SCmSTR

Yeah it’s always tough… you want people to understand and not be dicks, but a lot of it feels risky.

I pay for it. I paid for it a little while after yt red came out. Then bought a family plan because it was such a good deal and not having ads and paying to support my creators is worth it.

But it keeps going up and I want to cancel. But, I guess so many people decided to block ads on yt instead of doing what I did (yt’s logic, not sure if the sole or primary reason), that now there’s a million long af ads? It’s kind of like the health insurance cost increase feedback loop (uninsured gets hurt, gets treated, drives cost for paying customers up, less people get insurance, more people driving cost for paying customers up, repeat).

Paying the 7 bucks a month (84/y)for yt red back then was a barely acceptable deal. But NOW I’m paying close to 30 (360/y)now for a family plan and that’s just not okay (when I first started family plan, it was like 13.xx/m (156/y), and that was a great deal). Maybe I’ll buy a pi-hole and cancel, because this shit is ridiculous and I can’t afford it.

Woah, what? There are stages??? Do tell!

Honestly? TikTok.

I have found more good music and culture on TikTok than anywhere else on any other platform. Remixes, up and coming artists, classical, jazz, hippie, pop, subculture. You name it.

I think this has to do with how TikTok’s algorithm nails you down to similar interests and stuff, but also not so much like YouTube where it’s literally ONLY more of the exact same.

Spotify sometimes hits a good station, but you largely have to find your own vibe-of-the-moment.

TikTok now, though, for years, has been turning up some of the most interesting and good to listen music. I get northerner civil war anthem remixes, super genuine pop piano music that I’m blown away by, culture videogame anthems, and more.

The one drawback is that it’s not fast. If you search through music on a service, top lists and “audiophile” lists, you’re bound to find tons of cool new things that you probably never would have found. TikTok cannot compare with doing your own actual mass searching. But, as a platform of just using it, it’s been otherwise by far the best.

The main reason this world/could work is because it IS so quirky, that they couldn’t fuck it all up like they have everything else progressively more since ff9 came out. Square peaked with ff7 and took a nosedive after 10, change my mind. Baseless uneducated hot take: I blame Enix. Either that, or they still haven’t figured out how to actually bring fun JRPG gameplay into the 21st century without ruining it and making it generic and dull. Ff11 onwards lack intimacy, value, and quiet - they’re tacky, cheap, and feel disingenuous.

So, ff9 getting a remaster, they couldn’t mess up something that’s the antithesis of their modern stuff so badly that that quirky game loses ALL of it’s appeal.

I say all of this knowing this dissent and criticism will upset people, but I’ve been staying quiet on this for far too long and it has to be said.

Am purist. Grilled cheese doesn’t have meat, otherwise it’s a grilled x with cheese or grilled cheese with x. Maybe if like, there’s a shit-ton of cheese and a sprinkling of meat crumble it could maybe still be a grilled cheese?, but calling a grilled meat sandwich a grilled cheese is like calling a salad with rasins, soy dressing, and grilled chicken a cesear salad just because it has ceasear dressing. You can call it cesear WITH chicken, but the minute it departs from what a specific and narrowly defined sub-item in a category of things is, you need to clarify that.

Like maybe if you radically improve the original so much that it becomes the standard? Then you can use the name? Like how modern Caesar salads explicitly use anchovy paste rather than Worcestershire sauce, which is where the anchovy flavor came from originally. I’m okay with that being called a Caesar salad because it is really good and close enough that the distinction doesn’t need to be made unless it’s the topic of the conversation, but you still can’t just say it’s the original recipe.

Tldr: A grilled cheese sandwich is specifically a cheese-only filling sandwich.