cobysev

When I was a child, my mother had to travel to Kentucky for work and I told everyone who asked that she was at “Kentucky Fried Chicken.”

My dad pointed out where Kentucky was on the map, and I almost immediately saw the chef and pan in the state shapes. I’ve never forgotten where Kentucky was since then.

Way back in my senior year of high school (around 2002), we had a debate project where everyone partnered up, picked a controversial topic, picked a side of the topic, and then researched and advocated for their side to the rest of the class, including a Q&A at the end, where the class could challenge their position.

To our surprise, the two hottest girls in our class picked prostitution as their topic, and advocated for it to be legalized. The teacher was also surprised, and curious enough to let them present their topic to the class.

We all thought they were joking with their topic, to get a rise out of all the horny boys. After all, as 17/18 year olds, our experience with prostitution came from movies or TV documentaries, where it was generally shown as a disgusting and degrading act; the last resort for a woman down on her luck.

But the girls’ presentation was incredibly well researched, with figures regarding the number of deaths, violent crime, drugs, and human trafficking involved in illegal prostitution, compared to Nevada’s legalized prostitution since the 1970s, which had practically no numbers to report.

They even did a deep dive into a brothel in Nevada, where the women were paid very well and treated kindly and fair and not like they’re just a piece of meat. Plus, they had regular checkups and practically free health care because of their profession. They even walked through the various services they provided, since some people (they serviced anyone, not just men) wanted other forms of intimacy instead of just sex. It was a safe and judgment-free environment, on both sides of the table, and the women employed there actually wanted to do the job, with the option to quit anytime. Unlike illegal prostitution, which removed the woman’s autonomy over her own body and placed her in dangerous situations, exposed to violence and drugs to barely make a living.

In the end, the girls did a fantastic job on their presentation and convinced a whole class of seniors that prostitution could be an honest and respectable position, and should be legalized. I’ve never looked at it the same way since.

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I was referring to PlexAmp. It’s decent, works well, but I just liked the interface for Symfonium better. It seemed more functional than PlexAmp when I switched over to it.

I actually haven’t used PlexAmp in a few years, so maybe it’s gotten better lately. I guess I’ll have to compare apps.

I’ve been maintaining a self-hosted music library for so long (30+ years now), there used to not be any tools for editing metadata. I used to have to go into file properties and manually edit the data for each individual MP3 file. Nowadays, I use Mp3tag to manually edit entire albums at a time. I have ADHD though (the hyperfixation kind), so I’ve literally dedicated thousands of hours to manually fixing metadata.

I guess I never bothered to look for more advanced tools to auto-update metadata. I had to go in and manually fix stuff that updated automatically from the Internet in the past, so I guess I stopped trusting online databases. But they’ve really advanced since the last time I went searching for tools, and their databases are a lot more complete in this day and age. I’m gonna play around with some of these programs and see how well they work.

I host my music library through Plex, then use Symfonium on my phone if I want to stream my Plex music remotely, just because I like their interface a little better than Plex’s.

Your example is from the '80s cartoon show, but Alvin and the Chipmunks are far older than that. They were a band (originally David Seville and the Chipmunks) formed in 1958, using a sped-up technique developed by David Seville (real name Ross Bagdasarian).

It did have a cartoon spinoff in 1961 named The Alvin Show, then later after David Seville’s death, an '80s cartoon show named Alvin and the Chipmunks. And then in the early 2000s, a series of live-action/CG films.

When I was a kid (in the early '80s), my parents had several vinyl records of David Seville and the Chipmunks and I used to listen to them on repeat all the time. They also had a vinyl record of David Seville’s “Witch Doctor” single, which pioneered the sped-up chipmunk voice effect. That song was an earworm! We’d be singing it for days after hearing it once. It’s no wonder Alvin and the Chipmunks became a hit sensation.

That’s the anarchy symbol, not the Avengers logo. Fitting, considering it’s spray-painted on a public structure.

This is the new MN flag. They just decided on it like a week ago.

My wife suffers from this. It’s called clinical anxiety and depression, with a heavy dose of ADHD. She needs medication to keep it in check, and some days, even that’s not enough. Trying to get her out of the house every few days is like pulling teeth.

On top of that, my wife is an introvert by nature, but you’d never know in a social setting, as she will talk everyone’s ear off all night long. I found out that’s her nervous tick; when she feels the social anxiety kicking in, she just lets the ADHD take charge and will run her mouth non-stop. When she gets home from any social event, even just a quiet evening hanging out with a close friend, she’ll collapse from exhaustion and sleep for half a day afterward.