Guitarist & educator. I spell things incorrectly to find my people. Talk guitar, songcraft, & production at FretClub.locals.com!
United States
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Merry Christmas!
In the New Year, my resolution will be to do more video. Play with @grok Imagine, keep adding new skills.
Not sure what the best aspect ratios are, Grok said vertical or square. Cool...
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Based Guitar 🎸 retweeted
C.S. Lewis, favorable conditions never come
ALT There are always plenty of rivals to our work. We are always falling in love or quarreling, looking for jobs or fearing to lose them, getting ill and recovering, following public affairs. If we let ourselves, we shall always be waiting for some distraction or other to end before we can really get down to our work. The only people who achieve much are those who want knowledge so badly that they seek it while the conditions are still unfavorable. Favorable conditions never come.
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Based Guitar 🎸 retweeted
Everyone should read this book.
In Leisure: The Basis of Culture, Pieper dismantles modernity's obsession with productivity and its misunderstanding of leisure.
Moderns think of "leisure" as a break from work: a way to recharge to make you a better worker.
Pieper argues beautifully that, instead, leisure is the foundation of all culture. And rather than passive relaxation, leisure is really a state of active receptivity: not the absence of activity but the presence of depth.
In the High Middle Ages, idleness wasn't understood as "doing nothing." Being idle was refusing to engage deeply with existence. Ironically, the modern workaholic is the true idler: "the restlessness of work-for-work's-sake arises from nothing other than idleness."
Engaging in true leisure isn't easy. You must learn to be at leisure, with intention and willingness to cultivate stillness. Pieper:
"The condition of utmost exertion is more easily realized than the condition of relaxation and detachment, even though the latter is effortless."
It's a paradoxical discipline, in the sense that it requires effort to relax in a way that truly restores you. But it is through leisure that you encounter truth, beauty, and meaning.
Pieper writes much about the role of the festival. If creation is good, we ought to celebrate it:
"And just as Holy Scripture tells us that God rested on the seventh day and beheld that ‘the work which he had made’ was ‘very good’—so too it is leisure which leads man to accept the reality of creation and thus to celebrate it, resting on the inner vision that accompanies it."
In our work-obsessed world, many use parties to drug or otherwise distract themselves from life. But in Pieper's conception, a true party is a heightening and celebration of life, a specific and time-bound event that points to the timeless and universal.
"Feast days and holy-days are the inner source of leisure. It is because leisure takes its origin from ‘celebration’ that it is not only effortless but the direct contrary of effort; not just the negative in the sense of being no effort, but the positive counterpart."
However, the biggest revelation comes when you realize that you can actually reverse-engineer this process and turn even "ordinary" moments into moments of leisure.
No matter where you are, leisure can be found when you let reality wash over you, pierce through the veil of mundanity to see its hidden beauty, and take a moment to express your gratitude.
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Based Guitar 🎸 retweeted
The Pittsburgh Steelers asked an Englishman to sing the American national anthem.
Bruce Dickinson did it a cappella, no autocue, having never sung it before in his life.
He held "free" for six seconds.
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Good evening gentlemen!
“I had rather be on my farm than be emperor of the world.”
-George Washington
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Omg, people are so afraid of reverb, and I need all of it! Low verb is singer coded. Be a proper guitarist, and get it wet!
Gary Moore performs Voodoo Child (Slight Return)
A tribute to the legendary Jimi Hendrix
#Straturday
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Too bad I’m on team Fender.
But there’s a town just up ahead, you can find a couple oil boys there!
(One day, I’m gonna catch my break…)
I lost my dad last year, and this guitar holds memories I’ll treasure forever I’m looking for someone who will truly value it, care for it, and understand that it’s so much more than just a guitar it’s a piece of him. ❤️Please send me a DM if this resonate wu
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Based Guitar 🎸 retweeted
Jimi Hendrix
The Best Guitarist of all time
A trio of songs
“Voodoo Child”
“Hey Joe”
“Sunshine of Your Love” by Cream
If you like Rock n Roll, then this is the video for you.
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Based Guitar 🎸 retweeted
Eddie Van Halen. Tokyo Dome. Sitting down.
Most guitarists stand up to look dangerous. Eddie crossed his legs and turned "Eruption" into a parlor trick.
Tapping. Whammy. That brown sound.
Zero rush. Like the building belonged to him and the song was just something he kept in the other room.
That's the difference.
Talent stands. Genius sits.
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This is the large hadron collider too. More money, more electricity, more triangles is just a waste of time.
We need to move beyond 1940s physics.
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WARNING!! (Same with the McDonalds Garfield comic glasses, jelly jars, and many others from the era)
These glasses contain a lead paint not designed for dishwashers. Dishwashing one with other cups, and then merely drinking out of that other cup washed NEXT to it, will expose you to more than a years worth of recommended lead levels. Even more if drank from the lead painted glass directly.
There’s a reason these collectables are available so inexpensive on eBay. They’re fine on display, inert, but don’t drink from them or wash them.
I'm curious if you've had or still have any of these 1973 Looney Tunes Pepsi Glasses that were available at Hardee's?
I have a couple but the picture's faded or completely worn off at this point.. 😅
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Based Guitar 🎸 retweeted
Just released another album of classic songs on Gumroad!
Please show some support for Gumroad for reinstating my store and allowing me to keep selling this important music there.
Show them they made the right call and grab a copy!
ILLICIT SYNCOPATIONS (VOL. III)
23 vintage songs (1880-1906)
Download full album w/ sheet music:
foundring.gumroad.com/l/illi…
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Based Guitar 🎸 retweeted
You guys, I JUST found out about recency bias, its my favorite thing ever
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Based Guitar 🎸 retweeted
Man Once Again Loses Train Of Thought During Prayer And Starts Thinking About How He’d Defend The Church From Muslim Terrorists buff.ly/MbWXD9M
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Fun
Okay so I promised I'd discuss the nature of orc reproduction today and WHY they are in fact one of Morgoths' most lethal creations.
We know orcs breed fast. I admit this is stated by dwarfs and elves who are the slowest breeding things in the universe. (Arwen was 2800 years old before she got married.)
I'm speculating, but I think it's supported by the works. Imagine that orcs DON'T breed like humans. Instead they breed like dogs. A large dog is about about the size of an orc. They are pregnant about 80 days (same as a great dane). They give birth to a small litter of precocious children. Say 3-6 whelps, who are more or less abandoned to fend for themselves in a creche. A few guards get assigned to feed the orclings, and keep them from killing each other too much. Mom sticks around a few weeks as one of the guards, then leaves. If the orclings grow to adulthood at the rate of a dog, this means they can breed on their own in 2 years.
This isn't a weird preternatural ability. It's pretty common among mammals. A cow weighs more than 1000 lbs at 2 years of age. Mountain lions are 2 years old when they have their first litter. It's humans that are the outliers with our long gestation and growth. Why would orcs be similar? Why not be like other animals?
Morgoth's magic means orcs are born with a natural ability to learn Black Speech. If they're precocious the orcs can walk or crawl from birth. Think of lemurs - they are primates, but have motor skills early. Or goats & pigs - they can walk within a half hour of birth. This makes orcs more alien, which I think is good.
YES this also means that orcs, at age 2 and adult size, are going to be ABSOLUTELY CRAPPY warriors. Their skills will be limited. Sure they can stab you and figure out which end of a bow is the pointy bit, but most any human outfight a single orc. Don't worry. It's all part of the plan, and helps explain how the orcs get killed in such vast numbers in battles when they lose.
NOW FOR THE MATH. If orcs can breed at age 2, and each female has a litter of 3-6 orcs a year, then in the 78 years between the Battle of Five Armies and the War of the Ring, Sauron could have bred heaps of orcs. Assume the species was almost completely exterminated at Five Armies. Twenty years later there would be over 300,000 orcs.(assuming no losses). Thirty years after, almost 100 million orcs! By 78 years to the War of the Ring, there are theoretically 35 QUINTILLION orcs.
Obviously this isn't the case. They hunt, they fight, they die, they eat each other. I'm sure there are only a few million orcs by War of the Ring. But these creatures reproduce with amazing swiftness and that's what Sauron likes.
This is why Sauron doesn't care that orc warriors are inept. He can afford to lose 100 orcs for each human soldier he kills. He doesn't care when orcs kill each other at Cirith Ungol. Plenty more where THEY came from. And after all, orcs DO learn more skill in fighting over time, so eventually they're decent enough. Infighting just hones those skills.
Orcs don't need magic, super strength or anything else special to threaten Middle Earth. All they need is to be orcs. For leaders or elite troops, Sauron's got trolls, easterlings, and southrons. And a few remaining Black Numenoreans.
Why did Sauron breed Uruk-Hai? Surely they are slower to breed than orcs. I think the fact that Uruk-Hai can fight in the sunlight is a huge edge.
This means that an orc's family life is being raised in an underground warren, fighting for maggoty bread with your siblings, and being terrorized by bigger orcs. There are no orc babies in their cribs for Aragorn to massacre (sorry G. R. R. Martin). Just a terrifying unnatural species that destroys the world's natural balance. If allowed to grow unchecked, they will exterminate every other intelligent being.
You may argue that Sandy made a lot of assumptions here. And I did. But my assumptions match up with the movies and books AND more importantly make orcs a fearful force.
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