grady

[trey wingo @wingoz]

This is a loss of a true American hero, innovator and genuinely great human being

[Dirty Flannel @DirtyFlannel90]

MTV’s Unplugged series was a real test for the musicians of that era.

Sure, you sound huge wired up to stacks of amps with distortion and effects stacked on top of each other.

But can you do it in a small room, up close to the audience, without all the gear to hide behind?

Stripped naked of the electricity.

Just the songs, the voices, and whatever you could pull out of an acoustic guitar and bongos.

The Stone Temple Pilots walked into that room in 1993 and passed the test.

Scott Weiland sat in a rocking chair like he owned the place.

No theatrics, no wall of sound to lean on.

Just the band and the material.

“Plush,” “Creep,” “Wicked Garden,” and the first public airing of “Big Empty.”

It held up. The songs didn’t need the volume to work.

That was the point of the whole series.

Some bands just got quieter.

The ones that mattered found a different kind of power when everything else was taken away.

“Plush”
STP

[KD$ign @KnoxEndemic]

Apparently concert venues are having a hard time getting Millennials to fill the seats. Well, hello. Millennial here. I think I can help.

DEAR CONCERT VENUES:

🎟️ Just tell me what the ticket costs. I do not want to select a $79 ticket and discover at checkout that it is actually $146 because of a facility fee, service fee, processing fee, and a fee for having successfully paid the other fees.

📱 Stop making ticket buying a military operation. I should not need three apps, a verified fan code, a presale password from a credit card I don’t own, and 11:00 AM availability on a Tuesday to buy two seats.

💺 Assigned seats. We did our time standing shoulder-to-shoulder at shows in 2008. Some of us have mortgages now. Some of us have sciatica.

🕖 Start earlier. A 7 PM show is not embarrassing. In fact, I would like to formally recognize whoever invented the 7 PM show.

⏰ And tell us the actual times. “Doors at 7” is not useful information if the opener starts at 8:15 and the person I came to see appears at 10:07.

🚗 Parking instructions written for a normal person. Tell me which garage to use, what it costs, and whether I will spend 55 minutes trying to leave it afterward. I am willing to pay $20 for certainty.

🍺 I will buy your $14 beer. I have accepted this. But if I miss three songs waiting for it, you have broken the social contract.

🚽 Enough bathrooms. We are in our 30s and 40s. Half of us have had children. This is now infrastructure.

🔉 It can still be loud. We are Millennials, not the Greatest Generation. But some of us are bringing earplugs now and we are no longer ashamed of it.

DEAR ARTISTS:

⏰ Please go on roughly when you said you would. We have babysitters. The babysitter has an end time. This is now a logistics problem involving several adults.

🎤 Play the songs from 2004–2014. You know which ones. We know which ones. Nobody needs to pretend otherwise.

🎶 Play some new stuff. Absolutely. We support your continued artistic development. But there is a point in the evening when you need to play the song that was on our iPod Nano while we drove to high school.

📵 You can tell us to put our phones away. We secretly want someone to make us do this anyway.

🪑 An intermission would not offend us. We can use the bathroom, answer the babysitter, check whether the dog has destroyed anything, and look at Zillow for eight minutes.

And please understand: Millennials still like concerts.

We have disposable income now. We are nostalgic. We will absolutely spend irresponsible amounts of money to hear a band we first discovered on LimeWire.

But we also have jobs, children, dogs, mortgages, lower-back problems, and a very clear memory of when concert tickets cost $35.

You want Millennials back?

Make it easy to buy the ticket. Tell us when the show actually starts. Give us somewhere to sit. Play the song from 2007.

We’ll be there.

We just need to be home by 11.

[Jamison Daniel @AntiquarianMuse]

This is BRILLIANT.

[Lalinha 🗣 @Lalinhafofoca]

Não tenho estrutura pra não rir disso. Mbappé ficou incrível. 🤣🤣

[A DOG~ @StillADog]

Word

[Danny Manus @DannyManus]

Mitch McConnell is actually the best Metaphor for, and representation of, America and our political system. He spent almost a century making the world a better place for only himself and his friends, married an immigrant while working tirelessly against other immigrants, manipulated the system to increase his power only to be usurped & made impotent by someone even more unethical, unscrupulous and power hungry. Then when the system is finally done with him, they keep his dead body on life support just to use him for one more power move until finally allowing him sweet sweet death while his wife flees the country and his children go into hiding. And when it's all said and done, he'll be best remembered for a meme that made him into a turtle. America.

[grady @gzeroimages]

@gkittle46 From the water front!! 🇺🇸🇺🇸🇺🇸

[Wu Tang is for the Children @WUTangKids]

Happy 4th of July….

[Lakers All Day Everyday @LADEig]

The Snowtime Lakers 😭😭😭

[USMNT Only @usmntonly]

THE TELEMUNDO CALL OF THE MALIK TILLMAN FREE KICK IS THE BEST THING YOU'LL EVER HEAR 🇺🇸🦅❤️

[ESPN @espn]

THE USMNT IS HEADING TO THE ROUND OF 16 AT THE WORLD CUP 🔥🦅

[Mike Nellis @MikeNellis]

WHO MADE THIS!? I’m dying.

[𝙏𝙝𝙚𝙎𝙁𝙉𝙞𝙣𝙚𝙧𝙨 @TheSFNiners]

Anthony “Boobie” Dixon shares heartfelt message about Aldon Smith 🙏

[𝙏𝙝𝙚𝙎𝙁𝙉𝙞𝙣𝙚𝙧𝙨 @TheSFNiners]

RIP Aldon Smith 🙏

[Mistress Dividend @mistressdivy]

So if they're using Aliens to distract us from the Epstein Files, is this technically Alien vs. Predator? 🤔 

[Sen. Bernie Sanders @SenSanders]

Trump and his family have now made $4 BILLION off the presidency, including more than $3 billion from crypto alone.

Here’s a radical idea. What about having a president who wants to improve the financial well-being of ALL Americans, not just his own family and fellow oligarchs.

[James Tate @JamesTate121]

*BRITISH WRITER PENS THE BEST DESCRIPTION OF TRUMP*
Someone asked "Why do some British people not like Donald Trump?" Nate White, an articulate and witty writer from England wrote the following response:
A few things spring to mind. Trump lacks certain qualities which the British traditionally esteem. For instance, he has no class, no charm, no coolness, no credibility, no compassion, no wit, no warmth, no wisdom, no subtlety, no sensitivity, no self-awareness, no humility, no honour and no grace – all qualities, funnily enough, with which his predecessor Mr. Obama was generously blessed.
So for us, the stark contrast does rather throw Trump's limitations into embarrassingly sharp relief.
Plus, we like a laugh. And while Trump may be laughable, he has never once said anything wry, witty or even faintly amusing – not once, ever.
I don't say that rhetorically, I mean it quite literally: not once, not ever. And that fact is particularly disturbing to the British sensibility – for us, to lack humour is almost inhuman.
But with Trump, it's a fact. He doesn't even seem to understand what a joke is – his idea of a joke is a crass comment, an illiterate insult, a casual act of cruelty. Trump is a troll. And like all trolls, he is never funny and he never laughs; he only crows or jeers.
And scarily, he doesn't just talk in crude, witless insults – he actually thinks in them. His mind is a simple bot-like algorithm of petty prejudices and knee-jerk nastiness. There is never any under-layer of irony, complexity, nuance or depth. It's all surface.
Some Americans might see this as refreshingly upfront. Well, we don't. We see it as having no inner world, no soul. And in Britain we traditionally side with David, not Goliath. All our heroes are plucky underdogs: Robin Hood, Dick Whittington, Oliver Twist. Trump is neither plucky, nor an underdog. He is the exact opposite of that. He's not even a spoiled rich-boy, or a greedy fat-cat. He's more a fat white slug. A Jabba the Hutt of privilege.
And worse, he is that most unforgivable of all things to the British: a bully. That is, except when he is among bullies; then he suddenly transforms into a snivelling sidekick instead.
There are unspoken rules to this stuff – the Queensberry rules of basic decency – and he breaks them all. He punches downwards – which a gentleman should, would, could never do – and every blow he aims is below the belt. He particularly likes to kick the vulnerable or voiceless or female – and he kicks them when they are down. So the fact that a significant minority – perhaps a third – of Americans look at what he does, listen to what he says, and then think 'Yeah, he seems like my kind of guy' is a matter of some confusion and no little distress to British people, given that:
• Americans are supposed to be nicer than us, and most are.
• You don't need a particularly keen eye for detail to spot a few flaws in the man.
This last point is what especially confuses and dismays British people, and many other people too; his faults seem pretty bloody hard to miss.
After all, it's impossible to read a single tweet, or hear him speak a sentence or two, without staring deep into the abyss. He turns being artless into an art form; he is a Picasso of pettiness; a Shakespeare of shit. His faults are fractal: even his flaws have flaws, and so on ad infinitum. God knows there have always been stupid people in the world, and plenty of nasty people too. But rarely has stupidity been so nasty, or nastiness so stupid. He makes Nixon look trustworthy and George W look smart. In fact, if Frankenstein decided to make a monster assembled entirely from human flaws – he would make a Trump.

[Killer Mike @KillerMike]

Amen