Thanks, Calvin’s dad 😁

This is maybe not what you’re looking for, as it’s not about growing the money so much as using it to help others, but sharing just in case it’s of interest (no pun intended).

https://lendwithcare.org/

My wife has used this a lot - she reads up on microbusinesses who need a loan to develop, lends small sums (like less than £50 or so) to them and after a while usually gets her money back and then reinvests it in a loan to another microbusiness.

It doesn’t make a profit for the individual lenders as far as I know, but it’s a way to assist people in improving their lives. Kind of cool, I think.

If you’re using Windows, you could look into Microsoft Powertoys, a suite of cool extensions which adds some nifty functionality.

One of them (I can’t recall its name) allows you to quickly call up a toolbar for special accented characters, and other symbols - eg, if you want the © symbol, you type C, activate the toolbar via a keyboard shortcut and it’s there to select along with ç and other relevant options. I use it all the time, it’s really handy.

EDIT: Here’s a link, and that tool is called Quick Accent

Yeah, 7" singles, playing at 45rpm (and therefore sometimes called 45s)

Not afraid of AI. Contemptuous of its use for creative tasks though.

It’s ok, as a human, not to have the ability to be creative. And nobody has the right to that ability either, it’s just the way it is.

Using a machine to mimic (or rip off) the efforts of genuinely creative people does not make the person using the AI creative.

Or just use your own creativity if you have it, and don’t if you don’t.

Oh god, right enough, I’d forgotten about those, and that whole casino thing! God damn, I hated that movie…

No, the horses were in Rise of Skywalker.

The Last Jedi was the one with the “Can you hear me now?” gags, and Luke tossing the lightsaber away.

Mid 40s here - I mostly listen to stuff I’m already familiar with (albeit a pretty wide range, or at least I think so), and/or stuff which is from the same eras/genres/etc, particularly if it’s something acknowledged as influential on something else I know I like

Eg 1 - I’m a huge R.E.M. fan, and via them I discovered (some time ago, admittedly) artists like Patti Smith, the Velvet Underground, Leonard Cohen, etc.

Eg 2 - I am very much into house/techno, and have discovered so much great stuff old and new via a regular recommendations event on BlueSky (#RaveyardShift, Saturday nights from about 10pm, UK time, if anyone is interested!)

Eg 3 Although I don’t do this so much any more, I found that getting Tidal to generate a radio station based on a single song I like is often a great way to discover other great music in that genre whether it’s funk/soul, hip hop, post punk or whatever.

In all of the above, almost none of it is new… but it’s usually new to me, and that’s good enough.

I used to worry that I wasn’t keeping up with new music, but after a while I realised that that’s ok - there’s really no need to worry about that as it’s literally impossible to hear everything, so just find stuff you enjoy, let others do the same and don’t worry about it.

As an aside, I’m not religious at all, but I’ve long had this concept of “heaven” as a place where you simply have the time and resources to experience EVERYTHING you could ever want to. Every song, every movie, every flavour, every sensation, etc.

That’d be kind of cool. Although I’m conscious that that’s the Côtes du Rhône talking… 😁🍷

Woop woop! 😁

Plenty of superb songs use that word. Abandoning the songs altogether isn’t the answer IMO. Not singing the word is a better approach than never listening to the music.

This sounds like a decent approach, although it might struggle in instances where the n word is key to a rhyme.

For example, in Nas’ NY State of Mind, there’s the sequence:

But just a n___a walkin’ with his finger on the trigger
Make enough figures until my pockets get bigger

If I’m singing along to that, I now tend to leave a blank space rather than substitute another word. Especially because another word which rhymed could easily be mistaken for the real thing!

I would absolutely never use the word in casual speech, but there was a brief period in the past where I felt that it was more respectful to the artist/material to use the words exactly as written.

However I realised that I would only ever do that when I was alone - and thinking about why that was the case made me rethink what was really most important and stop doing even that.

[email protected] for more 😁

Just finished Joseph Heller’s Catch-22 for the umpteenth time. Always a classic.

That’s funny, I’m literally just about to start The Year of the Flood (it’s on the bed next to me), the second in that Atwood trilogy! I thoroughly enjoyed Oryx and Crake when I read it a while back.

Hello doggy :-)

House music :-)

Croatia (which was part of Yugoslavia when we went!), New York, and Mauritius. All spectacular in their own way, and I would love to visit them again.

😁👍