Andy Lowry @AndyLowry@qoto.org

@w7voa
This Arizonan is pleased to see Bowers on the list. Don't much like him otherwise, but he showed he could be honorable when a crisis called for it. That took some strength, because he knew full well that it would cost him his job and a lot of friends.

@SallyStrange
😀 I do that fairly often. I bet I've watched the entirety, including the movie, of Firefly a dozen times. Of course, it was only one season, so not that hard to do.

@wertham @elliottrandall
I lived in the Midwest of the US, namely Ohio, so things took a little longer to reach us and take off. 😎 A restaurant I worked in did have one of those projection things! There was a small dance floor in front of the lounge. I'd forgotten about that.

Weird how I conflate the time on the Heads and MTV-- probably because that was the first time I'd seen their work. I was mostly a high-skill art-rock fan at the time. Genesis, Crimson, Gabriel, Bruford, Eno, Fripp, UK, Yes, that kind of thing.

@jayarava
I guess I wouldn't feel right about clicking "favorite" on that. 🤔

I'm very familiar with how existence can be when trying to have a normal life while also having and being treated for mental illness. Over a two-year period in my early thirties, I was hospitalized in psychiatric lockups four times. Diagnosis was major depression with panic disorder. It was severe enough to involve some occasional psychoses (mostly just aural and visual hallucinations). I was lucky that it happened at a time when inexpensive health insurance commonly covered mental health, so at least I didn't have to add financial ruin to what was already going on.

I can also relate to scraping by-- my plan on retirement was to keep working for a few years, but then Covid happened. 🙄 And now that I'm sick, any sort of employment I'm qualified for can't really happen. I have to keep an eye on what I spend for food, but there's enough if I'm careful that I can have a coffee or small meal with friends now and then. It's the social connections, and the presence of my wife, that keep me going. (I'm in AA and other recovery groups, so I have a ready-made group of people that was easy to become friends with. Yeah, it's cheating. 😉 )

Speaking of which, I'm amazed at how much I've gotten out of this here Mastodon thing. I've met several very interesting people here whom I feel I can be quite open with-- you're one of them-- and that's the first time that's happened in this sort of medium, going back all the way to AOL chat.

@megabreadvanchannel@mastodon.world
We can hope! Right now, I can't tell the difference unless it's a Tesla.

@catvalente
Well put.

@wertham
They changed the world in a lot of good ways, and it sure didn't hurt that MTV was taking off at about the same time. I can still see some of the Talking Heads music videos in my head if I try; they were really compelling.

@megabreadvanchannel@mastodon.world
Those have always struck me as being really beautiful, along with the ones from the late twenties/early thirties. Rolls and Jaguar really knew how to create a one-of-a-kind look.

@alanthwaits@noc.social
My father and his father both grew up as farmboys in northern Ohio. Was serious business for them too. I was always amazed when we'd be on a country drive and my dad would comment on what a nice-looking crop of rape or sorghum or whatever that was that we'd just passed, after just a glance. I had no idea what any of that was; the only things I can reliably identify are corn and cotton. 😃

@jayarava
If you're ever curious as to how it happened that big-business, supposed conservatives
(often partly to promote their religious views) managed to capture the US government in many ways, Kurt Anderson's "Evil Geniuses" makes it clear without becoming a polemic. He's a great writer about society-- an earlier work, "Fantasyland," is a history of how gullible Americans tend to be.

I'm mostly anti-sports, since my country likes to pervert what could be excellent educational facilities into sports-money-generators. (I grew up where Ohio State is located.) And then the hopes of most college players are dashed on graduation, and then they might die later of traumatic brain injury. But other than that, I guess it's okay. (Both parents went to Ohio State and are fierce supporters of their teams, so we had to negotiate a truce when I lived at home.) 😉

If there's a comparable book or two about how the Tories managed a similar capture, I'd be glad to know about it!

@Molly
Yep, you got it. Bush Jr. would have privatized just about every government function if anybody would have let him. While it's true that the US used mercenaries before, you have to go back to the very beginning of the colonies breaking away to see it. The Shrub made it standard procedure somehow, and it's never gone away.