Oh dear, you've found the secret slime cave lair of Enforcer @ Draggian Universe where they put their awful little thoughts. Get out while you can. Established June 2024 as somewhere to put my angsty thoughts about how Falling In Reverse sucks other than the void and annoying my friends.
Enter at your own risk; this is where I put spur of the moment random nonsense, angst, and opinions to get them out of my brain. When I say slime, I mean slime. And possibly full on possession. There will be no content warnings.
The 50 most recent thoughts are being shown. A curated selection of old thoughts I thought were useful, funny, and/or interesting can be found here.
Part of me wants to dangle the RRverse or Terrence or some such in front of him and see if he bites while he's active on a text based forum on which I have an account but that probably wouldn't actually be very fun. It's not like his infectees can DO anything besides, like, emailing me or setting up accounts on Flight Rising, but there's no sense in me showing my work to people I know won't appreciate it.
Besides, if I specifically try to bait him, it's no fun and confers no cred to me. I already have his highest badge of approval on account of him using his graphic design skills on me, thrice, unprompted, so baiting would just be crass and devalue the original. Besides, it's not sporting to hunt creatures who so easily fall for obvious traps.
Ronnie update: dude has become a moderator on, and killed the falling in reverse subreddit. Not that I can feel bad for anyone on the sub. They rejected my message in 2024, so have fun with the flaming mic stands in hell. But, like, again, this is just sad. I've said that every time new FIR bullshit comes up.
(I still want to witness every step of the disintegration, mind you. I am going to order an actual fucking photo cake with that stupid PM2024 mugshot on it when FIR breaks up and I am going to if not throw a literal Ronnie Radke Is Over party, bring it to my class or a social event and we can symbolically consume him to absorb his powers. Some real Freudian primal horde shit. Or if I can get a reasonably sized cake, I eat the whole thing myself.)
Theoretically, destabilizing or destroying a hub of anti-Ronnie sentiment could be strategically useful, but I don't think he's actually capable of something that clever. Also, it's also a hub of pro-Ronnie sentiment. So, congratulations. You killed off one of the top results when people web search your band. That isn't doing anything.
Five bucks that he ends up throwing a tantrum and deleting / privating / paywalling it if possible, or it gets banned for him doing something horrible. Or he just forgets about it entirely.
Young, innocent, naïve versions of me would think a direct line of text communication with him would be good for lore. I know better now. He's so internally inconsistent as to be useless as a source on himself / FIR, if he answers at all.
This has to be intentional. I thought I had no faith in Ronald whatsoever, but this can't be how it ends. He can't just be completely incompetent in an uninteresting way. Tell me that even if it's subconscious, he wants to destroy the band so he can quit, and that's why this is happening. If he's going to kill something I love, he could at least give it some dignity!
(Of course, FIR for all intents and purposes died with Derek in 2020 and he's just been puppeting it around...)
If he isn't trying to destroy FIR, then he's just...incredibly short-sighted, mean, and bad at his job. He has to know this is a bad idea. He exudes too many obvious and canonical 2e vibes to be this dumb, and has somehow survived this long and had a career, so he has to know SOMETHING because his label and manager don't do shit.
If he's trying to destroy FIR because he doesn't think he can quit, then on some level he's a victim of RSD and shit. Still dug his own hole and I'll dance on his metaphorical grave, but that's better than him being so petty and spiteful that he'll destroy everything he's contributed to for no damned reason.
dude's my parasocial nemesis in the Phineas and Ferb sense, and it's no fun to be nemeses with someone who just sucks at their job and doesn't have a master plan
...never mind. It crashes whenever I click on...anything. I don't know if the problem is the OS or the device, but I also don't really care. Frankly, it's probably for the best. My relationship with Pokemon Go as a concept has stabilized as having nothing to do with the game.
Well, "works" in a vague sense. It keeps crashing, so idk if it's actually playable. And the bigger question is "do I still care and is this really something I want in my life again?"
To whom it may concern if you're curious -- I'm still not sure if I actually care about the game anymore, but I tried out of curiosity. Pokemon Go can run on LineageOS with Micro-G, but took a very long time to recognize GPS and seems to be pretty slow and glitchy about it, although idk if that's Lineage or that I got cheap hardware for my Degoogled emulator device. (custom ROM on my daily driver didn't work.)
Decades (Motionless In White) is incredible so they're forgiven for it taking 4 years. I'm also quite excited about Wage War's more brutal direction. The vaguely horny, religiously themed slow neither-metal-nor-core e-rock plague started by Sleep Token persists, but is less prevalent than in 2025. Story Of The Year seems to have forgotten they're a hybrid. Sleeping With Sirens' new positive output also isn't my thing, but I can't deny the overall competence of either of them. Greyhaven and August Burns Red's new albums are also excellent, as are all of the Stitched Up Heart singles.
Anti-social media songs continue to be generally speaking bad. (There's nothing musically wrong with Glitch Bitch, but it horrifically dates itself which is a common problem with this genre if you namedrop slang terms or platforms. The speed of production vs. speed of the Internet means there's no winning here, and the song becomes fully unlistenable once that platform is out of vogue.)
I continue to utterly despise the word "brainrot" and anyone who uses it, since it's uncomfortably close to being an ableist slur but no one seems to recognize it as such because of the "those dang phones" veneer so it creeps its way into otherwise progressive spaces. (e.g. the indie web loser I saw referring to modern society as "hyperfixated and brainrotted", both derogatory, ignoring that hyperfixation is a specifically AuDHD experience and not a synonym for fandom...thanks for saying the quiet part out loud! please jump off a cliff.)
It's victim blaming no matter what; it's essentially the same as blaming folks with drug addictions for lacking willpower and I thought we agreed that was a dick move but I guess "the kids these days are all awful in suspiciously autistic / ADHD coded ways" wins out. AlgoRHYTHM was also bad, so someone tell Dragged Under to just cut it out with the tech-themed songs.
I'm waiting to investigate the new Escape the Fate singles until the album comes out in October so I can download and review / do a video about everything at once and have it be properly blind. The snippets I've heard from promo videos my mom sends me do make me reasonably hopeful, though.
Assessment review: Everything released from bands I follow on FreeTube between last September and now.
You're not getting full descriptions (or even concise ones) of every album released in the past most-of-a-year, sorry. What you will get is the highlight reel. These are tracks I liked enough from this load that they get the position of honor of getting onto my Zune and/or Sanity Is For The Weak, i.e. my "no skip" list. Now my queue is finished so I'm clean in preparation for the new Escape the Fate album October 2nd, which will be getting a full text review and SAASP video and that will probably be my NeOCities-tober thing for that day and you'll like it.
The No Skip List:
Motionless In White - Decades
Playing God
All That I've Ever Known
Blood Rave
Decades
Fight Like Hell
Blood Pact
Love At First Bite
August Burns Red - Season Of Surrender
Behemoth
Sonic Salvation
Legions
Wage War - It Calls Me By Name
Song Of The Swamp
4x4
Purify
Karma
The Amity Affliction - House Of Cards
Misc. Singles
Stitched Up Heart - Beast
Stitched Up Heart - Meet Me After Life
Stitched Up Heart - Medusa
Stitched Up Heart - Love And Death
Stitched Up Heart - Dead To Me
Brace Yourself - Dead Eyes
I Prevail - Paradise
Brace Yourself - Habit
Remember in the I See Stars SAASP episode where I said that classic electronicore was probably killed off and is unlikely to come back on account of massive bias (some of it justified) against it and crunkcore as genres? Well, I've never been happier to be wrong. Listen to the new Motionless In White album.
August Burns Red - Forged By Failure - This song is generally good, albeit probably not getting downloaded on account of length and not especially interesting theming, but I have to admit that my first thought with the line "a cyclical cycle of insanity" was "ah, yes, the floor here is made out of floor".
I didn't move to living under a rock full time until 2020-21, and very rarely there exist memes that actually work with my sense of humor. Not enough for me to want to seek out new ones, but occasionally I'll deploy one from my very brief stint on Instagram.
Motionless In White - Playing God > Chris Motionless is far too classy for that, as demonstrated since 2022, but much like Hollow Points, I can't help but interpret this as perhaps being partially directed at my sweet darling boy...also, a testament to the importance of paratext, because if this wasn't coming from someone with both progressive themes in songs and actual action via supporting queer artists, I'd interpret it as Old Man Yells At Cloud "cancel culture" bullshit. Motionless In White and Artificial Gods (Dead Rabbitts) are the only people who do anti-Internet songs at all well. In that they understand that if you don't keep terms general, the song will become unlistenably dated...well, as soon as it comes out. It also helps that they don't participate in Scene Drama (TM) so it doesn't come off as hypocritical.
I have the utmost respect for Stitched Up Heart, but I haven't heard the term "e-girl" since, like, 2021 so... Glitch Bitch is good in general, albeit not something I would have downloaded anyway because I don't really feel comfortable with songs that use feminine terms in general and especially attempts at reclaiming misogynistic slurs, because there's no win condition: either I'm a woman or I just called someone a non-reclaimable slur, but the use of specific aesthetic and platform terms deeply frustrated me when put into a song I otherwise enjoyed but just not for me gender-wise. Even if you've got a good artistic reason and it isn't just trend chasing, it gives the song an expiration date.
Useless information: how I sort my (100% local MP3s) music library.
Computer: Every song I have ever downloaded or ripped. Including the bad ones. This is my hoard so that I have stuff preserved in the event that I ever need it or it vanishes. I didn't keep songs on my computer that I didn't like back in the day, which came back to bite me when I wanted to upload Dude, Where's My Grave to Web Archive and found out that the website on which I'd found the tracklist vanished, and only had metadata for the tracks I liked. That won't happen again. 6,830 files, 25 gigabytes at time of writing.
Phone: Every song that I actually like and could conceivably want to listen to in a random radio station fashion. Continually gets new assessments added to it and debloated as I listen. The same library is copied to my phone and my "dephone" (moto g play, lineageos, no SIM card, holds emulators and shit I'm not sure if Google Play will let me keep on my daily driver phone) so it's backed up in both places and I know I have it. Carrying around an MP3 player of some sort and wired earbuds is an extremely cheap, simple, and effective sensory and emotional accommodation. 3,523 songs at time of writing.
Zune: Falling In Reverse Baby Jail and songs I deem to be vibes congruent with that. There's about 500 songs on there at present. My whole library is more than 8 gigabytes big and AFAIK I can't do playlists or delete songs on-device on the Zune, so I need to be more selective with it. I also like using it when I'm biking because it has a switch so it can't be butt-dialed, and it has the ritual appeal for me and Fates when we're feeling slimy. Therefore, it needs to be able to be shuffled and left to sit and maintain vibes without skipping songs, which the full phone library can't guarantee.
SANITY IS FOR THE WEAK: The absolute cream of the crop and most selective. There's about 250 songs in here right now, a set that changes a bit over time as I get tired of ones that are on there and add new ones. These are my most favoritest, most vibes-congruent with Enforcer stuff songs. If someone were to hand me an aux cable and I didn't just play all of Dying Is Your Latest Fashion in order, this is what I'd invoke. Different from the Zune in that it's not necessarily slimy; these are songs that make me feel powerful and in touch with the badass snake demon king of edge stuff which is an overlapping but not the same vibe. It makes sense to me. The name is a holdover from when this was mostly Falling In Reverse; it isn't since 2024 for obvious reasons but I still think the name is funny and the evocation of SAN points and reclaiming eldritch madness appeals to me.
There aren't that many bands with reptile sonas, at least in the circles I run in. Trivium has something of a dragon motif, although more recently they seem less into mythology and more into how manly they are. (Including associating with Alex Terrible for some ungodly reason.)
Snakes are so ubiquitous in metal imagery in general that they show up all over the place, so if a given band had a specific snake motif I'm not sure how you'd tell. Presumably this is because they're well known symbols of life and death (and in a Christian context, evil and demons) and are also shaped such that you can put them on, around, or inside whatever other imagery is on your cover and use them to fill odd gaps in graphic design.
Wage War - Song Of The Swamp (Yewchube) > Wage War's been flirting with alligator imagery for a while on account of being from Florida (see also Death Roll), but it seems their latest EP and corresponding flagship song is escalating the gators to "band fursona" level, of which I am always in favor. No especially desirable merch yet, but if they release a plushie, you know what to do. (I'm finally going through the songs that released since my phone broke last year since I can copy stuff via USB again now and so I'm through my new releases queue before Last Goodbye drops on October 2nd.)
I wonder if anyone's noticed that I quietly deleted the "tech / society" thoughts archive and the webpage on my "political" opinions. I realized that the former was mostly negativity by volume, and while I have legitimate philosophical concerns, I'm not a political scientist / sociologist / etcetera so don't have anything especially informed to say and realized I didn't want to add to the volume of that online or come off as a "discourse" (derogatory) site. The latter, while I do believe all those things, I realized was there out of an unhealthy and unnecessary feeling of obligation to explain myself. I've decided that my work speaks for itself from now on, and that not partaking in unhelpful discourse includes not posting rebuttals or concerns myself.
https://rentry.co/aeyimsdm > I'd had an idea bouncing around for a while of a new In Which Zane Is Produced intro (I'm completely rewriting it from the 2023 draft and streamlining it quite a lot) which also incorporates some new Pokemon League worldbuilding.
I don't write political allegory. This is a logical worldbuilding consequence of Pokemon and if anyone decides to make any connections, that's on them.
Anyway, I realized that there's a much better explanation for why Spark and Arlo can't adopt or surrogate (outside of people they know) than just Arlo's job: if somebody adopted a child or got an official surrogate, and then that child got injured or killed by one of their Pokemon, the legal fallout for everybody would be massive. There are very few circumstances in which the Pokemon League and human authorities overlap (the Pokemon League bans Pokemon from being used in law enforcement or military applications unless they're sapient and volunteer, and anyone without League training from investigating Pokemon crime -- this is nominally for safety and to prevent Pokemon from being used as weapons of war or fascism, but is mostly so the League can act with absolute power over Trainers and everything else Pokemon related), but Pokemon being used as murder weapons is one of them.
A full investigation from both sides would be needed to make sure there's no foul play with either the parents or the agency. At minimum, if it were ruled an accident, the trainer / parent would have all of their Pokemon confiscated and permanent license revocation and lose custody of their child or the ability to adopt others. The agency would likely also end up getting shut down for gross negligence and endangerment. So, the adoption and surrogacy providers have decided that catering to trainers isn't worth everyone else losing access to a public service if something goes wrong.
There's nothing stopping Pokemon trainers from having biological children or finding carriers from people they know, and you can raise your child around Pokemon -- you just can't keep them unattended in the house. Pokemon are known (this is canon in the anime, at least) to be able to release themselves from their balls in cases of threats to themselves or their trainers, so the concern is that even if they're in their Pokeballs, Pokemon may still end up injuring or killing a young child if they're startled when they release themselves. They can be around your child with adult supervision, but other than that, need to be kept in PC boxes or a separate facility. Most non-sapient Pokemon are of equivalent intelligence to trainable animals or young children, which even without any tragedies or foul play, means that they want to play and may perceive small children as playmates, but don't know how squishy they are. All kids in League regions take classes on safe Pokemon handling in school, and by the time they reach 10-11 (the minimum age to apply for a trainer license, although most do so closer to age 14-15) are big enough that trained Pokemon are unlikely to seriously hurt them.
So, both sides have a point here -- Spark's valid in interpreting it as discrimination, since it does make it much harder for gay Pokemon trainers or those who otherwise can't have biological kids to get the same opportunity to raise families as their fertile counterparts. And Ronnie is also right that especially from the perspective of someone who isn't involved in the Pokemon for sport subculture and taught to perceive them as cute and innocent, Pokemon are legitimately dangerous and you wouldn't even leave a big dog or cat unattended around a baby. Being a Pokemon trainer is a voluntary career choice, so it's not like it's a demographic that can be discriminated against.
The general rule with Pokemon possession without trainer licenses is also what adoption agencies and apartments etcetera use for what Pokemon you can have outside their balls in the house. Basically, nothing a human couldn't physically overpower if necessary or that could do too severe of property damage. (Nothing over 100 pounds, that's past its second stage evolution, or that's classified as legendary or mythical.) Oh, and I also wrote the entire legal code around trainer license infrastructure.
August CD Stack #11: Recover - This May Be The Year I Disappear (Universal Records, 2004)
A band described as post-hardcore, emo, and pop punk, signed to infamous poppy-"emo" label Fueled By Ramen and associated with other notable relatively-poppy / less hardcore hybridized emo-adjacent bands. This is their second album. They haven't been seen since 2016 as far as I can tell. This contemporary review calls them alternative rock with emo and post-hardcore elements and vaguely 80s-like vocals; I'm unsure how accurate that is or if they're shying away from calling them "emo" because that's a dirty word. The only other contemporary review I can find hated it, but doesn't specify what's actually wrong with it, so I can't rule out it just being stylistic bashing. Them mentioning the guys having long hair as a point against them (as if that hasn't been part of rock since before it WAS modern rock...) makes me suspicious.
...opening with "this summer I want to get stoned and fall in love" is not a great first impression, I have to say.
I can see the 80s elements on Light Up The Night, but not really anywhere else. Referring back to how that one reviewer of Charity.Burns.Green derogatorily referred to the "scene bands" as Taking Back Thursday, I can see where they're getting it -- the structure here reminds me a lot of Thursday, but with poppier vocals and lyrical themes. Which frankly works better than when they try to be edgier, because the attempts at both screaming and classic rock vocals are pretty weak.
I agree with both reviewers that Once In A While is pointless. It's less than 30 seconds of acoustic that doesn't add anything to the album except a weird gap. I'd dislike it less if it wasn't followed by 2 minutes of silence for no reason.
When this album uses post-hardcore structure with poppier vocals, it's decently good. When it's pure pop punk, it's boring, and when they try to do harder vocals, they utterly fail. I do think that one reviewer who hated everything about this had some bias against the genre / style in general, but I also don't blame either of the contemporary ones I found for not being impressed with this. I already know that I don't especially like pop punk in general and the Fueled By Ramen style of super-poppy emo in particular, and this one, while harder than some, doesn't escape what's turned me off from similar bands in the past.
Tracks I liked:
Simple
Disappear
Fuck Me For Free
August CD Stack #10: We, The Undersigned - Bleed The Constants (Dimished Fifth Records, 2009)
Only notable release (there is one unsigned EP most of whose tracks are on here and that's it) from a band tagged on Bandcamp as metalcore among other things from Fredericton. Was nominated for, but did not win, an East Coast Music Association reward in 2010. Bandcamp cites reviews that don't seem to be otherwise findable. Still active on Facebook as of 2025, but doesn't seem to have done any shows or released music since this album.
It's not by any means "bad"; there's some interesting mixing throughout and some tracks I legitimately enjoyed, but I feel like it didn't quite land on whatever it was trying to do. It loosely reminds me of Enemy Of The Sun or System Of A Down but with more metalcore structure, and I think that's what they were going for: metalcore with thrashier vocals and a certain oscillation of mood and such to produce a feeling of instability. I understand the principle, but it just ended up feeling disjointed and I don't think the thrash vocals were executed well. I get wanting to be unique, but I think this album is at its best when it's the closest to pure metalcore and consistent in mood and musical structure. It's not bad, but I wouldn't say it's especially good either.
Tracks I liked:
Pangaea Mind
The Eschaton
Strassman's Child (there's some really neat audio mixing. however, it's really long, and I have no idea what this Canadian band is trying to say about US politics and if it's pro- or anti-Obama.)
August CD Stack #9: Tempting Tragedy - Carpe Noctem (Self-Published, 2007)
There are multiple bands and other goth-adjacent things named Carpe Noctem. This one seems to be from the metal band from Moncton which is only documented by Metal Archives. In all honesty, I mostly bought this CD for the cover. Tempting Tragedy has another album per Metal Archives, but no other documentation for the same reason as the album name -- it's an extremely common name archetype in metal in general, so you get a bunch of other bands named [X] Tragedy but not this one, who doesn't seem to have done anything since 2010.
It's definitely goth, and it's definitely metal. The supernatural imagery is fun, as is the overall atmosphere. Musically, loosely compare some of the slower metal CDs I've run into e.g. Images of Eden. Not really the sort of thing I'd seek out to look into further, but a generally enjoyable listen with some gems.
Tracks I liked:
Pray For Me
Mr. Hyde
Hell's Gates
August CD Stack #8: Days Like These - Charity.Burns.Green (Lobster Records, 2004)
Stream (YouTube, 2026 remaster. The original version does not appear to be anywhere but Spotify, but this band is still active and a remaster version is available so I don't feel right uploading it to Web Archive.)
It's not consistent whether this title has the periods between each word or not; the best conclusion I can come to is that it's Charity Burns Green with spaces but styled with dots. When looking up this CD deciding whether it was mission relevant, I found a contemporary review which provides yet another citation that "scene" and "emo" are synonymous in every pre-crash source that's actually referring to music and not the bastardized aesthetic. Said review described it favorably as "melodic rock that avoids emo cliches" and lacks influence from the "scene bands" referred to actually rather amusingly as Taking Back Thursday.
This Punktastic review and a contemporary interview from the same site appear to be the only real press this album got, but it's agreed to be post-hardcore of some sort. I get the impression from the description that it'll be more "post" than "hardcore", and if it was enjoyed by people doing blatant emo-bashing, I might not be a fan, but we'll see. Other than that, this band appears to have become broadly irrelevant; there's a review of their second album from a different punk website who liked it but describes Charity as "forgettable" and doesn't seem to mention much in the way of the hardcore and metal influences I like.
The Australian band with the same name who's described as metal / hardcore with EDM influences seems to be unrelated. That being said, it does sound like the sort of thing I might like, so this may be another Howl Like Wolves vs. LikeWolves situation where I get two bands I wouldn't have otherwise known about for the price of one. It appears that the Australian band has outcompeted the earlier US one, forcing the Days Like These who did Charity Burns Green to disambiguate their usernames. Days Like These (US) is still active and doesn't have any information other than the few old interviews / reviews and their social media, but if I had to guess, was probably a "broken up for an extended period then reformed for nostalgia" situation, since there's no music whatsoever between 2006 and 2025. The sum total of their output is the two albums from 2004 and 2006, a 20th anniversary remaster of Charity Burns Green, and a single-digit number of singles released in the past year.
It reminds me of Hoobastank, or Atreyu once they became substantially lighter and started doing standard enough pseudo-anthem rock. It's pleasant enough, but lacks the edge I look for. I'm disappointed given the punk / hardcore adjacent circles this band seemed to run in; I was expecting more from it. It doesn't even really have the fun parts of pop punk.
Tracks I liked:
One In One Thousand
Charity Burns Green
August CD Stack #7: Black Moor - The Conquering
Debut album from a broadly irrelevant band from Nova Scotia, who per Wikipedia, described themselves as part of a "new wave of traditional heavy metal". Given that neither the actual 80s metal I've listened to nor the bands attempting to emulate it has impressed me, I'm not expecting much from them, but I picked the CD up because it was cheap and definitely metal of some sort. Full disclosure that I'm not paying all that much attention to these CDs; I'm playing through West Of Loathing again and using them as background noise.
It's about what I expected -- some good guitar solos and imagery, but there isn't all that much there other than that. Pleasant enough as background noise, but the songs don't have enough substance individually to justify their length.
Tracks I liked:
Warshark
Fiend
Red Blood, Cold Steel
August CD Stack #6: Green Day - Dookie (Reprise Records, 1994)
Green Day's first relevant album. Somewhat poppier than Nimrod and lacking its hardcore influences, hence why I didn't like it as much. It's still fun and has the classic Green Day vocals and guitar work, but ultimately very simple structure and there's not all that much in the lyrics propping it up. Nimrod, Warning, and American Idiot work better for me since they incorporate harder influences and have more theatrical and storytelling elements. Still, though, I'm glad I was able to acquire and listen to this album that I wouldn't have necessarily sought out -- even though I'm not much of a Green Day fan, it's definitely of historical canon significance.
Tracks I liked:
Chump
Longview
Welcome To Paradise
August CD Stack #5: Avril Lavigne - Let Go (Arista Records, 2002)
It's Avril Lavigne. I'd say that as compared to the other album I assessed (Under My Skin) it's poppier - tbh, other than imagery and Sk8er Boi, there aren't really any meaningful pop punk elements I noticed. Regardless, it's still an extremely fun album, and I feel like "fun" is all it's really setting out to be. Unwanted and Nobody's Fool were both pretty fun outside of the obvious classics of Complicated and Sk8er Boi.
August CD Stack #4: Spawn - The Album (Compilation, Sony, 1999)
Yes, it's a movie soundtrack, but it's a movie soundtrack for one of the most infamous 90s edgelord superheroes and which contains several artist names I recognize with novel remixes / mashups / collabs. It seemed worth 2 dollars.
It's fun. It's grimy. It's edgy. It embodies what I like about this era of metal and such. I don't think it needs to join my permanent collection, but it's worth a listen if you're intro late 90s nu metal, industrial, and such -- the remix / mashup nature of the album means that it emphasizes nu metal's electronic and hip-hop elements more than some.
Tracks I liked:
Filter & The Crystal Method - (Can't You) Trip Like I Do
Korn & The Dust Brothers - Kick The P.A.
Stabbing Westward & Wink - Torn Apart
Incubus & D.J. Greyboy - Familiar
August CD Stack #3: Codeseven - The Rescue
According to Wikipedia, this band started out as melodic (post-)hardcore, but dropped it and became weird atmospheric space rock sometime around this album. With that in mind, I'm not really sure if this album is mission relevant since apparently the hardcore era was also a different singer, so is for all intents and purposes a different band. Still, some elements will probably be retained in earlier work with composition and such?
When Wikipedia said that this band fully departed from hardcore on this album, they meant it -- there's some metal elements, but this is enough outside of my post-hardcore / metalcore / loosely thrash adjacent orbit that I'm uncertain what to say about it. This suggests that this album, and Codeseven's subsequent output, isn't mission-relevant, but that's okay: the presence of this CD means I learned about their mission relevant hardcore era, which I wouldn't have otherwise known about, and that probably is worth assessing -- the fact that the same instrumentalists (presumably) were able to effectively pivot to experimental spacey stuff from hardcore suggests that they're damned good at their jobs and probably made good, more interesting than the fight-in-the-pit kind hardcore when they did that.
Tracks I liked:
Smell Of Yellow And Black
The Rescue
Give It To Us
August CD Stack #2: Sum 41 - Does This Look Infected? (Aquarius Records, 2002)
We last saw Canadian pop punk / vaguely-metal hybrid Sum 41 with their final album Heaven X Hell, which I found generally unremarkable -- it's a lot like early Falling In Reverse, but with even less screaming and such, and something more of a 90s pop punk mentality. "Scene" continues to have never been a real subculture or a different thing from emo. It's just a synonym for "the [post-hardcore adjacent] music scene", and the "scene aesthetic" has nothing to do with anything. Alternative Press also sucks in general so like.
Much like on Heaven X Hell, the base structure is mediore 90s pop punk with occasional vaguely thrashy components, like Nimrod (Green Day) but less interesting. When the metal / post-hardcore hybridization enters the equation, it becomes comparable to a somewhat poppier and less screamy version of Dying Is Your Latest Fashion and its ilk, albeit with less going on musically. Again, it's a lot like early Falling In Reverse which isn't a compliment.
I guess Sum 41 may be worth assessing, but it isn't a priority because their output is huge, they're not especially unique stylistically, and the concentration of songs I like has been low. I get something of a feeling that if I were to fully assess and download output, a lot of it would end up having to get debloated out 6 months later. Even the more hybridized songs are fun, but I wouldn't call them "interesting". Nothing is hitting the Sanity Is For The Weak resonance of DIYLF / early FIR / The Used / Atreyu / Destroy Rebuild Until God Shows / Get Scared, who all do similar styles but better. Well, the others are better. Falling In Reverse resonates with my concept core for reasons I can neither understand nor control.
I've discussed before how I think I might just not like pop punk. I seek it out in CDs and assessments because I know it's relevant to the subcultural (emo; "scene" is synonymous and/or a historical fabrication made to sell music-irrelevant aesthetics) canon, but it just doesn't do anything for me.
I'm usually pretty unapologetic about my tastes and you should be too, but this just slightly confuses me in that I feel like I should like it, but I don't, and I can't explain why. There's something that the slime-free FIR substitutes I listed above have and this lacks, and I'm not sure where it is. Perhaps there's the post-hardcore edge that this lacks? The tonality is less arrogant-RSD about it all even on songs with darker lyrical themes. I don't feel emotion in this in the same way -- it feels hollow, in a way that the hybrids I listed and the more pop punk toned tracks I like from other bands don't. Again, I can't explain why. It's similar to what I ran into with All Time Low and Taking Back Sunday -- there's just something that my Edge core needs that despite emo canonicity, the poppier bands just lack. (Taking Back Sunday, I also disliked their vocals. They felt slightly off from the instrumentation.)
Acceptable background noise, but broadly disappointing.
Tracks that stood out:
Still Waiting (I think I might have heard this on emo night setlists? It sounds familiar. Good mixing, cliche and daft lyrics. Social commentary songs need to be about something.)
No Brains (first track I legitimately liked)
Mr. Amsterdam
August CD Stack #1: Gutted The Band - Self-Titled Album (Self-published [?], 2017)
Method of acquisition: Thrift store
Small, relatively recent, and still active band from Edmunston, New Brunswick, who call themselves "thrash country". I haven't liked hybrids with country influences before (see Antiseen, Every Time I Die, and Bad Remedy) because they tend to go for the "bro country" mentality and mediocre guitar work rather than the actually interesting parts of country and it takes away from the fun punk / metal part, but it was unusual enough to be worth 3 dollars to try out.
I'm confident that there exist good country / metal hybrids. I think if you played into the desolation and storytelling of some of the darker country, and got an actual country vocalist, it could work quite well. This is not that. Nor are any of the previous hybrids I've dealt in. There's nothing musically wrong with it, but the attempts at country vocals and guitar work don't synergize with the metal elements so just end up clashing and drawing the off-key accent to attention. It's acceptable thrash, I guess, but I also don't find pure thrash all that interesting so ¯(ツ)/¯ not my thing.
Tracks I enjoyed:
Fool Yourself
Haunt Me!
Heracles wields a club, traditionally. Why is cutting hydra heads off even relevant? Can't he bash their brains out without cutting, or does that count too? (If you hit a hydra with a blunt weapon such that it causes internal bleeding / vessel rupture, does it grow new heads inside? That could be gruesome.)
Also, I know the whole thing is a metaphor for paganism, but not only are the villagers in Saint George and the Dragon terrible at wildlife management (if this dragon is eating sheep and/or people, it isn't going to find enough prey so will leave if you STOP FEEDING IT), Georgie-boy himself is kinda grotesquely endangering the townsfolk and extorting them? "Look at this tame dragon I have here. It'd be a SHAME if you didn't convert to my religion, so I'd have to let it loose to start eating you again. I could kill it right now, but have chosen not to because you being pagans is more important." I know that in this case, dragons = demons = other people's gods, so they need to convert to prevent future attacks, but holy shit, that's horrifying from the perspective of the dragon as wildlife. I don't blame modern versions for removing the overtly Christian parts.
Also, if this dragon is eating sheep and/or people, how come all the art makes it look like a monitor lizard with wings that George just kinda tramples with his horse and then stabs to finish off?
OK, I officially give up on attempting custom ROMs on the new phone. All available options that I don't have to build from source code have either had SMS not work or failed to boot at all. I have no idea what building from source code via Git even really IS and GSIs are generally described as unstable and unsuitable for daily use. So, uh, hopefully uninstalling the bloatware I can and disabling the bloatware I can't will work. Second device which doesn't need to worry about being a phone and is on LineageOS's official build list is shipping.
I like my website. I like looking at it. I'm proud of the art and writing that's there. And yet, the urge to destroy it persists. No matter what, there's some part of me that doesn't want to exist in a perceptible medium.
There are no stupid questions, only mean answerers. (...I have been asking a lot of questions on XDA, because I don't know what I'm doing and don't want to break anything.)
you would think that with the number of times it has happened I would have internalized by now that I can't eat an entire large pizza in one sitting because it will result in me feeling like crap. Unfortunately, the operating impulse was "I have not eaten anything since a noodle cup 8 hours ago" so. Also my fault.
I don't get devices for software. I get devices for hardware features and then apply software to them.
"Get a pixel with GrapheneOS" -- I like. The stylus. And headphone jack. I consider what I can do with my device more important than its OS. Just answer my question.
well, I've gotten bored of sims 2 but still don't have motivation to do much else. servos actually kinda suck? I mean, sure, they're good for business, but business isn't interesting as a mechanic especially since you can't hire household sims as employees so they're not controllable
my "personal self-hosted cloud" is that I walk 5 feet and transfer files with a flash drive
I got a response to my forum thread -- I don't think it's likely to be all that helpful (asking for logs and to check if my sim card number is correct), but at least it proves the developer is active and alive. However, the monologue would rather do literally anything but Android Nonsense. I legitimately have no idea why it got so heavily set off last night, but taking a break so we can cool down is a reasonable request.
I'm still frustrated enough that I don't think I'd be very patient with attempted tech support even if I thought it was going to work, so I'll wait to send said logs until tomorrow.
The "steps for other devices" are as follows: go back to the stock ROM and update firmware, go back to the stock ROM and ask my carrier to re-initialize the SIM card, and spend 7 dollars on Google Play for an automation app to turn on airplane mode when the phone reboots and that's supposed to do something. Everything else I found was for devices that could either send or receive texts, not that couldn't do either.
tldr: got new phone. attempted to install lineageos on it. everything works except texts, which are kinda nonnegotiable and why we needed a new phone number, and like 5 people total use this rom so there is no documentation or support. if you are not one of those 5 people (lineageos for moto g stylus 2024) do not attempt to give me "tech support". fates is freaking out about it with what can only be described as timeline dysphoria
Yes, dear, I KNOW that you're frustrated and disappointed by the whole phone thing. Yes, I agree that messing with undocumented rooting so I can be sure my apps will work in January shouldn't be necessary and that this is personally offensive to your 2000s sensibilities. I understand why you think existing in 2026 is a curse. I understand that it's triggering the feeling of being trapped and that US technofascist bullshit can and will continue to screw us over no matter where we are.
Other than checking if folks on the XDA forums can contribute anything and trying what limited software troubleshooting / reinstalling we have, I can't do anything about any of those! We need to have a smartphone for various infrastructure reasons, and you can't listen to your MP3s on wired earbuds while drawing with the stylus on any other model. We might as well make use of the damned thing if we have to have one. I also know that you know that if you met Ronnie you wouldn't like him and that you would not be able to be openly trans or autistic if time travel were an option. What do I need to do so you'll let me sleep? This is not a heart rate speeding up situation.
I get that it's probably HP and MP levels being low and that we were hoping things would work out, but I am not having a dysphoria fit over a damned PHONE.
Sims 2 trick I learned yesterday: Sims can't interact with items on shelves, which means that buying something (e.g. a stereo) and immediately putting it on a shelf means it won't count for aspiration. But what you can do if somebody wants something that fits on a shelf and you don't want them constantly playing with it is buy something, then move it onto a shelf. This would also work if you wanted your Sims to have small toys or something for characterization, but not autonomously play with them. (Yes, you could turn off free will, but what kind of malevolent god would do that?)
oh hey, the FIR stationery on which I had him write Arlo a threatening postcard in reverse mode ii (2023) is real
file that under my prophecies
also I looked up the address he does have the sense not to dox himself and I think I might have figured out how he is printing the new tiktok merch; there is a print shop in the same parking lot
my dude if you want to do print on demand merch so badly, fix the actual Falling in reverse merch store that has been broken since 2023. anyway POD stuff will arrive until he inevitably starts selling random stuff from around his house which won't and he'll get banned. (This also happened with Whatnot.)
Again, I think whatnot had stuff arrive for a while when it was POD and/or old merch nobody bought in 2022 (or earlier), and then everything stopped once he started making promises he couldn't keep, e.g. VIP and the design contest.
but, like, dude, if you like POD so much, fix the FIR merch store? it's probably better out of pocket for you because your merch provider has industrial quantity deals that you don't with a random print shop in Anaheim. also, remember you had a Patreon?
Either he's paying terrible rates or he's gonna end up with a lot of shirts that won't sell.
been playing sims 2 again now that I actually can...made a household with versions of RRverse Ronnie!06 and Arlo and I'm having a great time. maybe writing of some sort coming soon? this is canon in that 06 is playing this game; who wants to enable me to write a story that's just him talking about a game he's playing while Arlo comments over his shoulder? (I have screenshots but not of a lot of the emergent gameplay)
Sims 2 FreeTime is broken #n+1: one session of instruction in a hobby can make someone a friend by itself, making family friends for jobs way easier.
Turns out you actually can change the color of layer styles in Photoshop Elements 8 (2009); it's just in the Layer -> Style Settings menu instead of in the styles panel. Sweet.
ceci n'est pas un site web
The monologue decided to start shit about "why are you messing with this computer when you have several windows boxen at your parents' house? if you wanted a windows 7 desktop so badly, why didn't you bring Draggyslair II with you?"
...this one is here and I have somewhere to put it, which was not the case in the dorm, in the slime house, or when I thought i would be flying or cramming all my stuff into the minivan to move to Canada.
correction: it is actually a new moon. one of them pokemon sleep special event bitches. i also go werewolf apparently during both the full and new moon so like
both a big thunderstorm and a full moon so a great day for my critter vibes I had the urge to go stand out and vibe in the yard but that was quickly thwarted because the rain is cold so I am going to spiritually vibe with the shift inducers in my enclosure
psa that uninstalling google play services (shizuku / canta) on moto g stylus 2024 will result in bootlooping
got new phone (moto g stylus 2024). going to attempt custom rom installation, but forgot about the motorola OEM unlock cooldown so I'm gonna be waiting a week
goddamn pixel art hurts bigger stuff with the drawing tablet is so much easier
Theme is 90% by Enforcer; the rest is thoughts.page default. Kick ass, take names, fuck Ronnie Radke (not literally). scrapers, "AI" agents, and their enablers fuck off and die
