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Cake day: September 10th, 2023

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  • Lutra@lemmy.worldtoMusic@lemmy.worldCan someone help me "get" Prince?
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    6 days ago

    What if it’s just not for you? Not in a bad way, but in a blunt, not everything is for everybody way? To me thats ok.


    Art comes to us 1. at a time 2. in a place 3. in a culture.
    Those things together sometimes make magic for millions and it’s cool. But sometimes all of them are off just enough to make the art uncompelling - we just can’t get into it. Name a top artist of the last 50 years, and there a millions of people who would give anything to see them one more time, and millions (who have listened) and it just doesn’t do anything for them.

    I’ve heard a couple of 60’s big acts say I’m not sure how you could enjoy our music without living the lifestyle we were into back then. That scratches at the thing I’m talking about, it’s sometimes a bit of ‘you had to be there.’ That phrase is abused, but when it’s used right it has meaning. You’re hanging out with friends and the funniest thing happens. The next day you try to tell the story and it falls so flat of the experience. It was a time, a place, a people that made the magic.


    Agreeing with other folk who point to his mastery, his craft, his ingenuity, his artistry, integrity. And those are all arguably real, measurable and true. But that doesn’t mean it will speak to everyone. Or even be enjoyable by everyone.


    for me to get Prince, I had to be a teenager first experiencing life and love and pain, and seeing Purple Rain as my first real musical movie, and having a brother who thought Prince as a genius, and a few close friends who would loan me the albums, and a tape deck to listen to on the way to school, and a radio that was playing the new hits - Abracadabra, Jack and Diane, and Hard to Say I’m Sorry, You Dropped the Bomb on Me, and Oh Mickey. In that soup, 1999 comes to me and I see it in Technicolor somehow, and it seeps in, and I read the liner notes, and lay on the floor listening, imagining. I had to have the mystery about a man who really only had one name, and what the word androgynous means. I think I had to have all of these things to get Prince. And for years I did. And I got older, and I got it less, and others more, and maybe back again a couple of times. The last thing is the new of it all. You cant recapture, re-experience the new - and once it’s here it changes all of us, and everything is maybe a bit different and maybe a bit better, but it’s near impossible to look back and feel what happened, you can only feel it going forward. I’d like to feel the Beatle’s coming to America, or Chuck Berry on TV, or Getting muddy at Woodstock, but that’s not really a thing. You can read, and watch, and learn get an appreciation, but we can’t recatch old waves.





  • In any problem, every solution that works is a solution, but not every solution is of equal value. In math we use the word "Elegant : Characterised by minimalism and intuitiveness while preserving exactness and precision. " To describe solutions that work well, are concise, and don’t add pain.

    Jigsaw puzzle analogy: If you have a puzzle with one piece missing, there are at least a hundred things you can use that will fill that space … sawdust, sand, play-doh, cement, but the most elegant solution, is the puzzle piece made to go there.

    With tech, its just more complex- we don’t create solutions in a vacuum ( a world by themselves ), they have to exist and mesh with a preexisting world. We call those limits constraints. And the problem with tech is that often the people who create the technology ignore (don’t care much about) the constraints.

    Inventor: Can we do xyz with cameras? Society: And not let them be used for evil? Inventor: Not my problem.

    Its easy to solve problems: the cat is sick. kill the cat. people: No that’s awful. inventor: but it did solve the cat problem.

    Solving problems in a way that meshes well with the world is not easy. And our inventors are at the moment, shortsighted and greedy.


  • Just adding. This and all the bad things that will happen if they get the green light, is not how this is done or should be done.

    ‘But all the waste and ineficciency!’ Hog wash.

    From the system that is working? and serves thousands of people what they needed every day of every year.

    They have to say it’s horribly broken. Its a lie, but they have to justify why.

    There are standards, procurement contracts, entire agency’s to make sure — Make sure what?

    March 28, 2025 - Make sure that what will happen, doesn’t.


    coda: The trick this cabal is using is simple - take a thing most folk don’t understand. Say it’s broken. Open it. Rob it. Say its fixed. Collect profits and praise, leave town.


  • Just clearing up the argument.

    1. The files will be scanned
    2. They’ve been doing for decades

    There’s a difference here in principle. Exemplified by the answer to this question: “Do you expect that things you store somewhere are kept private?” Where, Private means: “No one looks at your things.” Where, No One means: not a single person or machine.

    This is the core argument. In the world, things stored somewhere are often still considered private. (Safe Deposit box). People take this expectation into the cloud. Apple, Google, Microsoft, Box, Dropbox etc - only made their scanning known publicly _after they were called out. They allowed their customers to _assume their files were private.

    Second issue: Does just a simple machine looking at your files count as unprivate? And what if we Pinky Promise to make the machine not really really look at your files, and only like squinty eyed. For many, yes this also counts as unprivate. Its the process that is problematic. There is a difference between living in a free society, and one in which citizens have to produce papers when asked. A substantial difference. Having files unexamined and having them examined by an ‘innocuous’ machine, are substantial differences. The difference _is privacy. On one, you have a right to privacy. In the other you don’t.


    an aside…

    In our small village, a team sweeps every house during the day while people are out at work. In the afternoon you are informed that team found illegal paraphernalia in your house. You know you had none. What defense do you have?