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Why would you think anyone has more staying power than Taylor Swift? At 34 years old she has been in the music industry for 19 years and she's only growing in popularity. She topped the Country charts for 24 weeks with her debut album at age 17.

Sure, we won't be able to compare her to Madonna for another 30 years or so, but I don't exactly see a reason to question her staying power.

So I'm not exactly an expert, I just have some friends who are Swifties and I enjoy sometimes hearing people out about what they're interested in over a beer. But I'll give a shot at answering based on my limited knowledge.

I don't think Swift makes a point out of reinventing herself every time. I guess she had her country phase until Red in 2012 (We Are Never Ever Getting Back Together), and perfected pop in 2014 with 1989 and Shake it Off, Blank Space and all that. The following two albums I know nothing about, but Wikipedia lists them as electropop. And then she completely changes her sound in 2020 with folklore, suddenly being more folksy and reaching an audience of middle aged male music reviewers who had previously not shown any interest in her music. Somehow the fans of her older albums loved it as well, so her fan-base only expanded.

Evermore is kind of a continuation of folklore. I find it to be a little bit more poppy at times, but it's not a huge change of direction, and kind of builds on the same universe (low-key and lower-key). Midnights however, which is her final album to date, is again something completely different: A full blown concept album, and musically again a complete change of direction. A Swiftie friend of mine said she had to give it a couple of spins before she got into it, but that it's now one of her favourites. As a prog rock fan, that sounds about right to me for a concept album.

Personally I started listening to Midnights for the first time ever while writing this post, and I gotta say the opening tune Lavender Haze has some fun things going on in it. The music is interesting, the songwriting is original, and she's a talented performer with a likeable persona. I'm not very surprised she receives her awards.

#taylorswift

I used to dislike Taylor Swift along with all other contemporary pop stars. Maybe even a little bit more, because she had the audacity to call herself Country: Spitting in the face of personal heroes like Kristofferson, Nelson, and Cash.

Then I stopped being an edgy teenager, Swift released Shake it Off, and I had to recognize it was a fun song to dance to. In an ironic kind of way of course, but nevertheless.

And then, in 2015, Ryan Adams released his cover album of Swift's 1989, playing every single song on the album in a folksy way. I dug it. And with it, I had to appreciate that Taylor Swift is one hell of a songwriter: I loved the songs, I just don't love the sound of pop music all that much. That's personal taste, not everything I dislike is bad.

Then Ryan Adams fell from grace with metoo, so fuck him. At least it triggered Father John Misty to publish (and later remove) his legendary covers of Swift in the style of the Velvet Underground.

Fast forward to 2020, and Taylor Swift dabbles with music I can actually enjoy listening to with her album folklore. Pretty cool. I actually got my expectations up for her next album, evermore, low-key hoping that it would be musically inspired by the Battle of Evermore. Sadly I was wrong, but again, it's a matter of personal preferences.

What matters more is the fact that she's reinventing herself from album to album - she's successful in one formula, and she just ditches it and moves on to something different. And every time she does it, she seems to be even more successful than the last time. Her growth as an artist is astonishing.

Finally, she's just cool. Fuck the labels - she'll just casually re-records her entire discography in order to take back control of her songs. She's caught up in all kinds of stupid celebrity drama, but it tends to be the rest of the industry falling over like toddlers trying to drag her into shit for PR while she acts like the only adult in the room. She also scores points for casually hanging out with Billy Bragg and encouraging people to vote and shit.

Worth mentioning that Vivaldi is basically the spiritual successor of Opera, and it's doing pretty well at that. It's still Chromium based though, so unless you really miss Opera for the functionality you're better off with Firefox.

Still, rather Vivaldi than Opera, Chrome, or Edge.

This might be assuming there's no such thing as natural law. I guess some might argue there is a natural law, but breaking it doesn't amount to a crime. In either case it's somewhat contested in moral and legal philosophy circles.

Well, it's based on experiences travelling through Germany proper - for example Denmark to France or Italy, including transfers. Often the delay will just be a couple of hours, but then you miss your transfer and you're screwed.

Also if you're on your way to Switzerland the Swiss have no patience for disruptions in their services, so if a train is delayed coming from Germany they're likely to just not accept it into the country at all.

I have also heard from people who were told to spend the night in the train, which DB just parked in the outskirts of the city for the night. That way they could offer passengers a place to sleep in the cheapest possible ways. Pregnant women or families with young children were asked to check in to hotels.

I have no doubt their bureaucrats perform world-class efficiency in their handing out, filling in, faxing and archiving a sophisticated system of paper forms.

I guess it's the trap of getting complacent and stopping modernizing as soon as you've convinced yourself you have the best system in the world.

Oh, everyone who ever travels by train in Europe will tell you that the German infrastructure is very much broken. You're lucky if your delay is less than a day travelling through Germany.

It's generally defined by a claim to represent some unified idea of the "true people" as opposed to the corrupt elites running everything.

Stewart is not pretending to represent anyone, he's just a guy highlighting problems and making jokes on television. If he ran for office he could decide to use populist or non-populust rhetoric.

I have used it for maybe a year and I never had any problems. Then again, I'm hardly a power user, so it makes sense that other people might have different experiences. :)

A personal recommendation is to use Droidify, it's just a great F-droid front-end.

You can download the APK here: https://f-droid.org/packages/com.looker.droidify/

If they're from F-Droid you're good; if you're on Google Play I doubt they'll update anything to get more permissions without your consent.

However, if the developer has taken a turn for the worse (which this post seems to indicate), you might not receive any more updates for your F-Droid software, and you might get to a point where you don't want to install updates from Google Play. Software that cannot be updated is generally not a good thing.

Furthermore, these apps deal with somewhat sensitive information by default, and I wouldn't want to use apps developed by a company I don't trust if I don't absolutely have to. :)