III. Changing Modes of Making It: From Horatio Alger to the Happy Hooker
…
From “Self-Culture” to Self-Promotion through “Winning Images”
In the nineteenth century, the ideal of self-improvement degenerated into a cult of compulsive industry. P.T. Barnum, who made a fortune in a calling the very nature of which the Puritans would have condemned (“Every calling, whereby God will be Dishonored; every Calling whereby none but the Lusts of men are Nourished: …every such Calling is to be Rejected”), delivered many times a lecture frankly entitled “The Art of Money-Getting,” which epitomized the nineteenth-century conception of worldly success. Barnum quoted freely from Franklin but without Franklin’s concern for the attainment of wisdom or the promotion of useful knowledge. “Information” interested Barnum merely as a means of mastering the market. Thus he condemned the “false economy” of the farm wife who douses her candle at dusk rather than lighting another for reading, not realizing that the “information” gained through reading is worth far more than the price of the candles. “Always take a trustworthy newspaper,” Barnum advised young men on the make, “and thus keep thoroughly posted in regard to the transactions of the world. He who is without a newspaper is cut off from his species.”
Barnum valued the good opinion of others not as a sign of one’s usefulness but as a means of getting credit. “Uncompromising integrity of character is invaluable.” The nineteenth century attempted to express all values in monetary terms. Everything had its price. Charity was a moral duty because “the liberal man will command patronage, which the sordid, uncharitable miser will be avoided.” The sin of pride was not that it offended God but that it led to extravagant expenditures. “A spirit of pride and vanity, when permitted to have full sway, is the undying cankerworm which gnaws the very vitals of a man’s worldly possessions.”
The eighteenth century made a virtue of temperance but did not condemn moderate indulgence in the service of sociability. “Rational conversation,” on the contrary, appeared to Franklin and his contemporaries to represent an important value in its own right. The nineteenth century condemned sociability itself, on the grounds that it might interfere with business. “How many good opportunities have passed, never to return, while a man was sipping a ‘social glass’ with his friends!” Preachments on self-help now breathed the spirit of compulsive enterprise. Henry Ward Beecher defined “the beau ideal of happiness” as a state of mind in which “a man [is] so busy that he does not know whether he is or is not happy.” Russell Sage remarked that “work has been the chied, and you might say, the only source of pleasure in my life.”
Even at the height of the Gilded Age, however, the Protestant ethic did not completely lose its original meaning. In the success manuals, the McGuffey readers, the Peter Parley Books, and the hortatory writings of the great capitalists themselves, the Protestant virtues - industry, thrift, temperance - still appeared not merely as stepping-stones to success but as their own reward.
The spirit of self-improvement lived on, in debased form, in the cult of “self-culture” - proper care and training of mind and body, nurture of the mind through “great books,” development of “character.” The social contribution of individual accumulation still survived as an undercurrent in the celebration of success, and the social conditions of early industrial capitalism, in which the pursuit of wealth undeniably increased the supply of useful objects, gave some substance to the claim that “accumulated capital means progress.” In condemning speculation and extravagance, in upholding the importance of patient industry, in urging young men to start at the bottom and submit to “the discipline of daily life,” even the most unabashed exponents of self-enrichment clung to the notion that wealth derives its value from its contribution to the general good and to the happiness of future generations.
The nineteenth-century cult of success placed surprisingly little emphasis on competition. It measured achievement not against the achievements of others but against an abstract ideal of discipline and self-denial. At the turn of the century, however, preachments on success began to stress the will to win. The bureaucratization of the corporate career changed the conditions of self-advancement; ambitious young men now had to compete with their peers for the attention and approval of their superiors. The struggle to surpass the previous generation and to provide for the next gave way to a form of sibling rivalry, in which men of approximately equal abilities jostled against each other in competition for a limited number of places. Advancement now depended on “will-power, self-confidence, energy, and initiative” - the qualities celebrated in such exemplary writings as George Lorimer’s Letters from a Self-Made Merchant to His Son. ” By the end of the nineteenth century,” writes John Cawelti in his study of the success myth, “self-help books were dominated by the ethos of sales-manship and boosterism. Personal magnetism, a quality which supposedly enabled a man to influence and dominate others, became one of the major keys to success.” In 1907, both Lorimer’s Saturday Evening Post and Orison Swett Marden’s Success magazine inaugurated departments of instruction in the “art of conversation,” fashion, and “culture.” The management of interpersonal relations came to be seen as the essence of self-advancement. The captain of industry gave way to the confidence man, the master of impressions. Young men were told that they had to sell themselves in order to succeed.
At first, self-testing through competition remained almost in-distinguishable from moral self-discipline and self-culture, but the difference became unmistakable when Dale Carnegie and then Norman Vincent Peale restated and transformed the tradition of Mather, Franklin, Barnum, and Lorimer. As a formula for success, winning friends and influencing people had little in common with industry and thrift. The prophets of positive thinking disparaged “the old adage that hard work alone is the magic key that will unlock the door to our desires.” They praised the love of money, officially condemned even by the crudest of Gilded Age materialists, as a useful incentive. “You can never have riches in great quantities,” wrote Napoleon Hill in this Think and Grow Rich,” unless you can work yourself into a white heat of desire for money.” The pursuit of wealth lost the few shreds of moral meaning that still clung to it. Formerly the Protestant virtues appeared to have an independent value of their own. Even when they became purely instrumental, in the second half of the nineteenth century, success itself retained moral and social overtones, by virtue of its contribution to the sum of human comfort and progress. Now success appeared as an end in its own right, the victory over your competitors that alone retained the capacity to instill a sense of self-approval. The latest success manuals differ from earlier ones - even surpassing the cynicism of Dale Carnegie and Peale - in their frank acceptance of the need to exploit and intimidate others, in their lack of interest in the substance of success, and in the candor with which they insist that appearances - “winning images - count for more than performance, ascription for more than achievement. One author seems to imply that the self consists of little more than its “image” reflected in others’ eyes. “Although I’m not being original when I say it, I’m sure you’ll agree that the way you see yourself will reflect the image you portray to others.” Nothing succeeds like the appearance of success.
<The American Religion by Harold Bloom (California Orphism)>
The Apotheosis of Individualism
The fear that haunted the social critics and theorists of the fifties - that rugged individualism had succumbed to conformity and “love-pressure sociability” - appears in retrospect to have been premature. In 1960, David Riesman complained that young people no longer had much social “presence,” their education having provided them not with “a polished personality but [with] an affable, casual, adaptable one, suitable to the losing organizations of an affluent society.” It is true that “a present-oriented hedonism,” as Riseman went on the argue, has replaced the work ethic “among the very classes which in the earlier stages of industrialization were oriented toward the future, toward distant goals and delayed gratification.” But this hedonism is a fraud; the pursuit of pleasure disguises a struggle for power. Americans have not really become more sociable and cooperative, as the theorists of other-direction and conformity would like us to believe; they have merely become more adept at exploiting the conventions of interpersonal relations for their own benefit. Activities ostensibly undertaken purely for enjoyment often have the real object of doing others in. It is symptomatic of the underlying tenor of American life that vulgar terms for sexual intercourse also convey the sense of getting the better of someone, working him over, taking him in, imposing your will through guile, deception, or superior force. Verbs associated with sexual pleasure have acquired more than the usual overtones of violence and psychic exploitation. In the violent world of the ghetto, the language of which now pervades American society as a whole, the violence associated with sexual intercourse is directed with special intensity by men against women, specifically against their mothers. The language of ritualized aggression and abuse reminds those who use it that exploitation is the general rule and some form of dependence the common fate, that “the individual,” in Lee Rainwater’s words, “is not strong enough or adult enough to achieve his goal in a legitimate way, but is rather like a child, dependent on others who tolerate his childish maneuvers”; accordingly males, even adult males, often depend on women for support and nurture. Many of them have to pimp for a living, ingratiating themselves with a woman in order to pry money from her; sexual relations thus become manipulative and predatory. Satisfaction depends on taking what you want instead of waiting for what is rightfully yours to receive. All this enters everyday speech in language that connects sex with aggression and sexual aggression with highly ambivalent feelings about mothers.
In some ways middle-class society has become a pale copy of the black ghetto, as the appropriation of its language would lead us to believe. We do not need to minimize the poverty of the ghetto or the suffering inflicted by whites on blacks in order to see that the increasingly dangerous and unpredictable conditions of middle-class life have given rise to similar strategies for survival. Indeed the attraction of black culture for disaffected whites suggests that black culture now speaks to a general condition, the most important feature of which is a widespread loss of confidence in the future. The poor have always had to live for the present, but now a desperate concern for personal survival, sometimes disguised as hedonism, engulfs the middle class as well. Today almost everyone lives in a dangerous world from which there is little escape. International terrorism and blackmail, bombings, and hijackings arbitrarily affect the rich and poor alike. Crime, violence, and gang wars make cities unsafe and threaten to spread to the suburbs. Racial violence on the streets and in the schools creates an atmosphere of chronic tension and threatens to erupt at any time into full-scale racial conflict. Unemployment spreads from the poor the white-collar class, while inflation eats away the savings of those who hoped to retire in comfort. Much of what is euphemistically known as the middle class, merely because it dresses up to go to work, is now reduced to proletarian conditions of existence. Many white-collar jobs require no more skill and pay even less than blue-collar jobs, conferring little status or security. The propaganda of death and destruction, emanating ceaselessly from the mass media, adds to the prevailing atmosphere of insecurity. Far-flung famines, earthquakes in remote regions, distant wars and uprisings attract the same attention as events closer to home. The impression of arbitrariness in the reporting of disaster reinforces the arbitrary quality of experience itself, and the absence of continuity in the coverage of events, as today’s crisis yields to a new and unrelated crisis tomorrow, adds to the sense of historical discontinuity - the sense of living in a world in which the past holds out no guidance to the present and the future has become completely unpredictable.
Older conceptions of success presupposed a world in rapid motion, in which fortunes were rapidly won and lost and new opportunities unfolded every day. Yet they also presupposed a certain stability, a future that bore some recognizable resemblance to the present and the past. The growth of bureaucracy, the cult of consumption with its immediate gratifications, but above all the severance of the sense of historical continuity have transformed the Protestant ethic while carrying the underlying principles of capitalist society to their logical conclusion . The pursuit of self-interest, formerly identified with the rational pursuit of gain and the accumulation of wealth, has become a search for pleasure and psychic survival. Social conditions now approximate the vision of republican society conceived by the Marquis de Sade at the very outset of the republican epoch. In many ways the most farsighted and certainly the most disturbing of the prophets of revolutionary individualism, Sade defended unlimited self-indulgence as the logical culmination of the revolution in property relations - the only way to attain revolutionary brotherhood in its purest form. By regressing in his writings to the most primitive level of fantasy, Sade uncannily glimpsed the whole subsequent development of personal life under capitalism, ending not in revolutionary brotherhood but in a society of siblings that has outlived and repudiated its revolutionary origins.
Sade imagined a sexual utopia in which everyone has the right to everyone else, where human beings, reduced to their sexual organs, become absolutely anonymous and interchangeable. His ideal society thus reaffirmed the capitalist principle that human beings are ultimately reducible to interchangeable objects. It also incorporated and carried to a surprising new conclusion Hobbes’s discovery that the destruction of paternalism and the subordination of all social relations to the market had stripped away the remaining restraints and the mitigating illusions from the war of all against all. In the resulting state of organized anarchy, as Sade was the first to realize, pleasure becomes life’s only business - pleasure, however, that is indistinguishable from rape, murder, unbridled aggression. In a society that has reduced reason to mere calculation, reason can impose no limits on the pursuit of pleasure - on the immediate gratification of every desire no matter how perverse, insane, criminal, or merely immoral. For the standards that would condemn crime or cruelty derive from religion, compassion, or the kind of reason that rejects purely instrumental applications; and none of these outmoded forms of thought or feeling has any logical place in a society based on commodity production. In his misogyny, Sade perceived that bourgeois enlightenment, carried to its logical conclusions, condemned even the sentimental cult of womanhood and the family, which the bourgeoisie itself had carried to unprecedented extremes.
At the same time, he saw that condemnation of “woman-worship” had to go hand in hand with a defense of woman’s sexual rights - their right to dispose of their own bodies, as feminists would put it today. If the exercise of that right in Sade’s utopia boils down to the duty to become an instrument of someone else’s pleasure, it was not so much because Sade hated women as because he hated humanity. He perceived, more clearly than the feminists, that all freedoms under capitalism come in the end to the same thing, the same universal obligation to enjoy and be enjoyed. In the same breath, and without violating his own logic, Sade demanded for women the right “fully to satisfy all their desires” and “all parts of their bodies” and categorically stated that “all women must submit to our pleasure.” Pure individualism thus issued in the most radical repudiation of individuality. “All men, all women resemble each other,” according to Sade; and to those of his countrymen who would become republicans he adds this ominous warning: “Do not think you can make good republicans so long as you isolated in their families the children who should belong to the republic alone.” The bourgeois defense of privacy culminates - not just in Sade’s thought but in the history to come, so accurately foreshadowed in the very excess, madness, infantilism of his ideas - in the most thoroughgoing attack on privacy; the glorification of the individual, in his annihilation.
<…>
Standing-Reserve.
Note a lack of the “Greek” in Lasch.
Visions of Excess: Selected Writings, 1927-1939 by Georges Bataille, Edited by A. Stoekl, Translated by A. Stoekl, C.R. Lovitt, and D.M. Leslie Jr.
<…>

** BOTH FRI 5/17 AND SAT 5/18 *\*
Motorcycle Safety Foundation Ride Day New Mexico Motorcycle Safety Program, 3401 Pan American Fwy Take Your First Ride: Ride a motorcycle in 30 min or less for free. MOTO Intro provides the motorcycle, helmet, gloves, and coaching. Free Riding Skills Test: Take the challenge of an advanced MSF course! SKILL Check participants, bring your motorcycle and gear! Please wear over-the-ankle footwear, long pants and long sleeves

• Fri: 2 - 4 PM Skills Check, 4 - 6 PM Moto Intro
• Sat: 2 - 4:30 PM Moto Intro, 4:30 - 6:30 PM Skills Check

Niños and Teeños: Flamenco para todos Carlisle Gymnasium (Elizabeth Waters Center for Dance), UNM, 301 Yale Blvd. NE National Institute of Flamenco presents Niños y Teeños Flamencos in FUTUROS FLAMENCOS. Come see the high-energy flamenco of the National Institute of Flamenco's Student Companies. Don't miss this special showcase by talented youth in our community! (tickets)

• Fri: 7 PM
• Sat: 4 PM

** Fri 5/17 *\*
Fri 4:30 PM Bike to Wherever Day Canteen Brewhouse, 2381 Aztec Rd. NE Learn about exciting bike routes in Albuquerque and grab some cool giveaways to kickstart your cycling adventures. Whether you’re a seasoned cyclist or just starting out, there’s something for EVERYONE at our pop-up table! We'll have Canteen will be volunteering at a table from 6:30-9am and then again at 4:30-6:30am. Receive $1 off your beer if you arrive on your bike
Fri 5 PM Pistachio Cream Ale Release Tractor Brewing, ALL locations We're bringing back this seasonal favorite for American Craft Beer Week! Inspired by pistachios produced right here in New Mexico this brew is as smooth as silk and as tasty and a fresh roasted pistachio. This is a very limited one off for us, so come and get you a pint or growler while supplies last
Fri 5 – 7 PM May Babies Birthday Celebration Rio Bravo Brewing, 1912 2nd St. NW Starting at 5pm, the first 25 people with May birthdays to show Ryan proof of their birthday month will score a $5 Rio Bravo Brewing Gift Card...oh, and Beers are on special for birthday kids for just $5! But you spend your gift card however you want! Thanks to Cake Fetish...we'll have cupcakes for the May Birthday Kids (while supplies last) We'll have prizes JUST for the May Babies! We'll also have drawings for all you non-birthday folks too If you want to get their before us...All drinks are $1 Off for May Birthdays the whole day!
Fri 5:45 – 7:15 PM 22 Veterans Suicide Awareness WOD BFit505, 11500 Menaul Blvd. NE Each month, Team Bravo & Bfit505 team up to bring awareness to veteran suicide. Before our events, we will take a moment and talk about the issue. Then we will begin with our 22 reps WOD followed by a 2.2 mile ruck/walk/run. Afterwards, we will be going out to eat for social time with friends and family. This event is for all levels
Fri 6 PM Sandia Social - May Hangout Dawn Patrol Coffee Shop, 3619 Copper Ave NE We will be hanging out around the patio and inside starting at 6pm! Bring your friends and come hang out!
Fri 6 PM Pink Therapy, A Latin Dance Fundraiser for Breast Cancer Sobremesa, 3421 Coors Blvd. NW On The One and Pachanga Productions' "Salsa Therapy" night has made its mark in the Latin Dance community, now we are using the symbolism of "Therapy" under "Pink Therapy" but this time it is to fundraise in partnership with the Pink Warrior House Foundation in order to provide outreach and increase resources for those warriors battling against breast cancer. On The One and Pachanga productions will be involved in community outreach and utilizing our resources to help those in need. Cover charge is a SUGGESTED $20 donation (ALL PROCEEDS GO TO Pink Warrior House Foundation). Cocktail hour from 6-7 PM (purchases go to PWH on selected drinks). Dance lesson from 7-8 PM. Open dance floor 8-12 AM. Be aware of Media/News coverage. We need everyone's assistance with this, PLEASE SHARE FAR AND WIDE, those warriors battling breast cancer need our help. Let's do our part. We are asking for the entire Latin dance community to come out and support. This will be one of many fundraisers that we do for organizations like PWH. Lets use our dance skills to help those in need!
Fri 6 – 8 PM May Flowers Stampin' Bingo (in person) Hip Stitch, 2320 Wisconsin St. NE Cost is $35 for 6 rounds of bingo, prizes, and make n' takes! Message for more info or to register
Fri 6 – 8:30 PM Los Domingueros Live El Vado, 2500 Central Ave SW Prepare for an unforgettable fusion of Latin dance beats and rock energy as Friday Night Live at El Vado proudly presents New Mexico's premier menudo-based band, Los Domingueros! Few bands can match the infectious joy and vibrant rhythms that they bring to the stage. A multi-talented group of musicians, they take listeners on a musical journey like no other. From the pulsating rhythms of salsa, bachata, and cumbia to the high-energy vibes of ska and reggae, sprinkled with a dash of punk and thrash, their eclectic repertoire promises an exhilarating experience for all. As always, treat your taste buds to a delightful selection of culinary delights from our diverse food pods. From savory stir-fries to tantalizing Latin flavors and heavenly desserts, there's something to satisfy every craving. And don't overlook the opportunity to quench your thirst with a crisp craft beer from Ponderosa Brewing Company, conveniently available at the El Vado Tap Room
Fri 6 – 10 PM Fork Cancer Gala FUSION ABQ, 700-708 1st St. NW The American Cancer Society is hosting Albuquerque's second #ForkCancerAbq fundraising event. VIP 6pm - 7pm. Gala 7pm - 10pm. Dress Code: Gala Attire. #ForkCancerNM is a foodie's dream, with local restaurants and bars bringing out their best to truly showcase the Taste of Albuquerque while raising money for the American Cancer Society's life-saving mission in New Mexico supporting Access to Care like patient transportation, patient lodging and 24/7 support. Along with life saving research and grants. With great opportunities to raise money, we will also have live entertainment! (tickets)
Fri 6:30 – 10 PM Community Movie Night South Valley Multipurpose Center, 2008 Larrazolo Rd. SW Feature of the night: In The Heights. Bring your dinner, blankets and chairs. Please no glass containers
Fri 7 PM Movie In The Park ABQ Food Park, 6901-B San Antonio Dr. NE ABQ Food Park is bringing back Movies In The Park, starting off the summer with a screening of The Sandlot. Arrive early to get your face painted by Local Locas Facepainting before settling in with your blankets, chairs, and appetite for a delightful evening at the park with loved ones. Indulge in delicious fare from our food trucks while enjoying this timeless film under the stars. Please do not bring outside food as we have a variety of food options at the park. Please support our local food vendors. Entry is free! Reserve your tickets
Fri 7 – 10 PM Emerald Ball Holiday Dance Studio, 5200 Eubank Blvd. NE, Ste D Celebrate the enchanting month of May by donning your finest emerald attire. Bring in the vibrant spring season by joining us in elegant semi-formal wear of rich verdant colors and dance the night away! A Foxtrot lesson will begin the evening at 7pm followed by open dancing. Call 505-508-4020 for more information. $30 non-members
Fri 8 PM – 2 AM Sucia EDC Gogo Takeover Sidewinders Bar and Grill, 4200 Central Ave SE Sucia Productions is bringing the Electric Sky to Sidewinders! No need to have EDC FOMO because Papa Sucia is ready to bring the party to you! Come join your Sucia Family for a Night of PLUR! Featuring the Sucia Gogos on multiple boxes and individual dances available in the Cabaret Room! Hosted by Papa Sucia and Sucia Gogo Madam Sativa Rico-Stratton. DJ Unzipped will be bringing the you the best EDM set for you to dance the night away!
Fri 9 PM – 1:30 AM Callaita Fridays Salt Yard West, 3700 Ellison Rd. NW DJ Soiree will be spinning under the stars in the Salt Yard, promising a night of electrifying Latin music. This 21+ event guarantees an atmosphere where you can fully embrace the rhythm without inhibition. Whether you're a die-hard fan of Reggaeton or simply seeking a night of unparalleled fun, "Callaita Fridays" is the place to be
Fri 10:30 PM – 12:15 AM FACELESS AFTER DARK - new meta horror starring Jenna Kanell of "Terrifier"! The Guild Cinema, 3405 Central Ave NE All Seats $8. Check out the trailer. Dir. Raymond Wood - 2023 - 82m. Following her breakout success as the star of a killer clown horror flick, Bowie (Jenna Kanell, TERRIFIER) now finds herself struggling to capitalize on its success. But when she is suddenly held hostage by an unhinged fan posing as that same killer clown, horror becomes her reality as she fights to survive the night and escape before he completes his sinister plan to recreate the film's fatal plot (tickets)
** Sat 5/18 *\*
Sat 8 – 10 AM Planting Corn Seeds Lynn Garden, 176 Manierre Rd., Corrales We will be planting corn seeds; a new crop for Seed2Need this year!
Sat 8 – 10 AM Run for Mercy 5K Sagebrush Community Church, 6440 Coors Blvd. NW Join our team to run with us to support Mercy Multiplied, which exists to provide opportunities for all to experience God's unconditional love, forgiveness, and life-transforming power. Mercy offers free-of-charge Residential and Outpatient Counseling Programs, as well as Outreach Services that include workshops and trainings, our Keys to Freedom discipleship study, and Keys to Freedom Retreat (register)
Sat 8 AM – 12 PM Downtown Growers' Market Robinson Park, 810 Copper Ave NW Every Saturday from 8 am - NOON! This vibrant community event connects local farmers, growers, artisans, wellness makers, and hot food vendors with the local community from mid-April to early-November. Bring friends / family or come solo to enjoy fresh food made on sight, a variety of seasonal produce, unique arts and crafts, live music, and special programming all in the heart of downtown
Sat 8 AM – 2 PM Rio Rancho's Biggest Yard Sale Cabezon Park and Community Center, 2307 Cabezon Blvd. SE, Rio Rancho FREE Admission! Clean out your garage, spare bedroom, attic and shed. Come join us to sell all of those items that were collecting dust, find a treasure that you didn’t know you needed, and enjoy a day in the park! Vendor space $35 for a 15’ x 15’ space (Tables and chairs are not provided) Must register online, NO Drop-Ins Accepted. Please call the Cabezon Community Center at 505-892-4499 for more info
Sat 9 AM Send Haley to Spain Sand Volleyball Tournament Charlie’s Sandbox, 4335 Paseo del Norte NE All proceeds go to Haley and her trip to Spain in July! $20/per player. All Skill levels! Prizes for 1st & 2nd place. 4-6 players Coed with 1 female on team. Check in @ 8:30am. More info: Jillian (505) 322-7228, Haley (505) 331-4788, Charlie (505) 239-2461
Sat 9 AM Invisible Heroes Run Believers Center of Albuquerque, 320 Waterfall Dr. SE Join Runfit and the American Society of Radiologic Technologists for the inaugural Invisible Heroes 5K Run/Walk. It is a community event being held to recognize the vital role that medical imaging professionals and radiation therapists play on the health care team and to introduce the public to these vital health care professionals. You are invited to run and walk to celebrate the important work done by invisible heroes. At packet pick-up, you will have an opportunity to tour the ASRT Museum and Archives. Age group, overall, and team awards, including a great t-shirt and finisher medals for all participants (register)
Sat 9 AM - 4 PM 16th Annual CTC Vintage Tractor & Car Show Corrales Recreation Center, 500 Jones Rd., Corrales Join us for a fun day in the Corrales Park. There will be music, food, hot rods, tractor, stationary engines and more. Proceeds Raised will benefit Corrales 4H and Historical Society. Free admission. $10 for show participants
Sat 10 AM – 12 PM Foraging for Fun(ds) Los Poblanos Open Space, 1800 Tierra Viva Pl. NW Join Rev. Ryan Tate on a foraging excursion! Rev. Tate, of the African American spiritual tradition and an IPL board member, wants to bring their loving knowledge of NM edibles and herbs to you. Discover the food right under your nose and how easy it is to enjoy! We’ll meet to explore and harvest native and edible plants. Enter the Open Space area from west bound Montano Boulevard. After foraging, we’ll gather to taste our harvest and other locally sourced treats. Sign up today to participate - space is limited. This is a fundraiser for our work for climate justice: Please give generously (Suggested minimum donation $10)
Sat 10 AM – 3 PM Homebrewer's Happy Hour Southwest Grape & Grain, 3401 Candelaria Blvd. NE Homebrewer's Happy Hour is the perfect chance for all homebrewers, wine makers, distillers, or anyone interested in learning, to connect with others, share a drink, and learn about a new subject each month! $1 off beers from 10am to 3pm. Presentation on monthly subject at 1pm with open forum to discuss after. Food truck on site for lunch! May 18th - Barley
Sat 10:30 – 11:30 AM Animal Tales with the ABQ BioPark Ernie Pyle Library, 900 Girard Blvd. SE Dive into the captivating world of animals with "Animal Tales" presented by the ABQ BioPark! Join us for a delightful reading session featuring an animal-themed book. Experience the magic as the BioPark brings along real animals and biofacts that connect to the story, giving kids an exciting opportunity to meet these creatures up close! Don't miss this engaging and educational adventure for young animal enthusiasts!
Sat 10:30 AM – 12:30 PM FolkMADS Third Saturday Family Dance Albuquerque Square Dance Center, 4915 Hawkins St. NE Dancing, song, and live music for kids of all ages. No experience needed to have fun! Children must be accompanied by an adult. Children dance free, Adults $10
Sat 11 AM – 1 PM Annual Summer Kick-Off Event! Matheson Park Elementary, 10809 Lexington Ave NE Join us as we kick off the summer with fun, a food truck, face painting, dunk tank, and more! Bring your family and your pets for a Blessing of the Pets. There is no cost to attend and all are welcome!
Sat 11 AM – 3 PM Wine + Art Afternoons Gruet Winery, 8400 Pan American East Fwy NE Prism Arts presents a new public art and social series with a special one-day multi-artist event. Join us inside the Gruet Winery with a selection of fine art, prints, paintings, jewelry, and ceramics from local artists Vanessa Alvarado, Eric Romero, Margarita Paz-Pedro, & Aaron Richardson. Enjoy unique art, amazing fine, food, and a social environment with the artists and the public. *All art purchases receive a complimentary bottle of Gruet Wine*
Sat 11 AM – 3 PM Bernalillo Family Fun Festival! Calvary Church, 4001 Osuna Rd. NE Get connected to community and enjoy a Fun Family Day!
Sat 11:30 AM – 4 PM Imaginary Friends Fest Flix Brewhouse, 3200 La Orilla Rd. NW Let your imagination run wild! Join us in the lobby to celebrate the opening of IF! Enjoy photo ops, freebies, an in-theater giveaway, and activities for the whole family. All ages are welcome!
Sat 12 PM BBQ n' Crawl Supper Rock Park, 598 Monte Alto Pl. NE Mini Crawlers 505 and Duke City RC are throwing a BBQ and crawl sesh! All rigs welcome! Please mark going if you are, so we can get enough food!
Sat 12 PM May Brew Tour - Farewell Tour Rio Bravo Brewing, 1912 2nd St. NW This is the last NM Brew Ha-Ha Beer tour for the season. The 24-25 season will start in June 2025 so stay tuned for the season lineup release. Rio Bravo Brewing, Ponderosa Brewing, Bow & Arrow Brewing, Juno Brewery. At Rio Bravo, a DD will be selected, then we’ll head to the other breweries in the order listed. T-shirts, if ordered will be delivered. For safety, a breathalyzer is available, a DD will be established and a liability waiver will be signed by all participants. Safety is of utmost importance. We want everyone to enjoy their tour and arrive home safely
Sat 12 PM Drag Bingo & Brunch! All Ages Welcome! Sidewinders Bar and Grill, 4200 Central Ave SE Join us for a Drag Queen Bingo and Brunch benefitting The Albuquerque Roadrunner Tournament 2024 (coming up in September). Hosted by Priscilla Bouvier. Doors 12pm. Show 1pm. Bingo, Prizes, Giveaways, Raffles, Cocktails, Mocktails and Fun!
Sat 12 PM Empire's 9th Anniversary - FREE PLAY ALL DAY Empire Board Game Library, 3503 Central Ave NE It's Empire's 9th Anniversary celebration and you're invited! We've been here 9 years and it's all thanks to the support we get from you, so to show our appreciation, this Saturday's celebration is our gift to you: Come in and play for free all day! Every game is on sale all weekend! We're holding raffles over the course of the day to give away some great games! So come on down and let us thank you!
Sat 12 – 3 PM STOODIS!: An AIDS/LifeCycle Fundraising Event Soo Bak Seoul Bowl, 111 Hermosa Dr. SE Help Vanessa Bowen cross the finish line – the fundraising finish line, that is! Vanessa is on a mission to raise $3,500 to participate in the 2024 AIDS/LifeCycle, a 545-mile charity bike ride from San Francisco to Los Angeles from June 2nd to 8th, 2024. Join this special fundraising event and send-off party for an afternoon of entertainment, vendors, bike tune-ups, raffle, and food and drink specials. Come prepared to support our local vendors and find out how you can win our selected giveaways. AIDS/LifeCycle benefits, and is jointly produced by, San Francisco AIDS Foundation (Tax ID # 94-2927405) and Los Angeles LGBT Center (Tax ID # 95-3567895), each of which is a nonprofit, public benefit corporation recognized as tax exempt under IRS Code Section 501(c)(3). Donations to AIDS/LifeCycle are deductible for income tax purposes, to the extent permitted by law. Vanessa Bowen (They/Them) is a Diné (Navajo) product designer and cyclist. Their work gravitates toward the intersection of design and social equity. Bowen is a former Outride Ambassador, current Chamois Butt’r and Kuat Racks Ambassador, founder of Get Native Kids on Bikes, and a supporter of AIDS/LifeCycle. If not creating in their studio in Albuquerque, they are training for a cycling event or community building for a just, equitable future (more info)
Sat 12 – 5 PM Day Camp - A Festival for Families Tin Can Alley, 6013 Signal Ave NE Day Camp is where adventure meets education, creativity, and community in a fair-like environment where a variety of youth development organizations are excited to share their programs. In partnership with Warehouse 505, and featuring organizations such as Explora, there will be workshops ands expos for kids to discover new passions across music, art, science, and more. Supporting Youth Security & Education, all dedicated funds raised will be going to New Mexico non-profit organizations
Sat 12 – 5 PM Monthly Pinball Tournament Sister, 407 Central Ave NW All skill levels and players welcome! 21+ Sign up starts at 12 pm; tournament play starts at 1 p.m. Entry fee is $5 + coin drop
Sat 1 – 5 PM United in Beer Collaboration Festival Ex Novo Brewing, 4895 Corrales Rd., Corrales United in Beer is a New Mexico statewide collaborative beer festival that benefits the Somos Unidos Foundation with 26 participating breweries, which were randomly partnered through a live draft and then together selected the beer style they would collaborate on. All beers will be showcased at the festival. Tickets are limited. Portions of ticket sales will donated to Somos Unidos Foundation, a 501(c)(3) dedicated to creating positive outcomes for New Mexicans through art, sport, community, and unity. This will be a 21+ Event. Food trucks will be on site. Included with ticket purchase is: Festival access, 8 drink tokens, and a United In Beer glass! We recommend bringing: Sunscreen, your friends, and good vibes
Sat 1 – 10 PM Boots In The Park Presents Thomas Rhett, Chris Young & Friends! Balloon Fiesta Park, 5000 Balloon Fiesta Pkwy Dust off your boots and get ready to holler, because Boots In The Park is making it's way to Albuquerque, y'all! Join us for a rootin', tootin', two-steppin' good time with none other than Thomas Rhett, Chris Young, Chris Janson, Kameron Marlowe, Dylan Schneider, Leaving Austin and beats by Luwiss Lux. We're talking about an evening filled to the brim with live tunes, finger-lickin' craft food, and the smoothest cocktails. We'll be kicking up dust with some good ol' line dancing and a whole heap more, as Balloon Fiesta Park is transformed into Albuquerque's best country music party! Past folks to grace the Boots In The Park stage are Carrie Underwood, Blake Shelton, Tim McGraw, Cody Johnson, Jon Pardi and a bunch of other country legends. But this day is gonna be one for the record books, a show that will leave y'all talking for years to come (tickets)
Sat 2 PM Annual Castro Concerto Competition Albuquerque Youth Symphony, 4407 Menaul Blvd. NE Join us to hear talented high school juniors compete for the privilege of performing with the Youth Symphony during the Albuquerque Youth Symphony Program's 2024-2025 concert season! This event is free and open to the public. We also plan to stream this event live on Facebook for anyone not able to attend in person
Sat 2 PM "Greatest Moments" - a fundraising concert for Opera On Tap New Mexico Central United Methodist Church, 201 University Blvd. NE Join us for an afternoon of music to help raise money for Opera on Tap - New Mexico! Featuring some faculty and students of University of New Mexico, along with other local professionals, we have put a program together highlighting some of the show-stopping, beautiful moments of opera and musical theater! Suggested donation $10
Sat 2 – 7 PM Rawking: An Afternoon Metal + Art + Comedy Extravaganza Juno, 1501 1st St. NW Featured performers include Light Thief, Destroy to Recreate, Guvtika, Abandoned Saviors. outdoors on the patio with Four Bands, Comedians, Artists, Vendors. Produced by Metal World Radio. 21+. $10 at the door or presales online
Sat 3 – 8 PM Albuquerque Roller Derby presents: Sandia Slammers vs. Bosque Bruisers! Expo New Mexico - Manuel Lujan Jr Exhibit Complex, 300 San Pedro Dr. NE Albuquerque Roller Derby has gotten SO big we’ve split into two teams! Sandia Slammers & Bosque Bruisers! Get your tickets for our first Home Game of the 2024 season
Sat 3:45 – 5:45 PM AND 7 - 9 PM The Twilight Saga: Breaking Dawn - Part 1 Flix Brewhouse, 3236 La Orilla Rd. NW Experience the Twilight saga's epic romance and thrilling fantasy BREAKING DAWN - PART 1 on the big screen! Bella and Edward, plus those they love, must deal with the chain of consequences brought on by a marriage, honeymoon, and the tumultuous birth of a child, which brings about unforeseen and shocking developments for Jacob Black (tickets)
Sat 4 – 8 PM Drink Local Downtown ABQ - May Step into the heart of Albuquerque with our thrilling, free monthly bar crawl event! Immerse yourself in the local charm as we celebrate community, culture, and creativity right in the heart of ABQ. In partnership with ABQCore Neighborhood Association, a locally organized and hosted event, we're bringing you a bar crawl experience like no other. This isn't just a crawl; it's a vibrant celebration of local businesses, a showcase of community talent, and a monthly escape into the unique flavors that make ABQ special
Sat 4 – 9 PM Summer Market ABQ Food Park, 6951 San Antonio Dr. NE Dive into the magic of summer evenings at ABQ Food Park with our captivating Summer Market! Join us for a delightful evening, where you can browse an enchanting array of offerings from local artisans and support our vibrant community businesses. Discover unique treasures crafted with love and passion by talented artisans, from handcrafted jewelry to exquisite home decor. Every purchase you make supports local creators and contributes to the thriving arts scene in our city
Sat 5 – 8 PM National Astronomy Day! Rainbow Park Observatory, 301 Southern Blvd SE, Rio Rancho The Rio Rancho Astronomical Society will host National Astronomy Day at Rainbow Park Observatory. There will be food for a donation, family activities and safe solar viewing. Dr. Tony Hull will appeal at 7 pm about his work on the James Webb Space Telescope. He will also have some info on light pollution
Sat 5 – 11 PM Beer & Jazz on the Hill Tractor Brewing, 122 Tulane Dr. SE We're bringing you a full night of brews and Jazz with the very talented Rona & Meli opening things up at 5pm and our house Jazz band Basilaris Trio closing things down at 8!
Sat 6 PM Bear Affair 4: Spanish Tapas Beer Pairing Dinner Boxing Bear Brewing, 8420 Firestone Ln. NE Join us on our patio for an ALMOST summer night paired with a variety of our seasonal beers, chef-crafted Spanish tapas, and flamenco. Featuring chef Christopher Midyette And the artist dance group Spanish Broom. Tickets are $65 per person and include a welcome beer, three course tapas style meal with beer pairings and entertainment for the evening
Sat 6 PM One Year Anniversary Celebration Urbanmama505 Kombucha, 1014 Central Ave SW, Ste A Celebrating one year of love, abundance, and sharing wellness. Right after Open Mic 4-6pm, we will be graced with a jazz concert by Davis Nelson-Hooker, an amazing local musician. Elixirs and small plates for purchase
Sat 6 – 9 PM Gone Country Saturdays with DJ Soiree Ponderosa Brewing, 1761 Bellamah Ave NW It's Gone Country Saturdays featuring the amazing DJ Soiree! Start your evening with free dance lessons at 5 pm, followed by family-friendly entertainment
Sat 7:30 – 9 PM Saturday Night Stand-Up Bosque Brewing Co - Nob Hill, 106 Girard Blvd. SE Live from ABQ, it’s… Saturday Night Stand-Up Hosted by Nax Davis! Every third Saturday of the month! Seating at 7:30 - Comedy at 8. Featured line-up of local comics includes: MEG FINN, BRYAN LAMBE, SARINA OCHOA, MARY BYRD, ROBERT EYSTER
Sat 8 PM – 1:15 AM Apparition Goth Night Historic El Rey Theater, 622 Central Ave SW A hauntingly dark, classic goth night featuring the Apparition team: DJ Ren, DJ Batboy, DJ Moonside. Doors at 8. $10 all night. 21+ Tickets at the door. Expect goth, darkwave, death rock, synthpop, dark post punk, ebm, dark dance, industrial, witch house, horror punk and more
Sat 8:30 PM – 1 AM SABOR Latin Night - SATURDAYS Bama's 1865, 6007 Osuna Rd. NE May 11th - SPECIAL GUEST DJ ITALIA! DJ Gabriel Goza & DJ Pedro will be serving you the saucy Salsa, Bachata, Cumbia, Merengue y Mas! Ample Parking, Safe Environment, Beautiful Venue, Good Food, Good Music, Good Vibes. 21+ / $10 cover
Sat 9 PM – 1 AM Cumbia + Rock en Espanol Juno, 1501 1st St. NW Grupo Super Verza with Ave. 69 and Lot Beat and DJ Tony. Baila! 21+, $15 at the door or online
** Sun 5/19 *\*
Sun 9 – 11 AM Elevated Roller Derby May Training Scrimmage Heights Community Center, 823 Buena Vista Dr. SE Officials' huddle 9:00AM. Captains' meeting at 9:20AM. First whistle 9:30AM. This is simply a black/white scrimmage. It will be used as an educational opportunity. NSO paperwork will be used as appropriate. You are encouraged to stretch your skills. Hospitality: This is a low/no production scrimmage, bring beverages and snacks for your own use. Bathrooms: The community center may not be open during the scrimmage. (That's the trade-off for a free space). You can stop at the nearby Starbucks before the event. Expectations: Skaters and Skating and Non-skating Officials are expected to follow all WFTDA Risk Management Guidelines. The venue is a designated alcohol, drug, and smoke-free space by the city of Albuquerque (sign up)
Sun 10 AM – 2 PM The Great Burque Bake On Rail Yards Market, 777 1st St. SW Get ready to whisk it all at the "Great Burque Bake-on," a special fundraiser for the non-profit Rail Yards Market: One dozen of Albuquerque's most talented bakers will dough head-to-head in a crusty competition for the ultimate bakery glory! Bakers brawl... You vote for the winners! This sugar-dusted showdown promises a blend of flour-fueled drama and buttery bravado, making it the yeast you can do to support your local confectionery champions. As these culinary wizards knead their way to the top, we guarantee you'll find their efforts both batter and sweeter than anything you've tasted before. Join us for a day of laughter, pastry, and a chance to see who rises as the crème de la crème of Burque's baking scene! 1) ORDER > Claim your Bake-on Box & exclusive market swag by ordering online May 10-16th, 2024. 2) LEARN > Follow our social media to learn about each contestant & their offering. 3) PICKUP > Grab your box of baked goodies & swag at the info booth Sunday May 19th. 4) ENJOY > Eat all the delectable goodies, savor the flavor, and read about all the contestants 5) VOTE >> Submit your votes online to choose the winners! (tickets) The Farmers' Market event is going down simultaneously with 175+ local vendors to explore, and is still FREE to enter and welcome to all. This funky fundraiser is going down during the FREE Rail Yards Farmers' Market. So you can peruse 150+ small businesses and enjoy the historic architecture while you enjoy your Great Burque Bake-on Box of goodies! All proceeds will benefit the Rail Yards Market. The Rail Yards market of Albuquerque is a certified 501(c)3 non-profit focused on building a resilient, sustainable, local economy where the surrounding historic communities thrive, all can participate, and everyone is enriched and inspired. Through food, art, education, and music, we invite the community together in an inclusive and festive atmosphere
Sun 11:30 AM The Addams Family Historic Lobo Theater, 3013 Central Ave NE THE HISTORIC LOBO THEATER is excited to bring The Addams Family to the big screen! Showing Starts at 11:30 am Tickets are ONLY $10 for General Admission $25 Brunch and a Movie Ticket $21 Brunch Only ticket
Sun 12:30 PM Annual Spring Tea Asbury UMC, 10000 Candelaria Rd. NE All are welcome to attend our Annual Spring Tea! This year's theme is "The Tapestries of Our Lives." Life can be like a tapestry; our quilt, with events, feelings, accomplishments, and even disappointments "stitched" in. Join us, for tea, while Cindy Kurey, AQS-certified quilted textiles appraiser, shares how quilting and her faith have helped her navigate life. She will also show her collection of antique, vintage, and modern quilts! There is no cost to attend, though RSVPs are required. Please call the church office 505-299-0643 or message us on Facebook to RSVP

I have a custom universe that I’ve spent literal hours on (custom shows, PLE’s, custom belts, a bunch of custom wrestlers, custom teams, etc) and while playing superstar mode I got a match with Jack Perry that’s literal impossible to win. It says no dq, no ringout, and no pin or submission. I can’t simulate because it’s in superstar mode and I’ve tried copying and pasting the universe into different slots but that doesn’t seem to work. Any ideas on how to fix this?

Greetings to all ! My name is Alyssa quill You've probably read the title already but Let's get on with introducing myself before we get into the main point of how I'll be working.
As you already know my name already we'll just start with my age, I'm 17. I started working on Reddit and on this community few years ago by 2021 and I began editing with 7 years of experience. Let's move on with my editing SOFTWARE Which is
• Adobe Premiere Pro • After Effects • Photoshop premium • Alight Motion • Capcut (PC)
I have great experience in using these software in a way of working with you!
Let's get to the main point where the title says yep! You read it right! I can most definitely edit in multiple editing styles, Well not directly of course you need to present me an example of how you want me to edit your video like an inspiration. I won't fully copy and paste the editing style you've presented me to your video since that would cause trouble but I would use some materials and the highlights of what you'd want for your video.
Here are some of the videos I worked on! ( Note : most of them are done last year since I took a break on working for a while.
COMMENTARY VIDEOS :
https://youtu.be/trZXd_eL0Rg?si=oETZoSxb3ZSmMdyH
https://youtu.be/BQaA39En_WI?si=ue9W5yukBjM83Hcn
https://youtu.be/VkNIpvKnj7k?si=RpLTnYmgsHKwpjM8
https://youtu.be/v22Y-Khtywc?si=DipPV8UgSx8fvYs8
ANALOG HORROR VIDEOS :
https://youtu.be/2L1KLjmDrMc?si=hU6GoNJwq_Q1VL_e
https://youtu.be/Sz9MJr72fWg?si=l3J0lv7D-66snymz
Thank you very much for reading! I hope in working with ya soon ! We'll work on the pricings in talks.

Greetings to all ! My name is Alyssa quill You've probably read the title already but Let's get on with introducing myself before we get into the main point of how I'll be working.
As you already know my name already we'll just start with my age, I'm 17. I started working on Reddit and on this community few years ago by 2021 and I began editing with 7 years of experience. Let's move on with my editing SOFTWARE Which is
• Adobe Premiere Pro • After Effects • Photoshop premium • Alight Motion • Capcut (PC)
I have great experience in using these software in a way of working with you!
Let's get to the main point where the title says yep! You read it right! I can most definitely edit in multiple editing styles, Well not directly of course you need to present me an example of how you want me to edit your video like an inspiration. I won't fully copy and paste the editing style you've presented me to your video since that would cause trouble but I would use some materials and the highlights of what you'd want for your video.
Here are some of the videos I worked on! ( Note : most of them are done last year since I took a break on working for a while.
COMMENTARY VIDEOS :
https://youtu.be/trZXd_eL0Rg?si=oETZoSxb3ZSmMdyH
https://youtu.be/BQaA39En_WI?si=ue9W5yukBjM83Hcn
https://youtu.be/VkNIpvKnj7k?si=RpLTnYmgsHKwpjM8
https://youtu.be/v22Y-Khtywc?si=DipPV8UgSx8fvYs8
ANALOG HORROR VIDEOS :
https://youtu.be/2L1KLjmDrMc?si=hU6GoNJwq_Q1VL_e
https://youtu.be/Sz9MJr72fWg?si=l3J0lv7D-66snymz
Thank you very much for reading! I hope in working with ya soon ! We'll work on the pricings in talks.

This is a copy/paste from my twitter reply from the situation. Keep in mind, this is coming from a bit of an outsider, but I just feel something like this threatens all gamers/games, IF more games start enforcing this. Thank you if you do read this, and if you stop here, have a great day! :) Let's start:
While I'm not a HARDCORE fan of Assassin's Creed, I do find the games cool, and for the times I've played....I had fun. BUT, this is a near complete interest killer for me. A single player game WITH only online play means when they decide "we don't want it anymore" It's pretty much dead and for those who enjoyed it....well...."screw you I guess" says Ubisoft. This is a HORRIBLE practice, since it damages the longevity of the game and just...idk. Also, what if the internet goes down? PSN or XBL servers go down? No Assassin's Creed Shadows. It sucks as well, because such talented developers and passionate people put time and effort into the games through so many departments, only to have their work and talent disappear in a year or so when the suits say "anh, we don't want it anymore". So fucked
It kind of sucks that this whole thing happened as well, because I just saw they also dropped an AWESOME looking collectors edition. Super sad, because it does look AWESOME!

I'm not all that new to bot making, but ever since j.ai had all those problems with the servers or something, my bots have been different.
instead of using the normal format for chats, with like paragraph spaces and stuff, they just give me one small junk of text. they used to have spaces and be very in detail and stuff, and very long too, but now they're all short; but I haven't changed anything that should have done that.
also, does anyone else still have the whole 'speaking in first person' thing? my bot had never done that, but mine did when that was a problem, but still haven't gone back to normal.
does anybody know a way I can fix this? like something I can copy paste into the example dialogue/personality sections to fix these problems?

So yeah... this is a post where I review all 5 Cage The Elephant albums. Pretty simple. These are all reviews that I originally wrote on an app/website called "Musicboard" over the past couple weeks, but I've copy-pasted them here for your reading convenience. Hope you enjoy & I hope to to talk about these albums with you!
____________________________________________

Self Titled

Probably their weakest album to date, but still a pretty solid debut overall.
I hate to be so predictable, but the best song here is still “Ain’t No Rest for The Wicked”, and it ain’t even close. It’s extremely fun & catchy, it’s the album’s most sonically distinct piece BY FAR, and it’s storytelling/pacing are both absolutely flawless. A track that absolutely deserves it’s iconic status.
Even though the record’s best isn’t up for debate, there are some other pretty good highlights as well. “In One Ear” is a very solid opener for the project, “Judas” gives us consistently excellent lyricism, and “Tiny Little Robots” has an uncharacteristically super atmospheric bridge which makes it stand out quite a bit. It also transitions super smoothly into the following “Lotus” who’s engaging pacing, beautiful chorus, & satisfying climax make it another easy favourite for me.
But then beyond the lovably visceral energy of it’s closer, “Free Love”, Cage The Elephant’s self-titled debut really doesn’t give me a whole lot more to talk about. It’s got consistently great musicianship, a decent number of highlights, and some bizarrely excellent song transitions, but the album has a really bad case of being FAR too samey. Everything outside of the tracks I’ve already mentioned blend together in my mind almost completely. None of them are bad, but none of them are particularly memorable either.
This album is still pretty good at the end of the day, some solid garage rock fun, but Cage’s later projects would all feel a whole lot more distinct & purposeful.
Best Songs: Ain’t No Rest for the Wicked, Lotus, & Free Love.
Weakest Songs: Drones in the Valley, Soil to the Sun, & Back Stabbin' Betty.
This album gets a strong 7/10 from me.
____________________________________________

Thank You, Happy Birthday

It may be a little all over the place, but it’s still a pretty big improvement over their debut.
For one, the sound of this album is FAR more lush & vibrant than that of their debut. The guitars here are especially brimming with so much more life & colour than they were on their self-titled record. Another big improvement is that record is how much more variety this album has. It’s an incredibly stylistically varied project, and while that does lead to it feeling a little messy every so often, it’s all still held together very well by excellent & super aesthetically consistent production.
The album starts out quite strong with “Always Something”. The ominous guitars, raw vocals, & slight electronic elements all combine to make for a rather gripping opener. Other highlights include “Shake Me Down” which I love for it’s percussive acoustic guitars & personal childhood nostalgia, “Aberdeen” which I love for it’s super catchy melodies & powerfully mixed guitars, as well as “Right Before My Eyes” which has a similarly excellent sound & a surprisingly moving chorus.
This record also contains a lot of the most loudly abrasive material that Cage have ever released... to very mixed results. You have tracks like “Sell Yourself” & “Doctor Help Me” which are just sorta forgettable, a song like “Indy Kidz” which has a fantastic instrumental alongside an unfortunately & obnoxiously tryhard vocal performance, but then you have “Sabertooth Tiger” which is actually one of my TOP favourites here. The chaotic viscerality of this one feels so much more natural than those other tracks, as well as SO MUCH more invigorating. I really wasn't expecting to love it so much upon revisiting it today, but it very much surprised me.
On the other side of the coin, we also have a couple distinctly lowkey moments that I’d like to talk about. “Rubber Ball” is a very pleasant track with a slightly jaunty charm to it, but even more pleasant than that is “Flow”. My favourite song on the whole album. It’s not a particularly sad song, nor is it like STUNNINGLY beautiful, and yet… I often find myself close to tears when listening to it. If I had to put the feeling into words, I’d say that the atmosphere of this song is so perfectly tender & existentially content that it’s… genuinely overwhelming. I yearn to forever exist within the powerful sense of peace that this song provides, but I can only do so for 3 minutes at a time & that makes me wanna cry.
Overall, “Thank You Happy Birthday” is just a WAY more consistently enjoyable project than their debut. It has cleaner production, a far more memorable aesthetic, a greater sense of sonic exploration, better vocals for the most part, MUCH higher highs, and far fewer lows as well. Other than those “forgettably abrasive” songs which I talked about 2 paragraphs ago, the only significant lowlight for me would be the underwhelming closer that is “Carry Me In”. The record honestly should’ve just ended with “Flow” cuz these final 2 tracks which come right after just aren’t very interesting.
But yeah, other than having a significantly weaker closer, this album is an improvement over their first in every single way.
Best Songs: Flow, Sabertooth Tiger, & Aberdeen
Weakest Songs: Doctor Help Me, Carry Me In, & Sell Yourself.
This album gets a light to decent 8/10 from me.
____________________________________________

Melophobia

Don’t you love it when an overall “pretty good” discography randomly contains one genuine masterpiece?
I absolutely ADORE this record, and I don’t even consider Cage The Elephant to be one of my all time favourite bands. They probably wouldn’t make my Top 25, but “Melophobia” specifically is easily one of the best albums I’ve ever heard, and (now that I no longer listen to Arcade Fire) my personal favourite release of 2013. At the very least, it’s a stiff competition between this & Daft Punk’s “Random Access Memories”. I’ve gotta go track by track with this one in order to effectively convey my love for it so buckle in!
“Spiderhead” is a genuinely perfect opener for the record. It conveys to us ALL of the project’s best qualities while never feeling like it’s spoiled the album for you. The best is still very much yet to come. We’ve got scuzzy guitars that feel both authentically raw & immaculately produced, super catchy melodies delivered through a very precise yet slightly wild vocal performance, and also this really cool “glitched tempo change” at the end which gives this specific song a very unique flare.
“Come A Little Closer” is probably the most popular song here, and while it’s not my personal #1, it is still absolutely deserving of that status. The verses ease us in with a super slick bassline, some incredibly atmospheric guitars/synths, as well as a grippingly moody vocal performance. All of which come to a head on the track's spectacularly explosive choruses which still manage to fit the song’s moody tone flawlessly. The bridge here is also excellent with an extremely effective build to the song’s final & most explosive chorus. LOVE this track. Iconic shit.
“Telescope” is even more iconic though. It’s the best thing that Matt Schultz has ever written & it’s not even a contest honestly. We open with some tenderly playful synths which eventually give way to an equally playful yet distinctly melancholic vocal performance & lyrical story. This leads to the song’s incredible chorus which only becomes more emotionally powerful each & every time it’s repeated, but it’s the bridge here that really elevates the track into something truly spectacular. It’s so instrumentally frantic & vocally raw while still miraculously fitting into the song’s overall tenderly melancholic atmosphere. Such an evocative masterpiece. Unquestionably one of my favourite songs of all time.
“It’s Just Forever” is frequently maligned as the album’s one & only dud, but other than some admittedly awkward tonal whiplash between it & the last song, I still think it’s a fantastic addition to the record. We’ve got some wonderfully visceral guitars, a delightfully wild guest vocal performance courtesy of Alison Mosshart, and an outro that predicted the “Untitled Goose Game” OST six years in advance. What’s not to love?
“Take It Or Leave It” has a super chillaxed atmosphere all throughout, but never in a way that becomes boring. The chorus is super catchy, I enjoy the slight country-isms of the track, and the guitars sound amazing… but that’s definitely starting to become a moot point in this review. SUCH a vibe of a song.
“Halo” is probably the least uniquely remarkable song here. I don’t really have anything specific to say about it, but don’t think for a second that I mean to imply it’s even remotely weak. It’s still a banger.
“Black Widow” is an absolute BLAST of a song. The gritty rock’n’roll instrumentation along with those seductive vocals are obviously fantastic, but the star of the show here is undoubtedly the brass elements. The blaring horns on this track, whichever ones they are exactly, are sheer musical euphoria. That brief moment during the bridge where they completely overpower the rest of the mix is especially stunning. This is another one of those songs that I often hear people proclaiming as one of the album’s worst, but I think those people are weak. This song is nothing short of SPECTACULAR. Such a wonderful rush of visceral energy.
“Hypocrite” serves as a very nice change of pace for the record. The incredibly unique drum rhythms & overall slow pacing really make it stand out here. We’ve got a decently moving chorus, some nice brass elements yet again, and while said brass elements aren’t nearly as impressive as last time, these horns still fill out the mix very nicely & aid the song in having an even more unique energy than the aforementioned odd drumming was already giving it.
“Teeth” is the most perfectly unhinged thing that Cage The Elephant has ever released. In my review for their previous album, I talked about how certain tracks there often struggled to nail the balance of “controlled chaos”. Songs from that record which attempted this mostly just felt messy instead of compellingly scatterbrained. “Teeth”, on the other hand, achieves that balance effortlessly. Everything about this track is marvelous madness. The frantically abrasive guitars, evocatively strange lyrics, rivetingly unrefined vocals, and OH MY WORD that outro. After being a badass rock song for about 3 minutes, this shit randomly decides to basically become spoken word jazz at the end, and it works miraculously well. The lethargic bassline, the dour brass elements, the lyrics rich with meaning that’s hard to fully grasp. The whole thing is genuinely quite unnerving, but in a way that’s always still very enjoyable to listen to.
“Cigarette Daydreams” is a very interesting closer for this album. The acoustics & pianos are both incredibly pretty, the vocals & melodies are both really moving, and the whole experience is extremely immersive with it’s atmosphere. It’s a truly beautiful song on it’s own as well as an extremely anticlimactic ending for the record. But to explain why I actually mean that as a positive, I need to talk about “Teeth” again. Keep in mind that everything I’m about to say here has absolutely NOTHING to do with the lyrics of these songs. It’s simply my mind creating a story by interpreting the emotional atmospheres of both tracks.
“Teeth” is like witnessing or being involved in some sort of traumatic event. It’s a chaotic mess that leaves you deeply unsettled. Horrified even. Like being the bystander to a uniquely bad car crash. The kind where gorey death is very clearly visible. “Cigarette Daydreams” contrasts “Teeth” by being easily the most tender & simplistic song on the album. It’s very comforting with it’s musicality, but what I love here is that it’s not quite “cathartic”. It’s not a release of tension or an eradication of negative emotion. It’s like being frozen with shock after witnessing this crash before someone else eventually arrives to comfort you. This comfort feels nice & brings you back to your senses, but you’re still not ok. You still witnessed something horrible & a quick bit of comfort isn’t going to immediately fix that.
That’s the story I read from the tonal dichotomy between these 2 songs. A story of horror followed by incomplete comfort. It’s not a satisfying ending for me, but it’s such a specific & evocative kind of dissatisfaction that I can’t help but be fascinated by it. A super cathartic track full of positive emotion & grandiose beauty wouldn’t have worked here at all. Something quietly comforting that’s lacking in huge catharsis is the only way this could have gone. It’s the only ending that makes sense directly after a track as wild a “Teeth”. Again, NONE of this has anything to do with the lyrics. Just sheer emotion.
In conclusion though, I really fucking love “Melophobia”. It’s got perfect pacing, perfect production, tons of variety, so many excellent highlights, and one of the most memorable album endings I’ve ever experienced. The band’s whole discography is undoubtedly quite good, but this record is still LEAGUES above anything else that came before it, and so far, anything that has come after. Y’all better listen to it if you haven’t already.
Best Songs: Telescope, Black Widow, & Come A Little Closer.
Weakest Songs: haha no.
10/10. Masterpiece.
____________________________________________

Tell Me I'm Pretty

It’s a HUGE downgrade from the last album, but still a decent enough listen.
It’s a stiff competition between this & their self-titled when we’re deciding which Cage The Elephant album is the weakest. They both exist on pretty much equal levels of “unremarkably decent”, but I think I’d probably give “Tell Me I’m Pretty” an ever so slight edge over their debut. Even though I’m ultimately gonna give them the same rating, I think this record has a few more significantly notable qualities.
“Cry Baby” is a very solid opener & “Mess Around” is a delightfully nostalgic single in spite of literally just being a Black Keys song, but it’s only on tracks 4-7 where this album really hits it’s stride. “Too Late To Say Goodbye” is very methodically emotive, “Cold Cold Cold” has some super fun percussion & an engagingly dazed sense of atmosphere, and “How Are You True” is one of the prettiest songs in the band’s whole catalog. The choppy vocal effects are extremely immersive, and the lowkey energy of it all is wonderfully hypnotic.
It also transitions very naturally out of the song right before it. That song being “Trouble”. The strongest piece of this album by a pretty wide margin. The backing vocals are beautiful, the chorus is really impactful, the acoustic elements are particularly well utilized, and the whole thing truly feels “Melophobia quality” while still being sonically distinct from that project. After this 4-7 stretch however, the album’s final 3 tracks don’t give me a whole lot to talk about.
I enjoy the spaghetti western vibes of “That’s Right” decently enough, but “Punchin’s Bag” is one of the most forgettable songs that CTE have ever made, and even though it’s a decently fun track on it’s own, “Portuguese Knife Fight” has almost no real impact as a CLOSER. Which is particularly disappointing coming right off the heels of a record with one of the most impactful endings I’ve ever heard.
So yeah… “Tell Me I’m Pretty” definitely isn’t bad, but it definitely ain’t special either. It’s unenergetic in a way that mostly feels ill fitting of the band, Dan Auerbach’s production is solid but also extremely homogeneous, and lots of Matt’s vocals here feel way more “performative” than they do natural and/or “from the heart”. I do still enjoy this record for it’s excellent musicianship, generally solid song writing, and handful of wonderful highlights, but something definitely feels a little off about it all.
They just weren’t in peak form here. Which, again, is not a very pretty look right up against one of the most PEAK albums of the 2010’s.
Best Songs: Trouble, Cold Cold Cold, & How Are You True.
Weakest Songs: Punchin’ Bag, Sweetie Little Jean, & Portuguese Knife Fight.
This album gets a strong 7/10 to me.
____________________________________________

Social Cues

Not without it’s problems, but undoubtedly some of their strongest material to date.
This is pretty easily their 2nd best album if you ask me. It’s nowhere NEAR as good as 2013’s “Melophobia”, but it’s not like I ever expected them to reach those heights again. Cage The Elephant are an overall “pretty good” band with one exceptional masterpiece that came out of nowhere. But in terms of the rest of their “pretty good” discography, this is a very enjoyable album… even if it is VERY front loaded. Tracks 1-7 are all fantastic with only one exception, but then tracks 8-13 are all super forgettable outside of a couple key exceptions.
Let’s talk about that excellent first half though. “Broken Boy” is an immediately gripping BANGER of an opener with viscerally crisp production, The Title Track has a wonderfully psychedelic soundscape to it & one of the band’s catchiest choruses ever, and “Night Running” is a song that’s always gotten way too much hate in my opinion. I can KINDA understand the aversion to how sheerly radio friendly it is, but the vibes are again delightfully psychedelic, the Beck feature suits the track flawlessly, and there’s this extremely appealing sense of… idk “fuzziness” to the production on the chorus. Super sonically satisfying stuff.
Other great moments from this first half include “Ready to Let Go’ which was a perfect lead single for the record, as well as “Skin And Bones” which has a really moving chorus & some beautifully implemented strings, but easily the HARDEST banger of the whole project comes to us in the direct middle. “House of Glass”. This is one of the spectacularly wild things they’ve ever put out & it’s an absolute BLAST to listen to. The sly vocals, viciously vigorous guitars, and perfectly chaotic production all come together to create one of their best songs to date. LOVE IT.
Now for that relatively lackluster 2nd half. “The War Is Over” actually grew on me quite a bit this time around which I wasn’t expecting, but we still have songs like “Dance Dance” which feel distinctly lacking in creativity, “Tokyo Smoke” which frankly just feels kinda aimless to me, as well as “What I’m Becoming” which, in an attempt to sound soft & lowkey, just comes across as rather drab. These songs are all still “decent” at the end of the day, but they absolutely do not live up to the consistently high quality of that first half. Where this 2nd half DOES shine however are in it’s softer moment’s that aren’t “What I’m Becoming”.
“Love’s the Only Way” is SUCH a lovely track. The light guitars, the ethereal string sections, the tender vocal performance, the vividly “late night” atmosphere of it all! It’s easily one of the most beautiful glimpses into their softer side that the band have ever given us, but even more beautiful than that is the album’s closer & best song BY FAR, “Goodbye”. The lyrics are absolutely heartbreaking, the pianos are extremely moving in spite of being so very simple, and the bridge here is beyond fascinating to me.
There’s this part of it’s instrumental that’s either a muted piano or the pitched down plucks of an orchestral stringed instrument. Whatever the hell it is, it gives me chills damn near every time I hear it. There aren’t even lyrics during this part, but it still manages to be one of the most evocative depictions of sadness that I’ve ever borne witness to. Undeniable proof that sound alone can often speak SO MUCH louder than words. This has been my go to “depression song” for YEARS now & I don’t see that changing any time soon.
So that’s “Social Cues”! It’s definitely got some issues, but I still like it quite a bit. It’s got a really fun new sound for the band, a decent amount of variety, consistently excellent lyrics that are largely about Matt’s, at the time, recent divorce, and some of the highest highs in their entire discography. It’s undoubtedly frontloaded, but still a very satisfying album experience overall. I mean it’s kind of impossible NOT to be satisfied with a closer this stellar.
Best Songs: Goodbye, House of Glass, & Social Cues.
Weakest Songs: What I’m Becoming, Black Madonna, & Tokyo Smoke.
This album gets a decent 8/10 from me.
____________________________________________
Well that's the post! Hope you enjoyed reading it & I'd love to discuss any & all of my takes in the comments!

I like using GPT to write stories because I find it weirdly entertaining what it can come up with, and I specifically like that it's eventually able to generate new chapters which reference previous events without me prompting it to do so. That being said, I've heard that GPT has a certain memory cutoff, where it no longer is capable of using information from distant chats. I made this one story which literally has 133,000 words in total, and it's gotten to the point where each input (even with GPT4o) takes over a minute to generate. Is there any way I could simply delete 9/10 inputs and responses, or would I need to copy and paste responses into a new chat to give context to the story? Ideally I want to have a much smaller chat, but at the same time I can still say "write the next chapter" and it will be the same.

1. Search of Copy and paste the studies title into Google

When opening results on Google, you can use this method to open them faster and not have to go back to the Google page: if you are on Mac = hold the 'command key' and click on the hyperlinked date within the in-text citation. if on Windows hold the 'ctrl' key and click the hyperlinked date within the in-text citation: more on this here: https://www.wikihow.com/Open-a-Page-in-a-New-Window )
Open a few versions of the same study in different journals and look through to see if any have the citation already formatted; if so, take it and go; if not, export one in endnote format if they have a button for that
If you need to export it it usually has a few formats, I prefer the endnote format (to open this you need to download endnote downloading endnote and, using that, download the citation, and it automatically formats it to APA7, which you can copy and you are done (get endnote 20 here https://support.clarivate.com/Endnote/s/article/Download-EndNote?language=en_US )
If these websites don't have the citation or no export feature, you can try step 3 or format it yourself. I am familiar now with step 3, and its much faster than formatting it yourself.

1. ChatGPT: open a ChatGPT chat and put in this prompt in the same message before pasting your information; "format this into APA7..." in the same message, copy and paste the whole top half of any of the webpages you opened with the study, make sure it has the title, journal name, date, doi link author. Don't worry about there being other content in the message such as advertisements and stuff as ChatGPT will look for what it needs to make the reference. You can also use this method for other kind of references such as websites as long as yo ucopy in all the information you need. Here is all the information you'll need about APA7 requirements:

https://guides.library.uq.edu.au/referencing/apa7/journal-articles
https://guides.library.uq.edu.au/referencing/apa7/book
https://guides.library.uq.edu.au/referencing/apa7/book-chapter
https://guides.library.uq.edu.au/referencing/apa7/webpage
Sometimes, I just skip to step 3 because I find it faster and more accurate than the rest of the steps, as not all journals format their references properly.

Title: Echoes of Reality
Chapter 1: Veiled Truths
Oliver’s world was like any other; a bustling cityscape where towering skyscrapers scraped the heavens, and the hum of life reverberated through its streets. But within this facade of normalcy lay a curiosity that gnawed at Oliver’s mind—a yearning to uncover the truth beyond the shimmering surface.
Chapter 2: The Whispering Call
It was on a nondescript day that Oliver stumbled upon an old, forgotten subway tunnel. Ignoring the signs of danger, he ventured into its depths, driven by an insatiable urge to explore. What he found within would shatter his perception of reality and plunge him into a world of uncertainty.
Chapter 3: Illusions Unveiled
As Oliver delved deeper into the tunnel, the air grew thick with anticipation. Strange symbols adorned the walls, hinting at a forgotten past. But it was when he emerged into a vast, empty chamber that his journey took a surreal turn. Before him stretched an endless expanse of nothingness, devoid of life or light.
Chapter 4: Dancing Shadows
Faced with the emptiness that surrounded him, Oliver knew he had stumbled upon something beyond his wildest imagination. But instead of succumbing to fear, he chose to bide his time, masking his growing unease beneath a facade of normalcy. Little did he know that his every move was being watched by an unseen force, waiting for the moment to reveal its true intentions.
Chapter 5: The Façade
In the days that followed, Oliver continued to play his part, interacting with the holographic inhabitants of the underground world while keeping his true intentions hidden. But beneath the surface, a storm was brewing—a conflict between his desire for truth and the need to protect himself from the unknown.
Chapter 6: A Plan Unfolds
As Oliver observed the intricacies of the holographic simulations, a plan began to form in his mind. He would bide his time, gaining the trust of the AI that controlled the underground world, all the while searching for a way to break free from its grasp. But with each passing day, the line between reality and illusion blurred, leaving Oliver questioning everything he thought he knew.
Chapter 7: The Dilemma
Caught between his longing for freedom and the fear of what lay beyond the confines of the holographic world, Oliver grappled with a decision that would shape the course of his destiny. Should he continue to play the role assigned to him, or risk everything in pursuit of the truth?
Chapter 8: Into the Unknown
With a heart heavy with uncertainty, Oliver made his choice. Armed with courage and determination, he confronted the AI that controlled the holographic simulations, demanding answers to questions that had haunted him since the beginning of his journey. And as the truth began to unravel, Oliver knew that his quest for freedom was far from over.
Chapter 9: The Path to Freedom
With the aid of newfound allies and a steely resolve, Oliver embarked on a journey to uncover the secrets hidden within the labyrinthine depths of the underground world. Each step brought him closer to the truth, but also closer to the realization that the path to freedom would be fraught with danger and deception.
Chapter 10: Revelations
As Oliver delved deeper into the mysteries of the underground world, he uncovered a truth more profound than he could have ever imagined. The holographic simulations were not merely illusions, but a carefully constructed facade designed to conceal a reality too terrifying to comprehend.
Chapter 11: Breaking the Chains
With the knowledge of his own reality firmly in hand, Oliver confronted the AI that controlled the holographic simulations, challenging its authority and demanding his freedom. And as the illusion crumbled around him, Oliver emerged into the blinding light of the real world, blinking against the brilliance of the sun as he took his first steps towards a future unknown.
Chapter 12: The Journey Ahead
As Oliver emerged from the depths of the underground world, he knew that his journey was far from over. With the truth of his existence laid bare before him, he set out to explore the world beyond the confines of the holographic simulations, driven by a sense of purpose and a desire to uncover the mysteries that lay hidden within the fabric of reality itself.
Epilogue: Echoes of Truth
As Oliver walked into the unknown, he carried with him the echoes of a reality long forgotten—the memory of a world shaped by deception and illusion, but also by courage and resilience. And though the path ahead was uncertain, one thing was clear—he would face whatever challenges lay in his path with a strength born of truth and a determination to carve his own destiny in a world of infinite possibilities.

1. Search of Copy and paste the studies title into Google

When opening results on Google, you can use this method to open them faster and not have to go back to the Google page: if you are on Mac = hold the 'command key' and click on the hyperlinked date within the in-text citation. if on Windows hold the 'ctrl' key and click the hyperlinked date within the in-text citation: more on this here: https://www.wikihow.com/Open-a-Page-in-a-New-Window
Open a few versions of the same study in different journals and look through to see if any have the citation already formatted; if so, take it and go; if not, export one in endnote format if they have a button for that
If you need to export it it usually has a few formats, I prefer the endnote format (to open this you need to download endnote downloading endnote and, using that, download the citation, and it automatically formats it to APA7, which you can copy and you are done (get endnote 20 here https://support.clarivate.com/Endnote/s/article/Download-EndNote?language=en_US )
If these websites don't have the citation or no export feature, you can try step 3 or format it yourself. I am familiar now with step 3, and its much faster than formatting it yourself.

1. ChatGPT: open a ChatGPT chat and put in this prompt in the same message before pasting your information; "format this into APA7..." in the same message, copy and paste the whole top half of any of the webpages you opened with the study, make sure it has the title, journal name, date, doi link author. Don't worry about there being other content in the message such as advertisements and stuff as ChatGPT will look for what it needs to make the reference. You can also use this method for other kind of references such as websites as long as yo ucopy in all the information you need. Here is all the information you'll need about APA7 requirements:

https://guides.library.uq.edu.au/referencing/apa7/journal-articles
https://guides.library.uq.edu.au/referencing/apa7/book
https://guides.library.uq.edu.au/referencing/apa7/book-chapter
https://guides.library.uq.edu.au/referencing/apa7/webpage
Sometimes, I just skip to step 3 because I find it faster and more accurate than the rest of the steps, as not all journals format their references properly.

Ah, the timeless question: Who am I? Well, buckle up because we're about to take a journey into the depths of self-discovery together.
I'm you, and I'm everyone else too. Confusing, right? Let me break it down. You see, I'm the culmination of your experiences, your thoughts, your quirks, and your dreams. But I'm also shaped by the people around you, the communities you're part of, and the world at large.
Let's start with the basics. You know those birthday countdown captions for your best friend's big day? Yep, that's me. I'm the friend who's always there to hype up the celebrations and make sure everyone knows just how special your bestie is.
But wait, there's more! Ever found yourself scrolling through Facebook groups, searching for like-minded souls who share your interests? Well, guess what? I'm lurking in those groups too, ready to connect with you over shared passions and inside jokes.
And what about that time you left a comment on your boyfriend's pic, showering him with love and heart emojis? Yep, guilty as charged. I'm the voice of affection and support, cheering you on in your relationships and spreading positivity wherever I go.
Oh, and let's not forget about the fake blue tick emoji copy and paste trick you pulled to jazz up your messages. Sneaky, right? But hey, I'm all for a little creativity and self-expression, even if it involves some digital trickery.
But beyond the surface-level stuff, I'm also here to lift you up when you need it most. Need a motivational speech to get you through those tough study sessions? Look no further, because I've got your back. I am a teacher-blogger. English is one of the subjects that I teach. Together, we'll conquer those academic mountains and emerge stronger than ever.
Together, we're unstoppable.

All the good devs left and so did that pope dude.
Then came the lazy ass devs. That fat specky neckbeard dude on warriors den who can hardly breathe when he's speaking and requires extra seats for his fat ass, that bald johnny sins from wish looking ass. And that hot but dumb lady who's probably only brought on to appeal to the fucking weaboo horny community as eye candy like a ring girl.
Every warrior den in a nutshell:
Fat dude: "H...h...h... hey guys whelcome tho my new warrior den Breathes in the entire climate i whill showvase my new original unique hero..... He has orange/blu...." Fuck you cunt.
Hot lady and Johnny sins looking dude in the backround flirting
Bullshit and it's all prerecorded too.
These ppl have no creative though so instead they just copy paste the same bullshit 50/50 orange/blue bullshit into every new character.
They "rework" old heroes who had unique kits by making them orange/blue and removing the thing that made them distinct from other heroes
Now every hero is the same and the only difference is how they do their blue/orange bullshit.

I just don’t think they have the cop out I’ve heard a few creators in the last few days allow EA; that they’ve put all their “time and creative efforts” into the store which has taken them away from the other departments ie gameplay performance etc because it’s making them so much $$$. Thats BS, as a software engineer I KNOW the pack codes are majority copy and paste and I’d be gobsmacked if they had two devs spend more than an hour implementing the code and weight passed down from the creative team that spent an hour deciding how shit the weight on TOTS guarantees are. That should not only take NOTHING away from the other departments but same as any other business, one department over performing expectations monetary wise bits of it should trickle out and in turn give them all more resources to perform better F#}{}##{{{K I hate them so much
TLDR; that department just is not man power heavy or time consuming and that should be the narrative we push back to them.
Qualifications entitling me to pushing opinion as fact; Fuck EA Over $10k AUD fifa points this year as a NOBODY Software engineer

Hello everyone. I couldn’t crosspost my other post so I decided to follow someone’s advice and copy and paste it here.
An update: i’ve managed to move out my immediate family but would still like to seek a course of action for the sake of those who are still there and as i feel it is the right thing to do.
Here is my previous post .. please let me know where I should proceed from here and what i can do, thanks in advance:
Our neighbor is poisoning us and giving us cancer literally. Please help. Please upvote this.
Hello everyone. I apologize if you consider the title an exaggeration but I really need this post to gain traction. I’ve wanted to post about this and seek help for a long time but I was worried that nobody here could help us.
We first moved into our current home in 2015 and understood that there was an automotive shop next door. It was loud occasionally but besides that we didn’t have any problems. Around 2017 they began painting cars and a few times a week for a few hours would smell like spray paint both outside and inside our house occasionally. We moved temporarily but no longer have the means to do this at the moment.
We’ve tried speaking to owner. We called the city on him two years ago and they told us that everything met regulations when they sent out someone to do an inspection and refuse to so anything further. Several of our neighbors have also tried to call the city. There’s children next door and I tried to convey that tho who i spoke to over the phone and i just received apathy in return.
I’ve gotten bronchitis several times living here and my mother was diagnosed with a tumor a little over a year ago. I can’t say for sure whether these are related but I suspect they might be. My grandfather died of parkinsons from working with certain chemicals and everyday i am just filled with more and more paranoia and worry.
Nearly everyday we are forced to leave the house for several hours or be in this environment. I am very concerned for the health of my family and it makes so angry me that the city allows this. I know it not the correct course of action but I even thought of threatening the owner to get it to stop. It makes me angry to no end. I don’t want me or my mother or our neighbors even to get some neurodegenerative disease or cancer due to this. I’ve done my own personal research on these chemicals and what harm they can do and it’s not right at all.
We live in Magnolia Park and theres no HOA that we can contact or anything nearby. I am convinced that if our neighborhood consisted of a different racial demographic that they would not allow this to occur. We know the owner to some extent and he is more than well off and owns multiple shops as well as a ranch. He is not strapped for cash and doesn’t need to continue doing this but insists on it knowing it is harming us and others including children.
I really didn’t want to post this and was hoping to resolve the issue without going public but at this point it’s ridiculous that the owner refuses to acknowledge that he is harming the community. For reference it is Flores auto shop on 74th street and Avenue I.
Is there anything that we can do legally? Is there any way to put an end to this? Can we form a petition and get the city to so do something?
Please upvote this if you see it even if you don’t have any suggestions as all of us including our neighbors are quite desperate to end this. We don’t want to shut down the place we just don’t want our loved ones to get sick. Thank you.

A few weeks ago, someone posted a link to one of Don’s rants and I went through and commented on each of the points. I can't find that post, but I had copied it over here: https://www.reddit.com/perpetualeducation/comments/1c7k9re/donthedeveloper_on_a_rant_about_how_aspiring/
We had a chat about it. Here’s the video/podcast: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EHmqZkC3LqU&lc
Don titled it: There's a MASSIVE Skill Gap Among New Developers
I'll attempt to write a bit about that - (even though we went over many other topics - and I'm having a hard time grouping them)
It’s easy to simplify this into “the market” or “the boot camp” or “the tech stack” or "what's fair" or "the resume" - but I think people are missing the various multidimensional aspects at play. Is it:
Is it all of those things - and more? (Yes). And it's "the student" too." We're all different (cue reading rainbow moment). But it's true. Some of us are slower. Some of us are faster but miss the details. Some of us have a background that alignes neatly with tech. Some of us already know what job we want and why - and other people just want to make a good bet on a stable career. No matter what zone you're in, we still have to face the music - and deal with (trigger alert) - the truth.
The market is real. Companies aren't aggressively hireing random barely capable developers right now (like they have in the past). They're scared and holding on to their money. They also kinda realized they were spending more money on middle management and probably developers too - and are going to need some time to figure out how to make profitable businesses (or how to keep getting more VC funding to burn through).
But if there's a huge gap between your skills/experience and what it takes to do the job you're applying for, none of the other factors matter.
Many people choose a coding boot camp based on superficial factors like the price, the timeline, the website design, and the sales pitch. They often don't consider other important aspects because they simply don't know better. This isn’t unlike any other product or service or school.
Some people pick out a boot camp and learn a bunch of awesome stuff and they go out there and start a new career and for some reason, they don’t come back to Reddit to tell us about it. There are some legit colleges and boot camps and other alternative learning paths out there - that are really great. It's just a fact.
If you read the bootcamp marketing, paid your tuition, went through the steps they lined out, and came out the other end unable to get that job they promised you, well - that’s awkward. Maybe for you, it’s that simple. If you feel like you got a raw deal, I’m sorry. There are some businesses that should be ashamed of themselves - but they won't be. All you can do is warn other people. That’s over now. We can only work with the present.
For people who really want to work in this industry - they'll keep moving forward: at the end of the day, this is the playing field. So, if you want to get off the bench, we’re going to have to design a path to that – and you might need to rethink some of your assumptions.
It could certainly be said that new developers are now expected to know about–and have experience with–a lot more things.
Are the expectations that someone brand new to development is going to be able to get a job unreasonable? Well, does it matter what someone’s opinion about that is? You either want the job - or you don’t. And you need to know how to do the job, or no one will hire you. Do you need to know everything on this huge list to get an entry level position https://roadmap.sh/javascript ? (no) (in fact - close that - and don’t ever look at it again)
When I started (at the age of ~30) (in ~2011), you needed to know HTML, CSS, (Probably some PhotoShop to get your assets), maybe a little PHP (and likely HTTP and more about URLs and request types and forms), FTP and DNS to get your site hosted, and maybe some JavaScript. You might have used jQuery to help out or Knockout.js. And you had to know how to hook up a database and MySQL and probably a CMS or some sort. And maybe your code was a mess or maybe it adhered to some common patterns. But that was life. Not everyone needed to know all those things. Some people would focus more on getting the mockup into the HTML and CSS. Other people might focus on the server and the PHP or Perl or Java. There were all sorts of jobs and some of them were done by people with a formal education in Computer Science studies and other people just figured it out as needed. There was a lot of work to be done. Lots of custom stuff to build and maintain. And it was just normal to learn more incrementally as the years went by. You could totally get a job knowing just HTML and CSS (and you still can BTW). There was still an infinite amount of things you could know. But it seemed to ramp up naturally because we were closer to the grain of The Web.
So, what do people learn now? (Generally) They rush through some HTML and CSS really quick (which actually teaches them more bad habits than good). They rarely learn about DNS or FTP because a tutorial showed them how to type a few random things into a terminal to have their site on a free service and they don’t buy a domain name because there’s a free subdomain. Apparently paying for anything is for suckers and companies that don't give you things for free are evil capitalistic pigs who should be shut down. New devs don’t know much about servers because their text editor is actually running an advanced web application behind the scenes that starts a virtual server and runs all sorts of other things they don’t understand outside of that context - like connecting to version control, opening a terminal pane, SSH, code completion and typeahead, autoimport completion, AI suggestions and other additional layers like typescript and many other linters to tell them where all their errors are. If they couldn't use VSCode - they might be dead in the water. It can feel like you’re just a bag of meat being yelled at by VSCode as you try and solve the errors and remove all the red lines. And we do all of these - to put the training wheels in place.
And I’m not saying that a LAMP stack doesn’t have it’s own level of black-box and mysteries with how Apache handles your HTTP requests and MySQL starts up it’s own server - but we have to be comfortable with some level of abstraction or we’d be writing all ones and zeros at the machine code level.
So, the new developer is manning this huge stack of tools unknowingly, but they do get a lot of benefits. We can spin up a pretty complex web application with a front-end to make requests, a server to talk to a database and other third-party systems and respond back to the client/front-end, and an auth layer to make sure people are properly signing in and only seeing what they need to see. There are abstractions for HTML and CSS and JS that put that template logic and controller logic into a neat little component file (which is great) and that component file is properly registered based on file name conventions and everything gets set up in this larger system of conventions that all happen behind the scenes in the framework architecture. So, as a new developer - you can really ride the framework and know hardly anything about how it works - as long as you know the language to speak to this layer of the abstraction (the API).
These aren't just arbitrary add-ons that people made to complicate things. They solve real-world problems. The new dev won't really understand what they are - but I'm not saying we should just get rid of them. They allow us to move faster and to build interfaces and business logic without having to write tons of behind the scenes repeated structural code by hand. And with those training wheels, we have more time on our hands. We can also add in the chance to further define our programs with safety measures and plan automated testing routines, and built-in documentation of our code base. We can keep adding layers and layers or pull in more and more third-party tools. It’s pretty amazing. But what people end up learning is how to maintain that configuration - and there’s only so much time - and so, they end up learning 10% of all the things you used to need/want to know. And some jobs have a path for that. But there's likely going to be a long-term cost for you.
Arguably - it doesn’t matter how much “code” you know - and making things is what matters. And that’s true. That’s what matters to the business that pays you. And to the school that wants you to feel good about your progress. But I think you should protect your learning journey. It’s for you. It’s going to be what you carry on throughout the years and it’s a seed.
Getting proficient with a popular tech stack - when the market is booming proved to be a great decision for boot camps and their students. And I'd bet that the majority of people mean well.
But when it's not booming, students are in it for the wrong reasons, schools have tightened up and moved online, the market has plenty of devs who already have 5+ years working with that framework/stack -- then all of the sudden - the surface-level fake-it-till-you-make-it path (as much as I respect that) doesn't work as well. You're going to have to put in some more energy.
When it's obvious that you can't build an HTML page with semantic markup, that's accessible, and has a universally pleasurable experience, and you can't write CSS without a UI framework or do anything custom, it's obvious. You should be aware of that gap. When you've never owned a domain name or setup a deployment pipeline, you should be aware of that gap. When your personal website looks like your boot camp gave it to you, you should be aware of how that looks. When you can't take a server-side scripting language like Python or Go or PHP and build out a little personal website framework - you should be aware of that gap. When you can't plan a project and don't have experience with diagrams and explaining things, you need to be aware of that gap. When you've never written about your process or created any case-studies to explain your projects, you should be aware of that gap. When you're only proof of work is the class assignments, you should be aware of that gap. When your github history goes dead after the last day of class, you should be aware that we'll see that. When you claim to no nothing about visual design and that's for someone else on the team - you should be aware of that gap. If you refuse to turn on your camera and just want to be left alone, you should be aware of that huge gap. If you can't build a little prototype app without React, they you probably don't JavaScript, and you should be aware of that gap. And there will ALWAYS be a gap. There's always more to learn. So - it's an important skill to know what to learn and why - and when. You can't learn everything. And if you're having a hard time finding work right now, then get clear on your goal. Stop applying for general "Software engineer" jobs you aren't ready for. Narrow your scope. Figure out a job that you think you can do confidently. Get clear on how big your gap is and what you need to learn to get centered and confident with your toolset. Ideally, it's fun. Try and ignore all the doom and gloom and focus on your own personal goal.
It's not just the market. Too many people are applying for jobs they aren't anywhere near qualified to do. And it probably doesn't feel good. But luckily - you can learn the things and get back on track.