What lie would that be?

I’ve been alive through this before…

1969-1976
1981-1992
2001-2008
2017-2020
2025-2028

There have only been a few Democratic breaks:

1977-1980
1993-2000
2008-2016
2021-2024

It will likely flip back in 2028, but we have to flip the House back in 2026, ideally the House and Senate but that’s unlikely.

That’s the way politics works, you get another election and vote them out.

Organizing and voting is the action.

A revolution is a pipe dream, it’s not happening.

Getting people organized is the first step, getting them to actually vote is the second. That’s where we’re at in 2026.

If they succeed in motivating people to vote out the Republicans, that’s all it takes.

According to this, the US imports $421B worth of goods from Canada every year.

https://tradingeconomics.com/united-states/imports/canada

30% of it various oil related products.

Means nothing as long as Republicans control the House and Senate, it’s all for show.

Organizing 7 million people to protest on the same day was a huge feat.

To put that in perspective, the margin between Trump and Harris was only 2 million.

Not sure what makes you think No Kings and 5051 are dead, they’re still going and will only get stronger as we get closer to election season.

There will be a next election because elections are run at the state and local levels, the feds can’t stop it even if they wanted to.

Nothing can happen until the November election.

No Kings needs to organize and flip every red seat they can. It seems likely the House will flip. It’s POSSIBLE (but unlikely) the Senate will flip.

Oh, god no. There was this girl I knew years and years ago who wasn’t even a 10/10. She was cute, but wasn’t even under consideration when I found out how dumb she was.

We were friendly, but I’d have to stop the conversation to define what I thought were basic vocabulary words.

Words like “consideration” and “vocabulary”.

One of my favorite artists has his gear list on his website:

https://smither.com/etc/gear-bag/

"Pickup
Who knows what they put in those things?

DI
Who cares?"

LOL.

It’s part of the creative process, but it’s also it’s own rabbit hole. 😉 I do like having 42 simulated amps and 56 simulated effects pedals on tap without spending 10s of thousands of dollars, but fiddling with them is it’s own deal aside from playing and is, apparently, never ending. LOL.

But OTOH, if I want to try my hand at a specific song, I can get there without having to research every last bit of tech that went into it.

You’re right though, locking in “my own sound” is still do-able. The manual selection is all still there.

There is an AI angle that COULD work it’s just unfortunate that nobody is using AI in this way.

Instead of replacing creatives the way it does now, it could be used as a tool to inform creatives.

For example, not linking the product because they aren’t paying me to shill for them, but there is a brand of AI enhanced guitar amplifier. You use the prompt in the app to tell it what sound you’re looking for and it will do all the amp and pedal settings to make that happen.

“jazz guitar tone with a touch of reverb” or even specific bands and songs.

You STILL have to be able to play the guitar, it’s not going to do that for you, but it will save you hours of knob twiddling and pedal swapping to get the sound (or an approximation of the sound) you’re looking for.

Applying this to other creative fields, a novelist could use it to generate character names, or an artist could use it to come up with a color palette. I don’t think either of those would be objectionable because the creative still controls what happens after the fact.

It’s when the slop starts writing, painting, or playing for you that it becomes a problem and that’s where we are now.

No. Because I live with other mammals with their own ideas of where things go.

A lot of it is going to depend on the culture you’re talking about.

There are several series of books on myths and legends organized by culture:

https://www.chroniclebooks.com/collections/tales

Think of all the AOL discs eliminated! 😉

The ICE agent PLACED HIMSELF THERE. You don’t get to claim self defense when you create the danger.