Month: June 2023

Is Mikhaila getting sick of daddy’s shit?

Seen this being shared on Twatter:

Jordan Peterson’s daughter reminding him that their side has idiots too. (Everything I’ve seen about Pearly indicates that she is indeed a complete fucking tool, to be sure.) Fascinating that Mikhaila is snapping back at her old man like this… cos remember she snapped at him a bit when he reposted the “Chinese Communist milking machines” a few months ago, too. Onviously she and him share politics broadly, but she seems able to see through at least some of the shitheads on the right, moreso than daddy does, and she’s… reluctant, perhaps, to let get away with at least some nonsense? I don’t suppose Jurr Durr will take much notice, though, cos after all, even if Mikhaila is his own daughter, she’s still just a woman…

What is Malsh Walsh, for that matter?

New Aamon Animations video is up, and it is legitimately one of the most unsettling things I’ve ever seen. I mean, even for Aamon this is fucked up (though let’s face it: Malsh and Dennis Prager give him such material to work with). I don’t know how much further he’s going to have to go over the top to out-eldritch this thing.

A hand-me-down dress from who knows where

Found this via Twitter. Someone’s taken the various attempts at “All Tomorrow’s Parties” from the 1965 Velvet Underground home demo and synced them up. Kind of like how, when the band recorded “What Goes On” for the third record, they used all of Lou Reed’s different guitar solos together, but also… not. The remarkable thing is that the different takes actually come together more than they don’t (third verse is a little wobbly where they haven’t quite decided on the lyrics), they’re actually remarkably consistent, and brought together in stereo like this they sound pretty big. And John Cale probably benefits even more than Lou does; the mix kind of embiggens them both in a really nice way.

Did you see the frightened ones?

So a while ago I posted a picture of 1970-era King Crimson about which I said Andy McCulloch and Gordon Haskell were pretending to be happy to be there just before that version of the band disintegrated. This picture of Wall “tour”-era Pink Floyd is even sadder when you know the state they were in at the time. This looks like a band trying to pretend they haven’t already disintegrated. Rick Wright wasn’t actually a member of the band by this point, with Roger Waters having booted him during the recording sessions, but with hindsight it looks like Wright’s being kind of cocky cos he knows he’s the only one of the four who’ll make money from the tour because he’s on a salary now, and the remaining trio are putting on a collective brave face at the fact they’re about to lose nearly half a million pounds between them.

It gets stupider

OBVIOUSLY.

Yeah, the story of Oolong vs Zuck in a cage fight wasn’t sufficiently idiotic, apparently, cos now mother Musk has stepped in and demanded Zuck leave her little boy alone. I can’t wait for the followup story interviewing Beast about his feelings on the matter:

“I don’t know, man, I’m just a sheepdog, and these two-legged sheep just confuse the crap out of me… This ‘money’ thing I’ve heard about just seems to make them into complete fuckwits for some reason…”

Mastodon’t?

Found an interesting article about what the author considers the failure of the move away from Twitter to Mastodon and other “fediverse” services. I myself was among the Twitter migrants to Mastodon after the Oolong takeover last November (https://aus.social/@inanimatecarbongod should anyone care), but I’m one of those who stayed; I know quite a few friends and other Twitter folks who set up accounts that they then didn’t use or barely used, and who consequently remained on the bird site. Which I also did, cos I’d intended to be one of those people who terminated their association with Twitter entirely, but time went on and too many people I knew kept using Twitter and so have I, though vastly less than I used to.

I dislike the moralising tone some Masto users take about people still on Twitter, that by staying there they’re basically enabling the latest coming of fascism or some similar formulation, much as I disliked the harrumphing against those Twitter users who found the new layout of Masto rather less intuitive than the old place. Cos when I first checked Mastodon out after the Tumblr “no more porn!” meltdown of 2018, it confused the fuck out of me. How the hell did this work? What was this business about instances? Though when I went to finally try it out last year I actually found it a lot easier to sign up and use than it first looked.

But what did Masto actually offer apart from a social media platform not being run by an actual fascist enabler? This is a question the article asks, and it finds Masto wanting, particularly when it comes to the decentralisation thing. I found this particularly pertinent:

Then there’s the absolutely abysmal UX of following someone who exists on another Mastodon instance when you’re linked to their profile, which involves the non-obvious steps of manually copying and pasting a URL into a search box on your home instance, waiting for a connection to be made, then following them, at which point you won’t see any of their old posts, just their new ones. Compare and contrast with Twitter’s handling, which is where you search for a username, can see all their posts and can follow them without having to manually copy and paste a single damn thing.

Yeah, this for me has always been a major stumbling block for Mastodon. On Twitter you can just do things like this without the rigmarole that Masto insists on. That comparative ease of use is going to be a bigger draw for people to stay on Twitter than all the talk of decentralisation is a draw for Masto. The latter is a lot more pleasant to be around than Twitter, and I’ve encountered a bunch of people worth following there, but, to be honest, I’m not using it an awful lot either. In that I have a bit over 2000 posts on Masto since November, but my own original posts are very much in the minority; I find I’m a lot happier reposting other people’s stuff than I am making my own. (Much like how I’m using Twitter, in fact.) What energy I’ve got I want to use here rather than anywhere else.

Anyway, worth reading the whole article, though I was kind of struck by one of the comments:

Mastodon appears to be very welcoming to LGBTQ folks, communists, socialists, scientists, Apple users, and not so much to Democrats not right of Bernie, Microsoft, Corporations, Windows, and positively hostile to Nazis and associated Republicans.

This is basically part of the commenter describing their experience of Masto, and I’d say it’s fairly accurate… I’m just not sure about that last clause. The commenter is not actually pro-fash, it should be said, but I just find the wording a bit… odd. I mean, many Republicans are worth being hostile to, and there’s no reason not to be hostile to Nazis. Just seemed an odd thing to point out.

Not so live wire?

There was some fuss at the Glastonbury festival over the last few days about a performer called Billy Nomates, who I’d never heard of before, cos her manner of performing is basically her doing live vocals with pre-recorded electronics. The bit I saw sounded good enough, not a bad song, crowd were apparently quite into it from the reports I read, but the performance attracted a lot of pissbabies on the BBC website bitching about it not being “real” or something.

A propos of nothing, here’s “real” rock band Motley Crue apparently miming at a recent festival appearance.

This is not the first time they’ve been accused of this. Lars Ulrich from Metallica charged them in the 90s with having mimed at an awards show, and Mick Mars has also levelled the same charge at them in a lawsuit against the band:

“During much of the band’s recent tenure, Sixx continually ‘gaslighted’ Mars by telling him that he (Mars) had some sort of cognitive dysfunction, and that his guitar playing was sub-par, claiming that Mars forgot chords, and sometimes started playing the wrong songs.
“Astonishingly, Sixx made these claims about Mars‘s playing while he (Sixx) did not play a single note on bass during the entire U.S. tour. Ironically, 100% of Sixx‘s bass parts were nothing but recordings. Sixx was seen fist pumping in the air with his strumming hand, while the bass part was playing. In fact, a significant portion of (Vince) Neil‘s vocals were also pre-recorded. Even some of (Tommy) Lee‘s drum parts were recordings. Some fans actually noticed that Lee was walking toward his drum set as they heard his drum part begin.”

Considering that both Lars and Mars have beef with Motley Crue (the former’s going back to the birth of both bands, the latter’s because they allegedly kicked him out of his), perhaps both could be seen as questionable witnesses here, but the video in the first article is, frankly, kind of damning. It’s an audience-shot clip, but the view is good enough that, yeah, you can indeed hear Vince Neil’s voice continuing past the point where he pulls the mic away from his face. Indeed, during the chorus it sounds like there’s more than one voice singing, like it’s been double-tracked. Unless Tommy Lee’s on backup and you just can’t see him, Vince is the only one singing (I feel somehow that the hot chick writhing at back of stage was doing it even if she did have a microphone in hand). And guest Machine Gun Kelly was visibly not rapping all of his part (though I did rather enjoy the crowd booing as they realised who he was).

So there you go, “real” live music for you. At least Tor Maries from Billy Nomates brought her own voice with her.

RIP Titan

And yeah, the Titan submersible situation has ended as badly as it looked like it would, with the announcement the other day that the point where they lost contact with it on Sunday was probably the point where the thing imploded. The only consolation from which is that it would’ve happened so fast—within a millisecond, apparently—that none of them would’ve been able to register anything was untoward.

This Graun piece kind of echoes what I said the other day about the ghoulishness of some of the commentary:

Beneath the ostensible fears for the wellbeing of the Titan’s passengers lurked another, uglier emotion: excitement. It was evident in the myriad gleeful tweets mocking the irony that a vessel seeking the Titanic might have succumbed to a similar fate. It was evident in the grotesque live countdowns of the assumed dwindling supply of oxygen in the sub. It was evident in the churn of ghoulish tabloid articles feverishly speculating about what might have happened to those aboard and the torment they would surely be going through. […]
It was evident, too, in the focus on the wealth of the men and the sums they must have stumped up for the expedition (about £200,000). Far from making their situation more pitiable, their riches seemed only to lessen the empathy and assuage the guilt of those gripped by the story: it confirmed a sense that these people were not like us.

Yes. And we now know that the young fellow, Suleman Dawood, the 19 year old student, he was afraid of going on this thing. He basically went cos his dad told him to. I can’t not have some sympathy for someone who didn’t get much chance to live.

And, equally, I’m finding myself having less and less sympathy for Stockton Rush. I hesitate to say anyone deserves to die as such, cos who am I really to make that call, but the more information that comes out, the more of an inevitable disaster the Titan looks like it had to be. Even though it actually did make a number of safe dives in the last couple of years, that evidently wasn’t going to last. The whole story is so hideous and unnecessary.

Oh.

All that babbling I did about the Russia situation last night was a bit pointless, cos it turned out less like 1917 and more like 1991… and we know how that ended too, but this time there isn’t a Soviet Union to disintegrate, it’s long since been reduced to its constituent states…

Anyway, it appears Lukashenko has brokered some sort of deal whereby Prigozhin has called an end to his hissy fit and accepted exile in Belarus without facing any charges, and… that’s it? Not with a bang but a whimper indeed. I don’t even know what to say about it, the whole thing feels anticlimactic and weirdly pointless. I’d have thought there would at least be some sort of fight between the Wagner mob and the proper army. Baffling.