Good point. Gildan Heavy seems to be the main one for tshirts and they're fine, like the OP of this comment chain I don't really have any of the issues with them that many claim to in terms of quality. Design wise they're a little boxy, but meh. I've also got a few shirts on Gildan Softstyle and Hammer, both of which are palpably different to the Heavy, whether it's the thickness and feel of the fabric or way that the sleeves are tighter to my arms.

I ordered the hoodie as the picture of the hoodie look like really good quality.

A webstore photo doesn't seem like a reasonable basis upon which to make a decision over garment quality unless there's a visible product label indicating what brand of blank the design will be printed on. Even then, unless the product description mentions that it will definitely be that brand, I don't think there's a reasonable expectation that it will be.

They did not have any description as to what that material was being used.

At which point you can decide not to buy or fire a message to ask what it's likely to be printed on. You essentially committed to a blind purchase.

Should I just suck it up and rock the hoodie?

You have the hoodie now, why would you not wear it? What will letting it languish in a drawer or wardrobe achieve? I know it's become pretty common to bash Gildan, but they do make functional clothing you can still get a lot of use from even if there's better stuff out there.

No, they don't. Not sure exactly when the Dullboy era vocalist left, but the current one has been with them since at least 2021 and all the material they seem to play is the stuff he's recorded with the band.

I like all that newer material too and they put on a fun show.

You could conceivably have people with ancestry on both sides of the equation or even double on either side. Barbary pirates, by no means the only North African group to do so down the centuries, kidnapped and sold into slavery many a European and a huge number of the Africans shipped across the Atlantic were caught and sold by other Africans. So there will be people who could have their lineage encompass both being a slave and enslaver or doubly enslaved or doubly a slaver, maybe even more multiples thereof. If fairness is meant to be at the heart of any such proposals, working out who should and shouldn't have to contribute and to what extent would be an impractical nightmare.

Anyone repping Underneath gets an upvote. That album is savage.

Start briefing pretty much what I wrote to all and sundry - After 14 years of real terms cuts under the Tories recruitment and retention of NHS staff is the biggest challenge facing the service. Staffing is connected to most if not all of the problems people have been experiencing with the NHS. In order to fix that issue and return the service to the functional state everyone remembers, those jobs need to become more attractive and that will require spending money.

A long overdue wealth tax and actively reclaiming the billions spent on non-functional PPE via dodgy contracts will pay for some of it [Neither of which I suspect would play badly with the public, while also being the right thing to do], but some borrowing will also be necessary. We'd be borrowing to invest in a public service that has a multiplier effect on the nation and our economy, rather than borrowing to sling money into the private sector for it to be squandered on dividends and bonus for the already wealthy as the Tories did so often.

Basically I'd be bolder than Labour seem willing to be at the moment. It's what's necessary. They've a hell of a job on their hands to repair the country and I appreciate that they're terrified of giving the right wing press in this country anything to chew on or any typical 'tax and spend' tropes for the Tories to start playing into, but both those groups are going to sling mud regardless of whether Labour do or don't say anything ambitious or inspiring. They're not abov simply making shit up. If Labour have any ambitions of a second term, they're going to need to start tangibly making things better for people and that will require spending money and they need to prepare the public for that.

Other than Chile, England is the only country with our water system privatised to this extent. Wales and Scotland doing a shit job of public ownership doesn't mean a fully privatised system in England isn't working out disastrously with an alternative desperately required.

It's one thing to say you're going to recruit them, it's another to present a job that people will sign up to. Particularly with the 'strict fiscal rules' Reeves and Starmer keep banging on about.

Between pay and conditions the NHS has been haemorraging staff. Going the teaching route of bringing in lots of new young staff who are either naive to or wholly unaware of the realities of the the job and consequently go on to quit within 2 - 5 years will do nothing to abate the NHS' retention issues.

Stuff does sometimes go unresponded to, but that's usually because it's a hyper-specific request, something that doesn't really fit or someone just happens to post close to the end of the thread's lifespan.

The current one is on 86 comments, the one before that finished with 77 and the one before that finished with 92 etc. etc.

These threads are not dead by any means.

It's bizarre to me that people think they are. There's a handful of songs that maybe kinda fit from their discography, but they're so obviously unrepresentative of their sound as a whole that it makes no sense to categorise them as a metalcore band. Early stuff - Tesseract worship prog-metal. Eternal Blue onwards - alt-metal.

It's one of the many, many bee-mimicking flies.

Early stuff is good, the more they moved towards metal and started leaving the core behind the less interested I became.

No, they are definitly Tree Bumblebees. https://www.bumblebeeconservation.org/learn-about-bumblebees/species-guide/tree-bumblebee/

The dot isn't really part of their inherent look, it's just where fur starts to rub away from bumping into and rubbing up against things over time. You can see that it's most pronounced on the left-most two and it's a phenomenon I've certainly observed in other species.

The UK (where OP has confirmed they are) has over 20 species of bumblebee and not all of them are black with yellow bands. Female red tail bumblebees, for example, are all black apart from their orange tail. There are five species of carder bumblebees that are various combinations of ginger, blonde and black/grey

They sound like a blend of Glassjaw, La Dispute and Touche Amore. All post-hardcore bands. I can't fathom what else you could try and categorise them as.

Knocked Loose are the only one of those I'd consider metalcore tbh. There really aren't any 'hot' bands doing their style in terms of the level of popularity they're seeing or the level of those other bands you mentioned. Any metalcore or former metalcore band hitting the 1m listeners mark on Spotify is a massive outlier.

Other bands that sound similar to Knocked Loose and releasing great recent material - Terminal Sleep, Inclination, Sanction (not so recent, but there are rumours they're about to release some new stuff as they've been playing shows again), Field Of Flames.

Less similar vocally, but it's instrumentally in the ballpark - Incendiary, Kublai Khan TX, Orthodox, Year Of The Knife, Chamber

Dying Wish and Boundaries who play a slightly different style of more classic sounding metalcore are also popping off - starting to headline tours, releasing AOTY contender records and really building their listener count up consistently into 6 figures ( a lot of metalcore bands never make it this far).

There must be one somewhere, but it's really a post-satanic panic genre and it never really felt the need to so aggressively position itself against the culturally dominant religion as much of the metal that preceded it often did. Where anti-religious sentiment occurs it's usually secular in nature.

As am I. I can't recall ever having seen one even for the smaller bands.

I remember a review of What It Is To Burn back in the day from a mainstream publication, possible Kerrang, called them nu-metal. As a barely know anything 13 year old I thought that was weird. Maybe someone took that as their source?

Genres on wiki are wrong as often as they're right.

Or simply unwilling. You paid for a ticket to the show, you're buying merch. If that's not enough, then change the prices and I'll see if they're financially viable for me. But don't play the 'oh it'd be nice if you tipped some extra' game.

Why is it laughable? Retail employees, of which I was once one, often work a register alongside other duties like cleaning and stocking. While those make a difference to the overall customer experience, it's not something they actively experience like paying for their items.

I don't see the merch stall role as being appreciably different from retail work. And it would be extremely atypical to tip them. Certainly when I was doing it there were policies against receiving any type of gift from customers, not that it ever came up because handing the items over once paid for is simply part of the job.

And a merch person is probably working more than 8 hours a day.
Chances are they're watching the table, keeping inventory, loading in and out, possibly driving, doing social media promotion for the band, among a lot of other things.

Sounds like stuff their employer should be paying them for, not the person being handed a shirt.

My response is less about the voluntary sign and more about spurious justifications like 'merch people work their ass off' as if other people who simply hand us things that are asked for don't do the same in the other aspects of their job. Yet we don't tip those others because they are paid their full wage by their employer. Your average retail worker doesn't put up a voluntary 'tip me' sign.

There is also a sense on this side of the pond that there is a general concerted attempt to encourage American style tipping culture, so wherever it rears it's head it's treated with increasing hostility.

Crowd-surfing has been a part of alternative music genres for decades and so being up front means it's going to be part of your experience whether you like it or not. Stand front, but off to the side to minimise it I guess.

My only gripe with it is people not being self aware about their size/weight. Some people are tricky to keep aloft and the surfer really can't expect other audience members to do so if they're a particularly big/heavy person.

I've seen Kublai Khan man the merch table for their own headliner here. If bands can't pay their merch person without requiring tips, then they should follow suit.

Lots of people work their asses off in jobs, but if all the customer sees is 30 seconds of 'Hi I'd like [insert shirt description]' and hands over money, what exactly is there to tip? The rest of the work the merch person is doing is for the band. I don't tip shop clerks for the work they do that doesn't relate to their interaction with me.

Them, Undying and Reprisal.

Some of the newer wave of metalcore bands clearly listen to them as well - Contention someone else has already mentioned, but A Mourning Star, Memento, Times Of Desperation and Balmora. The sadly defunct xElegyx.