#when I was a teenager I had an mp3 player that could play videos

[namira]

This is my favorite short film of all time <3

[doodlenoodleboi]

Sally face head cannons

Authors note: If you don’t specify I’m gonna pick for you most of the time it’s gonna be headcanons, they tend to be easier and quicker to write.

TW: Not professional, might have misspellings and improper grammar, I just do this for fun. Nsfw, mentions of drugs, stoner Larry, Larry is 2 years older then Sal, some non accurate writing I haven’t watched or played Sally face in years but remember the general plot. Btw when this wrote Sal is 17-19

SFW

◦ Sal doesn’t have the best relationship with his father.

◦ Sal tends to get misgendered a lot to the point he doesn’t even correct people he couldn’t care less anyways and hates unnecessary confrontation.

◦ Sal keeps his glass eye on his bedside table and one nice he actually drunk out of the cup.

◦ Sal isn’t the best at saving money when it comes to video games. He doesn’t spend his money on much In high school besides games for his game boy and other systems.

◦ Sal loves rock music and listens to music whenever he can, he owns an old stereo along with a walk man and mp3 player. (Keep in mind his teen years are in the 90’s)

◦ Along with his hair Sal also ventured in make up in skincare.

◦ Because half of his face being disfigured he tried his best to at least look normal with make up and help it heal better with skincare.

◦ Sal has the worst split ends and uneven layers because he never actually had his hair cut properly he always has done it himself.

◦ Sal is rather geeky when it comes down to it, owning as much technology as he could by in the 90’s.

◦ Sal is most comfortable showing his face to Larry among anyone else almost like a big brother to him of sorts.

◦ Sal gets rather socially awkward when it comes to people liking him so you would have to be in his friend group to have a chance of a relationship or some established connection before hand.

◦ Once you and Sal become friends as he’s comfortable with you expect things like him painting your nails and rocking out to music

◦ If he does later show romantic interest in you before he shows you his face he will be anxious about what you’ll think about him after he shows you.

◦ He’ll even teach you how to play his guitar if you’re interested.

NSFW

F

◦ Sal Is obviously a virgin it’s hard to get close to him let alone take of his mask so you’ll have to have patience to get to this stage.

◦ For-play could be longer then the actual sex for the first time and he might back out from nervousness before you guys can even start.

◦ Sal is not a shy guy maybe introverted but not shy but moments like this make him extremely vulnerable so he’s flustered and embarrassed.

◦ If you find the courage to kiss him he has his mask on he’s whipped. He would be a flustered and embarrassed mess and he might even tell Larry about how exciting it was. You were probably his first kiss as well.

◦ Sal would be around 5 inches 5.5 hard (let’s be realistic here ain’t nobody taking much past that.) Just enough to reach the back of you’re and make you gag.

◦ Sal even if he’s isn’t pornhub but still likes to prep you, after all sex is a rather sacred thing so he tries his best to treat you with care even with his inexperience.

◦ He would probably be a nervous teenager at the back of Spencer’s trying to find lube (that doesn’t get used) and other things trying not to be seen. Covering up this purchases with a rock album or something of equal value.

◦ Sal is big on after care asking you how it was if it wasn’t obvious, he would be nervous after and still not realizing he actually did that.

◦ Sal isn’t big on giving hickeys but he doesn’t mind being especially on his jawline and neck. When talking to his friends he will just say it a bruise or injury just that’s always been there. But it’s almost obvious that it’s not.

◦ Once you’ve done it once he’s nervous to ask for you to do it again so he does enjoy make out session to keep him down.

◦ Sal didn’t heavily masturbate before hand honestly rarely doing it at all until he had sex once and now that’s all he thinks about ever since.

◦ He loves laying kisses against you when doing it but never hickeys as he’s a bit scared of hurting you.

◦ He holds your hands during sex for comfortability.

◦ His favorite positions would probably be missionary and cowgirl he’s a pretty vanilla switch.

◦ Mostly a service top and a shy bottom, it’s not like he’s generally shy he just gets embarrassed seeing you on top but overtime he gets used to it.

Sorry i accidentally deleted the request!

[folksy]

when I was a depressed teenager I didn’t really watch movies or play video games and started reading books less which is something I really regret bc I feel I just wasted my time being chronically online or sleeping and brooding. when I could have been enriching my life more. you feel. I was really into music and twin peaks but I just felt things weren’t worth my time yet I was doing stuff that was less worth my time. which ironically the stuff I feel wasn’t worthwhile was stuff I was into a lot as kid (video games, reading, movies) so maybe that’s why I had that reaction as I was being the rebellious teen or whatever and growing out of things. I had an MP3 player and portable CD player as a kid but it wasn’t the same like where I had all these video games and movies. I didn’t go to my first concert until I was 16… and then on top of that teenage angst there was the depression just telling me nothing is worthwhile. I feel like I just missed out on a lot of stuff that I would’ve liked. anyway so I’m still super depressed in my twenties but this year thus far I’ve:

• watched 50+ movies, including finally watching stuff like parasite (I started it a few years ago but didn’t finish it), the terminator, spirited away, trainspotting, almost famous (a movie I was really interested in while in high school yet never actually watched), and in the mood for love

• finished some games that I had started like resident evil 5, as well as started and finished resident evil 2, 3, code veronica x, and 6 (had literally only did a little bit of the prologue and quit for a year lol but it wasn’t as bad as I was anticipating). I’ve been on a resident evil kick within the last year and a half to two years. I’ve played through 12 of them. wished I had gotten into them earlier as I feel they would’ve been great for me as a teen because I’ve always liked supernatural or spooky stuff (the same thing applies to horror movies- I wish I had gotten into them as a teen too) and the gamecube games I bought would’ve been cheaper lol

• read the stepford wives, fight club, brokeback mountain, american psycho, and red dragon. I read the last two both within a span of less than two weeks which is crazy to me as I haven’t been a big reader (of books) as an adult. I have nine books on hold on libby including giovanni’s room, the only good indians, and flowers in the attic

I know this was really long but if anyone has any recommendations or wants to talk about any of this stuff I’d love to…

[dorefasolsido]

29. Millennial Survey

From someone who's on the cusp between a Millennial and Gen Z-er

What year were you born in?

1995

Do you remember a time before smartphones and social media?

Yup. I think I got my first smartphone either when I was finishing middle school or entering high school. Before it was all about flip phones and slide phones.

Were you part of the generation that experienced the transition from dial-up internet to broadband?

Oh yes. Until I was about 12-13, I barely ever used internet because it was dial-up and so obnoxiously slow. Other people already had broadband by that point, but we got it a bit late.

Did you grow up watching Saturday morning cartoons?

Yees. I didn't have Nickelodeon and Disney when I was a kid, but we had local channels playing blocks of cartoons every Saturday and Sunday morning, and I think they were similar to what could be found on those channels. I remember distinctly that I wasn't allowed to watch Ren & Stimpy, but I secretly did anyway before my parents got up lol

Do you have any memories of using floppy disks or cassette tapes?

Not floppy disks and not so much cassette tapes, though I think we had a few. CDs were a bigger thing.

I do remember watching Disney cartoons on VHS though, we had so many of those when I was very young.

How did you communicate with your friends before the advent of text messaging?

Either landline or we would go to each other's house, stand outside, and yell at the top of our lungs for the other person to come out. I don't know why we never simply went to the door and rang the bell, I just know we were always yelling lol

Were you a fan of any particular boy band or girl group during your teenage years?

Actually no. And I have to say, the only boy band that I remember from my teen years was One Direction. I think they formed when I was around 15 and broke up when I was 20, so technically they should be my teen boy band, but I was into alternative, rock, and metal. I'm into a boy band now though lol

Did you ever own a portable CD player or a Walkman?

Nope, I had an MP3 player for a while though.

What was your favorite video game console when you were growing up?

I didn't actually have any, nor did any of my friends have any. I only used my computer for games, and only the illegal versions a friend of a friend managed to obtain somehow lol. Ah, those were the days.

Did you ever use AOL Instant Messenger (AIM) or MSN Messenger to chat with friends?

Not really. I think I had MSN, but I only used it once or twice before I switched to chatting on Skype.

Were you aware of the Y2K bug and the associated concerns leading up to the year 2000?

Definitely not, I was younger than 5. I only learned about the whole thing years and years later.

Did you ever rent movies from a physical video rental store like Blockbuster or Hollywood Video?

Yes, not from those, but we had our local video rental stores that we got CDs from.

Were you into MySpace or LiveJournal during the early days of social networking?

Actually no, because I think those two things weren't as big here as they were in the West. Like, I always hear people online talk about MySpace days, but I never hear anyone irl ever mention they used MySpace.

What was your first experience with online shopping?

Ooh, that was very very late. I don't remember exactly when I started online shopping, but I think it came here only after 2010s and I didn't use it anyway because I didn't have my own money. So I guess I only really started online shopping after 2018 when I made enough. I never wanted to ask my parents to buy me something online because I felt they'd think it's sketchy lol.

Did you ever participate in a flash mob or witness one in person?

Nope.

How did you discover new music before the rise of streaming platforms like Spotify?

I think mostly Youtube. Like, you'd listen to something and get a bunch of other songs in the similar genre recommended to you. Also, friends from school would mention this band or that band is cool, check them out and then I would.

Were you a fan of the "Harry Potter" book series or the "Twilight" saga?

Yes to both. I grew up on Harry Potter, learned to read thanks to Harry Potter and I pretty much credit it for the path I chose to take in life because I really think it instilled the love for literature in me. I know it has fallen out of grace these days and it was painful to learn about the whole J.K. Rowling thing, but I can't deny its impact on me or pretend that I now hate the book series.

And Twilight was absolutely my jam in middle school. I didn't care about the romance at all, but I always loved vampires. Even if Twilight vampires are a bit, well, not traditional lol

Did you ever have a MySpace profile and customize it with HTML and CSS?

Nope.

What was your favorite TV show or cartoon during your childhood?

Hmm, Charmed was my favourite show. As for cartoons, there were so so many at different points in my life. There was Spongebob, Dragon Ball, Yu-gi-oh, Tokyo Mew Mew, Pokemon, Winx, Phineas and Ferb...

How did you feel about the transition from traditional television to streaming services?

I didn't feel any particular way. When I got Netflix in 2020, streaming services were already a totally normal, widespread thing and I hadn't properly watched traditional TV for years before that. As always, we were late jumping onto the streaming bandwagon, but it's not like I needed some special mental preparation for it. I just got Netflix, started watching, and was like, wow, this is convenient, I love it.

[mellometal]

WHAT'S GOING ON? THIS IS PART TWO OF ME RIPPING APART DHAR MANN'S VIDEOS ABOUT FATPHOBIA! Whoo-hoo!

Before I get started, here's an obligatory trigger warning: This post will be talking about fatphobia, bullying, homelessness, mentioned ED, fat shaming, shaming a person FOR EATING, and the abused thanking his abuser AS AN ADULT for tormenting him as a young, impressionable teenage boy.

If any of that is triggering, upsetting, or makes you uncomfortable in any way, you don't have to read this post. Please consume media that sparks joy for you.

This time, there won't be a response from me about this video, like I usually do with all my Dhar Mann posts. If you want to see my response, refer to my first post about fatphobia (the one about the plus-size woman being fat shamed). It does tie in with this post, as my thoughts on this video are the exact same here. Yes, even though this is about a (at the time) plus-size black teenage boy being targeted. Search for the "dhar mann talk" tag and it's one of the most recent posts. I don't believe anyone should be shamed for their weight. Your weight doesn't hold any significance to your worth as a person. Don't let anything or anyone tell you otherwise.

With all of that out of the way, let's get to the video!

To sum up the video, it starts out with a plus-size black teenage boy (Kurt or "Big Boy", as he's called almost throughout the entire video) who's on a basketball court at school with his friend (Mike), a few other teenage boys, and Mike's uncle (Frank) is their coach. Mike is the captain on one team, Frank is the captain on the other team. They're picking teammates, and everyone is on a team except for Kurt and another boy. Frank says to his nephew to not pick Kurt (he called him "Big Boy" instead) because "he'd never win with him". LIKE THEY WERE PLAYING FOR THE NBA. CALM YOUR DICK. HOLY FUCKING HELL. THEY'RE KIDS.

Mike, not listening to his uncle (good for him), picks Kurt anyway. Kurt is happy and thanks his friend for picking him. Mike gives Kurt a shirt that looks at least a couple sizes too small for him and would be pretty uncomfortable to wear. This isn't Mike's fault, obviously. Kurt politely asks if they had a bigger shirt. Obviously not an unreasonable request. They're playing a sport that requires lots of movement (honestly, pretty much any sport would apply here, except for maybe golf or cricket) so it's understandable to want to at least be comfortable and have room to move around. Frank mocks A LITERAL TEENAGER with the whole "You think you're shopping at Big&Tall?" line and then says that's the only size they had (why couldn't they supply inclusive sizes in the first place, or at least ASK Kurt what his size was IN ADVANCE?), which....umm, I'm actually GLAD plus-size clothing for men (Big&Tall, in this case) is more readily available and accessible now. I'm happy plus-size clothing in GENERAL is like that now.

Mike comforts Kurt and says the shirt might fit. The shirt does KIND OF fit Kurt, but it's obvious he's uncomfortable. Look at this screenshot here:

Frank laughs at Kurt, says he looks like Barney The Dinosaur, and the other kids laugh along with their coach. This is NOT setting a good example for children, Frank. You're a fucking teacher. You're a COACH. You're supposed to be teaching these kids about sports and shit. You're supposed to be setting a good example for these kids about teamwork and sportsmanship. WHAT YOU'RE DOING TO A TEENAGE BOY, WHO IS MOST LIKELY ONE OF YOUR STUDENTS, IS TEACHING NONE OF THOSE THINGS. You're teaching these kids that bullying their peers for things they can't help having is okay. Do better. (I'd say that he's an adult and should act like one, but I'm an adult and I barely act like one a lot of the time, so that'd make me a hypocrite.)

While I may be fortunate to have had a physical education teacher who never bashed on me or shamed me for my weight and she would cheer me on for whatever amount of effort I made the first and only year I had actual P.E., I know that many other kids who are plus-size most likely has/had horrible P.E. teachers or coaches like Frank.

To anyone who has/had a teacher or coach like Frank, I'm so sorry, kiddos. You don't deserve to be bullied by your own teachers. I wish I could give all of you a hug, but I can give y'all virtual hugs instead! *virtual hugs* /p

So they play a game of basketball, and Kurt is struggling to fully play because the shirt he was given was probably cutting off some circulation, especially in his arms (again, do I need to reiterate that this was NOT Mike's fault and is FRANK'S fault for his ignorance and negligence). Frank mocks his nephew Mike by saying that he told him not to pick Kurt. Why? Because according to him, Kurt will never make anything of himself in life due to him being fat. (AGAIN, THIS IS NOT TRUE.)

Then it cuts to Kurt sitting with Mike, who's working on his car and Kurt's working on his own thing. Mike says he believes one day he'll own a nice, brand new Cadillac. Kurt is very supportive and cheers his friend on. He says that he believes he'll be one of the biggest radio show hosts and has a title for it called "Big Boy's Neighborhood". Both of them are hyping each other up. Love to see men supporting men. Mike pulls out his Walkman (they were HUGE back in the 80s and 90s because you could listen to the radio from anywhere, I have a Sony Walkman mp3 player, but it's a newer model), and Kurt says that he's always wanted one but couldn't afford it. (I'll go into why in a second.)

Frank comes over to reprimand Mike, who has done NOTHING WRONG, for talking to Kurt. Instead of working, which Mike WAS actually doing. He tries to tell his uncle this, but he wasn't having it. Frank then reprimands Kurt, who also has done NOTHING WRONG, for just sitting and apparently "distracting Mike" (he wasn't). He asks if there's any work he was supposed to do. Kurt FINALLY stands up to Frank in a polite, mature manner. He says that just because he wasn't working with his hands, it didn't mean he wasn't working. Frank ridicules Kurt some more, Mike tells his uncle to leave his friend alone, and Kurt stands up to Frank AGAIN, still being polite and mature. UNLIKE THE ACTUAL ADULT ACTING LIKE A CLICHÉ MIDDLE SCHOOL BULLY WHO PROBABLY PEAKED IN HIGH SCHOOL. How fucking ironic.

What does Frank do in response to Kurt standing up to him? INSULTS THE KID SOME MORE. He tells Kurt that he must have "pig fat for brains" (which is not only insulting to Kurt, but also insulting to pigs, because pigs are intelligent animals), takes his small bag of Doritos, and says that he "doesn't need to be eating anything." He eats Kurt's Doritos IN FRONT OF HIM, tells Mike to quit letting his friend make him lazy (he wasn't doing that at all), and to get back to work.

THAT line made me livid. I've actually thought that I didn't deserve to eat anything because I'm plus-size as a teenager, and into my adulthood at a few points in my life. NEVER say that someone doesn't need to be eating anything. (Obviously except for poisonous things, inedible objects, and things that could and will kill them.) You could cause them to develop an ED, or trigger an ED if they already have one. THAT'S NOT A GOOD THING. EDs are no joke. Whether it be starving, purging, or binge eating, none of them are fun to have and/or to deal with. Even if they DON'T develop an ED, their relationship with food will be all sorts of fucky-wucky. Some even for the rest of their lives. Unless you get proper treatment, of course.

When Frank leaves, Kurt is obviously upset. Rightfully so. How he's feeling is justified. Mike comforts him and says to not let Frank get to him. Mike offers to take Kurt home, but then realizes that his friend and his mom got evicted and are homeless. (This is why Kurt couldn't afford to buy a Walkman.) Kurt, still distraught, says that he'll just walk. Mike invites him over for dinner and that he'd drop him off after, which Kurt agrees to.

They're at Mike's house, having dinner, and Mike's parents are talking to Kurt. They're being supportive. Frank walks in to have his sister's cooking. He sees that Kurt's there. Mike's parents introduce Frank to Kurt, tells him Kurt's gonna be on the radio one day, Frank laughs and says Kurt's not gonna be anything. Kurt brushes it off. He says that his mom says that he can achieve whatever he wants (which is true, to a reasonable extent), Frank cuts him off and says his mom was lying to him, and that his mom knows he's gonna be a big loser.

Mike's dad tells Frank to leave Kurt alone. Mike's mom also says the same thing. Frank asks Kurt if his mom doesn't feed him at home, and what he was doing "eating up all their food" (he wasn't; he just had a singular plate). Mike and his mom tell Frank to stop. His mom explains that they invited Kurt over for dinner, and she tells her brother to sit down and eat. Frank then asks Kurt again if his mom doesn't feed him at home. Mike tells Frank that Kurt and his mom don't have a home because they just got evicted, which is a shock to the parents. Instead of having sympathy for a teenage boy who was on the streets with his mom, HE MOCKS HIM. WHO THE FUCK DOES THAT? Especially to a teenage boy who didn't do anything whatsoever to deserve being evicted from his home and be out on the streets with his mom. I've dealt with being evicted. I've dealt with homelessness. Out of no fault of my own. It's not funny, cool, glamorous, or anything like that. It's terrifying. I'm still traumatized by that experience and it happened four years ago. Sometimes I have nightmares about that kind of thing. The very possibility of becoming homeless and going through that again scares the shit out of me. The thought of it is so triggering for me that I will resort to reverting back to things I used to do when I was a kid. It also doesn't help that I will NEVER be able to afford an apartment on my own where I live now and will probably have to rely on at least two or three roommates and/or family to get by. Thanks a lot, Boomers.

I would never wish what I went through on anyone. Anyways, back to the whole summary of the video.

Kurt gets up and leaves the table. Mike tries to go after his friend to make sure he was okay, but Frank stops his nephew. ONLY WHEN KURT LEAVES DOES FRANK ALL NONCHALANTLY SAY THAT HE'S STARVING AND THAT THEY SHOULD ALL EAT. Despite Frank making Kurt as well as his (Frank's) own family upset.

Kurt walks to where his mom is. His mom notices that he's upset. Kurt tells his mom that it's because of Frank. His mom comforts him and gives him the advice that she gave him before. Kurt is still obviously too upset to take anything she's telling him, bringing up that they're homeless and broke, and his mom is desperate to help comfort her son. She gives him his birthday present early, which happens to be a Walkman. Kurt is shocked. He thought they didn't have that kind of money. His mom says not to worry about that. She pokes some lighthearted fun at her son, he thanks her, and he asks her a question. He asks if she believes he'll be successful or if she's saying that to make him feel better. She asks if he believes he'll be successful (yep), and he tells her that when he succeeds, he'll buy them a house so they don't have to be homeless anymore or worry about getting evicted.

Fast forward to adulthood, Kurt becomes a bouncer, meets someone who works at a radio station, and he goes there. Just to have people laughing at him. He's distraught again and leaves the station, thinking that he made a bad decision. Frank happens to come by, see that Kurt was upset, and asks what's wrong. Kurt tells him what happened, and Frank mocks him AGAIN with the same shit he told him when he was a TEENAGE BOY, now as a YOUNG ADULT. He walks off, laughing.

Nice going! /s Kicking Kurt while he's down JUST LIKE OLD TIMES, RIGHT? FUCK YOU.

Kurt then decides that he's gonna lose weight and be the best radio show host. (Toxic much? Why would you try to preach that your weight = your worth as a person? If you're losing weight for yourself, great! I'm happy for you! If you don't want to lose weight, you don't give a fuck about what people say, and you're happy in your own skin, that's awesome too! Do it for yourself, not for anyone's approval. Try to love yourself and accept yourself in any form you're in. Don't fall for the bullshit that you have to be a certain size or look a certain way for you to love and accept yourself. The weight may be gone, but the rest of your issues will still be there. I have to clarify that I meant this in GENERAL, not necessarily for extremities on either side of the spectrum of weight...because there are things you MUST follow.)

Kurt gets back to the station, ignores all the people being assholes, he's doing his thing, and he's climbing up.

Fast forward to when Kurt is middle-aged. He has his own radio show, and he's one of the biggest names in the radio industry. After he finishes up his show, he goes outside to see a couple of young fans. A young black girl with her brother, a plus-size boy. They say how much they love his show, they got his merch, and the boy tells Kurt that he wants to be just like him. The boy doubts himself though because of people abusing him JUST LIKE what Kurt went through. Kurt empathizes with the boy and tells him a little bit about his own experience. Following them is Frank as an old man. They're his grandkids.

Frank recognizes Kurt, and actually apologizes to him for the torment he put him through as a teenager. WHAT A SHOCK. /srs

Kurt takes it with grace, but says that he should be thanking Frank for all the torment. Why? Because it "motivated him". The girl says that she loves that. (Okay, since she's a kid and there's still time for her to change her mind about certain things, I'm not going to be as harsh here. I don't bash on the kids unless they're doing or saying extremely fucked up things willingly. She didn't say this with bad intentions. I understand you're coming from a good place, and I appreciate that, but please hear me out. This wasn't at all like dealing with edgy thirteen year olds on the internet. This man you look up to was abused by your grandfather in his youth. Your brother is experiencing that same torment your idol went through...at a younger age too, it seems like. The kid looks no older than middle school age [ten or eleven at the YOUNGEST to maybe thirteen or fourteen at the OLDEST]. That's a huge problem. Kurt may have "toughed it out", but that might not be the case for your brother. Please don't excuse that kind of behavior.)

Dude...what the actual fuck? I can understand not being bothered by the hate, but this grown ass man literally VERBALLY AND EMOTIONALLY ABUSED YOU AS A YOUNG, IMPRESSIONABLE TEENAGE BOY, CONTINUING INTO ADULTHOOD, and you're THANKING Frank for all of that? Why should you thank your abuser for what he put you through? He didn't contribute ANYTHING to your success. So I guess abuse is a GREAT contribution to people's success now, right? /s It doesn't contribute to anything, in my opinion. Yes, what doesn't kill you can make you stronger, but can we normalize people becoming weaker to a point due to traumatic events? Because they exist. Demonizing survivors who have become weaker to some degree or just flat-out ignoring them isn't helping. You did the thing you wanted to do, Kurt. Frank didn't help you. The person who really helped you was YOU and your mom.

MOVING ON.

The boy asks Kurt if he thinks he'll ever be able to make it as a radio show host. Kurt asks if HE believes that. The boy says he does. Kurt gives him some advice and gives the boy his Walkman. The boy's ecstatic, they leave, and Kurt goes to meet up with his mom.

Keeping to his promise, Kurt bought his mom a house so she'd never be homeless again and never have to worry about being evicted. (HOW LONG WAS SHE HOMELESS FOR? OH MY GOD. THAT'S WHAT I WANT TO KNOW. I hope you at least let her stay with you or something. They never went into that, unfortunately.) She's very grateful. The video ends there.

My personal thoughts on the video: Another piss poor video....but worse! Because it was a COLLAB. And based on a true story. Good going with taking this man's story of being abused by a grown adult to exploit for your personal gain, Dhar Mann! WOW. LOVE THAT! Totally a good look. /s

What I took from this video is that if you're plus-size, according to Dhar Mann, you'll apparently NEVER be successful, let alone be taken seriously...which is an absolute lie. There are many plus-size people who are very successful. Another thing I took from the video is that apparently according to Dhar Mann, being verbally and emotionally abused as a teenager by a grown adult all the way into adulthood is "motivation" for you to work harder to reach your goals. (Nice going, Dhar Mann. Justifying grown adults abusing children. Who would've thought? /s)

Oh, and it's like MANDATORY to thank your abusers for tormenting you when you become successful! (Obviously this is an exaggeration. This is me using Dhar Mann's logic against him.) You want to thank them for making you stronger? Fine. You want to spit in their face and say, "Fuck you." to them? Also fine. You want to just never acknowledge them ever again? Totally fine. Whatever you want to do, that's fine by me, but can you not imply that "thanking" your abusers is mandatory in some way?

If you made it this far, thank you! I hope you're having a good morning/day/afternoon/evening/night. Stay safe, y'all. Love you. /p

[thegeminisage]

rare music rec for zelda nerds

since i completely completed EVERY. POSSIBLE. THING. to do in botw, i’ve been spending my evenings re-downloading the soundtrack to almost every single zelda game i’ve ever played. i used to have these via hard work and waiting 6000 years on ultra-rare limewire torrents on a dial-up connection, and tbh i thought i’d never see them again after i lost 90% of my music library a few years ago, but now most of them, even the rare albums, are on khinsider.

before there was a such thing as mp3 players*, my brother and i had a psp, sony’s attempt at matching the mobile gaming nintendo is so famous for, and it stored data on an SD card. our psp’s SD card, after you took away the space needed to store game data, had enough room for 12 mp3s exactly. i took that thing everywhere - school, the car - 12 seems like a ridiculously low number now, but back then it was INCREDIBLE that i could change the mp3s on it with just a few minutes in front of my computer, instead of having to carefully arrange a playlist and burn a CD (which took forever, and would fail if i accidentally bumped into the computer - i’d have to scrap it and start all over), AND i could listen to music wherever i wanted without having to carry a giant portable CD player, which would skip if i jostled it too much.

anyway, while i was downloading zelda music, i came across this album - an official re-arrangement of some ocarina of time songs. the title theme, the battle theme, lost woods, lon lon ranch (with lyrics!), the shop theme, zelda’s lullaby, the miniboss theme, the temple of time, kotake & koume's theme, hyrule field, the fairy fountain, and the last battle. that’s 12 tracks.

i didn’t even realize what it was until i played the first track - about .5 seconds in i recognized it and it was like getting with with a sledgehammer to my face. our psp had room for exactly 12 songs. this album is 12 tracks long. and out of every possible piece of music in the world i could have chosen to take with me, i picked this album. i listened to it when i was hiding from other kids and teachers in the bathroom. i listened to it while i ate lunch alone outside. i listened to it during art club. i listened to it during long car rides. when i went on vacation with my uncle’s family and wouldn’t have access to a computer or any privacy for an entire week, i hid behind this album. and i forgot it even existed until last night! what an amazing, wonderful find. it’s easy to forget that there WERE times i was happy as a teenager, but i absolutely cherish the nostalgia this brings me.

anyway, if you like zelda, you should also give it a listen. here it is on youtube:

my favorite tracks are the title, koume & kotake’s theme, and of course the last battle.

*i know mp3 players existed in the mid 00s but they weren’t widely available and i sure as hell couldn’t put my pirated video game music on most of them lol

[johannesviii]

Top 10 Personal Favorite Hit Songs from 2017

Not a very good year for hit songs. Still better than the next one, though.

And a very satisfying #1 that launched an entire infodump about a specific band. I’m not even sorry.

Disclaimers:

Keep in mind I’m using both the year-end top 100 lists from the US and from France while making these top 10 things. There’s songs in English that charted in my country way higher than they did in their home countries, or even earlier or later, so that might get surprising at times.

Of course there will be stuff in French. We suck. I know. It’s my list. Deal with it.

My musical tastes have always been terrible and I’m not a critic, just a listener and an idiot.

I have sound to color synesthesia which justifies nothing but might explain why I have trouble describing some songs in other terms than visual ones.

2017 might not sound super distant, but it’s already distant enough to analyse what started to happen to me that year with some clarity. This is when I started to lose some of my energy and motivation. A lot, in fact. Everything suddenly felt exhausting and this whole “what’s even the point of anything” mentality started to fall on my shoulders. And you know what, at first, while making these recaps, I had no idea what started it all. Was it that super rare infection I caught in early 2018 and almost made me lose a part of a finger? Was it both my grandfathers dying in mid 2018? Was it the general state of the world? But no, I did some digging and noticed this general exhaustion actually started right during summer 2017 and I was like what the f█ck happened in summer 2017? That summer was fine?

And then it clicked. I know exactly what kickstarted my spiral into about 18 months of depression, and it’s got nothing to do with health or family. It’s something that shouldn’t have affected my life in any way, and that I kinda tried to ignore at the time, and some of you might even find me overdramatic or cringy for letting it affect my life. But yeah, as I’ve realised while making these lists, Linkin Park was actually a super important part of my life, so it makes perfect sense: what started it all was Chester Bennington killing himself. Clearly, someone who had contributed so much to convince me that life was worth living and who suddenly decided it wasn’t worth it, that had a huge impact on me, whether I wanted it or not.

Aaaand now I’m crying again. Great.

Anyway. Uh. Important albums that year! Yeah so uh. Depeche Mode made Spirit and it wasn’t good, and so I kinda lost faith they would ever make a great album again, but I did realise one of my teenage dreams and saw them in concert in the Stade de France in July 2017 (it was huge. Going home after that felt like waking up from some sort of hypnotic trance. They even played Walking In My Shoes, one of my absolute favorite songs from them, along with a video featuring a trans person going to work and I started to bawl my eyes out in the middle of the f█cking crowd). Nine Inch Nails also made Add Violence and continued to be super good, and Indochine made 13, and while it wasn’t nearly as good as Black City Parade, it was also better than La République des Météors, so I was pretty happy about that. EDIT: Forgot about Under Your Spell by The Birthday Massacre, which blew my goddamn mind, but still not as much as the next album I'm gonna talk about.

But the defining album of the year, to me, was Mike Oldfield making a sequel to my favorite album from him, with Return to Ommadawn. Of course it’s not as good as Ommadawn. But still. If Ommadawn felt like discovering a new strange country full of weird folklore and forests and mysterious buildings, Return to Ommadawn feels like going back there half a century later and seeing things in ruins and wounded people, but still trying to seek beauty and joy in a partly destroyed landscape. It makes perfect sense considering the circumstances that surround the making of this thing, and it was the only way to make a good sequel to such a legendary album.

Unelligible songs that piss me off... uh, actually there’s only Cut to the Feeling by Carly Rae Jepsen. Why wasn’t it a huge hit. Come to think of it, why hasn’t any Carly Rae song been a huge hit since Good Times. This feels unfair.

Time for some honorable mentions, then.

Feels and also Slide (Calvin Harris and a lot of other people) - Got nothing to say about either of these songs, but they’re both pretty good.

Katchi (Ofenbach) - Nice little earworm.

No Roots (Alice Merton) - Super surprised this was a hit. Good.

OK (Robin Schulz ft James Blunt) - That’s a James Blunt song in the year of our lord 2017 and it sounds actually good??

What About Us (Pink) - Really caught my attention and made me wonder if I should listen to Pink again after a long streak of mediocre Pink songs.

Congratulations (Post Malone) - I find the song mostly boring but the guest verse ending with “uh, Malone... I gotta play on my phone...” is the stuff of legends and that got a chuckle out of me every time I heard it.

Glorious (Macklemore) - I’m glad this was a hit here but at the same time it’s not my favorite song from him. The music video is adorable, though.

Fly (Odyssey) - Nothing to say about that one.

XO Tour Life (Lil Uzi Vert) - The fact that I was regularly humming this is either a sign of quality or yet another sign I was depressed as shit.

Devil in Me (Purple Disco Machine) - What a great artist name.

Symphony (Clean Bandit) - Nothing to say here either, just good sound all around.

Attention (Charlie Puth) - 2017: The Year Charlie Puth Made A Great Song.

All Stars (Martin Solveig & Alma) - The last cut. It was on the list at some point. I really like it a lot, though.

And now, the list. The stuff I genuinely love starts at #6 and things that are still on my mp3 player to this day start at #4.

10 - Chained to the Rhythm (Katy Perry)

US: #73 / FR: #10

I just love the concept of a Katy Perry song about how Katy Perry songs are happy nonsense distracting you from actual issues. What can I say, I’m a sucker for meta stuff.

9 - Water Under The Bridge (Adele)

US: #88 / FR: Not on the list

An Adele song projecting actual positive energy!? That automatically goes on the list.

8 - Praying (Kesha)

US: #67 / FR: Not on the list

You know I mostly dislike slow emotional songs regardless of how good they actually are. I will, however, make an exception for this one even though I very rarely listen to it considering how emotionally taxing it is. That’s definitely a fantastic song, though.

7 - Viens On S’aime (Slimane)

US: Not on the list / FR: #53

“Listen, we love each other, f█ck it, f█ck their words and their decorum, listen, we love each other, f█ck it, f█ck their ideas and what they’re saying”. Well said, dude, well said.

6 - There’s Nothing Holding Me Back (Shawn Mendes)

US: #23 / FR: #91

That’s a very good song for running and that is becoming increasingly rarer, so I’ll take what I can get.

5 - Paris (The Chainsmokers)

US: #42 / FR: Not on the list (that’s irony for you)

Unlike Closer this is an unrelatable song about rich young people that can afford to live in Paris just “to get away from [their] parents” but honestly that’s the only negative thing I have to say against it. It sounds fantastic.

4 - Castle On The Hill (Ed Sheeran)

US: #40 / FR: #50

We’ve now entered the realm of songs that are still on my mp3 player to this day. This is the only Ed Sheeran song I’ve ever liked, and I love it. It sounds like a lost U2 song. Maybe from a strange dimension where U2 became more fragile and emotional instead of more pretentious.

I have no idea why this guy keeps making such boring stuff when he’s got that kind of song in him. I have no clue.

3 - Something Just Like This (Coldplay & The Chainsmokers)

US: #5 / FR: #19

Hey so Coldplay is still on my lists, apparently. It’s a bit too slow, some lyrics about superheros don’t make much sense, and the drop isn’t super good, but my god, that guitar near the end makes everything worth it. Just amazing colors and textures all around.

It’s not even my favorite song on that EP! I think Miracles (Someone Special) is even better, but eh, this one is a close second.

2 - 24k Magic (Bruno Mars)

US: #16 / FR: Not on the list (#13 in 2016 but I put it on the 2017 list instead)

Am I the only one to like this more than Uptown Funk? It’s so much fun to sing along to it. And unlike Uptown Funk, it’s making me feel nostalgic for an era I actually (vaguely) knew, the super colorful and ridiculous early 90s. My s.o loves it too and when it comes up on the radio or on our playlists you can bet we’re both going PUT YOUR. PINKY. RINGS UP. TO THE. MOOOOOOOON like two idiots.

This is the song I could have put on the previous list but elected to put on this list instead since it was elligible for both years, by the way! Since 2017 was less good than 2016, I thought it would be more interesting to save such a great song for later.

It would have topped the list too, if it wasn’t for something I didn’t expect to be elligible before reading the French year-end list.

Strap yourselves in, because I had no real opportunity to talk about this band at length in the posts made for the years when it was the most relevant in my life, so this is going to be quite long.

1 - La Vie Est Belle (Indochine)

US: Not on the list / FR: #44

As you already know if you remember some of my previous lists, Indochine is a band I started to love right in the middle of the absolute worst years of my life. These guys had been around since the 80s as a super successful new wave band, then became very unpopular and went underground for about twelve years in the entire 90s, then one of them died, then every member except the singer basically rotated, and then they suddenly re-emerged in 2002-2003 with Paradize, a monster of an album, full of energy, sinister themes and weird provocative songs, and an entire generation of angsty teenagers (me included as you can guess) embraced it wholeheartedly.

And all of a sudden Indochine was the favorite French mainstream band of local young punk/goths! So many kids with the Indochine logo in highschool. Nowadays the band is mocked and well-loved in equal doses by just about everyone, but I suspect it’s just because we’ve all grown up.

Placebo, Linkin Park and Indochine were the bands that ruled my entire world in 2003/2004. My mother hated all three of them, because of course she did, but especially Indochine, because according to her it was partly their fault if I was gender non-conforming. See, she used to say, they had put all kinds of bad ideas in my head and now I was all messed up.

...Holy shit, that’s a lot of blame to put on a ridiculous new wave band who’s first hit song from 1983 is just a long nonsensical list of shitty old Bob Morane pulp novels.

But here’s the problem. Even if Indochine kept having hit song after hit song, those were never the best songs on their albums. Here I am, 31, making these top ten lists since last December, and becoming more and more frustrated to see none of my favorite modern Indochine songs are elligible. My favorite Paradize singles were Mao Boy, Popstitute and especially Marilyn (god, this song rocked my entire year alongside Placebo’s The Bitter End. 2003 was such a fantastic year for dark energetic hit songs)? Too bad, the biggest hits were J’ai demandé à la lune and Le Grand Secret. Alice & June had four fantastic singles? Too bad, none of them is elligible! Same thing for the entirety of Black City Parade. Oh, but that song I hate from La Republique des Météors is elligible, I guess!

So we’re in summer 2017, and my life is completely different now, and Indochine releases La Vie Est Belle (I’m linking the album version and not the music video because it has some violent themes in it). I’m in my car doing some errands and the local radio goes “hey new song from Indochine” and I’m like “oh shit, gotta hear this” and then two minutes later “oh wow, that is super good. Won’t be a hit though”.

And yet, it was a hit! It became huge, even! And at that point I was already loving that song even though I thought it was just a super good but tragic love song about a significant other dying too young.

And then, about a month later, the wordplay of the first line finally hit me with the force of a semitruck. It’s not a love song. It’s a song about the singer’s dead twin. Who died in 1999.

It’s such a devastating, beautiful song, and yet it’s full of energy. I. adore. it. It’s exactly the kind of song you need to continue to fight and to live and to help other people in this day and age. “Life is beautiful and cruel, it looks like us sometimes” indeed. And it’s one of the best on the album, too!

So yes, 15 years after I first fell in love with this band and after they helped me during super dark times, finally, I can put one of their songs at the top of one of these lists, hands down, no debate whatsoever.

That probably sounds ridiculous but it’s genuinely making me feel extremely emotional.

Next up: I thought music sucked that year because I was depressed but I relistened to it and no it wasn’t just me

[tellthemeerkatsitsfine]

I strongly agree with the premise of this, but I see this post come up fairly often and I do want to point out that there are a lot of ways to own things besides DVDs. Not to be all “the technology that happened to come out during my teenage years was when it peaked in usefulness”, but... I do actually believe that’s when it peaked. That’s when it first became widespread for regular people to own digital copies of files.

I remember when I got my first iPod, and was amazed. Because I loved my CD collection, but it was much more convenient to be able to put every single song on all my CDs, and all the CDs in my dad’s collection that I wanted, onto one little rectangle. And then I could take all those songs with me wherever I went, instead of having to choose one or two CDs to carry around, along with a (larger, more cumbersome, didn’t fit in a pocket) portable CD player, if I went out. I could play it in my bedroom and have my favourite songs all together, instead of changing the CD every time.

I have a nostalgic affection for the boombox, probably my favourite childhood possession, that was constantly playing my CDs in my bedroom when I was a kid. But I also think it’s just objectively easier to put all my songs in one place. I still like the iPod Classic, and there are plenty of very valid reasons for others to prefer non-Apple products that do the same thing (you can get mp3 players that don’t come from the weird cult that is Apple Inc... I just happen to think they’re a shitty company but really went off with that one thing when they made the iPod Classic). But aside from a vague nostalgia for lying on my back in my childhood bedroom and listening to my boombox, I don’t think CDs were better.

The same concept applies to DVDs. Yeah, I have nostalgic memories of being eleven years old and waking up at 5:30 AM so I could click through the menus on my parents’ boxsets of M*A*S*H or Cheers or Yes Minister or Fawlty Towers and watch a few episodes before school. But I also think it’s objectively easier to be able to carry around a memory stick or an external hard drive with all those shows and more in one place. Rather than changing the disks all the time and messing around with all those different boxes.

My teenage years did not involve the invention of memory sticks or external hard drives that were large enough to hold all the episodes of a long-running television show. Not even close. But that’s when the concept became widely available. It was new and exciting then. Floppy disks turned into USB sticks when I was in high school. In grade eleven, one of my friends wore a necklace with a USB stick that contained the first Stargate video game on it, because at that time it was groundbreaking that video games could come in forms that people could just wear around their necks. My friend wore that necklace because he was so excited to be on the cutting edge of this new and amazing technology that lets you just carry these things around in a form that fits on a necklace. He also wore it because he maybe had just a bit too much of his identity wrapped around being a large nerd, and I loved him for it. That necklace also had a D20 with a hole drilled through it, and a novelty One Ring modeled after the LOTR movies. Remembering that makes me smile, so nostalgia can apply to more recent technology as well as CDs and DVDs.

Anyway. The point is that I do think that was the peak of media-playing technology. That type of technology has been improved upon since then, and I’m very glad of that. I’d rather have my 1 TB external hard drive that holds hundreds of hours of TV shows, than whatever size memory stick was around my friends neck in 2007 and that I’m willing to bet couldn’t hold more than that one game. But this is just the same piece of tech, made to hold more stuff. Whereas these days, a lot of people have moved on to new types of technology for their media in the form of streaming services.

I strongly believe that streaming services are much worse than my digital copies of files, and worse than the DVDs and CDs that came before them. In some ways they’re worse than the VHS and cassette tapes that came before those, and that I used when I was a kid (okay... I have to admit that in other ways, they are better than those). They’re worse for all the reasons stated in the above post: you don’t end up owning any media. You’re just paying to rent whatever a corporation has decided to put on offer, and they can change that around at any time. You only have access to it when you’re connected to the internet. And if you stop paying every month, you don’t have any of it anymore. That is a shit way to consume media. The digital music collection I have now is the same one I started building in 2006, when I got my first iPod and ripped all my CDs onto my computer. I’d have lost so much money if I’d had to pay a fee every month since 2006 to keep getting access to that collection. But I don’t have to do that. It’s mine, to use as I please. It’s mine, to put on a portable music player and listen to on a hike in the middle of nowhere, with no internet access. It’s mine, no matter how many artists take their music off Spotify because that’s the only tiny thing they can do to a corporation that hosts content that’s ruining the world.

I have an external hard drive that’s almost always connected to my computer (in fact, it’s  mounted on there via a pocket that I’ve adhered to the back of my laptop for convenience, but I can also take the hard drive out of that pocket and carry it around the same way I would an iPod or a memory stick on a necklace). This hard drive contains most of my TV shows and movies. I do think this is the best way to store digital files, because 1) more space gets saved on the computer itself to do its operating tasks well, 2) I can carry the hard drive to someone else’s house without bringing my whole laptop, so we can watch a show together the same way as if I brought a DVD over there, and 3) my files aren’t fucked if my computer gets fucked. Yeah, I realize an external hard drive or a memory stick can get corrupted. But DVDs and CDs can get scratched and broken. No form of technology preservation is a guarantee that your files will never be lost. But an external hard drive is much, much less likely to suddenly get rid of your favourite show than, say, Netflix.

This is my argument for the fact that I know everyone thinks technology peaked when they were a teenager, but unlike all those other people, I am right. I was in high school when it first became common to own digital copies of media that could be saved on a computer and put on external devices small enough to be worn on a necklace. A device that we could customize with whatever collection of files we wanted. Before that, we had cumbersome disks that only held whatever files were put on there when we bought them (usually like three episodes of a show, and then you had to switch to the next disk in the boxset). After that, we’ve had streaming services, which are shit. So everyone needs to stop inventing new ways to consume media, and just keep improving on the way we all did things in 2007.

Thank you for coming to my TED talk.

society fucked up by letting dvds go out of style because streaming is not ownership, titles leave streaming services to end up on another (or leave streaming entirely) all the time and stuff gets edited out a lot too. physical media is so important i wish buying dvds and physically owning something could be “trendy” again because corporations have ruined streaming forever with their greed

[purplesurveys]

629

What color is your bedspread? Blue and yellow. Pick up the nearest book to you, turn to page 25 and read the first sentence. I’m on the rooftop and there isn’t a book anywhere near me at the moment. How many candles are in the room you are in? No candles, just two faint beams coming from our rooftop lights. What was your first word when you were a baby? My parents didn’t give much thought to stuff like that so they didn’t keep track of my first word, whatever it was. It was most likely either mommy or daddy though. How old were you in 1996? I was...somewhere in the universe, floating around lmao.

How old will you be in 2016? I turned 18 in 2016. How long until your birthday? A little less than three months before I turn 22. How many siblings do you have? Two.  Are they older or younger than you? My sister is two years younger, my brother is five years younger. Are your grandparents still alive? I have three out of four. I lost my maternal grandfather in 2015. How many orange objects are there in the room you are in? The lights we have on our rooftop emit a yellow-orange hue.   Have you ever run a stoplight? Never. I’ve seen enough car crash videos to know what could possibly happen if I was that impatient/if I drove too fast to brake. Do you have any children? Nope. Maybe by the end of the decade. Saying that and knowing that it isn’t 100% bullshit feels WILD. How was your first kiss? It was mostly her. I was too overwhelmed and shaking too much to remember. That whole time I was just in disbelief that I was already having my first kiss lol. Have you completed high school yet? Yeah, almost four years ago. I’m about to complete university/college this year. Do you have any relatives in the military currently? As far as I know, no. The only person I know who’s in the military is Angela’s uncle, who she’s told me about but we’ve never met each other. I also know Kate’s brother is attending military school instead of attending a ~traditional academic university, so to speak. Who got married at the last wedding you went to? Oh my, the last wedding I was in was in 2007, and it was between my uncle (my mom’s youngest brother) and my now-aunt. The new batch of weddings I’m going to be invited to now is definitely gonna be my friends’ and I’m STOKED. What time did you get up today? I first woke up at 6 AM, but I wanted to sleep in so I officially got up at around 9. When was the last time you stayed up all night? I haven’t had an all-nighter in around three years, but I did stay up until 4 AM partying with my friends a couple of months ago. We got back to Rita’s place by 5 AM, but I guess this still kinda counts as staying up all night. How long have you had a myspace, facebook, or whatever you use? I’ve had a Facebook since 2013 (I only made one since my English teacher in freshman year required us to make an account, but I technically wasn’t allowed by my parents so I had to sign up in secret). I made a Twitter three years before that, because it was a website that my parents didn’t know about yet so it was easier to sneak in and make an account for it. Who was the last person of the opposite sex you hung out with? My cousin, Jereth. We exchanged stories and played the Switch while waiting for 2020 to hit. Person of the same sex? Gabie. She came over last Friday. What color are your eyes? They are dark brown but appear to be black most days. Do you like them? Sure, it’s not like Filipinos have a choice lolol. Have you ever had braces? Yes, I had them for a year and a half in high school. I eventually lost my retainers and never got to buy another set, so everything that the braces did was to no avail since my teeth just went back to how they looked like pre-braces. :( Turn on your mp3, cd player, radio, etc. What song is playing? Khalid’s Talk just started playing on my Spotify. What was the last thing you drank? My second cup of barako coffee is keeping me company up on the rooftop right now.

Are you better at math or art? Math. I never accomplished anything presentable in art classes. Science or History? Oooooh, ya got me. I love both, but nothing replaces my love for history. Who was your 4th grade teacher? Ms. Belen, who is actually Satan in a middle-aged woman’s body. I won’t deny that I’ve wished for her death several times; she had her favorites and made her non-favorites know that she hated them. She was just that awful. Who was your best friend in 7th grade? Gabie! We actually met in the seventh grade and she’s been my best friend ever since then. Where did you go to pre-school, if you went at all? I went to the same school from preschool to high school, which we’ll hide under the name AA. We don’t have schools divided into primary, secondary, high school and whatever else y’all have in America. Who was the last person to call you? It was my mom. We went to the mall so I can spend time in Starbucks while she was looking for fancy china (we were going to have guests the next day), and she called to tell me she was gonna drive to another mall cos she couldn’t find any good plates in the mall we were currently in.

Did you smile in your driver's license picture? Yes. They told me I was allowed to smile, so I gave a hearty grin. Apparently that’s an unusual thing to do cos most people just give a closed-mouth smile or don’t smile at all, and the people at the LTO were very amused when my license was finally printed out hahaha. Do you have a job? Not yet, but that’s my goal by the end of the year. AHHHHHHHH WILD What is your favorite smell? Curry being cooked or cookies being baked. What's your favorite brand of gum? Bazooka is classic bubblegum flavor, so I’ll go with that. Have you ever dated someone & then dated their sibling? Nope. I think I’d find that super awkward, especially in my case because I see Gab’s sisters as my little sisters too lol. Who was your crush in 5th grade? My science teacher lmaoooo. We don’t talk about that era. Who was your first bf/gf? Gab. What color is the shirt you are wearing? Brown and black. What do you think of the 1980's? Pop music, big hair, Madonna, Michael Jackson. Have you ever dated someone more than 2 years older than you? I haven’t. How about 2 years younger? Nope. I’ve only dated one person and they’re the same age as me, so I don’t really know how I feel about age gaps in relationships. What brand of shampoo do you use? Dove. How long is your hair? It’s super long now that I hadn’t had it cut AT ALL in 2019. I want to have it long for my grad pic shoot so I’m probably not having it trimmed until February. If I lean my head a bit back, it already reaches my hips. If you could change one thing about yourself physically, what would it be? I’d have my teeth fixed. Is there a box of tissues in the room you are in right now? Nope, I’m out in the rooftop and there’s no reason to keep tissue in here lol. What time is it? 10:27 PM. Is their anything living (plant, animal, etc) in your room right now? We have plants on each corner of the rooftop. What color are the walls in your kitchen? White. All our walls are white, except for my brother’s bedroom which used to be the balcony until we had it renovated. His walls are creamish. Have you ever had a car accident? Mild ones. I’ve never been in a major crash where a car was totally destroyed or where someone was hurt. Do you have any major plans for today? There’s like half an hour left before the day officially ends, so I think I’m good. What kind of deoderant do you use? A...normal one? If you mean brands, I have a Dove one. What color is your toothbrush? Maroon and white. Do you own a digital camera? Nope. I stopped using those around seven or eight years ago. How old is the cellphone you have right now? It’s almost two years old. What are your initials, using the last letter of each of your names? NELZ. Do you know anyone named Tyler? I know a high school classmate’s stepbrother is named Tyler, but I don’t know anyone personally with that name. How about Reese? Katreen’s younger sister is named Reese. Diana? No. I know several Diannes, though. Shelby? That’s a no for me. Have you ever kissed someone who's name started with "C"? Negative. How about "L"? Also no. "E"? I haven’t. "B"? Andddddd nope. Are both your parents still living? Yep. What was the last thing you cooked? Nothing. How many times have you moved in your life? That I remember? Two. Do you live within 20 miles of your birthplace? Yeah, I think Manila counts as being pretty close to where I am now. Can you do a handstand? I can’t. I tried many times as a kid though (and hurt myself several times in the process). Is it after 11am? Well after, in fact. What day is it? Thursday, but it’s soon going to turn to Friday. What's the longest time you've ever spent on the phone? I was once on a Viber call for around eight hours straight with Gab back in like the early months of our relationship. That was insane. We never did it again after that lolol. How many pairs of brown shoes do you own? Just the one pair of brown heels. Are you on any prescribed medications? Nopes. What was the date 2 weeks ago from today? December 19th. If you aren't already married, do you expect to be married within 5 years? No. I’m giving myself between 7-10 years. How about 2 years? That’s an even bigger no. How many funerals have you been to in your lifetime? I’ve never been to a funeral, just wakes. I don’t think I’d like funerals, so I want to stay as unaware as I am now. Have you ever been far away from home on your birthday? Yeah. I was in Batangas for my 20th. I also went on a cruise around East Asia for my 18th birthday, but I was back in the Philippines by the day of my actual birthday. The cruise took place in the days leading up to it. Have you ever had a pet fish? Yes. My first pets were goldfish. Do you have any tattoos? Nope. Would you ever or do you have a nose piercing? Probably not. I wanted one as a teenager though. If you only had 30 days to live, what would you do? That’s pretty dark, but uhhhhhhhh I guess I’d spend all my money, party as much as I want, drink as much as I want, look for new owner/s for my dog, drive as far as I can, spend most of the time with my girlfriend.

[dougmeet]

Dog Police 

Nobody knows who you are...until now

Dog Police nobody knows who you are ... until now! PLUS 1-800 WATCH Memphis' Strangest Video https://t.co/JC8H3PADrx https://t.co/eSKKNDYRG3 — mrjyn (@mrjyn) 12 septembre 2019

Dog Police 1-800

I finally became friends with the leader of the Dog Police.

Met him, interviewed him.

The video I uploaded has long since been taken down, but it became my most popular Video

I ever posted at the time...

Thanks, Sam Shoup for your cooperation and kind words....

WHAT THEY'RE SAYING ABOUT DOG POLICE

In 1985, at Memphis studio 485 Hollywood Memphis

The Dog Police

recorded an hilarious song, then video, showcasing their

canine-teeth approach to Memphis music.

Also known as The Tony Thomas Trio, the group featured, Tony Thomas Tom Leanardo

Sam Shoup

Dog Police Comments and info

I thought this clip was lost for eternity. I'm forever grateful and thank you for this gem.

Sam Shoup puppy is from Memphis, Tennessee. the old Shoe Productions. I was there!

Never heard of William Macy.

lly is an entire album of satirical songs called simply "Dog Police". I've been trying to explain this video to people for about 1,000 years. Thank you for confirming the fact that my brain did not make this song and video up.

The keyboard player looks like William H. Macy. My god. It's like Hurra Torpedo, Devo and Blue Öyster Cult got together for a side project. THIS is my YouTube account. We all know that furriers are flapping it to the dog-girl in this video. HOLY CRAP!! I have not seen this video since 198-freakin'-4! I actually came to think that I had just imagined the whole thing. Thank you for providing me with proof that I was not nearly as deranged as I thought I was! i just shat myself in fear I remember "1 800" also.

I thought I was the only one in the world who remembered this video? it took 2nd place behind RAIL in the MTV Video Contest back in like 1982?

THAT DOG CHICK WAS HOT AM I RITE GUYS?

no, you are, in fact, quite wrong, my friend. she was a cat.

Digney Fignus won.

His video is posted on YouTube. Just search for his name and you'll find,

The Girl With the Curious Hand

It makes me remind La Máquina del Rock in Lima city, Perú. Thanks! i do member this.. but i still don't get it i do like the drug fragrance though they said they were the ART BARF FAR ARR This was the video that SHOULD have won the "MTV's Basement Tapes" contest back in about 1982. It is so crazy and imaginative! Instead, some heavy metal group made up of 10 year olds won. GAG... how "cute." It was such a rip-off. This video is a classic! But it came in second place. That has made me mad for all these years. Hopefully these artists have had success elsewhere. The band was honestly called: "The Dog Police!" The band they lost to was called Trak. I remember them because they were featured in LIFE magazine's edition on teenagers in 1984. Google them and the name Derita, because Trak was like a Leif Garrett butt-gawk Partridge Family. I can't find a thing on them. Digney Fignus and Guadalcanal Diary also had entries that year. Dog Police was ROBBED, I tells ya. I totally agree! DP were robbed! The basement tapes were voted in by callers - the band that won had their entire community on the phone that night hitting the redial button. hen this video first came out and MTV was cool, a bunch of us single bachelors had this as our theme song. Woof Woof Woof...were they think-in? glad i was born when DA 80s was nearly over. reminds me of fat weird cartoon cop dog "scruff gruff" 'take a bite out of crime' now we just need someone to post the video for "1-800." Oh man, I never forgot this video, I can't believe I got to see it again. I can die happy now. Totally fucked up, but happy. Truly amazing. MTV used to be so ahead of its time. Basement tapes are YouTube Music 24 years before YouTube ever happened. Dog Police forever! Nobody knows who we are! HOLY SHIT, 20 bloody be damned years i've been looking for this video No shit. I saw this way back in the day and used to tell everyone about it and could never find it. This kicks my uncles ass. actually cut (edited) this song and produced the video and hes in it when the dog police are walking in the bar hes the one dancing all crazy on the far left wow cool! I've totally giggled at him a million times. he actually did a lot of stuff back then he was a camera man for the Mikey mouse club and he did all the audio for hustle and flow and he is currently working on black snake moan fortunately the departments he work in don't make him fa-mouse Are you talking about Andy? Yes I know Andy & Linda very well. Tell him "Wags" said hello. No the work that we stagehands do carries no fame or solaces but quite often, at the end of the day, we end up making more than the performers and, ask your uncle, WE ARE GOD. If I don't like you one little turn of a dial can make your audience not like you tee gee. All you Dog Police fans will be pleased to know Andrew Sullivan linked to this. OH MY GOD! I can't believe it! I've been looking for this for years. GOD BLESS YOU! I was starting to think I made this up in my head. Dear god. I suspected that I'd imagined this for years because I saw it as a tyke and when I tried to explain it to people they would do little but blankly stare at me. I've had the chorus of this song running through my head since 1983. me too. ;) that makes 3 of us. That makes 4 of us. These guys are now playing with The Jumpiness Chi Chi's That is the weirdest thing I've ever seen in my life. Just straight up weirdness. For reals Is this supposed to make women feel badly about themselves? Like the theme of this is 'have a poor self-image' I think. Like you're so ugly you should be arrested. I've been looking all over for an mp3 of this song. Can anyone help me out? i have an MP3 of this song give me your Email and i will send it to you it'd LOVE AN mp3 OF THIS TOO....BEEN LOOKING FOR THIS VIDEO FOR OVER 20 YEARS NOW I actually finally roistered YouTube just so I could echo all the sentiments posted...I thought it was a figment of my imagination also. I'm also glad to see some people remember 1-800 also. The singer looked like a babushka with a corncob planted. Fay and lame. Was there another video from the 80's that has people wearing dog faces? I swear I vaguely remember another video (other than dog police) that involved people dressed like dogs singing. If someone knows what I'm talking about, please tell what the song was called. this video actually WON 1st prize in an MTV contest for unsigned bands. they were supposed to get a record contract out of the deal,which they probably did, but were then just told to forget it. At the time, everybody was shocked to see that they had won compared to more serious entries. But it was a people's vote that put it there, so go figure. Try not to take it too seriously. it's more at home on Dr. Memento or something. i saw that once back in the 80's and never thought it'd see that again. thanks for posting! i remember that... so trash so cool!! I never realized how much this sounded like Devo! I remember it. Dog Police, where are you comin' from? Dog Police, Nobody knows who you are! This also played on Night Flight, where I first recorded it. MTV (Mars candy company TV....those that were there will remember the Quincy Jones war against MTV's biggest advertiser, MARS, because they weren't playing enough Michael Jackson and it was ALL downhill from there)sucked only marginally less than it does now (except for Al TV). thanks for the video! The hubby pretty much thought I was retarded for singing about the Dog Police (he had never heard of them)...now he just pretty much thinks I'm retarded. yo solo se qe si no entiendes lo qe dizen esto es una mierda pintxada en un palo seko.  Saluted. I remember watching this on USA's Night Flight - way back in the day. Thanks for posting! It came close to winning MTV's "Basement Tapes" contest, but it didn't win.

[elizabethrobertajones]

this is pretty random but i was playing life is strange and there's a mixtape that chloe made for a girl she liked, amber. the main character, max, has the option to look at it, and if she does she says "i sure wished chloe would make me a mixtape" and this game was made in, like, 2012!! so is it still a romantic trope even in the 2000s?

Aww :P As far as I know about that game it’s got a retro feel but it’s actually about modern day 2012 hipsters, isn’t it? 

But anyway, it’s still a romantic trope now! :P At least when it comes to the media rather than what people IRL are doing, because you would need to be a bunch of hipster music nerds to casually make mixtapes these days unless you pre-packaged a tape-playing walkman when gifting them… 

But everyone pre-00s kids had that at least somewhat as a cultural thing when it was around, and 90s kids, who are the last generation who it was a general cultural thing in their general awareness, are now about the age where they’re adult and contributing to media and probably making things using it as a trope, while the kids who have only know MP3 players and ipods are still just getting there (I think? Even as a teenager I fit more into the CD > MP3 narrow bracket when ipods were still too luxury/didn’t exist yet for everyone I knew to casually have them, but people just a few  years younger than me would have had them accessibly as kids, but I also grew up poor and with a large tape deck and a whole bunch of blank tapes to play with so I don’t really identify with mix CD people either :P) – but anyway, in the mass media, we’re still presumably at the phase of people who know what a mixtape is from first hand experience still being among the fresh creative faces around the office, never mind that everyone else predating them knows what it is (I’m basing this on Buzzfeed, millenial target demographic, and the 90s kids viral posts :P), so I would guess the majority of everyone contributing to the media at least has pretty certain cultural awareness of mixtapes.

Consumers of the media can obviously be of pretty much any age, so idk, all the 00s kids who are kind of frighteningly old to me as a 90s kid but at least were raised up a step ahead in this *rapidly changing* technological arms race are perfectly capable of watching all this content but on the other side of it where because the world changed SO RAPIDLY stuff which was commonplace to someone a few years older is completely obsolete now except as nostalgia, hispter stuff, or things which are used in media set in times pre-dating the change, or older adults stuck in their old ways. And SPN starts in 2005 and Dean is being ALREADY portrayed as the latter, because despite the vibe of the show, ipods were released in 2001. 

I mean, technology moved SO rapidly, I think really only people in their early 20s and younger (I’m mid to late 20s :P) won’t really have a concrete understanding of mixtapes culturally, unless they were living in poorer communities which took longer to adopt these changes? I mean if the ipod was released in 2001 you could be 16, watching SPN (which is a 15 rated show in this country at least), and literally have never lived in a world where mixtapes were a thing, if you were from an affluent society and by the time you were old enough to process the world properly, everyone around you had adopted the new technology or were phasing out CD players. This is not an unreasonable thing to imagine at all :P

Since it’s an enduring image because it’s romantic and useful in the media as a shorthand, and already has a cultural weight behind it basically since mixtapes were a thing and the adults already in the media as adults when the fad started began including it in their media while it was current, I feel like at least using mixtapes as a romantic shorthand might not even have got full steam yet, depending on if/when 90s kids flood the market with nostalgic retro movies and TV shows about the 90s, using their childhoods as the backdrop for the stories they want to tell. And that’s gonna be soon - there’s older 90s kids than me out there. 

I’m not looking up Life Is Strange, but I get the feeling from the bits I’ve seen of it that the people who made it probably are 90s kids who are now old enough to make a video game. :P 

[but-its-only-the-beginning]

I often wonder to myself, when he says ‘Wake me up before you Go Go’ does he mean – wake me up before you leave leave, or wake me up before you leave for your job as a go go dancer?

Five most played songs on my iTunes

I had originally planned to make ‘Ten most played songs of 2016”, but weirdly enough iTunes doesn’t show me that information. There is a theme in this list, majority of the songs are quite slow. I enjoy music that allows me to think, but is powerful enough that it distracts me, because I’m obviously a fucking music guru. I have decided to listen to each song as I write about it, y’know raw emotion and all that shit, which is ruining Ru Paul’s drag race for me just by the way. Some of these songs mean quite a lot to me, some of them are just awesome. 

1.     Mellon Collie and The Infinite Sadness by The Smashing Pumpkins.

Play count: 590

Date added to iTunes: 02/06/2013

Let me just begin by saying, this song is honestly just a two minute and fifty-two second instrumental.

I play this song on repeat for a few reasons. It helps to calm me when my anxiety attacks become just a little too real, it really helps me concentrate if I need to study, and it put kids right the fuck to sleep. There is nothing I don’t love about this song. The piano is strong and the focus of the song. For me, it perfectly replaces lyrics. I don’t personally hear a story as I listen, but it does take me to a very calm place. If I could learn any song on the piano, this would be it. The strings in the background definitely add to the calming tone, but I really feel like the piano on it’s own is enough.

2.     Make You Feel My Love – Adele

Play count: 128 (huge number difference!)

Date added to iTunes: 29/10/2013

I am a huge Bob Dylan fan, but Adele’s rendition of this song is absolutely perfect. I generally prefer originals, I love older music, but I would absolutely dance to this at my wedding. Hell, I would even serenade the lucky bastard! This song is, again, very piano heavy, but obviously the focus is Adele’s angel voice. Is there anything this woman can’t do?! Fuck Beyoncé! When I die, I want to come back as Adele. I love strong singing voices, they give me chills. I will literally listen to a song on repeat 20 times if the voice is good enough. It of course helps that I love the original.

3.     America – Simon & Garfunkel

Play count: 105

Date added to iTunes: 14/06/2014

I’m surprised there isn’t more Simon & Garfunkel in this list; I listen to them every time I feel anxious.

This is one of my favourite Simon & Garfunkel songs. I can listen to it in any situation.

I get very real chills in two parts of this song.

- ‘It took me four days to hitch-hike from Saginaw’ I just like the way this part is sung. There is no other way to put it. C-H-I-L-L-S!

- “Kathy, I’m lost” I said,  though I knew she was sleeping. “I’m empty and Aching and I don’t know why.” I have always felt like this specific lyric stood out to me more than any other lyric I have ever heard. When I hear it, I feel like I wrote it. That’s the best way for me to explain it. I have written and re-written a hundred different ways to explain how that lyric makes me feel, but nothing else feels more right.

4.     A Million Love Songs – Take That

Play count: also 105

Date added to iTunes: 26/09/2013

I’m not even embarrassed. Gary Barlow is an angel. Back at it again with the piano strong songs, this one is a classic. It’s definitely another wedding song. I don’t really have much in depth stuff to say about this song, I just like singing it to be honest. You’re welcome neighbours. I’m disappointed in myself for this one, but the only person who can get deep about a Take That song, is Gary Barlow.

5.     Freedom – Wham!

Play count: 92

Date added to iTunes: 08/11/2015

Hands down, the best Wham! song ever. I’ve listened to this song at least 4000000 times in my lifetime. George Michael’s voice does things to me. The man is an absolute treasure. I could dance completely sober to this song, anytime! It is another one of those songs that I can’t really get too deep about, it’s freakin’ Wham!. It’s honestly just one of my all time favourite songs. R.I.P. George.

6.     Ha Ha You’re Dead – Green Day

Play Count: 83

Date added to iTunes: 26/01/15

Believe it or not, I can get pretty deep with this one. It’s basically a punk rock song written by a bunch of twenty-something’s, so it’s as mature as you’d think. The final chorus of this song goes as follows;

Ha ha you’re dead

The joke is over.

You were an asshole, and now you’re gone.

As your ship is going down, I’ll stand by and watch you drown.

Ha ha you’re dead.

Ha ha you’re dead.

Ha ha you’re dead.

I remember absolutely screaming this chorus on the way to work after being dumped. Good times. I belt this song out anytime anyone fucks me over, actually. I’ve used this song as anger management since I was about 13, it works wonders.

I accidentally did six, you’re welcome. 

Mood Playlists.

I have like three moods so don’t get too excited. I’ll give a brief description on the reason each song is in these playlists, but over all you’re welcome because these are some of the best songs the world has to offer.

Ten songs’ I listen to when I’m super anxious.

Landslide – The Smashing Pumpkins

The first version I heard of this was by The Dixie Chicks and I know it’s a Fleetwood Mac song, but Billy Corgan’s voice speaks to me on another level when I’m all fucked up.

Candle in the Wind – Elton John

Elton John could bring me down from just about anything. What a voice! What a man! What a song!

One Crowded Hour – Augie March

I could listen to this song thousands of times over, and I genuinely would not get sick of it. It is music genius. MUSIC GENIUS I SAY!!!!!!

Dear God – Avenged Sevenfold

M Shadow’s voice is fucking beautiful. It is only his voice that calms me, but I like to listen to slow music when I’m anxious, heavy metal would just work me up.

Tangled Up In Blue – Bob Dylan

The first time I heard this song was a cover by The Whitlams, so I was actually surprised to learn that it was a Bob song. Bob Dylan is definitely one of those artists that I could probably listen to his discography in its entirety when I’m anxious, but this one is a favourite.

Little Drummer Boy/Peace On Earth – David Bowie & Bing Crosby

I don’t even give a fuck that this is meant to me a Christmas song. Also, fuck Bing. This choice is honestly all about David Bowie’s voice. This is the first song I have ever heard David Bowie sing that gave me butterflies in my stomach. It’s so beautiful.

My Way – Frank Sinatra

I discovered this song after heard Sid Vicious’ version, which is obviously equally as calming.

Be Calm – Fun.

I read this information years ago, so if it’s wrong… well I don’t give a fuck. This song was actually written by the lead singer during a panic attack, and speaks to me so personally. It basically talks me down. “I know you feel like you are breaking down. Oh I know that it gets so hard sometimes. Be calm.” You got it, buddy. Obviously not a cure for anxiety, but it sure as fuck helps.

Yer Spring – Hey Rosetta!

This is just a very slow and peaceful song. I actually discovered when I saw The Living End Once.

Last Hope – Paramore

I think this is another song that really speaks to me when I’m down or anxious. It’s definitely about overcoming obstacles and coming out stronger. There is one part of the song that I usually play over and over. “It’s not that I don’t feel the paint it’s just I’m not afraid of hurting anymore.” I wish I were that deep sometimes.

Ten song’s I listen to when I’m feeling nostalgic.

You Sound Like Louis Burdett – The Whitlams

I remember being maybe 7 years old, and begging my Mum to let me say the F word in the song. She always said no, but I mouthed it anyway because I don’t play by the fucking rules.

Another Saturday Night – Cat Stevens

I know for a fact that this was not the song that my Dad likes most by Cat Steven’s but I just have memories of it being played A LOT.

Real Men – Joe Jackson

Another song my Dad played to death. I heard it for the first time in about 5 years on the radio a few months back, and instantly had ‘nam like flashbacks to my childhood.

I Feel Possessed – Crowded House

Again, a song my Mum wouldn’t have played the most when it comes to Crowded House, but it’s just one of those songs that takes me back whenever I heard the chorus.

The entire Bad album - Michael Jackson

Let me tell you a story! I can’t remember exactly which birthday, but I feel like it was my tenth. I had just heard of this little Indi artist called Michael Jackson. I’d gotten the HIStory album that I played to death. You’re welcome Mum and Dad. My grandparents came over for dinner, and brought a large box for me to open. Inside this box were several things, but most importantly Michael Jackson’s 1987 album Bad. I have memories of literally picking up the album and not giving a shit about anything else. I chucked that sucker into my discman and the rest is history.

Keep On Movin’ – Five

Every time I hear this song, I remember having my CD player sitting up on the window with that song blasting, while bathing. Good times.

Whatsername – Green Day

There are hundreds of Green Day song’s I could’ve chosen. This one specifically, I remember listening to on my MP3 player on the bus to and from school on repeat. I would stare out the window, just to make sure I looked as depressed as my music made me seems.

Dead! – My Chemical Romance

I used to have a dance to this song. Actually, there’s a video of me on YouTube somewhere dancing to this song. I used to act like a psycho teenager when listening to this song.

English Army – The Living End

Besides the fact that this is actually my favourite one of their songs, I used to have this DVD which had several videos of live performances on it. I used to listen to the live version of English Army all the time. Also, I’ve seen The Living End like 14 times, and they have not played it once!!!

Last Beautiful Girl – Matchbox Twenty

Honestly just another song my Mum played to death.

Songs that just generally give me some goddamn chills right down my spine.

I’m just going to write the lyric that gives me chill’s. Although, its actually the way the lyric is sung that gets me.

One Crowded Hour – Augie March (Yes, I’m mentioning it again because it’s that good.)

I completely relax when they sing “What is this six-stringed instrument but an adolescent loom

Let Her Cry – Hootie & The Blowfish

“Last night I tried to leave, cried so much I could not believe she was the same girl I fell in love with long ago. She went in the back to get high, I sat down on my couch and cried. Yellin’, “Oh, mama, please help me””

Somewhere Only We Know – Keane

I like all of these lyrics. What a good fucking song!

So Far Away – Avenged Sevenfold

“I love you, you were ready, the pain is strong and urges rise. But I’ll see you when He lets me, your paint is gone, your hands untied” insert cry emoji

Under Pressure – Queen ft. David Bowie

Like I need to just choose one fucking lyric.

Run To The Water – Live

“A million mile fall from grace, thank god we missed the ground.”

The Deepest Blues Are Black – Foo Fighters

The whole chorus is sung so well!!!

You Are Not Alone – Michael Jackson

I do the best version of this song. THE BEST. I used to jam to this with my karaoke microphone in my bedroom when I was younger.

I Walk Away – Split Enz

“Your life, slave to ambition”

Fin.

[ablanariwho]

The Death of Murphy Radio

The 12 year old lanky girl with two plaits of hair hanging behind her ears was holding the cover of a LP (Long Playing) record in her hand. She was engrossed in the picture on the cover. Young and handsome Rishi Kapoor was holding glamorous Dimple Kapadia romantically from back. It was a scene from their debut movie Bobby. The pre-teen girl liked the image so much. It stirred something fizzy in her early adolescent mind. Today, after crossing half a century, I cannot help but smile fondly at this frame in my memory. I still steal a few minutes looking at this picture. The twelve year old surprises me by making her presence felt still in my heart. 

Bobby LP Cover

We had a  Russian LP record player, gifted by my maternal uncle. From the day it was gifted, the very Russian looking record player permanently occupied a large space on a loft as the most immovable property of our household. 

Vintage Long Playing Record

The poor thing never got the chance to play Long Playing (LP) records. Hence, I didn’t get the chance to grow up listening to variety of music. Buying LPs always got crossed in the list of priorities of our shoe string household budget. 

HMV LP Logo

HMV LP

My maternal uncle, who was a great music connoisseur, owned a Gramophone Radio. 

Gramophone LP Player

It could play six LPs one after another. He had the entire sound track of the movie The Sound of Music.

Sound of Music LP Cover

I loved to listen to it as a little girl.

The Murphy Radio set in our home retired and settled on the loft, alongside the  LP record player, when I started going to Junior College. An era ended.

A boxy ‘Two in One’ hyphenated the gap in time between the radio and the TV in our lives.

Our collection of music never rose in number from the initial purchase of 4-5 cassettes. Mother never gave us enough pocket money to afford buying cassettes. However, at least I was in a position to smartly toss those 4 to 5 names to show off my up to date status as an avid listener of pop music, whenever required! The names were very few though – Wham by George Michael! Michael Jackson! Lionel Richie! Abba! And that’s it. 

The “2 in 1” phase still shows traces of its impact on my memory.  Until a few years back I would invariably call a Mp3 player “2 in 1” and get curtly corrected by my school going children, “Momma, it’s not a 2 in 1. It’s a Mp3 player, duh!”  

Good that listening to music has overgrown that phase too. Now that it’s all online, and available for ‘streaming’ through apps such as Spotify, TuneIn, Deezer, Slacker Radio etc, I am saved from the embarrassing guilt of demeaning the glamorous hi-tech  gadgets by calling them by their inferior or backdated versions.

Two-in-One

Our first television set came when I was in the second year of my junior college. My father surprised us with it to our utmost glee. We didn’t have a black and white TV set. I sometimes peeped in to our neighbor’s home to catch a glimpse of ‘Hum Log’ on their black and white TV set. 

Hum Log

We directly graduated from radio to a color TV set, the best desi (local/domestic)  brand available at that time. The economic reform was yet to start for multinational electronic brands to foray in to our country.

Illustration: Arjun Jadhav

Our family could never rise to the empowering status of possessing a VCR or VCP. Those who had one, would wear an aura of a superior specie than humans on earth. Wives prodded their husbands to buy it so that they could record, play and watch Ramyana and Mahabharata or Buniyad - a family TV soap  whenever they wanted and also boast about it in the Haldi Kumkum meetings of ladies from the neighborhood.  But it came most useful for watching porn by teenage boys and girls too when their parents were away. Middle aged bored husbands  too had a gala time watching porn when their wives went for vacationing at their parents’ homes. A new business of Video Cassette Library mushroomed, providing income to many jobless young and middle aged people or even retired persons.

Video Cassette Recorder Player

Ramayan

Mahabharat

Buniyad

 Sound of Music

Bobby

The Police

Aandhi

[devinrhdp719-blog]

Last but not least may be the Compound Paintball Field in Ellensburg, Washington. You also don't need to experience intimidated if you are a new player because they serve a mix of experienced and inexperienced players.

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All of their fields include props such as planes, tanks, creeks, villages, castles and woods. They have 48 different playing field that pass on across 700 acres. There is. Below I have found the very best then best paintball areas in the United States.

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In fact, we don't bet when 'form' is likely to be compromised - e.g. on New Year's Day when the players have been celebrating. In the British group season, most teams play close to 'form' - that is, at a fairly consistent (and predictable) regular - but Cup matches are even more of a lottery when 'giant killing' happens fairly frequently. Studies of football players show that actually concussions can be reduced with mouth area guards, notes the Centers for Disease Control and Avoidance.

However, any sport where a participant may fall or collide with someone else is a predicament where stopping mouth problems is essential. Many youth, senior high school and university athletic associations need mouth guards for team sports such as football and basketball. Rugby players don't wear pads, but they need mouth guards.

Paintball is pleasurable game which gives you a whole lot of adrenaline. You do not need to have great understanding to play Paintball. There are numerous centers existing where you can go and play Paintball.

Moreover it is played on a special platform with guns which you use to shoot colored balls on your own enemies. To lessen stress person must involve in some kind of fun filled actions and Paintball can be that kind of activity. When enough time factor is applied to games, the adrenaline hurry increases to a blast as you might only have 10 minutes to run into the opposing base.

It is a good way to release some of that holiday energy and go through the fun and exhilaration of a game designed to play out a lot of those childhood fantasies. 2010 HealthDay News” article, figured this trend was because of increased concussion intensity, increased willingness on the part of players to statement concussions and NFL medical staffers adopting a fresh conservative approach for concussion management. A 12-year study shows that players had been sidelined for a significantly longer period after concussions between 2002 and 2007 than from 1996 to 2001.

Players making a tackle on the kickoff accounts for 5.5 percent, or 17 players, who had a serious injury. Tackled players represent 8.8 percent - 27 players - of severe injuries. Between 1977 and 2009, 41 percent of catastrophic accidents to 126 players below the professional level happened while tackling and 20 percent of these - 62 players - while tackling with the head down.

Between 1977 and 2009 - including the nine players previously mentioned: 253 senior high school players, 34 university players, six recreational players and 14 professionals suffered an incomplete recovery from a cervical cord injury. This makes the price of this serious damage 0.46 and 1.33 per 100,000 players, respectively. Seven cervical cord injuries with incomplete neurological recovery occurred to football players at the high school level and one happened at the university level, based on the 2009 Annual Survey of Catastrophic Football Injuries.

To help prevent soccer injury, the American Academy of Orthopaedic Surgeons recommends wearing appropriate protective equipment, stretching before and after taking part in- especially when the weather is cold - and frequent water breaks to prevent dehydration. The majority of catastrophic football accidents are associated with defensive players blocking and tackling. Recreational, amateur and professional soccer players are in risk for injury.

Oliver Anye works for Delta Force Paintball Europes largest paintball field operator. If you are using these 3 methods as outlined above you have to be able to successfully locate your closest paintball fields with ease. The biggest paintball field operator in Europe boasts to possess paintball centres no more than 40 minutes away from 95% of the united kingdom population.

So for example in the event that you where you can open the Yellow Web pages for London, you could look for paintballing and after that all the paintballing fields in London will be listed. These governing bodies regulate the sport so they have to keep up to date record's out of all the paintball centres within their area or nation. So in this post I'll outline 3 easy strategies that you can use to discover your closest paintball fields.

As you find out more about the activity and improve your skills, you'll probably find that you'll want to make changes to tailor your performing style. Paintball can be physically taxing, and you don't want to buy a gun that'll be uncomfortable to deal with. Whenever choosing a paintball gun, arranged a budget before you start browsing.

Shortly after George Skoog invented a paintball capsule that's gelatin based and water soluble to ensure that cleanup would no longer be considered a dreadful event. After the game an article was published in sports activities illustrated and an instantaneous popularity had began. Paintballs contain water soluble, biodegradable and non-poisonous polymer.

Making paintball grenades yourself is not going to be wise when you have not examine anything (or talked with anyone) ahead of time to get a concept about what you need with regards to supplies and how to go about making a simple yet effective paintball grenade. Modern marketing merchandise include digital products such as MP3 players and USB storage space drives. They can also play video gaming, use social networking sites and actually build robots and write programs to create them run.

For non-traditionalists, they can join an greatest Frisbee or paintball group. Teens may also choose to take part in traditional team sports activities such as soccer, baseball, hockey and basketball. Team sports help teens develop social skills.

Stromsodt, Eric "Guidelines For Your First Time Paintballing." Guidelines For Your FIRST-TIME Paintballing. Make sure you are putting on a mask with eyesight protection whenever you are around the overall game of paintball. By no means wipe off the paint and keep playing.

Players who stand out in the open get eliminated rapidly. In between video games it is vital to resupply yourself with drinking water in order to avoid dehydration. Retrieved August 30, 2018, from ?Throw-­A-­Paintball-­Party!&id=7145096.

Levesque, Dan "Throw A Paintball Party!." Throw A Paintball Party!. Providing every bit of paintball equipment for all your guests would be too expensive for most budgets, however paintball is popular enough; it will surprise you how many people already own equipment. If you don't live close plenty of to a field to hold your party there, another best choice is to hold your own, however this will require an expansive enough property space to play.

While presents, cake and ice cream are fun, the real entertainment at the party will be the game. This could be done rather cheaply, however thankfully the paintball party idea isn't fresh; there are numerous paintball themed invitation templates available to use as simple ideas.

[dower]

“Out of the blue”: Forty years of musical influence

Musical youth

I think it's fair to say that the generation you were born in generally dicatates your musical tastes. Of course there are exceptions to this, some individuals seem to be born too late and some variations of music are truly timeless.

But. for most folks the musical taste is formed in their youth and then develops or dies depending on how engaged they remain during the ups and downs of life.

This is my journey, my life so far in sounds.

The summer of '77

I turned 12 in August 1977, and my Dad bought a good quality radio and a cassette tape recorder. No more listening to Radio Luxembourg on a tinny transistor radio late into the night in bed. I had found music. Real music.

And the journey starts

Coincidentally, it was the year NASA launched the Voyager mission on its Grand Tour across the solar system, and it carried a golden record embossed with the sounds and music from our earth. Amongst all the classical crap, Johnny B. Goode by Chuck Berry stood out as an excellent “message in a bottle” to toss out into the cosmic ocean. It said something very hopeful about our future. My future.

It was the start of my second year at “big” school, and I recall recording ELOs “Turn to stone” from “Out of the Blue” ... directly from AM radio onto a cassette tape using a proper AUX connection, cables and everything. While not entirely replicating the creation of the golden disc carried on Voyager 1, recording my first music was the start of my journey across the cosmos of music - kickstarting a lifelong deep connection to music. My music.

I was too young to understand punk, which had started a year before, and I quickly developed a love of heavy music: Status Quo were still anti-establishment, AC/DC was “just a racket”, and “Motörhead can’t sing”. I loved them all, plus a side-order of Queen and Meatloaf. It was fast, rocky and it spoke to me with heavy guitar riffs and ballad-style lyrics.

Sadly, the late seventies popular music scene was dominated by Radio 1 playlists; ABBA, Showwaddywaddy, The Wurzels, and The Bay City Rollers - and quite a lot of disco. It was mostly terrible. If we had the internet back then, or I had the money to buy independent label stuff then I’d be spending my time with the Stranglers, The Damned and Ducks Deluxe.

It took until 1979, and my parents splitting, to get a proper record player and the freedom to buy vinyl. My first single was Lucky Numbers by Lene Lovich. A poppy-post-punk track that, till this day, I have no idea why I bought it.

The Eighties

The end of the seventies saw the end of punk, fragmenting into New Wave (think Blondie, Talking Heads, The Cars, and The Police) and Post-Punk (Joy Division, Magazine, Siouxsie & The Banshees, Public Image). Peer and “sheep” thinking meant following one, and I went New Wave until that quickly went soft-in-the-head and became mainstream New Romantic (think Duran Duran, Ultravox, Culture Club, and everything else that came out of Rusty Egan’s Blitz Club).

I’d deepened my love of Heavy Metal, getting into Whitesnake and Deep Purple. It was my “style” if you could call it that. I wore jeans, long hair, cut-off jackets and was a “metal head” from 12 through 16 years old, up to 1982 when I moved into the sixth form and peer-grouped with post-punks and moved to a more affluent area.

It’s also when I properly discovered girls, so I smartened how I looked, got into the disruptive intelligentsia punk scene. But fuck knows why - but it was better than dressing like the gender-confused New Romantics.

With no money, my record collection centred around birthday presents, occasional trades and purchases. But I taped everything on the radio and bootlegged albums from friends on “borrowed” C90 tapes. I had been given a second-hand music centre and became my mums worst late-night-loud-music-nightmare.

I was still a kid, I hadn’t developed my own musical identity and very much led by school-related peer groups. I started to break free from the norms, but that was more of a reaction to the rise of manufactured new romance and the cultural backwater that living in rural East Yorkshire meant.

Last train to London

This would all change in 1984 when as a still-wet teenager I moved to London after landing a “cool job” in the city. I was rich, sort of (£7,500 a year), so bought a wicked stereo and went on a bender buying vinyl. Commuting from my flat in Kilburn to Farringdon every day meant recording “best of” tapes to play on my Walkman clone. I was as cool as a cucumber.

At the same time, I discovered the London club scene; I was a regular visitor to the clubs and bars of Londons West End; the Hippodrome in Charing Cross Road and Samantha’s off Regent Street were my regular haunts. Club music at the time was high-energy, so Frankie Goes to Hollywood and Hazel Dean - it wasn’t, to be honest, great music but played so very loud it went through you, you felt it.

I would get home at 3 am and create my club sound by winding the little stereo up until it could take no more. My neighbours, who I mostly never saw, hated my late-nights music blasts.

All grown up

It would stay that way until the release in 1986 (I was now 21) of Dire Strait’s Brother in Arms on CD. Overnight my collection of 300 vinyl records just seemed antiquated. CD quality was mind-bending to hear for the first time. I went mad and spent over £1,000 on a brand new stereo component system (which I mostly still possess) .

Mostly, my musical taste had gone mainstream, but the late 80’s saw the underground rise of House and Acid. By this time I had a car, with a sound system that included CD, so bass-laden house music was where I was at until the early 90s. But, like most folks, my first influences in music stayed with me - and have remained to this day.

The grim 1990s

By 1990, the Voyager 1 probe was now 4,000,000,000 miles away having flown past all the outer planets; it’s mission over. There was nothing new to record, much like my musical taste - not very much new stuff, not really. And then, for no scientific reason, Voyager flipped around and took the famous “pale blue dot” picture - a selfie of planet earth before slipping off into the featureless, quiet outer solar system.

By 1995 I didn’t play vinyl anymore - my decade-old deck got consigned to deep storage and would not see the light of day for another a decade - and vinyl wouldn’t re-appear back in my lounge until 2016. New music had become a little dull and formulaic, yes, The Strokes, Oasis, Blur and Pulp saved the world from totalitarian purgatory but nothing new was firing me up.

I discovered Jamiroquai and Faithless must be listened to at mental volumes, and when high on dope. More free money meant more music, louder rigs, a flirtation with MiniDisc and eventually a massive (at the time) CD jukebox for 300 CDs. I reached “peak sound” in the late 90s, with a pair of fridge-sized Cerwin Vega speakers powered by a massively powerful domestic rig. It would rattle windows and keep several postcodes awake late into the evening.

The iPod revolution

In early 2002 I visited New York and brought back a new invention called the iPod. It held a thousand songs, lasted for hours on a single charge and fitted in your pocket. It was almost unbelievable at the time. Overnight (again) my music collection was out of date - I spent weeks converting my existing CDs into MP3 and illegally acquiring a whole load more music.

Suddenly every track that ever existed was available free of charge, forever. When YouTube appeared, I now had every music video ever filmed available, too. I now had too much music, and with easy skipping, I had, in fact, reduced the range of music I was listening to.

Too much choice is not always a good thing, and when music moved onto my iPhone in 2008, I started to fall out of love with music. I had no stereo in my lounge anymore, and phone battery life was not conducive to mixing calls and music during a typical working day.

Streaming eveything

A year later in 2009 Spotify launched in the U.K. and I was pretty much straight in. My previous collection of music was made redundant for the third time - I probably had 10,000 MP3 tracks stored when I switched over to using a streaming service.

But I still didn’t listen to music at home, not really. I had a small sound dock for events, summer listening outside and occasional dinners but mostly music only existed on my iPhone.

But, on the road, on the train, on the tube, on planes I was back in love with music. And with Spotify I went back and re-explored my early choices and this time I discovered, for the first time, post-punk. Spotify had most of the smaller labels from day one, while big bands such as AC/DC stayed off the streaming platforms.

Hello again

And then randomly in 2015, I decided to fix my vinyl urge. I had lost most of my LPs over the years, but my wife had quite a few records, and we’d occasionally had a vinyl session on a Heath Robinson setup since 2008, but now I wanted to bring vinyl back into the lounge. I bought a modern turntable deck and a retro-looking Marshall speaker. Oh, and an original 1980s graphic equaliser for that authentic look.

I went on to purchase a few Amazon Echo devices, all attached to various music outlets around the house so now it’s just a case of “Alexa, play Ceremony by New Order”. Simple, and brought music into every room of the house. Nor does it require any technical knowledge ... anyone can ask for anything. Perfect.

My technology habits have gone full cycle and more; tranny->tape->vinyl->CD->Minidisc->MP3->Streaming->Vinyl. I still listen to the music from my formative years - 1978 thru to about 1987. In the last few years, I’ve also picked-up the live music bug again, nicely timed as punk turned 40 and all the old bands came out of the woodwork. But mostly my real musical taste is frozen in time, and space.

And Voyager’s Grand Tour of the solar system is complete, travelling at 10 miles per second, it is now over 13,000,000,000 miles away in interstellar space. Long after we’re dead, long after our sun dies, Voyager 1 will still be trucking along - still carrying Johnny B. Goode. I can relate to that; Voyager still carries the music of its formative years.

[sunspice]

New Prompt List Idea

New Prompt List Idea

A hundred years from now archaeologists find your MP3 player, whatever it is. Due to age and wear only ten songs can be recovered from it- which ten songs would you want them to find and why?

I’ll start, music has played a big part in my life- I love to sing, but I can’t carry a tune in a bucket. However, that does not stop me from enjoying it, and in fact if I hear a new song it is liable to star my fingers dancing across the keyboard, it sparks a fire in my mind that cant be quenched- only burnt out over time. I was born in the 80′s, and my parents left MTV on as background noise to my childhood. 

10. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_QUq72fla3o One of the first songs I ever felt this with was this song, I was maybe eleven when I found it- youtube didn’t exist, this was the 90′s you understand- the days of Napster. I’d never heard anything like it and I was in love.

9. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=n4RjJKxsamQ The meaning of this song applies as much today as it did when I first heard it- I was born in the tail end of the Cold War, and now again I feel this is a lesson to be learned, a song that should be heard. But one that wont be heard by the people who need it the most.

8.  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=R3CSZSUkjs4 How this became a staple of my teenage years I will never be able to say. But it was epic.

7. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6M6samPEMpM Looking back this may be the reason I was so into vampires and werewolves so early... I still am tbh. In any case in middle school I had a dirty secret, everyone was either an Nsync fan or a Backstreet Boys fan. I liked both.

6. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fw-QRyQcFH8 Speaking of popular music, who could leave the Spice Girls out. 

5. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TIy3n2b7V9k Belly shirts and pop music man, that was all that I can say about the late 90′s and early 2000′s even the rock songs were pretty upbeat. Sorry for the trip down 90′s era lane.

4. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=z9xJ3y7SM7Q A more recent song, but the lyrics stay in my heart. “I am a collapsing star, with tunnel vision. But only for you, but only for you.” It sticks with me long after the verse is past.

3. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xdYFuCp3m9k Something from Halsey will always I feel describe the melancholic feel that I get sometimes. I without a doubt have depression, it is a part of me, but it does not define me.  

2. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JQbjS0_ZfJ0 Iconic, beautiful, and the beat behind it all. Seeing the music video for this was just amazing to the artistic part of my brain, besides being part of an amazing movie soundtrack.

1. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dQw4w9WgXcQ Because fuck you, I had to live with this and so do you future scientists.