#Fuck the CMAs

[wizardtributedauntlessmaximoff]

Anyone still mad a year later that Lainey Wilson won Entertainer of the Year at the CMAs before Carrie Underwood?

Like I love Lainey, but Carrie deserved it by the time she released her debut album Some Hearts. Not to mention they gave it to Lainey, when she hasn’t done half of what Carrie has managed to do. It’s crazy that the Grammy’s show more respect to her than the Country Music Association. All they gave it to this year is an opening act. And Carrie Underwood was an opening act too. For Guns N’ Roses. Not to mention she had her own Denim And Rhinestones album and tour, and her Las Vegas Residency. Not to mention the NBC Sunday Night Football theme.

I refuse to watch the CMAs this year.

[snail-friend]

Not my boy! noooooooo!

[sbrown82]

The way Beyoncé is constantly DISRESPECTED!!!

[cyarsk52-20]

Im just going to leave this here… 😊

CMA Awards 2024 viewership: 6mil Bey’s Halftime Show viewership: 27mil

[mariamariquinha]

Just so you know, "She didn't embrace the genre" is a way of saying, "She's just black and we don't like it."

[freakystinky]

OP is being a wet sock in the comments for some bizarre reason, so since I’m U.S. based here’s a link to all the United States requirements for relicensing physicians because I think it’s an imperative resource for chronically ill and disabled people to have:

Due to individual states deciding these requirements, they’re obviously insanely varied. This impacts the way that patient care is delivered SIGNIFICANTLY, especially in physicians who have stayed in the same states and have been meeting those lower standards for many years, compounding their paucity of knowledge and lowering the quality of care their patients can receive.

Generally, 50hrs/yr is the average, with retesting every 1-4yrs, but some states such as Alabama, Mississippi, and Louisiana have them at 20hrs/yr or lower.

This means, that over only 8 years of practice, an MD in Washington state (50 hrs/yr) has obtained up to 304 more credit hours than an MD in Alabama (12 hrs/yr).

You’ll also notice that states with the lowest CME requirements (highlighted) also happen to make up the states with the highest maternal mortality rates…

That correlation aside, we KNOW that CE is incredibly important, and that doctors with CE have better patient outcomes. The fact that the US doesn’t have federal regulations regarding this is just plain embarrassing (source).

The system is dysfunctional and things like this are probably costing peoples lives. We need to talk more about it; the first step to improving it is creating awareness that this stuff does exist, it’s just not as effective as it should be. As patients deserve it to be.

Relicensing is already real and a requirement, what we need to do is make it functional and regulated using our votes.

I'm so extremely serious when I say doctors should be put through an extremely extensive reliscensing process every 10 years. Doctors should have their knowledge scrutinized against current medical research and be de-barred at even the tiniest discrepancy. Too many old doctors absolutely refuse to stay up to date on research and dismiss patients because of their personal experiences. Too many people die every year because doctors don't take us seriously and refuse to listen to people who KNOW something is wrong. Too many people are told their problems are nothing and come back in a year or more with serious illnesses and doctors are just like "lol everyone makes mistakes" but doctors mistakes routinely cost people their lives! I'm tired of medical malpractice being swept away under the guise of "mistakes were made."

[sensitivegoblin]

Vent

[theinfinitedivides]

we love racism!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! (derogatory)

[lyricsandpapers]

Might i be drunk? Yes. And?

[strawberrysweater]

i wish i could just have one less thing to worry about closing in on 3 weeks left in the semester i need an internship i've only gotten 2 interviews i am dangerously close to having to drop out. all my work will be for nothing if i dont get a job i literally will not graduate if i don't get one and then my life will be over

[oeuvrinarydurian]

Everybody’s choices have been terrific. Hundred percent Millie Bagshot, hundred percent Charles Highbank, and I agree with you, his performance was absolutely pitch perfect. I’m immensely moved every time I watch his dinner scene with Mrs. Armstrong - his eyeshadow and scarf worn without comment in a safe space like her flat, he’s so himself. I get choked up.

Evans would have chemistry with a rock, so I can’t help but think back to characters like Alice Vexin and Pat what’s her name from “Game“, both of whom he had crazy chemistry with. 

Of course, I thought he had such great chemistry with Gillian Nicholls from “Terminus” that I wrote a 50,000-word fiction about the two of them. 

One of the things that keeps the show so engaging and that it does so exceptionally well is cast people even with a handful of lines. 

Just for comedy, though, I’m gonna go with…

Cousin Carol.

Somebody posted a few weeks ago that she should’ve wound up with Strange, and I’m sorry, I can’t remember who you are, but it would’ve been splendid to have her come back. I was even thinking of writing a fic where she does.

With a baby in tow.

Ahem. 

Favorite one-episode characters?

The love for Eve Thorne got me wondering, what other one-episode characters would you happily have seen more of?

For me it's this guy, Charles Highbank. He was such a good friend and had a very moving backstory. Scenes without the main cast can cause me to zone out a little at times, but whenever this man was on screen I was entertained. Was sad to learn while looking him up that the actor, Adrian Schiller, died earlier this year.

I also found this character memorable. She had great chemistry with Morse. I felt like she'd be a fun match for him, similar to Joan but more self-assured, and despite her small role she honestly seemed more fully rounded as a character than Claudine.

[alexanderwales]

One of the more pointlessly frustrating things that ever happened to me was getting an email that told me I was switching cell phone carriers. The email just said "Notice: Your Verizon Wireless service is transitioning to AT&T". This was back in 2010, when that was a slightly bigger deal, since LTE wasn't widely available in the United States at the time. Verizon was using one standard, AT&T was using the other, and most phones could not switch between the two because they required fundamentally different hardware.

The email said that they were going to get me a new phone, and that my Verizon plan would become an AT&T plan in some kind of bastardized version of grandfathering, without changing the rate I was paying.

It did not explain to me why this was happening, or how, and I didn't find out until later, in spite of a few emails inquiring what the fuck they thought they were doing.

This was the biggest pain in the ass I have ever experienced. I was one of a group of people this was happening to, but it was a small group of mostly rural customers, and between the time I'd signed up with Verizon and when the switch happened, I had moved away from where virtually all the other customers were. I had no way of knowing this at the time, but it meant that when I went to the AT&T store, they had not had any training whatsoever in what was supposed to happen. They didn't believe me until I showed them the documentation, and even then, I think they were a little skeptical. Managers were called.

Eventually I got it sorted out, but it was even more complicated than it needed to be because my dad had been the one to sign me up for the phone (I was in college at the time) and his name was the one on the account. He lived four hours away from me, and AT&T did not seem to know what to do about this whole thing.

But I did, eventually, learn how and why I was being made to switch carriers.

What had happened is that back in 2008, two years prior, Verizon announced that it was set to acquire Alltel. This would have created a monopoly (Alltel and Verizon were significant competitors), so the FCC required that part of Alltel would be spun off into its own company that would remain independent in order to ensure that there was market competition, particularly in rural areas. AT&T then snapped up some of the remaining pieces of Alltel. In theory this should not have affected me, because I was a Verizon customer, not an Alltel or AT&T customer.

So what happened to me was more complicated.

As background, the FCC divides cell phone markets into Cellular Market Areas (CMAs), which are then either Metropolitan Statistical Areas (MSAs) or Rural Service Areas (RSAs). There are about 750 total CMAs in the United States.

Back in 2005, Alltel acquired Midwest Wireless Holdings. There was a consent decree in 2006 that required them to divest markets that would have been anticompetitive, and four of those RSAs were then snatched up by Rural Cellular Corporation. Rural Cellular was then bought by Verizon in 2009.

So there was one single RSA, out of 750 in the United States, which was covered by the Alltel/Midwest consent decree and the Alltel/Verizon consent decree, and for all this merger madness to go ahead, it was agreed that Verizon could acquire everything in that RSA conditional on "prompt redivestiture" to a buyer approved by the DOJ. Most of these customers would go from being Alltel customers to being customers of someone else, not Verizon, but Verizon did also have to give up some of their own original customers.

Here is the punchline: the Department of Justice, in order to promote competition in the free market, forced me to change carriers to someone I did not choose for myself. Like if I was about to go to Burger King and they forced me to go to McDonald's instead so that there would be "fair competition". Absolutely ludicrous, at least from my perspective.

Anyway, this was all back in 2010, so ... thanks, Obama.

[mariacallous]

Ticketmaster has a dream. A dream that one day, it will be “pleased to have partnered with” your child’s school, making it “easier for you to buy tickets” to the nativity play. Which will henceforth be known as the nativity experience. But listen – Ticketmaster wants to make the whole process run more smoothly, freeing you up to connect with the performers you love (your kids) while being “gifted” the paper cup that forms part of the package in these platinum seats (the tiny chairs from the classroom).

No, none of the standard seat tickets are still available. But you can upgrade to the ultimate VIP package, meaning you have access to the Bethlehem lounge (the reception reading corner) an hour before the event. If you want to experience magic this Christmas, do remember to clear all cookies, have only one tab open, and prepare nevertheless to be ejected from the queue four hours in after being accused of being a computer, by a computer.

So yes: Ticketmaster. After the Oasis tickets horror show last weekend, the row about the ticketing website this week developed into such a horror show that you could probably sell tickets to it. And if you could, Ticketmaster surely would, having previously handled ticketing for such fan-facing events as the crucifixion and French Revolution guillotinings (mandatory purchase from one of our knitting concessions). Sadly, the Competition and Markets Authority (CMA) doesn’t seem to recognise that rich heritage, opting to launch an investigation into Ticketmaster over Oasis ticket sales, “including how so-called ‘dynamic pricing’ may have been used”. Sarcastic scare-quotes: the CMA’s own.

I’m not saying the ticketing websites are quite simply the worst people in the world, even though I’d quite like to provoke Ticketmaster’s lawyer into writing a cease-and-desist letter listing much worse people from the 20th and 21st centuries. Listen, I already love this notional lawyer. Like a lot of people who draw a salary in his stratum of reality-laundering, he possibly tells himself he works in respectable business, but may be better off informing his parents he works in a more popular trade, like puppy-drowning or journalism.

Now, there are some companies in this world of ours that love to be talked about. But a feature of ticketing companies is that they don’t want anyone talking about them, because if people are talking, the talking is always bad. Nobody goes through a ticket purchase these days and wants to sing its praises. They get to the final scene of an absolute ring quest of an attempt to see an artist/show/ballgame they like, are faced with the last-minute news that, actually, their ticket is going to cost nearly three times as much as they thought, cycle through the five stages of grief while a little counter threatens to time them out, decide to pay the extra, and are left staring at the success screen thinking: “Fucking Ticketmaster.”

Obviously, it’s better if they say this on their own. Unfortunately for Ticketmaster, more and more people are saying it out loud, some of whom are the UK culture secretary, others of whom are the CMA, and the last of whom is the US attorney general, who in May launched a lawsuit against LiveNation-Ticketmaster seeking to break it up on grounds of “monopolisation and other unlawful conduct that thwarts competition in markets across the live entertainment industry”.

What its Department of Justice detractors don’t love about the firm is its ability to dictate to every part of the entertainment supply chain, from venues to artists to promoters, and that’s before you get into its role in the resale market. Unsurprisingly, this is not the vibe you get from the Ticketmaster website, which is a masterclass in that very particular self-pitying corporate tone. “The fees we charge,” it quavers, “are often the only revenue we get for making sure you can get the tickets to the events you love.” Oh no! Who’ll spare a thought for poor old Ticketmaster, simply trying to connect fans with their beloved artists, and surviving only on the coins thrown into its begging bowl? Counterpoint: this is a vast international firm headquartered in Beverly Hills, currently worth an estimated $22bn.

That’s enough cash to make you the proud licensee of some ultra-high-end euphemisms. “Processing fee”, “service fee”, “delivery fee” – truly it has 100 ways of saying “because-we-can fee”. If that feels like you accepting a wage for your job, then charging your boss a supplementary “doing my job” fee each time you feel you’re doing your job … try it, see how you get on! The fact is, Ticketmaster fees can be as high as 75% of the base price of the ticket. Arguably the worst euphemism of them all is “dynamic pricing”, which sounds buzzy and energetic, and something we’d all like to be involved in, until you realise that it means the £148 ticket you queued for hours for now costs £355 – and your favourite artist agreed it all via their management. Whatever they may now say (“Shut up”, in the case of Liam Gallagher.)

In the end, like most things with the word “experience” tacked on to them these days, the “fan experience” has become a soul-swallowing submission to getting rinsed and having to look grateful. But with so many hares now running on Ticketmaster and the practices of the wider ticketing industry, it would be nice to think we might be closer to better regulation in the interests of the customer. Record numbers of fans would buy tickets to that.

[lastoneout]

finding out the grammys denied this for the country category makes me so FUCKING mad like give me names I swear to god I'll fuckin- *I am dragged off stage kicking and screaming and snarling*

listening to the version of 'Daddy Lessons' that Beyonce did with The Chicks and like I need someone to come scrape my ass off the floor I am a changed person what the FUCK

[prettygirlstothefloor]

Cowboy Carter Review

sorry if i write a lot. i like to yap lol

Ameriican Requiem- i'm a huge sucker for a sitar so i was gripped in from the beginning. i grew up on country music (mainly 90s/early 2000s) and so when she showed up at the CMAs and performed with the chicks it was a childhood dream. but as a person who liked country music around the time 9/11 happened, it's only become even more racist since. the way they treated her that night even though she was one of, if not THE, best performer of the night was so upsetting to watch. even as the best artist on the planet, at the top of her game, she's always going to work a million times harder than any of her peers. i'm so proud of her being able to make a song like to this to put her thoughts out on the whole night that night.

Blackbiird- obviously everyone has heard this song before. i was unaware of the actual backstory to the song since i don't follow the beatles too much (i like george harrison but that's about it lol). i was not aware that the song the song was written for black women during the civil rights movement. i assumed the song was mainly written by john lennon who to my knowledge was kind of a grifter when it came to his activism. having this song come right after ameriican requiem is so poetic.

16 Carriages- shockingly i was able to avoid hearing this song in full until tonight. i tend to only do one single per release and so texas hold em was the one. this song is so heartbreaking because i think about all the kids in the entertainment industry who can probably relate to this song all too well

Protector- these songs she makes for her kids... i'm gonna need her to stop. not because they're bad but i straight up can't listen to blue and probably this song because i want a mom like this 😭

My Rose- i hate that this is an interlude. it's so beautiful and not to be dramatic should've been 10 hours long

Smoke Hour • Willie Nelson- idk what to say about this one lol

Texas Hold 'Em- i love this song. the only problem i have with it is it sounds too clean. like the production sounds too clean. maybe it sounds better on the radio where the quality is lower than streaming but its definitely a song that needs to be played not so isolated.

Bodyguard- there's something in this song. she channeled carole king for this on or something. it's so good instantly a top 20 if not top 10 song of hers through her whole discography.

Dolly P- once again idk what to say about this one its too short to say anything

Jolene- i mean i think the same way about her version as i do about dolly's version. why are we getting mad at these women when we should be getting mad at the men?? take away that beyonce is beyonce for a second. if she was a normal lady and this girl was unaware her man was taken, isn't that more on him than anyone? he's letting it happen.

Daughter- her voice in this song is insanity. the control she has is unmatched truly.

Spaghettii- the beat omgggg. i know this would hit so hard in a mashup with "my house" i'm obsessed.

Alliigator Tears- just from hearing snippets of the country music that's on the radio nowadays, i think this might be one of the few songs from this album that they will eat up. i'm not saying that as a diss at all. i love this song alot especially after a second listen.

Smoke Hour II- i guess i can add on here a random tid bit. i made a country playlist in preperation for the album to come out. i made it on valentine's day. tell me why i named it KNTRY. i didn't even know the "radio station" she has on the album was called that lol.

Just for Fun- i don't listen to lana del rey anymore. i had a small time during last year where i did but then she got real messy again and signed that letter thanking joe biden. that being said this song sounds identical to "norman fucking rockwell". which is a compliment because both are good songs. keep jack antonoff away from beyonce though. that's the good thing about beyonce is she doesn't sound like everyone else which he makes everyone do (yes i am a fan of him but i'm critical of his production lol)

II Most Wanted- i'm sorry i've never been a fan of miley cyrus (except for the song she did for black mirror and that one EP she put out). i want to like this song because i like aspects of the song but it being a miley cyrus song with a beyonce feature is not want i want.

Levii's Jeans- this is also a collab i'm not a fan of. i actually enjoy post malone but i would've liked to see them in a more upbeat song.

Flamenco- idk how to take this song. it's stunning as usual. my thoughts on the lyrics though is she's kinda talking to fans maybe like the OG like destiny's child fans who have started to leave because she's starting to experiment more with her sound and they miss her old sound. i would love to know her take on this song in particular. because i know so many artists who decide to change their sound throughout each release are terrified of losing fans because they're so stuck on a certain sound.

The Linda Martell Show- another one i can't say much on since it's an interlude

Ya Ya- now.... remember what i said about bodyguard??? easily top 10. idk where on my ranking but it's there. the interpolation of "these boots were made for walking" and "good vibrations". there's something about that old soul rock sound that gets me every single time. i know that it doesn't sound anything alike but "freedom" has that same vibe, where it takes alot from old 60s blues soul rock. this is gonna hit so good on tour!

Oh Louisiana- i will say i really like this interlude. second favorite out of the ones with actual music

Desert Eagle- another song she chose to make extremely short when it should've been hours long... come on B

Riiverdance- its a fun and cute song. i think the beat is good but i think i like it more on my first listen.

II Hands II Heaven- i'm hoping this will finally click for me. im seeing everyone really love this song but idk whats not clicking for me. i'll definitely keep listening to it though maybe someday.

Tyrant- someone said this is the thique of cowboy carter and yeah i can definitely hear it. it's a sexy song and it's a fun song. definitely like it alot more after a second listen

Sweet • Honey • Buckiin'- her sampling "i fall to pieces" in this song is so special to me. i do want someone to take this "honey" and add it to the end of pure/honey though i wonder if it would sound any good. i think sweet and buckiin are the best songs out of the three of these.

Amen- i love how this really rounds out the album, calling back to the first song. it feels and is a very emotional song. don't know if i'll go back to it only because i think it could make me cry lol

overall, i think it's a solid album. if we're comparing the acts, which idk how you can because they're two distinctly different sounds, i would probably still go with renaissance but there's still so many solid songs on this album that are now some of my top faves. usually i rate out of 10 but it feels too low tbh, so i'm rating it out of 100. it will definitely grow on me just like renaissance did. 89/100.