A Phlaming Phoenix

The character Pie’o’pah from Clive Barker’s Imajica has a sort of “third” genitalia which can both penetrate and be penetrated. Through the story, the main character is kind of magically seduced by this, initially revolted, but it becomes a point of personal growth which helps unlock his true potential. It’s a really cool and weird (and long) story with some pretty ahead-of-its time pontification on trans and non-binary identities.

Look around to see if I can rummage up the necessary implements to brew a pot of tea.

Isn’t the core of jazz improvisation and breaking the “rules” of music? If that’s what they’re doing, why would we disqualify it as jazz? A lot of folks had this opinion of Miles Davis doing jazz fusion in the 70s on Bitches Brew and Live/Evil with his squeaky, borderline abusive trumpeting, or of Herbie Hancock doing weird space synth stuff on Sextant and funk fusion on Headhunters. I don’t see how what you’re saying isn’t just gatekeeping that’s not really in the spirit of jazz.

Awful take. Last weekend I saw Mike Dillon with Phunkadelick playing with Brian Haas on the Rhodes organ. They played a wild punk-jazz show that is one of the best shows I’ve ever attended. There was a mosh pit at a jazz concert where a primary instrument was a vibraphone.

In recent years, I’ve greatly enjoyed things like AKU!'s album Blind Fury (drum/trumpet/baritone sax trio) and Ambrose Akinmusire’s Origami Harvest. A lot of modern jazz is blending in electronic influences, like Sungazer. Maybe you don’t like these things, but I can’t imagine calling jazz dead.

This is a literary device called a “bookend narrative.” If you want more stories like that, there’s your search term.

Wheel! Of! Fish!

Really, the media finally realized millennials don’t care if we killed Applebee’s or whatever, and they’ve moved on to the next thing to scare boomers with. “They hate us because we buy bags of paper napkins” becomes “They hate us because we can use old style keyboards.” Generations are not a monolith. You can compare them, but it’s stupid to pass judgment in that way.

women are so obviously not sure about the situation but they are not done with my partner

Hah, I love this track, but kind of ironically. It’s fun when it comes up on shuffle.

White Pony is accessible and everyone knows it. Around the Fur has the best snare I’ve ever heard recorded.

With polyamory, Brokeback Mountain is a light hearted comedy about some queer friends who like to escape to the woods sometimes.

Exactly this. It also lacks the gravity of an entire concept album preceding it and two minutes of static death sounds at the end. It’s a sanitized cover of a song that shouldn’t be sanitized.

I’ll even accept “joolry”.

God damn you.

I stand corrected on that one. I assumed it was sumac bark, and you know what they say about assumption. It makes an ass out of u and mption.

Cinnamon and sumac are two common spices that are made from grinding up tree bark.

I really dislike superhero movies in general, especially this non-stop Marvel/DC stuff, and a primary reason for that is the way they tend to go in and out of live action and animation. There’s an uncanny valley thing that happens in that transition, and you can obviously still tell that large portions of the live action stuff is shot on a greenscreen. It all looks fake as a result. My suspension of disbelief is shattered.

But when a movie like this admits it’s animated, things improve a lot. I watched the first Spiderverse movie the other day with my kid, and I absolutely loved the art style. I had other problems with the movie, but the visual style was not one of them. I wish there were more animated movies targeting older audiences with unique art direction like that.

It was used by Hilary Clinton to describe Trump supporters. A “basket of deplorables” I think was her term.

Do you recommend a particular instance?

It’s very, very costly, both but the hardware and the electricity it takes to run it. There may be a bit of sunk cost fallacy at play for some, especially the execs who are calling for AI Everything, but in the end, in AI doesn’t generate enough increase in revenue to offset its operational costs, even those execs will bow out. I think the economics of AI will cause the bubble to burst because end users aren’t going to pay money for a service that does a mediocre job at most things but costs more.