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Cake day: December 27th, 2025

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  • There are still places that ‘value’ those things, it’s just all bunk. I know of a local department that requires applicants to have a college degree. It’s just that (some) college(s) has both become a degree mill, and there are plenty of places ‘captured’ by conservative thought/material.

    You could still be a fool, and a bigoted asshole, and graduate no problem. Even just going by intelligence, it’s not like being intelligent carries with it concern for your fellow man. There are brilliant individuals who are every bit evil.

    I think that the overall push for why police are the way they are is that only certain types want to be a cop in the first place, much more so than intelligence, education, or desire to find truth in scientific ways.






  • Not that video, but I remember another one from a little more than a decade ago where the guy was talking the entire time, explaining the process (and joking at one point about how only the new guys constantly used both safety hooks because it doubled or tripled the time of the work). Then you realize that there was another fella climbing with him when they get up on the little platform.


  • Not really subtle, but it’s different, right? With fortunate son, there’s this weirder dynamic where you have to actually string the entire thing together to gather the meaning. I would say unless you went and asked someone to repeat the lines to you after the song is over and tell you what they meant, they would never really ‘get’ what the song is saying.

    I was going to reply to the uwu pawb about that, but it’s really difficult to put it into words. There’s something about a really catchy song with really good flow and rhythm and melody and composition that does sort of turn your brain off. It ‘bypasses’ the logical language part of your brain’s comprehension and just gets you grooving. If I were a bettor, I would put money on it being the same reason that people with stutters can often sing without issue: it’s the same part of the brain (Broca’s area, if you want to pull out my neuroscientist days) that issues the commands to the muscles of the mouth and tongue and such, but the area that is directing Broca’s area is different (there’s an area called Wernicke’s area that is really heavily involved in the comprehension of language; it’s on the left side of the brain, while a great deal of your musical appreciation bits are in the right side of the brain [and I’m definitely getting far out of my knowledge base here, it’s been a great while since I did brain and specific tasks]). If you just listen/sing to the music, and never pull it up out of the memory banks and into your ‘logical’ part of the brain, you’ll never really engage with the meaning of the music/song.

    Anyway. I don’t know quite how to describe it, but like nicki said, if you just sing the chorus of independence day, you’d probably not get the song’s imagery, but the verses are more straightforward and easy to comprehend in mcbride’s song than in creedence’s. I’m just more surprised about it being misunderstood than fortunate son, I guess, more than I’m totally surprised.







  • It was a fucking struggle to leave, let me tell you.

    I suddenly suffered from a crippling disease (made worse because I was 10 and generally healthy before that, so it was mind boggling at the time), and no one in the church gave a hoot. You’d think a community of people who believed in a loving god would care that such a god would randomly punish a kid… so when everyone just told me to accept it I understandably grew pissed. That then blossomed into asking questions about others with diseases, famine, war, death, bla bla bla, and every answer was just stupid.

    Buuut, I was in a super religious family, and went to a religious school, and was a part of a very community focused church, so it took until I left at the age of majority to really leave religion behind. I argued with every single dumb christian I could find for my teenage years, because I wanted to find someone who actually had a good argument. Humorously enough, the best argument ever made to me was by someone who didn’t even care about christianity except that he ‘was’ one by dint of other people being christians: maybe it was necessary for god to send people to hell and have a shitty life… except obviously that’s a shitty god that I wouldn’t care to worship, so finally in college I said good-fucking-bye to the entire mindset.

    As for what happened, while I was still under the parents’ control and the school’s control, I was labeled as a troublemaker and generally ostracized. My mother would wail (reasonably) about the situation, but stopped making me go to church as I entered high school. The extended family that still cared about religion just chalked it up to attention seeking and ignored it, which was fine by both parties.