Can’t wait until the next debate when he can shield himself with a tinfoil hat.

Gamers : “I am being exploited by Chinese capitalism!” (Buys another Funko Pop to keep on the shelf still in original packaging)

Nostalgia is partly an indicator that current environment is so shit that it can’t just be reformed or tweaked to get to a better place. Instead the best solution that people want is to time travel back to before it all took a nosedive and restart from there.

For Australia, it will be a long slog. The land rights acts getting through parliament that previously were making progress started to dry up about 15 years ago. IMO it was a sign Australian politics was going down the toilet.

Previous acts granted ownership of particular areas to various indigenous land councils. The councils would manage the land and it’s effectively a perpetual lease owned by the indigenous community. So post-revolution, those land rights concepts would have to come back and get expanded further to make decolonization work.

The stone stopped bleeding. You can’t squeeze indefinitely.

Work on your health. I suggest Yoga. Follow-along routines of whatever length you like can be found on YouTube.

Aside from what everyone else has said, the book advice itself is really bad also.

But I am afraid of the future. I am afraid that if I start dating her now I end up regretting it later in life.

I suggest enjoy the relationship as it is now rather than imagining how it will be in the future. It’s not like you have proposed so it’s way too early to think about your combined incomes and stuff.

Interesting that you picked up the micro tonal aspects of Non-Western music. Another aspect that’s very complex in Indian music is the rhythmic system.

On Chinese music I think you have oversimplified it somewhat. While it often uses the pentatonic scale, you do see 6 and seven note scales. Plus it actually has 5 different pentatonic scales. Similarly to Indian music there’s ornaments in Chinese musical notation to describe microtones and other effects. And another feature is Chinese traditional music is very elastic in the tempo speeding up or slowing to add emotions. A quick overview :https://youtu.be/sJdUugXLfWs?si=-GfHi0F1bn8b6SyC.

Concerning commodifiable modernization of traditional culture:

I don’t think the West has anything quite like the tv show Pili which is based on Chinese hand puppets but with a crap tonne of camerawork and special effects to added. The show has been around for decades. Only thing close is the Thunderbirds which never looked as crazy as this. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QGLKJ_S-iDU

I get what you’re saying but I don’t see how American mass media being dominant is a good thing.

A lot of it is just pumped out like widgets, created by a few big corporations, because of a modern appetite for shoving stuff in our eyeballs.

It places people into the role of just being passive consumers but they only have a few big fast food chains to pick from. Then it’s like just looking at the menu, seeing if they introduced a twist on their regular offering or a different sauce you can add to the same shit. An illusion of variety. They’ve gotten good at polishing the glass and wiping down the plastic furniture.

Then your life gets divided into portions that suit the mass media: movie duration, hourish long tv show, half hour show, 3 min pop song. These are formats they have worked out for you.

It’s all formulaic. I would hope that other cultures go BACK to before the formulas were so standardized and start developing from there. Change the formats so people aren’t so passive.

China is just copying the formula because the “demand for bland” is so pervasive.

I really hope they look to other countries for better inspiration. India for example has incredible music and movies.

After you buy a train ticket, you push the train the whole way to your destination.

Get on the bicycle and explore.

You can also volunteer at neighborhood community services: e.g. a lot of older people need help with taking care of gardening or other strenuous chores.

I think the youth will take that, grumble about it, dislike it but still be too propagandized and not uncomfortable enough to actually revolt or do anything that threatens the western system or governments.

While I agree with this, the revolt is actually already taking place at the periphery of the US empire. It’s other countries that previously had no choice but to tow the line with US policy. Now they have alternatives. We see the rise of BRICS+ and their influence both politically and economically.

There won’t be a revolution inside the US because there is no political alternatives. The economic side could go to shit and there would still be no actual political change : Maybe the names of the politicians change but the policies are still controlled by corporations and capitalists.

Even if there was a US revolt, there’s no alternative organisation to take control.

The GTA games allow gamers to choose who they want to be in the game. Sometimes they can’t do that in real life so it is enjoyable to have that persona in the game world.

To use terms/phrases like bloat and too many wickets, downplays this as a fundamental feature of the games. And it treats this feature as something that should be de-prioritized because it’s not “fun” for the chuds and it’s even taking the fun away.

Dark army = typical racist bullshit stereotypes.

I enjoy most genres but I am in a bluegrass phase : Chinese bluegrass

You see when the American colonies declared independence in 1776, Britain’s source of agricultural goods started to dry up. They needed a replacement colony because they were losing the American Revolutionary War hence the invasion of Australia started in 1788. Since slavery was abolished, they had to use prisoners as their cheap labour force.

Fellow Australian here. Australian politics is a shitshow. AUKUS is just the most visible (and expensive) cringe element at the moment.

People living with disabilities use their phone to help them find and access services which they need. Paying bills, getting cash at the bank, etc all previously required physically queuing up.

Yes - not all modernization and tech “advancement” has improved people’s lives. Postmodernism is a side effect of a capitalist system. Communication has become a commodity to be consumed.

Unfortunately we haven’t yet created a Linux-like philosophy that applies to mobile phones. With Unix, you use files or file handles to interface between command line tools. You incorporate the tools together in scripts to create more complex applications. How that philosophy can be transformed into a mobile device? I’m not sure.

Tech needs creative people to build things that help others live better rather than screw their life up.