Mixtape Reflections: The Ear of the Beholder ~ The 25 Most Beautiful Songs I’ve Ever Heard

 It is often said that beauty is in the eye of the beholder. When we think of the concept of beauty, we automatically think of visual beauty. But there can be beautiful smells, tastes, sensations, and of course sounds. But what makes a song beautiful? An angelic female voice? Perhaps an instrument like a piano, a violin or a harp? But could something like a song by Dimmu Borgir or Cradle of Filth with screaming, demonic vocals be beautiful? Perhaps, in a way. Perhaps it’s in the ear of the beholder. All I can talk about is what music I find beautiful. It isn’t going to be what other people find beautiful, although there might be some overlap at best.

I decided to put together a mixtape of the songs I consider the most beautiful ones I have ever heard, as of this year at age 35. These are the top 25. They’re certainly not the only songs I consider beautiful, of course. I don’t even consider every song that I like beautiful, per se. A catchy song isn’t the same as a beautiful song, but I can still like it. So this isn’t necessarily a list of my favorite songs, just the ones I find the most beautiful. What do I consider beautiful in a song? Well, they all do have a few things in common. They often but not always have female vocals; Liv Kristine of Theatre of Tragedy, for instance, has what I would consider the most beautiful female singing voice I have heard. For this list I have narrowed down the two most beautiful Theatre of Tragedy songs, in my opinion. There are certainly more though. If I consider a song beautiful and it has a male singer, it is generally due to the instruments and not so much the singing, although there are a few male singers with very beautiful voices, such as Peter Steele of Type O Negative. Most of these songs are slow, not very heavy, not really something you would dance to. And I even put a few guilty pleasures on there, like some love ballads and award-bait songs I’m a sucker for, if I’m in the right mood anyway. But most of all, a song that I really find beautiful usually puts a beautiful image in my head when I hear it. It lets me escape somewhere. It might be a memory of somewhere I have been before, or someplace in my imagination.

I have put together a YouTube playlist so you can follow along. I tried to make them all flow together. Again, as I mentioned in my last mixtape blog, Spotify wouldn’t have all these songs so I am doing the playlists on YouTube from now on. The mix clocks in at an estimated 132 minutes, so to even put it on a two hour blank cassette, the longest they made, will necessitate some cuts, sadly. I haven’t recorded it yet, but I plan to. At least with playlists time isn’t an issue. 

YouTube Playlist

https://m.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLUzP1Twau7QIP804FAVINriyfpQW0hPmr

Theatre of Tragedy - And When He Falleth

Liv Kristine’s angelic vocals are at their best here, blending well with the piano, and the voice samples from Vincent Price in the film Masque of the Red Death just add to the dark beauty of this song. Although I don’t mind them, the growling male vocals aren’t everybody’s cup of tea, but the rest of the song has more than enough beauty to make up for it. 

Glaare - My Love Grows in Darkness 

I mentioned this song on my most recent Top Songs of the Month blog when speaking about Glaare’s newest album, and said that this was one of the most beautiful songs I had ever heard. And I wasn’t kidding. The beautiful vocals and dreamlike music take me on a journey. I feel like I am standing on a cliff along the cold Pacific coast, fog in the fresh salty air, overcast skies, the waves breaking against the rocky coast. The nearby redwood forest is covered in a blanket of mist.  There might be darkness, but there is still love. 

This picture I took in Northern California illustrates it perfectly.

Aurelio Voltaire - Underground (demo version) 

This track is off Voltaire’s previously unreleased Cave Candem album, which featured early demo versions of songs that would later appear on his albums. This song would resurface on his Almost Human album, but it lost something in the process. That version has a bit of melancholy, but sounds downright cheerful compared to the original version. The lyrics, paired with the instrumentation, hold more weight. It feels more genuine, more from the heart. That is true of other songs on Cave Candem, for instance, the more widely-known version of “Ex-Lover’s Lover” is a funny, tongue-in-cheek if slightly morbid song about fantasizing killing your ex-girlfriend’s new lover out of jealousy, but the original, darker version, despite having the same lyrics, sounds like it is being sung by someone who would actually do it. This version of “Underground” similarly feels more genuine. I remember listening to it on my MP3 player when I was hiking in the forested hills around Vanadzor, Armenia, so it always takes me back to that, putting in my mind the vision of tree-covered hills, the tops shrouded in low clouds.

Type O Negative- Haunted

This song continues the energy of the last two songs. Someone put together a fan video of it on YouTube (which you’ll see on the playlist I shared), images of misty forests and a full moon rising in the night, and that’s what goes through my mind when I hear this song. This song is an experience. You don’t just listen to it, you experience it. Only Peter Steele could make the line “I hate the morning” sound utterly beautiful. I don’t even listen to the words really, I just listen to his voice and the music, and it takes me on an adventure. 

The Smashing Pumpkins - Porcelina of the Vast Oceans

This is a song from my childhood. I wrote about the album Mellon Collie and the Infinite Sadness way back in December 2019 when I was talking about the top ten albums that changed my life, and I think if you read that it will give you a sense of why I find this song beautiful. It reminds me of a fantasy world, like Neverland. 

Katil - Kuzim

Again, you need only refer to a blog post I wrote about this very song to understand why it made this list. 

Tigran Hamasyan - The Apple Orchard in Saghmosavank

This song is an instrumental. I got to see pianist Tigran Hamasyan in concert once, and he is very skilled. This song in particular I find to be very emotional. It paints a picture of a beautiful place. An isolated apple orchard somewhere up in the mountains. I have been to Saghmosavank, it’s a medieval church built at the edge of a canyon. It was quite a hike getting there, but the view was worth it, as you can see above. They always built churches in the most beautiful and scenic areas back then. This song brings me back there.

 

Serj Tankian - Garuna

Originally an old Armenian folk song that was preserved by Komitas Vartapet, this song has many beautiful renditions. I chose this one in particular because, like many of the songs on this list, I associate it with a memory. It was my last day in Armenia, and I chose to spend it by visiting the ancient ruins of Erebuni one last time. Erebuni is a fortress built by the Kingdom of Urartu in the 780s BC. I wish I had a picture of the view of Yerevan from Erebuni to share but I don’t. But I remember standing there, looking at that view, and tearing up because I knew I was leaving, and I didn’t know when I was ever coming back. 

Theatre of Tragedy - ... a distance there is...

This is a song carried purely by Liv Kristine’s voice. The only other sounds are a piano and thunder in the distance. Thunder is always beautiful in my opinion. I picture a foggy field like the one above (taken in Shushi, Artsakh...sigh let’s not get on that subject), the song being sung by a beautiful Goddess dressed in a white shroud. This song is probably the most beautiful Theatre of Tragedy song. It is so pure. 

Kamelot - On the Coldest Winter Night

Another subdued song by a metal band, this one is only vocals and orchestration, no drums or guitars, of which the piano is most dominant. It’s a song that makes me think about cuddling warmly in front of a fire under a blanket with your loved one on the coldest winter night, ice and snow outside. What’s funny is that since I’ve only ever lived in California and Florida I’ve never actually been in that situation. But I imagine it’s nice. 

Journey - Open Arms

Guilty pleasure section! Well alright, I don’t really mind saying I like Journey, in general. But this is their slowest love ballad. Not my usual type of music. Still, you can’t help but get goosebumps listening to it. It sounds like love, that’s the best way I can describe it. There are a lot of beautiful Journey songs, this is just one of them.

Phillip Glasser - Somewhere Out There

The film An American Tail has held special significance to me since childhood. And this is a beautiful song. The version on this mix is the best version in my opinion, from an obscure promotional album. I never really liked the Linda Ronstadt version that became popular on the radio, only due to the vocals. The instrumentation is fine though. This takes the instrumentation from the Linda Ronstadt version and includes the vocals of Phillip Glasser, who voiced Fievel in the film. The only flaw is that it’s just him, while the song is designed to be a duet. Still the best version in my opinion. 

Florence Warner Jones - Once Upon a Time With Me

This is a song from the little-known animated film Once Upon a Forest. Another childhood favorite of mine. I would have never admitted as a kid that this song gave me the feels, but it did, and still does. It’s a song about looking back on your life and remembering cherished memories of childhood, which strangely I understood as a child. And yes, it’s an award-bait song. Except it never won any awards because it’s obscure. How sad.

Goo Goo Dolls - Iris

Yes I like this band. It’s because of 90s nostalgia. This song was also on my first mixtape ever, so that also makes it special. This song was popular when I was in Middle School, a very horrible time in my life, and this song got me through some very hard times back then. It’s the stirring string section that gets me. If you listen to it being played acoustically it just doesn’t pack that same punch. It’s that string section that makes the song, making it sound epic and emotional. There was a trend in 90s alternative rock of orchestral string sections being incorporated into the usual guitars and drums (“Tonight, Tonight” by The Smashing Pumpkins, “The World I Know” by Collective Soul, “Numb” by The Cure, plenty of others), that’s another mix for another time. 

Robbie Robb - In Time

This song is from the movie Bill and Ted’s Excellent Adventure. It plays during the scene where Bill and Ted visit the utopian future that their music would eventually create. And this song definitely suits a future utopia. I purposely chose a version with a guitar solo at the beginning because it makes the song sound even better. It isn’t the version that appears on the soundtrack. I was really hoping they would bring this song back for the third movie that came out recently but sadly they did not. 

I wish I were blissfully ignorant enough to believe that in time everything would be alright with the world when it seems like everything’s spiraling toward disaster, but I’m a cynic and borderline nihilist. When I listen to this song though, I do feel like an optimist, if only momentarily. Well, maybe “in time” means centuries from now. That’s reasonable enough. 

Ministry - Game Over

Yes, Ministry made this list. Early synthpop Ministry, of course. Though I’m sure “NWO” and “Jesus Built My Hotrod” have their own sort of beauty. This song was never properly released and only appeared on much later compilations of early 1980s Ministry, but there must be an alternate universe where this song topped the Billboard charts. For me it’s not so much about the lyrics themselves, but the sound of the song and the vocals, not unlike Type O Negative’s “Haunted”. It sounds like the soundtrack to an adventure. It kind of makes me feel like I’m flying. That probably sounds strange but I like to close my eyes and let my imagination go when I listen to music sometimes. 

Affordable Floors - The Sounding

This is some little-known New Wave from 1986. It has the same sort of energy as “Game Over”. It’s another song that takes me places in my imagination. I imagine flying above the clouds, looking down at the world below, like what you see out the window in an airplane. 

Fuel - Shimmer

We move back to the 1990s with this song. Another track that appears on my earliest mixtapes, this is a song that I remember hearing in Middle School, and as such, like “Iris”, it’s another song that got me through some of the roughest times in my life. It’s been with me for a long time, and I never get tired of it. I think of the good times of my youth. “Will we ever be again”? And it may be true, that all that shimmers in this world is sure to fade away again. There’s a sense of longing in this song, a sense of nostalgia, a sense of not being able to ever recapture the past. And yet all those sad feelings have been made into something beautiful. 

William Control - Cemetery (acoustic version)

The studio version of this song is a nice song, but I rather prefer the acoustic version. It reminds me of comparing Voltaire’s demo songs with how they ended up on his albums. There’s more raw emotion in this version of the song. It’s hard to describe why I find this song beautiful. I think, like the last few songs, it’s more emotionally beautiful, not so much about the lyrics themselves at face value. I used to live across the street from a cemetery when I was a teenager, in fact (I know, how goth), and I would stare out my bedroom window at it on those long summer days where I wasn’t in school, and just contemplate it. This song brings me back to those days, even though it’s only a few years old. It reminds me of just letting your walls come down and allowing yourself to feel emotions again, which is something I had to learn to do again when I got out of High School. 

The Smashing Pumpkins- Galapagos

“Ain’t it funny how we pretend we’re still a child?” As opposed to “Porcelina of the Vast Oceans” which I mostly like for the music, I like this song also for the lyrics. It’s another childhood song. The whole album was like my favorite music ever when I was ten years old, that’s how two songs from it made this list. I’ve always liked this track, it’s a sentimental one. 

Type O Negative- Green Man

I gave Type O Negative one more track as well. There are a lot of beautiful songs from them, but to me this one is second only to “Haunted”. I like that it evokes nature imagery. It starts slow, opening with the chirping of birds, but by the end of it, it transcends itself and becomes a harmonious, spiritual experience. But just as you feel like your soul is about to leave your body and go astral traveling, it cuts off abruptly. I think this was just part of the band’s sense of humor. Still, a really beautiful song. There’s a demo version out there with a complete ending, but it’s from a long-lost cassette that had been dubbed from a master tape apparently, so not the greatest sound quality. And they ended it like the theme at the end of an episode of The Three Stooges. Ah you were so funny, Peter Steele.

Ace Morino - Summer

All right, time for the synthwave section. I really like this song, and it’s one of the newer songs on the list, the newest in fact, having come out in 2019. A wistful melody and lyrics about the changing seasons and longing for the past. It is thematically similar to “Shimmer”. It manages to capture the energy of the waning days of Summer, with the cold months just ahead. Summer is my least favorite season but this song still makes me feel sad that summer is ending, and with it, the good times. I remember feeling that way in grade school, but it was the vacation I was really mourning, not the season itself.

The Midnight- Crystalline

This song includes one of the best saxophone solos I have ever heard. It manages to bring to my mind a crystal landscape; in fact it makes me think of the Emerald City in Oz, said to be a most beautiful city inlaid with emeralds and gemstones everywhere you look. The Midnight has a lot of beautiful songs, I simply chose what I feel is their prettiest song. 

Kalax - Let Go

This song will always bring me back to a particular moment in my life, because of when I first heard it. I talked about it on another Mixtape Reflection but I don’t mind summarizing it again. It was back in 2019, the day I got fired from the worst job I ever had, at the Macy’s call center, for using up my attendance credits. When I got home it hadn’t really sunk in yet. I was in a state of shock I guess. I laid back in bed, put YouTube on the TV, and this song appeared in my subscriptions. I put it on, and it had kind of a healing effect. I felt an outpouring of emotion. I could finally let go of the negativity and the demons that had been haunting me since I started working at that place. The trauma was finally over. I feel like this song has a healing power to it. 

Opale - Sparkles and Wine

I put the extended version on the playlist but you should watch the music video for it, though it uses the shortened version. It’s flashing lights against a woman’s face, but it just has kind of an otherworldly effect. People in the comments have said that’s what the world looks like to them when they drop acid. I never have, but I will take their word for it. This song is hypnotic. In fact, if I’m being honest, I imagine this being the last song that goes through my mind before I die. I don’t know if anyone else ever contemplates that. It is an uncomfortable thing to think about. It’s something that will happen to everyone eventually, there’s no use denying it. I feel like this is the song I will hear when I finally leave my body, and go back to the stars. Hopefully that won’t be for a long time.

Reviewing an old school assignment: Have I always been this cynical? The answer may surprise you.

 I keep a binder up in my closet with a bunch of old school work dating back to High School in it. This morning I was rummaging through it, looking for something to use as an art reference for my webcomic Alcatraz High. And I found the assignment above. There’s no date, so I don’t remember when exactly I wrote it. Due to a reference to a specific incident that happened to me in Junior year, the earliest it could have been written would have been late Junior year, which was 2003 for me. This may have been some kind of creative writing prompt; for all I know it could have been written later and I was putting myself back into my high school mindset, which would have been much easier to do in early college than it would be now. I honestly don’t remember writing it. It appears to be a mock answer key to a test, but within it are some valuable tidbits from my years as a sarcastic and moody teenager who even back then saw right through all the bullshit of the world. This is stuff that’s going to help me with my comic, because there’s a lot I don’t remember. Anyway, I will transcribe it in case it’s hard to read, and provide commentary.

High School Answer Key

Question 1: How was Homecoming Week

Question 2: How was the dance?

Question 3: Did you do your homework?

Question 4: How are you doing in school?

Question 5: What is your GPA?

Question 6: Is it true when people say “these are the best years of your life”?

Answer 1: It was a nauseating display of “pride” in the very thing that imprisons us, forces us to conform and makes our lives miserable.

Answer 2: Loud, hot, clammy, lacking oxygen, crowded, filled with crappy hip-hop music; mark answer right if the student guessed any of these.

Answer 3: Only in the classes I didn’t do it for last class. The teachers say it should only take an hour; little do they know I have five other teachers who feel the same way about their homework.

Answer 4: I would be doing good if it wasn’t for the dead beat moron I got paired up with for a project that was 25% of my grade who didn’t do any work and made me do it all, resulting in my getting an “F”. 

Answer 5: Saying that your GPA matters in college is the biggest lie told in school. As long as it’s decent, it doesn’t matter.

Answer 6: It may be the best years of your life if you’re a jock or a cheerleader. If you aren’t and these are still the best years of your life, you must have had a pretty crappy life.

Elaborations on my Answers

Ah the precious high school memories this brings back. Even back then I suspected the purpose of school “pride” is to create a unifying factor among the students so that they will be more obedient and less likely to rebel against their oppressors. Nationalism is this on a larger scale, by the way.

I went to maybe two dances the entire time at High School and didn’t enjoy myself in the slightest. I never had a girlfriend first off, and as a metalhead at the time they never played my type of music. Wouldn’t it be fun to have Cradle of Filth played at a school dance? 

I do remember having to prioritize my homework due to having too damn much of it. I would figure out which assignment would have the least impact on my grade if I didn’t do it, and focus on more important ones. The teachers always acted like their class was the only class their students had. Perhaps this was a result of tunnel vision, myopia, or as I suspected as a teen, the teachers got together and coordinated their assignments this way deliberately to stress their students out. 

The partner project incident happened to me in a history class Junior Year. My partner was a notorious burnout drug addict who just didn’t care, and try as I might to save the project it wasn’t enough. I ended up with an F and had to retake the class in night school the next year. Partner projects are a special kind of evil. I don’t know why the teacher who graded this found that so funny. 

I was correct that GPAs don’t matter in college, but when I wrote this I still didn’t realize just how meaningless they were. Is my life better right now because I got an A in English 20 years ago? Is my life worse because of the F I got in History Junior year? NO. My grades were generally pretty good. I ended up with a Master’s Degree, a huge student loan debt I’ll never pay off, and I can still only get hired for barely above minimum wage. I would be in the exact same position now if I had just stopped after High School, except without the debt. 

“Best years of my life”, ha! I stand by what I said there. My best years were either late childhood ages 9 to 11, or my early-to-mid 20s. My worst years were Middle School, and High School was only marginally not as awful. 

Top 11 Songs of the Month- June 2021/ Մարգաց 4513 ~ Lilith My Mother, No Man Cry, Death Loves Veronica

I have been inundated with new music this past month so it’s been hard to narrow my favorites down to just 5. But you know, why limit myself? I’ll just talk about all my favorite new songs this month. Just one per band though, or else I would be writing forever. So this time, let’s call it a Top 11 list. You can think of it as a Top 10 plus an honorable mention, but I would say after the third song these are in no particular order and I like them all equally. I won’t say I will have this many songs every month, I might go back to just 5 next month, but we’ll see. There’s no limit, no maximum. 

I’ve been listening mainly to music that came out either this year or last year. I’ve made some exciting discoveries this month, from bands around the world. A lot of US bands this time around, a lot of California bands in fact, but, I finally found an Armenian goth band! More on that later. 

Lilith my Mother - There’s No Poetry in Light

Lilith My Mother is the solo project of Oleg Degtiarev out of Czechia, and their new album Now released just last month. Included on the album is the original title track along with no less than 13 remixes of the song from artists such as Project Ich, Luin and Batavia. It’s very interesting listening to each artist’s different take on the track, I don’t think I have ever heard so many remixes of one song. It really becomes an entirely different song sometimes. So don’t think the album is going to be redundant with so many remixes of the same song on it, it really is quite varied. No two are the same. In fact Oleg was kind enough to send me the album to listen to and review, and I decided to include it in my monthly Top Songs blog. My favorite track off the album is one of two songs that aren’t “Now”, and that’s “There’s No Poetry in Light”. A terrific song for lovers of the night and lovers of poetry, of which I am both. The lyrics themselves would make a good poem. I definitely recommend checking this album out.

You can find the album here:

https://lilithmymother.bandcamp.com/album/now

No Man Cry - Undead

I finally did it! I finally found an Armenian goth band! They do exist! After finding so many Greek, Russian and Turkish goth bands it feels great to finally hear goth from my homeland. I know The Deenjes, an Armenian band which has made my lists before, can be goth-passing or goth-adjectant on certain tracks, but No Man Cry is fully goth. No Man Cry is the solo project of Tigran Davtyan out of Yerevan, Armenia, founded just last year. He now has three albums out. As soon as I found this band I bought their whole discography. So far my favorite song on the three albums is the above track, “Undead”. The song is off their debut album Kukuruznik, released almost exactly one year ago, which you see on the video above. The usage of an old Soviet skyscraper on the album cover (Kukuruznik, Russian for “corn”, is the name of the building, in fact, a legacy of Soviet modernism in Yerevan) reminds one of Molchat Doma, and given Armenia’s cultural closeness with Russia I wouldn’t be surprised if No Man Cry wasn’t influenced by the bustling Russian post-punk scene that has exploded in recent years. But No Man Cry has a charm all its own. They mainly sing in English, although they do have an occasional song in Armenian. The English in the lyrics isn’t always the best, reminding me of the Greek band Tango Mangalore; for instance one verse in this song is “Body that twitchy, eyes that are twitch, a blood on my hands I am dragging that witch.” It adds to the charm. As does the accent. I love how “Undead” opens with the sound of ravens and a church bell chiming, very classical gothic. The song goes on to have shades of Bauhaus’ “Bela Lugosi’s Dead”, with its “undead” chant, and a gloomy post-punk atmosphere. The drum beat at the beginning even reminds me of that song. In all, I think it’s a good introduction to this band if you want to check them out. 

Check the album out here:

https://nomancry.bandcamp.com/album/kukuruznik

Death Loves Veronica - LIES

“You can’t break the system, it’s always been this way.”

This is another one of those songs, like the thematically similar songs “Deep Down in a Box” by Paradox Obscur and “Off the Grid” by Rein, that correlates with my worldview. It expresses a desire to escape the inescapable dystopian system upon which our society operates. The system is something you can’t escape, it’s always been this way and always will. Or at least that’s what the authorities would have you believe; the Sun has to expand into a red supergiant and swallow the Earth someday, after all, it won’t always be this way. Another good lyric is “Don’t go outside, just play the game.” Stay asleep and obedient, work to make the rich richer, pay your bills, never question anything, and then die. Stay locked up in the cave and stare at the shadows on the wall your whole life. Basically the stuff I write about in my Doom Scroll blogs all the time. The system is a game I never asked to play. 

Death Loves Veronica is the solo project of Veronica Campbell of San Antonio, Texas. She’s been releasing albums for a few years now but I only just discovered her, and I like what I’ve heard. I have a lot of great music to get through. This track is off the album Chemical, which released late last month and can be found here:

https://deathlovesveronica.bandcamp.com/album/chemical

Slow Danse With the Dead- Red Wine and Sad Songs

The ever-prolific Slow Danse With the Dead released a new album mere days ago, called Into the Dark, not to be confused with a two-song EP by the same name released in late May (which I accidentally bought while trying to buy this album on Bandcamp, but it’s okay! One of the songs on that wasn’t on this album at least.) Each SDWTD album is a little different. This album is a bit more up-tempo and synth-heavy than their self-titled album last year, if only by comparison. It also doesn’t sound quite as ironically miserable as the first albums I heard from the band (compare the title track “Into the Dark” to “So Obnoxious” and “Monday Mourning”, you’ll see how the music has evolved), but it’s still satisfyingly dark. My favorite track was the final one, “Red Wine and Sad Songs”, with “Church Be Gone” as a close second. Who doesn’t like sipping red wine while listening to sad songs? Well okay, let me rephrase that, what goth doesn’t like sipping red wine while listening to sad songs? Anyway, Slow Danse With the Dead remains one of my favorite bands right now. 

You can find the album here:

https://slowdansewiththedead.bandcamp.com/album/into-the-dark-2

Mystic Priestess - No Tomorrow, Only Today

Mystic Priestess is a deathrock band out of Oakland, California, same county I grew up in. I wonder where all the goths were when I lived in the eastern San Francisco Bay Area, I always felt like the only one on the planet when I lived there. Anyway, I discovered this band last year when they appeared on a radio show I occasionally listen to either on their website or through Radio Garden, The Hanging Garden on BFF. FM out of San Francisco. I heard the track “Toxic Masculinity” and enjoyed it, but I hadn’t gotten around to listening to to their other music until recently. Their music is often very angry and politically charged, as is the case with the above track “No Tomorrow, Only Today”, a song about how the United States is headed for nuclear doom. But what really grabbed me about this track was the rare and illusive goth sax. Yes, the gothic saxophone appears again. I’m going to make a goth sax mixtape once I find enough songs with it. 

This track is off their self-titled album, which was released last December. Highly recommended listening. You can buy the digital album, but the CD is only two dollars more and you also get their previous EPs as well as the MP3s, so that’s probably the best way to go.

https://mysticpriestess.bandcamp.com/

Glaare - Buyer’s Remorse

Glaare’s 2017 debut album To Death and a Day is still a favorite of mine, I even got it on cassette. The song “My Love Grows in Darkness”, first song on the album, is one of the most beautiful songs I have ever heard, and I don’t say that lightly, considering my MP3 player is now past 2,200 songs. So I was thrilled when I learned that Glaare was going to have a new album out this year. The new album, Your Hellbound Heart, takes their sound in a bit of a new direction, with synthwave tones thrown into their usual shoegaze/post-punk. The theme of the album is sci-fi action movies of the 1980s, such as Hellraiser and They Live. One of the songs is even called “Terminator 2” and is told from the perspective of Sarah Connor, a character in the film. It’s very much a concept album, which are getting rare these days. Like their previous album, listening to it from beginning to end is like listening to one single work rather than a collection of unrelated songs, and that’s the mark of a good mix. There’s a lost science to placing songs on an album (or mixtape) in a way that they flow into each other and you kind of forget that you’re listening to more than one song at times. Glaare is good at this.

 My favorite off the album is “Buyer’s Remorse”, with the title track “Your Hellbound Heart” a close second. Those two songs are a bit slower and sound closer to Glaare’s initial sound, although I do like all the songs. Admittedly nothing is quite like “My Love Grows in Darkness”, but perhaps that song is like lightning in a bottle. I do wonder if this album signals a permanent change of musical direction for the band, or if the next one will be different still.

Listen to it here:

https://glaare.bandcamp.com/album/your-hellbound-heart

Pitch After Dark - Torn

I discussed this band last month when I was hooked on their song “Trapped Inside”. I bought both of their albums then, and I love every song on both. This song eventually surpassed “Trapped Inside”. It’s more subdued and mellow than that song, but with that same great post-punk sound. I just love the vocals of singer Pari Dark, and while the guitar solos that appear in their songs almost feel a bit outside the genre, that punctuate the songs well. Anyway, this song is a good one to listen to during my walks outside. Dark yet relaxing.

This track appears on their self-titled debut album, released last year.

 https://pitchafterdark.bandcamp.com/album/pitch-after-dark

New Cross - Fist of the Hanged Man

New Cross is a band out of London, England, which emerged last year. I recently became hooked on this song after it was shared on the Guitars and Sound YouTube page. I went on a quest to find out more about this band for the blog but information seems pretty scant. They do have quite a lot of music out despite only debuting last year though, so it looks like I have some more new music to get to! This song can be found on the Fist of the Hanged Man EP, which also includes an instrumental version of the track. 

https://newcrosss.bandcamp.com/album/fist-of-the-hanged-man

Qyburn - Rain on a Grave

This song has two versions, a slow version and a speeded up version. I find that I prefer the speeded up version, but maybe it depends on one’s mood. This song is atmospheric and dreary. It just puts the image  in your mind of a foggy graveyard, raindrops falling upon a tombstone. I imagine if it were played live a fog machine with blue and purple lights would be a must. Maybe it’s because of the image on the above video but I feel like the hooded druid is perfect too, like the Ghost of Christmas Future presiding over the grave of Ebenezer Scrooge. I guess this song just takes my imagination places. Which judging by Qyburn’s Bandcamp page was the intent. The music is supposed to evoke a setting. They’ve succeeded.

Qyburn is based out of Los Angeles, California. This track is off their new album Wax Mask.

https://qyburn.bandcamp.com/album/wax-mask

Serj Tankian - Your Mom

Alright, time for some rock music. Serjik appears on my non-music related blogs quite frequently due to how our viewpoints usually align, but I hadn’t actually listened to his music in a long time until this song came out and got stuck in my head for days. Then I had to go marathon his discography again. This ties in with a nu-metal kick I’ve been on lately, which I will talk about next. Anyway, this song is a scathing attack on Islamic extremism, but I think it could also apply to anyone whose extreme dogmatic philosophy leads them to kill, like Armenia’s wonderful neighbors to the east for instance. I almost wonder if that is indirectly what he’s singing about, given present circumstances. I mean I guess ISIS and Al Qaeda still exist but they haven’t been in the news much for several years (that’s American news for you though, they exist but they aren’t a useful boogeyman at the moment so they’re not talked about). Some might take issue with the abelist language in it, (the word “retarded”, specifically), just to forewarn. I think he could have used a better word there. I mean when I was in high school just 20-ish years ago everyone was calling each other that, but it’s hurtful to people with mental disabilities so I don’t say it anymore. I’ve been trying to understand the connection with “your mom”. I think he’s asking if their mother would approve of their bloodthirsty behavior. I’m not exactly sure. Serj ending the song with “nah, bruh” was a stroke of genius though. Can we make this man Prime Minister of Armenia, please? 

This track is off his new album Elasticity. You can find the album here:

https://serj.themerchcollective.com/

Tetrarch - I’m Not Right

You know what, I like nu-metal and I’m tired of pretending that I don’t! So along with my typical musical tastes of post-punk, darkwave, and all the other spooky wave genres, thanks to my old CD collection now being on my MP3 player I’ve been going back and listening to the nu-metal of my early teens for the first time in many years (Korn, Disturbed, System of a Down, Adema, even Linkin Park). My trip down memory lane transferred over to Youtube where I was searching for other music I remembered from back then, and I eventually landed upon this band. People say Tetrarch is like a cross between Korn, Slipknot and Linkin Park (minus the rap, which yeah, was never my favorite part of a Linkin Park song). The singer sounds like Chester Bennington, the guitar work brings to mind Korn and on the heavier tracks Slipknot. There was another band that sounded just like that in the early 2000s known as Adema, a band I have also been listening to for the first time in forever. So really this band is carrying the torch of all these bands. This just goes to show what I’ve said on this blog before. Crusty old fogeys who complain that today’s music sucks just aren’t digging deep enough, and if you look hard enough you will find some band, somewhere in the world, making music in a genre most people think is dead. Case in point, I thought nu-metal was long dead, having been killed off by emo in the mid-2000s. I mean the only other genre I can think of that was “killed” by a sudden backlash like that is disco. I don’t know why everyone turned on nu-metal. And yet here I find a new band that makes me feel like a moody 14 year old again. It looks like nu-metal is making a recovery!

This track is off their new album Unstable, and can he found here:

https://tetrarch.bandcamp.com/album/unstable

The Doom Scroll - The Worst of Social Media ~ May 2021

 

Another dreary month passes, as humanity edges ever closer to oblivion. I mainly spent May following the ever-more-troubling events in Armenia, while also trying to distract myself from it with literally anything else for the sake of my mental health. That will shine through in this blog entry I’m sure. Don’t play a drinking game and take a sip every time I bring Armenia up, you’re going to get alcohol poisoning. Worrying about big world events while only being able to control the little microcosm of my life. That’s always fun. But again, that’s what Doom Scrolling is all about.

You know, I thought about putting a Table of Contents here because this post is really long (been writing it all month), but that would betray the format. This is supposed to mirror the experience of scrolling through Facebook/Reddit and seeing random stupidity. So just keep scrolling, skip stuff you don’t care about, just like you do on social media.

Anyway, time for some freewrites.

Ad-Blocking on Facebook

To start with, I felt like ranting about a feature of Facebook rather than a specific post. As you doom scroll, you will eventually be bombarded with ads telling you to consume. They listen to your conversations and find out what you buy. Your phone, your smart TV, your “Alexa”, are all spying on you. I have often brought up some product in conversation, or bought something at a grocery store, only to “miraculously” be bombarded by ads for that thing later. Just recently my wife said something like “we need more band-aids”, and lo and behold I started getting ads for them. Go ahead and say “I need more *insert product here*” out loud and see what happens. Surprisingly, everyone has simply come to accept this dystopian, dare I say Orwellian eavesdropping. The right-wing nutjobs who normally rant about government conspiracies never address the most obvious and demonstrably true one right under their noses. To do so would be to critique capitalism, which is their religion (money is their God, not Jesus, as they’d like to think). I think the advertisers probably know that I am a tough nut to crack when it comes to ads. They probably have me on some list of people who are awake to their brainwashing. I am at least aware that they are trying to invade my subconscious with their subliminal messaging, and I actively try to prevent it. I can’t say I am completely immune, maybe I am even less immune than I like to think I am, but I try my best. I hate that I recognize corporate logos better than I recognize varieties of plants and animals, or certain historical events, or world capitals, or even small countries. Without looking it up I would have a hard time placing Kyrgyzstan on a map, but I can tell you that Coca-Cola was founded in 1886 in Atlanta, Georgia, and they used to put cocaine in their drinks, and I don’t even drink the stuff and haven’t for over a decade now. Perhaps that is partly my own fault for not doing the research and memorizing it, but I would argue it is also a fault of the US education system. It’s an embarrassment that so much of my knowledge had to be self taught. The job was already done on me when I was a child, before I knew any better. An entire section of my brain is reserved for corporate brainwashing and I can’t erase it.      

In an effort to avoid advertising I no longer watch cable, with its constant breaks for five minutes of brainwashing in the middle of your show. I mainly watch YouTube and other streaming services, and I allow YouTube to charge my credit card each month so that I can have premium and avoid the ads. It is worth it, to me. I am less concerned with shielding my son from sex, violence and cursing, all things that he is going to encounter eventually anyway, than I am about shielding him from ads; at least as much as is possible in this consumerist society, which is not much. 

I am stuck with Facebook ads, however. The best I can do is hide the ones that get repetitive or that I find especially objectionable. The menu they give you when you do this is the above screenshot. Many of the categories, “knows too much” (they outright admit they’re spying on you there), “repetitive”, “too personal”, are usually equally true. But you can only pick one, so I always choose the one that is the most true. Irrelevant. Because everything is irrelevant in the cosmic sense, really. Humanity itself is irrelevant. Relevance is a manmade concept, and one which mankind does not even qualify as by their own definition. But least of all relevant are ads. 

Sphinx Bizimdir!

“Thə pyramids wərə built by Caucasian Albanians, Sphinx bizimdir!”

- Some Azeri, probably

With how dire things have been lately for Armenians, what else can we do but stupid stuff like this. Yes, that is the president-for-life of Azerbaijan Ilham Aliyev imposed over the sphinx. That man is probably the person I hate most in the entire world, I have to honestly say. More than anyone who ever personally wronged me. Քաք կեր, բոզի դղա:  I hate looking at his punchable, ugly ass donkey face. A hideous ape in a suit and tie. I want to knock the teeth out of that braying donkey grin of his with a baseball bat wrapped in rusty barbed wire (in Minecraft). They like to caricature Armenians as having big noses (as seen in that disgusting “victory park” they opened in Baku), but look at that ski slope. It’s projection, obviously. Carl Jung would find modern Azerbaijan an interesting case study in psychological projection. “Bizimdir” in their language translates to something like “is ours”, which is something they like to say about Artsakh. The picture mocks the tendency of Azerbaijan to claim the ancient history of Armenia, as well as Iran, as their own. Azerbaijan is an insecure nation, you see, that never existed on a map until 1918, while records of Armenia existing go back to at least 500 BC, specifically an inscription from the records of King Darius of Persia. But in their twisted historiography, Armenia is the country that only sprung up recently, while Azerbaijan is actually ancient, despite mountains of evidence to the contrary by ancient Persian, Greek and Roman sources. Pretty much no historian outside of their own country and Turkey would agree with their version of events, unless they were bribed or something. This may seem humorous, but it’s had dire real world consequences, as it is being used to justify the continued genocide of Armenians, as no doubt their claims that the current territory of Armenia is ancient Azeri land will give them an excuse to sell an invasion to their populace in the future, as soon as they think they can get away with it. Isn’t it great having a neighbor that wants to erase any evidence that you ever existed, and probably would succeed too were it not for the dubious, half-assed protection of Russia? Not that the rest of the world cares. No, but when a very similar conflict happens between Israel and Palestine, that gets their attention. Speaking of that subject:

Serj Tankian’s Take on Palestine

Serj Tankian, lead singer of System of a Down, had the best Armenian leftist take on the Israel/Palestine War/Occupation, and it is basically my take too. I more or less come down on Palestine’s side, but that doesn’t mean their leadership, the Hamas, doesn’t also suck. Neither party is any friend to Armenia. Which, perhaps selfishly, is at the center of my international political opinions (I don’t really root for the United States much if you haven’t noticed). I have personal beef with Israel for supplying Azerbaijan with weapons, knowing full well what they were going to be used for. But paradoxically, Palestine celebrated Armenia’s defeat last year too, despite Azerbaijan being BFFs with their worst enemy. I may have my issues with both governments, but I do feel bad for the regular people caught up in this mess, people just trying to go about their lives until suddenly Israel hurls missiles at them, and if I’m being objective I think Israel is in the wrong, they are the clear aggressors and occupiers, and they’ve created an apartheid state. I firmly believe if a group of people want to be independent from a country they should be. Right to self determination over territorial integrity. Anyway, if anyone asks where I stand on Israel vs Palestine, Serj Tankian’s opinion is more or less my own. 

In fact while we’re on the subject, here’s a take on the subject I saw that gave me food for thought:

Does the metaphor work? I mean I see where this is coming from, although the Romans no longer really exist, they converted to Catholicism and became Italians, and they were never native to England; while Jews have existed basically uninterrupted since ancient times, and did originate from the Levant area. I like the use of the Roman pagan religion as justification. That is a good metaphor. I still don’t think a book of old folk tales gives a country the right to establish itself on an existing country and kick the former inhabitants out. A big reason Israel happened was because of some batshit insane protestant Christians wanting to fulfill the prophecies in Revelations.  

This was the big news story this month, and I am pretty angry that no one other than Armenians gave this much of a shit when Artsakh was similarly attacked last year. Where was the media coverage, the internet outrage, even the memes? And no one cares about the current border crisis either. The Armenians of Artsakh are in a very comparable situation to the Palestinians. It is interesting what makes the news and what doesn’t. I have only just now begun to hear about a civil war in Ethiopia that has been going on since last November and a genocide against the Tigray people there, and not through the mainstream media but through individual Facebook posts from certain groups I’m in, and then looking it up on Wikipedia to see what they were talking about (and it is probably not the most unbiased resource, since they refuse to call it a genocide, but it’s just a general jumping point). An entire genocide that almost no one is talking about. How many others are going on in the world right now that I haven’t even heard about? I can’t help but be reminded of how Armenians are ignored by the mainstream media. I suppose it is because the Islamic world and the political left in the US and Europe sympathizes with Palestine, and that Israel is practically the 51st US state, that they have better PR and the conflict gets more attention than either the Armenians or the Tigray. Who also don’t have any oil. But for some reason you can’t get the American left to care this much about any other foreign conflict.

My solution to the conflict is to just do away with the concept of countries, borders, land ownership, nationalism and separate national identities. It’s all fake made-up bullshit in the end. Meaningless social constructs. Just the rich keeping the poor divided and at each other’s throats rather than theirs. The two-state solution would just lead to something like Armenia and Azerbaijan. Two groups of people who just cannot live together at all, fighting over who was there first, claiming each other’s land and fighting over borders, the stronger country gradually choking the weaker one out until the coast is clear for an invasion, all that fun stuff. The two-state solution is not going to stop the conflict. It is no solution at all. In fact, perhaps the entire concept of nation states just lends itself to conflict and war. That’s why humanity would be better off without it. The only thing that ever stopped the fighting between Azerbaijan and Armenia was when the Soviet Union conquered both. Maybe Israel and Palestine need to be taken over by some bigger empire to get them to stop fighting. So there’s either the no-state solution, or just having both states get absorbed into a bigger empire which forces them to get along. Neither of which look like they’re happening any time soon. Humans are such territorial monkeys. I wish I didn’t care as much as I do. Let’s leave these warring little ants for a bit and think about the bigger picture.

The Vastness of the Cosmos

There are more things in heaven and Earth, Horatio, than are dreamt in your philosophy.

A pallet cleanser. I also follow the official Facebook page of the Hubble Space Telescope, because I need a break from all the idiocy on this space rock. Perhaps thinking about space makes my problems feel small, and there is comfort in that. This is galaxy cluster ACO S 295 (why don’t astronomers ever give things real names?), with some stars in the foreground and other galaxies in the background. This is why “irrelevant” is the correct choice when you hide a Facebook ad. This is what the universe really looks like. Go ahead, break your mind by attempting to comprehend what’s really in this picture. “Reach inside a raging galaxy and grab a small glittering oddity.” Due to the finite speed of light these are galaxies as they looked hundreds of millions or even billions of years ago. An amount of time we can’t comprehend either. What else is happening in the universe, this very instant? How many different worlds are there? How many planets harbor life? Is there something else we cannot comprehend? If something is either alive or not alive, what if there is a third option? Are the very stars alive? Or the galaxies themselves? Or do they exist in that incomprehensible third option? With a universe this vast, do we really even need a multiverse? What are galaxies, really? Are galaxies actually cells in the body of an even grander living beast? There’s no limit to size. Maybe we all have a universe inside each of our cells and molecules. If galaxies are alive, we are all part of that life. Like how the microorganisms in our own bodies are part of a much larger living being, we are like microorganisms living inside something larger. 

Think about what this picture really is. We are the first lifeforms on this planet to peer this far into the universe and see what’s really out there. We’ve only known that other galaxies exist for about a century. There are people alive older than that. Have any other life forms become self aware enough to peer through space and see the other galaxies like this? Are we the only ones seeing this, and wondering what it is? Is anyone looking at our galaxy right now, and seeing it as it looked 100 million years ago? We will likely never see our own galaxy from a distance, because it would take eons to even leave the galaxy.

And they want you to waste your minuscule existence, the tiny fragment of time you get to exist in the universe, working. Telling you that you’re “lazy” if you do not comply. So they pollute the skies with light, blind the populace to what’s really out there. Keep people divided with countless labels like races and nationalities that are ultimately meaningless. Avoid teaching astronomy in schools. When you aren’t working, they lull you into slumber and submission with ads, television, internet. Humanity has established a way of life in which you do not enjoy your life at all. I’m not saying I’m above it all either. I’m online all the time myself. But I am beginning to realize what’s going on. I can’t change the world or how human society works, but I can try to control my own life, at least. 

Ruining Wrestling Pay Per View Titles

I felt like having fun on the Doom Scroll for once. So I grabbed this one off a wrestling meme group I’m in on Facebook. Pro wrestling has always named their pay per views either something catchy, generic, or just bad. These were the ones I thought were the funniest with “in the Ass” added to them.

Royal Rumble in the Ass

Summerslam in the Ass

Backlash in the Ass

Hell in a Cell in the Ass

Vengeance in the Ass

Armageddon in the Ass

The Great American Bash in the Ass

Halloween Havoc in the Ass

Tables, Ladders & Chairs in the Ass

Money in the Bank in the Ass

Fully Loaded in the Ass

One Night Stand in the Ass

Fatal 4-Way in the Ass

Great Balls of Fire in the Ass 

No Way Out in the Ass

No Mercy in the Ass

Anyway, I could go on, those just seemed like the funniest ones. I’ve written about wrestling on this blog from time to time, how I haven’t really watched it consistently since 2007 but kinda miss it, or at least how it used to be. I still have a collection of wrestling VHS and DVDs for when I want a nostalgia dose. Whenever I would order a PPV I would always be sure to record it on a blank tape in order to get my money’s worth, and I still have all those. I feel that since I stopped watching not only has the wrestling gotten worse but even the pay per view titles have gotten worse. When I was watching they had Vengeance, Backlash, Judgment Day, these were all good titles. Now they have stupid crap like Bragging Rights, Money in the Bank, Extreme Rules, Great Balls of Fire. What even is that last one? Some one-time event in 2017 apparently. I can see why they never reused that title again, what a stupid name. 

An Article on “Shrek” That Pissed Off Fans

 

This article got passed around a lot on May 18th, and many fans of the film were hurt by Scott Tobias’ words. I could have commented on people’s shares of it, but I would have been dog-piled for doing so, because I mostly agree with the article. It basically is a buddy comedy with fart jokes, vindictive jabs at Disney, and a pretty cliche “be yourself” moral to the story, albeit delivered in a way that was unusual for animated films at the time. I was fifteen when the movie came out, too old to harbor any nostalgia for it and look back on it with rose-tinted glasses. I get the nostalgia for it, some of my favorite films from my childhood like Little Nemo: Adventures in Slumberland and Once Upon a Forest have glaring flaws and probably aren’t movies I would like nearly as much if I were seeing them for the first time as an adult. But I was old enough when it came out to see Shrek more objectively than today’s twenty-somethings. 

  

Now Shrek on its own merits may not be the worst film ever made, but the trends it set, fairly novel when it debuted, made animated films insufferable for the next fifteen years or so. Perhaps it can’t be fully blamed for the demise of traditional animation in favor of computer animation, it shares that blame with Disney and Pixar, but it certainly helped drive it into the grave faster. But the worst influences it had were the infestation of inane fart jokes, needless celebrity voice acting and pop culture humor that quickly dates itself, in just about every animated film for the rest of the 2000s, and though the animation industry has recovered some in the last ten years, now that animated films are allowed to have genuine pathos again, its influence is still being felt. Even today you still see the Dreamworks Face on animated movie posters because they think “attitude” sells, largely a legacy of the success of Shrek. I would still say that perhaps a successful anti-Disney movie needed to happen at that moment in animation history. They needed to be taken down a notch. It was the first animated movie to challenge Disney since The Land Before Time in the 1980s. From the late 1980s on Disney dominated the market, and the only remotely successful non-Disney animated films (Ferngully, Anastasia) succeeded by not directly competing with Disney. After Shrek, the playing field opened up, and to this day Disney still doesn’t monopolize animated films like they used to. But the Hollywood movie studios just took all the wrong lessons from Shrek’s success. It succeeded because it was something different, not because of potty humor, celebrities and pop culture references. Ask yourself why Shrek is remembered but Chicken Little is not. In short, movie itself isn’t nearly as bad as the films it would later inspire, but that’s about the nicest thing I can say about it. 

 

If I must watch Shrek though, I prefer Shrek Retold, which is the far superior adaptation. I actually enjoyed that. 

 

“No One Wants To Work Anymore”

“Boo hoo hoo, no one wants to work anymore because unemployment pays more than we do!” Did anyone ever really want to work at a fast food joint? The original “No one wants to work anymore” signs have that “Girls only date jerks and not nice guys like me” energy. Nobody wants to work FOR YOU anymore. But this one’s a parody. The fine print on this sign is everything. This is far from the only parody Help Wanted sign I’ve seen floating around online lately, but it was my favorite one. What a humiliating process applying for jobs is. They want you to beg for jobs no one in their right mind would actually want to do, obviously the only ones who do apply are forced to apply by poverty. Capitalism thrives on desperate poor people. Can you imagine if everyone “pulled themselves up by their bootstraps, stopped being lazy and stopped buying lattes and avocado toast”? Who would flip the burgers? Who would work in the Amazon warehouses and piss in bottles? Of course, it’s all just victim blaming, everything depends on how rich or poor your parents were. Without a desperate working class it would all fall apart.

I loathe having to submit a resume and cover letter and then enter all the exact same information again on the application. Wasting hours of your life only to never hear anything back nine times out of ten. And they all want someone who’s twenty years old with 15 years work experience. “Why not show up in person with a hand-written application and shake the boss’ hand?” some old fogeys might say, who haven’t applied for a job since the 1970s. It’s never worked that way in my lifetime. Drug testing is just another way to test your submissiveness, as well as to make sure drug addicts can’t find work and end up in prison. The criminalization of drugs is simply an excuse to arrest people to provide free labor (i.e. slavery) to the capitalist class, as well as to keep as many of the dangerous poor minorities imprisoned and as disenfranchised as they can, to minimize threats to the power structure. The 13th amendment which outlawed slavery left that little escape clause in there, “except as punishment for a crime whereof the party shall have been duly convicted”. Better invent more crimes to keep your slaves then. Even after they’ve been released they can’t vote or get anything but the lowest paying jobs (provided they pass the drug screening), keeping them impoverished, and under control. 

But most jobs serve a purpose along those exact lines as well. Read David Graeber’s On the Phenomenon of Bullshit Jobs: A Work Rant. David Graeber helped me realize a lot of this. The majority of jobs don’t even need to exist. But they do because it keeps the populace busy and under control. People stuck working 40 hours a week don’t have much time to protest. Make them pay rent and put them in debt and that’s even better. The pandemic is winding down, so the “get back to work you lazy bums” propaganda is in full swing. But people understandably are finding that they prefer being on unemployment rather than subjecting themselves to humiliating jobs that pay little and cost both ones dignity and precious hours of their finite lives. This is dangerous to the capitalist class, as these people do have time to protest. Fast food restaurants are resorting to bribery to get people to apply, but doing everything except actually raising their wages. They’re afraid. I hope people stay on unemployment as long as possible. There needs to be a nice shakeup in this dystopian hellhole. Of course the powers that be are already scrambling to sign in laws that make it near impossible to stay on unemployment. Got to get that human capital (live)stock back to servitude and get back to business as soon as possible, of course.

The solution is replace these jobs with robots and give people Universal Basic Income. But the rich will have to go down kicking and screaming first.

 

European Languages circa 600 AD, Or How to Piss off a Turkish Nationalist in One Easy Step

“This map is liəs sprəad by thə global shaytan Ərməni diaspora lobby!!”       

  - Some Azeri, probably

Well well well. What have we here? European languages circa 600AD. I see Armenian, I see Kione Greek, I see Georgian and Circassian, but my my, where is Turkish? I don’t see i- oh look, there it is, Common Turkic, that dark orange one way up there in the northeast by Oghur and Magyar. How very curious. What’s it doing way up there? I thought the almighty president-for-life of Azerbaijan, Führer Aliyev, said that Armenia was only founded in 1920 or whatever, and that Turks have been in the area since 1,000,000 BC. You mean to say the rest of the world doesn’t teach the same history as Baku State University? 

Sigh, don’t mind me, dwelling on the ancient past is a lot less depressing than dwelling on the present state of Armenia. Instead of going by old Soviet maps to demarcate the Armenia-Azerbaijan border, why not use this map? Just a thought.

Shared on I Fucking Love Maps. I’m sure there were some lovely and civilized discussions in the comments between the Turkic nationalists and everyone else, but I chose not to look at the comments and save myself some brain cells.

So, Let’s See How Ol’ Biden Is Doing This Month...

Well I am shocked! Shocked, I tell you! That the diet-republican candidate who was behind the bill that made it impossible to declare bankruptcy on student loans is now doing nothing at all to alleviate them despite promising to. At least the Orange Man is gone and the new president writes nicer tweets, am I right? Now we can all finally stop paying attention to politics and go back to brunch, while nothing fundamentally changes. Now you see, at least Republicans are upfront about being greedy assholes who bend over backwards for the rich. They promise nothing, and they deliver nothing. They’re honest. Evil, but honest. The Democratic Party is like Diet Coke. Masquerading as the healthier choice, but in some ways even worse. The puppet masters put a Democrat in charge when they need to silence dissent from the left while continuing business as usual. 

Recognizing the Armenian genocide last month wasn’t enough to make me like Biden. Besides, he undid that by lifting the sanctions on Azerbaijan and resuming selling weapons to them. In fact I think he only recognized the genocide to distract Armenian-Americans while he aided our enemies. I should have known the other shoe would drop. A brief moment of weakness where my cynicism wavered and I almost thought something good had happened for once. I should know better by now.

As for the student loan thing, my eventual plan is to flee the country to escape the debt. Until I do, I can never own a car or a home without it getting repossessed, and they’d forever be garnishing my paychecks. I’ll never be able to pay it off. They fucked me over for life by getting me to fall for the scam that is college. They think they own my soul. Well fuck that. 

This was shared on the Lost Generation subreddit. 

Another Day, Another Insensitive Tweet

Okay, imagine if you will. In an alternate universe, Twitter and Facebook exist in 2001. September 11th happens as normal, it’s a national tragedy for the US. And on September 12th, let’s say the UK Embassy to the United States tweets out “Look guys, here’s the history of the great British sport, cricket!” Probably wouldn’t go over well, would it? That’s what happens when the US Embassy to Armenia makes this idiotic post on both Twitter and Facebook the day after Azerbaijan infiltrated Armenia’s borders and took six soldiers hostage. Not to mention Artsakh having been ethnically cleansed less than a year ago, and the political turmoil in the months since, which they’ve also never commented on. Oh but please, tell us more about surfing! I mean this is probably pretty normal behavior for the US Embassy of every small country that the US doesn’t care about, but for some reason this time, it pissed everyone off. Even Serj Tankian commented on it (why not just make him Prime Minister of Armenia at this point, he couldn’t do much worse than any other leader the country has had since 1991), calling for the US Ambassador to Armenia to resign and be replaced. Really the only reason the US has an embassy in Armenia is to be a thorn in Russia’s side. They don’t actually give a shit about a little oil-free country like Armenia. I actually visited the US embassy in 2014 during my first trip to Armenia. I was with a class of Armenian students from Fresno State. They took us through a metal detector and I had to leave behind all my coins, my hat and my belt. We had a little tour, of which I don’t remember much because it was rather unremarkable. They took us into a conference room and we were allowed to question the US ambassador. One of my classmates asked why the US didn’t recognize the Armenian genocide, I remember how she skillfully sidestepped the question with some BS about wanting peace between Armenia and its neighbors and open borders with Turkey, never once using the word “genocide”. So this post is completely in-character for the US Embassy. 

Anyway, that was May 2021 on the internet for me. Next month Armenia is having an election, so I’m sure things will go from bad to worse and I will get to lament about that on next month’s Doom Scroll. 

So to the handful of you who read this, I bid you farewell.