Music For Your Tape Recorder

In light of my underwhelming tenth year on Blogspot, I thought the least I could do might be to upload my 2015 playlist on time. Well here it is, the ninth in the series. A little short as with last year because for whatever reason once I hit August I don't seem to hear anything new that catches my ear until December. That's likely because I hold off on buying any CDs so there's something to put on the wishlist for my birthday - critically needed because I really don't want much these days. If anything I need more shelves to store all the physical media I prefer to have and to hold.

Ifwhiteamericatoldthetruthforonedayitsworldwouldfallapart

"If tomorrow the Vietnamese are communists, they will be Vietnamese communists! And this is something you never understood, you Americans."
Hubert de Marais, Apocalypse Now Redux (1979)

Defaced Great Seal of the United States, Wikipedia, 2004

This year marked the 70th anniversary of the defeat of Nazi Germany, and also the 40th anniversary of the capitulation of South Vietnam. A scant thirty year period in which the United States of America went from being unstoppable in the Western hemisphere to crumbling world power. The Vietnam debacle was one of a string of events (the energy crisis, Watergate, stagflation, etc) in the lead up to the US Bicentennial celebrations that put America on much the same stagnant footing as the Soviet Union under Brezhnev. The only reason history is more interested in the Soviet experience is because that state did eventually fall, and in doing so left the US placed for assuming the role of hyperpower. Explaining the decline of American power in the second half of the 20th Century is critically linked to the tumultuous years in South-East Asia.

Palace Posy

Fourteen months later I finally follow-up on my short review of Threads with the promised discussion on the Cold War. This seems as good a time as any; it recently being the 70th anniversary of the nuclear attacks on Japan, and, therefore concurrently, the 10th anniversary of this blog. A good way to mark a decade of blogging might be to write something on the blog for the first time in months.

Cuevas de las Manos, Wikipedia, 2005

Threads depicts the almost total obliteration of a functioning state - it really was the end. The Day After (the American analogue, produced in the same era) on the other hand seems very tame, and deliberately so. It even includes a Presidential address, coming across on the radio without any hint of interference, which clearly indicates that for all the immense damage incurred the federal government appears to be intact - the future possibility of the cessation of existence of the USA like every other power in history being inconceivable to the majority of the citizenry (in my experience) and so probably too much for the casual public to swallow alongside their TV movie of the week popcorn. The softer depiction is of course the result of network pressure (can't keep the proles down if you make them start to think, after all), but it raises a serious problem in the logic of nuclear strategy: it almost implies nuclear war is winnable. The title is supposed to make you think about what happens after both sides' missiles have flown. By depicting what looks like a survivable exchange, it then begs the question what will the day after the day after be like.

Actually, It's Darkness

The Long Dark, Hinterland Studios, 2014

It's too bad she won't live, but then again who does?

There goes another week off. Five Marches later I still have the same problem. When I'm not working I quickly slip into a nightshift pattern. It starts innocuously enough with Sunday evening extending to 2am. From there it cascades later and later and by Friday the only thing I can do to rectify it is to stay awake until Saturday afternoon and take a nap to see me through the evening. It's not so bad in March when Spring is breaking through, as it did today, and there's some daylight to play with; but when I went through this in January I probably suffered a shortfall of Vitamin-D. Ironic, then, I should spend the middle of the night playing The Long Dark. I am without a doubt late to this party. You know I'd judge you for it in an instant, so why not be the better man? Fact is, I've not had much time to play games - aside from GTA Online, but then I got bored of (and pissed off by) that last August. What I've done to compensate is subscribe to a couple of YouTube channels thereby gaming vicariously.

Data Kiss

Valentine's Day sweet fleet, EvelynGiggles, 2007

Three is the magic number, oh yes it is. Well, at some point in this third year of OKCupid it perhaps might merit such a description. I'm certainly hoping it does, and there's a light on the horizon that's either thermonuclear death or the dawn of a new era. After writing last year's summary of two largely non-eventful years on OKCupid it mostly rumbled on in the same fashion - occasionally contacting someone every few weeks if they caught my eye in the search results. Eventually in August I came to the conclusion the current set-up wasn't working. I decided to massively overhaul my method. Let's be clear I'm not talking about pick-up artistry, rather I read a comprehensive guide on the Dr Nerdlove site and tore my profile down in order to rebuild it. That wasn't enough, though. You can construct the perfect profile for yourself but the basic fact of the matter is women don't contact men. I'm sure some do, but they're so rare they may as well be a statistical anomaly. The flip side of this universal is that you, the guy, must make yourself seen. It flies in the face of the spirit of the age that you can let your virtual presence do all the 'being' for you, but as above so below. Human nature is what it is, no matter the medium.

Music For Your Tape Recorder

I know. You don't need to tell me. Suffice to say I've not been motivated to write much this year and when it came to putting my playlist together it's apparent I haven't listened to that much music either. You can imagine I was dissuaded from bothering with that in mind when I realised I'd only left a few hours of 2014 to write it up. Here I am, though, two weeks later in what is my 10th year of blogging with a sense of obligation to drive myself to produce something. It may not be a long list this year (the shortest duration in the nine years I've done this), but there is plenty I want to get off my chest regarding some releases.

A Strangely Isolated Place

Piatra Galbenei, Apuseni Mountains, Bihor county, Romania
2005, Razvan Antonescu

Last year I presented a slice of the first steps toward the completion of my conlang project. So far the effort has taken £80 and roughly 1,100 elapsed days since embarking on the obscurantist desire in July 2011. In a way it was a reaction to the banal commonality of Romlangs and the impressive but not quite daring enough attempts at creating Indo-European daughter languages - often derived from the well documented Proto-Germanic or Proto-Slavic. I was attracted to the quirkiness of Albanian (the word for shore semantically drifting to mountain, etc) coupled with the general murky history of languages in the Balkans - only Albanian and Greek, and (in some theories) Armenian survive. The latter two are well attested back into antiquity, so the uncertainty of Albanian's origins and development left space for creativity. I like to think of this as a reverse-Brithenig - what if the Dacians/Romanians weren't romanised, compared to Brithenig's what if the Welsh/Britons were romanised.

Well, now I can show what a solid year of ripping up and starting again twice has finally yielded.

Also: I underestimated how long it would take to write this all up, so I've missed my traditional conlang date of October 25th. Eleven days isn't that late.

Note: Much of this is now deprecated. Don't calculate any interplanetary flight manoeuvres with this.