I got some pretty nice headphones a while back. Not the really high end ones or anything, but good enough that I can get lost in the shapes, textures, and sometimes colors of the different instruments. Like someone else said, it’s a bit like being high.

Cheap studio monitors are fun too because they really separate out the sounds. It can make me a little tired, listening to all that detail, but it’s so fun.

Well, there’s that, and also

• Having to work really long hours to try to make ends meet
• Being underpaid
• No or minimal time off work (vacation and sick time both, and sometimes even medical leave doesn’t protect you all that much)
• Poor worker’s rights in general
• Crushing cost of housing
• Crushing cost of education
• Food and everything else you need to live is getting more expensive all the time, and the quality often goes down
• Poor quality of medical care (on top of the exorbitant cost)
• Not being able to spend much time with friends and family because they’re all drowning in work or otherwise struggling
• Thinking about the number of friends and family who have killed themselves, come close, or are likely to try

Officers or prosecutors withheld the existence of multiple witnesses and police reports, including one of an attempted armed robbery at a gas station across the street from the furniture store within hours of the murders. The original judge also behaved inappropriately, the lawyers say, getting a doctor to prescribe Valium to a holdout juror, who only then voted to convict.

Withholding evidence is not that uncommon, unfortunately, but it looks like it was especially bad in this case. And giving Valium to a juror is an egregious overreach. The full details of what happened are even worse than it sounds at first glance.

She was under a lot of pressure because she wanted to talk about the evidence and the other jurors didn’t. They yelled at her and heckled her, basically, until she fainted. The judge finds out and says it’s no problem. Defense lawyer asks for a mistrial, gets turned down. Juror says she doesn’t need a doctor. Then the judge makes a phone call, in secret, and gets her doctor to give her Valium. Enough that the other jurors thought she was “floating.”

The worst part is, the Florida supreme court saw no problem with that. They said it wasn’t judicial misconduct, it was just the judge being concerned and looking out for her.

Smell, not that I remember. Sound, all the time. I’ll have conversations or hear people saying things, sometimes in different languages. Sometimes a word comes to mind that seems totally real, but usually it’s not. Some of the more detailed dreams have had storms, sirens, earthquakes (that eerie rumbling they have). Or even music.

I’d say even one landlord is too many, but easier to deal with. The scale this seems to be happening at is mind boggling and should be criminal, in my opinion. Or whatever it takes to stop this.

I have some open-back headphones (wired) that I can wear for hours and forget they’re there. Not hot at all. The cushioned part is breathable too. They were a little snug at first, but great since then.

I understand that, but at some point they will hit a number where people in the area can’t afford the 1st month (or more) down or even monthly payments.

I lived in a place where that happened. There were very obvious changes as the rent kept going up. (I stayed because everywhere else was going up just as much.)

• Long-term tenants moved out.
• A lot more one bedrooms had roommates.
• People had less furniture. Sometimes just a mattress on the floor and a plastic chair.
• A lot more three-day notices and eviction notices on people’s doors.
• Some apartments turned into Airbnbs.
• One apartment turned, very not surreptitiously, into a “massage” place.
• More and more units stayed empty for months.

None of that stopped the rent from going up. If anything, it went up faster.

The article does mention him by name. His part of the story starts in section 5 (the detective and the sheriff). I couldn’t believe the part where the mole brought a bug to the Kinch’s house, his dog stole it, and then he just handed it back without asking questions.

Same guy who bragged about being on a “black squad” and woke up with blood on his hands, wondering if he had killed someone.

Link for anyone who missed the article. It’s a long read, but worth it.

I started learning a little about music theory. I’ve been interested for a while, but always thought I wouldn’t be able to understand it. But it’s doable, a little at a time.

And I’ve been going outside more. I spend too much time in front of the computer. It’s nice to have fresh air and read, listen to music, or just take in the surroundings.

And the newer threads (from the last 1-2 years) often just aren’t that helpful. Lots of people who don’t know what they’re talking about, or comment just to say they have the same problem.

I can usually get a helpful answer by trying a couple search engines or just fighting with Google, but it takes longer than it should sometimes.

And wealthy or well-connected. If you’re poor, you don’t necessarily have much of a chance.

The link is a long read, but interesting. The story of Cameron Todd Willingham, who was executed in Texas in 2004 for supposedly setting a fire that killed his three kids.

In December, 2004, questions about the scientific evidence in the Willingham case began to surface. Maurice Possley and Steve Mills, of the Chicago Tribune, had published an investigative series on flaws in forensic science; upon learning of Hurst’s report, Possley and Mills asked three fire experts, including John Lentini, to examine the original investigation. The experts concurred with Hurst’s report. Nearly two years later, the Innocence Project commissioned Lentini and three other top fire investigators to conduct an independent review of the arson evidence in the Willingham case. The panel concluded that “each and every one” of the indicators of arson had been “scientifically proven to be invalid.”

Some kids have died at camps like this. The link is the story of a 16 year old who died in Arizona in 1994.

He had to hike for miles a day and sleep with no blanket or sleeping bag in temperatures below freezing. He had no food for 11 days out of 20, partly as a punishment for being sick.

He complained about being sick for weeks - stomach pain, falling down, hallucinations. On the day he died, it took him an hour to crawl 20 feet to the fire. He died from an infection from a perforated ulcer. The staff were standing around making fun of him when he collapsed for the last time.

The owners of the camp pleaded guilty to negligent homicide. One of the counselors was convicted of felony neglect.

Earlier this year, a 12 year old suffocated to death at a wilderness camp in North Carolina. His death was found to be a homicide.

Fascinating! So oxygen from the air (or wherever) + hydrogen from food = water.

Plants can make their own food, and birds can make their own water :)

That’s what I thought too, but bones are about 1/3 protein with a lot of fat and minerals. Kind of like tonkotsu broth.

They also store well. If the vultures find more than they need, they’ll keep the extra bones in a storage place really high up. The fat content drops a lot when the bones dry out, but the protein is still there.

The downside is bones don’t have a lot of water, so bearded vultures need a source of fresh water in their territory.

Bearded vultures are pretty neat too. They pretty much only eat bones. They can eat surprisingly big chunks whole. Or if the bone is too big, they drop it onto a rock to break it up.

And they’re very peaceful, because they know no one is going to fight them for the bones.

An Illinois sheriff’s deputy charged with murder in the death of a Black woman shot her in the face during a tense moment over a pot of water in her home, authorities said Thursday.

Prosecutors said Grayson “aggressively yelled” at Massey to put a pot down. They said she put her hands in the air and ducked for cover before she was shot in the face.

And then right after that is the part about the medical kit. So you kill someone who asked for help because they were holding a pot of water.

Maybe it depends on what you watch. I use Youtube for music (only things that I search for) and sometimes live streams of an owl nest or something like that.

If I stick to that, the recommendations are sort of OK. Usually stuff I watched before. Little to no clickbait or random topics.

I clicked on one reaction video to a song I listened to just to see what would happen. The recommendations turned into like 90% reaction videos, plus a bunch of topics I’ve never shown any interest in. U.S. politics, the death penalty in Japan, gaming, Brexit, some Christian hymns, and brand new videos on random topics.

This article is part of a pretty big investigation that’s worth reading. It talks about different kinds of “less lethal” force that can kill people. Tasers, punching, body slamming, restraining people face down.

And injecting them with sedatives. It happened to someone with schizophrenia who took meth and was wandering around at night. A guy whose mother made a mental help call when he was having a manic episode. And someone who was having a seizure.

Here’s a link to the original song. The part the meme comes from starts around 0:45. It was a hit in 2004.

She threw their homework and other things in the trash. Said they had until the end of the day to pay cash or do chores to get it back so they could learn the real value of their things.

She took her son’s bed away for seven months, apparently because he played a prank on his brother.

Oh, and the kids had to make their own school lunch in the morning. The school calls one day because her 6 year old daughter didn’t have any food. She let the girl go hungry. Quote:

My hope is that she’ll be hungry and come home and go, ‘oh man, that was really painful, being hungry all day. I will make sure to always have lunch with me.