Thank you for that recommendation. The video is both fascinating and hilarious!

Hard disagree. We must use the terms “socialism” (and “communism”) openly and directly.

This is correct. We are witnessing some of the greatest upsurge in working class militancy in several decades, as well as a veritable renaissance in revolutionary thought. The stuff of great historic movements is available in plenty abundance. It depends on what we do with this moment.

Now is the time for world socialist revolution. The time for a Labor Party was 60 years ago. Instead, the leadership of the trade union movement subordinated itself to the Democratic Party and imperialism. This process has been replicated worldwide in the various Social Democratic and Labor parties in support of capitalist exploitation and imperialist war. The entire system is in a state of advanced decay and historical bankruptcy with no possibility of meaningful reform.

The viol instrument family are frettless! Pick up a violin/viola/cello/bass and have fun :)

I just checked on this. Your display choices in the app are limited to light, dark and sepia. It would be nice if you could enter custom styles for display, but I don’t see that option. That might be an interesting feature to contribute—it’s FOSS!

As far as styling the converted output, it depends. You can style HTML with CSS. Pandoc has options to style other formats with custom templates.

I use Apostrophe markdown editor. It’s basically a plaintext editor with Markdown syntax highlighting and a rendered preview mode. It is the same formatting language you can use for posts and comments on Lemmy (and the other place).

Honestly, I’m just obsessed with Markdown. You can write it anywhere you can type. It’s just structured plaintext that you can easily convert to other formats (html, odf, pdf, etc.) Write it in Notepad. Use it text messages. Put it on Facebook. There is no native support for the format in any of these places, and it doesn’t matter.

I do all my writing in Markdown now. It keeps me focused on my document content and structure.

Whence cometh the experts expertise? They had to do the work to get there.

I can, and I do benefit from other people’s skills and efforts. That is the content of society.

Our culture trains us to value only the output of our work and regard the process as nothing but liability—but for the results, an abject waste of time and resources. And so, the masters of our society attempt to eliminate every expenditure that does not yield an immediate return. So they extinguish the light of human culture, which is the expression of our creative activities.

Music as magic is a wonderful motif! I saw an image post circulate that suggested using photos of orchestra conductors as visual reference for drawing spellcasters. The image spoke for itself: the degree of focused intensity and direction in their posture fits the concept perfectly.

I never really felt like the “creative” type; that was always my dad and my brother. I’ve always been more interested in the “analytical” minded subject: mathematics, natural sciences, computer programming and logic.

Ironically, my journey in music really began after I chose to cut contact with my dad, arguably the biggest musical influence in my life beginning from early childhood. I take this as spiritual validation that I made the correct choice leaving behind his narcissistic bullying and abuse.

I play a mandolin. It’s neat that it is tuned the same as a violin, because that makes the very expansive repertoire music arranged for that instrument available to me as well. I’ve been learning mainly folk music, but I may dabble in classical more as I continue.

I don’t really mean dotted notes. I am referring to the entire score of music as “dots on a page” reductively by the noteheads. The dots don’t do anything until I make them do something. I make the note longer when I hold it longer. The music doesn’t come from the page nor the instrument, but from me.

I can’t take people who use the term “tankie” seriously. If you mean Stalinist, say Stalinist. Most of the time these people are creating a dishonest almagam of Stalinism and all Marxism. Genuine Marxism, that is Trotskyism, stood against Stalinist political distortions and resulting degradation of the Soviet Union. Many people, including Trotsky himself, paid the ultimate price for their faithful defence of the ideals of the Russian Revolution and Soviet democracy. By any measure, Stalin was a mass murderer.

Stalin forsook the program of world revolution in favor of the nationalist program socialism in one country. His policies were disastrous and lead to a famine that claimed the lives of millions of Soviet citizens in the period of the early 1930s, through the entire Soviet Union. There is no evidence that this was an intentional policy of genocide. The so-called “Holodomor” is a fabrication of Ukranian nationalists meant to justify their participation in the Nazi’s genocidal war of destruction against the whole Slavic people.