I thought the new format for these “Friday Thoughts” worked really well last week, so I’m going to use it again this week. They’ve slowly been becoming longer and more fleshed out. Not quite a weekly newsletter yet, but almost.
This week looks at new music from Alkaline Trio, Pale Waves, Young the Giant, The Night Game, and more.
GoRuck, who make the best backpack you can buy (the GR1), are increasing prices in September. If you are on the fence about picking one up, I wouldn’t wait:
So instead of surprising our community, and that means you, about a price increase on all pieces of GORUCK gear and apparel, we wanted to give you fair warning. So here it is: September 1 at midnight, prices across the board on GORUCK built Rucksacks and Apparel are going up, on average 20-30%. This will be GR1‘s first ever price increase.
Another Friday is here. I hope everyone has a good week as we move toward the end of summer. I’m not ready for it to end. I’m ready for it to be less hot though. The temperature finally dropped here the past week. That coordinated nicely with the smoke coming in from all the fires. Been pretty gross air-quality-wise lately. I’ll take a few days in the 70s for a while. I’m looking forward to fall. Fall’s my favorite season. I love the weather, the crisp feeling in the air, and I like wearing fall clothes. I feel too hot all the time in summer. I like being able to put on long sleeves, and jeans, and wear shoes. Bring on the sweaters I say.
I’m going to try something a little different today and attempt to organize this round-up a little more.
This week seemed to go by very fast. I feel like I was just typing one of these up and now I’m back again.
I hope everyone had a good week. I spent most of my week working on this stupid posting bug where the posting box goes behind the keyboard, but everything I’ve done to fix it ends up causing a headache in a different and new way. It’s driving me fucking insane. So, I’ve decided to pause that until next Monday and do some other maintenance things today. Take a step back for a bit and see if that helps.
This post is made weekly in the supporter only Q&A thread on our forums. I share thoughts about new music out and various other things going on in my life.
This week went by insanely fast. I feel like I was just getting into a groove, and now it’s already Friday. Damn. Bring on the weekend.
This post is made weekly in the supporter only Q&A thread on our forums. I share thoughts about new music out and various other things going on in my life.
Oh Friday! I am so glad you’re here. Been a long week, but a good week all-in-all.
The biggest difference between racial issues in the UK and the US is the attitude the people have towards the topic. In the US, there is a constant call for racial tolerance, racial awareness, and racial acceptance. Emphasized from childhood, people of color are aware of the racial differences. However, in the UK, there is an unspoken rule that race should be ignored. In Britain, racism is more subtle. It’s more insidious. Sometimes, you won’t even know you’re being discriminated against. The way the script usually goes is, “Hello. So nice to meet you.” Fake laugh, fake laugh, and more fake laughter, until you leave the room, and they say, “We are never going to employ that woman.” Many of them have mastered that script.
Meet the two successful black British women, Yomi Adegoke, and Elizabeth Uviebinené who have written Slay In Your Lane, a book with the tricks for black women to make lemonade out of the lemons given to them by racists. Yomi Adegoke is a journalist and senior writer at The Pool. While her best friend, and co-author, Elizabeth Uviebinené is a marketing manager at HSBC. They met at Warwick University years ago, and among the many things they share in common is their goal to protect black people at all cost.
This post is made weekly in the supporter only Q&A thread on our forums. I share thoughts about new music out and various other things going on in my life.
This post is made weekly in the supporter only Q&A thread on our forums. I share thoughts about new music out and various other things going on in my life.
The 14 Habits of Highly Miserable People:
- Attribute bad intentions. Whenever you can, attribute the worst possible intentions to your partner, friends, and coworkers. Take any innocent remark and turn it into an insult or attempt to humiliate you. For example, if someone asks, “How did you like such and such movie?” you should immediately think, He’s trying to humiliate me by proving that I didn’t understand the movie, or He’s preparing to tell me that I have poor taste in movies. The idea is to always expect the worst from people. If someone is late to meet you for dinner, while you wait for them, remind yourself of all the other times the person was late, and tell yourself that he or she is doing this deliberately to slight you. Make sure that by the time the person arrives, you’re either seething or so despondent that the evening is ruined. If the person asks what’s wrong, don’t say a word: let him or her suffer.
Craig Fehrman, writing at Slate:
The NBA has been bad for two years, and it’s Kevin Durant’s fault.
If the Warriors beat the Cavaliers on Friday night, they’ll clinch a second straight title, compiling a playoff record of 32–6 along the way. This team has erased two seasons of potentially exciting basketball as thoroughly as Ted Williams’ military service erased several years of his prime.
The Warriors aren’t the ’96 Bulls. The Warriors were the ’96 Bulls—a 70-plus-win team with a superstar and a championship-level supporting cast. Then they added the second-best player in the league. It’s as if David Robinson decided to join Michael Jordan and Scottie Pippen in Chicago and coast his way to some mid-’90s titles.
I love the NBA and have hated this year’s playoffs and finals. It’s not fun to watch. This article really gets to the why and how an un-competitive league is bad for basketball.
My girlfriend (she’s the violinist) made a music video. It’s awesome, you should watch it.
Read More “Duo Odéon – “Valses from Specter of the Rose: Maestoso” (Video)”
Federico Viticci, writing at MacStories:
I used to be obsessed about not being “behind” and being one step ahead of everyone in terms of tweets and news and emails. Now I understand that’s a battle I can’t win and a fight I don’t want to participate in. It wasn’t healthy and it prevented me from enjoying everything else happening around me. I went on vacation multiple times over the past few years and all I could think about was work and todos piling up in my task manager. That’s absurd, and it’s not a job I enjoy. Perhaps it’s one of the common pitfalls of being self-employed and working from home. I want to work at my own pace; even during the busiest periods of the year, I won’t let the anxiety of being “productive” get in the way of spending time with my family and enjoying everyday life.
God damn can I relate to this.
Megan Garber, writing for The Atlantic:
The added tragedy of all this — kicked, climbed, son, gun, months — is the fact that Karr was not, specifically, making allegations. As Jezebel’s Whitney Kimball pointed out, “The fact that [Wallace] abused [Karr] is not a revelation; this has been documented and adopted by the literary world as one of Wallace’s character traits.” D.T. Max’s 2012 biography of Wallace, Every Love Story Is a Ghost Story, documented those abuses: Wallace, Max alleges, once pushed Karr from a vehicle. During another fight, he threw a coffee table at her. Karr, in her tweets, was merely repeating the story she has told many times before. A story that has been treated — stop me if this sounds familiar — largely as a complication to another story. In this case, the story of the romantically unruly genius of one David Foster Wallace.