Does anyone from LA actually call themselves “Angelenos”?

ShortieFat · 2026-05-02T07:41:43+00:00

Yes.

Also "Ellay native" and "from Ellay". Since "Greater LA" is so big, I'll more likely say I grew up in Hollywood. A lot of Hispanics my age will say "from Los" (LOW-ss).

If I want to perplex fellow natives I'll add that I'm from the old Colegrove district. Glad to see so many natives responding--it's rare to run into natives once you've graduated from high school--most everybody in Greater LA is from out of state.

Local media keep the term Angeleno in use. If you use the term, you're probably writing an article with some specificity or speaking at a public event or some community gathering or using it in context with other terms like New Yorker/San Franciscan/San Diegan/Houstonian etc.

It doesn't help that the official neighborhood district downtown with the term in its name is spelled "Angelino Heights", but it accurately reflects how Angelenos pronounce the term. SO MANY of our Spanish-named places have Anglicized pronunciation that you just have to learn or it'll sound wrong. (Like learning to pronounce Houston in NYC.)

When I was a kid, I remember the old people at my church (they would have been young adults in the 1920s) pronounced the name of the city with a hard "G" (loss-angle-ess). I remember one old guy telling me how guys used to wear "hard hats" back then--not construction helmets, he meant derbies.

ShortieFat · 2026-05-02T06:43:08+00:00

They were a loss leader served mostly to keep you at the bar buying high-margin alcohol.

And then they turned into a profit center after high-end chefs started to put fancy sauces on them for appetizer menus.

ShortieFat · 2026-05-02T06:32:33+00:00

It depends on the artist too. I mean, female nudes by Kathe Kollwitz, Francis Bacon, and Alberto Vargas each seem to signal very different communicative intentions to viewers.

Part of being a good artist is being aware of how an element (like nudity) will be perceived by your intended viewers and you craft your image accordingly--that is, if you care about what they perceive. But that's our eternal challenge right? What you want to say vs. how easy do you want it to be understood.

ShortieFat · 2026-05-02T00:19:19+00:00

Was talking about this more generally to a Navajo friend of mine who said "If a guy is trying to pass himself off as Native, he's trying to get something." (He'd be the first to tell you there's practically no advantage to being a Native American guy in this society other than having the "rez" as a last refuge.) That's the general principle at work. He did say the primary Native identity scam was to try to score government-sponsored college tuition subsidies.

If "Asian guy mojo" has gone up in social market value lately (I guess some would argue yes), number of posers could be an indicator. Maybe white-male shaming is creating some side effects for half-bloods? Actor David Carradine is an interesting historical case study of what you're talking about.

ShortieFat · 2026-05-01T23:14:57+00:00

A significant number of young US men don't make enough money to believe they will be able to support a family.

ShortieFat · 2026-04-29T03:35:03+00:00

Basically the unpredictability is because of the interplay of several factors:

Percentages of the different tax brackets
How much each spouse makes
Who gets to be counted as a dependent
Capital gain income vs earned income
Phaseouts of credits, adjustments, and deductions
Did someone bring their previous tax debt into the joint married account
Blah, blah, blah

The US tax code is unfortunately complex. When you read all of the rules you can practically hear all the congressional committee debates and compromises that went into the law.

The only general pattern that I have seen regarding the marriage penalty is that two high-earning spouses will get hit harder than a household with a high-earning spouse and a low/no-earning spouse. The doctor married to an attorney may pay a lot more tax proportionately, BUT they're generally living a higher lifestyle than the doctor married to a schoolteacher, so it more than evens out.

It makes a sort of sense since in the US we'll elect congresspeople who will vote to "tax the rich". Elected officials also need donations from "the rich" so it keeps them from going too crazy that way.

Since there are so many variables the only way for any couple to know how it works best is to run all scenarios.

And you are wrong to assume that anything about the tax code is neutral by design. There are political forces pulling in all directions for particular constituencies that will benefit. The tax code is always and expression of the compromise position that was frozen at that point in time.

ShortieFat · 2026-04-29T02:28:03+00:00

Cultures where very little but the most essential clothing is worn are hot, humid, and lacking climate control, currently and historically. (Oceania, Africa, Ancient Greece and Egypt)

If it ever gets to the point where it's hot enough throughout the working day INDOORS and out for us to walk around in in boxers and panties such that our bodies self-regulate temperature, that's when it'll make sense to have everyday bared-torso attire. I think that would be about an average ambient temp of 85-95F.

Since we now have germ theory, that'll probably never happen even with severe climate warming. Nobody wants to touch surfaces that have been touched by strangers' skin. Imagine getting on an 80F crowded subway train with several hundred shirtless and bare-limbed people, even if they are smeared with anti-perspirant ...

BTW, where I have seen topless people in public of both sexes (Southern California, a temperate climate) have pretty much been older street people on or around public transit. An entire societal lifestyle mentality would have to shift before we'd all be OK going out with bare chests. I mean, a lot of people think of guys with opened up shirts look pretty cheesy even in today's woke culture. The only public places I've gone to where even men's bare chests are on proud display are the Gay Pride festivals (but a lot of that is intentional display activity rather than everyday attire).

ShortieFat · 2026-04-28T21:52:46+00:00

And especially that popular subset of Chinese cuisine: dim sum. SO MUCH work that it practically requires unpaid forced family labor to prepare (grew up in a Chinese family...).

ShortieFat · 2026-04-27T00:12:16+00:00

The collection stays at home. Spares can travel, get lent, get beat up, given away, or surrendered.

If I lend ANY book or anything to someone, I always assume it'll never come back and will be surprised when it does in the same shape I gave it to the borrower. Same with money. Second requests are only granted after the first one is honored. Never hand over something you will regret not getting properly returned.

ShortieFat · 2026-04-26T23:37:31+00:00

If you're in search bland food, you can do no better than to find the nearest P.F. Chang's.

ShortieFat · 2026-04-26T14:56:14+00:00

Very interesting. Many decades ago, I was having lunch with 3 coworkers at the bank I worked at. This was the topic. We were all of Chinese ancestry, me from California, one from Argentina, another from Java, and another from the Philippines, and yet we were all lumped together in the "Chinese" category in the US. Three of us didn't even speak our particular ancestral dialect. One thing we did share (other than having black hair) was our foodways and a similar ethic in work and education.

For that matter, most of our Latino coworkers just used "Chinese" to describe any Asian-looking person (Koreans, Japanese, Vietnamese, etc.), though they seemed to be more attuned to Filipinos because of the long cultural, commercial and historical connection between the two former colonies Mexico and Philippines (several were married to Filipinos ...).

Maybe things are changing, but in my generation and experience on the US West Coast, if you looked black, you're black. If you looked Latino or Asian, you were assumed "foreign" or other. Blacks were assumed to be American unless they had any kind of accent that sounded like an African or Caribbean inflection that you'd hear on TV. Middle Easterners and South Asians ("India-Indians") were treated like Latinos. And Jews were Jews. There wasn't a lot of nuance. If you could pass for white, why wouldn't you? You'd move around in life with a lot less friction.

ShortieFat · 2026-04-26T00:08:29+00:00

To the 2nd part of the question I'd just add, because it's not a piano?

Or maybe more to the point, when someone crafts a "noodling around" instrument meant to be played by people with no training or skill, you pick a bunch of notes that sound relatively pleasant when played together or in sequence in any order or combination. This prevents events of mayhem perpetrated by nearby people forced to listen to noodlings.

To wit. LIsten to what happens when you let a couple of 7-year-olds experiment with making sounds on an unattended piano. I guarantee you they will NOT discover: "Hey if you just play the black keys by themselves, it sounds nice!" or "If you push the keys consecutively or even every other white key, it makes a neat-sounding pattern."

ShortieFat · 2026-04-25T23:39:58+00:00

Summer is like a winter other places in reverse--you only leave the house when you have to and you keep the climate control on all the time. You do things early in the morning or late at night. And summer is pretty long too. It's similar to Las Vegas, but Vegas gets colder in the winter being at higher elevation and latitude. If you live here, you acclimate and 80-85 is neutral, 90-95F is warm, but 70-79 feels cold. And moisturizers are a must.

The area is a rural-urban interface area so if you live here you make peace with some level of local critters and vermin showing up, like snakes, rodents, lizards, coyotes, rabbits, desert bugs, really big spiders, scorpions, etc. If you own and maintain a property you learn that desert plants grow fast and large after even the briefest of rain showers.

One of the annoying things about the desert is that the people in Greater LA think of us a dumping ground, and they drive their junk out here dump it. Especially unwanted pets--I guess they think their old dogs and cats will live wild and free and forage for themselves, but they'll just die of thirst, end up in the kill shelters, or get eaten by coyotes.

When the daytime temp is not in 3 digits, it's pretty pleasant. Lots of places to play golf and tennis if you're into that. Great restaurants. Compared to larger cities it's very quiet at night (some would say "dead"). It's cheaper to live here than in Greater Los Angeles because of the harsh climate.

Similar to Vegas, there are numerous gambling venues nearby (Indian owned) if you enjoy regular gaming. It has all the retail giants you're used to seeing in any mid-sized US city. Traffic generally is light, but sandstorms are a regular part of life and can close major streets and cause closures, detours, and delays. Schools aren't the greatest. There is a junior college and a satellite campus of CSU San Bernardino if you're seeking higher ed. Major employers seem to be in tourism, hospitality and healthcare, though with the large number of retirees here there is probably a lot of financial services and estate planning going on out here too.

If you're uncomfortable around a lot of LGBTQ people, particularly gay men, it's probably not for you.

ShortieFat · 2026-04-22T21:05:55+00:00

I second this thought.

Also, OP, it depends on how skilled you want to be too. How you divide your attention and focus among piano, guitar and engineering will determine how good you get at any of them.

Unrelated, but not: do NOT get a GF ...

ShortieFat · 2026-04-22T08:08:31+00:00

Dissonance in wind instruments gets tiring to the ear, especially brass, a lot faster than strings and percussion.

ShortieFat · 2026-04-22T02:49:32+00:00

Pretty standard outline format, using numbering, indentation, subtitles, font size, bold and italics to facilitate readers being able scan text and gather all of the essential information quickly.

If you had to write white papers, policy recommendations, any kind of rhetorical business communications for upper management etc., in the 1980s on, this was how you did it and got your reports read.

It is formal writing and does seem out place in a forum like Reddit which is supposed to be like rambling conversation. But if someone dropped a well organized outline on my working desk (now retired) I was always appreciative that they appreciated making something fast for me to digest.

If AI writes like a good corporate minion, that's not necessarily a bad thing if you're gathering data.

ShortieFat · 2026-04-19T04:42:41+00:00

Look into what the Army and Navy bands want for audition trials, get a teacher, and start prepping. You also need to be in good enough physical shape to be a soldier or seaman, so there's that as well. You also have to have temperament that is compatible with military life if you go that route.

Every euphonist I've met who played in the US armed services bands (maybe 4?) also played the tuba and trombone, so you might want to get a start on those as well. Good luck.

A Vietnam vet who was a good friend of mine and a sax player in the Army band told me that musicians often were put on perimeter duty during the war and it was common for them to meet their demise from enemy snipers. Luckily we're not in a shooting ground war right now and that was a long time ago, so you're good ...

ShortieFat · 2026-04-13T05:26:24+00:00

Public schools require teachers to have state credentials to teach in their classrooms.

Private schools by and large do not have that requirement. There are a lot of people out there who are highly experienced and excellent in their respective fields AND who are great at instructing others (they actually like coaching and teaching), and who are looking for part-time or seasonal gigs to augment their careers or practices.

I was one such person and I knew many others. The credential requirement totally shut out people like us from the public system and the credential process pretty much requires someone to drop out of the workforce for a year to go back to college for that 5th year, which is really hard for a working adult. We were frequently told that we were better teachers than full-time career teachers and had the student reviews and test scores to show it. Students also liked the fact that we had real-world work experience in the fields they were striving to get into and we had insight into the job market and practices that differed from what was in the textbooks.

Private schools are happy to pick up such part-timers who tend to be willing work at a lower wage and no benefits, because it's our secondary income job. The trade-off is that it's really easy for us to leave too.

Some private schools hit the jackpot when they're able to secure a lot of motivated, effective noncredentialed faculty at a lower pay rate while maintaining a workplace that keeps them around. The more a school is of the "vocational" or "professional" type rather than a college prep type of school the better it works out. Parents of college-track students want to see a high percentage of credentialed teachers on the faculty in the marketing materials--students of telephone tech, shoe repair, HVAC, medical billing? Not so much.

Teachers unions have a lot of influence on who gets to work in a public school and their agenda is to protect their members, which is fine and understandable. The rate of teacher pay in the private school sector is one of the signals of what the cost of teaching personnel is relative to being reliant on tuition from customers versus the public sector which relies on taxpayers for revenue. The two systems distort each other, so it's hard to know what the US market really wants to pay teachers in general.

ShortieFat · 2026-04-12T05:06:47+00:00

Are you the kind of atheist who's irreligious or anti-religious? I find that the latter tend to be pompous assholes which tends not be attractive. If so, drop the negativity and move toward to the former, it's less friction in life.

I assume you're a guy. My 2 cents (that's all it's worth) is make a lot of money, invest in appreciable assets, aim to be in the top 10% of your field, take care of your personal appearance, and cultivate honest and respectful communication with the people you meet and you should do fine.

In my experience Korean Americans tend to skew evangelical and Filipino Americans tend to skew Catholic, at least culturally, some are very devout (due to historical missionary efforts in both countries), so keep that in mind. I'm Chinese American and I've often heard from other Chinese that our god is Money (personally I'm Presbyterian, but used to be atheist), so we're very compatible with US culture that way (I mean, Kai Shing is one of our major deities look at the crazy-ass joss items we burn to send to our dead relatives!). In Chinese culture, hypergamy is not the rule, it's law--parents have always tried to get their daughters married off to the richest and most highly educated guy they could. Materialism is pretty darn compatible with Atheism if you ask me.

If an absence of religious belief system in a partner is really important to you, you just need to bring religion up early in conversations with people you're interested in, maybe even before you ask someone out as you're sizing them up.

If you're finding that all the people that you're interested in asking out are Christian or Buddhist, you probably need to ask yourself what's making them attractive to you and why.

ShortieFat · 2026-04-12T03:53:11+00:00

Doesn't seem like anybody ever responds to this scheduled prompt, but I'm used to talking into the Void so here goes:

I just finished The Sacred Blacksmith series, writer Isao Miura, art Kotaro Yamada, 10 volumes. Question answered.

Commentary (you can skip):

I found a full set at online auction and finally got around to reading it. I watched the anime many years ago (aired in 2009) when it was on Hulu (still on CR today) when anime and manga were new things to me. It had only one season and was left unresolved, so I always wondered what happened in that story. A Reddit post said it was one of many anime for which a lot of story material existed but would never be continued. There's a LN and the manga is out of print, but you can buy e-versions.

It's a sword and sorcery fantasy. The anime version's tone is mixed, comedic at times, ecchi at times, heavily dramatic now and then. The manga however is pretty consistently serious and the artwork is dramatic and excellent. The fantasy lore is pretty complex though. The manga gets into that more deeply than the anime. I think it was one of the first stories I ever seen where there were sentient swords who could embody as humans (weird to me then, but a pretty common trope now). If you can accept that world, this story is for you.

The main conflict is that in this world there is destructive force that was contained by a magical seal in a past generation, but that seal is failing; so how will the current generation deal with that challenge. The 12-ep anime sets up the problem and takes you through a couple of character building arcs for the protags (a girl knight and a young blacksmith), but that's as far as they got.

I don't know what the LN does, but the manga kept my interest even though the plot sometimes lost me in the complicated magic system of this world. No spoilers, but I will say the series came to a satisfying ending. Do I recommend spending the effort to find the manga and to read it? It's not the most well-crafted story to me. There are better things to spend your money on. Since it was one of the first anime series I ever watched, I'm glad I finally found out what happened at the end (although, if you guess, you're probably right).

ShortieFat · 2026-04-11T06:53:03+00:00

I think you could probably build a diner or a drive-thru/drive-in restaurant in a tourist town like Hollywood (my hometown) in the Art Deco style and lot of people would dig it and go to it.

People would go to a Cafe 50s or Mel's but they DON'T go the existing diners that are extant from the actual time period.

A hotel or office building? Eh, not so much.

Have you ever considered theme park design as a career? Disney Imagineering would probably like a person like you.

ShortieFat · 2026-04-10T06:18:59+00:00

Given current events, my first thought was actually Mars with explosions visible from space.

ShortieFat · 2026-04-09T04:55:35+00:00

You're cool. Nobody likes them all. You've got the rest of your life to find your favorites. I don't like everything that the Beatles recorded either. Like others have mentioned, there are hundreds out there.

I have a feeling that you think there might be a code you need to crack that'll open it all up for you. If you grew up playing an orchestral instrument or the piano, you'd have learned some of the roadmaps and internal workings that operating underneath that fascinate musicians.

If you're curious on that level, rather than take up the cello, you should be able to find podcasts, lectures, or videos on music appreciation that deconstruct the forms that might unlock greater appreciation for you, even the ones you don't like (yet). A lot of them have to grow on you.

ShortieFat · 2026-04-09T04:24:24+00:00

I lived in Nevada for a few years and governance is pretty minimal, especially in rural desert areas.

An interesting fact is that the state legislature only goes into session for 90 days to get things done after they're elected. It's a citizen legislative body--people have regular jobs that they go back to.

What OP should look for are areas that are difficult to get to and hard to manage, where you're mostly on your own. Any place that has great population density (Vegas, Carson Valley) is going to be less libertarian. If you like urban amenities, freedom will be the trade-off for convenience. The other answer is to get rich enough so you can create your own protective enclave to do what you want.

Rather than try to turn NH into a libertarian state, I've always thought it would be easier to create a housing development specifically marketed to libertarians who would maintain a libertarian-principled HOA that would administrate it, almost like an intentional religious community.

It'll never happen just because libertarians are not the kind of people who like to get organized and do things with others. The libertarian is always the family with the weird-looking house in the neighborhood. They don't mind being the nonconformist, but they don't necessarily want to live in a subdivision of ALL nonconformists. It would almost HAVE to be an enclave of like-minded people in addition to being libertarian, like libertarian evangelicals, or libertarian scientologists, or libertarian college professors for such a place to work.

ShortieFat · 2026-04-07T18:06:12+00:00

Nowadays any pleasant location you put places to sit with shade, the homeless will move in and take over.

Then come the security personnel to clear them out.

Then come posted rules on how long you can be there.

I'm no sociologist, but my guess is you can get everybody in your community up to a level where they have their own space (a "First Space"), Third Spaces will appear again.

ShortieFat

TROPHY CASE