From Daring Fireball, though I’m omitting the horrifying description of brain inflammation caused by otherwise-mild covid infections:

Germany yesterday reported 298 new cases of COVID-19.

The U.S. reported over 55,000. Just yesterday. It is raging out of control here in the United States. It’s that simple. We’ve lost any handle on it we might have had, infections are now — I repeat myself because there’s no other way to accurately describe it — raging out of control, and a large segment of the population has decided to pretend it isn’t happening and isn’t a big deal if you do get it.

For those of us who’ve been taking this seriously since March, it’s soul-crushing that this is where we’re at after four months of isolation.

And that’s for those of us alive and unafflicted.

I have decided that today I am allowed to be just flat-out angry at how our fucking trash country has handled this, along with so many other things that, with even the tiniest amount of compassionate or logical thought, could be resolved and improved dramatically. I hate it, I hate the people who have held ya hostage to their greed-fed indifference, their fear-stoked campfire boogeyman tales, their idiot priorities and deference to unearned power. Fuck them through hell and out the other side, out into the cold vast accident that our unbelievable planet silently protects us from.

Those who survive this goddamned virus will have had months of our lives stolen by malicious negligence. Those who catch it and survive may have extensive neurological damage, or other prolonged health problems. Things, people, places, and experiences we love are being taken from us, day after day, simply because we have allowed the rich to trick a sufficient portion of our population into believing they live in a world which has never been. And as overall horrible as it’s been to grow into adulthood in this hellhole, what comforts we’ve been afforded are even now being moved farther and farther away. Not by nature. Not by fate. But by fuckers.

“If you don’t like it, you can leave,” doesn’t apply to people who disagree with our national policy. But it can apply to those who hate our planet, and the lifeforms it produces, so much that they would just as soon see it burn. Maybe they’d prefer the view from helmetless space?

jimmy eat world — pass the baby

this song is so fucking weird!!! bizarre first half that feels like it's part of a heist movie standoff; and then the absolute chunkiest, droniest, head-banging-est thing jimmy's ever published, as the abrupt coda. I love it every time it comes around.

man I still feel like this record just came out. but it was... ah, 2016. right. that makes sense. the last year of the gregorian calendar, while we now live in a perpetual year zero of interminable collapse

you know I was thinking about how the carceral state has extended itself to trapping us in our homes by way of preventing policy that would diminish the threat of covid or provide access to treatment, but has done so by inflaming the canker sore of "freedom" in the mewling mouths of the abject masses. freedom to work. freedom to not wear a mask. freedom to inflict yourself upon others without reflection.

and I feel so trapped in my own home that I can't even reach out, because it all draws attention to how absolutely fucked everything is. remembering how cool it was to just have friends over, but now they can't come over because our government would prefer we die and are happy to passive aggressively allow the virus to do it, and when I think about the friends who would come over it makes me so fucking mad to be unable to see them that I just, can't, do anything about it????????????????

BECAUSE I JUST WANT TO SING SONGS WITH MY FRIENDS AND INSTEAD WE'RE TRAPPED INSIDE SCREAMING TO OURSELVES BECAUSE THE FUCKING DEATH CULT OF CAPITALISM REFUSES TO MAKE THE DUMB FUCKS WE'RE DROWNING IN WEAR A GOD DAMNED MASK??????????????? WHAT? THE FUCK??????? ARE WE STILL DOING INSIDE????????????????????????????????????????????????? WHILE THE FUCKING MONSTERS GLOAT UPON THE THRONE

anyway, "it's almost too easy. the pictures frame themselves." what the fuck ever!!!!!!!!

I have been making up songs as long as I can remember. I started writing them down, and formalizing them into product, when I was 15, and some new friends wanted to start a band, and I liked singing, right? And I said sure, and the focused effort of the next 6 years slotted into place. I stopped performing songs long before I stopped writing them down; and I still write songs in my head, so often it’s annoying, and most of them turn into jokes now because it’s easier than confronting what it would mean to take it seriously.

I don’t want to be a middle-aged man, full stop. And I especially don’t want to be one who picks up the guitar periodically, remembers what it felt like to believe that dreams mattered, strums and picks a bit before putting it down again. But lord, that’s the way I’m going; and I feel the slope steepening.

Listening to someone like Phoebe Bridgers is infuriating for me. I’m moved, but I also resent the songbird voice, the simple chord structures, the apparent ease I know she still struggles to produce. Her new album is at least half good; I liked her better before Conor Oberst sank his sonic fangs in. But I can’t listen to it without feeling both moved to write a song of my own, and then to full-blown envious disgust with myself that I have the wrong voice for what I want to sing; that I learned to be pent up and strange and still haven’t unlearned it; that hearts open readily for some voices, but I’ve always felt like mine was more crowbar than key.

we were all of us born after the end of a world.

Circa Survive — "The Difference Between Medicine and Poison Is In The Dose"

"Don't call me by my full name. Don't talk about it; write it down, but don't ask for help. I can't be honest with even myself! Did you ever wish you were somebody else?"

Circa Survive — Semi Constructive Criticism

Bandcamp:

We Live Here—and its take-no-prisoners title track—was inspired by Vylan’s young daughter, who randomly announced, ‘We live here!’ one day while playing in the family’s front room. “She often says very beautiful things with very little reason behind it,” he explains with a laugh. “But I knew it was going to be the title for something. Eventually, I came to the conclusion that she’ll have the same experience that I did. One day someone will call her ‘n—r,’ and I can’t shield her from that.”

“This is the England I know,” he explains. “I was born here, but when someone calls you ‘n—r’ at a very young age, you realize you’re never gonna be English in that sense. I’m in this country, but not of it. You have to come to grips with that. But the other side of that is, ‘No—fuck that. This is my country.’ There’s no ‘Go back to where you come from.’ This is where I come from. I am England. This is what England looks like now.”

“Great Britannia is no longer,” he says. “It’s not fly the flag and crusade. Let’s get over that. It’s the reggae parties and the warehouse raves with garage and grime music. It’s the backstreet pub with indie music; It’s the curry houses; it’s a multicultural land. Whether they like it or not, I’m here to stay. And there’s plenty of people like me. So I’ve got to figure out how I’m gonna make this place better.”

RED ALERT EXCITING!!!!!!!!!!!!!

WEEEEEEOOOOOOOOOOO

dreamt I was asked to fill in for a well-known rocker whose voice was gone. I agreed, without realizing it was going to be a deep-cuts show, and only knew the lyrics to the first two songs. I lived through this performance in great detail, relishing hitting the notes, interacting with people in the crowd, and slowly panicking as I realized I was about to look like a massive idiot for not knowing the rest of the songs.

had another dream last week about playing to a big crowd, filling in as vocalist for a band I liked. the concert hall was on the 70th floor of a skyscraper, several stories high, with plate glass all around; a huge stage surrounded by japanese sky.

I keep having the thought: I wished I'd done more X when it was still possible to go out thoughtlessly. dancing, karaoke , fucking, performing. I try to reshape it, and say, I'm glad I did X while it was still possible. but I do tell you what: if I could tell my 20-year-old self anything, I'd tell him to stop giving a fuck about the rules, go nuts and do what he really wanted, because that might have been the last decade it would be possible to live anything approaching happily in this cursed nation!!!

oh well! here's another song from the early 2000s since I'm on a nostalgic kick, thinking things were better when they really weren't, not for me, not for most people, oh well

From Quartz:

Of the 69 scripted television dramas that aired on the big four US broadcast networks (CBS, NBC, Fox, and ABC) in the last year-and-a-half, 35 were about law enforcement, according to a Quartz analysis. CBS was responsible for 16 of those on its own. About 70% of the network’s dramatic programming from 2019-2020 were about cops.

The few ongoing cop comedies, like NBC’s Brooklyn Nine-Nine, were not included. Neither were reality shows, such as Cops or Live PD.

Even many of the non-cop dramas on these channels are so cop-adjacent that one could reasonably argue they are also about law enforcement.

Or the military, which they exclude from consideration.

Numerous academic studies over many years have showed that viewing cop shows can leaded to warped views of the criminal justice system and policing. A 2015 study by St. John Fisher College found viewers of these shows are more likely to believe police departments are much more effective in solving crimes than they are in reality. The same study also found that viewers were more likely to believe police misconduct is not a problem, and that officers only use force when necessary.

.......... “LAW AND ORDER!!!!!”

Here’s the whole article about this fucking wild, simply-air fact of our cultural-industrial complex. The carcinogenic particles of the carceral state of mind.

Just think directly about that for a minute, 14 years into the iPhone era, from the company which pioneered the destruction of purchased music as a viable product for musicians. As pundits celebrate the addition of tiny cosmetic adjustments to the home screen, and as the Mac’s usefulness is eroded further in the direction of iOS. As Apple rejects and shapes what developers are allowed to do with legitimate applications, and that people are allowed to install. Bandcamp has to include a note like this right after you buy music nearly-directly from a band.

Just struck me anew how bad some of the foundational assumptions of (some instances of) modern computing are.