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.

I backed this game years ago on Kickstarter. 2012, 2013? It's been on a long, long journey, but apparently it's in the last few months of polish. There's stuff they've shown on kickstarter that isn't in the trailer, and it has continued to look wild as hell the whole time.

I'm trying to imagine working on the same thing for that whole time. I aspire to that energy and dedication.

Wishlist it on Steam, or go ahead and buy it on itch, why doncha?

From this hilarious and insightful interview with Kool Keith / Dr Octagon / etc:

But it’s a catch-22. Some people will pay you a lot to do something easy, and some people will pay less to do something harder, but it’s been the way of my life. There’s people that will let you be free and do what you like to do. You can do a track with a person and they just say, “Yo, do what you do, I don’t care. I don’t give a fuck. I’m rapping about Pizza Hut on my version and you can rap about the fucking garbage truck. I like that.” Then you got some people that want to be more precision. They got to be like, “Okay, this album is about a pit bull—we’re going to talk about his ass, tail, legs, and his head, the wrinkles on his body, or whatever. The dog, we got to talk about him for the whole record.” It’s all cool.

FUCK, THAT'S FUNNY

A lot of rappers, they have dope rhymes and stuff, but they didn’t have the beats to really make it sound good. It should be like a soundtrack, like when James Brown did Black Caesar or when Curtis Mayfield did Super Fly. The soundtrack matched the movie so well. Now you got movies, the soundtrack don’t match. These guys now, they do a scene—a shark is coming, but that shit be playing some elevator music or something. It don’t even match the movie screen. So I wanted my beats to match the lyrics.

I get on all kinds of beats. There’s so much new music out there that it’s just too much for the average antique person. It’s like when the new Dodge Magnum with the magnifying sunroof come out, they can’t look at it. They still riding in the old shit. So they’re mad—it’s the same with music, with beats. The beats are too new and they can’t adjust and get on them. It’s like you sitting in the new Bugatti but you don’t know shit about it. You don’t know how to turn it on; you don’t know how to roll the windows down. You so used to driving that 1991 Buick. You on some ’91 Corolla beats. These motherfuckers don’t wanna adjust to the new shit, so they get mad and say, “That’s not the real shit.” That is the real shit. You pull your ’91 car up to the 2021 shit and it’s parked right next to you. But the old cats is mad because they can’t decipher it.

"The average antique person." God damn. I don't want to be an antique person!

I've been a pretty bad friend, colleague, and overall communicator. For a long time, particularly since the end of last year. I've posted here about doing "better," and I think I am, but in very specific ways. Other things have gotten more difficult; specifically, I have felt an uncharacteristic amount of shame around letting people down, and not being able to apologize or even reach out. I haven't talked to very many people since January; and it's not feeling any easier to reach out and repair my damaged and neglected friendships. I'm not sure why I can recognize it as a problem and yet not do anything directly about it. I'm already at maximum anxiety and discomfort most of the time; adding a phone call where I know I deserve to be chastised causes a peak and then slides away from me as impossible.

To one stupid end, I have fully blocked my access to social media. It's addicting and primarily destructive to me. If you need me, please email me, nick at this domain. Or text me, or better yet, call me; even if you want to yell at me, you can call me. It's easier for me to answer than to dial.

I can feel something unclenching, after just a few days without twitter. There is enormous guilt about not "keeping up" with the cavalcade of horrors, but I'm still reading the news; just less frequently, by way of rss subscriptions, which are significantly less-compelling by virtue of their length. Surely, on my deathbed, I will look back on the amount of time I spent fussing over the precise ways in which I want to be scoured by chaotic information as a shameful waste of finite materiality. Yet here, unfortunately, we are.

lovedrug — castling

The first step toward the management of disease was replacement of demon theories and humours theories by the germ theory. That very step, the beginning of hope, in itself dashed all hopes of magical solutions. It told workers the progress would be made stepwise, at great effort, and that a persistent, unremitting care would have to be paid to a discipline of cleanliness. So it is with software engineering today.

— Fred Brooks, No Silver Bullet

lovedrug — bleed together

this song sounds so cool. I don't identify with its lyrics; I like a lot of Lovedrug's songs because they are strange stories, mythic or fictive, little horror-story vignettes clawing out of the speakers