Megabear is an album made up of 52 tracks. The majority of the tracks are 32 seconds long, performed at 120 bpm, in 4/4 time, & in the key of Bb. Each track is represented by a card that has been beautifully designed by Jono Ganz.
This album has no beginning or end but exists as a cyclical body of work intended to be played on shuffle. This allows the listener to find their own unique sonic narrative with each listen.
There are 8.06e+67 possible combinations to experience Megabear. It will play in a different order every time you press play. We hope you enjoy it.
And dang it is good. I love the voice, the variety, the feelings. Me Rex are a pretty dang neat band indeed. Thanks to the shuffle on this one as well.
Once upon a time I was deep enough in radio things to be invited to showcase festivals like the SPOT festival in Denmark. Once upon a time promotion firms would pay the hotel and tickets. Wild times. Anyhow. There I met the wonderful people of the band LISERSTILLE. Excellent people.
Really great music too, if you like prog rock, self made instruments and heavy music. Nowadays LISERSTILLE is not around anymore I think.
But some of them are in a band called HIRAKI. And they just signed to a new label. They also released a new single.
This is much heavier and less spheric than LISERSTILLE. But it slaps.
I spent the week at home. Had a positive covid test on Saturday that only turned negative on Wednesday. Thursday would have been such a heavy day at school that I could have gone right back to being major sick, so I stayed minor sick and at home. Now it is Sunday again and I am mostly back in my shoes. The nose will stay full. That is life with a dust allergy and no will to actually take care of it.
It was an interesting week. I was confronted with a lot of my habits and how they shape my days. With spending a lot of time in front of my PC and becoming frustrated with myself for not “really doing anything” in that time. Mind you that is the idea of being sick, doing nothing. At the end of that week I read it may not just be the damn phone and resolved to be less mean to myself.
Just let me float the thesis that maybe, you aren’t lonely and unhappy just because of your online habits – but also because other aspects of modern living made you lonely and bored and the phone is how you cope, and using it less, while somewhat beneficial, isn’t radically transforming your life the way you wish it did. It may just be exposing some holes in your life that are outside of your control to fix, as you can’t control other people or will yourself into superhuman productivity.
Next to that I spent some time watching videos by struthless. And really enjoyed them.
I feel a little cold creeping into my throat. I hate it.
Paul Beakley kicked off a conversation a while ago about ttrpg products becoming bigger and more involved in The New Novelty and a bunch of other writers responded. And it made me think about my own consumption of ttrpg books and the sway kickstarters have over me. So much of myself is caught up in “pretty books” and those ttrpg books shure as hell are really pretty. I don't even know if they are something that I actually do anything with or want for me or do I want them because I have met people who are very into the hobby and this is a way for me to connect to them? To get my foot in an imaginary door?
And then again I do have fun writing adventures for my once in a while DnD group. I love looking through these neat books, ingesting parts of them. I have a hard time “reading” rules and actually committing them to memory. It is much more likely that I will play the game and learn the rules through that and then when I run a game I just somewhat wing it. Because I don't have a dep understanding of the rules. It still works, because I am good at winging it and the people I play with don't know the rules either.
Then I see this Codex Of Old School Axioms and on the one hand I feel like an imposter and on the other hand I think “what a douche, telling me how to play anything”.
Blargh. I did back the DURF kickstarter on a whim, the art is so cool. It made me realize that fun art is okay as well and that is the art that most often comes out of me.
something real
Mike Monteiro is one of the good ones. And there are so many good lines in this. I should watch it again.
Music Corner
A new record by Dirty Knobs aka Zac Bentz who I know of because he once did Field Recordings from the Edge of Hell and also used to review japanese rock music and I found a lot of cool tunes through that old blog, that I can't find anymore. I wrote a lot of my university papers to the field recordings.
Kochkraft durch KMA have a new EP and it is excellent. Great party tunes and fun lyrics.
Frances Quinlan of Hop Along fame has a new band with excellent colleagues. Great tunes.
the rest
I made a thing. It is a little zungeon for an old school ttrpg of your choice or even for 5e. I am proud I made it. It has many faults. But heck, I made it dang it.
This one has tunes, mopes and some good reading. Let's go!
It is funny how even though Summer is festival season, autumn is when all the good albums drop.
Brògeal have a new one, as do Good Luck, Rauchen as well.
I can't quite say what it is a bout Brògeal that works for me. It is not exactly new music, it has a very specific touch to it that I enjoy.
Ah Good Luck is just a really good band. And this album is excellent.
Rauchen make heavy tunes. And they have grown a bunch in between records. This is fun. And they are good people as well.
Give them a spin.
Personally I've been caught in somewhat of a loop of not being able to really connect with things. I have read some books, they were great. But sometimes it seems like my time with video games has gone. They don't grab me anymore and most often I feel like they are something I do because I am used to it and not because I want to or they bring me anything. It is weird, because I am not yet used to doing anything else and I don't know how to get there. Anyhow, this video got washed into my youtube algorithm and resonated quite nicely with me.
What to do? I am thinking about downsizing the pc. Basically only turning it on for games and moving my work parts off to another smaller machine, that will not play games and just do office things. I am imagining a smaller footprint. But who knows if that is not just a way to get another machine to fiddle with into my life?
All of that wont stop me from doomscrolling. But hey, I am also quite mopey today, because I am running in not enough sleep.
To reject “AI” isn't to demand the restoration of some former glory of the utopian campus. There is no such place, as the original Greek reminds us; there never has been. Rather to reject “AI” involves a political and intellectual commitment to better institutions. And better institutions, better practices now not just off in some hand-wavy tomorrow.
In conclusion: expel cop shit from your classrooms; expel cop shit from your hearts. We are educators. We are not cops. If you want to be a cop, I recommend you go be a cop. At least then you’ll wear a nice uniform that lets us know that you are not on our side.
But the thing is: “You'll never know” goes both ways. If people stay, they'll never know how good it would have been to leave, either. I am not for throwing the towel at every slight hardship, but I think after a while, you can tell whether it is a tough but temporary phase or whether you have truly outgrown the job. One thing I learned this year is to spot that, because I mistook the latter for the former, and if I had seen the difference sooner, maybe there would be less bore-out exhaustion and resentment associated with the work for me internally.
“AI” will only harm, because “AI” is built by and built for men who actively seek to harm, men who seek power and hierarchy and (in particular) revenge.
They will talk about “fairness.” They will point to the “biases” and the “weakness” in human decision-making process. But what they mean is that, over the course of the last few decades, other people – women, immigrants, people with disabilities, trans folks, queer folk, non-Christians, non-whites – have been allowed (in some cases) to be decision-makers too.
Saw an amazing sunset yesterday. It was so pretty. Have a good one!
I think I'll beat the drum of “please body, either be really sick or not at all” until I am really sick again. Then I'll go back to wishing for not being sick as much. I hate the middle ground so much. Last week was pretty aggressively okay.
Lobsterbomb came to the studio to talk about their new record Overstimulated
There was a new blog bandwagon in the ttrpg/osr space and it was all about The Appendices Ns or in other words lists of media that made people who they are now. Here is a collection.
here is a movie about Grimdark and lots of small figurines
I had to think about this quote while walking through a neighborhood today. Sorry for its length. Emphasis mine.
It is strange and striking that climate change activists have not committed any acts of terrorism. After all, terrorism is for the individual by far the modern world’s most effective form of political action, and climate change is an issue about which people feel just as strongly as about, say, animal rights. This is especially noticeable when you bear in mind the ease of things like blowing up petrol stations, or vandalising SUVs. In cities, SUVs are loathed by everyone except the people who drive them; and in a city the size of London, a few dozen people could in a short space of time make the ownership of these cars effectively impossible, just by running keys down the side of them, at a cost to the owner of several thousand pounds a time. Say fifty people vandalising four cars each every night for a month: six thousand trashed SUVs in a month and the Chelsea tractors would soon be disappearing from our streets. So why don’t these things happen? Is it because the people who feel strongly about climate change are simply too nice, too educated, to do anything of the sort? (But terrorists are often highly educated.) Or is it that even the people who feel most strongly about climate change on some level can’t quite bring themselves to believe in it?
Funny how that quote is from a piece published in 2007. Has anything changed?
And that reminds me that I should read How to blow up a pipeline and that Andreas Malm has a new book out soonish. I took a lot from The Destruction of Palestine Is the Destruction of the Earth and the new one is called The Long Heat: Climate Politics When It’s Too Late and it is a “A scathing critique of proposals to geoengineer our way out of climate disaster, by the bestselling authors of Overshoot”.
If you do not know what to say, if you do not know what to write, if you do not know what to think, it isn't a signal that you are flawed, that you are inadequate, inept, inarticulate. Sure, you might be lacking something – ideas, words, clarity, what have you – and certainly the latest “hot, new” product promises to fill up the page for you. But if you don't know what to say, it is quite alright to say nothing. You needn't supplicate the machine-oracle for “inspiration.” (It's not inspiration after all; it's autocomplete.)
You were not put here to “create content,” although surely this is what the “AI” gods (and the tech industry writ large) demand of us.
It is alright to be speechless when things are overwhelming. It is alright to sit in uncertainty, to contemplate. It is alright. It is expected.
Indeed, part of the problem, perhaps, is we live in a culture (an economy, a technology infratructure) that demands we speak on everything, that demands we post, we update, we share. “Say anything,” post something, or you are nothing.
And it resonates.
Sarah Jaffe and Craig Gent talk about hope and being part of something. They read from a poem by Marge Piercy. It ends like this:
It goes on one at a time,
it starts when you care
to act, it starts when you do
it again and they said no,
it starts when you say We
and know who you mean,
and each day you mean one more.
They talk about David Graeber and a piece in the LRB by Richard Seymour called Baseline Communism that sounds excellent. Seymour also talked about Graeber in a related podcast. And I want to read Dawn of Everything again. Or rather start anew and finish it or keep going. Whichever. Where does one train to read Anthropology? To understand it and to learn from it? Did university teach me nothing or did my time at the computer shatter any resemblance of information intake?
Here is Aubrey Watters again:
What it means when teachers and professors push the button to create “AI” slop for themselves or for their students – whether that's assignments, handouts, quizzes, feedback, slide-decks, or essays; whether that's students pushing the button to create “AI” slop for their instructors.
And I think of my colleagues praising AI tools for what they can do for them and their classes. And here I get stuck in the sand. Between thoughts of optimization and relearning to do nothing. Relearning once again to fall into a book. To learn from it. Finding time for it. We'll see.
It sure is a new week. The new first graders have arrived and suddenly the class is so much fuller than before. I was running around reminding kids of their tasks all day. But it was mostly fun and games.
What kind of media does a kid consume to sit on a chair and make constant finger guns and even do a reloading motion with their hands?
Good Luck are an excellent band. I love their record Without Hesitation quite a lot. It's been more than ten years since that record was released. Same goes for Ritual. I interviewed the drummer last week and it was interesting to hear what needs to happen for a band to start again after ten years. And especially for a band whose name has not really grown in that time.
this episode of One Shot is excellent and makes me really happy I backed the Cosmic Century Knights kickstarter! Will I ever get to play it? Who knows. I'll take those blades with me into other games for sure.
Which brings me to me trying to make a Zungeon. My little notebook is full of dungeons that are drawn and not keyed. And now I have keyed one and when I started to type it up I immediately ran out of steam. I immediately felt like it was not great, didn't look good on the page and stopped working on it.
It is all bullshit of course. Just today I told the kids in class to just draw and not think about the way it does not look like the thing you imagined in your head. I want to ride the high of the TWG Game Jam and actually produce something. Make my own jam? I don't know yet. So I'll just keep on drawing dungeons. Better than looking at the phone in the subway.
Don't look at me like that. Slothrust are just too flipping great.
