#wow is that thomas jefferson

[here-a-lee-there-a-lee]

[raphaelloclonehigh]

clone high is the batman to hamilton’s joker

[ask-james-madison-stuff]

*James had awoken in a hospital bed,he had bandages around his head and he was still laying on his side in a for once warm hospital room and a few blankets over him, he tried to look around for Thomas or really anyone, he didn’t wanna be alone at all!*

[ask-thomas-jefferson-1]

He sat down, forcing himself to sit up straight. This was uncomfortable… what didn‘t he do for appearances? Hamilton shook his head.

"Uh, right. Yes. Most certainly."

God, this was a horrible idea. Horrible. Why did he think that he, orphan immigrant, could do this?

-Jefferson started to speak about the basics oddly staying calm,he did look tired like he’d only just started sleeping again which was true,he’d also demonstrate a few notes then asked Hamilton to copy the notes he was showing him, Jefferson was an actual great teacher-

[mostlysignssomeportents]

Three AI insights for hard-charging, future-oriented smartypantses

MERE HOURS REMAIN for the Kickstarter for the audiobook for The Bezzle, the sequel to Red Team Blues, narrated by @wilwheaton! You can pre-order the audiobook and ebook, DRM free, as well as the hardcover, signed or unsigned. There’s also bundles with Red Team Blues in ebook, audio or paperback.

Living in the age of AI hype makes demands on all of us to come up with smartypants prognostications about how AI is about to change everything forever, and wow, it's pretty amazing, huh?

AI pitchmen don't make it easy. They like to pile on the cognitive dissonance and demand that we all somehow resolve it. This is a thing cult leaders do, too – tell blatant and obvious lies to their followers. When a cult follower repeats the lie to others, they are demonstrating their loyalty, both to the leader and to themselves.

Over and over, the claims of AI pitchmen turn out to be blatant lies. This has been the case since at least the age of the Mechanical Turk, the 18th chess-playing automaton that was actually just a chess player crammed into the base of an elaborate puppet that was exhibited as an autonomous, intelligent robot.

The most prominent Mechanical Turk huckster is Elon Musk, who habitually, blatantly and repeatedly lies about AI. He's been promising "full self driving" Telsas in "one to two years" for more than a decade. Periodically, he'll "demonstrate" a car that's in full-self driving mode – which then turns out to be canned, recorded demo:

https://www.reuters.com/technology/tesla-video-promoting-self-driving-was-staged-engineer-testifies-2023-01-17/

Musk even trotted an autonomous, humanoid robot on-stage at an investor presentation, failing to mention that this mechanical marvel was just a person in a robot suit:

https://www.siliconrepublic.com/machines/elon-musk-tesla-robot-optimus-ai

Now, Musk has announced that his junk-science neural interface company, Neuralink, has made the leap to implanting neural interface chips in a human brain. As Joan Westenberg writes, the press have repeated this claim as presumptively true, despite its wild implausibility:

https://joanwestenberg.com/blog/elon-musk-lies

Neuralink, after all, is a company notorious for mutilating primates in pursuit of showy, meaningless demos:

https://www.wired.com/story/elon-musk-pcrm-neuralink-monkey-deaths/

I'm perfectly willing to believe that Musk would risk someone else's life to help him with this nonsense, because he doesn't see other people as real and deserving of compassion or empathy. But he's also profoundly lazy and is accustomed to a world that unquestioningly swallows his most outlandish pronouncements, so Occam's Razor dictates that the most likely explanation here is that he just made it up.

The odds that there's a human being beta-testing Musk's neural interface with the only brain they will ever have aren't zero. But I give it the same odds as the Raelians' claim to have cloned a human being:

https://edition.cnn.com/2003/ALLPOLITICS/01/03/cf.opinion.rael/

The human-in-a-robot-suit gambit is everywhere in AI hype. Cruise, GM's disgraced "robot taxi" company, had 1.5 remote operators for every one of the cars on the road. They used AI to replace a single, low-waged driver with 1.5 high-waged, specialized technicians. Truly, it was a marvel.

Globalization is key to maintaining the guy-in-a-robot-suit phenomenon. Globalization gives AI pitchmen access to millions of low-waged workers who can pretend to be software programs, allowing us to pretend to have transcended the capitalism's exploitation trap. This is also a very old pattern – just a couple decades after the Mechanical Turk toured Europe, Thomas Jefferson returned from the continent with the dumbwaiter. Jefferson refined and installed these marvels, announcing to his dinner guests that they allowed him to replace his "servants" (that is, his slaves). Dumbwaiters don't replace slaves, of course – they just keep them out of sight:

https://www.stuartmcmillen.com/blog/behind-the-dumbwaiter/

So much AI turns out to be low-waged people in a call center in the Global South pretending to be robots that Indian techies have a joke about it: "AI stands for 'absent Indian'":

https://pluralistic.net/2024/01/29/pay-no-attention/#to-the-little-man-behind-the-curtain

A reader wrote to me this week. They're a multi-decade veteran of Amazon who had a fascinating tale about the launch of Amazon Go, the "fully automated" Amazon retail outlets that let you wander around, pick up goods and walk out again, while AI-enabled cameras totted up the goods in your basket and charged your card for them.

According to this reader, the AI cameras didn't work any better than Tesla's full-self driving mode, and had to be backstopped by a minimum of three camera operators in an Indian call center, "so that there could be a quorum system for deciding on a customer's activity – three autopilots good, two autopilots bad."

Amazon got a ton of press from the launch of the Amazon Go stores. A lot of it was very favorable, of course: Mister Market is insatiably horny for firing human beings and replacing them with robots, so any announcement that you've got a human-replacing robot is a surefire way to make Line Go Up. But there was also plenty of critical press about this – pieces that took Amazon to task for replacing human beings with robots.

What was missing from the criticism? Articles that said that Amazon was probably lying about its robots, that it had replaced low-waged clerks in the USA with even-lower-waged camera-jockeys in India.

Which is a shame, because that criticism would have hit Amazon where it hurts, right there in the ole Line Go Up. Amazon's stock price boost off the back of the Amazon Go announcements represented the market's bet that Amazon would evert out of cyberspace and fill all of our physical retail corridors with monopolistic robot stores, moated with IP that prevented other retailers from similarly slashing their wage bills. That unbridgeable moat would guarantee Amazon generations of monopoly rents, which it would share with any shareholders who piled into the stock at that moment.

See the difference? Criticize Amazon for its devastatingly effective automation and you help Amazon sell stock to suckers, which makes Amazon executives richer. Criticize Amazon for lying about its automation, and you clobber the personal net worth of the executives who spun up this lie, because their portfolios are full of Amazon stock:

https://sts-news.medium.com/youre-doing-it-wrong-notes-on-criticism-and-technology-hype-18b08b4307e5

Amazon Go didn't go. The hundreds of Amazon Go stores we were promised never materialized. There's an embarrassing rump of 25 of these things still around, which will doubtless be quietly shuttered in the years to come. But Amazon Go wasn't a failure. It allowed its architects to pocket massive capital gains on the way to building generational wealth and establishing a new permanent aristocracy of habitual bullshitters dressed up as high-tech wizards.

"Wizard" is the right word for it. The high-tech sector pretends to be science fiction, but it's usually fantasy. For a generation, America's largest tech firms peddled the dream of imminently establishing colonies on distant worlds or even traveling to other solar systems, something that is still so far in our future that it might well never come to pass:

https://pluralistic.net/2024/01/09/astrobezzle/#send-robots-instead

During the Space Age, we got the same kind of performative bullshit. On The Well David Gans mentioned hearing a promo on SiriusXM for a radio show with "the first AI co-host." To this, Craig L Maudlin replied, "Reminds me of fins on automobiles."

Yup, that's exactly it. An AI radio co-host is to artificial intelligence as a Cadillac Eldorado Biaritz tail-fin is to interstellar rocketry.

Back the Kickstarter for the audiobook of The Bezzle here!

If you’d like an essay-formatted version of this post to read or share, here’s a link to it on pluralistic.net, my surveillance-free, ad-free, tracker-free blog:

https://pluralistic.net/2024/01/31/neural-interface-beta-tester/#tailfins

[garecc]

Oh my god that's so crazy. A black teenager made art of Thomas Jefferson in a miku binder. Wow that's so insane. We should bully her off the internet and send her death threats for this crime. And we should pass around the image forever as the epitome of cringe. Wow that's so crazy a 15 year old made art of her favorite musical that was cringey. Should we call the news? Should we start a new lolcow campaign? Should we forever idolize it as the worst thing in the world?

[ravewing]

1770 ???? 1770 like the year that thomas jeffersons home in shadwell burned down ????? 1770 as in the year that the boston massacre occured ???????? 1770 just like the year that the one and only IRON MARSHAL (and also frederick william iii of prussia and i think beethoven) was born ??????????????????????????????

rate my setup for recording my orchestra audition thing

8/10

[brainstirfry]

im making a thread of things that happened in the wolverine's canonical lifespan. Cause they had movie that was supposed to be his ORIGIN story, but it gave 5 minutes to one experience in his childhood and 45 cumulative seconds to like THREE major wars he was in. So just to highlight how rich this character COULD be with culture across actual CENTURIES here's some shit that Logan Howlett lived through since he was born in the year of our lord, 1832. (By the way, as of earlier this month, that makes him 192 years old cause I think some people just wanted him to have the same birthday as hugh jackman which is great and I support it but I also can't find any evidence that it's actually true.) the last note I will make is that 1832 is neither the date supported by the comics and I've heard that it's not even true for Origins, but it's the most commonly cited and I think it will all be okay. it will all be okay in time. Oh yeah, and spoilers for x men origins Wolverine.

- For historical background, 1801 in America saw the election of Thomas Jefferson, who was the THIRD ever president of the US, so just for context the revolutionary war was just under 30 years prior and the events of Hamilton the musical will shake out within 3 years.

- Anyways in Canada after the American revolution the British split the territory in half, upper and lower Canada and all the British loyalists in the North American colonies went up there. 20 years after the split was the war of 1812.

- Washington Irving was alive during what would be Logan's parents? Time? which I mention because I think Beast would quote him and it would send Logan into a flashback that's the only reason

FROM HERE OUT Logan was probably alive for these things:

- Charles Darwin visits the Galápagos Islands in 1835 but it's hard to say how that really fits in with there being 'evolved' mutants but it's an interesting thought.

- Telegraphs were being widely used by the 1840s. Cool

- there's the Great famine in Ireland late 1840s which kicks off a lot of immigration to the US, in time for the gold rush starting around 1848. Also during this period Edgar Allan Poe hits national fame

- Ok finally getting to the First fucking thing we even see in Origins after the initial opening scene. This is being shown WHILE credits are rolling: the civil war. (1861-65) (Idk if him and Victor are still living in Canada at this point or if they've emigrated to the US after being on the run(?) but it doesn't really matter since Canadians did fight in the war regardless, mostly on the union side, obviously. By this time, they're both certifiably adults. Also Abraham Lincoln is assassinated.

- the late 1870s had graham bell's telephone and Edison's lightbulb. And wax cylinders for music on phonographs. Battle of Little Bighorn in Montana in the summer of 1876

- 1886 I wrote "statue of liberty put up. damn."

- 1890's: Wounded Knee, Carnegie hall OPENS, Sherlock Holmes first appears in a newspaper. kinda thought that was interesting. 93 there's a depression in America that foreshadows the Great Depression, then oh this one is important,

- 1894 has the first motorcycle production in the US! wow.. later Logan will buy his favorite '48 panhead "new off the line"

[musicalmoritz]

Funniest headcanons?

Okay wow I have so many crack headcanons so prepare yourself. Take every negative thing I’ve ever said abt fanon and throw it out the window, this is about to get so unserious

• Hanako is a fudanshi. This applies to the whole Toilet Gang (except Nene would be called a fujoshi), they’ve got a little book club. Hanako is the most insane about it tho

• Aoi and Akane are a himejoshi/himedanshi couple

• Lemon and Akane smoke weed together on a regular basis (throw back to the time I looked up “slang words for marijuana” for my Terukaneaoi fic and ended up sounding like Skyler White)

• I feel like an average conversation between the Toilet Gang is the most insufferable, out of pocket middle school humor you’ve ever heard in your life. Those four make South Park look like a kids show

• Akane has a random lock of Aoi’s hair on a shelf in his room

• Since the Minamoto father is absent and the mother is dead, Tiara just kind of assumes Teru and Akane are her parents. Instead of correcting her on this, Akane decides to be the dad who stepped up

• Akane is one of those filmbros who does NOT play abt Pulp Fiction (me) (that’s the second time I’ve mentioned that movie in relation to Akane today)

• He’s also the type to ask you to name three Nirvana songs if he catches you wearing one of their shirts and if you even so much as think about saying Smells Like Teen Spirit, he’ll shoot you in the head

• Hanako is lowkey mad Kou and Mitsuba started dating without him

• In the TBHK universe, Mei is the one who drew the Miku Binder Thomas Jefferson image

• Nene writes reader insert fan fiction

• She’s also a BookTok girlie (not one of the really bad ones, just cringy. As in she would unironically love the book boyfriend audio)

• Sakura is rly into disturbing movies and they make Natsuhiko watch them with them just to make him nauseous

• Hanako and Kou jokingly flirt with each other and it makes Mitsuba and Nene genuinely mad. Like Hanako can ruin Mitsuba’s day with a single “I can take your man”

• Yk that one image of Cheryl Blossom wearing an “I ❤️ Boys” shirt? Teru owns that shirt

• Akane is the type of dude to raise his hand during a class discussion and say “I’d like to play the Devil’s Advocate”

• Aoi flirts with waitresses very poorly and it gives Nene severe secondhand embarrassment

• Once a week, Natsuhiko challenges Teru to a fight. She loses every single time

• Nene has one of those traumatic hamster death stories

• Mitsuba’s hair is dyed so whenever he’s being particularly annoying, Tsukasa tells him his roots are showing

• Kou and Nene have had one of those awkward “I have a crush on someone🤭 And it’s someone you know veryyyy well👀” moments

• Sumire used to climb to the highest places she could find to get Hakubo’s attention, and it gave him a mini heart attack each time

• OG Mei had a fursona. It was a dragon

• Yk in Spongebob when Squidward was confirmed to be the most miserable person in all of the Bikini Bottom?? In the TBHK universe that’s Akane except it’s for all of Japan

• Teru has given the “I’m vengeance, I am the knight” speech while exorcizing supernaturals AT LEAST once

• The Minamotos frequently watch Cinderella together bcuz Tiara is obsessed with it, to the point that it’s become Teru and Kou’s favorite movie as well. Teru drags his friends to watch it with him too but Kou refuses to admit he likes it

• Kou chews with his mouth open

• Mitsuba has cheesy romantic fantasies about Kou the same way Nene does about her crushes (I credit this one to one of my TikTok mutuals @/mads)

• Natsuhiko has an ASMR account (just like they do in the Monster Nursery au)

• Tiara doesn’t quite understand the premise of being gay or coming out so every day she congratulates Kou on being bi

• Kou straight up lies to Tiara about things, it’s an older sibling canon event. Teru does the same to Kou. For example I once told my sister you could dilute chocolate milk into regular milk by pouring water in it. And she believed me.

• Despite the fact that Kou’s been friends with them for many years, Teru regularly forgets Yokoo and Satou’s names

• Aoi and Nene’s mothers have a bet on when the two of them will reveal they’re secretly dating

• Mei is one of those ppl who’s allergic to almost everything. You order a plate of shrimp beside her and before it even hits the table she’s like “Keep that FAR away from me”

• Kako was homophobic until meeting Akane. A “I don’t support that lifestyle” kind of homophobe. Before meeting Akane’s baseball bat

• It’s okay tho he supports his bisexual son now!! He goes to pride parades and everything

• Mirai braids Akane’s hair when she’s bored

• Tsuchigomori has never felt the touch of a man

• If you say one bad word about Teru around Kou, you better be prepared for a full monologue. Stan Twitter wishes they could be as dedicated as Kou (Yokoo: I want to kms / Kou: Wait until the next student council election we can’t lose votes)

• To avoid tarnishing her popular girl image by coming off as rude, whenever Aoi wants to leave a conversation with someone she doesn’t like she pretends to faint

• Mitsuba breaks up with Kou every other day

• When Aoi and Nene are having trouble communicating their feelings verbally, they find a wrestling ring and box their feelings out

• Aoi and Nene apply to every job together, they are a package deal

• Kou is the designated bug killer for the Toilet Gang

• Yako can talk to other foxes. But only foxes, no other animals so the power isn’t all that exciting

• Natsuhiko hasn’t picked up on Mitsuba being gay yet so he keeps offering to set him up with girls

• Sakura has been involved in at least (1) unethical psychology experiment in the past. They administered those shocks for Milgram with a completely straight face

• The hands in Mitsuba’s boundary reflect his feelings so every time Kou comes to visit, they jump around him like overexcited dogs

• Tsukasa had a very intense Alvin and the Chipmunks phase

Okay I have homework that’s due in like 2 hours so I’m gonna have to end it there. I hope my terrible sense of humor amused some of you

[deanofsam]

wow gang what a packed three days. color me exhausted. first we had 9/11, so obv i had to make a bunch of online jokes about it, which was, as always, creatively draining, and then the next day, 9/12, was the anniversary of the miku binder thomas jefferson post, so i had to take the customary miku binder thomas jefferson communion (a shot of pink whitney and half a sleeve of saltine crackers), and now today 9/13 in honor of the air date of the pilot episode of supernatural, i have to salt my entire house (which is of course STILL filled with bugs from last year’s salting🙄) like damn i need a nap

[here-a-lee-there-a-lee]

found a jackpot of images when 1776 performed at the white house on feb. 22, 1970

[belannaswlonkderfulworm]

hamilton characters as texts my best friend has sent me within the past month

alexander hamilton : how and why do you know all this

thomas jefferson : so i just thought 'oh this makes no sense ok then'

marquis de lafayette : IM SEXY IM SEXY IM REALLY FUCKING SEXY

john laurens : youre super fucking gay

hercules mulligan : ok so now I'm going to break you-

aaron burr : wow theyre fucking

eliza schuyler : bc yuo love me and will do stupid shit for me

angelica schuyler : fuck the fuck off

peggy schuyler : don't tell them but i am silently judging the person in front of us' tiktok feed

maria reynolds : so ik I'm meant to be having dinner like a sane person

george washington : hey so am i are you saying i dont deserve a statue?

king george iii : I've stumbled onto swiftie instagram and i can't find my way out

james madison : I don't need to transgender you you've done it yourslef

phillip hamilton : I ate it up in a non-sexual way

[presidentkittycherk]

B U R R E N S W E D D I N G

pls? :]

ohhh burrens 70s au ........... a beautiful love.... thank you for the ask anon i hop you like :]

okay so big yap about the wedding UNDER CUT...

Okay so i feel like when jeffmads got married(as beautifully drawn by esteemed collegue @hamilfreak !!!!), burr was invited as he was still working at the office and was thomas and james friend by then. I feel like he saw jefferson queen out and all the drama of getting ready and he was like "oh yes..... i will need this to be in my life!" but at the time he didnt have a longterm partner or even know john so he was like sigh... a later endeavor... but i feel like the whole time he was judging jefferson and madisons classiness and planning what he imagined his own would be like.

and so the whole burrens 70s au plot goes down they live together for a while and i feel like marrage ends up getting brought up by john being confused if they would or is they should and how it would go (being confused abouthow gay people get married etcccc cuz he is a little bewildered in that regard).. and burr is like.. well sense you are interested..... and im not sure how he would propose and how corny it would be but i definitly think it would either be 1. super earnest and lovey dovey cliche or 2. very causal like ya lets get married ... idk im tired ill plot this better later on...

but the wedding comes and wow look a moodboard.

sigh... i went crazy this is kinda lame idk i spent like too long on it no going back now! anyways the top two dress and suit jacket obvs are not their outfits just the closest i could get while also looking cuteish with the rest of th eictures....

venue: gay club---- i like to think gay club is in an old style movie theatre somone bought to use as a club and i think its also where jeffmads had their wedding maybeeee.... cuz like also i think burr and john dropped SO MUCH on getting the vision just right

honeymoon?: i beleive they went somewhere crazy.. im too tired to think where rn but on god that trip was freaky. also on their wedding night they stayed in a beautiful honeymoon suite at a bougie hotel(pictured in the last two pictures) sigh

just rambling..... anywasy hope you like!!!!

[icystorm76]

Lauren’s comments on Ep 4

My sister has now watched Ep 4, and again I wrote down what she had to say. She has never read the books and has no idea about basically everything. Anything in parentheses is my comment on her comment.

Her reaction to Ep 3: https://www.tumblr.com/icystorm76/753858454799761408/laurens-commentary-im-forcing-my-sister-to-watch

“The title of this is “I want you more than anything in the world”, which GREATLY concerns me”

Claudia’s performance

“Wow, she in the show”

“Ok this is kinda creepy”

“Yes, slay Claudia”

“Claudia must hate this. It’s like her biggest pet peeve, being treated like a child”

“His face!!!”

“Ok, that ghost thing is kind of cool”

“Ok, that is abuse again”

“So what happens if Claudia falls in love with another vampire who was turned as an adult”

“I want someone to edit that scene with “it’s a small world” but it’s just Claudia on stage”

Coven meeting after performance

“Anne rice you kinky little bastard”

“It’s funny because she doesn’t like windows when they close but I don’t like Louis boyfriends when they abuse”

“He’s kinda daddy with those muscles”

“Abuser. Victim”

“Understand his commitment issues. Please.”

Louis and Armand

“Wow, eww, keep that gay stuff to yourself. Yes. Thank you. One time I’m with you Lestat.”

Dubai

“He has sad eyes. Daniel does. He looks like the restaurant guy from ratatouille”

*Extreme sarcasm* “Thank you Louis, that cleared it up”

“I feel like his face would be fun to sculpt”

“What? Fire at the theater?!”

“PTSD awareness too. That’s crazy”

Claudia and Santi’s convo in the wet room

“That moment when trying to be a cottage core bitch comes back to bite you”

“Awwww, they’re going to be friends!”(NONONONONO CLAUDIA AND SANTI ARE NOT GOING TO BE FRIENDS)

“Daddy vamp?!?!? I’m using that”

“Marketing campaign, she lays on the ground like she’s fucking dead”

“When are they going to notice she doesn’t age”

Dinner with the coven

“I love how they’re like “we need to get far away from Lestat, who has a French accent. Let’s go to France!””

“Awww, she’s smiling!”

“Du ponte du lac, say his full name”

“Theoretically, if him and Lestat got married he would be Louis Du Ponte Du lac De Lioncourt”

“You know what I need? Lestat drawn by the same person who did Miku binder Thomas Jefferson”

“Why don’t vampires have Orgys?”

“Don’t put all my sexual comments in here. People are going to think I’m oversexual, tell them in not oversexual!”

“That’s kinda gay”

Les+Lou and Claudia+Madeline

“This feels like a scene from a marvel movie, the way it’s shot”

“Is he a goat?! Hello?”

“Oh God, I knew he was going to say that. I knew he was going to say that. You vain bitch”

“Yeah, I think we learned from your last family that thats not always good.”

Art gallery

“Wow, that is doing to much.”

“Look at how bored Lestat looks”

“I love how it’s been years and years and none of the vampires are over their exs”

“I feel like I’m in therapy”

Louis and Claudia’s arguing and Lestats goodbye

“She keeps repeating things. It’s like in books when they do that Oh. Oh. OH. Thing. It was nice the first time but after that it felt like she was looking for things to say.”

“I like the detail that he’s not getting wet because he’s not really there”

“Yo butt gonna get wet. People gon think you peed yourself”

“Oh my god he’s imagining Lestat with emotions”

“Oh my god the snap just happened”

“Ok. Idea. Daniel fucked Santiago.” (She is really stuck on the idea of Daniel fucking a vampire, she just keeps choosing the Wrong one)

“Is the dark gift really just a vasectomy?”

“There it is!”

“I am… so confused. What just happened?”

[wow-its-grantaire]

Woah I have a Les Mis blog now ?!

Uhm hi it's Grantaire;3

I like uh a lot of stuff!!! My asks will always be open!! I'm working on a lot of fun stuff and you could always ask about it or request something!! I have lots of headcanons too,,, hehe

Anyways

[Updated: Dec. 5th.]

Main: @wow-its-jester-hat

Friendz: @a-wannabe-emo & @karisumichan

Silver: @zilver-zp00n

Finn: @finn-in-the-reels

Taco: @not-taco-at-all

Xob: @xobz

Sideblog for uh. Everything: @woah-its-paper

Sideblog for being Thomas Jefferson: @its-me-thomas-jefferson

Inanimate Insanity ask blog: @ask-ch33sy-ii

Photgraphy: @phot0s-and-life-being-strange

Stimboards: @im-a-reb00t

[microscopiclady]

spotify wrapped

i experienced, this year, what im calling my “adult onset hamilton phase”. yeah i lived on tumblr when miku binder thomas jefferson first broke the internet, but i somehow swerved it, until a drunk evening with my friends this year. the next day, i awoke with lin manuel miranda’s grating voice ricocheting off the walls of my skull. better than a hangover, i guess.

i can’t deny that the songs absolutely slap (wow, almost as if hamilton is one of the most popular musicals ever). i started listening to the songs, but not on the streaming app that i paid $10/month for. i listened on youtube, as if i was hiding some sort of illicit affair, because i was afraid of how it would affect my beloved spotify stats. eventually, that just wasn’t convenient anymore…but…lin manuel miranda continued to entrance me with his jaunty tunes…

spotify wrapped is coming out any day now, and it will undoubtably be infected by the cast of hamilton. i would be lying if i said i didnt feel a complicated kind of disappointment in myself. what do you mean my top artists and genres aren’t going to fit what i want people to perceive me as? who am i even trying to impress?

the only people whose opinions i care about already know of this disease, and think im cool despite my shortcomings. it’s not my job to be aesthetic via the songs i listen to, nor is it my job to be funny by revealing my uncurated taste in music. my (37) instagram followers they have their own performances to worry about.

i realize that making fun of myself for wanting to be uncurated is the biggest irony of all. it’s easy to see so much curation around you and want to achieve the same for yourself. attaching your personhood to a handful of songs is easy. it gives people a shorthand to judge you by.

maybe my real self believes she just wants to use the music app she pays for to listen to music. leave her alone if her top song is the room where it happens!