Is there any other choice than Sanders? The world of ASMR is sorely lacking in thick Brooklyn accents.

I think they're videos simply because YouTube is probably the main delivery system for them. When I've listened to ASMR videos, I've almost always turned away from the screen so that I can just focus on the sound.

I didn't presume that you were somehow blameless. I just don't think much of friends who won't go at least part of the distance, if that makes sense. It's not an entirely rational point of view. I know that at least some of them probably hit a sensible breaking point and departed. I just identify more with someone…

I figure that your column gets at a basic truth: in a healthy relationship, pretty much anything healthy will probably become acceptable. A parent might balk at a lot of things, but real unconditional love is a powerful thing. Doesn't matter how conservative you are, you love your gay son and you find a way to live…

I feel like I have to say (because it's 5 AM where I am and I still can't sleep just yet) that your post woke up some mixed feelings re: the friends who walked away. On the one hand, I get that; not everybody can handle that sort of thing, everyone has their limits, and it can be very difficult to observe something…

Thanks. I tried to get down to do it a long time ago now, but it didn't work out for reasons that ended up accenting a rather sadder story. Someday, though, and hopefully not just to scatter ashes (I'm hoping for either some sort of miracle of happy immortality or, failing that, just to have a long, long time before…

There's a whole kind of shitty 70s novel's worth of subtext behind MUDDLE's letter. Every new implied detail about her mother made the picture more bizarre. Unrepentant snooping, reading her daughter's whole supposedly-enraging sex diary, apparently being placated by the notion that her daughter has been "cured"…

When my mother was in her early 20s, long before I was born, she traveled down by way of hitchhiking and buses and such from Canada to a small village in Mexico pretty much just for the sake of it and remained there for about three years, having my eldest brother in the process. She always told me about it when I was…

I get what you're saying, but I don't know if I'm making myself clear here. I'm not trying to boil the situation down, I'm trying to expand upon it. I'm already pretty familiar with the whole debate about piracy. I was trying to move beyond that and talk about how the situation has changed beyond what can be…

I don't think you said a single incorrect thing in all of that. This is exactly how it works these days. Almost everyone I know in my local scene is a part-timer; I don't think there's enough money in the city to support more than a few full-time musicians. The part-time money has been good enough for me, though;…

Very good point. The market is small enough that nobody involved wants to deal with a sales flop. Sex sells, so they sell sex (tongue twister!).

For the first point, take the example of someone who wants to play a song as a joke. They'll bring it up on YouTube, sure (at which point they can easily download it), but will they buy it?

Is it possible that the core audience for every medium wants sex? Movies have porn for a hardcore example and gratuitous semi-nudity in respectable features for softcore. There are tons and tons of erotic books ranging from mild romances to hardcore erotica. Even musical acts often push sex as hard as they can to…

Here are more questions: if the ethical breach is in denying revenue from a sale to the owner of the music, what does it mean to buy a used CD? What if the CD has been copied before sale? In both cases, two people hear the album, but the owner is only paid once. Is that a lost sale? Is it an ethical breach to buy…

That's an ethical evaluation of the act. My point was directed towards a categorical evaluation. Basically, you're calling it stealing because it's depriving someone of the revenue they would have received had you purchased it. What I'm wondering about is the situation of someone pirating something he or she would…

That's sort of adjacent to my point, though. Basically, I'm questioning categories here. My argument is that a person downloading a song that he or she would never have bought constitutes something like the act of depriving a person (the hypothetical recipient of funds from the song) of revenue that was never…

Not bad at all, though I do like Hero of the Day and Low Man's Lyric (partially for sentimental reasons).

Consider this, though. Pirating music isn't a traditional theft, in that one is not taking an object and depriving its owner of that object. Instead, it's getting access to something without paying for it, which doesn't deprive the owner of access to it but does deprive him/her/them of the revenue that might have…

You can still do that, it's just thinner on the ground. I've actually run into more competition from karaoke than DJs. Bar owners fucking love karaoke. The rate of return is reliably great.

I said it in another comment, but I think that Andie leaves the movie on a good trajectory. I liked that she decided to do what she wanted at the prom and I was genuinely mystified to learn that it was supposed to have a different ending.