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06/16/2020 02:29 PM
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Occasionally Amusing, Occasionally Uncomfortable, Always Bizarre
Current mood:
 overstimulated
As a grown adult who had no fondness for emo music or the subculture when it was actually relevant and has no fondness for it now, this is a rather bizarre website to have a presence on. I found, and still find, people — female and male— who conformed to the subculture's fashion to be rather attractive, but that was about it. I'd rather listen to nu metal than emo, because even though I hate nu metal more and consider it to be the worst thing ever to happen to rock, it at least has an inherent trainwreck element whereupon its trashy wrechedness is achieved in unexpected ways. Every emo song sucks in exactly the same way, because they're all the same song.
I used to joke in the aughts about how there was absolutely nothing about the then-contemporary culture and subcultures that people could probably have nostalgia for in the future — my favorite thought experiment was the speculation over whether or not people would become nostalgic for the 80s nostalgia that was so ubiquitous during the aughts. I was ended up being half-right in that respect; instead 80s nostalgia itself becoming nostalgic, 80s nostalgia simply never went away in pop culture. I can forgive members of my generation for listening to emo, because it was right in front of them so they may as well have passively consumed it, but if you're not of age during the moment of a subculture's relevance, then you have to actively seek out the media in order consume it. People after the 60s continue actively seek out The Beatles and it's understandable because the music is so good that it should be sought out, ditto for people after the 80s Metallica or any other example celebrating the victors of the test of time. I'm sorry, but the likes of My Chemical Romance cannot have stood the test of time, because they never should have stood the test of their own moment.
Nevertheless, here I am on a website surrounded by people who have actively sought out this subculture that was never good to begin with, and enjoyed its foundational texts so much that they decided to don the uniforms, appropriate the lingo, and rebuild the meeting place. Now, I'm not going to say you can't enjoy this sh*t — okay, I kind of am — and I believe that if someone is going to be an emo after the year 2009 ended, then they are entitled Zionist birthright to congregate on a MySpace replica on the same grounds that a metalhead born after the 80s is entitled to wear a battle jacket, but I will never not be weirded out by these damned kids, and the the absurdity of their existence on this shared platform would be a lot easier laugh off instead of wincing in discomfort if they did not constitute the vast, vast majority of this site's populace.
No offense to anyone to whom this description applies. Now, get the f*** off my lawn.
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04/10/2020 04:50 PM
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"Epic collection, friend"
I wanted to save the new Nightwish album, but I ended up breaking Spotify instead.
I did not know there was a limit to how many albums I could save, nor do I understand why there needs to be one. Spotify is a cloud-based service that I pay for. Saving an album does not equate to me owning an album and taking up some quantity of space on a hard-drive; saving an album on the service is effectively giving the user a bookmarked hyperlink to listen to the album which exists in Spotify's cloud storage. The closest analogue to a saved album on Spotify is a bookmark on a web-browser; imagine if NetScape or your favorite browser set a limit to how many bookmarks you could save. Paying customers should be able to save an infinite amount of albums. This is an arbitrary limit unrelated to any technical limitations. The limit, apparently, is based on songs, not albums. Specifically, it is a 10,000 song limit, which may seem justifiable if you're one of the Damn Kids who only listens to and saves individual songs, which are usually singles. Those of us who listen to albums, which constitute the way that artists intend for their music to be distributed whether you personally consume them or not, are f***ed. Let's say that the average album contains 12.5 songs: that would make an 800-album library reach the song limit. If 800 albums seems like a lot, consider that the types of bands people adore so much that they'd want to save their entire discography are the bands who last for an entire career of say, twenty-ish years and 15 albums (usually about 12.5ish canon studio albums, but a hardcore fan might want to save a live album or two for variety's sake). 15 albums consisting of 12.5 albums counts for 187.5 songs, and that would represent the complete discography of a single band with a complete career. 10,000 songs divided by 187.5 songs is 53, meaning that you would only be able to save the complete discographies of 53 bands who have had complete careers. That is not accounting for outlier artists like Frank Zappa, who released 42 studio albums in his lifetime; that's 527 songs. This is also not accounting for situations where the members of the band also have solo careers which would interest any fan of the proper band. For example, Genesis released 14 studio albums in their 27-year career, but Peter Gabriel has 7 solo albums, Phil Collins has 7, and Steve Hackett has 17; that's 45 albums or 562 songs, and that's only counting the solo careers people care about. Consider that some of the most popular bands of all time (The Beatles, Pink Floyd, Led Zeppelin) have similar situations regarding extensive solo works and it is very possible for regular people to run into this problem even if they're not into posthumous Frank Zappa archives or obscure Les Claypool experimental collaborations. If you wanted to save the complete discographies of a mere 17 bands with Genesis-esque solo spinoff situations, you would run into the 10,000 song limit. SEVENTEEN BANDS. The song limit is so arbitrary that you'll hit it whether your 10,000 songs are all three minutes long or twenty minutes long. That puts me in a privileged position as a progressive rock fan, as it is not unusual for prog albums to consist of three songs, each lasting fifteen minutes, but this is absurd for anyone who enjoys music. The premier music streaming service is targeting music-listeners. Music-listeners. We're a group of people who will sit for hours, days, even weeks on end, listening to noises. Over, and over, and over all for nothing more than the recollection of doing it. We'll punish ourselves listening to Ringo Starr solo albums that others would consider torture because it don't come easy. We'll spend most, if not all of our free time listening to Freddie Mercury erotically moan over a disco beat just so we can get to the track with David Bowie on guest vocals. Many of us have made careers out of doing just these things: slogging through the same riffs all day, the same drum fills over and over, hundreds of times to the point where we know every little detail such that some have attained such music nirvana that they can literally play Nirvana covers blindfolded. Do these people have any idea how many records have been scratched, compact discs overheated in car stereo systems, headphones discarded due to impossible entanglements? All to latter be referred to as bragging rights? These people honestly think this is a battle they can win? They take Napster? We already seeded torrents of our entire libraries. They shoot John Lennon? Music listeners aren't shy about throwing their money at George Harrison, or even Wings. They think calling us Satan-worshipers, suicide-sympathizers, or swashbuckling pirates is going to change us? We've been called worse things by Tipper Gore. They picked a fight against a group that's already grown desensitized to grindcore lyrics describing the entrails ripped from a virgin's cunt, who enjoy the loudness war Rick Rubin has waged against us for years and take it ask us when our substitute teachers demand we stand up and tell the class what we want to do with our lives. Our obsession with proving we want to rock after being told we can't rock is so deeply ingrained from years of dealing with our fathers wanting to watch the news and proving to him that Megadeth music videos ARE, in fact, the news. Music-listeners are fighters by nature. We love to fight for our rights to party. The worst thing you did in all of this was to challenge us. You're not special, you're a creep and a weirdo; this is just another PMRC hearing.
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02/25/2020 03:44 PM
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Sasquatch Conservation: An Exception to Malthusian Anti-Natalism
Current mood:
 vital
Acclaimed Cryptozoologist Loren Coleman states: "I give a lecture called Sex and the Single Sasquatch. People laugh at first; but then, after laughing, they have to start thinking. What I've found in the sexual realm is that, as opposed to the fantasy that most people assume —of a well-endowed Bigfoot having sex with Indian native girls—the reality of the sexual aspects is mostly with regard to human men being kidnapped to have sex with younger, female Bigfoot."
Which brings me to this blog post.
My university speeches on Malthusian population principles have brought numerous people to tears as they realized that their Judeo-Christian dreams of fruitful multiplication were, in fact, selfish assertions of anthropocentric entitlement to the world's finite resources. The inconvenient truth is that the nuclear family has cast the same shadow of ominous doom over Mother Earth's continued existence as the nuclear bomb.
With such an overabundance of humans, it requires one hell of an ego for anyone cognizant of overpopulation to declare your genes so important that they must persist in new individuals during a time when we need drastically fewer roaming these lands. I may be pretentious enough to regularly use my own name as an adjective, but my ego is not large enough to insist the world needs baby Klobbers running around to knock society's proverbial Diddy Kongs off their progressively sidescrolling paths down the bottomless crevice that has been inexplicably cracked into this pirate ship we call life. Conjointly, I may advocate for the efficient mass liquidation of any soul enriched by the latter day George Lucas, but even my black heart lacks the malice to curse a newborn with the genetic lingerings of whatever the hell I've got going on in my head. I will not contribute to this ecologically suicidal catastrophe with the procreation of another human being.
However, as acclaimed cryptozoologist Loren Coleman has acknowledged, the record of has accounted for far more human males being kidnapped than human females at the hands of alleged sasquatches. Those who subscribe the North American wood ape belonging to the genus Homo have extrapolated that these abductions could be performed so that the human male can mate with a young sasquatch female. I promise to never use my sperm to bring another human to life, but should a bigfoot family ever abduct me for the purpose of hybridization with one of their females, I will happily and voluntarily cooperate in providing my sexual services to the noble cause of bigfoot procreation.
As Phil Collins so eloquently described the issue, there are too many people making too many problems, but I think we can all agree that, whatever quantity constitutes the sasquatch population, it is nowhere near large enough. I had always interpreted a paradox between Phil's observation of human overpopulation correlating with love scarcity, but correlation is not causation. Nowhere in Invisible Touch was it stated that it was specifically human love which was not going around enough. Similarly to how that classic 1986 album's title track was sung with the word "mess up" on the studio recording, but Phil always sang "f*** up" during live performances, I suspect that Atlantic Records censored the true lyrics to Land of Confusion, removing any mentions of sasquatches so not to offend the theocratic sensibilities of Reagan's America. Retrospect makes it clear that what Phil always meant to sing was "there's too many men, too many people making too many problems, and not much squatch love to go around".
Let me be perfectly clear about numerous points. I personally doubt that the addition of human blood into the sasquatch gene pool could ever be anything but a detriment to the sixth great ape, but they're the ones initiating abduction, so I will respectfully yield that they see something in our kind that I don't. Secondly, I want to assert a deep moral opposition to bestiality while raising the question, if Homo sapiens and an unverified Homo species have coexisted for years with comparable intelligence and bipedal capabilities, and it is the sapiens who polluted the earth beyond saving while the bigfoot peacefully roamed in defense of the forests, then which species truly represents man and which one is monster? I volunteer for this duty as a conservation effort for a presumably endangered primate, not to satisfy eager bigfoot fetishism. I am not a zoophile or a furry. I am not sexually attracted to bigfoot. My visits to Candy's Music Shop in Donkey Kong 64 were done exclusively to refill the music energy of my Kong party. Get your mind out of the gutter.
However, if my arranged sasquatch mate, presumably a young female with much self-esteem invested into hormonal romance, should happen to be Neo-Myspace stalking me, I want to reassure to you that you are a specific and extraordinary exception to this rule.
This post was not written to declare intent of action. It's like marking yourself as an organ donor on your driver's license. You're not saying you're necessarily going to die in a car wreck and donate your organs, you're just putting it out there for accountability. I'm not pontificating about bigfoot fornicating, as you may think. I'm just putting it out there, that should the situation arise, I will be ready.
I am a conservationist.
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