The Doom Scroll ~ The Worst of Social Media ~ July 2021

 

You know this past month, I didn’t really come across many posts on social media that really angered me, but you know, we still live in a dystopia and the world is still doomed, so there’s always something I could do a writing prompt on. I came across a lot of religious absurdity this time.

I think I may start posting these on the last day of the month I’m covering, rather than the first day of the next month. Seems more appropriate, since it’s still July. 

If this many people ever actually read my blog.

Haaaa well…. I don’t think I’m going to do a big anti-capitalist rant this time around. Maybe a small one. I mean what else can I say that I haven’t already said? I am content with being obscure. Perhaps I should be glad to have a small audience, wouldn’t want to be targeted by the CIA or something. My grandfather did enough time as a political prisoner in Stalin’s Soviet Union. It’s something of a family tradition to be discontent with the country one lives in. He struggled against a different brand of authoritarianism than I, but it was authoritarianism nonetheless. America has its own gulags. 

Anyway, my most conservative relatives have probably all either blocked me or unfollowed me by now. The gory and profane webcomics probably don’t help that either. 

Am I an Old Soul?

I believe in souls and reincarnation, but at the same time I am open to the possibility that I’m totally wrong and it’s all wishful thinking and there’s nothing after death. I believe it in the way a scientist might “believe” a hypothesis before they test it out. It doesn’t run counter to my observed reality, as it’s largely unfalsifiable. Now Wicca, with its belief in karma coming back in threes and such, runs counter to my observed reality, because I see people get away with all manner horrible atrocities all the time without any repercussions, so while I do still like and even believe some aspects of the religion, I do not follow it. If karma exists maybe you have to feel guilty first for it to happen. 

I couldn’t say how many past lives I’ve had, if indeed it isn’t all just some fantasy I’ve concocted, but I do feel like I’ve done this all before, more than once. I’ve had flashbacks, and I’ve done past life regression hypnosis. Let’s see how many of these apply to me. 

1. I do miss being more ignorant, because now that I understand the world better I’m depressed. The truth hurts. Having critical thinking skills means I can probe into other people’s minds who I have a disagreement with and figure out why they think that way, and if it makes more sense than what I believed I can change my mind. Everyone has a different perception of reality, like seeing a mountain from a different angle. So they have different versions of the truth. People are also often manipulated into believing lies, because lies are more comfortable than the truth. We’re all just like brains in jars, receiving signals that tell us about the reality around us. The signals can’t always be trusted.

2. As I was talking about before, I’ve always been anti-authoritarian. Just have a look at my old schedule planner and assignments from back in school that I blogged about recently. In seeing the bigger picture I’ve begun to question everything, and see most social norms as arbitrary and meaningless. I still have to abide by many of them, I’m not going to go running down the street naked for instance, but I also think it is absurd that we aren’t allowed to do so if we want. 

3. I’ve always been creative. I love storytelling. It’s one of the only things I’m really good at, not that society values this skill. 

4. This is the one I’m not completely on board with as I don’t see what believing in a God has to do with being an older soul, then again, I’m not really an atheist. Neither am I a monotheist either. A pantheist with pagan leanings, I suppose. I see modern mainstream atheism as an understandable reaction to centuries of dogma by the Abrahamic religions, however in an active disbelief and a rejection of all spirituality, they have a blind spot. Christianity took away the belief that there was anything particularly special about the Sun, the Moon, other things that pagan religions around the globe almost universally revered; they took all that spirituality and put it in one God. The Sun for instance became just another inanimate object; a ball of gas, not the source of all life. Modern atheism, in rejecting the one God, lost all of this. Polytheism can be another way to interpret reality by personifying real concepts; I don’t take it exactly literally, but it is another way through which to interpret the universe. I believe in a celestial consciousness, the Sun gave us life and must itself be alive, our souls and our life force are a fragment of the Sun’s energy. The universe itself could be a brain cell in a larger creature. Quantum theory is beginning to tear down the walls between science and spirituality, so perhaps this brand of atheism is merely a passing phase in Western philosophy. If you look at Eastern philosophy, they don’t have this problem with materialism.

5. My beliefs are always developing as I learn more and more. I wouldn’t say I’m just now “waking up”, or perhaps I’ve been waking up for the last fifteen years or so. 

So, maybe I’m an old soul. Then again this graphic seems designed to make the reader want to pat themselves on the back for being better than most people. I don’t want to be self-congratulatory. It’s important to note that being an old soul doesn’t make you superior to anyone. There’s no such thing as superior and inferior except in the human mind. There are advantages to being a new soul too. For one thing, it’s less depressing.

Oh no, those satanic liberals are indoctrinating children to…save the whales!

“Oh no, my child is going to step outside the strict religious bubble I’ve put them in and think for themselves!” When I first saw this one I couldn’t tell if it was saying this was a good thing or not, but the clues crop up the longer you look at it. “Atheist” Lawrence Krauss, ha. I guess we should all have our beliefs before our first names. That “Save the Whales” sticker though. Did the bible ever say that saving whales was wrong? And the “Love your Mother” sticker with Earth on it. I guess according to the bible you’re supposed to hate the Earth. It’s all bollocks. Schools really are indoctrinating children, just not the way these whackjobs think. They’re indoctrinating students with obedience so they will be effective workers or soldiers for the wealthy class. Wedge issues like the ones the conservatives complain about are there to keep the working class at each others throats and not at their real oppressors. This is especially obvious with issues the bible doesn’t actually say much about, like homosexuality and abortion. It was all concocted by the ruling class as manufactured outrage. 

There should be a Godwin’s Law for oppression/genocide comparisons.

I’m tired of this comparison. It gets so overused. What was unique about the Holocaust was not so much the scale or the brutality, but the fact that there was any sort of punishment for it at the end. I can’t think of another genocide in all of history that was ever properly punished. I guess that’s why this comparison always gets trotted out whenever someone needs to compare historical trauma to something. You can’t point at another country that committed genocide and say “what if they were still proud of it?” Because they all are, except Germany. Or if they’re not proud they’re completely ignorant of it. It’s also the only genocide laymen really know about, any other genocide gets barely glossed over in school, because the US uses it to distract from their own crimes.

Let me tell you a little story about a country named Turkey. Where this sort of thing actually happens. Those of you playing my blog’s drinking game can take a shot because I’m talking about this again. In Turkey they have statues and street names dedicated to Talaat Pasha and Sultan Abdul Hamid, who together are responsible for genocides against millions of Armenians, Greeks and Assyrians. And they either deny the genocides happened or are actually proud of it, with few exceptions. These days Turkey’s lackey Azerbaijan is working hard to finish the job. The genocide never really ended. A genocide that is denied never ends. It’s been put on pause a few times, and happens more slowly and gradually, whenever the international community is distracted enough.

Anyway, because I understand this, I don’t have to imagine how a Black person must feel seeing confederate statues and stupid Trumpster hicks being proud of their “heritage”. Nor do I have to imagine how Native Americans feel about Mt. Rushmore and the like. Although I don’t actually live in Turkey and have to experience this kind of oppression every day, I can put myself in their shoes. I guess the comparison works for blissfully ignorant American white people, for whom the Holocaust is the only genocide they’ve ever heard of. But only because it’s the only time a genocide was ever punished. So as much as I wish people would use a different example, there really is no other example, sadly. 

The Problem of Evil

I guess I’m picking on religion in this post. I always thought the Epicurean paradox was a pretty sound argument against monotheism, as interpreted by Abrahamic religions. Especially where it disproves both the “free will” argument and the “God is testing you” argument, which are the go-to excuses Christians have when confronted with the problem of the existence of evil, or bad things happening to good people. I have but one bone to pick with it, and that is the premise, which assumes that objective evil exists at all and isn’t just an arbitrary human invention. I’m playing Devil’s Advocate here since I’m not a Christian (God’s Advocate, I guess), but who’s to say what God considers evil, if he were to exist? Maybe he’s okay with all the injustice of the world, because only we see it as injustice. Maybe he views us the way we view bacteria and one-celled organisms. But then again, the point of this exercise doesn’t seem to be to actually disprove God’s existence, just to disprove that he’s all-powerful, all-knowing and all-loving. At least one of the three must be missing, if we assume evil exists as an objective concept. I may have my own morals, but I don’t think that they’re objective.

I quite prefer the outlook of ancient Egyptian religion, where the main binary is not good vs evil, but order vs chaos, with the goal not to defeat chaos but to come to a balance between order and chaos; because not all chaos is “bad”, and some chaos is even needed. It’s not so black and white, you see. Even the God Set, a God of Chaos who is often misinterpreted by modern observers under Christianity’s influence as a Satan-like figure, isn’t all bad, and has an important role to play in the universe by defeating the chaos serpent every night and protecting the Sun God Ra so that he may rise again. It’s a more nuanced view on reality. 

Facebook’s war on extremism.

Another They Live meme. One if my favorite formats. The thought police are at it again. I haven’t gotten one of these notices yet. From what I’ve heard they’re going after both leftists and extreme conservatives. I guess Facebook doesn’t think I’m extreme enough. I feel so left out. How sad. I’m on the lower left corner of the political compass. What more do I have to do? I’m probably just not influential enough. Which they help by burying all my posts. I often wonder if Facebook has me shadow-banned. It’s only ever the same five or six people who leave reactions on my posts. I get further in groups sometimes, but only when I’m sharing something from another Facebook account, not when I’m sharing my blog or comic. Do I really want to raise the ire of the ruling class, though?

These notices are rather alarming, though. Say the government starts cracking down on any ideology they don’t like, and using Facebook as a way to target people. If you think they’re only going to go after the alt-right, think again. 

Anyway, I’m not snitching on anybody. Screw that.

I’m in this picture and I don’t like it. 

I fell for this too, and learned too late that I had been scammed. All throughout the 1990s up to the 2008 market crash they hammered into our heads “get a college degree, you’ll be rich and be able to pay off that $100,000 student loan debt in no time”. And now that most degrees are worthless the reaction is “haha, you dumbass, you should’ve gone to trade school”. What’s going to happen to the next generation when everybody goes to trade school? That will be worthless too. This is how they keep people trapped in crappy jobs or get people to sign up for the military. Debt is a form of social control. Keep people desperate. I’ve ranted about this in detail before on the blog, but this meme just reminded me of it. 

“Choose Your Hard”, gee thanks, I’m cured and I’m a millionaire now.

Okay, finally, here’s one that really makes my blood boil. The kind of post I started this blog series for. I forgot to save another post I saw with “choose your hard” but it was saying something like you can choose to work hard and be rich or not try and be poor. “Have you tried not being poor?” Utter idiocy. Not everyone can make these choices. Let’s have a look at some of these. 

Marriage and divorce; okay maybe that is something you might have a choice in, sometimes, but not in every culture or circumstance. A woman might get stoned to death for leaving their husband in some parts of the world. Or maybe they have to worry about their psychotic and abusive partner attacking or killing them if they try to leave. Maybe they’re using the kids as blackmail and saying they’re going to take the kids away if there’s a divorce. There’s all sorts of reasons this doesn’t apply to everyone. “Staying in an abusive relationship is hard. Getting stoned to death is hard. Choose your hard.”

That obesity one is such utter bullshit. Some people are genetically predisposed to obesity and can’t lose the weight. Healthy food is expensive, some people who are poor don’t have a choice in what they get to eat, so become obese (ever been to a free food pantry?). Some people are disabled and can’t exercise. Some people don’t mind being obese anyway. You might as well say “Having cancer is hard. Staying healthy is hard. Choose your hard.”

Capitalism is designed to put you in debt, hardly anyone in this country isn’t in some kind of debt. What are you supposed to do when you’re out of food, spent your money on rent and bills, and your next paycheck isn’t coming for several days? Oh I know, “get a better job, budget better, blah blah blah”, says someone who has never been poor. How about an unexpected but astronomical medical bill that your insurance won’t cover, if you even have insurance? Even just a ride in an ambulance will put you in automatic debt. What should one do, just don’t ever get injured or sick? My entire generation was tricked into getting student loan debt thinking our degrees would get us anywhere, and weren’t taught anything about being financially responsible in school (on purpose no doubt). I chose the wrong hard, obviously. You could have your home destroyed in a natural disaster, have a relative unexpectedly die and have to pay for a funeral or cremation, get laid off from your job suddenly, there’s infinite ways to end up in debt that no amount of financial discipline will save you from. Just fuck you, whoever wrote this. Piss off.

And the last one, communication. That one’s so broad I don’t really know what they mean. But okay. If someone has a mental disability that prevents them from being good at communicating, can they just decide to be good at communicating? No. This is one of the lesser sins of this post I guess, but it’s still bollocks in a way.

This was written by the same type of person who would tell someone with depression caused by genetics and chemical balances in the brain to just cheer up and get over it. The “lift yourself up by the bootstraps” type of person. Some smug asshole who has never struggled in their life, probably lives in a fancy home their mommy and daddy bought them, no mortgage or rent. The type of person who when they hear the grievances of African-Americans would say “we freed your ancestors and lifted segregation, what more do you want? Must be your choice to be poor.” Even though after slavery they had to start at rock bottom and were deliberately kept poor during segregation, and have been unable to build any generational wealth (and in today’s financial climate building generational wealth from nothing is basically impossible). This is the type of person who doesn’t believe privilege exists. Choose your hard, my ass. Here’s one for whoever wrote this. “Getting my boot up your ass for making stupid victim-blaming arguments is hard. Keeping your mouth shut is hard. Choose your hard.” 

Anyway, that’s the blog. Felt cathartic writing that last one out. Maybe I’ll encounter more ridiculous posts in August. 

Highlights from my 8th Grade 1999/2000 Schedule Planner and Time Calsule

 

Middle School remains one of the worst times of my entire life. By the start of 8th grade I had been through the worst of it, but it had left me broken inside. The child I used to be had been thoroughly crushed and twisted. My dysthymia probably dates all the way back to those years. Still, there was some light at the end of the tunnel. At the end of the school year I would be out of this prison, and into another prison that might be better. Or just as bad. But at least it would be a different prison; although it happened to be right across the street.

At the beginning of the 1999/2000 school year, the students were all given these spiral-bound schedule planners. They had holographic covers, which were fun to scratch on and pretend we were DJs. I’m sure the teachers despised them. These schedule planners made a huge deal out of the year 2000 and “The New Millennium”. As if an arbitrary number on a year has any real significance. I remember this hype well (and a while back I blogged about what I did on New Years 2000 if you want to read more on that subject). The schedule planners contained all of the tyrannical school policies, the main calendar part, and at the end, a time capsule of sorts, out of paper of course. We were encouraged to keep these schedule planners and open the time capsules at a later date. For some reason I did keep it. And it is a time capsule in a lot of ways, not just the way it was intended to be. It allows me to see how much I’ve changed since I was 13, and how much I haven’t. Anyway, here are the best bits.

Valley View Federal Penitentiary and Insane Asylum. I had fun adding to the artwork throughout the planner in my own fashion. This jaguar drawing was made much more interesting by having it pounce on a security guard at a prison; whose appearance I’m almost certain I based on my 7th grade English and Social Studies teacher that I despised. 

Throughout this section I crossed out the word “school” and replaced it with “prison”, as well as “student” with “prisoner” wherever it appeared. It works, actually. My favorite sentence here, “The Valley View guards, torturers, officers, custodians, cafeteria workers, support staff, volunteer fiends and administrators are all working together to make this the worst year ever for you.” 

This is probably the edgiest page in the planner. X marks the spot where the bomb would go on the map to destroy the school. Now I had no ability or desire to actually carry out such a thing. I only wrote that out of sheer hatred for the school. It was merely a doodle. And what kid hasn’t thought about turning their school into a smoldering crater? There was even a Calvin and Hobbes comic about that. This being fresh off Columbine though, I’m pretty lucky no one saw it. This sort of thing earned me a reputation at school among the other students however, for being a psycho who was going to burn the school down one day. But being feared was better than being bullied, as I had been the previous two years. So I embraced it. Started adding a little more black to my wardrobe.

Here is the PE dress code and other rules. Oh how I hated PE. Forced to don uniforms emblazoned with the school logo and mascot, encouraging obedience through a false sense of “pride”. It wasn’t actually about fitness. It was about getting the students used to taking orders, so that we would be suited for either the military or whatever dead end minimum wage job we would end up with after accumulating massive student loan debt on a useless college degree. This was always the plan. I had some idea of this even back then. 

Lovely doodles, aren’t they?

 

There’s that infamous stylized S, incorporated into “School Sucks”, no less. I also would doodle on and cover up my English teacher’s negative feedback over my homework that I didn’t do with a red ink pen of my own. He required me to have a parent sign each day, but I’m pretty sure my mom just signed through the whole planner in one go near the beginning of the school year. What’s the teacher going to do about that, really? Not sure what grade I ended up getting in that class, but does that even matter in the slightest now, 21 years later? I wish I knew how little everything was going to matter back then; how utterly pointless all the struggle and suffering I went through turned out to be in the end. I’d have talked back more, and stood up for myself more. Just as long as you do the bare minimum to not get held back a grade or sent to summer school, it doesn’t matter at all what grade you get. Neither of those things ever happened to me, fortunately. But I still feel robbed of my childhood.

Oh goodie, the last day in this stupid school! How exciting that was. I knew I still had four more years in High School to go, but I was just so glad to be out of that nightmare. High School wasn’t as bad. Better teachers, less bullying, most of the other students were just a little bit more mature and no longer felt the need to project their insecurities on people who were different, like me. Not that it never happened. It still sucked but it was less of a toxic environment, by comparison. It could have been better if I wasn’t already so mentally scarred by Middle School. It made me very pessimistic. I went into High School already hating it before anything bad had even happened. 

I love the summer schedule I wrote here. Listen to radio, play video game, eat. Repeat to infinity. That’s still the schedule I wish I had. 

Here it is, the time capsule. It’s really corny. I knew it back then. I decided I would open it on the last day of High School, which really wasn’t long enough. Then I decided to open it again on December 21, 2012, because you know, that was the date of the Mayan apocalypse. I knew about that before most other people because of some speculative documentary I watched in the 90s that terrified me (I wrote about that on this blog before too). After 2012, I just left it open, to look at whenever. There’s nothing that amazing inside.

Some highlights from the main two pages: 

My fitness goal six months from now is: 

Nothing.

Addictions are unhealthy. To me these are the three worst addictions:

Pokemon, soap operas, cigarettes (in that order of course).

Three junk foods I like but should eat less more of:

Salsa Verde Chips, ShockTarts, Sour Strings (I largely cut candy out of my diet in my late 20s after a root canal on my molar, which I eventually had extracted).

Two Things I Do To Relax:

Play video games, listen to music (this is still true)

3 Things I like to do that help me stay fit:

Lift TV controllers, lift N64 controllers, lift (video game) cartridges (I was so funny back then).

This is what I wish to contribute to society:

I want to dominate society, end youth segregation, let kids vote and destroy school. 

(I used to love drawing over maps of the world with my own ideal country boundaries, under the fantasy that I would one day take over the world. World domination is the kind of thing you dream about when you feel powerless. And I felt very powerless in Middle School. I had no autonomy whatsoever, no control over my life.)

3 things I’m proud about myself:

My tapes. (And I still stubbornly make mixtapes.)

The middle part has my ominous message about the 2012 apocalypse, plus some of the music I liked at the time (some of which makes me cringe now, please don’t read it, Gods I hate Kid Rock what was I thinking). 

Another flap of the time capsule. Some further highlights:

My friends will remember me most for:

Being the small one. (I wonder if that’s true?)

The class I like most:

I hate school.

Why?

Because it takes over my life.

I took the liberty of listing more of my favorite songs, which are hit-or-miss to me today:

I’m Not Crazy (actually Institutionalized by Suicidal Tendencies)

Freak of the Week (by Marvelous 3)

Pretty Fly (for a white guy) by The Offspring 

Song 2 (by Blur)

Everything Dies (by Type O Negative)

Sehnsucht (by Rammstein)

Paul Revere (by The Beastie Boys)

My musical tastes were flawed, but gradually coming around, showing a flash here and there of what they would later become. Another thing to remember in younger me’s defense is that I was very limited by whatever the radio played. And CDs were expensive, I think at that point I owned less than ten. I wasn’t from a rich family. It wasn’t like today where I can hop on YouTube and find any song that’s ever been recorded. I would never even have imagined that back then, though it was less than ten years away.

And that’s the end. “Ehh shut up!” Was this the most significant thing I did all year? Nah. Probably the mixtapes I made that year were more significant, to me at least. But it gave me something to write about in my blog, and more fuel for my webcomic. So maybe it did end up being significant. It’s a terrible chapter in my life, but it’s part of what shaped me. I think what I find most interesting are the ways I haven’t changed. I’m still very cynical and anti-authoritarian (unless the authority was me, heh. But I don’t want to be an authority anymore). I still love music and video games, I still make mixtapes. I may have changed in many ways in the last 21 years, but at my core I’ve always been the same person. I’ve always been me.

One more doodle for the road. Here’s the back cover. Some typical anti-drug propaganda that never stopped anyone from doing drugs. I ought to rip this off and roll a joint with it. 

Anyway, I’m homeschooling my kid. 

Top 10 Songs of the Month ~ July 2021/Հրոտից 4513 ~ Jrimurmur, Vestron Vulture, Candelabre

I have been especially bombarded with good music this past month. I am going to run out of room on my 16gb MP3 player very soon, methinks. It’s the problem of having a refrigerator that’s too full. I’ve been back into post-punk again mainly, along with some darkwave, so this will be a very goth list as usual. And it feels very liberating to not be limiting myself to 3 or 5 songs anymore. We’ll have a nice round number this time, 10. Maybe it means more writing, but I’m okay with that, I just need to start writing them earlier now. I started this one in late June. Here’s what’s been rattling around in my head this past month.

Jrimurmur ~ Averak

On July 3rd, I found no less than four Armenian goth bands! Turns out No Man Cry is not alone. Here’s our first band, Jrimurmur, or alternatively Jrimurmurner (the “ner” is a plural suffix). Google Translate tells me it translates to seaweed; understandably since Armenia is a landlocked country I have never come across that word. Jrimurmur is a duo from Yerevan, Armenia, who describe themselves as “two crazy girls making noise”. They’ve been active from at least 2015, and just released their first full length LP last month, Lur Mur. This song, “Averak”, translates to “Ruins”. It’s a breakup song; the singer claims that their lover left them in ruins, comparing themselves to the ruined medieval Armenian capital of Ani, which is now on the Turkish side of the border, while the lover went on to flourish like Yerevan, the current capital. It’s a cover actually. The original song was by Elvina Markaryan, a very famous jazz singer in Armenia and the former Soviet Union. I can swear I’ve heard it before, but I have no idea when. But I recognized the lyrics in Jrimurmur’s version. Jrimurmur’s version has quite a different, gothier sound to it. It’s almost like Lebanon Hanover. A really close second from this band for me is “Anharmar a im Mej” (“I am Uncomfortable in Myself”), a really nice post-punk track which leads me to believe the huge post-punk scene in Russia must be catching on in Armenia. 

You can find the album on Bandcamp: 

https://jrimurmur.bandcamp.com/album/lur-mur-2

Vestron Vulture ~ Cemetery Cowboy

Vestron Vulture is a band out of Monterrey, Mexico. They just released three albums at once on June 30th, Hexen, Heretic and Hecatomb. The song “Cemetery Cowboy” is off the album Heretic. This music video was what captured my attention; it’s a sad video actually, of a young woman being consumed with a cocaine addiction. Maybe it sort of struck a cord with me this month because I finally decided to quit kratom, a far less harmful and a legal drug, but still very addicting, and going through a week of horrible withdrawals. It’s also just a great post-punk track, with its gloomy bass guitar and macabre subject matter. I don’t know why the word “cowboy” is in the title, but at least this sounds nothing like a country song. Another song I like from Vestron Vulture is “Crippling Death”, off this same album, which I also recommend listening to. The singer Vestron Vulture, the namesake of the band, has been very prolific since 2010 when he left a thrash metal band to go solo, with almost forty albums, and in that time he has hopped through several different genres if you look into his back catalog, from more electronically influenced styles like synthwave and EBM, to this sort of music, which he’s been making since 2019. It seems he’s been through even more genres than Mortiis. And I only just heard of Vestron Vulture, which means I get to go on a fun journey through their discography. By releasing three albums on the same day, he certainly likes to spoil his fans.

You can find the album this track is on here: 

https://vestronvulture.bandcamp.com/album/heretic

Candelabre ~ Ceasefire of Love

Candelabre is a band out of France and just released a new album in May of this year. I typically think of France as like the coldwave capital, thanks to Hante, Minuit Machine, and going further back Little Nemo. But this band has kind of a goth rock/shoegaze sound to it, reminding me a lot of Glaare and Electrotsoy, bands in the same genre. It’s a mixture of dark and light energies; that’s how I would describe their music. In an interview I uncovered they explained that the music is a combination of all three of the band member’s personalities, which explains how it has such a mixture to it. Singer Cindy Sanchez has a really beautiful ethereal voice as well, carrying the music over any darker elements. This song, “Ceasefire of Love”, turned out to be my favorite one so far from them. It’s a very impassioned song. I tend to associate ceasefires with war, quite the opposite of love. So what is a ceasefire of love then? Is it when two lovers decide to take a break from one another? The lyrics, available in the description of the music video, speak of war, but are very abstract and I can’t make much sense of them. I suppose it’s open to interpretation. 

You can find their new album, For Time is to Have Wings, here:

https://manicdepressionrecords.bandcamp.com/album/md133-candelabre-for-to-have-time-is-to-have-wings

Metal Disco ~ Vile

This track caught my attention because the music video incorporates footage from the infamous Max Headroom signal hijacking in 1987. If you’ve never heard of that go ahead and watch it, it’s somewhere between creepy and funny. The song fits the video well. The beginning almost sounds like what you would imagine a signal hijacking to sound like, before it gives way to a kind of sinister-sounding heavy electronic beat with growling vocals. Metal Disco is out of Greece, the side-project of Toxic Razor of the band Paradox Obscur, who’ve made my lists before. I found another review of this same video, which in turn provided me more information about the band. This is a good industrial track, and I feel like I don’t find a lot of modern industrial music that I like these days, but I really like this one.

The album, Rough and Dirty, releases on July 25th, and can be found here:

https://synthesizer.bandcamp.com/album/331-metal-disco-rough-dirty

Skinny Puppy ~ Far Too Frail

“For years some people have argued that this kind of pornography is a matter of artistic creativity.”

Yes, this song came out in 1984, two years before I was born, and I just recently heard it. Certain iconic goth/industrial bands just fly under my radar sometimes, despite my being into this type of music since 2005. Take my recent dive into Christian Death, for instance. I’ve been on a Skinny Puppy binge the last couple of weeks. Now I know what influenced Velvet Acid Christ. Skinny Puppy were way ahead of their times, and it’s strange to think I could have been listening to this song as a kid, if I’d had any way of discovering it back then. The Skinny Puppy song “Warlock” made my top songs of the month list before some years ago (before I started putting them up on my blog), but I failed to probe deeper. To be honest, some Skinny Puppy songs are a bit too sample-heavy for my tastes, which deterred me for a while. Take for example “Monster Radio Man”, which is basically just samples from The Twilight Zone episode “The Monsters are Due on Maple Street” with a simple beat in the background. That’s the whole song. I think using samples from that episode could make for a great industrial song, but it’s got to at least have lyrics, and shorter samples, not ones that take up the entire song. I mean I could just watch the actual episode if I wanted that. The samples in “Far too Frail” are used more sparingly. The one I quoted above came from a speech by Ronald Reagan, and the other sample, “They’re alive, they’re human beings!” comes from the movie Shadow of a Doubt directed by Alfred Hitchcock. 

Despite being 37 years old this year, you can find the album Remission on Bandcamp.

https://skinnypuppy.bandcamp.com/album/remission

The Black Veils ~ Rabbits (The Foreign Resort Remix)

You know, I never once thought I’d hear a post-punk song about rabbits. This would be great for the soundtrack to a remake of  Watership Down. I actually wonder if that’s what this song is about. One fun thing to do when listening to this song is to imagine it being sung by Elmer Fudd. “Wun, girl! This ain’t no wand foh wabbits!” It’s such a good song though. Has good energy to it. It’ll get stuck in your head. This version is a remix by The Foreign Resort, which is a band I have enjoyed before (my favorite song of their’s is “She is Lost”). The original version is slower and a bit more minimalistic, but I think I prefer the remix, which is upbeat and exciting. I don’t always prefer that with every song, but I think it works with this one. The song was released last month as a single for an upcoming album The Black Veils will be releasing later this year. I look forward to hearing their album when it comes out.

You can find the single with the original version and the remix here:

https://theblackveils.bandcamp.com/album/rabbits

Скубут ~ Вещество

It’s the Russian coldwave/darkwave band from Austria again, Skubut, with another hit song. This is the second time they’ve captured my attention, as I was listening to their previous album back in February. I would say they’re among my favorite Russian language post-punk bands right now, along with Molchat Doma, Electrotsoy and Divid. Скубут is a solo project by Mikhail Shlepin. How it came to be based out of Vienna, Austria I have yet to learn. The song’s title translates to “Substance”, and comes off their album Сгублен (“ Ruined” in English) which was just released on June 21st. Their second album this year in fact. Give it a listen.

You can find their new album here:

https://skubut.bandcamp.com/album/--5

Altar of Eden ~ Sacrilege 

Altar of Eden truly sounds like it came right out of the early 1980s, echoing the sound of classic deathrock. It’s got a heaviness to it that a lot of modern bands in the genre lack. Their album Chimeras came out last February. I bought a couple of their albums on Bandcamp early last month when I discovered them, unfortunately their cassettes were sold out but I would have loved to listen to this band over a cassette, it’s just the type of music that sounds good on analog media. I found an interview with the singer of the band from after their album Chimeras was released. From what I can gather they’re not trying to chase any trends with their music, they mainly just listen to classic punk and post-punk and go from there. I can respect that, as an artist I don’t like chasing trends either. Just stick to what you want to make.

The album can be found here:

https://soundgrotesca.bandcamp.com/album/altar-of-eden-chimeras

Node ~ Infection

Node is a coldwave band out of Yerevan, Armenia. Right after I found Jrimurmur, YouTube’s algorithm brought me to the page of Vardan Sargsyan, linking me to other Armenian coldwave, post-punk, dark alternative by the bands Node, Duke, and Kay. I could probably write a separate blog post about the Armenian dark alternative music I’ve uncovered so far. The singer reminds me of the likes of SYZYGYX, Selofan and Lebanon Hanover. They sing in English with a distinct Armenian accent. I don’t have a lot of information about this band, as of yet, but they do have a Bandcamp. This track is very eerie, and almost hypnotic. The visuals in the music video add to that too.

This is off their album Thought Infection which was released in November of 2020. Check it out here:

https://nodeofficial.bandcamp.com/releases

The Doom Scroll ~ The Worst of Social Media ~ June 2021

 

Welcome to my consciousness. A window into my mind. Filled with subjects I find important enough to rant about, whether or not it is universally considered important. I know someone reads these things. I write them as if someone reads them. It’s a presentation thing, keeping a stern face in front of the crowd, even though it’s a small crowd. Like how I have three people who subscribe to me on Patreon but I have to write all my posts like I have hundreds of subscribers. It’s the kind of show a third party US presidential candidate puts on, knowing there’s no way in hell they’re going to win the election but keeping their chin up anyway and carrying on as if they do have a chance. I’ve come to terms with the fact that I’m never going to be some New York Times Bestseller author, just let me have my fun. Let me pretend that more than a handful of people care about what I write and draw. It’s my way of entertaining myself as my consciousness floats in a black abyss, as if the only thing that truly exists. If you’re reading and comprehending this, gaining meaning from these symbols we call “letters”, at least that disproves solipsism. I exist, so far as I know. This was written by a real person. And you know you exist, if you’re reading this. I guess there’s still no way to prove it to each other. Anyway, I should just settle for having been able to entertain a handful of people. Storytellers were more valued back in the days of hunter gather tribes. We lost our value to society by the time of the Industrial Revolution, if not earlier than that. But in ancient times, fame rarely carried you outside your immediate tribe, village, maybe city. Our jobs were stolen by a small number of celebrities, hand-picked by those in power, who reach millions of people and take our audience. So I guess if you read my stuff, I can consider you a member of my tribe. Without the internet my audience would be even smaller. 

I’ve written much of this post while suffering from kratom withdrawal (which is basically the same as an opiate withdrawal), and I am sure the ensuing rage and delirium will shine through. I’ve had to quit both because of the expense and because I built up such a tolerance to it that it was no longer worth it. 

The Meaning of Life

Would life be any more meaningful without menial, time-wasting jobs? Maybe not, but it would be more enjoyable at least. I think if you’re going to be thrust into this bizarre nonsensical universe trapped in a slowly decaying meat robot without any context or explanation, you might as well enjoy the ride. What’s the point of spending it suffering? What’s the point of spending it in boredom? If you aren’t enjoying yourself, you’re wasting time. Responsibility and priorities come first, of course, but beyond that why not enjoy yourself? As long as you and your loved ones are surviving just fine, and your preferred way to enjoy yourself doesn’t harm yourself or others. 

To an extent I agree with what this post is saying, but I don’t know what they’re expecting life to be like. Life isn’t a movie or a book. We’re never going to get superpowers, that just doesn’t happen, at least in our corner of the universe, as far as we know. The vast majority of us are never going to gain any sort of notoriety, and a hundred years from now we’ll only be remembered as names on a family tree at best, if we’re even that lucky. Not that it will matter much. Life is never going to have an objective meaning. Meaning is something humans made up. It has whatever meaning you think it has. 

Generation Bashing, but Kinda True

Nostalgia is an escape from the horrors of the day. It doesn’t even matter if the movie was any good, a movie of our childhood brings us back to a time before we knew the ghastly truth about the way the world worked. I think if you shield children from the truth of the world they’re going to have a much harder time knowing how to handle it when they do have to face it. Like telling them their pet ran off to the circus instead of saying it was hit by a car. How are they going to be able to process it when they face death down the line? 

Anyway, off-topic I guess. But yeah, that’s why I like so many animated movies that can even be “bad”, or flawed. I miss being ignorant. And that’s why today’s twenty-somethings cling to Shrek even though it’s not a good movie. Or that any nostalgia exists among older people for the mostly crude, poorly-animated and derivative Hannah-Barbera cartoons of the 1960s and 1970s. That doesn’t matter when you’re nostalgic. Because it’s not the movie or book or TV show you actually like and yearn for, but the past itself. The world seemed nicer when you knew less about it. Like I was saying last month. I had a return to the An American Tail series in my twenties, but as the years have gone by I look at it more objectively, without the nostalgia goggles, and strictly speaking only the first movie is really any good, although imperfect. So this was kind of a passing phase for me. Or maybe I’m too cynical now to be unrealistically nostalgic. Too self aware.

The Past is Part of the Present

Everything affects the future in some way. You move a pebble, and it causes a chain reaction that might change the future in five hundred years. Things that happened more than 100 million years ago affect the present. The Butterfly flaps its wings in China and it causes a tornado in Oklahoma. This is why people who try to separate the past from the present and tell you to get over it are wrong. The present is the culmination of every event that has ever transpired since the creation of the Universe. 

Should the Catholic church pay for what they did to Native Americans in boarding schools? Should African Americans get reparations for slavery? Should Turkey recognize and pay for the Armenian genocide? Yes. All of the above. These things created the present. They are a part of the present. There’s no time limit. Another example off the top of my head; I know no one’s really going to make them, but the Mongolians should stop idolizing Genghis Khan too. He was a genocidal mass murderer, killed more people than Hitler. And yet they build huge statues of him. Even though it was 800 years ago, it’s condoning, normalizing and whitewashing that behavior. Maybe they don’t need to pay reparations to the descendants of survivors, perhaps, but at least stop worshiping the guy. Needless to say I think all the Confederate statues should be torn down too. The Union was far from perfect but the Confederates were definitely worse.

In some ways the past is the present, and the present is the past. Look up at the night sky. Even the closest star you see is how it looked about four years ago. Many are hundreds of lightyears away. The sun could explode suddenly and we wouldn’t know for eight minutes. It takes time for your eyes to process light and for your brain to unscramble an image. A fraction of a second, yes, but not instantly. If you feel pain it takes a split second for it to register in your brain. We don’t live in the present. We live in the past. There is no present. Or it is impossible for us to observe the actual present, anyway.

Anyway, this map gave me deep thoughts. 

A List of Brags From an Old Person That Claims Old People Don’t Brag

Where is this mythical old person? I worked at a call center, I know they can be rude, entitled assholes who will chew you out because their coupon is expired. It was actually the younger people who generally were more polite and understanding on the phone. They don’t curse? Please. I’ve heard it all. Do they think the word “fuck” was invented by Millennials? Here’s a better question; do they extend this legendary politeness to African Americans, or pretty much anyone of color, or homeless people? Why do you think they ask you what your job is when you first meet? So they can decide how respectful and polite they’re going to be to you. I’m not saying all elderly people are that way, far from it, but the white male conservative American nationalist elderly people this post is specifically talking about definitely are. 

It’s embarrassing that someone could get that old and still believe in utter bollocks like the national anthem. 80 years old and still worshipping the colored sky cloth, hm? How have they not woken up yet? Flags, countries, borders, money, all your dated “values”, it’s all fake. Fake bullcrap to keep you obedient. The puppet masters have you right where they want you. They still watch and believe Fox News. Might as well believe in the Tooth Fairy. They’ve been force-fed corporate imperialist propaganda their whole lives and they’ve never once woken up and realized it’s all bullshit. They’ve had decades upon decades to figure this out and still haven’t questioned it once. They’ve stayed locked up in Plato’s Cave staring at the shadows on the wall their whole lives. Land of the free? Free to be a wage slave or starve to death, and be victim-blamed either way, some free country. Free to die of some preventable disease because you don’t have health insurance. It’s only “free” if you’re born rich. And what makes a rich person more worthy of respect? Because they’ve collected more imaginary numbers by exploiting others? And home of the brave? A country where people stockpile guns and ammo even if they live in the middle of a safe suburban neighborhood? Where they can’t tolerate the idea of someone different from themselves living in the same country, and went down kicking and screaming over the official end of slavery and later segregation (at least on paper)? Cowards. Fear rules this country. Next door neighbors don’t even talk to each other here. Anyway, I guess it’s because their generation didn’t have their dreams and aspirations dashed to utter oblivion the moment they graduated college like the majority of my generation did that they never woke up from their nationalist fever dream. Disillusionment leads to clarity.

And yeah, #3, “peace keeping missions”, a polite way of saying invasions. War is Peace, Freedom is Slavery. Orwell was right. Or I guess it’s more like Slavery is Freedom in this country. Anyway congratulations for remembering things and stuff. Or just wars, really. You remember people killing each other over stupid made-up abstract concepts, and America bullying smaller countries and stealing their resources. Good for you, that makes you sooo much better than young people. Give yourself a pat on the back. You wanna know what I don’t remember? I don’t remember when a minimum wage job could afford you even a studio apartment. I don’t remember a time before we were on the brink of ecological collapse and mass extinctions. I don’t remember a time when the world didn’t fucking suck.

And one more thing, about #8, what’s with the hat obsession from pretty much everyone born before the 1960s or so? It’s a freaking head covering, why does it matter if I want to wear it indoors? I’ll wear a hat wherever I damn well please. Life’s too short for your idiotic customs and societal norms. Is my hat bothering someone? Is it hurting anybody? Gives me horrible public school flashbacks of having my hat confiscated for no good reason. 

Hey, this game came out in 2003, it’s not old! Oh…wait…

Once you reach your thirties, is there anything more depressing than watching people in their late teens and early twenties get nostalgic over things that came out less than twenty years ago? I guess I must have really pissed off a lot of thirty-somethings when I was nostalgic for the 1990s in my early twenties. It’s only going to get worse over time as I get older. I can only guess what it’s like to witness this phenomenon when you’re 70. I can’t imagine why someone would be nostalgic for the early 2000s, it was an awful time. 9/11, Iraq war and all that. It was a terrible time for movies and music too. That was around when you had to start digging if you wanted good music because the radio was playing crap, and the movies all had terrible CG and cliche plots (now they have decent CG and cliche plots).

The game above is Sonic Heroes, a game I used to have but never beat because it becomes too damned frustrating toward the end, and completing it 100% to see the true ending requires you to be good at this stupid mini-game that I could never beat, where you run through a tunnel collecting balls. I sold it out of spite years ago. It was a crappy game and people only like it if they were under 10 years old when they first played it, out of nostalgia. I’ve come to the conclusion that the only good Sonic game to ever come out after Sonic 3 & Knuckles in 1995 was Sonic Mania, a retro return to form as a 2D Sonic game. And of course some of the fan-made Rom hacks blow both those games out of the water, good as they are. 3D Sonic was a mistake. I tried to like the 3D games for a while, maybe even convinced myself I liked them, but although they might have occasionally had fleeting moments of being fun sometimes, they’re overall not good. They’ve aged worse than the 16-bit Sonic games. And I also hate the Japanese canon that overtook the American canon when Sonic went 3D. It’s Dr. Robotnik, not Dr. Eggman, dammit. That’s a stupid name. I don’t like Amy Rose or Cream the Rabbit or the Chao either. Give me Sally Acorn and Bunnie Rabbot, please. “Okay boomer”, the young Sonic fans will say to me. I wonder if anyone under 30 holds this opinion.

Sonic Heroes doesn’t feel that old of a game, but I guess it’s currently 18 years old. This game is old enough to vote and smoke. I remember when the first Sonic game was 18 years old in 2009, and it seemed retro then. I mean, I don’t think I bought the game right when it came out, it could have been a few years later, so maybe that’s why it doesn’t feel as old to me, but still. I know I ranted at white conservative American elderly males earlier, but I am on my way to being old and curmudgeonly too. I’ve always been kind of curmudgeonly though. See that sad guy in the bottom picture on this meme, that’s me right now weeping over the fact that anyone could be nostalgic for this bad game that feels like it came out five years ago.

The Problem of Gun Violence- A Nuanced Take

They say when you go far enough left you get your guns back. I suppose that’s true. There’s no easy fix for the problem of mass shootings, or shootings in general. To do nothing, as conservatives want to do, is to allow the problem to continue. To ban guns, as many liberals want to do, isn’t really getting to the heart of the problem, and neither is it going to stop people from getting guns illegally, leaving those who cannot get guns through those channels potentially more vulnerable. Many drugs are illegal but that doesn’t stop them from circulating. The true solution is to look at all the underlying issues that lead someone to resort to gun violence. Mass shootings are rare outside the United States, and that is where these issues are at their worst. It’s one of the only wealthy countries without universal healthcare, it’s where the cults of “Rugged Individualism” and toxic masculinity are the strongest, it has perhaps the worst case of reactionary politics, leading to outlandish conspiracy theories. These are all things that prop up those in power. The image above could also have mentioned racism, colonialism, and the toxic work mentality (wherein people are expected to spend all their waking hours working leading to a burnout) as well, but those too have the same root cause. So yes, in my honest opinion, gun control isn’t really going to solve the issue. To use an unfortunate idiom, it would be a bandaid over a bullet wound.

Where I want to Move

I think I’ll end things on a peaceful note. Above is the isolated village of Katnaghpyoor, in the northern Lori region of Armenia. Quite a mouthful, even for me. This is where I want to live; if not this specific village then one like it. No Walmart, no McDonalds, no traffic and pollution, no being bombarded with neon advertisements and billboards everywhere you look, no lawns covered in pesticide and dog piss. Off the grid. As long as I had electricity and an internet connection, I would be good. I wonder if they grow their own food and barter with their neighbors here. Everyone must know each other here. I bet you could buy one of these houses for like $300. I want to move here and just forget the rest of the world exists. 

Anyway, I could have written more, but I ran out of time, July snuck up on me. So enjoy the utter drivel I was able to squeeze out before the month ended, whoever reads these. Next time I won’t be suffering kratom withdrawals.