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.

Blow Yr Mind / "Heroes"

Promo poster, 2014

When I reviewed Under the Skin in March I said that much as I bought into the idea that Scarlett Johansson is a sex symbol, I wouldn't see a film with her simply on that basis. Case in point - I haven't seen any of her Marvel appearances as the Black Widow, because the omnipresent comic book films do nothing for me. I nearly passed on seeing Batman Begins in 2005 for that reason. Lucy genuinely interested me because it looked like a strong female-led action film from noted director Luc Besson. I love Besson's The Fifth Element and I increasingly like Ms. Johansson's work (perhaps save for the Israel controversy). Indeed, I've been having something of a Scarlett year and Lucy made three after watching Don Jon, and intend to continue with Her at some point. So it was that I decided to repeat my little day out in March with a strong sense of déjà vu. Not only was I riding the train to see another 'ScarJo' (urgh) film at Cineworld, I was also in a new pair of Doc Martens - replacing the pair I broke-in seeing Under The Skin. I also didn't have a date again, so that's too many coincidences.

Spoilers, duh

Cold Earth / Семена Мёртвых

No spare fuel for cremation.

No spare fuel for bulldozers.

Wasteful of manpower to dig pits by hand.

Washington Crossing the Delaware, 1851, Emanuel Leutze

It is a decade since The Day After Tomorrow was released. Not the exact date (May 28th), since I've remastered the art of missing deadlines and got beaten to the subject. It's not a seminal film, nor ground-breaking in narrative or special effects; it is, however, the last Roland Emmerich film I enjoyed. Emmerich is something of a fetishist for destruction having made many many films about disasters - most famously and well-received Independence Day, and most infamously and less well-received Godzilla. Then there was 2012 for which I presented many criticisms a year and a half ago, primarily that is was built on a non-premise and the idea that it was somehow sci-fi. Emmerich was originally going to step away from the disaster genre but unfortunately went back on his word because he believed it was too good a concept to pass-up. See my criticisms for why I honestly have no idea how those words could reflect what sets '2012' in motion. However, let's get back to discussing The Day After Tomorrow (herein TDAT).

Frigid Spring

El juicio de Paris, Enrique de Simonet, 1904

It's a title that works on so many levels. After writing the longest string of words I've ever put together, well beyond my Buffy retrospective and edging out my criticism of Star Trek Into Damnation, part one of my Scarlett Johansson indulgence left me a bit listless. And more than a little irritated that the review's been on the front page for exactly two months and garnered precisely one view - I feel like Rivers Cuomo after Pinkerton, which I haven't heard, or Bill Murray after The Razor's Edge, which I haven't seen. Er, point made. Having readers might help. All I need is a little discourage, or perhaps as with Donnie Darko over a decade ago I'm waiting for other people to discover it so that I can refresh the tree of smugness with the blood of latecomers. I haven't been as single-minded about a film since I saw Battle Royale - I've got the Under The Skin soundtrack on vinyl, a promo ad cut out of The Guardian I read on the day I saw it, and my DVD pre-order date stamped over a month ago. Despite that, I'm still far more restrained than the individual on IMDB who declared of Ms Johansson that he would happily "drink her bathwater". People like that make fans look like obsessives and ruin my chances of ever having children with her. It's spring after all - a time of fertility and flourishing of the quick.

Human Flesh is Porky Meat (Hee Hee Hee Hee)

Under The Skin, US poster, 2014

I'm not one for hype. I'm not one for opening day screenings. And I'm on holiday, so I'm not really one for getting out of bed. Despite that, I've been waiting several months now for the release of Under The Skin. The Guardian has until recently been choked (non-erotically) with articles about Lars Von Trier's magnus trollus Nymphomaniac to the expense of every other film. With that finally out of the way I saw the low-key promotion for Under The Skin begin in the run-up to a March 14th general release. Still, why so interested? Well, my interest was piqued over two years ago when I heard parts of the film were being shot in the area. And, most obviously and honestly, it's Scarlett Johansson. Not that I would see any old tripe just cause she's in it. Undeniably, though, she is a sex symbol - and I don't say that often. I once got into a minor brawl with a friend at the age of thirteen when I dared to suggest Britney Spears was unattractive. I was engaged in a daydream two weeks ago about meeting Scarlett on set via certain connections, although I realised my connection didn't extend over that boundary line. Ahem. Nonetheless, I've always been into sci-fi cinema beyond the space-opera of Star Wars and what little I'd heard of the premise intrigued me.

Spoilers for Under The Skin inbound after several paragraphs of travelogue twaddle.

COMPUTERLIEBE

Know All Men By These Presents, Coles Phillips, c1910

It seems like there should be a morose Morrisey-penned song about a flaming meteor saving us from Valentine's Day. There might well be - I haven't paid any attention to him in years, so I don't know. This isn't supposed to be my critique of Morrisey's latter-day output, opinions, and jack-assery; but consider that a summary. This is about Valentine's Day, OKCupid, and another Valentine's Day on OKCupid. Oh yes, I'm on there - I obliquely mentioned it in 2012. All that stuff I said years ago about throwing darts in lovers' eyes were the over-dramatic ramblings of a nineteen year old. Not that I retract my statements. It was two years ago while I was reading my more popular and less pseudonymous East coast counterpart's blog that I was ensnared by an OKCupid (hereafter OKC) personality test. In order to save the results of my test I had to create an account. Thus began a relatively lame journey. Sorry, that was a spoiler.

Music: Response

Some favourites, me on flickr

It's been a bit of a paradox that I'm most productive on this blog when I'm not having the best time at work. 2008 and 2009 were the lowest points in my time blogging when I was close to ditching it even though I had so much spare time from finishing work early from the latter half of 08. I got moved in 2010 to a much more physically challenging duty and yet turned the blog right around with a prolonged burst of activity. Now I'm back to being shafted and yet I've let the blog slide for the past month. Truth is, I've been busy in another medium. I usually think of writing as my hobby, and the various other interests I have more as on-off projects which wax and wane in my focus. I'm sure they're all tied together as creative outlets, probably all stemming from my love of building with Lego many many years ago. I mean, it's easy to use a hammer to wreck things, but wasn't there underlying symbolism in Jesus being a carpenter? Amongst the projects on the go are occasional dips into programming (or scripting, strictly); and, of course, my long-running conlang efforts which comes and goes depending on how much I've exhausted myself in completing some aspect. So as I mentioned in my end of year post, I've dipped into making music in the past two months.

Music For Your Tape Recorder

This year started slowly as Lone's Galaxy Garden was still in hard rotation - or whatever technical phrase applies in the iTunes era. In the latter half of last year it suppressed everything else and continued to do so into the first half of 2013. 'Dream Girl/Sky Surfer' overtook 'Roygbiv' as my most listened song and is now beyond five hundred plays. Last time I checked I was listening to it twice a day on average, though I've slowed down a lot since it passed that mark. The rest of the album isn't far behind. Lone released a standalone single in June which you can see only six places into the list, giving you an idea of how little anything else caught my ear. It's a slightly shorter annual list than usual and probably more padded than I'd prefer, but that doesn't mean that there's little to talk about.

The Further Away

IMG_4808, Sarah Zucca, 2013

Back in 2007 I wrote that Christmas had lost the meaning it once had. Given our earliest Christmases are as children, the meaning it has is invariably material. A decade ago as I was approaching the end of school, receiving lots of presents or even money in lieu was very little to get excited about. Where once there was unwrapping at 5am, I now struggle to get out of bed at 1pm. By the time I got a job and started generating income I could buy all the CDs and DVDs I wanted any time of the year. Asking for them, because you've been asked what you want, reveals a massive void at the core of the materially-orientated 25th. Currency is just being cycled and because requesting an object requires no consideration on the part of the purchaser, the present isn't really personal so much as a financial obligation to avoid being the one taking more than giving. So come the material crisis in my later teenage years, I began to realise the spirit of Christmas was seeing relatives.

Unfortunately, when I wrote up that realisation it was actually the last time my relatives came over from the US in December. For the past two years they've come over in late October for a pre-emptive combination of three birthdays in November, two in December, and Christmas rolled into one. Still, that leaves Christmas itself rather sparse with only my uncle joining us from down South. This compounds the sense of meaninglessness since the 25th is pretty much like any other day except very few people are working. Since I'm working right up to the 24th and back to the coalface three days later for the stint before the New Year holiday, it feels little different from an extra long-weekend. A far cry from the build-up in primary school when in the final few days before finishing up we'd bring in board games and videos to watch. My traditional viewing of the Muppet Christmas Carol is down to that. In fact, that too reveals a change in perspective.

Wake Up Maggie, I Think I've Got Something to Say to You

(C) Agence France-Presse

Originally I was going to write back in April about Margaret Thatcher on account of her recent cessation of life, but the saturation of media coverage covered most of what could be said. I put the post back to November and planned to use some of the non-domestic events of her premiership as jumping off points for some discussion. That schedule slipped as per the pattern of neglecting to write when work is easy, so here I am in the midst of the Christmas workload (you know, that company that even Thatcher wouldn't privatise) writing two posts back to back. Fortuitously (and this is going to sound terrible), Nelson Mandela died last week. Perhaps this is a good time to follow on from my comparison of Zimbabwe and South Africa, Mugabe and Mandela.

The wind of change is blowing through this continent. Whether we like it or not, this growth of national consciousness is a political fact.

The Emperors and Kings Curl in the Autumn as the Burning of Leaves

It's a bit odd, don't you think, that even while freedom and equality are the hallmarks of Western democracy (apparently simultaneously unique to all) that some people are living like royalty? I'm not talking about those financially benefiting from austerity and the ideologically-driven shrinking of the state, I mean royalty with a capital R. Of the nineteen monarchies depicted left in 1908 only eight survive.

The first to go was the Portuguese overthrown in 1910. The Qing Empire (of China) was overthrown in 1912, though Puyi was restored in Japanese Manchukuo from 1934 to 1945. The Russian monarchy was famously overthrown in 1917 which directly inspired events in Germany a year later in November 1918. Austria-Hungary ceased to exist earlier in 1918 and the Hungarian throne was vacant until overthrown in 1944. The Ottoman Sultanate was abolished in 1922. The Hellenic (Greek) monarchy was abolished in 1924, restored in 1935, vacated in 1947 and abolished again in 1967. Serbia had become Yugoslavia in 1918 and the monarchy was exiled in 1941 then formally abolished in 1944. Romania and Bulgaria were overthrown under Soviet hegemony in 1947 and 1946 respectively. The Italian monarchy was abolished in 1946. Japan and Thailand remain, while the Spanish crown was vacated in 1931 and only restored in 1978. The other survivors are stable and quite geographically restricted, almost forming an arc: Britain (minus Ireland, 1921), Belgium (not depicted above, probably because Leopold II wasn't welcome in the club at the time), The Netherlands, Denmark, Sweden, and Norway.

Sweet Bird of Truth

P52 Verso, Public Domain

This may read as a disjointed rambling piece as it was stitched together from three parts.

You have to beLIEve me!

As an atheist I have to admit to being quite envious of the sense of community I see in churches. One of the reasons I try to go to the local shop as often as possible, while others point out how much I could be saving by visiting the outlets of the megacorps, is to hold even the slightest sensation of community.

The increasingly belligerent tone of the new Dawkinsian atheists has turned me off. I really have no appetite to go round actively (de)-converting people and pulling them from their church for the aforementioned reasons. This raises a genuine problem - essentially the concept of 'the noble lie'. Is it right to use a lie to effect good in the world? That was pretty much the theme at the end of The Dark Knight and the beginning of The Dark Knight Rises concerning the cover-up of the corrupted Harvey Dent's crimes. For the protagonists, it was absolutely necessary to preserve the heroic status of Dent that they had long sought.

Towers in Sand / From Feudal Serf to Spender

EPILOGUE OF A SERIES.

Abstimmung an der Landsgemeinde, Adrian Sulc, 2006

This series of posts started out three years ago with a reprint of a college essay (so more like eight years ago) on the definition of Marxism and the failure of the Soviet Union. At the time I stated that I had loosely considered myself a Trotskyist if only because I understood it in my teens as in opposition to Stalinist totalitarianism, and in exploring the subject across ten thousand words I have found myself reaching back into the nineteenth century roots of socialism. The value of these essays, and this blog, is basically a personal learning tool - in writing this series I have managed to organise my ideas about political theory into something structured that I can recognise myself and refine. Thus, instead of complain about elements of society and politics, I can present my ideas for their own critique. To do so I must first re-summarise the problems with the Bolshevik revolution.

Word Problems, Level 1

Green Eagle, Quinn Dombrowski, 2010

Despite conlanging being a long-lasting hobby of mine that I can't talk to anyone about offline lest I receive a lovely long-sleeved jacket, a post about conlanging hasn't appeared on this blog since 2011. In October that year I presented what little I had to show of the conlang I was working on. Getic (aka Not-Albanian) is an attempt to derive a sister language to Albanian from Proto-Albanian under the pretence that the Dacians were their ancestors and one tribe went South (our world's Albanians) and another remained in the Carpathians (the Getae). The Getae were actually located near the Danube and possibly a Thracian tribe, but ethnicity and identity in the Paleo-Balkans is a hell of a mess - I'm just using the name. What I've been working on the almost two years alone are the sound changes from Proto-Indo-European. In that time I ripped most of it up and reorganised the whole thing at least once in order to get the right output. At first it was difficult given the paucity of information on Proto-Albanian. Before I eventually bought A Concise Historical Grammar of the Albanian Language for £80 I had to painstakingly gleam some fundamentals from the Wikipedia page on Albanian - the fronting of long PIE back vowels and monophthongisation of PIE diphthongs and the incidences of palatalisation before front vowels built up a crude chronology. The juicy stuff in that book was of course unavailable at Google Books, so I put down some real money on this hobby. That allowed me to finally progress onto creating the beginnings of a grammar this summer.