I feel like that’s a niche market and also the sort of dude willing to corner the market on being the Atheist Weird Al of Jesus Music is probably both bad at music and generally unpleasant.
yeah like, something I wonder is why there’s no attempt out there to provide guilt-free alternatives to nostalgia pieces which have, to put it simply, become milkshake ducks 😮
(at least none that I know of)
Thag Simmons
Honestly I’m not sure there’s much profit in it. I’ve seen a few things get headwind as alternatives to canceled art, but that’s mostly an organic process and you’re only going to capture a small chunk of the audience.
Harry Potter is still a bigger franchise by orders of magnitude than anything that’s ever been passed around as a viable alternative, for example.
very much so, Little Witch Academia for instance, seems like a good Harry Potter substitute, although it popular among today’s youth, can’t have the same power because Harry Potter wasn’t just the films
there were the books, the sleepovers with the decorations, the events at school and blockbusters, the toys, the theme parks,
…the memories
why won’t Little Witch Academia get a theme park or toys, and fond memories be (re?)made with those?
the answer always seems to be money, one way or another, yay capitalism
(-_-)
Mild Lee Interested
The Nevermoor Series by Jessica Townsend is a pretty good HP alternative that’s not written by a TERF. And the audio books are brilliant.
Lilith Rose
What’s sad is the fact Harry Potter was just a lower-quality knockoff remix of multiple “school of witchcraft” books that came before, including…
Books of Magic (Young British boy with pet messenger owl learning to be a wizard),
Secret of Platform 13 (a magical train hidden at King’s Cross station in London with a “13” in its number and a magical child kept in a cupboard by his abusive family with adoptive parents that have a non-adopted son who is fat and rude),
The Worst Witch (attending a witching academy that has witches uniforms, and attends potions class taught by a harsh hook-nosed teacher who hates the protagonist, as well as attending charms class & broomstick flying lessons, and joins up with her friends to make an invisibility potion, and this popular blond kid gets off on the wrong foot with the protagonist on the first day and makes life hard for the protagonist, as they attend their castle-like school near magical woods after the protagonist escapes a family that gives them no knowledge of the magical world, but at least the headmaster has the protagonist’s back),
Discworld (Unseen University & Ponder Stibbons & broom-riding lessons vs Harry Potter & Hogwarts & broom riding lessons),
Lord of the Rings (Ring Wraiths vs Dementors),
Troll (The 1986 Horror Film’s Troll-fighting Harry Potter who has to worry about an evil wizard hiding his essence in someone close to him vs 1997 Harry Potter’s Troll-fighting Harry Potter who has to worry about an evil wizard hiding his essence in someone close to him)
D&D & Russian Folklore (Phylacteries borrowed from Koschei the Deathless vs Horcruxes)
Wow, cool! Thank you for sharing that! Fascinating!
Stormies
That’s great for you that you think HP is “lower-quality”, but a lot of people grew up loving it and have a million fond memories of it. That doesn’t mean they suddenly have terrible literary taste just because we now know the author really sucks.
Art is always in part a remix of art that came before it, that’s how creativity and inspiration works. You can point out the influences, but simply having literary influences doesn’t make the result automatically low quality.
Veronica
It’s almost as if you donknow the difference between “knock off” and “the extremely basic tropes one would use if one was to wrote a story about a magical boarding school”.
Ponder Stibbons is an influence on Harry Potter? Why? Because they both wear glasses?
You can dislike a person’s political views without talking absolute rot about their artistic work.
Freemage
Veronica, didn’t you get the memo? If someone is one form of bad, they must, perforce, be assumed to be all forms of bad. So by virtue of being a GCF, JKR is also a racist colonialist homophobic classist anti-Semitic climate-denialist anti-vax plagiarist. It’s inconceivable that someone might have one or two points of difference with the overall position currently adopted by the left, without being entirely a creature of the far-right.
HueSatLight
Not to be “I was unimpressed with it before that was cool”, but it was always mediocre, and not very creative with the sources it was “inspired” by. Millions of people having fond memories of it doesn’t mean people, especially kids, don’t ever like mid stuff. That doesn’t invalidate the feelings of betrayal and such you might have.
thejeff
I kind of agree with it not being great literature, but I’m still unimpressed with the list of things it was a “knock-off remix of”.
What I’d say it was mostly is something not really on that list, which is a mix of basic British boarding school fiction and the wizard side. The other wizard school stuff doesn’t really draw that directly on that genre (Maybe the worst witch?)
Whatever its flaws it definitely did something to catch a generation of kids like little in the recent past and like nothing’s been able to replicate since. The marketing obviously helped once it got started, but if that was all there was, it could have been duplicated. I can’t really judge, since I encountered it as an adult.
It certainly is deeply flawed and awkward in many ways, one of which is that I suspect it really works best if you grow up along with it, since the early books and later ones aren’t really aimed at the same ages.
Aura
@Freemage When it comes to the books in question though, there actually is plenty of anti-semitic tropes and strong pro-slavery messaging which kind of undermines the point you’re trying to make there.
@Stormies/Veronica I agree that the one of the worst people in the world using the same tropes as books written by other authors doesn’t make their work automatically inferior. I’d also add that of the books I’ve read in Lilith’s list there’s not much common ground and they’re not at all trying to do the same thing as each other. (Some of the descriptions of books there that I haven’t read sound like they bear more of a similarity than just tropes, but I don’t feel like I can judge on that.)
In terms of whether or not the series is a low-grade knock-off or some kind of literary masterpiece exemplar of the genre, we’re getting into much more subjective realms here but personally I’d say it falls somewhere in-between, and much closer to knock-off than masterpiece. It’s certainly a deeply flawed work with little to nothing really inspired or very original about it. However, to give evil its due there are some things it does quite well. When I finally got around to reading the books I was struck by the writing style and how accessible and easy to read the prose was. From memory the pacing was quite good as well, particularly for the first few books. As far as the books themselves go and not contextual things like marketing budgets, the movie adaptations etc., I think it’s probably these two attributes that contributed the most to capturing that large reluctant reader market.
thejeff
@Freemage, a lot of that list can be drawn right out of the books and doesn’t rely just on a right wing parody of what the left thinks.
Psychie
Personal opinions regarding writing quality aside, no other book series has ever had a similarly large cultural impact that endured for more than a few years after the release of the last book (or movie adaptation in some cases) the way it did with Harry Potter.
Twilight was a similar cultural phenomenon at the time, and had pretty terrible writing, but it immediately fell off to the point where people don’t really talk about it from the perspective of fans anymore and haven’t for like a decade. And after popularizing the paranormal romance genre and many of it’s tropes, all of the objectively better books that came after failed to come close to that level of popularity and as such the genre as a whole has kind of fallen off in the public consciousness and remains kind of niche (although not even close to as niche as it was before Twilight). I maintain that a large part of that comes from Twilight was (more or less) the first one to find a formula that resonated with the target audience, which caused it to catch the notice of the general public, and then when the target audience started finding better series to scratch the same itch they splintered into different fandoms as the genre grew and thus weren’t consolidated into one space and thus couldn’t become a cultural phenomenon. Also the controversy of the writing being bad enough for there to be a really solid contingent of vocal haters at the time further drove attention that way, furthering the spread, and that largely died down alongside the popularity.
Harry Potter, meanwhile, likely also became big for much the same reasons, it was the first (more or less) to collect the disparate tropes and genre conventions into a formula that really resonated with the target audience enough to achieve broader attention and appeal. But a very notable difference is that the fans did not dilute into various other fandoms of better books in the same genre, a large amount of people still continue talking about it today, and that has only really started to die down because of the author getting cancelled. There was enough of a draw for a broadway play sequel, a series of movie prequels, and even some successful video games and that draw has even persisted, partially, through the controversy. And, very notably, *at the time* there was not an especially large or vocal contingent of haters pointing out bad writing the way Twilight had. If the writing was really that bad, why is it only being discussed *now*? I mean, Twilight proves that if a bad product becomes popular the haters won’t be drowned out by the fans, largely because they have an actual point.
This leads me to conclude that the current claims of bad writing and supposedly blatant problematic messaging are likely more fueled by the current bandwagon of hate toward the author than actually reflective of the literary quality of the work, because nothing could possibly have been anywhere close to that popular for anywhere close to that long after completion if it was actually bad. If it was actually bad, the popularity should have quietly died off more or less immediately a long time ago the way it did for Twilight, and it didn’t. And if the problematic messaging was really so blatant, prevalent, and pervasive, it wouldn’t have only recently started being discussed seriously now when we have the benefit of hindsight and the additional context of the author’s views on certain issues. Not saying the messaging isn’t there, but rather if it is there it is FAR more subtle and non-obvious/blatant than people are currently giving it credit for. If these issues were really so clear and present within the works themselves, they would not only just now be entering the notice of the public consciousness. People’s eagerness to criticize, especially criticize popular things that they don’t like, is not new, it was absolutely already around when Harry Potter was first becoming popular, and with the internet growing alongside Harry Potter that is especially true as the internet used to be a lot more anonymous than it is now, meaning people were a lot more emboldened to post unpopular opinions at the time (especially since cancel culture largely developed later, at least in the form we know it in today).
GreyICE
Part of that is that the idea of “X, but without Y” is so creatively bankrupt that it’s doomed to suck.
Jerach
That’s definitely an important point. If somebody’s starting point for making art is “I can capture a demographic with nostalgia for X but has issues with it now” that’s not really a place of genuine creativity.
Psychie
I dunno, spite can be an excellent inspiration for creativity, the issue is that being blatantly driven by spite isn’t going to make you popular, even if you ultimately prove your point of “I can do that but better” is correct. Speaking from experience.
Chokfi
On the one hand, probably, on the other I have heard some fun polytheistic songs based on jesus ones. “Loki loves all the little children” “Loe ye scary great old ones” and the like. more comedic than maybe I’d prefer but stills…
Aw, that can backfire though. For eg, Tom Waits’ Way Down in the Hole is a savagely vicious parody of Christian music, while The Blind Boys of Alabama’s version of Tom Waits’ Way Down in the Hole has to be one of the greatest gospel recordings of all time.
You want farts from hell, try going to a big bike ride like the Hotter’n’Hell 100. After carb loading there is a surplus of food for the gut flora and fauna that produce digestive gas so the result is a cloud or noxious gas floating through the rooms where they are sleeping.
I feel personally hurt by your spelling. But at least you started your sentence with a capital letter and ended it with a period. And at least it was a readable and coherent sentence.
My daughter (on the spectrum) has an obsession with chicken tenders as well. Apropos of nothing, the best thing has been to ease her into other food items. Because of this she’s learned she really likes the taste and texture of cucumbers and raw onion, among a few other more ‘usual kid stuff’.
Texture has always been an issue for me, even now in my 30s. There are just some textures that I can’t handle without triggering the gag reflex. I have always found that I prefer the texture of raw vegetables over cooked, even with things like zucchini. With things like onion, I find that I am fine if it is minced small enough that it isn’t noticeable, but otherwise the cooked onion texture is a hard no. In college, I really liked the stir fries that the school would do, since the vegetables would still have that raw-like texture. They would also do both rice and pasta stir fries, so there was a lot of variety that you could have in between that and the sauces.
In some ways, a potluck or buffet is a good way to try different things and see what ones you like and don’t like because it isn’t a waste of a whole meal. I didn’t like experimenting too much in college since if it ended up being something I couldn’t handle, it would be a waste of money and a meal.
It also makes a difference in how things are cooked or made. For example, a lot of people season meat but they don’t season cooked vegetables. Seasoning doesn’t help with the texture but it can with flavor. I have also known people that haven’t liked tea, but then their only experience is things like bagged green tea made using boiling hot coffee temperatures (different teas need different temperatures, only black and herbal should be done at boiling). London fog (earl grey milk tea) or milk chais tend to be a lot more palatable to people, especially for an introduction into tea. Loose leaf also tends to have a lot better flavor than ‘who knows how old’ tea bags.
Doesn’t tend to have lyrics, but Two Steps From Hell is great. Trailer movie and score music (audiomachine, epic score, etc.) tends to have good variety between slow and fast paced music too.
You know, it’s too bad Joyce never got into some of the more, shall we say, liberal thinking Christian Metal groups. They would have made a lovely stepping stone for her. I’m very much non-Christian, but there are a couple of those I actively enjoy mixed in with my other music.
Nah, just a regular flavor boy band. You could make some of their sing christian if you imagine the “you” they’re singing about is Jesus, but it doesn’t work for all of them
Breaking any college student, much less Joyce, free of the breaded hold of chicken fingers is a tough sell – they were one of the few really good foods in my university’s cafeteria.
They also tend to be trustwothy in quality. Me dad would say that on mystery meat days in the navy, he would prefer peanut butter and jelly sandwiches. Provided, he would get things like banana meatloaf in the navy, so it was understandable.
Would you want vaguely Jesus-y songs like American Pearl and Pedro The Lion, generic kid-friendly fare like Jim Valley, or a full descent into antitheist metal?
Lamb Of God sounds like one but is definitely the other.
I would suggest getting someone who knows music(ie not me) to listen to her 5 songs, categorize what they’re doing, and then find secular bands that are doing similar things in a non-awful way.
And then get Joyce to listen to those bands while drinking a veggie shake.
They’re probably all Christian Contemporary Music (CCM) which isn’t a very wide genre. A good starting place is probably non-romantic pop songs, dipping into light rock, and seeing if she gravitates to any particular artist.
Though my info is also probably a good decade or two out of date at this point…
mindbleach
My impression from twenty-odd years ago was a cottage industry of “The Christian [popular band name]” alternatives. For anything folksy or country… y… that almost seems like cheating.
I’d feel genuinely sorry for whichever sincere weirdos or desperate grifters tried being The Christian Sevendust.
331 thoughts on “New music”
Ana Chronistic
luckily there are only so many kinds of meat, so your chicken fingers are prolly safe
Ana Chronistic
what about parody music set to the tune of the Jesus songs
Thag Simmons
I feel like that’s a niche market and also the sort of dude willing to corner the market on being the Atheist Weird Al of Jesus Music is probably both bad at music and generally unpleasant.
NGPZ
yeah like, something I wonder is why there’s no attempt out there to provide guilt-free alternatives to nostalgia pieces which have, to put it simply, become milkshake ducks 😮
(at least none that I know of)
Thag Simmons
Honestly I’m not sure there’s much profit in it. I’ve seen a few things get headwind as alternatives to canceled art, but that’s mostly an organic process and you’re only going to capture a small chunk of the audience.
Harry Potter is still a bigger franchise by orders of magnitude than anything that’s ever been passed around as a viable alternative, for example.
NGPZ
very much so, Little Witch Academia for instance, seems like a good Harry Potter substitute, although it popular among today’s youth, can’t have the same power because Harry Potter wasn’t just the films
there were the books, the sleepovers with the decorations, the events at school and blockbusters, the toys, the theme parks,
…the memories
why won’t Little Witch Academia get a theme park or toys, and fond memories be (re?)made with those?
the answer always seems to be money, one way or another, yay capitalism
(-_-)
Mild Lee Interested
The Nevermoor Series by Jessica Townsend is a pretty good HP alternative that’s not written by a TERF. And the audio books are brilliant.
Lilith Rose
What’s sad is the fact Harry Potter was just a lower-quality knockoff remix of multiple “school of witchcraft” books that came before, including…
Books of Magic (Young British boy with pet messenger owl learning to be a wizard),
Secret of Platform 13 (a magical train hidden at King’s Cross station in London with a “13” in its number and a magical child kept in a cupboard by his abusive family with adoptive parents that have a non-adopted son who is fat and rude),
The Worst Witch (attending a witching academy that has witches uniforms, and attends potions class taught by a harsh hook-nosed teacher who hates the protagonist, as well as attending charms class & broomstick flying lessons, and joins up with her friends to make an invisibility potion, and this popular blond kid gets off on the wrong foot with the protagonist on the first day and makes life hard for the protagonist, as they attend their castle-like school near magical woods after the protagonist escapes a family that gives them no knowledge of the magical world, but at least the headmaster has the protagonist’s back),
Discworld (Unseen University & Ponder Stibbons & broom-riding lessons vs Harry Potter & Hogwarts & broom riding lessons),
Lord of the Rings (Ring Wraiths vs Dementors),
Troll (The 1986 Horror Film’s Troll-fighting Harry Potter who has to worry about an evil wizard hiding his essence in someone close to him vs 1997 Harry Potter’s Troll-fighting Harry Potter who has to worry about an evil wizard hiding his essence in someone close to him)
D&D & Russian Folklore (Phylacteries borrowed from Koschei the Deathless vs Horcruxes)
It goes on and on and on…
But hey, this is basically just a partial summary of this article: https://elftor.medium.com/harry-potter-and-the-possible-plagiarism-of-one-j-rowling-c19f1b05595c
Which goes into a lot more detail.
Laura
Wow, cool! Thank you for sharing that! Fascinating!
Stormies
That’s great for you that you think HP is “lower-quality”, but a lot of people grew up loving it and have a million fond memories of it. That doesn’t mean they suddenly have terrible literary taste just because we now know the author really sucks.
Art is always in part a remix of art that came before it, that’s how creativity and inspiration works. You can point out the influences, but simply having literary influences doesn’t make the result automatically low quality.
Veronica
It’s almost as if you donknow the difference between “knock off” and “the extremely basic tropes one would use if one was to wrote a story about a magical boarding school”.
Ponder Stibbons is an influence on Harry Potter? Why? Because they both wear glasses?
You can dislike a person’s political views without talking absolute rot about their artistic work.
Freemage
Veronica, didn’t you get the memo? If someone is one form of bad, they must, perforce, be assumed to be all forms of bad. So by virtue of being a GCF, JKR is also a racist colonialist homophobic classist anti-Semitic climate-denialist anti-vax plagiarist. It’s inconceivable that someone might have one or two points of difference with the overall position currently adopted by the left, without being entirely a creature of the far-right.
HueSatLight
Not to be “I was unimpressed with it before that was cool”, but it was always mediocre, and not very creative with the sources it was “inspired” by. Millions of people having fond memories of it doesn’t mean people, especially kids, don’t ever like mid stuff. That doesn’t invalidate the feelings of betrayal and such you might have.
thejeff
I kind of agree with it not being great literature, but I’m still unimpressed with the list of things it was a “knock-off remix of”.
What I’d say it was mostly is something not really on that list, which is a mix of basic British boarding school fiction and the wizard side. The other wizard school stuff doesn’t really draw that directly on that genre (Maybe the worst witch?)
Whatever its flaws it definitely did something to catch a generation of kids like little in the recent past and like nothing’s been able to replicate since. The marketing obviously helped once it got started, but if that was all there was, it could have been duplicated. I can’t really judge, since I encountered it as an adult.
It certainly is deeply flawed and awkward in many ways, one of which is that I suspect it really works best if you grow up along with it, since the early books and later ones aren’t really aimed at the same ages.
Aura
@Freemage When it comes to the books in question though, there actually is plenty of anti-semitic tropes and strong pro-slavery messaging which kind of undermines the point you’re trying to make there.
@Stormies/Veronica I agree that the one of the worst people in the world using the same tropes as books written by other authors doesn’t make their work automatically inferior. I’d also add that of the books I’ve read in Lilith’s list there’s not much common ground and they’re not at all trying to do the same thing as each other. (Some of the descriptions of books there that I haven’t read sound like they bear more of a similarity than just tropes, but I don’t feel like I can judge on that.)
In terms of whether or not the series is a low-grade knock-off or some kind of literary masterpiece exemplar of the genre, we’re getting into much more subjective realms here but personally I’d say it falls somewhere in-between, and much closer to knock-off than masterpiece. It’s certainly a deeply flawed work with little to nothing really inspired or very original about it. However, to give evil its due there are some things it does quite well. When I finally got around to reading the books I was struck by the writing style and how accessible and easy to read the prose was. From memory the pacing was quite good as well, particularly for the first few books. As far as the books themselves go and not contextual things like marketing budgets, the movie adaptations etc., I think it’s probably these two attributes that contributed the most to capturing that large reluctant reader market.
thejeff
@Freemage, a lot of that list can be drawn right out of the books and doesn’t rely just on a right wing parody of what the left thinks.
Psychie
Personal opinions regarding writing quality aside, no other book series has ever had a similarly large cultural impact that endured for more than a few years after the release of the last book (or movie adaptation in some cases) the way it did with Harry Potter.
Twilight was a similar cultural phenomenon at the time, and had pretty terrible writing, but it immediately fell off to the point where people don’t really talk about it from the perspective of fans anymore and haven’t for like a decade. And after popularizing the paranormal romance genre and many of it’s tropes, all of the objectively better books that came after failed to come close to that level of popularity and as such the genre as a whole has kind of fallen off in the public consciousness and remains kind of niche (although not even close to as niche as it was before Twilight). I maintain that a large part of that comes from Twilight was (more or less) the first one to find a formula that resonated with the target audience, which caused it to catch the notice of the general public, and then when the target audience started finding better series to scratch the same itch they splintered into different fandoms as the genre grew and thus weren’t consolidated into one space and thus couldn’t become a cultural phenomenon. Also the controversy of the writing being bad enough for there to be a really solid contingent of vocal haters at the time further drove attention that way, furthering the spread, and that largely died down alongside the popularity.
Harry Potter, meanwhile, likely also became big for much the same reasons, it was the first (more or less) to collect the disparate tropes and genre conventions into a formula that really resonated with the target audience enough to achieve broader attention and appeal. But a very notable difference is that the fans did not dilute into various other fandoms of better books in the same genre, a large amount of people still continue talking about it today, and that has only really started to die down because of the author getting cancelled. There was enough of a draw for a broadway play sequel, a series of movie prequels, and even some successful video games and that draw has even persisted, partially, through the controversy. And, very notably, *at the time* there was not an especially large or vocal contingent of haters pointing out bad writing the way Twilight had. If the writing was really that bad, why is it only being discussed *now*? I mean, Twilight proves that if a bad product becomes popular the haters won’t be drowned out by the fans, largely because they have an actual point.
This leads me to conclude that the current claims of bad writing and supposedly blatant problematic messaging are likely more fueled by the current bandwagon of hate toward the author than actually reflective of the literary quality of the work, because nothing could possibly have been anywhere close to that popular for anywhere close to that long after completion if it was actually bad. If it was actually bad, the popularity should have quietly died off more or less immediately a long time ago the way it did for Twilight, and it didn’t. And if the problematic messaging was really so blatant, prevalent, and pervasive, it wouldn’t have only recently started being discussed seriously now when we have the benefit of hindsight and the additional context of the author’s views on certain issues. Not saying the messaging isn’t there, but rather if it is there it is FAR more subtle and non-obvious/blatant than people are currently giving it credit for. If these issues were really so clear and present within the works themselves, they would not only just now be entering the notice of the public consciousness. People’s eagerness to criticize, especially criticize popular things that they don’t like, is not new, it was absolutely already around when Harry Potter was first becoming popular, and with the internet growing alongside Harry Potter that is especially true as the internet used to be a lot more anonymous than it is now, meaning people were a lot more emboldened to post unpopular opinions at the time (especially since cancel culture largely developed later, at least in the form we know it in today).
GreyICE
Part of that is that the idea of “X, but without Y” is so creatively bankrupt that it’s doomed to suck.
Jerach
That’s definitely an important point. If somebody’s starting point for making art is “I can capture a demographic with nostalgia for X but has issues with it now” that’s not really a place of genuine creativity.
Psychie
I dunno, spite can be an excellent inspiration for creativity, the issue is that being blatantly driven by spite isn’t going to make you popular, even if you ultimately prove your point of “I can do that but better” is correct. Speaking from experience.
Chokfi
On the one hand, probably, on the other I have heard some fun polytheistic songs based on jesus ones. “Loki loves all the little children” “Loe ye scary great old ones” and the like. more comedic than maybe I’d prefer but stills…
Effie
Give me that old time religion!
And I mean REALLY old time…
https://www.paganlibrary.com/music_poetry/real_old_religion.php
butting
Aw, that can backfire though. For eg, Tom Waits’ Way Down in the Hole is a savagely vicious parody of Christian music, while The Blind Boys of Alabama’s version of Tom Waits’ Way Down in the Hole has to be one of the greatest gospel recordings of all time.
Roland Barthes has regrets.
Laura
Dang, Man o Man, you are NOT kidding!
https://youtu.be/hFTtty3ajYo
https://youtu.be/ZlkXhKAVjJQ
Gut-tuggingly beautiful…
butting
Oh HELLS yes
the album version, though, with the bass and vocals way way wayyyyy out front… *fans self*
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=J4zZCuNAGRo
Laura
Amazing!
GholaHalleck
Joco and Weird Al have entered the chat…
Benjamin Geiger
Tim Minchin is a better example of “performer of funny antitheistic songs” (but not parodies).
Benjamin Geiger
(Though keep in mind that many of them are quite NSFW. “The Pope Song” contains over a hundred uses of the F bomb.)
Veronica
I used to love Tim Minchin until he started getting a shade “not liking people because they follow JK Rowling on social media is laughable”.
Mark
Look up the Apologetix discography and listen to the originals instead?
Laura
Flamy Grant drag performance music is pretty AMAZING.
Also there’s plenty of good secular Amy Grant music out there.
tim Rowledge
That would let her edge into Filk. A veritable mine of wild and wonderful music ?
apricot
Bless Joe for thinking of the bigger picture lol. But baby steps, buddy. Baby steps.
Chiatroll
He must of been thinking about her diets affect on her health for a while with that subject change.
GholaHalleck
She sleeps on her belly, the post chicken finger sleep farts have got to be as ungodly as Joyce herself now.
Opus the Poet
You want farts from hell, try going to a big bike ride like the Hotter’n’Hell 100. After carb loading there is a surplus of food for the gut flora and fauna that produce digestive gas so the result is a cloud or noxious gas floating through the rooms where they are sleeping.
Regret
I feel personally hurt by your spelling. But at least you started your sentence with a capital letter and ended it with a period. And at least it was a readable and coherent sentence.
“must have”
“effect”
eh, whatever
…and “diet’s”
Andrews
The spelling and grammar police! Thank goodness you came to carry your important and very necessary, not-at-all tedious work here.
Laura
“This is the kind of errant pedantry up with which I will not put!”
…Now I’m off to boldly split infinitives where no man has split before…
Casi
ACAB includes grammar police
Animedingo
I forgot they were in bed before i started ? over them getting dressed
Sirksome
I know Joe is good for the weed gummy connection. Hook your girl up, Joeseph!
RARD
Those were also just multivitamins
Sirksome
Shhhh. Joyce doesn’t need to know that.
ValdVin
Agreed. Her path to adolescent rebellion is slower and more winding than the median, but she’s ready to travel it.
Wizard
She’s trippin’ placeballs!
brionl
Vitamin W.
Grimey
My daughter (on the spectrum) has an obsession with chicken tenders as well. Apropos of nothing, the best thing has been to ease her into other food items. Because of this she’s learned she really likes the taste and texture of cucumbers and raw onion, among a few other more ‘usual kid stuff’.
Kimi
Texture has always been an issue for me, even now in my 30s. There are just some textures that I can’t handle without triggering the gag reflex. I have always found that I prefer the texture of raw vegetables over cooked, even with things like zucchini. With things like onion, I find that I am fine if it is minced small enough that it isn’t noticeable, but otherwise the cooked onion texture is a hard no. In college, I really liked the stir fries that the school would do, since the vegetables would still have that raw-like texture. They would also do both rice and pasta stir fries, so there was a lot of variety that you could have in between that and the sauces.
In some ways, a potluck or buffet is a good way to try different things and see what ones you like and don’t like because it isn’t a waste of a whole meal. I didn’t like experimenting too much in college since if it ended up being something I couldn’t handle, it would be a waste of money and a meal.
It also makes a difference in how things are cooked or made. For example, a lot of people season meat but they don’t season cooked vegetables. Seasoning doesn’t help with the texture but it can with flavor. I have also known people that haven’t liked tea, but then their only experience is things like bagged green tea made using boiling hot coffee temperatures (different teas need different temperatures, only black and herbal should be done at boiling). London fog (earl grey milk tea) or milk chais tend to be a lot more palatable to people, especially for an introduction into tea. Loose leaf also tends to have a lot better flavor than ‘who knows how old’ tea bags.
Lokitsu
Stir fry really is cooking’s gift to those of us who don’t like to eat their vegetables.
Needfuldoer
It’s because they’re bland and predictable.
Thag Simmons
I wanted to make a joke about the sort of new music Joyce should get into but honestly my reference pools probably aren’t much deeper than hers.
Kimi
Doesn’t tend to have lyrics, but Two Steps From Hell is great. Trailer movie and score music (audiomachine, epic score, etc.) tends to have good variety between slow and fast paced music too.
Opus the Poet
My meditation mix would be of help, if it didn’t blow her mind.
Aquila
Bad Religion, maybe?
Or is that too on the nose?
Needfuldoer
She should get into prog rock, if only because I think it’s hilarious when people mangle the lyrics to Tempus Fugit by Yes.
Daibhid C
Looking at the wide range of music on my iPod, I think she’d probably be more into Muppet soundtracks than Scottish folk music.
Rose by Any other Name
You know, it’s too bad Joyce never got into some of the more, shall we say, liberal thinking Christian Metal groups. They would have made a lovely stepping stone for her. I’m very much non-Christian, but there are a couple of those I actively enjoy mixed in with my other music.
TheKelliestKelly
Hey, I know from the second collection of Dumbing of Age that Joyce also likes One Direction.
(…they weren’t a Christian band, were they?)
TheKelliestKelly
I’m Tony now? Awesome! Y’know, I’ve been excited for him to make another appearance and I’m gonna count this
Thag Simmons
Pretty sure Zayn was Muslim, or at least from a practicing muslim family, so I don’t think so.
Regret
That’s perfectly possible, the Islam recognizes Christ as an important figure in their religion, so a Muslim wouldn’t mind singing about him.
Nono
Wasn’t it Harry Styles?
zee
Nah, just a regular flavor boy band. You could make some of their sing christian if you imagine the “you” they’re singing about is Jesus, but it doesn’t work for all of them
True Survivor
Breaking any college student, much less Joyce, free of the breaded hold of chicken fingers is a tough sell – they were one of the few really good foods in my university’s cafeteria.
Jeremiah
And it’s why they shouldn’t be. Chicken forever!
Kimi
They also tend to be trustwothy in quality. Me dad would say that on mystery meat days in the navy, he would prefer peanut butter and jelly sandwiches. Provided, he would get things like banana meatloaf in the navy, so it was understandable.
mindbleach
Would you want vaguely Jesus-y songs like American Pearl and Pedro The Lion, generic kid-friendly fare like Jim Valley, or a full descent into antitheist metal?
Lamb Of God sounds like one but is definitely the other.
Viktoria
I would suggest getting someone who knows music(ie not me) to listen to her 5 songs, categorize what they’re doing, and then find secular bands that are doing similar things in a non-awful way.
And then get Joyce to listen to those bands while drinking a veggie shake.
Jamie
They’re probably all Christian Contemporary Music (CCM) which isn’t a very wide genre. A good starting place is probably non-romantic pop songs, dipping into light rock, and seeing if she gravitates to any particular artist.
Though my info is also probably a good decade or two out of date at this point…
mindbleach
My impression from twenty-odd years ago was a cottage industry of “The Christian [popular band name]” alternatives. For anything folksy or country… y… that almost seems like cheating.
I’d feel genuinely sorry for whichever sincere weirdos or desperate grifters tried being The Christian Sevendust.