Album Review - UNEARTH’D

 

One of my readers was kind enough to send me an advance digital copy of this compilation album to review, and I was of course thrilled to agree to do it. UNEARTH’D is a collection of underground darkwave, post-punk and deathrock, put together in celebration of World Goth Day on May 22nd, which is when this album will officially be released. As an aside I had forgotten there was a World Goth Day; I would have thought if there were such a holiday it would be in either autumn or winter, because it gets really hot being dressed in black leather that time of the year. Although I guess goths in South America and Australia will be fine. Anyway, I found this to be a very fine compilation, like a well put-together mix CD. It introduced me to several new bands; even though I like to think I’m well-informed about new music in the goth scene the only band I had heard of before listening to this was Secret Shame, so this album does a good job of exposing underground bands to new listeners. So I recommend this album if the genre is up your alley, because you might just discover something new that you like. I think it would be great if this album became an annual compilation released for every World Goth Day, giving spotlight to under-appreciated bands.

I liked every song, but if I had to pick a top three from the album they’d be “Lost” by Horror Vacui, “Goodbyes That Last For Years” by Feeding Fingers, and “Let Me In” by Vincas; the last of which made it into my Top 5 Songs of the Month for April because of its inclusion on this compilation. For that I did a mini review of the track. All of the bands on the compilation are worth checking out though. You can think of this as a sampler for new bands to discover and listen to.

You can buy the album on Bandcamp, as well as sample a few of the tracks for yourself:

https://brokensoundtapes.bandcamp.com/album/unearthd

Track listing:

Dead Cells - Listen 

Horror Vacui - Lost

Vision Video - Static Drone 

Secret Shame - Storm

Feeding Fingers - Goodbyes That Last for Years

Solemn Shapes - Concealed 

Vincas - Let Me In (Dream Tent Remix)

Entertainment - Voyeur (single edit)

M is We - Arts and Krafts

Night Battles - Summer of Loathe 

Cold Choir - Paper Flowers

The Machine in the Garden - Beyond

Dispel - Journey into Limbo

Of note, when I was looking these bands up I found that two of them released music videos for tracks that appear on this compilation, which I might as well share. Listen for yourself!

Audiobiography - Reflections of My Life as Mixtapes

I’m turning 35 this year. Do it all over again, and I’ll be 70. It doesn’t seem that long ago I was worried that double my age was 50. I don’t personally feel 35, although my lower back begs to differ. But then, what does it mean to “feel” an age anyway? I appreciate the number of “Happy birthday” messages on Facebook. It can get a little overwhelming, but like having too much food in the refrigerator, if that’s your biggest problem you must be lucky. Birthdays used to excite me. Now, as the age number climbs, they haunt me. For some reason, ages that end in 5 or 0 are the worst. Completely abstract and arbitrary, but behind their symbolism, birthdays represent something very real. Grains of sand slipping through an hourglass. Time ticks away, in a cruel endless flow that accelerates with every passing year, and my body is gradually breaking down. No one really believes that they’re going to grow old when they’re young. “Other people age, but of course, I’ll be the exception.” It gets harder to live in such denial as you begin to age. The illusion has been shattered. Is it time for a midlife crisis yet? I’m still not over my quarter life crisis. But no matter how much time passes, no matter how much I may change, I am and always have been at my core, myself.

Music has been a constant companion to my existence on this floating space rock since the beginning. There are songs I associate with different periods of my life. I’ve been making mixtapes since I was 12, and I started making mix tapes covering eras in my life after I turned 20, as a retrospective of my life up to that point. The first of these is Mikey’s Music. I have mentioned on my blog that as a kid I went by my middle name Michael, and there were a few years where I went by Mikey. Hence, this mix was the music that Mikey liked. Nearly a separate entity from who I am now, but still me, deep down. It’s definitely just a summary, being only 90 minutes long but covering my first 12 years. Perhaps because I have retained so few memories from that long ago, it feels complete enough. It mainly consists of 1990s alternative rock. 

The next tape, Suren’s Songs: The Teen Years, covers my teens, from 13 to 19. This tape, 120 minutes long this time, follows my transition from alternative rock to metal and finally into dark electronic goth genres. Seven years in two hours was still only scratching the surface.

When I turned 30 I made the next one, Suren’s Songs: The Roaring Twenties, covering my life from ages 20 to 29. During these years I became a goth. Das Ich, And One and Ayria were my favorites. This was ten years in a two hour tape, or twelve minutes per year. Two to three songs for each year. So a lot was omitted. You still get a feel for each year. 

Wih my thirties, I’m going to do what I wish I had thought of sooner. Each five years will get a 90 minute tape. 16 minutes per year. That will be about four songs per year. I originally came up with this idea because two hour blank tapes are getting harder to find, since they don’t manufacture them anymore. But this gives each decade three hours, and I can cover more. I will do this for the rest of my life, as long as I can still make mix tapes.

I am going to share the playlists of each tape here on my blog. Then, you will be able to hear my life story. Of course, I have my own unique memories and interpretations embedded in each song. Thus, I’m the only one who will ever really understand these tapes. Just like we all are the only ones who truly understand our own minds. But I want to share them anyway. Perhaps someone who has been on a similar life path as I will relate to them.

Because I’m tired of Spotify not having half the songs I put on my mixtapes when I try to share them on my blog, I made a YouTube playlist this time, of all four mixtapes in one. And it was only missing one song (“Missing Track” by And One...ironically). Where available I included music videos, but not every song has a music video. I did this more for myself (just like this blog, pretty much), I don’t know who would actually want to listen to it. But it is a public playlist.

Listen along here:

https://youtube.com/playlist?list=PLUzP1Twau7QIG1JgtWBPoGB1WaugydIcx

I wonder though. If my life were a mix tape, would I still be on Side A? If I live to 70, this would be where I flip the tape over. Hopefully I will live to be older than that. But I don’t know how long I’ll live. We are all serving out a death sentence in this strange universe, time and method of execution unknown. 

Mikey’s Music

This tape was just a mix, with no real chronological order. The later ones were more orderly. Still, it is arranged in such a way that the songs energetically flow together, giving it a whimsy, sentimental and nostalgic 1990s feel, but of course, with darkness lingering just beneath the surface. The other tapes don’t have that same flow, so sometimes the transition is abrupt and jarring. The first track, “Sledgehammer” by Peter Gabriel, accompanies one of my earliest memories, watching the music video on MTV as a toddler. It was released the same month I was born, April 1986, so in a way I feel that it heralded my birth. Most of the rest are from what was the prime of my childhood, from ages 9 to 12, in the mid-to-late 1990s. The time I am most nostalgic for, late Elementary School. This was when I first really started listening to the radio, mainly alternative rock stations, but before I started making mixtapes. It was my mother who was into this sort of music, and when you’re young your music tastes can sometimes match that of your parents, until you become a teenager and start listening to music they would never enjoy. I couldn’t leave out music from earlier in my childhood though, such as Paula Abdul, or the “Turtle Power” rap from the 1990 Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles movie, nor music from Sonic the Hedgehog.

Side A

Peter Gabriel - Sledgehammer 

Collective Soul - Precious Declaration

The Smashing Pumpkins - Mellon Collie and the Infinite Sadness

The Smashing Pumpkins - Tonight, Tonight

Dishwalla - Counting Blue Cars

Oasis - Wonderwall

The Mighty Mighty Bosstones - The Impression That I Get

Green Day - Brain Stew

Faith No More - Epic

The Prodigy - Breathe

Third Eye Blind - Semi-Charmed Kind of Life

Sonic the Hedgehog 2 Ending and credits theme

Side B

Partnerz in Krime - Turtle Power

Paula Abdul - Cold Hearted

Presidents of the United States of America- Peaches

Red Hot Chili Peppers - Coffee Shop

Gin Blossoms - Follow You Down

Fuel - Shimmer

The Smashing Pumpkins- Thirty Three

Oasis - Champagne Supernova

Big Pig - Break Away

Soundgarden - Black Hole Sun

Marvelous 3 - Freak of the Week

Suren’s Songs: The Teen Years

This tape was done chronologically. You’ll immediately notice an abrupt change in tone from the previous tape, as my childhood imploded due to bullying, school, and just puberty. It was an abrupt loss of innocence. “Anthem to the Year 2000” by Silverchair in particular signified my turn to the dark side, at least with regards to my musical taste. The Linkin Park type of stuff kinda makes me cringe a little bit, but it’s what I was into at the time, it’s part of who I was. What 14-year-old wasn’t listening to that band in the early 2000s? The mix takes us from my tumultuous Middle School years to my angsty, angry and dark High School years, and at the end, a change in direction as I finally began to work out who I was. It is a chronicle of my transition from Michael to Suren. An unpleasant, bumpy ride. 

Age 13

Silverchair - Anthem to the Year 2000
The Smashing Pumpkins - Disarm
Reveille - The Phoenix 
System of a Down - Sugar

Age 14

Linkin Park - By Myself

Rammstein - Mein Herz Brennt

Disturbed - Stupify

Age 15

The Avalanches - Frontier Psychiatrist 
Rob Zombie - Dragula
Korn - Kick the P.A.
Adema - Freaking Out

Age 16 

Rammstein - Ashe zu Ashe

Linkin Park - Points of Authority (remix)

Korn - Thoughtless 

Covenant - Sulphur Feast

Age 17

Dimmu Borgir- Puritainia

Cradle of Filth - From the Cradle to Enslave

Mortiis - Parasite God

The Kovenant - Toward the Crown of Nights

Age 18 

Hanzel und Gretyl - Let the Planets Burn

Covenant - Through the Eyes of the Raven

Kamelot - Farewell

Das Ich - Uterus (Ashe Remix)

Age 19

Mortiis - Way too Wicked

Disillusion - Back to Times of Splendor 

Apoptygma Berzerk - Nothing Else Matters

Silverchair - Cemetery

Ehh, it’s kind of a cringey title. I should rename it. But it’s too much trouble at this point.

Suren’s Songs - The Roaring Twenties

My twenties were much less of an emotional rollercoaster, and this tape probably reflects that. It chronicles the music of my college years mainly, plus my trip to Armenia at the end. I suffered heartbreak with my first girlfriend, but met my wife a couple years later, and my second relationship ever was a success. It was overall an enjoyable time in my life, I had such dreams and ambitions, which didn’t quite wind up working out the way I had hoped, but let’s save that for the next tape. Once I discovered And One at age 23 that was almost all I listened to for a long time, so some years they appear more than once. They had a very extensive and varied discography. Anyway, I had a little extra room at the end of the tape, so that’s why Age 29 got four songs.

Age 20

Theatre of Tragedy - And When He Falleth

Das Ich - Nahe

Voltaire - The Happy Song

Age 21

Tristania - Tender Trip on Earth

Eisbrecher - Sakrileg 11

Voltaire - Hell in a Handbasket

Age 22

Orgy - Stitches

E Nomine - Wolfen - Das Tier in Mir

Big Bad Voodoo Daddy - Save my Soul

Age 23

And One - Sometimes

Deathstars - Cyanide

And One - Stand the Pain

Age 24

Ayria - Lovely Day

Project Pitchfork - December Sadness

And One - Years

Age 25

Ayria - Start Again

Brighter Fires - From the Sky

And One - Save the Hate

Age 26

Mortiis - Closer to the End

Narine - Հայ եմ ես

And One - The Sun

Age 27

Ayria - Big City Lullaby 

Light Asylum - Heart of Dust

The Jetzons - Hard Times

Age 28

And One - An Alle Krieger

Zombie Girl - Panic Attack

And One - Missing Track (missing from Youtube too sadly)

Age 29

Alice in Chains - Nutshell

Ministry - Revenge

And One - Nyctophiliac 

Aurelio Voltaire- The Masquerade 

Like the Venn diagram?

Suren’s Songs - The Thirties Part I

The dawn of my thirties was really when I began to realize the harshness of reality, as well as the first aches and pains of aging, after I was cast out from paradise when I graduated with my Master’s Degree, which left me over-qualified for the jobs I wanted yet at the same time without enough work experience, and saddled with insurmountable debt. College had been a scam. I also learned through trying to publish my first novel that the traditional publishing world is a lottery, and self publishing only becomes profitable if you have enough money to market yourself in the first place. However, I did start working at a historical museum which I very much enjoyed. I got married, which of course was nice. When my wife became pregnant though I could no longer stay at my museum job because I needed health insurance, I toiled away at call centers, which chipped away at my sanity and became a very low point in my life. After this though, I got to raise my son, and with nothing at all to lose, I started blogging, writing Oz books and a webcomic. I stopped caring whether or not my art made money, and I accepted the fact that I may never be rich or famous, and that I may always be obscure and fade into oblivion. Doing so has been liberating. I got interested in astronomy, I started to finally contemplate existence, and see the bigger picture. Other than the shadows of my past, as well as the realization of what a dreary and unjust world this is, I’m overall in a good place at the moment. Anyway, here’s my mixtape. It chronicles the ups and downs of my bumpy journey through publishing, jobs, marriage and parenthood these past five years. I will do the next tape when I’m 40...in five years. Excuse me while I scream into a pillow at that revelation.

Age 30

New Order - Shellshock

Vellum Stairs - You’re Always Guilty

Katzenjammer - Soviet Trumpeter

Velvet Acid Christ - Evoked

Age 31

Brotherhood - Damned

The Midnight - River of Darkness 

Glaare - My Love Grows in Darkness

Paradise Walk - Rogue 

Age 32

William Control - Cemetery (acoustic version)

The Cure - Cold

Ministry - Game Over

Daniel Guerrera - Dear Rosie

Age 33

Holygram - Still There

Ace Marino - Summer

Silent Em - No Rest

Buzz Kull - Avoiding the Light

Age 34

SYZYGYX - In Pieces

Lebanon Hanover- Avalanche 

Forever Grey - The Style is Death

Slow Danse With the Dead- So Obnoxious 

An Ode to a Hat

 

It has been twenty years this month since I began wearing this piece of tanned cow meat on my head, and I thought I would write about it, because it played a significant role in the development of my identity and sense of self. 

It was April 2001. I was 14 going on 15, and bullying throughout Middle School had left my ego utterly destroyed. I was still going by Michael, after all, it would be a few years before I chose to go by my birth name Suren, thereby accepting my birthright. I took band class during my Freshman year of High School, despite enduring three years with a sociopathic band teacher in Middle School who despite being a teacher seemed to hate teaching. Not a semester would go by where she wouldn’t make some poor kid cry in front of the class at least once. I suppose I was one of those kids once. I remember when I accidentally dropped and broke my clarinet, and she just screamed at me for it even though I was already upset. Another moment that stood out to me was her long-winded post-Columbine shooting speech. Someone had left their timer on in their instrument case, and she was afraid it was a bomb. She found out otherwise, but of course it was our fault she was paranoid because our generation is a bunch of soulless, emotionless, murderous robots. She said something along those lines. I could have taken shop class, or some other elective, but for some reason I was a glutton for punishment. The band teacher at my High School asked us to raise our hands if we’d had her as a teacher in Middle School. When we did, he sincerely apologized to us. She was that bad. 

But had it not been for my continued dedication to being tormented in a class I really didn’t have to take, I would have never gotten my hat. Band class in High School was way better. The teacher was cool. He even had us bring in the music we listened to and he would tell us the tempo of the music. I brought in Rammstein and scared the whole class. How fun. Anyway, every year the band class did a big week-long trip on a cruise ship to Ensenada, Mexico, where we put on a band concert. I got to go for this trip, my first time outside the United States (well, barely outside of it). I had my portable CD player with me of course, and to this day listening to Rammstein’s Mutter album and System of a Down’s self titled album make me think of this trip. We were only actually in Mexico for a couple hours, mostly we were on the ship. Ensenada was a tourist trap, not like real Mexico. Beneath the artificiality of it I could sense the real poverty of the people living there, sadly. Some kid was selling candy on the side of the street, and I asked him for change for a twenty dollar bill and he just ran off with it. I was surprised, but not angry, really. 

I went into a clothing store, and of course all the clothes was much cheaper than it would be in the US. They had a stand with leather hats on it, and I was immediately drawn to them. They were flat caps, technically. I can’t quite say why, but I think it was subconsciously because they reminded me of Fievel’s hat in An American Tail. Though 14-year-old me would never admit it, even to himself. This was during my “cartoons are lame and for babies” stage, which thankfully ended after High School. 

I picked a hat that fit me, and from then on, my hat was like a part of my body. Inseparable. I would take it off to sleep or take a shower, or when it was raining and I had to protect it from moisture, but other than that I almost never took it off. No matter how hot it got outside. Yes, this was probably not advisable. But it was something I could construct a new identity around. It was part of who I was. I always wore it backwards, for some reason it always looked better that way. The leather bill is too floppy for it to be worn forward. I think other kids at school were envious, because I soon saw other people wearing this style of hat too. It didn’t start a full-blown trend, but it got people’s attention I think. 

And over the years, I changed beneath the hat, while the hat remained the same. I’ve taken good care of it, and it hasn’t aged a day. It went with me on all my trips. I wore it in Florida, Armenia, Artsakh. It’s been everywhere I have been.  In my twenties I started collecting other hats, and wearing those a bit more often as I began to dress in button-up shirts and a blazer, which the leather hat doesn’t really look good with. I have a trilby, a derby, a top hat, a Greek Fisherman’s Cap, and a British flat cap (made of wool not leather). But when I wear my traditional outfit (leather hat, black hoodie, jeans), I feel like my old self again. I feel 15 again. When I drew my self portrait for my art and prose page over on Facebook, I drew myself wearing it, because even though I don’t look as young anymore, that still represents me deep down.

My Hat Through the Years: A Gallery

Age 15

Me with my friends, Age 16

Age 19

Me with my brothers, age 20

Age 21

Age 26, at an indy wrestling show

At Dashtadem Fortress in Armenia, Age 29

Age 34

Top 5 Songs of the Month ~ April 2021/Ահեկի 4513 ~ Statiqbloom, Christian Death, Vincas

It’s been an interesting month for me musically, since the last of these Top 5 lists. I finally got a new MP3 player that holds 16 gigabytes; far more than the paltry 2 gigabytes my old MP3 player holds. So to fill it up I’ve gone deep into my CD archives and dredged up songs I haven’t heard in years. Currently I have 1,360 songs, and that number is growing as I go through my vast CD collection. On this MP3 player, bands as far-flung from each other as Metallica, The Cure, The Smashing Pumpkins, Dimmu Borgir, Lebanon Hanover, System of a Down, Kraftwerk, Voltaire, Cradle of Filth, Das Ich, And One and Cab Calloway all coexist. It’s music from all the stages of my life. As a result, I haven’t been constantly listening to new stuff lately, but instead taking walks down memory lane. My new stuff is on there, but few and far between as I listen to each song alphabetically. At the same time though, I did do a little shopping spree on Bandcamp recently too, so I have been listening to what I bought there. Some honorable mentions that aren’t on this list which I recently bought albums from are Bleib Modern, Slow Danse With The Dead and Forever Grey. They might make it next month, I just haven’t had enough time to listen to what I purchased just yet.

Statiqbloom - Black Walks Eternal 

Bad luck isn’t brought by broken mirrors, but by broken minds. 

This is one of those songs that I’ve known about for a while but took some time to climb my personal charts. I first heard it on a livestream concert Statiqbloom released last summer on YouTube, which I thoroughly enjoyed. The more I listened to the concert the more I liked this track. I finally bought the album it’s from this past Bandcamp Friday, Blue Moon Blood, released in 2017. The voice samples are particularly fun. “What’s wrong with me? I’m not some kind of kook!” At the end of the song we even get special guest vocals by the late Stephen Hawking (not really, but it sounds like him). My first exposure to Statiqbloom was the song “Thin Hidden Hand” a few years ago. They reminded me of a mixture of Velvet Acid Christ and Das Ich, two of my all-time favorites. I haven’t been disappointed by them yet so I will be working my way through their discography. 

https://statiqbloom.bandcamp.com/album/blue-moon-blood

Christian Death - Figurative Theatre (Klute Version)

This is a song I heard through Radio Garden on one of the goth stations. Even though they are a seminal, pioneering band for goth rock, I never really got into Christian Death before. Not because I don’t like it, it just kind of slipped under my radar. I was into the electronic side of goth music (industrial, EBM, synthpop, etc.) before I got into goth rock and post-punk in recent years. But this song is so very catchy. It’s off a remix album called Death Mix that was released in 1996. This track was remixed by Klute, who now goes by Klutae. It’s quite the earworm.

You can buy it here:

https://www.amazon.com/Death-Mix-Christian/dp/B000001JT6

Vincas - Let Me In 

Vincas is a post-punk and darkwave band from Athens, Georgia. Interesting story about how I came across this song. It is part of an upcoming compilation album called UNEARTH’D, which I agreed to review on my blog. While listening to each song and kind of mentally digesting them and coming up with what to say about each, this one stood out to me the most. It seems to be about a creepy guy hanging around outside someone’s window, wanting to be let in. It’s a short song, but to the point. The twang of the guitar in this track betrays underlying southern rock influences I think. It definitely sounds like how you would think goth music from Georgia would sound.

Get it here:

https://vincas.bandcamp.com/track/let-me-in-3

No Man’s Land - Плачь

I first heard this one as part of another one of those Russian Doomer Music compilations on YouTube. The anguished, impassioned cry of “Plach! Plach! Plach! Plach !” is what got my attention. The word “Плачь”, “plach” in English letters, translates to “cry”. I didn’t realize this was what the singer was shouting repeatedly until I translated the title; I previously thought it sounded more like “blazh”. I’m still trying to learn the Russian alphabet. No Man’s Land released the album this song is from in 1997, Слезы, making it another 90s song this month that I just now discovered. I don’t know what else the song is about, but what I do understand is the emotion it.

A remastered version of the album is available on CD and digital on Bandcamp.

https://darkpage.bandcamp.com/album/no-mans-land

Minuit Machine - Lovers of the Night

Minuit Machine has long been one of my favorite coldwave bands. The songs “Don’t Run From the Fire” and “To Control” had been on my monthly charts late last year, and it was high time for this track to climb it’s way up as well, after I listened to the four track Don’t Run from the Fire EP it was on a few more times. The entire EP is excellent, by the way. Each track has so much power to it. But, the previous two tracks I mentioned kind of overshadowed the rest for me back when it first came out. This song was brought to my attention again when the music video was released in early March. Sometimes that’s kind of what it takes to get me into a song, being that I’m constantly inundated with new music. The lyrics are interesting; I can’t really tell if it’s supposed to be a happy or sad song. The music itself is melancholy. The lyrics “Dance until you die, fuck until you cry” make me wonder what the singer was getting at. 

Get it here:

https://minuitmachine.bandcamp.com/album/dont-run-from-the-fire

The Doom Scroll - The Worst of Social Media, March 2021

Here’s the second installment of a new monthly feature on my blog where I bemoan the state of the world and rant about bad memes. I don’t know how many people actually liked the first Doom Scroll, it got about 12 views. But these are kind of therapeutic so I’m going to keep doing them. If too many people saw these posts I might have to get into a dreaded internet argument, and I wouldn’t want that. So the low view count kinda works for me anyway. I am at peace with my obscurity and eventual oblivion. 

March was quite a month to be on social media. The manufactured culture wars continued, and of course, humanity slid ever closer to oblivion. You might notice more Reddit this time around. That’s because my Facebook feed didn’t update much for the first half of the month. I kept getting stuff that was two or three days old and seeing it over and over again. Could it be Zuckerberg doesn’t like these blogs so he’s keeping me from seeing things? Ha, if only I were that important. The problem seems to have righted itself now though. Anyway, beware of edgy political opinions ahead. Keep in mind a big reason I write these blogs is to have an outlet without participating in online arguments, ‘kay? Also, having a month to work on them gives me time to form the perfect comebacks to things, which I would never be able to do in a real-time argument. But I hate arguing and debating, just so you know. And I don’t consider myself an expert in everything I talk about either. 

Places I’d Rather Be Than My Old Call Center Job #109,853,739

As a palate cleanser, let’s first have a look at the surface of a planet that isn’t facing immediate doom. One that isn’t divided into arbitrary territories called countries that all hate each other. That is unless Elon Musk has his way and space capitalism gets exported there. The Perseverance rover sent back breathtaking views of the surface of Mars in March. This is the surface of what was for the majority of human existence merely a red shiny dot in the sky. What would someone 1,000 years ago think of seeing the surface of another planet? The rover even sent back audio recordings. You can hear the wind on another planet. And yet while this was happening, everyone was whining about Dr. Seuss and Mr. Potato Head. Humanity is indeed doomed. Will humanity be able to refrain from destroying itself long enough to terraform Mars and live there? I have my serious doubts. If it does happen, you know you and I aren’t going there. It will be a refuge for the billionaires after they finish making this planet uninhabitable. Best us peasants can hope for is to be taken there as servants.

Shared in the subreddit r/spaceporn. Which isn’t what it sounds like. 

Another “Don’t Make Me Tap the Sign” Meme

I hate American politics. I would much rather think about astronomy and things like that. Higher, loftier thoughts. Or just escapist fantasy, that works too. But, it inevitably affects me and people I care about, so I can’t completely shut it out. I’m not going “back to brunch” like the neo-liberals though. 

“B-b-but, orange man bad!” they might say. Yes, I agree. But he lost. Can we not bring him up anymore? It’s the Fallacy of Relative Privation. “Sure, X is bad, but Y was even worse so we must tolerate X.” I may be a bit of a conspiracy theorist, but I wonder if the reason they failed to impeach Trump was so that they could keep him around as a threat to the left so that they won’t criticize anything Biden and his team does. If he runs again in 2024 it will be another convenient excuse to keep the two-party system going. We’ll be told we have to vote blue because “You don’t want the cheeto man back in the White House, do you?” It’s all a big show. Theater, really. I wonder if it’s scripted and predetermined like pro wrestling sometimes. This is why nothing ever changes or gets better in America. But before the inevitable repeat of 2016 in 2024, can we at least have a couple years where we’re not talking about the orange oompa-loompa man, please? 

It’s not an airport, no need to announce your departure 

It’s 2021, and people are really still fighting over Nintendo vs Sega like it’s 1991? This is just sad. So I am in a Sega Genesis group on Facebook, as it was my game system of choice throughout most of the 1990s. I even have access to every game ever made on it now thanks to my Mega Everdrive. And this schmuck posts this on March 5th. I cropped his name out as a courtesy, since I would want someone to crop my name out too if I said something stupid on the internet that warranted screenshots. (Maybe this whole blog is something stupid I said on the internet.) Not long after this, the group was flooded with pro-Nintendo trolls bashing Sega, who couldn’t find something better to do with their time. I buried the hatchet with the Super Nintendo years ago. I realize that being loyal to a corporation is meaningless, because they certainly don’t care about you, just your money. It’s about as pointless as nationalism, really if you think about it. Both systems had good games. Why restrict yourself to one system? Especially these days, when the rivalry between Sega and Nintendo has been over for 20 years. I have a Retron 2 bootleg game system that plays both NES and SNES games, which I bought after my old NES died. I only have Super Mario World, The Legend of Zelda: A Link to the Past, Kirby Superstar, and a Super Game Boy cartridge that allows one to play Game Boy games on the TV, but it’s something. I guess there are some in the group who hold onto this immature grudge against the Super Nintendo like they’re still on the playground at Elementary School, this person isn’t entirely wrong about that. One day in about 30-40 years there will be a Nintendo vs Sega fight at a retirement home. People will never give it up. Prideful jerks just ruin everything. Why a grown ass adult would have their pride tied up in a damn game console is beyond me. Then again, is it any stupider than social constructs that people kill each other over, like religion, race and nationalism? In the eyes of the universe, in the cosmic sense, not really.

Who knew a Facebook group about a 30 year old game system could provide such insight into human nature? 

“Where are my grandkids?”

Man, if only I’d stop drinking lattes and eating avocados, I could be a millionaire. Anyway, I actually did have a kid on purpose, unlike many in my generation. I realize my wife and I are extremely fortunate to have a guaranteed roof over our heads. It would be a different story if we were struggling to pay rent and bills with both of us working full time. We probably wouldn’t have had a kid in that case. They’d just be stuck in daycare and most of our paychecks would go toward keeping them there. I’d rather, you know, actually raise my own kid, rather than miss their whole childhood while making a CEO richer. That’s what parents have to do these days. It was never like this before the 20th century. It’s like some people think that they’re immortal and that their kids will never grow up. They may technically know that’s not true, but they believe it deep down because their minds can’t contemplate their own mortality, and live out their finite lives accordingly. Meanwhile they’re wasting their kid’s childhood and the part of their lives where they’re still able-bodied working away at a pointless job. To paraphrase a quote by the Dalai Lama, people live as if they’ll never die, and then die having never lived. Most of my friends my age don’t have kids. I don’t blame anyone who doesn’t want kids or can’t have them. Nobody can afford them. They screwed our generation over by feeding us to the student loan sharks. Not to mention the perpetually crappy economy. And the millennials that did have kids, mostly by accident, have to become the “welfare queens” that conservatives whine about. So which is it, have kids and rely on government benefits, or don’t have kids at all? If someone has a say in it, they’ll probably choose the latter. And then the wealthy elites will start to run out of peasants to exploit. Uh oh.

I forget where I found this meme. One of the lefty groups I’m in. 

Did Dennis Nedry do Nothing Wrong?

I was far too young to be reading the Jurassic Park novel when I was ten years old, but it was my favorite book. And the movie was my favorite movie. But until I started working, I never saw things from Nedry’s perspective. Would I have screwed over the companies I worked for at the call centers for a chance to get rich? Hell yes. In a heartbeat. They treated me like an expendable number anyway. Besides, Nedry couldn’t have known he’d be Dilophosaurus food while the park descended into Malcolm’s chaos theory. He was only supposed to be gone a few minutes to deliver the dinosaur DNA and get back to the control room. The power wasn’t supposed to be out long enough for dinosaurs to start escaping. It was just bad luck. In fact, and the book goes into even more detail about this, dinosaurs had already been escaping and breeding long before Nedry did this, even making it to the mainland. So you could argue the disaster was going to happen one way or another anyway. It helps that in the book John Hammond is much more of a villain himself. They toned him down a lot for the movie, because Steven Spielberg didn’t like the idea of an evil rich character. But even movie Hammond deserves the blame for what went wrong at Jurassic Park. He spared too much expense despite claiming not to. 

Shared in Jurassic Park Raptorposting.

What-aboutism and Mental Gymnastics in Azeri Internet Discourse

Oh look, it’s the Fallacy of Relative Privation again. It’s is every Turkish/Azeri nationalist’s favorite fallacy, followed also by the Red Herring Fallacy which gets used in genocide denial. It provides an indispensable golden ticket that justifies every single depraved genocidal act they commit. Either exaggerate or outright invent atrocities committed by Armenia, and suddenly it’s okay for a guy to murder another guy in his sleep with an axe because the murderer was Azeri and his victim Armenian. Even though neither of them had anything to do with any perceived wartime atrocities in the early 1990s because they were kids at the time and weren’t there when it happened. The victim just happened to be on the wrong team. Gives them permission to destroy all the churches and monuments they want as well, which was big news this month. I had to come to accept that any land they were able to ethnically cleanse in Artsakh last year is pretty much doomed, and you might as well forget about them preserving anything Armenian there. It’s gone. Helps soften the blow when more news comes out about about their latest act of destruction. I already mourned all of that back in November. I’m more concerned with people than buildings and such. Have to say though, it makes one grateful that all Turkey does with their abandoned Armenian churches is let them decay and crumble, or turn them into barns, or occasionally mosques if they’re intact enough. That’s still better than either destroying them or making them into “Caucasian Albanian” churches for historical revisionism. 

And yes, Armenians shouldn’t be doing this what-aboutism either, and they can do it sometimes, although I don’t see their hatred institutionalized and made an inseparable part of their national identity the way it is in Azerbaijan. You’d think the Azeri nationalists would at least stop acting like sore losers after ethnically cleansing most of Artsakh, but now they’re sore winners, doubling down on their xenophobic hatred. Azeri nationalism is a cult, it hinges on scapegoating and historical revisionism. I mean, so does most nationalism if you think about it. But while the United States has its own boogeymen, you don’t see the whole country cheering at leaked videos of American soldiers torturing and beheading Afghanis or Syrians, or whatever country we’re bombing this month while the news talks about something else. I remember when evidence of torture at a prison camp did come out during the Iraq war, Americans were appalled, aside from perhaps a few psychopaths. It was a scandal. Admittedly, that was an unusual example; the default reaction by the majority of Americans is to ignore those sorts of things. There’s a reason nobody really talks about the Iraq war anymore. I suppose you could draw a lot of parallels between Azeri nationalists and white supremacists in the United States, but while the US government and media does kind of subtly, low-key cater to these people behind the scenes, especially when Republicans are in office, it’s not quite to the degree that Armenophobia and Turkic supremacy is pushed by the government and media in Azerbaijan. The bigoted fascists don’t need dog whistles in Azerbaijan, it’s all out in the open. 

I’m a recovering nationalist myself, as I’ve written about in this blog before. You can enjoy your own ethnic culture and history without thinking yours is superior and hating other groups of people. Just like you can enjoy both Sega Genesis and Super Nintendo. I’m over jingoism and tribalism, and the very concept of nation states. All it’s brought humanity is death. But I’m forced to take a side when ultra-nationalism threatens to morph into genocide. I am against the doctrine of Pan-Turkism and those who push it, not Turks and Azeris themselves. And I understand the Azeri nationalist trolls I see all the time on the internet don’t represent every Azeri, and neither does their petty, hateful dictator of a leader. I respect the Azeris who are able to deprogram from their minds all the hatred and bigotry that they’re force-fed by their government from the moment they’re born. But humans in general are a long way from getting to the point where they can overcome nationalism. Makes me want to go live on Mars.

Found on the r/ArMEMEia subreddit, which like the main r/Armenia subreddit has been terrible for my mental health these past several months. But I can’t bring myself to quit reading them. 

You know what, this calls for another palate cleanser. We need a break from all this depression. Here’s a nice picture I saw in my scrolling. 

That’s Lake Van at the top, Lake Sevan at the bottom, and between them is Mt. Ararat. You don’t see any borders from up that high, now do you? Countries aren’t real. They’re abstract constructs. Flags, national anthems, it’s all fake. Delusions created by an insane species. Humans are like little ants, fighting over ant hills. It’s good to be reminded of that before the news gets me down.

This one was shared on an Armenian group I’m in, from this page:

https://m.facebook.com/pg/Сдам-в-аренду-мысли-1437012379651420/posts/?ref=page_internal&mt_nav=0

Obey. Consume. Stay Asleep.

I love the movie They Live. Take out the sci-fi elements and it’s practically a documentary. In it, a man finds out that rich people are actually aliens enslaving humanity, and finds a pair of sunglasses that decodes their subliminal messages in advertising and media, which when boiled down to one or two words is rather simple; “obey”, “consume”, “no independent thought”, “marry and reproduce”, “submit”. When he looks at cash through them it reads “This Is Your God”. I can’t see or hear an ad myself without thinking it’s trying to get me to consume and obey. Propaganda isn’t just old World War II posters. It is all around us, all the time, and permeates our consciousness to such a degree that it becomes like the air; all around us all the time, but we forget it’s there. 

Now this ad is a pretty insidious one. You might have to click on it to read it. Basically it boils down to “stop asking to raise the minimum wage or we’ll replace you with robots and you’ll starve and die”. You have to wonder who paid for that billboard. Whoever it was should be boycotted. Now if you ask me (I know nobody ever would, but humor me for a moment) one way we could “rehabilitate” capitalism, if such a thing were possible, would be to just go ahead and replace most jobs with robots, and then give people universal basic income, a guaranteed home at least as big as a small apartment, and universal healthcare. Stuff that the presidential candidate Andrew Yang was talking about. Pay for it by cutting the military budget and taxing the obscenely rich. There are more empty homes in the US than there are homeless people. Money is a made-up concept anyway. Our overlords could do this if they wanted to (but they don’t, of course). If people wanted more money than the universal basic income or wanted a nicer home than the one allotted to them by the government, they could choose to get some kind of job, but no one would be forced to choose between wage slavery and death. And no one would have to work 40 hours a week or more. They could do whatever endeavor they would actually want to do. Follow their intellectual pursuits. Enjoy their finite existences. You know, actual freedom, not the fake freedom the US has where how free you are depends on how much money you were born into. The more grueling and mindless jobs would be automated. Jobs that will always require a human touch, like a teacher for example, would have special benefits so that people would still want to do them. This still wouldn’t solve the environmental problems capitalism causes, but it would go a long way towards alleviating the human rights problems. Of course, greedy people won’t let this happen, and I have little hope of it happening any time soon. Wouldn’t want the peasants having too much time on their hands, they might actually start thinking and forming opinions. Instead of freeing us from labor, technology is instead being used to coerce us into doing even more labor, and to control and spy on the masses. But if the masses were having all their needs met, they’d have no reason to riot. Just saying. Replacing jobs with robots and just meeting the needs of the citizens so they don’t need employment to survive makes sense even from the perspective of our oppressive capitalistic overlords. They can even still keep brainwashing us with the media and ads, they could still have complete control. But they’re either too greedy or too sadistic to do this, or both.

 As far as my actual ideal world goes, this idea of “bring on the robots, make employment optional and give people at least the bare minimum needed to survive” would be merely a compromise. It would still be capitalism, you would still have different corporations competing with one another, you would still have consumerism, rich and poor, nation states, property and money. I think all of these concepts need to be either drastically reinvented or abolished altogether, or else humanity is going to kill itself, sooner or later. We live in a society based on trade, when we should have a society based on sharing (isn’t that right....Batman?). Everything is commodified. Land, healthcare, food. You can boil almost all the world’s problems to this. Why don’t the Israelis and Palestinians just share? There, you see, I just solved the Artsakh/Nagorno-Karabakh Conflict too. Why don’t we just share land? Why does it come down to this jingoistic “my people were here longer than yours even if we have to falsify history so the land is all ours and actually your people never existed”, or “face it, you lost the war, the stronger side won, just get over it and accept your oppression and genocide” idiocy? It’s the mindset of trade and ownership that causes such conflicts. It’s the whole reason crime exists.

Not to make sweeping generalizations, but many cultures in the Western Hemisphere prior to European colonialism were based around the concept of sharing rather than trade, and had no concept of land ownership, money, or rigid borders to nation states. It’s not impossible. No other living thing on this planet trades, but they do share. Is it really so evil to think sharing is better than trading? Is sharing lazy, weak or childish? Really examine why it is you think that, if you do. And while you’re at it, examine why you think those adjectives are even a negative thing, whether or not they accurately describe sharing, which I think they don’t. Who wants you to think that those adjectives are negative and accurately describe sharing? Who benefits from it?

There you go, give me the Nobel Peace Prize now, I just solved all the world’s problems, Suren for President 2024.  Eh, I’m just some poor deluded dreamer who’d rather live in the Land of Oz than the real world. An April Fool, if you will. But it doesn’t seem like rocket science. Society formed in the first place due to sharing. Trade divided us. And resulted in things like that monstrous dystopian propaganda poster above.

Found at the A Boring Dystopia subreddit. A fun place to doomscroll. 

There is no escape.

This post caught my eye as I was scrolling Facebook. An interesting piece of absurdist humor. Yes, the pink pony is right, for most people. It costs $2,350 to renounce your US citizenship, and if you don’t do it after leaving the country for good, the US will keep taxing you even though you aren’t living there anymore. I don’t really know what they would do if you just refused to pay and went off the grid, and got lost in the Amazon rainforest or the Gobi desert or something. I’ve heard fleeing the country is a good way to get out of student loans, because really what are they going to do at that point. But the IRS may not give up so easily. Maybe they would extradite you or something. So basically, along with the expenses of actually moving to another country (passport, plane tickets, shipping your stuff over, renting an apartment or buying a home, enough savings to last until you find some source of income), poor people are stuck here, doomed to spend their lives at crappy jobs while barely making ends meet, paying rent on apartments they barely get to spend any time in. And it’s probably no accident either. It’s by design. That’s what I find hilarious when conservatives say “if you don’t like America, I’ll help you pack your bags”. Thanks for the offer. I would leave if I could, but the system has made that impossible. I have this fun idea of getting conservatives to do a crowdfunding campaign where they help pay for willing liberals and leftists to renounce their citizenships and move to another country. At least they would be rid of us, and they could go ahead and have their gun-obsessed corporate owned theocracy unopposed, it’s a win-win. 

Catching Google Translate Being Sexist

Here’s an Armenia-related post that isn’t too depressing...although I suppose it can be if you get upset by sexism. Someone on the Armenia subreddit shared this. Now in the Armenian language, there are no gender pronouns. He/she/it are all the same word, է (eh). So why is it “She is beautiful”, and “she raises the child” and “she sews”, when it could have just as easily been “he” or “it”? Why does “he” have a high income, why is “he” a politician? How’s that for gender stereotypes? At least he cooks and cleans the dishes! 

Note that having a language free of gender pronouns hasn’t exactly translated to a culture free of sexism, homophobia and transphobia. Armenian culture is very conservative overall, although I like to think it is a little bit more tolerant than its immediate neighbors, but not by much. By bringing this up I’m not trying to change Armenian culture from the outside (I understand native Armenians hate when diaspora Armenians try to do that), it is what it is and it will change (or not) on its own time, I’m just stating facts.

Still, none of this excuses Google Translate for being sexist. Was this just random? Or was it programmed this way? You have to wonder.

Oh WWF Attitude Era...

Let’s end on a funny note, shall we? So I guess NBC is starting their own streaming service (sigh, it was better when the only one was Netflix), and they’re putting wrestling on there. I thought WWE already had their own streaming service, but alas. It’s too bad they’re censoring stuff. I mean I’m okay with content warnings, but censorship never sat well with me. I think of the racist gags in old cartoons. Yes they’re awful, but censoring it is whitewashing the history, pretending it never happened. When Warner Bros. put Looney Tunes and Tom and Jerry on DVD they had a content warning with Whoopi Goldberg explaining that censoring them is historical whitewashing, and then presented the shorts unedited (although two Tom and Jerry episodes still didn’t make it on DVD, due to blackface gags which I think they could have edited out fairly easily). But anyway, I don’t think wrestling was ever quite as offensive as that. Err, except for maybe that one time. 

But yeah, just wait until that poor intern gets to the part where Mae Young gave birth to a hand. As I recall, it was a storyline involving an 80-something year old woman wrestler having a fling with a much younger wrestler named Mark Henry, whose nickname was “Sexual Chocolate”, and getting pregnant. Things got really weird in the WWF in the late 90s. That poor intern is going to have their work cut out for them going through 1998 to 2001. Nowadays it’s all boring and kid-friendly. The censorship team probably won’t need to censor anything after around 2006 or so. The name change to World Wrestling Entertainment in 2002 kind of signified the end of “kayfabe” as it’s called, because they were no longer presenting themselves as a legitimate wrestling federation, and were admitting it was all just a show. Then WCW went out of business around the same time, which was their only real competition, so they no longer needed to put as much effort into their product. They were still good for a few years after that, but the quality was in decline. Sealing the deal was the Chris Benoit incident in 2007. They needed to make their image squeaky clean after that. I mean it’s good that they’re taking better care of their employees so they don’t get brain damage and go insane like Benoit did, but that’s not an excuse for them to become so boring. In the 1980s they were kid-friendly and did safer stunts too but they were never this boring. I miss the outlandish gimmicks and storylines. Stuff like the original Undertaker gimmick. 

Anyway, hope you enjoyed that emotional roller coaster. Let’s see what memes and posts I collect in April! How much worse will the world be by May, I wonder.