I had my last class ever yesterday. That feels insane. It's really weird not feeling constant external pressure anymore.
I have spent over 40 of the last 72 hours in front of a computer, and I feel amazing. I was in WAY over my head on this site a few days ago, but I buckled down and did hours of research and debugging and I figured stuff out. There was also a (cute) girl in my class who was struggling with a lot of the stuff that confused me when I was learning this language, and it felt really good to not just help her fix her code, but see that she was actually understanding a lot of what I was telling her. Also she kept buying me coffee, which was nice.
I'm getting ready for a house show in a week. It'll be a nice last hurrah, but it feels strange that this is the last time that most of my friends will be hearing me play music - at least for a long time. I'm collaborating with a bunch of music friends on this show (including my ex, who is singing this Leonard Cohen song with me), and it should be a good time all around.
I've made it a full month being single, and I am starting to really find things to like about myself again. I am in a generally good place, and I feel really solid.
I woke up from a nightmare this morning. I was stuck at a social full of back hills, inbred neo-nazis. They were all fucking nasty, from the way that they talked to their meth sores, rotting teeth, and yellow fingernails full of fungus. They were all trying to kiss my cheek, shake my hands, and give me hugs as they introduced themselves to me and talked to me, all the while I was trying to dance around their very pointed questions about race, religion, and politics. I tried so fucking hard to not bring up about how everything about them, from their looks to their attitude sickened me. It was, in short, overwhelming.
If any of you creative types want a free story idea to work with, there you go. Just be sure to give me a cut when you become rich.
Mr_Scythe is somewhat right. West Virginia isn't that bad, but then again, neither is Kentucky. The rural parts of the Appalachian States have a stereotype for having rural pockets of weird people, from neo-nazis to anti-government types to the uber paranoid. It comes from popular images of Hillbillies and Moonshiners and has taken on more modern twists, meth users and neo-nazis often fitting the bill. One of the things to remember about the Appalachian States, which you might not know about being Russian and all, is that much of the economy in that region has depended on some very niche industries, mainly coal, lumber, and steel. They have a history of relying on them so heavily that they don't really diversify their economy, so when times go south for those industries, a lot of people suffer. Poverty has and will continue to be a big problem there, and with poverty comes drug abuse and extremist world views.
I see. Any particular reason why these weird people gather where they do?
- much of the economy in that region has depended on some very niche industries, mainly coal, lumber, and steel.
I'm failing to see how those are niche industries. I'm pretty sure that the US, much like the rest of the world, still uses those to produce, well, books and cars. Do you guys have coal-to-energy still?
Presume there is a coal mine. Presume it has been there for a hundred years and presume that it has provided jobs for people who can reasonably get to a coal mine in a reasonable amount of time.
That coal mine is a local resource that can be exploited on the global marketplace. It exchanges a local good - coal - for global resources. You can't eat coal, but you can trade it for food. More generally, coal can be sold to provide for the livelihood of everyone who mines it.
The people who mine it need things other than coal. As a result, ancillary businesses develop surrounding the coal mine - department stores, grocery stores, etc. While the local economy is diversified into most business segments, the economic driver remains coal.
Now suppose the world needs less coal.
The first thing that happens is that there is less value in what comes out of the ground because scarcity has diminished. Companies that own coal mines start doing things like selling them. The people who work at that coal mine will continue to be employed so long as someone buys the coal mine and pays them the same wages, which rarely happens. There will also be layoffs as less coal mined means less people to mine it.
The next thing that happens is that those coal miners buy less stuff. Your ancillary markets suffer - the grocery stores, the car dealerships, etc. Now people who do not mine coal are suffering because of coal prices.
But you can move away, right? Except the only asset most families own is their house... and a house that was purchased in a thriving economy is worth a whole lot less than a house in a failing economy. So you're going to take a muther of a hit just moving away (fun fact: my move last year cost me $9k for a family of three from one metropolis to another) and then another muther of a hit divesting yourself of your house and then you're going to need to find another job and if you're in coal... well, you're fucked. And if you're in sales or other ancillary business... well, there are no markets that suddenly need a whole bunch of ancillary support except other boom industries, like fracking, which is also getting hammered.
So what you're left with is a bunch of people who used to work in a thriving industry in a town that used to be thriving who can't afford to go anywhere else because the thriving was a long damn time ago.
- I see. Any particular reason why these weird people gather where they do?
There are weird people of all types all over the place. Certain regions just have certain stereotypes for weird people and for Appalachia, the weird people are Hillbillies. If you were to talk about Florida, you'd probably joke about retirees, of liberal yuppies for the Pacific Northwest. It's just a thing.
- I'm failing to see how those are niche industries. I'm pretty sure that the US, much like the rest of the world, still uses those to produce, well, books and cars. Do you guys have coal-to-energy still?
So I'm not super huge into economics or how these things work, but I'll try my best to answer this question, though hopefully someone who knows a bit more than me can expand upon things or correct any mistakes I make.
The problem with coal, lumber, and steel, like other resources such as oil, is that they're largely based upon demand. If something happened tomorrow and all of the sudden people stop buying those goods, a lot of people will get laid off, which creates a huge rippled effect of bills not getting paid and goods not being purchased, which leads to tightening of the belts, which leads to less bills getting paid and less goods being purchased.
Coal - Coal use is dying a slow, yet steady death here in The States for a lot of reasons. The push for greener energy and the cheap abundance of natural gas have made coal suddenly look very unattractive, both from an ethical and a financial standpoint. Coal companies are being hit very hard right now from all sides and the companies that depend on the coal industry, from mining equipment manufacturers to chemical processing companies, are obviously feeling that pinch as well.
Lumber - I really don't know how much lumber comes out of Appalachia any more, though if I had to guess, it's probably on par with what you see coming out of the Pacific Northwest and Canada so it's probably doing pretty well right now.
Steel - From what I understand, Asia becoming home to many modern world powers, such as China, Japan, South Korea, and India, has caused their demand for steel to go through the roof. The thing is, they're going to source their steel locally, mostly from China, because it's cheaper than having stuff shipped to them, which makes a lot of sense. This creates an abundance of steel though, causing global prices to drop, making it more difficult for smaller steel firms to compete. As a result, a lot of them have closed their doors, causing people to lose jobs.
- I see. Any particular reason why these weird people gather where they do?
They have no skills, no family living elsewhere and have literally no place else to go. So they stay and watch their towns and lives rot away in drugs and alcoholism and Government handouts. I've driven through some of these areas and there is a permeating sorrow that oozes out of the people and towns in the area. Go to an inner city where you see kids on drugs being raised by single parents with no hope, no future, no jobs, buildings falling apart, communities rotting and nobody has the energy to fix the core problems. Now, imagine that same inner city but instead of black and Hispanic people you have hillbillies and beaten down white people. That is the extreme poverty of rural West Virginia and Kentucky, rural Arkansas and Central Ohio.
Some of these families have lived in the hills of Appalachia for eight generations. There is a sunk cost in just up and leaving that they will never get back and a paralyzing fear of what the outside world is like.
If I ever win the lottery I want to get groups of poor inner city people and poor rural Appalachians together and get them to compare their lives. Maybe that combined anger will force some changes to address these folks.
It is my seventh wedding anniversary today. We got married on cross-quarters so that the date would move around and confound our relatives. The anniversary often coincides with Cinco de Mayo which is amusing, but today it's the day before.
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I have developed another old man obsession borne out of lucky internet searches and stupidity. Long have I been overly-interested in mechanical clocks. I thought I was interested in wooden ones but wood is a piss-poor engineering material and makes for a really shitty clock, at least as far as accuracy goes. This obsession was exacerbated by the fact that longcase/grandfather clocks are tackily ornate and most of them have quartz movements anyway so what's the fucking point? Turns out I'm just not spending enough money by a handful of zeros.
As it turns out, perfectly elegant, perfectly accurate, perfectly lovely clocks can be had for roughly the price of a BMW 7-series. Unless you want something particularly impressive, in which case you should expect to spend about as much as you would on a McLaren MP4-12C.
For that price, of course, they include a ladder so you can wind the thing. They do not include a well-heeled Romanian manservant to do it for you, however.
They have, in their magnanimousness, provided a pathway to ownership for the rubes among us. For a mere eight thousand euros you can build your own regulator using pimpin' german parts. Of course if you want things like the dual anemometer compensator that's another thousand euros, or 250 euros for polished screws.
I would have a really hard time spending a thousand dollars on a watch. For some reason, however, I stroke my chin and nod at the idea of putting someone else's clock parts together for ten grand. Which is pretty much priming in a nutshell - "but it's a small fraction of the $250k their real clocks cost! What a bargain!" without really internalizing that I've spent less than that on a hyperexotic italian motorcycle capable of dusting an F430 Scuderia on the straights.
So instead of enriching the krauts for a bunch of brass and pianoblack I probably oughtta buy a book on movements for $20 and focus on shit that interests more than the polo crowd. I mean, look at this choad.
So I'm also busy loathing myself for liking clocks because they're intricate mechanical objects of precision beauty but, unlike guns, they don't kill anyone and you can use them all day long without your hands smelling like smokeless.
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And "loathing myself" is a comfortable position as I've finished the book. It's been less than 24 hours, and I've finished it for the third time now, the first time to get it up to like 200,000 pages, the second time to get it down to 176,000 and the third time to reuse maybe 8 paragraphs of that 176,000 words and start over with another 87,000.
One way to look at it is to say I cut the book more than in half. A more accurate way to look at it is that I retold the story in an entirely new way using half as many words. I'm sick to fucking death of the story, unsatisfied with the ending and generally disgusted with the written word but I also must acknowledge that it's better than it was, and it was good enough to get me one hell of an agent.
An agent I haven't talked to in a year.
So now I need to start that bullshit back up again. Meanwhile there's at least two chapters I know of that I need to rewrite because I've decided that my "never scenes in restaurants" rule did not in fact have exceptions, and even if it did, those exceptions are not in this book.
I tell myself this is the part that separates dilettantes from professionals - the willingness to beat the shit out of it until it's right. At the same time I recognize that I had to let Google spell "dilettantes" for me and that spending three years and 300,000 words on a book no one will ever read is the very definition of "dilettante."
One of my earliest, most brutal, most unintentional fights on Hubski was over the nature of artistry. I've always found it disingenuous that the man who tried twenty two titles on A Farewell to Arms would say something as fatuous as "there's nothing to writing - you just sit at the typewriter and bleed." You DON'T. You take a living idea and you strangle it and torture it until people you will never meet, people who would actively hate you, people who would reject everything you stand for would enjoy reading it.
But then, I write because people tell me I'm good at it, not because I enjoy it. Times like this I hate them for it.
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A rat got into the house night before last. Came in through the hole left in the wall when we replaced the subfloor under the en fuego dishwasher. Took the little fucker four months to find his way in but once he did he ate a fist-sized hole in the side of a watermelon then made it into the pantry and snacked down on a container of pancake mix. Thought it was a squirrel at first and that I'd left the screen door open. But last night we heard the fucker while watching TV.
I grew up with rats and mice. There was never any hope of actually keeping them out of the house, so you just kept your room clean enough that when they wandered in, you could catch them, toss them in a ziplock, step on them (usually in bare feet) and throw them in the garbage because the garbage disposal would wake up mommy. So I went on a rat hunt - put on my gloves 'cuz the little fuckers can bite and proceeded to attempt to catch the little shit. My wife, who did not grow up with vermin, had a better idea - box the little shit in so that he couldn't get away. Of course we both failed and as soon as he was behind the fridge he was back down under the house, but at least it led me to his hole, which I plugged up with one of the few pieces of scrap wood left after I put 8 loads through the chipper two days ago.
He gnawed at that plank until 5am.
My daughter woke up at one point - I heard her saying "come in!" at 3am and had to go in and explain that there was a critter trying to get into the kitchen to get food. She saw no reason our kitchen couldn't accommodate a "creature" since it was cold outside and we had a lot of food. I then had to explain that outside animals are better outside. She seemed to buy it, but this morning she had created an entire cosmology about the creature that knocks on the door at night.
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My daughter will not grow up with vermin. She will not have rodents that bite coming into her room. She will consider it deviant to crush animals to death because the cat's too lazy to eat them. She will not lose classmates to plague spread by squirrels, she will not have siblings nearly killed by hantavirus because her parents are too drunk to deal with the squalor. She will not fear running the garbage disposal at 3am; she will not have reason to run the garbage disposal at 3am. And that is something worth drinking to. That is something that outweighs the obsession with poncy German clocks, that outweighs the life wasted in pursuit of words never read.
I'm doing a better job than my parents did, so it hasn't been a total waste.
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The number of words above, added to the book I wrote yesterday, would equal exactly half the book I wrote last year. It took me 35 minutes to write that.
If only everything could happen so quickly.
Hemingway said that because he liked his own image as the guy who bleeds. The author of that post who quoted it I think actually believed it. I say that because I tried to throw her a bone and I bought her book. I'm not generally a harsh critic, because I respect effort in creation, but that thing was unreadable. Almost literally, as I had no idea if there was a plot, or characters, or simply words and vaguely sentences. It took me probably 20 minutes to get through three pages and I quit. Then she turned into one of those people who reamed out "hubski" for being dicks after the only people who purchased that steaming pile of garbage besides her parents were from this website. Oh man, what a shitty trip down hubski memory lane.
- My daughter woke up at one point - I heard her saying "come in!" at 3am and had to go in and explain that there was a critter trying to get into the kitchen to get food. She saw no reason our kitchen couldn't accommodate a "creature" since it was cold outside and we had a lot of food. I then had to explain that outside animals are better outside. She seemed to buy it, but this morning she had created an entire cosmology about the creature that knocks on the door at night.
aw
- My daughter will not grow up with vermin. She will not have rodents that bite coming into her room. She will consider it deviant to crush animals to death because the cat's too lazy to eat them. She will not lose classmates to plague spread by squirrels, she will not have siblings nearly killed by hantavirus because her parents are too drunk to deal with the squalor. She will not fear running the garbage disposal at 3am; she will not have reason to run the garbage disposal at 3am. And that is something worth drinking to. That is something that outweighs the obsession with poncy German clocks, that outweighs the life wasted in pursuit of words never read.
I'm doing a better job than my parents did, so it hasn't been a total waste.
best thing I've read today thanks
Good luck.
What are you doing in college/planning on doing as a career?
Right now I'm doing computer science, planning on being a software dev. My internship over the summer is with a local online retail company.
However, I've been pretty dissatisfied with my classes and college experience as a whole. I don't enjoy the program I'm in, either, so I've been looking for a change recently.
The old aged adage of doing something that you are passionate about is a real bummer for people who are also fixed on making money. I'm not sure thats why you don't enjoy your program; that you don't find passion in CS but in something else, but I would suggest doing a minor or doing another major to make up for the dissatisfaction induced by CS
Just spent the last week in Portland with my folks. Five days would've been perfect. interesting watching them interact with my kids as an outside observer. Gives me some understanding of why they acted the way they did towards my brothers and me when we were kids. Doesn't make it totally acceptable, but takes the bite away a little bit.
Last night we were there, dad got explosively angry at me for buying the wrong kind of peanuts for the dinner he was making. Put me in a place I haven't been for a long, long time. Nevertheless. I'm a grownup now, so I felt okay telling him to fuck off and then going to play with my kids. Unexpected: the tenderness I felt watching him nibble at the periphery of the scene, wondering how to make things better. Like I said, distance fosters understanding. We got really drunk that night, like every night.
I should say: my parents have given me so much throughout my life, including a very comfortable childhood, and the continuing opportunity to grow. They're also a lot of fun, so long as I can escape when necessary. Take the good with the bad.
Glad you experience the hell hole that is bureaucracy. Waited 30 minutes in line to grab the red decals for my brother who just got his permit.
Few more exams until I'm essentially done with college. I've got jury duty in a little over a month (My first time). I know people talk about about how terrible it is, but I'm excited.
I think the most interesting realization I had this week was how close I am to music. I don't play an instrument (I sing a bit), but I love listening to it. I love seeing people play music. I love what music can do, how emotionally charged it can be, how it can change a person. To me there something weirdly mystical about the whole thing (forgive me I spent an hour or so last night listening to radioheads new single).
Music is mystical. It's why it stuck with humanity through thousands of years.
I know exactly how you feel about it. My headphones constantly transport some sort of audio signal when I'm at home. Can't imagine living without music, even less can I imagine living without good music. I'll wager a guess that not only music can inspire such an emotional response from you. Am I correct?
Even though Endomondo crapped out on me, I just had a great run. I love it when I run and I have more energy afterwards.
Hopefully it sticks - my calender for the next four weeks is already almost full. Mostly with the 4 project classes that I have running simultaneously, but also because I'm going traveling twice! To London with my sister not this weekend but the next, and two weeks after that to Antwerp. Anyone know some cool things to do in London? I already booked breakfast at the Sky Garden.
Your mileage may vary, but Map My Run seems to be the one that craps the least.
I am jealous of the Sky Garden. Upon first visiting Los Angeles in the '90s I had the idea of starting a place like that and calling it Silent Running.
Unfortunately I am not a bilionaire.
I enjoyed the shit out of the Tate Modern, but you may not.
Seconded about the Tate. Sometimes expos are not the most interesting and very expensive(I think it was like 20 something pounds last time I went! Who has that kind of money!?), but at least walk in for the architecture of the place and check out the free exhibit. There's a really cool market walking distance away too :)
How was your London visit?
The Evening Standard reports that London Stone has moved to temporary quarters at the Museum of London.
I had a fun day doing the free walking tour: Street art edition last time I went. It was basically a walk around Brick Lane: the most hipster street I've ever seen. I think you need to book a day or two in advance.
I also quite enjoyed an expo at the Barbican about games and VR. It's a really cool building too, maybe they have something interesting right now too?
It was nice having my sister living there for the past 3 years, I'd make it my connecting flight every time I flew to Europe and got to stay with her :) Too bad she just moved to Ottawa, the most boring city in Canada. The UK really dropped the ball by not giving her that working visa...
I know that feeling -- I have a Fitbit, and when I play a long soccer game without it on, it feels like the steps and miles I ran "don't count." Which is silly.
By the way, have you tried RunKeeper? The running app? I wonder how the two compare, Endomondo and RunKeeper.
In those cases I usually manually add the workout. It might have also been OxygenOS's fault, because after the workout crashed I couldn't turn the screen on for a while. When I rebooted my battery jumped from 21% to 8% to 3% in a few seconds. Luckily it stayed there for the rest of the run.
When I last tried it I didn't find RunKeeper to be much better. Endomondo is also very good at taking all kinds of sports and activities and dealing with it. It works out of the box with my HR monitor and during the run I can easily check the map to adjust my route. I'll take the few times it shits itself if the rest of the time I get exactly what I want out of my running experience. Maybe when I'm more serious about a detailed tracking I'll give it a try.
Honestly, my favorite thing to do in London is ride around on the underground and pop out in different places to get a feel for the entire city (zone 1 at least). I suspect you sympathize.
But if you have a day, boats leave from the downtown docks heading to Hampton Court. Really soothing trip along the Thames, and you can tour the castle at the end. Take a train back to save time. 4-5 hours.
And if you really have time for a day trip, go to Oxford. It's the college town. If the weather is good it's one of the most peaceful places on earth. Bus trip is ~90 minutes one way, I recall, and cheap.
If you have limited time, simply wander around Hyde Park at night.
That's a shame. I'd maybe skip the museums, if you only really have one day. Just explore, eat at a pub, drink ale, look at the famous buildings on the Thames and wander the famous gardens/parks.
And! Put the Knowledge to the test if you have some funds. I bet any cabbie you meet would enjoy talking about it.
- In other news I have begun writing a general series on Project Euler related mathematics. No spoilers, no solutions; just a overview of required material and guide over various branches of mathematics. It was inspired by bhrgunatha in this post. I will likely finish making website for it tomorrow.
Real cool site. Always love engaging in these sorts of problems. thanks
The things which I know and am good at and the things I am being utilized for have very little overlap right now, as evidenced by the fact I was thrown in a tool shop and told "go do this" and then had no idea what I was doing. Haven't been in a shop since high school and while it's enjoyable stuff that I wouldn't mind relearning, it came across like I was expected to already know my way around. My boss' perception of an engineer, and what my skillset actually is don't match up at all and it's frustrating, to say the least.
I keep thinking about how the things I've been working on don't actually help anybody, make anyone's life better, and that's what I want to do. Starting to work on the resume again (anyone want to review it?) and thinking about what I want to do...maybe I'll join the Peace Corps or AmeriCorps or something because I'm rapidly hitting the doooooooooon't caaaaaaaaaare point. On the bright side, I've been working on a small team to complete a grant application which would create multiple paid part-time positions related to media equity and digital literacy, which would be amazing. That's been an enjoyable experience. Moreso than work, really.
Ridiculous suggestion, have you thought about driving for Uber? My dad was an environmental engineer for 30 years and then quit because a.) stress and b.) basically "I keep thinking about how the things I've been working on don't actually help anybody, make anyone's life better, and that's what I want to do." He's now making less money (but still enough) and loving his job as an Uber driver.
I bought a plane ticket to a very special wedding in October. I'm really excited : )
In other news, the lacrosse team I coach just won the City A Conference championship! A great season, now it's time for the playoffs. Coaching, even though I'm doing it for the kids, has wound up being as or more useful to me. Seeing the kids learn, them trusting me and pushing themselves. It's crazy to think that there's a genetic basis for why this sort of experience is so rewarding. It just feels so self-evidently good.
Wow. Already? Okay.
I was talking about this play-by-post I've been trying to get into, where the admins were rather... aggressive about asserting themselves as the kings of the hill. AshleyR suggested that I move on to another game, so that's what I'm doing - by building my own. I wanted to do something like this for a really long time already, and now is the perfect opportunity to write the hell out of the setting. Scribing up the ideas as we speak.
Finished my second week of running this morning. Feels great, and I can't wait to go on and see what it turns out to be. So far, the program I've been following has been moderately challenging, which I enjoyed very much: it allows me to feel myself becoming a better athlete while also requiring something of me. Awarded myself with skipping the day in the uni, which, in hindsight, may not have been the best of ideas, but I need the time to revise my Latin anyway.
I've been reading about Richard Feynman lately - specifically, the books about him. The manner in which he relays his thoughts - unconcerned of others' opinions and fully accepting of oneself - is inspiring. As uncomfortable as I am with talking straight, I'm going to adopt this manner because it seems to be the only right way to express oneself. Will start by telling exactly what I think to the admin of the aforementioned PBP. Not like there's anything of value there for me anymore.
Yesterday the last season's first episode of Person of Interest came out! I'm very excited to see how the story ends. Thought I could manage to rewatch the previous seasons before the last one comes out. Wondering now whether I should rewatch as quickly as I can or go on with the last season. It may seem like a minor issue, but it's important for me to get reacquainted with the story I'm about to continue - which is the reason I'd reread all of the previous Harry Potter books when the next movie came out.
P. S. I apologize to everyone I haven't replied to yet. I have quite a few messages in my notification area that require a certain amount of attention, and the attention I can't give yet.
Less than 3 weeks left to the travels! I've been on edge recently because of a re-order by UO (while we're still in Asia, fuck) and our local supplier being shit. How come you have stuff maked "in stock" and then it takes 2 week to be available for pickup!? Or worse "we're not sure, maybe sometime next week". Goddamn it, thats 90% of your business, you should at least KNOW. Skrew you, I'm ordering on Amazon (exept I can't for the bottles and now we're stuck waiting on them idiots). I'll have to research new suppliers when I get home because they ve been a huge pain to deal with.
But in good news, travels are still great :)
Just got my mechanical keyboard (quickfire TK) which delivers the best experience I have encountered on a keyboard; makes coding and writing a joy.
Apart from that, concerning my actual life, I've finally escaped idleness.
I am going to
- cut out sugars and drink more water
- stretch and foam roll every morning and night
- Run 5-10 miles a day
- Start doing bodyweight exercises
- Meditating before going to sleep
- Keep a journal (record) of what I've been up to and what I plan to accomplish
- Finish a book every week (Currently reading Zizek if anyone likes him)
Besides that, I'm going, firstly meeting with my dad on Friday who will be around a month sober (and thankfully he has agreed to keep going on), and then with him to go to a store in upstate NY to see if it would be a good investment. Being backed up into a corner where I have to support the people around me is exhausting.
I got a new bed after I got rid of my cat. It came from my awful roommate's spare room. And now I have fleas. I just found three of the motherfuckers on me after two days of assuming they were gone. And there's another one. Maybe it's the fleas from my cat looking for food now that he's gone. But I'm leaning towards fleas from my roommates dog since my cat was outside for all of a week in 20 degree weather. Fuck this. I'm buying some flea killing stuff. I'll sleep on a bed of Raid if need be.
You might be interested in Diatomaceous Earth
yea the awesome thing about DE is that its non-toxic (safe to eat). I've used it on bed bugs and nail fungus actually.
This seems like a good place to ask this...
All my life, I've never liked rap music or hiphop, but I've still always wondered where and when it originated from. All I know is that I wasn't made to long ago, and I'm sure there is multiple people here who were living when it came out. I know, I know, your probably asking, why can't he just look it up on Wikipedia... Jeez...
I think it would be nice to hear a first person impression of when it came out.
Rap became a recorded thing in the early '80s. There are 3 potential "first recorded rap songs," I prefer the belief that Sugarhill Gang's Rapper's Delight is the 'true first.' So, rap is probably older than maybe you think. (It's certainly older than I thought at first.)
I wasn't around when it came out, so I can't give you a first hand impression, but my understanding is that rap existed as a form of expression especially in urban (city) communities long before it was recorded - i.e., that while Rapper's Delight was at least among the first, if not the first, rap song recorded and released for popular consumption, the idea of rap and rapping was not new to listeners when the single was released in 1979.
Hip-hop, a more broad category of music which I believe can be taken to include "rap" as a subgenre, I believe descended/is most closely related to R&B (rhythm and blues), which in turn is a descendent of the jazz of the 1920s and 1930s.
I bet that you and I would both love to hear, maybe, determinedkid weigh in on this, as I'm pretty sure he knows way more about ran and hip-hop and its evolution than I do, although he wasn't there in 1979 either. nowaypablo may have something valid to throw in too, not sure ;)
Shoutout: if you haven't, consider checking out the tag #hiphophubski .
Side note, my brother has Rapper's Delight on LP, and it's one of the records I'm most jealous of him for possessing.
I see rap as kind of an inevitable evolution of blues actually, but hiphop as a whole is absolutely thanks to jazz. Also, it's arguable but you can thank Miles Davis for bridging a coherent gap between jazz and hiphop with the album Doo-Bop, although he died before it was finished and the guy rapping ruined it a little lol
This one's got to be up there as well in regards to bridging that gap:
- ... Jazz samples have also had a large role in hip-hop, but the idea of rapping over actual live jazz wasn't truly fully realized until Gang Starr MC Guru created and released the first in his Jazzmatazz series in 1993, with guest musicians who included saxophonist Branford Marsalis (who had previously collaborated with DJ Premier and Guru for the track "Jazz Thing" on the Mo' Better Blues soundtrack), trumpeter Donald Byrd, vibraphonist Roy Ayers, guitarist Ronny Jordan, and keyboardist Lonnie Liston Smith, as well as vocalist N'Dea Davenport (also of the acid jazz group the Brand New Heavies) and French rapper MC Solaar. "
Getting closer. I'm pretty satisfied with the progress so far. I want to dip it in a bit more atmosphere. It's lacking in global light effects.
I got poison ivy already this year. I think I am getting more sensitive.
Life is crazy busy, but at the moment it doesn't feel overwhelming.
This morning my daughter asked what the name of the stuff that adults drink is called. I said, ' Do you mean alcohol?' and she said yes. She then asked me why I drink it. I said that I like the taste. She then asked why I drink it every day. I don't. Then I had to drop her off at preschool. :/
Small update on me on the morale menagerie post:
And I'll repeat my question for visibility:
- ...so for now I've taken to consuming media about mental illness and drug abuse.
I've just started Serial Experiments Lain, which I believe kleinbl00 and a few others were recommending. I also found a touching documentary last week that followed the relationships of several individuals on the spectrum. I normally have trouble taking shows / histories about romance seriously, but this felt like a real punch in the heart.
Any other suggestions? The book of trainspotting has been sitting in my library for about a month now, but was pushed aside by all the other DFW and GRRM stories I've been reading.