Observations

[EraPassing]

No reader's remorse refunds for you, kiddo.

*ruins another minute or so of Turd's life, neener neener neener*

[Delusion]

19.) It is not the politicians, but the businessmen who control our society... Government has always been controlled by religion, industrialist or militarists. The benefits to the people of a particular form of government is merely a side product, more extensive in some countries, less extensive in others... Personally, Ill take the industrialists.

One advantage to the industrialists is that they don't care if you succeed,
while often the religious and militarists want you to fail.

That assumes that you are not competing with the industrialists.  (And, if
you're not a consumer wageslave, you probably are.).  Situations that cause
most new small businesses to fail quickly are beneficial to established
large businesses, f'rinstance.

[Bob the Mediocre]

1.) Most people listen to music while they are doing other things. Few people listen to music, as an end unto itself. This, combined with a vastly increased standard of living in modern history and various technological advancements, has resulted in a plethora of new music that is neither technically proficient nor insightful and moving. Excellence and meaning are unnecessary when music has been relegated to background noise.
On the other hand, there is also a plethora of highly proficient music representing an enormous variety of styles. Traditionally, good music stood out and was fairly easy to identify, today, it,Äôs a highly competitive business and many very good works get lost in the shuffle. It,Äôs almost as if the music itself was not important. Hype and image and timing are the game now as much as good music.(My point exactly. For if neither excellence nor meaning are required, what is left to make one stand out but image? This undermines the very purpose music serves - the expression of emotions and ideas, which today are as likely to be manufactured and reprocessed as image.)

I think this is true. What I can't stand is extremely repetitive music, whether it's repeating exactly the same chords without any changes 5 or 10 times or more, or incessantly singing the same thing over and over. At least add a few subtle changes, or you might as well just cut out half the song.

Anyway, there's other stuff I should say, but I need to finish an essay sometime soon. These are really insightful.

[Horab Fibslager]

after a range i like to call the happy medium, the less repititve a piec gets teh more "shizophrenic" it gets, and the more dificult it is to make good, let alone any music. fantomas' first disc is a prime example(noise recordings tend to be either extremes of one sort or another, ultra repitive or ultra-nonrepitive).

the whoel bit abotu background noise is i think linked directly to the avilability and affordability of quality soudn repordcution equipment, which is exponentially more avialble and cheaper than it was 10, 20 , 50 years ago, and movie soudntracks. aeveryone wants theirown soudntrack.

also int eh last ten yeaars or so the rave culture in particular have really focused on the use of drugs withtheir music, tho they limit thmeselves in tthis somewhat(tho maybe nto always as far as elecvtronica go but anywaY) because generally the music should eb danceable.

[DJRubberducky]

I hate that cliche.  People seem to read it to mean that they have the right to treat other people's children as their own - or, more accurately, punish a child as though he or she was their own child.

See, I've usually seen the other side of that, where the parents read it to mean that they can let their kids run around in a crowd of people and expect everyone else to be as concerned for the kid's welfare as they are - but NO WAY are you allowed to smack the child's hand if it tries to stick a fork in an electrical socket.  Someone got upset at me because I physically removed their child from behind a cash register display case, but you know damned well that if the kid had picked something up and broken it, they wouldn't have taken responsibility for the kid's behaviour and paid for the item.

If you're going to inflict on me the responsibility of looking after YOUR child, you're either going to pay me, or you're going to accept that my disciplinary philosophies are different from yours.  If you don't want me smacking your child's hand, don't leave him unattended with a fork in my presence.

[EraPassing]

My mom never allowed me to get away with something like that.  The sentence that struck terror into my soul during my childhood was "If you (insert bad deed here), so help me, I'll pull down your pants and beat you in front of God and everybody else!"
Which meant, of course, that I stopped what I was doing.  Because she meant it, and I didn't want a bunch of strangers, much less God, to see me with handprints on my bare ass.

Actually, now that I think about it, I came to heel better than a dog whenever my mom got that look on her face.

But then, my mother was a careful and consistent with her discipline, and she raised me to be polite and civilized.  A lot of parents are too lazy to understand that children need rules, not confusion.