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How to solve a problem like Daniel Ek?

So it’s no news that Daniel Ek sucks.

I’ve said this in a previous post about Tidal, and expanded on that in an earlier post about pirating music. From his seemingly tone-deaf opinion that being an artist costs close to zero (though to his credit, he expanded on that in an equally tone-deaf followup), to Spotify demonetizing songs that hit under 1000 streams, to just the opening of floodgates to a plethora of AI slop on the platform, it’s kinda bad news bears all around.

Recently, Ek decided to top his previous efforts and invest in Helsing, an AI military startup, because apparently he has a few Call of Duty wet dreams to fulfil.

I’m not associated with Ek, I don’t know his accountant, I don’t know what his finances are, but it’d be no surprise to anyone if that some of that sweet sweet investment cash came from Spotify.

Which puts artists and consumers like myself (as part of The Limited, anyway) in a very difficult position. I certainly don’t want to support Ek’s male fantasy of playing wargames BUT IN REAL LIFE, so the obvious solution is to pull music from Spotify, right?

Yeah, so. Storytime.

When we first started out as a band, we discovered very quickly people are lazy and just want convenience over having to put effort in. So they’d ask for a spotify link.

It’s not like we were unreachable, we have a Bandcamp with all of our ‘proper’ releases and then some. The proceeds from which go directly to us and it’s a bigger payout.

But nope, the unwashed masses were having none of that. they wanted Spotify, so Spotify they got and it’s become a bit of a necessary evil, and we’ve got a pretty decent following there.

So if we ditch Spotify, we lose all that traction we worked hard on, and would have to start semi-fresh elsewhere (our distributor shotguns us out to most streaming platforms so it’s not like we’d be starting from scratch)

But staying goes against the band’s ethics.

It’s an awful situation to be in, and we don’t know what to do.

As consumers though, we can vote with our wallets. There’s plenty of options out there, and I might try a bunch as a follow up to this post. Don’t just go with Spotify just because it’s there. Brand loyalty is dead in 2025 and your money is going to a total and utter fuckwit while artists get the dregs. Do your research and go with what’s best.

There’s obviously also something to be said about how there’s plenty of other shitty actors out there we unintentionally fund we just don’t know about, or definitely know about and just go ‘eh, whatever’, but this feels different, somehow. Spotify is just a huge content repository with very little benefit to those who create that content, and the proceeds from that (which should very much be going to those creators) are now funding military tech.

Though, to be fair to Ek, he also co founded Neko Health, which specializes in non-invasive body scanning technology, so maybe he’s not the world’s greatest monster I and many others make him out to be.

rarr rarr billionaires are shit, eat the rich, etc.

Till next time…

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The Chronicles of Quitting Smoking

I have attempted to quit smoking over the years.

It fucking sucked.

To keep myself amused and/or to scream into the void, I kept a diary of the occasional day here and there.

Thought I’d post here for posterity.

Without further ado:

Quitting smoking day 2 – 9:35am:

For comparison’s sake, I cracked at about 8:15am yesterday. So FUCK YEAH. NEW HIGH SCORE!

I’m not feeling the cravings as much. Patches appear to be helping but may be a placebo effect (they’re working too well. I haven’t called anything a cunt yet). But something is puzzling me…

What the hell do you non-smokers do all day?

I have spent the last five minutes wandering around listlessly looking for something to do. Had a crack on the guitar for about 10 minutes, gave the Xbox a look and a hearty “meh” soon after, now I’m just watching Youtube and prepping for editing work that I have been neglecting for months.

Okay granted, I’m home sick from work so there’s the extra boredom factor to tackle, but work has smoke breaks, and lunch, and whatnot, so I’d probably feel the same way there, too.

I bought a Rubix cube to distract myself. I’m going to solve the fucking thing by tonight at this rate. Good lord.

Is this what non-smoking life is like? Just being endlessly fucking bored?

“Oh being a non smoker is soooo great. You can breathe better, and less likely to die of horrible diseases, and doing any amount of exercise doesn’t fucking send you to an early grave, and you won’t sound like Tom Waits!”

Yeah, great. All for what? To stare at a fucking wall all day? How the hell do you people keep yourselves entertained?

And for the record, hypothetical non-smoker person; Tom Waits is a fucking champ. Those dulcet tones that sound like a badger being force-fed a running lawnmower make people weep, okay? Don’t make me car-bomb you for being a fucking embarrassment.

May 2nd, 2017

Quitting smoking, day three – 10.00am

24 hours without a single cigarette. Yeah, great, whatever, well done me.

I’d be more excited except I have a severe case of “that facemelty thing that happens when you open the Ark of the Covenant”, everything hurts, and I stayed up till the wee hours playing DayZ. Mostly because Dead by Daylight hates my dinosaur of a computer.

Let’s talk about DayZ for a minute, shall we?

That shit isn’t conducive to quitting smoking.

First off, your character is completely fucking hopeless. You start off with basically nothing, and hungry, and they won’t shut the fuck up about how hungry they are until you down three cans of beans and two powdered milks. Then they’re thirsty, so off you go in the middle of bumfuckistan to find a gazillion cans of pepsi. Just when you think you have that shit covered, BAM! Hungry again.

Who the hell is this hungry all the time? I’m more sugar than human at this point, and I can last basically three quarters of a day without eating. C’mon dude. pick your game up.

Then there’s the thing where you’re in the middle of Bumfuckistan.

You were spawned in Bumfuckistan,

you are continually hungry or thirsty in Bumfuckistan,

you will inevitably die in Bumfuckistan.

Where are all the cities? I’ve managed to find large towns and then got stuck at a coastal area with a lighthouse and died of starvation because Dudley Dickhead didn’t have food in 2.5 seconds.

At least he’s got being a zombie down pat; wander around aimlessly (you don’t get a map, so your best hope is to just find a road and hope it doesn’t lead to the fucking Lighthouse), satisfy eternal hunger, get stuck on stairs, or rocks, or flat concrete, or an infinite plane.

Oh, and holy shit you’re bad at combat. Like I get you’re not meant to be the Terminator or anything, but surely your numbnuts of a character can swing a fucking axe. Any time a melee weapon hits it just makes this unsatisfying “paff” sound. Jesus fucking christ, throwing toilet paper would do a better job.

Oh, and forget about unarmed fighting; the dude’s boxer stance just gives you false confidence. You’re going to die. Your character has all the punching power of an infant.

For some reason it’s running better on my computer now, so there’s that. plus even on low rez it’s rather pretty. I would have stuck around to admire the scenery, but Dudley Dickhead died of starvation again and I was re-respawned near the lighthouse.

May 3rd, 2017

Might help if I don’t derp and accidentally post non-Youtube shit into a youtube community…

Making good on one of my non-quitting-smoking resolutions… A sketch a week, or day, or whenever the fuck I feel like it.

Not sure if this is meant to be an ogre or self portrait…

January 8th, 2015

I haven’t had a smoke for 7 hours and I’ve already yelled at everything in the house.

To everyone who has to deal with me on a regular basis: I am so fucking sorry.

September 10th, 2018

First smoke of the day. It tastes like deep-fried shit with shit frosting…

Progress?

May 6th, 2015

Barely a few hours in and already I’m a snarling hellbeast.

Yeeeeah. next few days are going to be GREAT!

May 5th, 2015

Cracked after 4 hours…

Clearly I’m the hero Gotham deserves…

May 5th 2015

Okay. For reals this time. Take 2 and all that.

Have patches on, brain is still melting.

May 5th, 2015

Normally this would be worth a mere eye-roll. But seriously, Globe. I’m quitting smoking here. Don’t make me car-bomb you for being such a fucking embarrasment…

May 7th, 2015

Tonight’s episode of “I’m having withdrawals and I must scream”

Can we stop ‘breaking the internet’ already? You can’t break the internet. It’s the internet. No, not even Kim Kardashian’s probably-fake ass can break the internet.

The only thing that could break the internet is Liam Neeson’s giganto-cock. Pretty sure that dude woke up with morning wood one time and caused 9/11…

May 7th, 2015

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Ranty nonsense

So I switched to Tidal…

I’ve been a mostly-okay-with-it Spotify user for years now.

Yes, the payouts suck, there’s no major discovery anymore thanks to The Algorithm™ (all hail) and for some reason they’re doing videos now? Like, okay. Settle down there, big wheels.

But the convenience is there and hell, most of my music is there. Say I want to listen to Juno Reactor, Seth Sentry, and Fear Factory in the same playlist? They’re both there. Add them to “another 40 hour playlist #5” and you’re cheerin, Ed Sheeran.

And then I got into headphones that didn’t suck (more on that in another post), and FLAC files, and I wrote this post/incoherent babble a while back now.

Oh yeah, and Daniel Ek sucks.

So I switched over to Tidal (read: I signed up for Tidal and forgot to cancel my Spotify account, so I’m running both. Sigh.) and have done so for a number of months now. Seeing as I’m already basically a homebrand version of Dankpods I figured it’s high time I put my thoughts on it out there.

WHAT IS IT? IS THIS THAT TIKTOK TREND THAT HOSPITALIZED ALL THOSE KIDS?

Ok so you’ve got Spotify or Apple Music, right? Tidal is essentially the “pro” version of that. Offering up audiophile quality lossless audio where possible, Dolby Atmos, and pushing a “by artists, for artists” agenda.

It pays artists out better, too ($0.01284 per stream, vs $0.00318 per stream for Spotify). Nifty.

Beyond that for the general end user not a lot is different. You can still cast music to IoT devices, use Apple Carplay/Android Auto, make playlists, the works.

SO WHAT’S GOOD ABOUT IT?

While the difference is about a bee’s dick worth, it’s nice knowing I’m pumping the best quality possible music into my head. Chuck some good headphones on and you’re golden. Add into the mix support for Dolby Atmos and similar fanciful things and you’re in for some good listening.

The UI is familiar to anyone who has used YouTube Music, Spotify, Apple Music, etc previously. You can add to playlists, you can queue songs, there’s a co-listening/”go live” feature, it’s all there, for the most part.

Speaking of things being “all there”, the gang’s all here, too. I’ve only noticed a few songs missing from Tidal that were on Spotify, but they were either meme songs or easily findable again. I even checked just now if Donnie Dumphy’s “Havin’ A Time’ is available, and sure enough, he’s there, in all his ADHD glory.

Canada’s second greatest export, IMHO.

Again, better payouts for artists you enjoy is a big draw if you care about that sort of thing (or at least, do a cute little pearl clutch any time you load up a song or two) and -given Spotify’s recent turn to a world beyond music- it just plays music. That’s all it does. No podcasts, no videos, no canvases, no bullshit. It is more or less an iPod Touch app, and I love it for that.

It’s not that much more costly than other offerings, either. Tidal costs AU$12.99 p/m for an individual plan, and a family plan for AU$16.99 for up to six people. A student plan for AU$6.49 also exists, but I’m old and not studying. Maybe I should start my midlife crisis a week early and study STEM for cheap music streaming.

Compared to Spotify’s AU$13.99/$23.99 for individual and family, respectively, it’s not so bad.

SO WHAT SUCKS ABOUT IT?

The UI is kinda shit. Maybe this is a total PEBKAC error and if it is, I’ll own it, but at least Spotify remembered I hit “shuffle” and “repeat” in between uses. Tidal -to my knowledge- doesn’t. Which you know, is fine, I guess, but I am also an incredibly lazy and forgetful man. The “add to queue” and “play next” works, sorta, maybe. If the forecast for the day isn’t cloudy. Overall using Tidal just feels a bit unrefined and clunky. (Given audiophiles’ knack for owning equipment that is a pain in the ass to use and maintain, maybe this is a feature, not a bug.)

Pictured: This is as convenient as things get for audiophiles.

A blessing and a curse: no podcasts. I at the very least tolerate Spotify for its holistic approach to on-demand streaming. I can chuck on “Songs I say I don’t like but I secretly do #46” on and then listen to “Yet Another Two White Dudes With Microphones Whinging About Shit” straight after. No can do with Tidal. You wanted a music app? You’re getting a music app.

I’ve also noticed it’s a bit finicky when I’m using Google Maps. On Spotify? Play/skip/pause is right there. Tidal, on the other hand worked fine for a bit, then it decided it didn’t want to be associated with Google Maps and fucked the fuck off.

Also, if you’re a tightass? Then Tidal might not be for you. There’s no free option beyond a 30 day trial. No ad-supported version, no “basic” version, you either pay for it or GTFO.

Lastly, there’s either “Individual”, “Student” or “Family” plans. I had the Spotify “Duo” plan and it was great for me and my partner at the time (when I remembered to renew the subscription). I really wish there was a little more flexibility with Tidal in this respect.

OK, OK. SHUT UP ALREADY AND TELL US IF IT’S WORTH IT

It’s a wee bit of a mixed bag.

I like it, I feel better ethically about using it, I’ll happily keep using it, but it might not be for everyone. If you care enough about your music that you buy headphones more expensive than some people’s cars then Tidal might be the platform for you (if you can look past the quibbles I’ve had).

If you just want music, lots of it, in a convenient package, then maybe look for another option. There’s enough here to be satisfied with your experience, and nothing I’ve encountered has been a major dealbreaker, but a lot of it kinda falls into the “could be better” column that I can’t 100% recommend it for everybody.

I NEED A NUMERICAL RATING BECAUSE I TL;DR’D THIS WHOLE POST

Shit. I dunno. 7/10? Spotify does it better, but Spotify also kinda sucks in different ways. Youtube has more niche content (read: meme songs), but if it’s music you want, then with Tidal, music you shall have. In the best quality possible.

Till next time…

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EDIT: Tidal does videos. but they don’t make as much of a big deal about it.

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Reasons why Myst is way more hardcore than Dark Souls

Another one from the archives while I’m clearing up my personal social media (read: Deleting as much as I can).

Much like the last one, I felt this was worth keeping, so without further ado:

REASONS WHY MYST IS MORE HARDCORE THAN DARK SOULS

DARK SOULS:

-Go to the thing

-Get killed

-Go to the other thing

-Atmosphere of the world is pretty WYSIWYG

-There are bad guys and they’re all tough

-Didn’t have a satirical follow up starring John Goodman

MYST:

-What the fuck do I do?

-I’ve been pushing this lever for 10 mins and it does nothing

-ALL THE BUTTONS DO NOTHING

-Atmosphere of the world lulls you into a false sense of security

-There are no bad guys. Just your own incompetence

-PYST exists, and it’s glorious

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Not another one…

Hoo boy this is one of those posts where I wish I was younger and didn’t know any better. But I’m turning 40 this year.

Fuck.

For those who don’t know, I’m a pretty staunch Neil Gaiman fan. I have a bunch of his books, poured several hundo into The Absolute Sandman, bought the humble bundle, went to see him (and Kevin Smith!) at Graphic, and we follow each other on Last.FM (remember that?).

For those who somehow have been living under a rock, it turns out Neil Gaiman is -shall we say- a wee bit of a grub.

Ok fine he’s a piece of shit.

I’m no genius on the nuances of depravity and sexual assault (hint: there are none, it seems), but I’ve talked about it with people, tried to rationalize it the best way I can, read both sides of the story (well, Neil’s responses and that fairly detailed article on Vulture), and yup. No can do this time.

At first I thought maybe -just maybe- this was a once off anomaly, bad judgement of a man in his 60’s, a misread situation, another wannabe Dom who didn’t read the fucking manual (and maybe I still think that, in a way. I mean, we’ve all made mistakes, right?). But it’s hard to justify that when Gaiman is incredibly smart, incredibly well-read, worldy, a wise sage and a fantastic storyteller. One whose worlds I have been enthralled by, engaged with, and -as much as one can do with a book- lived in.

To wit; he knows what he fucking did, and he knows what he did was wrong. Well, maybe not wrong, maybe he was misguided, but real, breathing, living fucking (and seemingly vulnerable)people got hurt in the process.

Hurt enough to report it as abuse.

As someone who is a fan of his work, it’s heartbreaking, sure (I’m still not over Rik Mayall’s passing, so this is gonna take some time). But as someone with a little bit of a conscience and common sense, it’s appalling, and upsetting (I guess I know how all the trans/enby/queer folk feel about J.K. Rowling now).

But who the fuck am I? I can’t do anything about it. I’m an idiot with a blog and a noisy keyboard.

He says on his blog he’s gonna do better, do the work, and make amends, and the naïve, 39 year old idiot manchild in me still believes him a little. But now’s probably not the time for conjecture.

As far as his works that I own? He has my money, already. If I want to spend more I can buy them used or pick an author who isn’t fucking awful. Hell I never read any KA Applegate growing up and she seems like a legend.

And to Neil: You don’t know I exist outside of Twitter, but mate, do better. For yourself, at least. Might not fix the hurt you’ve caused these women, or your fans, but at least you can fix yourself so you’re not such a shitty human. The world has enough of those.

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Wrapping up Spotify (or: “How to download music without sailing the seven seas”)

We live in the streaming age. We don’t own anything, and big tech corporations who rake in the millions.

Spotify’s Daniel Ek put his foot in it by flippantly saying that creating content costs “close to zero” back in June (sure Dan, tell that to anyone who’s ever professionally recorded an album), Apple seems to have all but forgotten about the humble existence of iTunes in favour of Apple Music, Google ditched Play Music in favour of YouTube music, and the stream train shows no sign of stopping.

I get it and I’m guilty of it. I have Spotify and for the most part I’m happy with it as a pleb consumer. As an artist and someone who owns an iPod or two? hoo boy, do I miss the inconvenient times of having to buy and download music.

Actually I think I miss the chase more; the hunt for a $25 CD that is all killer, no filler (I think the last full album I bought that gave me that feeling was Nine Inch Nails’ Year Zero back in 2007, if that gives you any idea), and swapping tapes/CDs/files with friends because they had cooler music than you.

But -to borrow a quote from Jeff Goldblum like Kirk Van Houten wants to borrow a feeling- “life, uh, finds a way”.

This too-long-didn’t-read leadup could just end with “you can still download music” and I could finish things up here before my work shift starts with about 30 minutes to spare, but I’m relying on eyeballs here so I’m not going to do that to you.

But yeah, you can totally download full albums, in whatever filetype you want, to have and to hold forever (or at least until your hard drive shits itself).

FLACS MP3S AND WAVS OH MY!

Yeah there’s The Pirate Bay and other dubious means, but I’m going to blindly assume you wanna support the artists you listen to. As far as your copyright infringing shenanigans go, I don’t wanna know about it, and I didn’t just hear you click on uTorrent.

I’m also going to blindly assume you’re fucking lazy like I am and don’t want to rip your entire CD collection (or, also like me, you’ve completely thrashed your favourites and they’re un-rippable, either way).

A lot of bigger-name-than-your-mate’s-band are making the move to Bandcamp, basically the standard for downloading music. They even have their own app so the process is relatively painless.

zDigital and 7Digital I would suggest as your go-to for any of your big-name bands. The ones that sell out stadiums and charge $120 for a hoodie with their name on it. They both include music lockers for you to download again at any time, and all the files are DRM free. The one downside I have with these two are other filetypes are separate purchases (with the lossless files being a little bit more expensive), which is kind of a bummer.

If you want a nostalgia kick and own a Windows PC, iTunes still exists. It’s still a jank mess and the files are all in m4a so caveat emptor there. But hey if you still own an iPod, don’t wanna download Rockbox, and want to keep your player as OG as it’s ageing components allow, it’s your best bet. (Mac users: iPod support still exists in modern Mac hardware, but I haven’t owned a MacOS pc in donkeys years but apparently the iTunes store still exists for you guys?)

[INSERT PLAYER PUN I CAN’T THINK OF RIGHT NOW]

It goes without saying, that glass rectangle you may be reading this on right now is a perfectly capable DAP (or Digital Audio Player. Basically iPods for people who dabble in enough snobbery to call them DAPs). It’ll play anything you throw at it with some trickery and app downloads. The best one I’ve found is Poweramp for Android. Dunno about iOS but Vox seems to be reasonably rated.

If you’re running off of a Windows PC? Come on, man. The original and the best. Can confirm it still whips the llama’s ass. There’s probably others, but I don’t caaaaaare. Winamp is great… Almost.

Mac? Vox again, Elmedia player, or y’know, apple music/itunes.

But say you wanna switch dump all your music onto something that isn’t connected to notifications, phonecalls, and Candy Crush, where you tell it when to pause. Hell, something with a headphone jack. I don’t have much experience on this front, but I _almost_ recommend the FiiO x1. I say _almost_, because it’s quote old and would be an eBay job. FiiO still makes players though and some of them look decent. There’s also the usual suspects of Sony, Astell & Kern, HiBy, et. al.

There’s other players that won’t break the bank on Amazon if you wanna go down that route that seem pretty good on paper, and the Chi-Fi scene has pretty much exploded with how decent some of the players are, from reviews I’ve checked out.

There’s also just… getting a manky old iPod. Either getting iTunes and running it as it was intended or modding it with flash storage, whack a new battery in, or -if you’re particularly brave- adding USB-C functionality.

I could go on about this but all you need to know there are choices. Both for the budget-conscious, and for those with more dollars than common sense.

There’s more I could bang on about, but I’ll spare you a rant about headphones. That’ll come later.

Hopefully this helps the one or two of you that are looking to break away from streaming services!

Till next time…

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Roses Chocolates

Doing a social media cleanup. Found this in the void which is Facebook memories.

posting here for posterity. enjoy.

A cross section of Roses chocolates: A tasty, indulgent, and diabetic coma-inducing research paper by T. A. Farto.

(Alternative title: “I have chocolate and you don’t. Ner-ner-ner”)

One thing of note is modern packaging has made the text hard to read for the sight-impaired. Thus fulfilling what hereafter shall be referred to as “The Gump Theorem”.

To further complement the above, all chocolates are individually wrapped in similar-coloured packaging. This is known colloquially as the “Go Fuck Yourself Theorem”.

The chocolate themselves can be categorized as follows:

10% – Actually Good. These are the ones that one hordes for themselves like a dragon. These are solely what Roses boxes should comprise of.

70% – Trash. Possibly put into box to deter thieves or anyone in the 10-45 age demographic.

20% – What you offer to mates. They’re not in the top 10 percentile but these eventually make it into the hands of others, or your own after you’re hungover on New Years Day and there’s nothing in the house left.

20% – I failed at basic math in high school. Blow me.

Conclusion: Favourites are still the shit. Or, at least the branding is clearly marked so you know what to avoid.

More research is required to accurately place each individual serving into categories (read: I’m probably going to polish the box off anyway, because I have no shame).

NOTE: Preference of chocolate is highly subjective and the quality thereof is debateable. Except for whatever that pinky-white piece of shit is supposed to be. Best avoided or pelted at cars.

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The Monster has Escaped the Lab

In every horror/sci-fi/Jurassic Park/World movie/anything-involving-a-monster, there’s inevitably always a scene where whatever abomination ‘they’ have cooked up escapes and starts terrorizing the heroes. Usually with a fair amount of bloodshed.

This is US Politics 2024, with the landslide victory of Trump against Kamala Harris.

For transparency’s sake, I won’t pretend to know all there is to know about American politics; but I do know this: America’s experimental monster has escaped the lab. Y’all had a T-Rex in captivity and decided to go full Dennis Nedry.

Trump 1.0 was a fun experiment in breaking away from the establishment. The tired, old guard we all know and have come to be sick of. The career politicians, The Machine™.

Trump, being a brash, reckless media personality best known for firing people and appearing in Home Alone 2: Lost in New York, disrupted all that. He wasn’t a politician (and as we later found out, barely a good businessman), he didn’t care for the petty whims of The System™, he just wanted to Make America Great Again so hard he made it his catch-phrase, and the world at large grabbed onto that and ran with it. So many people (celebrities included) harp on about “well, if I became president….” and this cheeto-dust-coated fucker actually went and did it.

The message was clear: “We’re not happy with the offerings on the table, so we’re gonna go with the loose cannon.”

What resulted is not only one of the worst presidencies I’ve seen in my lifetime, and a whole heap of people somehow missing the memo on what ‘freedom of speech’ actually means, but also a swarm of “me-too” demi-Trumps wanting a slice of the action. Especially here in Australia where the three things we’re good at are sports, being the world’s weird friend, and being casually racist.

We’ve had cult of personality candidates in Parliament in the past; most notably Kevin Rudd’s “Kevin07” campaign (that one actually succeeded, mind. and it wasn’t a bad run), but nothing stirred up the hornet’s nest like the Trump administration. The two most notable hornets being Pauline Hanson, and Clive Palmer.

Hanson had been memed into oblivion the last time she was relevant in the 90’s, with a number of songs produced by Simon Hunt, better known as drag queen Pauline Pantsdown, and after perhaps a decade of being completely irrelevant, gained a huge resurgence in popularity and votes after Trump took office.

Palmer tried to ride Trump’s coat-tails with his own “me too”-isms; he’s an eccentric mining magnate with more dollars than common sense, who’s active on social media in that “how do you do, fellow kids?” sort of way, but I feel never really got to capitalize on the same cult of personality that Trump relished in.

Both saw a considerable amount of votes their way, with Hanson and her party, the far-right One Nation managing to gain a place in parliament, and Palmer gaining a bit of traction, but not to the same level as Hanson.

Hanson, who has done very little her entire political career but make waves and be effectively useless, beating her chest about the “Aussie battler” and “a fair go for all” (also a few questionable words about anyone other than whitey) kept making waves (including climbing Uluru and getting stuck, and wearing a Burka in parliament much to the chagrin of pretty much everyone), and being useless short of getting a motion passed regarding clearer Halal labelling on foods and telling white people that it’s “okay to be white”.

Palmer sort of just buzzed about, his only real achievement being picking a litigious fight with political commentator and comedian Jordan “FriendlyJordies” Shanks. His party, the United Australia Party, was formally deregistered in 2022 except for Victoria, where it still somehow has a precarious foothold thanks to a senator I previously talked shit about, Ralph Babet.

All in all, they squandered their seemingly never-ending fifteen minutes of pseudo-fame; Two useless idiots riding on the coat-tails of an actually useful (to some, anyway) idiot. Even politicians who actually did some damage (proto-Nazi Fraser Anning comes to mind) couldn’t keep up with the Trump train.

But the dangerous part is that the Trump train paved the way for every sort of cockhead racist/bigot/transphobe/anti-“woke”-warrior/what have you to start thinking their opinions are valid and need to be heard, and I do not see things slowing down in 2024 with America’s newly-elected Criminal-in-Chief. Dunno about you, but I’m not exactly a fan of having far-right ideology on full display (whats that saying about one normal guy and 9 nazis at a table?).

The other dangerous part is that the whole cult of personality surrounding Trump really muddies the waters when it comes to our politics here. We do things differently here and the Westminster system -try as people might- really doesn’t gel too well with the sort of Americanized politics we see over in Freedomland. A lot of people here simply don’t give a fuck or thinks “fuck ’em all, they’re all the same” or are simply ignorant (wilfuly or otherwise) to how things are done, and the Rudds (don’t get me wrong, I liked Rudd mostly), Hansons, Palmers of Australia are gonna jump on that, I fear.

This is pure speculation, mind. I am, after all, an idiot with a blog. Still something I worry about all the same.

In the meantime, the monster’s escaped the lab and we’re gonna have a rough 4 years ahead of us, even if it’s gonna be good for business. Come January 20th, we gotta rally up.

Till next time…

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Categories
life stuff

So you wanna be a musician…

Welcome to the first part of a possible multi-part series I’ll call “Advice from someone who doesn’t really know any better, but hell I’ve been on this planet long enough to have a good idea or two, surely.”

I’ve been in a band since late 2019 and shared in it’s ups and downs (mostly ups, thankfully), I’ve also recorded solo bleepy-bloopy nonsense. I’ve played guitar longer than I care to admit given my skill level, so I like to think I know a thing or two about a thing or two.

So you wanna be a musician? great! It’s fun, learning an instrument is rad, and once you start down this path everything is expensive so you’ll have no money to waste on drugs, Fortnite skins, or OnlyFans egirls (uwu).

If you’re wondering where to start? Well, I’m a terrible role model, but I’ll tell you what I can. I’m going to be sharing some general stuff, as well as tips and tricks that helped _me_, specifically. Ultimately, I hope any budding muso out there finds this useful!

I’ll also be talking primarily about guitar, but I’ll try and keep it as general as possible.

PROTIP #1: Figure out your learning style

Do you prefer to just figure it out on your own and follow along to a YouTube video? Do you want lessons? If so, in person or online? This is a tough question and one you may not have an answer for right away, but it’s good to know. There’s no real right or wrong way to learn (picking up bad habits aside, but I’ll get to that later), so figure that out as well as you can.

For me I felt that getting lessons face-to-face was definitely the leg-up I needed when it came to starting out. It wasn’t through a music school or anything (it was pretty much some guy at school) so it’s wasn’t the most robust education, but totally worth it. That was for a few years and then I was out on my own, learning new songs and tabs via YouTube and Ultimate Guitar. Occasionally, I’ll pick Herschel’s brain for things if I need to.

PROTIP #2: What sort of music do you want to play? Where do you want to take this?

This sorta goes with tip #1. I’ll admit YES, learning the basic chords, your scales, whatever the fuck modes are, and a few rounds of ‘Greensleeves’ or whatever never hurt anyone. There’s a lot of fundamentals there you kinda need to know to be good at an instrument. But learning “The Lion Sleeps Tonight” (as much of a bop as it is), or “Row, Row, Row Your Boat” isn’t going to be fun or teach you anything about learning how to play say, Black Sabbath, or Bad Religion. Definitely learn the fundamentals, but cater it to the sorta stuff you wanna play.

Additionally, do you want to just play for fun? (the answer is almost always is yes. The age of getting rich from playing music is kinda over) Do you want to work on your own music? Do you want to join a band? Work that out, too. I started playing guitar because I read that the school band needed a bass guitarist and both me and my parents misread the PSA. It takes all sorts. Even the annoying cunt with the acoustic guitar at parties had to start somewhere.

This will also narrow down the instrument you buy (though, it never really ends at one).

PROTIP #3: Get good gear

This is an important line in the sand. I didn’t say “buy the most expensive”, or “buy the best”, but buy good gear. The benchmark for affordable instruments (in the guitar world, anyway) is pretty decent these days, so don’t waste your money on ebay-spec, bottom-of-the-barrel trash unless you definitely know what you’re buying. Hell, buy used! Yeah you’ll have to scrub off years of skin flakes and dust and god-knows what, but that’s what technicians are for. Read or watch reviews, do some deep diving if you find something you like, and definitely take the time to go into a music store and have a play of things, as well. With everything going online these days, the store clerks will probably be grateful.

Speaking specifically on guitars, here. Some models you could look into are the Squier Sonic series and the Pacifica series by Yamaha.

PROTIP #4: Go outside and touch grass

No, seriously, you might have to go outside at some point and touch some damn grass. Go meet other musicians or get your mate who also plays an instrument over and just noodle, have a laugh over a beer while playing dumb songs. I learned way more and was table to take stock of my playing ability from rehearsing and gigging with a band than I ever did on my lonesome. Plus it’s fun! And you can count it towards your quota for socializing and going back to being a hermit!

PROTIP #5: You. Are going. To suck. (at least for a while)

There’s no avoiding this. You’re going to suck. You’re going to suck harder than a Hoover for a long time. You’re going to suck during lessons, suck during practice, suck at the music store, and suck while playing with friends. Learn from it, embrace it, and just fucking have fun. Learning an instrument (unless you’re a particularly gifted River Tam-type) is hard. Don’t make it harder by being hard on yourself.

PROTIP #6: Work on a repertoire

Inevitably, you’re going to be asked to play something for someone. This happened to me at a party and it went down faster than a lead balloon with concrete shoved in it. Learn a few songs and shove ’em in your back pocket for these occasions. My recommendation? Go for a couple of funny songs, couple of happy songs, a couple that just sound nice to listen to and a couple of crowd favourites (maybe a few sad songs too depending on your friends circle). For the sake of transparency, here’s mine:

Eels – I Like Birds
Corky and the Juice Pigs – The Only Gay Eskimo
The Smashing Pumpkins – Bullet With Butterfly Wings
The Smashing Pumpkins – Today
Bill Bailey – I Will Not Look at Titties For a Year
Blink-182 – Dammit
Blink-182 – Stay Together for the Kids
Eels – Hey Man (Now You’re Really Living)
Jon Sudano – Wonderwall (Wonderwall chords, but the lyrics to “All Star” by Smash Mouth)

I sincerely hope all of this helps you get somewhere, young (or old, or somewhere in between, for that matter) budding muso. If you read this far? You’re gonna do great. <3

Till next time…

IF YOU’VE READ THIS FAR:

Hey so I provide this on my own website, funded by myself, with my own money. If you liked this and want to support this nonsense, feel free to flick me a couple of bucks on Ko-Fi!

Categories
The Limited

‘The Coffin or the Suitcase’ – One year on.

For those who don’t know, I’m in a band called ‘The Limited’. It’s pretty fun.

In 2023 we released our debut album, “The Coffin or the Suitcase” which pretty much compiled everything we’ve worked on up to that point (minus a few songs we’d prefer to forget). It’s been a year since that came out so I figured it’d be a nice revisit to go through what sorta led up to that point, and the proper album recording experience!

By the point the album was a “yeah ok let’s do this already” we already knew all the songs back to front, upside down, in the bath, front to back, in Esperanto, Pig Latin, and that clicking language from “The Gods Must be Crazy. We would have been gigging with only the EP to shill for a couple of years at this point, which we recorded for about $500 in the studio we were rehearsing in at the time.

By the time we were talking about finally making the album, Jomz (former drummer) had left the band, and Landon was officially ‘in’, complete with a dorky “welcome to the band” video on YouTube (and quite frankly the band has never been the same since). Sean (singer, The Owen Guns) was hounding us to release something already and the EP was definitely showing it’s age compared to how the songs were played now, so it was definitely high time we threw a proper album together.

We tracked the drums and bass at Studio Woodford (conveniently placed right near Herschel’s house, so he could just walk there, the bastard), and also recorded a scratch track for the vocals and guitars. It felt pretty much like doing the EP except we had to wear headphones. Kitty’s bass had it’s own little compartment to be recorded in and Herschel and I were plugged into the DI.

Once that was all tracked, we headed to Songcave (about 5 mins from Herschel’s house, so he had to drive this time, just not as far as the rest of us, so he’s still a bastard) and worked on the guitars and vocals with Eliot Boyd Reynolds, whose body of work is frankly amazing, and current member of Sideshow Annie.

And this is where it kinda got a bit pear shaped, so consider this your first word of warning: If you wanna be in a band with other living, breathing humans all with ego’s and their own ideas and their own mini-goals working towards your common goal, and you wanna record something that doesn’t sound like trash: Fucking communicate with your bandmates. Communicate lots, especially when it comes to the music side of things. Too much is never enough.

I say “it got pear shaped”, I’m catastrophizing a little, admittedly. I was recording solo vocals where it could have easily been gang vocals (not that takes are _really_ an issue aside from wasted time, everything’s digital now), Landon was coming up with all these ideas for tracks without telling us (it seemed, anyway. Could have been a spur of the moment thing and he went ‘fuckit, we’re doing it’), “Bodycount” was tracked way too fast and there wasn’t enough caffeine in my system to nail that in one take, that was really it. a few miscommunications and different ideas. Sorry to like, clickbait or anything.

The amount of trickery involved in the album was cool, too. We had Landon on a totally different mic for his vocals in “Coffin”, Eliot put this weird rotary phaser thing over my noodly bits (I refuse to call them solos, that would imply I could solo and frankly, I really can’t. I just know octaves and the Pentatonic/Blues scale) in “Tikkun Olam”, the only real issue was getting us all to fit comfortably in the vocal booth for gang vocals. Four of us, with headphones, screaming into the one mic? chaos. Fun chaos, and it was all very silly, but still chaos.

Because Herschel lived like, five minutes away, he did the bulk of the work with Eliot in mixing and editing the tracks and we all did a final listen. Few months later? we had an album. Bam, done. We released it digitally and then shipped the masters off to Replicat to do the physical release later on. It was a huge, monstrous expense for the band (as Herschel will tell you in between songs, by the way, come to our gigs), but it was totally worthwhile and a learning experience for all of us.

The album art took some time. A lot of the artwork was done by Jade Gallogly, with additional photos by Zak Campbell (both went on to do the video for “Coffin or the Suitcase”). We pretty much all just discussed our favourite album art as a band and put together a mood board from there to send through. Landon and Herschel took liner note duties and DIY’d it, matching the style to suit. The animal caricatures (why am I a bird? I don’t know. I did vocals on a cover of an Eels song so I’m ‘the bird guy’ now) were also done by Jade specifically for the album, but if I recall, we managed to get a few social media posts out of how ridiculous they were.

It’s weird. Seeing your name, your face, and knowing you played those parts on something that exists, you know? We did the EP of course, and I release things under Pigeonrat, obviously, (and sometimes it hits me then too), but for some reason “Coffin or the Suitcase” hit different. A sort of self-deprecating dissociation of “that can’t be me/us/, it sounds too good” for a brief moment, then the realization sets in that it was you, and you did sound good. It’s good weird, but still weird.

I can’t speak on behalf of the band, but would I, personally have done anything different? Yeah, absolutely. There’s a few bits in “Bodycount”, “Animal” and “Tikkun” that could have done with a tweak (when I suggested we re-re-re-record a few bits while the album was being mixed to Herschel he almost drove down from his mountain compound and murdered me in the face), I’m sure the others would tell a very similar story. Ultimately though, I’m very proud of what we put together and hope the next one (yes there’s more stuff coming, promise) tops it.

Going into the next chapter of The Limited, what would I want to bring to the table? Hard to answer, really. As a band I’d like to see more collaboration between all of us on what we’d like to try and what we could probably drop, definitely having all the songs as completed and finalized as possible, and absolutely bringing something new to the studio so we’re not just re-releasing “Coffin II: Electric Boogaloo”.

Personally? There’s definitely places where I want to build on the work I did on ‘Coffin’ and do more than just “play a bunch of power chords really fast” (though there’s gonna be way more songs like that. We’re a punk band, after all), and I guess try new and weird ways to ruin Herschel’s songs as much as possible before he yells at me.

Till next time…

IF YOU’VE READ THIS FAR:

Hey so I provide this on my own website, funded by myself, with my own money. If you liked this and want to support this nonsense, feel free to flick me a couple of bucks on Ko-Fi!