Random Thought of the Day

[Nyctophilia]

weirdly that [post I removed] didn't even make 'peak dystopia' for the last hour since I then stumbled on Russia's knock off McDonald's chain now that they've stopped doing business there. McDonalds is not good... Imo. Banning it wouldn't even be a punishment from my pov lol.

Whenever I express my opinions about fast food burgers (I only really like the ones they serve in pubs here, but never the American fastfood chains,) people bring up Five guys (my brother is also a big fan,) but I don't like them either lol. I don't mind chicken sometimes from those chains though but even then it's not great food.

[Otherside]

^ weirdly that didn't even make 'peak dystopia' for the last hour since I then stumbled on Russia's knock off McDonald's chain now that they've stopped doing business there. McDonalds is not good... Imo. Banning it wouldn't even be a punishment from my pov lol.

Wonder what the next Russian copycat will be.

[Nyctophilia]

@Otherside

lol yeah, it was such a half assed attempt too. Well there was already a Russian Harry Potter knock off in the past called Tanya Grotter lol. I think from what I've heard it's easier to get away with that kind of thing over there in the first place. (I heard about this book series a long time ago, was the first example I heard of that sort of thing happening. China often does similar stuff, probably even more than Russia.)

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tanya_Grotter

I̶̶̶ ̶̶̶a̶̶̶l̶̶̶s̶̶̶o̶̶̶ ̶̶̶a̶̶̶p̶̶̶p̶̶̶r̶̶̶e̶̶̶c̶̶̶i̶̶̶a̶̶̶t̶̶̶e̶̶̶ ̶̶̶t̶̶̶h̶̶̶a̶̶̶t̶̶̶ ̶̶̶t̶̶̶h̶̶̶a̶̶̶t̶̶̶'̶̶̶s̶̶̶ ̶̶̶m̶̶̶y̶̶̶ ̶̶̶l̶̶̶e̶̶̶g̶̶̶a̶̶̶l̶̶̶ ̶̶̶f̶̶̶i̶̶̶r̶̶̶s̶̶̶t̶̶̶ ̶̶̶n̶̶̶a̶̶̶m̶̶̶e̶̶̶.̶̶̶ ̶̶̶F̶̶̶e̶̶̶e̶̶̶l̶̶̶s̶̶̶ ̶̶̶l̶̶̶i̶̶̶k̶̶̶e̶̶̶ ̶̶̶f̶̶̶a̶̶̶t̶̶̶e̶̶̶.̶̶̶ ̶N̶o̶t̶ ̶a̶ ̶h̶u̶g̶e̶ ̶f̶a̶n̶ ̶o̶f̶ ̶h̶e̶r̶ ̶t̶h̶e̶s̶e̶ ̶d̶a̶y̶s̶.̶

[Nyctophilia]

Someone described this photo as grandma punk and I feel like this is the logical end conclusion to all the recent ****-core aesthetics like Grandparentcore.



Also lol:

Grandparentcore is an aesthetic related to the common aesthetic depiction of grandparents as a whole. It is a comfortable, whimsical (but not necessarily chaotic) and comfortable aesthetic centered around focusing on things we enjoy most.

'not necessarily chaotic' lmao. Maybe just a little chaos.

[Nyctophilia]

Nooo they're destroying the Spyro tile on r/place. How rude. I was trying to get Spyro to take off yesterday but all the coordinates people were mentioning on the spyro subreddit didn't seem to have anything there and you can't do it alone. Reddit increased the size of it earlier and there's something there now, but the void is slowly destroying that area.

(In case you don't know reddit are doing this thing where you can place one pixel every 5 minutes per account you can find it on r/place.)

[Otherside]

Nooo they're destroying the Spyro tile on r/place. How rude. I was trying to get Spyro to take off yesterday but all the coordinates people were mentioning on the spyro subreddit didn't seem to have anything there and you can't do it alone. Reddit increased the size of it earlier and there's something there now, but the void is slowly destroying that area.

(In case you don't know reddit are doing this thing where you can place one pixel every 5 minutes per account you can find it on r/place.)

The artwork on some of those flags is nice. Shame 4chan is defacing a lot of it though.

Did something similar yesrs ago with a world map, same concept, one tile every few minutes. Was fun. Every now and then would be defaced with nazi flags and penises.

[CloudMaker]

I hate the ANTICHRIST

[Nyctophilia]

Also I randomly decided to start watching The Lone Gunmen TV show recently without having ever watched the X-files. My primary reason for doing this was that there are three sort of Similar Sims in The Sims 2 (The Curious brothers,) I definitely think one of them has the physical appearance of Langley but with shorter hair. Also because it has that y2k era optimism/early 2000s nerd vibe that's very nostalgic and reminds me of watching the film Hackers and unironically enjoying it and then writing a quote from the film in a notebook like some kind of dramatic potato chip and eat it Death Note moment (if you've seen that scene you'll know.)

Or watching the Making of Medievil game demo (playstation game from the 90s,) and deciding I wanted to be a game developer. A lot of these characters and people in real life actually (people involved with gamedev,) cause I've known loads now are really quite full of themselves and egotistical, and have low patience for others, not everyone though like my friend is very chill. I also fall into that somewhat. But yeah that was like #goals when I was a kid so.



This. I'm not going to lie to you. My favourite character was Cereal Killer (the one with the braided pigtail kind of hairstyle.)

I'm not at all a functional adult so (I've been seeing a lot more people tweeting about this film recently I think generally that era has become a kind of fashion thing lately.) Mr Robot is kind of like 10-20 years on but if skilled. (I didn't watch all of that only a few episodes. He seems alienated and mentally ill. And I do often wear hoodies.) I mean Mr Robot is 'what happens if you were a kid/teen during that era.' Expectation: Hackers Expectation: Mr Robot lol (still too successful based on what I watched,) but no anyway reality: Mr Robot. Reality: prison/exile.

It's not brilliant though there are a couple of characters who are really quite 2d and a lot of cheesyness and one character is clearly trying to be Lara Croft or something, and there's an obnoxious amount of US patriotism that wouldn't fly today and I feel like I'm often having issues understanding the intended tone. Maybe more of it is meant to be sarcastic than I think. Also hilarious that I've never even watched the X-Files and maybe I still won't just to be that person, but nah I keep running out of TV so maybe I'll at least watch some of it. But what I really am looking for these days (all the time,) are alien shows with a Roswell desert aesthetic. I'm looking for something that I haven't quite found and can't articulate and really that's how I feel about everything not just TV.

Also why I'm thinking about the alien thing again is probably just because Storm Area 51 was the best use of the internet in the 2010s, possibly ever. Like imagine you start off with a meme and then it turns into a spontaneous eccentric festival in a month (though the festival was really poorly planned and so failed expectations and there were tons of issues like the guy who created the original post and was setting it up dropped out and did something elsewhere, but an event occurred in a desert,) And also happened just before the pandemic where everything became even worse. Sucks that plane tickets are so expensive though 100% would have gone otherwise.

I don't care if it's just a bunch of people standing around at a gate and then some cars parked in a desert with some small bands. Do you know how lame culture is now? This is the best thing we can hope for. If you were born in the 90s or later this is peak performance.

Lol you know what I just remembered.



This is how I'm picturing it went down.

[Otherside]

So for the completely random, was walking down by the canal today, and with house prices hitting the ?500k+ mark around here, debated buying a narrowboat. Much more affordable.

The downsides to this plan -

- Not sure theres any permanent moorings around here. So would have to move quite a bit. Which could be interesting. But also a pain.
- Opening up a canal lock sounds a bit terrifying, not even sure you can actually open one up on your own, always seen one person on the lock, another to sail get the boat through.
- Canal paths aren't exactly known for being safe at night if I ended up mooring there.
- I have no clue how to drive a canal boat.
- Can you even get internet a canal boat? Because whilst remote worker means I can work anywhere, I do need internet to do my job.

On a side note, did have a student back at my uni who bought an old, run down yaucht and lived on that. Saved thousands, apparently. And mooring there was about a ?1 a day. Was very run down boat though.

[CloudMaker]

@Nyctophilia OMG I had no idea grimes was into the fender stuff no wonder musk and her broke up he seems like he is pretty alt right sometimes. IDK much about her other than she released an image of some stone tablet with lots of emojis that seemed like it predicted Covid and really FREAKED me out !!

@Othersise the boat idea sounds scary IDK I love the water but idk if I could sleep on it. Here there is a movement called van life which seems like it would be much cheaper and safer do you have that there?

[Nyctophilia]

@CloudMaker

I've known about her for quite a while because of her music. I'm not a huge fan of her work but some of her songs are OK to listen to. I was surprised to hear she was dating Elon Musk initially but they apparently bonded over a rationalist community injoke and a lot of their other behaviour and weird relationship etc is less weird to me now because of that.

I was invited to a discord server from reddit with a bunch of people who are part of that community to discuss certain topics related to sexuality and gender, and so I ended up exposed to more of them, and ended up reading some rationalist's blogs/twitter profiles and they're fairly odd and calculated people I guess (Not sure how to explain it just that there's always a vibe. They also have ingroup language.) Very networked and ambitious. I find they pop up all over the place (or people who are adj in some way, like Dominic Cummings in the UK.) Grimes follows a few of them (one of the people I do actually lol.)

Elon Musk thinks the population of Earth is going to collapse and that this is a huge concern, but I think his interest in that is mostly because he wants more workers for Mars (as he tweeted that before.) So his intent is to have as many kids as possible. Anyway I deleted that post I dunno if the Chelsea Manning story is real though the media has reported on it anyway and she's been responding to Elon's tweets (but that might just be because Elon keeps tweeting about trans people, possibly based on rumours alone.) Still entertaining to me though.

Pretty much this though lol:

Every time I read a sentence containing the word "Grimes", it's something absolutely batshit bizarre

Indeed

A well-known and pseudonymous blogger, “Carles”, who ran a popular indie music blog called Hipster Runoff (popularly referred to as “HRO”), published a post in early 2012 which was unflattering to Grimes, among others he had previously posted. She didn’t like this, so in March 2012 Grimes enlisted a friend in the video game industry to send a Distributed Denial of Service attack (a type of attack intended to knock someone’s systems offline) aimed at this blogger’s website. She implies her friend who was employed at the video game company used his access to the company’s systems to perform this attack. The video appears to be edited as she is making this statement.

I was able to find an interview written by Motherboard which describes the attack from the blogger’s perspective, which sounds quite a bit more involved. The author of the piece, who eventually went on to become VICE’s Editor in Chief, wrote that the site’s backups had also been destroyed and its server crashed, which implies a bad actor or actors gained access to his system(s) through a strategic, malicious hack, which would be far more involved than simply sending large amounts of traffic to cause a DDoS attack.
Here are several relevant excerpts from that interview:

https://hackingbutlegal.com/grimes-a...w-a1e3a3d41a4e

“worked for, I will not say which video game, had access to… okay, well, I don’t want to get him in trouble. But anyway, we were actually able to DDoS Hipster Runoff and um, basically blackmail them, we were like, and like, we’re not gonna let you put your site back up until you take the story down. And he did in fact take the story down. And it was like my coolest hacker moment.”

Do I trust any of these people? Honestly no lol. But it does make for great fiction.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LessWrong

I never really read that blog though except one depressing fictional thing someone linked me which seemed to be describing men and women no longer caring about each other because they had a special ideal partner designed by a fictional AI.

I read this blog a bunch before he moved:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Slate_Star_Codex

Tangentially... There's been a lot of trippy stuff going on though. I really like this Adam Curtis documentary (though it just scratches the surface. I think this is the full documentary I know one upload on YouTube cuts out a section from it):



(I was also reminded of the part of this documentary where he talks about the media and 9/11 when watching the first episode of The Lone Gunmen lol very weird timing.)

[Nyctophilia]

Lol what? Spencer Reid (Criminal Minds)/Langley (The Lone Gunmen) fanfiction exists. There are several fics by this one author, and a couple of them are 40+ chapters long. Still can't get one Slaanesh/Isha fanfic though (this is basically a personal meme now everytime I find a rare pairing.) I think there's actually a pretty big lack of Slaanesh fanfiction too and I feel like s/he especially would not be amused.

I mean there's a 50% chance I'm going to read one of them at some point though.

I started watching Criminal Minds several months ago because I thought Spencer Reid seemed cute (YouTube suggested some clips. It knew I needed help to find more cute guys due to my picky ways. Truthfully I could be more attracted but it did the best it could,) and wanted to read fanfiction, but I thought I should watch the show first even though I dislike police procedurals. Some episodes were decent like the end of season ones where there's more fast paced action but dear God does the constant repetitive suburbs kid goes missing/serial killer plotlines get boring fast. I got to season 9 and then I drifted away and I think I'm going to struggle to watch the rest.

Actually you know, they made Spencer a technophobe later on (I swear they weren't angling for that in the first season though? I have a vague memory that he seemed to know what he was doing with a computer in possibly the first episode.) So I guess that would be amusing with Langley.



I'm struggling to find good Loki fanfics again with ships I like or oc's. Got to the point where I'm re-reading stuff I read years ago lol.

[Otherside]

@Othersise the boat idea sounds scary IDK I love the water but idk if I could sleep on it. Here there is a movement called van life which seems like it would be much cheaper and safer do you have that there?

Yeah, I've never tried sleeping on a boat to be honest. No idea if I can sleep on it. The pathways by the canals here - they are fine for walking by during the day, but not very safe during the night. No lighting. Would also worry someone would break in.

I have heard of Van life. Also tempting. Would be tempting to just take off and go around Europe or something.

[Otherside]

Elon Musk thinks the population of Earth is going to collapse and that this is a huge concern, but I think his interest in that is mostly because he wants more workers for Mars (as he tweeted that before.) So his intent is to have as many kids as possible.

I follow r/Collapse. Interesting place.

Lot of tech bros seem to be into prepping for the apocalypse. All building bunkers in New Zealand. Personally, I think it is a stretch to think that the Kiwis are going to let all these American Tech Bros fly into there luxury bunkers to wait out the zombie apocalypse or something, and the bunkers won't be seized for the kiwis to use.

Musk and Mars...I will wait and see. 2026 is very ambitious for getting people to Mars?

[Nyctophilia]

Oh man I just now found out TOOL are playing live next week in London. So that makes two bands who were either broken up or long since retired who I assumed wouldn't come back again and then did and during the worst possible time.

So TOOL release their new album in 2019 well over a decade after their last, then covid hits and now it seems they're going to be touring including some UK dates. My Chemical Romance break up in 2013 I think? Then in 2020 decide they will do a reunion tour but then covid happens so they postpone the UK dates till this month in 2022. But I still don't feel comfortable going to concerts right now it's not clear to what extent things have stabilised.

These are huge concerts too and I really prefer smaller venues to giant stadiums. The MCR dates nearest to me are also at an awkward to reach location as I don't have a car. Obviously all the tickets to MCR were sold out as soon as I found out about it. Not sure with TOOL, they might just be pricey at face value (I only quickly looked.)

They're not accepting paper tickets now either because of covid, have to show your phone with the O2 app (at least for the O2 TOOL gigs.) Basically no apps work on my phone though lol.

On top of all of that there's the increased anxiety I have now about going to London and going to concerts alone, since I haven't been to a concert since October 2018. The last time I went to London was in February 2020, just after the pandemic spread to the UK, and before lockdown etc but I wasn't alone then.

I wasn't aware of any concerts I wanted to go to in 2019, bought tickets to one in April 2020 but it was postponed and eventually cancelled. That was for IAMX. They'll be touring again soon but leaving out the UK. Kind of sucks but I've seen them live 3 times already. They left the UK out on another previous tour too and I was a bit bummed about that because they had mental health sessions after the show. We're very crazy too I'll have you know. Before the pandemic hit I noticed a couple of artists I saw live seemed to bring up stuff like that during concerts because I suppose they're aware of the prevalent issues and how music is a coping mechanism. IAMX specifically did have someone attempt suicide at a show though (not one I went to, I just read about it.)

I saw A Perfect Circle live in 2018 as well I think (think it was 2018.) That was great and a smaller venue again, but don't think they're quite as big as TOOL. Deftones are another big band that occasionally do medium sized gigs like one I went to in 2017.

There are lots of bands that pretty much just do festivals and stadiums because they're huge that way and kind of sucks. With My Chemical Romance I should have gone as a teenager since I knew of them before their third album and before they went mainstream, but I was a bit too young then. The only concert I went to as a teenager was when I was 14 with my mum and brother lol to see Green Day (that was a huge concert too, in Milton Keynes like this MCR concert will be though a different venue this time I think, and my mum's friend gave us a lift back then.) My Chemical Romance were actually the support act on the American leg of that tour but weren't at those MK shows.

So I really enjoyed the Green Day concert and it was one of the best days of my life, but only because I was a teenager and obsessed with Green Day at the time and it was my first concert. So anything was better than nothing. I remember having some form of mini depressive episode in the days following because I had to go back to school and my mundane life that wasn't a Green Day concert. Couldn't really see the stage and ended up looking at a screen most of the time. There were 50,000 people there and I was about half way back. I actually got a lot closer than my mum wanted to be I kept dragging her forward. Concerts are a lot better now that I'm an adult and can go alone and get close to the stage lol.

Remember hearing about Radiohead resale tickets after they all sold out in about 20 minutes lol. Three dates in Camden in 20 minutes. They rarely tour. I can live without seeing Radiohead though I wouldn't turn down the opportunity. But really always wanted to see My Chemical Romance and I'm not a huge fan of them now (not dying for a new album, didn't buy the last, and mostly liked their first two albums,) but they were one of the big bands of my teen years so would be nice, and I'd also like to see TOOL. I bet they'd be really great live. Just don't really want to be somewhere really far from the stage.

One thing I love about small bands is there's barely anyone at their shows (like IAMX, though you then end up recognising people which is weird in a dif way lol.) I remember how tiny the ONE OK ROCK and Girugamesh concerts were too (both Japanese bands,) they weren't small fanbase wise but they're niche because they're from Japan. There's this great Japanese band that I don't think plays outside Japan, and def hasn't ever toured in Europe. 'Backdrop Cinderella' バックドロップシンデレラ easily one of the most underrated bands I've encountered.



Edited above video because can't settle on one lol.



And the guitarist is always wearing an Iron Maiden shirt lol.

Europe is phase two for Japanese bands from what I've noticed. Like Asia, then Europe mainland, then UK, then maybe Canada (?) then US (should point out almost everywhere probably comes before US lol so including South and central American countries.) US is very hard to break. The reason I think Canada before US actually has nothing to do with Japanese bands lol. Just this band I like from the UK called Crywank have toured in the UK, Europe, Australia I think, Canada (a bunch of other regions too lol,) they just never had dates in the US. There's another artist Little Simz not really small. Rapper. I heard she was cancelling her US dates because she couldn't fund it. Very expensive too. US is great for seeing US bands or people who move there later (IAMX,) not great for most bands though. European mainland seems to be the best place really in terms of getting people from everywhere and being the most likely area to get bands from outside the continent (esp Germany and France I think.) I should have known I'd ramble on. Stopping soon but have to link this really great track:



Uh Crywank are another group postponing a final tour during covid lol. I feel optimistic that Jay is going to make music in the future though. They're at a point of being so tiny and I heard the band walk around talking to fans etc at concerts which freaked me out because of anxiety lol.