If I had to choose....

I guess CDs are kind of, practically speaking, obsolete, so if I had to just outright get rid of my CD collection, I could probably get rid of just about everything, but these are the ones I would really truly prefer to keep if I had to, for whatever reason (?), cut it down to the bare minimum.

UPDATED:

1. American Football - American Football

2. Kate Bush - The Whole Story

3. The Fray - How To Save A Life

4. Genesis - Genesis

5. Genesis - ...And Then There Were Three...

6. Genesis - Invisible Touch

7. Genesis - Live/The Way We Walk 2: Longs

8. Genesis - Three Sides Live

9. Genesis - We Can't Dance

10. Idlewild - 100 Broken Windows

11. Idlewild - The Remote Part

12. Jars Of Clay - Good Monsters

13. Jars Of Clay - Much Afraid

14. Avril Lavigne - Let Go

15. Oingo Boingo - Dark At The End Of The Tunnel

16. Oingo Boingo - Nothing To Fear

17. Oingo Boingo - Skeletons In The Closet: The Best Of

18. Pale Waves - My Mind Makes Noises

19. Real Friends - The Home Inside My Head

20. The Story So Far - Proper Dose

21. Tears For Fears - Shout: The Very Best Of

22. Toto - Toto IV

removed
Genesis - Live
Genesis - Live/The Way We Walk 1: Short
Weird Al Yankovic - Even Worse
Weird Al Yankovic - Off The Deep End

added
Pale Waves - My Mind Makes Noises

surprise!

 My nephews seem really iffy on the whole concept of presents being a surprise.  They spend copious amounts of time prior to Christmas and birthdays trying to figure out what they're presents are.  They say things like "It could be....[ x ]", and I feel compelled to remind them it could be ANYTHING(!), as far as they know, because they DON'T KNOW what it is!  I highly doubt the oldest one, now 8, even knows of everything it COULD be.  Heck, I don't know what their presents COULD be.  Not exhaustively anyway.  If I were actively shopping for their Christmas and birthday gifts, I'd still be unaware of a possible gift, meanwhile they themselves might be pining for something that even they explained it to me, with their limited ability to articulate, I might be like "Huh?  Are you sure you didn't dream this....?"  (I know this because they've tried doing that and that's exactly how it goes sometimes)

I myself at times have wondered not so much what a surprise really is, but more so why surprises are important.
I think with Christmas gifts, the gift is a surprise because, if you're giving it to the recipient in honor of what Christ has accomplished during his stay on earth, it's important to distinguish it from other gifts by giving in on the day that Christians have decided upon as Christmas.  The fact that we don't know what day Jesus was in fact born is really irrelevent and it's honestly perplexing why people feel the need to point that out.
And as for birthday gifts, I guess if you love somebody enough, setting aside a special day just for them is importand and what better day than the day that started it all?  For me, it's more tradition.  If nobody I knew had been born, it would be because God decreed or at least allowed that to be the case (there is indeed a distinct difference between a decree and a permitting and I wish Christians would quit using the terms interchangeably).  A birthday celebration, therefore, in my imaginary perfect world, is more of an honoring of God's infinitely wise providence, as unfathomable and confounding as it often is.  There is an element of care to it as well.  In the case of the adults I know, seems like they're so heavenly minded, getting them a gift is like dropping a penny in a well.  For children, ie my nephews, they get so excited by the bling and blang, it's fun to partake in by buying them gifts.  For me, even though I can get caught up in the same kind of thing, I recognize that everything comes with a price tag and, with a few exceptions, it's much bigger than the amount of enjoyment I am able to get out of it.  If I had enough income to buy whatever I wanted without taking a huge pause just after buying a tiny sliver of it, it'd be a different story but nobody I know has that kind of money, including myself.  I still do like to buy stuff, but I'm hoping, given my budget and everything, hopefully I'll be more consistently cognizant of the fact that I really would be better off just giving my money to charity than spending it on cool stuff....

Per Unshakable Assurance by MacArthur

According to John MacArthur I'm not a Christian.  I've been suspecting it for a good while...  I think it's possible I'm saved, but even if so, I really am not where I should be in my relationship with God.  The story continues...

Party line

I will be fine.  Cut me off.  I'll be fine.  If I'm not enough like Jesus to avoid damnation, oh well.  

Bestselling author.....Ha!

 https://www.amazon.com/gp/aw/d/1439102740/ref=tmm_hrd_swatch_0?ie=UTF8&dib_tag=se&dib=eyJ2IjoiMSJ9.w2Q8slxcL3KzrzOCaXG6QMX-k5OcjJdJlMvDYPjO91K7H3rjfVeHlYuWESe4bwmf-US5dLVgQbJMK3HSa-xKKB440hn93Igg-v-k2ntMrXnuKMbwbPzmNoSxEFM8VF34JBe-F9hUxKV22xMApLjBpg6GLVPyXxFlGJ9IVXWaWfcNiO7N0iNhcoHsvh2KJfiE__kiUBYN0ARF8kvrczplBg.fh2G8k9bFU77pmBxLszYpX8HgVFeYnsal64BmiCFoYA&qid=1736607773&sr=8-6#secondary_view_morpheus_1736608195443

Jodi Picoult has written some pretty dang good stuff.  NINETEEN MINUTES and MY SISTER'S KEEPER are pretty good.  A few of her other books might also be good.  I haven't looked really extensively into most of them.  I have noticed a few different publications have pointed out glaring flaws in various books.  A customer on Amazon once noted the cheap pulp - ie LAW & ORDER 8hr DNA testing bs - quality of SALEM FALLS, which some people defend 'because it's 

just

 fiction '.  

just as my CD collection "are just things", and should look like the contents of a dumpster because they're not something more....

And taken from Wikipedia, SMALL GREAT THINGS; A writer for the New York Times thought the white supremacist character was well-written, though found that the protagonist and African American character [Ruth] to be the least believable: 

"The more we see of Ruth and her family, the more their characterization feels like black-people bingo — as if Picoult is working through a checklist of issues in an attempt to say everything about race in one book." Gay found it a "flawed novel" but felt "generous" toward the book and gave her "a lot of credit for trying, and for supporting her attempt with rigorous research, good intentions and an awareness of her fallibility"

I can't say I feel as generous toward an author who has gotten crazy rich writing horseshoot.  There are plenty of books out there that are entertaining, well researched and don't suffer from an author overextending (s)he's grasp.  Granted, you have to look for them.  The more an author writes, the more oxidized their work is likely to be.  The same thing started happening with Stephen King as far back as the early 80s when he started churning out BS like Firestarter and Cujo.  And it got even worse the more prolific he got.

 

Faith, yeah I know...

 I think some people confuse faith with what The Bible talks about when the word "faith" is used.  Believing is an important initial step toward faith, but if it's just something you know, it's just as irrelevant as knowing that Abraham Lincoln is the 16th president.  You have to be willing to bank on it.  Because if you truly grasp even a surface understanding of what God has done for people, you know that there's nothing to do but respond.  And you also know that no response - no matter how extreme - is ever going to be enough to make up for your sorry existence.   

People in the Calvinist camp tend to combine "faith is a gift" with "you were dead in your trespasses", and assume by "dead ", that God means incapable of anything good.  If a person is incapable of anything good, then God has no reason whatsoever to have mercy on them.  No person can come to father unless The Father draws him to Himself.  God has to see at least some inkling of potential in you in order to empower you for service to His kingdom.  To believe anything else is to assume there's some factor in God's decision making that we're completely clueless about, which I suppose is possible.  Granted, we should not assume that we know all of the ins and outs of God's decision making.  We don't know ourselves as well as we presumably should and so how can we know what exactly led God to show compassion on us?  More so, we should not take any credit for the good that is in us, because we didn't put it there.  Good comes from external influences.  We have the capacity to respond to those influences but without the influences, we are hopeless.   And even with a treasure trove of good influence we are still prone to amplify whatever negative influences come upon us.  We need Jesus' intercession.  Woe to those who reject it.

Happy New Year 2025 AD

 https://www.gotquestions.org/what-year-was-Jesus-born.html

Really don't know why people are so fixated on this question.  The calander that "Western" society uses is completely made up and has been traded so many times and I'm assuming didn't even exist when Adam & Eve were created.  The geneologies cited in Genesis are not there for us to try and figure out how old the world is and there is no promise God makes to include every person in any geneoloy list.  Maybe He has done that, but how do we know?  He does not owe us any such thing and we don't need any such thing.  Or maybe I don't need any such thing.  I can't imagine a person's soul longing to know how old the world is, but then again I'm kinda dulled to what my soul needs...

God's providence or luck?

 I've heard at least a couple different people scoff at the idea of luck because luck implies randomness and God has ordained every single molecule to operate exactly for a specific purpose.  I don't get that.  If I spill a glass of milk, I am not going to revel in God's providence in that.  I call that "bad luck" because it's bad and as far I can tell, there is no purpose in it.  Knowing that God works all things together for the purpose of Christians should temper the negative reaction that I have toward it, but the reality is a lot of things happen just because.  Why did God create mankind?  "to be glorified" Ok, so why is mankind not doing its job?  You can explain things like that from The Bible, but aside from these microcosmic explanations like "mankind was tempted", "God is glorified in His wrath", and bla bla bla, the fact of the matter is we're in a giant melting pot and we don't know why we're here.  We can to an extent explain it, but the explanations that God has provided only go so far.  We're at war on multiple fronts and we would not have chosen that path had we known what we were getting into.  And there's no going back.  Why?  There's no point in trying to wrap your mind around such things.  And there's even less of a point in trying to wrap your mind around a minuscule occurrence like the power going out or tripping over a log.  Those are bad things that DO NOT HAVE AN EXPLANATION.  God has one, somewhere in the incomprehensibly vast terrain of His mind, but He's, generally speaking, not going to provide it and we'd ultimately be wasting our time asking Him such things.  It's bad luck.  You can substitute it with a bunch of unnecessary words, or you can just say "it's bad luck" and move on.  Times when something truly awful or indescribably good happens might deserve an examination, but even those things, we ultimately usually don't know why they happen and God does not owe us, who cannot hear His voice and cannot fully comprehend the written documents He has provided us, an explanation.  If He gave us an explanation, we'd most likely be too dull of hearing/discerning to even be aware that He's talking to us, much less WHAT He's saying.

It was kindofa neat time in my life, but it also kinda sucked

Hold on my heart Spotify playlist

covering that crazy time in my life 1991-1995.

I'm vengeance 🤬

 Literally have no interest in watching the new Batman movie when ever the heck it finally comes out ..   At the rate it's going, by the time they get the trilogy finished Robert Pattinson will be as old as death.  And then there's this stupid Godfather Goes To Gotham City TV show... no telling how much of that is going to factor in to the movie which should be on home video by now.  I think they might have started filming it finally.  Warner Bros. is so obsessed with this "DC universe" nonsense.  They're not going to be Marvel.  It just ain't happening.  Just make the new Batman movie already!  

Anyway....  also really skeptical about the portrayal of The Joker at the end of the newest Batman movie.  It's like they were running out of time and just hired some dopey off the street and quickly wrote some half baked dialogue for him.  Maybe that's the direction they decided on.  I'll probably watch it eventually and might even be excited when the trailer gets put up, but this trajectory that Warner has been on with the Batman property over the past 10+/- years just ticks me off.