since some if not all of the after-the-ending material wasn’t technically official as it wasn’t technically made by him, you can’t have an “unofficial sequel” try to make itself “here’s what actually happened” without acknowledging what we got being on the same level of canonicity if both are given any higher weight than any other given fanfic) is if Homestuck could be visual-media-adaptable at all, try to make a show that fixes the plot but has some of the plot threads added to fix things basically meta-symbolize why we’re fixing it for these reasons (y’know, the fixing having as much weird meta-resonance about the nature of fiction as the breaking)

i politely but STRONGLY disagree: you can’t fix homestuck. it was finished in such a way as to deliberately break it and leave it broken and have that brokenness stand as a monument to the waste of it all.

you can not fix homestuck because it is, by its nature, on every level, a story about the futility of stories, and a story about breaking stories, and a story about how stories break the people inside them and outside them and trying to escape from them and watching helpless from outside.

in every act, from every perspective, the story breaks. it breaks the fourth wall. it breaks the timeline. it betrays its own premises repeatedly, it breaks promises, it subverts expectations and then subverts those subversions. it contradicts itself and laughs at you for expecting honesty. it sets characters up and drops them to shatter. it tells you that this time maybe you’ll kick the football and then it eats the football.

you can’t fix homestuck because it does not want you to. it would be like trying to fix a smashed egg with a dead chicken while the kitchen’s on fire. you’re trying to do something that’s too late, that’s always been too late.

like, this is the insane power of this fantastic, bewildering tragedy: it is so broken that it breaks your heart. ten years later you still want to fix it, and you couldn’t then and you won’t now. two vast and trunkless legs of stone lie in the desert and on their shattered pedestal is a dick joke that hates you personally.

incredible piece of work. 0/10 stars. 10/10 stars. and a fist full of penis.