deathisnotalesson

[deathisnotalesson]

postulations on the upcoming season of game of thrones

i haven't read asoiaf so i apologize in advance if some of this seems obvious or naive - this is more or less the product of a lay perspective of what might take place in season 8 and is purely speculative. if you haven't watched season 7 or really any of game of thrones and you plan to i would advise not reading further unless you don't really care about spoilers. some of this stuff just occurs to me throughout the day and i like to imagine hypothetical conversations between characters while doing mundane things - i've always really loved the conversational scenes even though they seemed to peak somewhere in the first few seasons with a few gems interspersed later on. insert spoiler alert flag here.

jaime really only has one place to go, and i get the feeling that this idea was ingrained into the main story arc in asoiaf - i can't really imagine a departure from the inevitable reunion of the lannister brothers, so that's more or less the starting point, but i'm fully expecting a curveball or two. following that line it's pretty clear that jaime will be met with extreme apprehension given dany's general antipathy toward the lannisters. another lannister joining the party is the last thing dany wants at this point, and jaime isn't just another lannister. he's the lannister that suicidally charged her and drogon on the battlefield, so she'd sooner see him incinerated like the tarlys than take him under her wing. enter tyrion.

TYRION: He's not all bad. I'm alive because of him. Cersei wouldn't have entertained us for a second.

DANY: (scowling furiously)

eventually he'll convince her to take him on board because - even though he's much smarter than jaime - he simply doesn't possess the same military mind as made evident by his embarrassing defeat at highgarden. his failure will have served the better purpose of prolonged fraternity. granted, jaime isn't the wisest military mind in westeros either - cersei is clearly the brains of the two, but nevertheless he'll be in a unique position to understand and counteract her brutal, underhanded style of warfare. at the very least he'll have insider information which could provide dany and co. with an advantage or innoculate them against her calculus. this would also open up some space to see a return of bran's humanity since he went all emotionless, contemplative three eyed raven and everything. how will he react when he comes face to face with the guy who crippled him from the waist down, who's now allied with his team? how will he react when he taps into cerebro and realizes it was him?

jaime's prince charming will be coming along for the ride, but he won't be ecstatic about leaving king's landing - his place of gainful employment - only to join the eunuchs under command of his sworn enemy. as we know, bronn is the only living person to put even so much as a scratch on one of dany's dragons since the sons of the harpy did some damage to an adolescent drogon back in season 5 - this would heighten dany and co.'s prospects for defeating zombie viserion assuming they can build a similar contraption or somehow hijack one of cersei's. add dragonglass to this equation and it becomes difficult to imagine how this wouldn't happen. i suspect dany will lose another dragon to the knight king but manage to burn the corpse before conversion and refuse to risk the life of her last which of course will be drogon - this will raise the urgency of finding another means to defeat viserion which may in the end require collaboration between a drogon-mounted dany and a well-aimed obsidian projectile courtesy of ser bronn. i wonder how many days of cgi rendering a shattering undead dragon in midflight will run them.

jon versus the night king doesn't intrigue me, but deprived of their winged mount the white walkers' days will surely be numbered.

[deathisnotalesson]

if the rest of the country is anything like me, then it should come as no surprise that negative reinforcement helps to spur productivity. while this is overall a good thing - a very good thing - it does create a dilemma: the sudden uptick in effort reinforces the false notion that the country is putting it forth in the name of trump, instead of in spite of him, vindicating the 60 million who lapsed out of sanity at the ballot box. right-wingers will still be just as obstinate and lazy as they were before, but they'll be carried by a marked surge of no-more-fucking-around on behalf of the other side.

as 2016 somersaults awkwardly to an end there is definitely a feeling of relief, though it's fraught with uncertainty and fatalism. to me it's become reassuringly clear that this is the death knell of republicanism, despite that its effects will be felt for decades to come - its hatred, its fear, its bigotry and partisanship and contempt for thought will all be clutched closely to hollow chests and held onto until their halcyon days. but chronologically, this is it. this is their last chance; they've lost, and they know it, and now here we are ominously waiting to see what horrors they will inflict upon the world as part of their final meaningless fuck you to everyone who left them behind. i'm convinced that as a whole they're unafraid to die. if it all ends in one last glorious nuclear exchange, the anything-right will be gleefully cheering with their liberal tears mugs while everything, including them, incinerates in a blaze and returns to dust. this is us pushing them off the precipice, and they've grasped onto our leg to make sure they take us with. they don't care if the whole thing comes to an end, and with someone as maniacal as trump now spearheading the party, it makes sense that most of them actually hope for it.

i'd like to look toward next year with a glimmer of optimism, but it just isn't appropriate. i'd like to believe that the majority of the country who didn't opt for self-destruction will be able to prevent catastrophe. if we are, and we do, then i'll be glad that i didn't throw in with optimism. if we don't, then my doubts will be justified for whatever they're worth, while the world spirals into terror and lunacy. if we make it to the other side of this nightmare, i have no doubt that things will turn around and be exceptionally good. that "if" seems bigger than life. that anyone could even contemplate a trump presidency that doesn't result in sheer disaster seems hopelessly beyond the pale. it's absurdly difficult to imagine someone more likely to lead us into certain death, or someone who will more thoroughly disgrace every unfortunate soul he represents while doing it. if we make it to the other side - if it lasts until the other side - we will be a very different country.

[deathisnotalesson]

i recently had a full-on anxiety attack, which might've been the first i've experienced since the last decade. though i have in the last few years had occasional flare-ups, which are always pretty scary, i wouldn't put those in the "attack" category. it was really an awful experience while going through it, but i find myself increasingly fascinated with the phenomenon and its underlying causes and presenting features. it was pretty strange, because i knew exactly what was happening at its inception, and even though i was ahead of it before it happened, and knew with near certainty that it was just anxiety, the machinery of the attack had already begun and i was left helpless to just experience it and hopefully get through it without calling for an ambulance, which i've unfortunately done in the past to horrifying embarrassment and financial cost.

i think one reason anxiety escalates to full-blown attacks is because of the misconception that because an anxiety disorder is a psychiatric disorder, the symptoms it presents with will be purely psychic. this is absolutely not the case. the machinery behind an anxiety attack is driven by changes in your physical state as a direct result of the sudden explosion of anxiety. i have absolutely no doubts that anxiety alone can make you faint or pass out, or cause other strange anomalies like temporary loss of vision or hearing. for example, i have a condition called tinnitus and during the attack the only thing i could hear was the nearly inaudible yet deafening ringing in my ears that one normally experiences when their tinnitus is triggered.

the onslaught of physical exacerbation happens at a rapidly incremental pace, with the anxiety feeding into and giving way to the whole process while it suppresses your reasoning ability. even though i stopped what i was doing and reassured myself that it was just anxiety, the process was already underway and those reassurances quickly eroded and morphed into panicked, irrational thoughts. meanwhile your body goes through a sort of hyperactive fight-or-flight response, with a huge shot of adrenaline sent coursing through your bloodstream. this can cause all sorts of weird sensations that could very easily be mistaken for something more serious - shortness of breath, numbness of your arms and legs, dizziness, tunnel-vision, etc. at that point all you can really do is ride it out and hope that it doesn't end in rash decisions. it makes me wonder how many "i think i'm having a heart attack" calls emergency responders deal with on a regular basis.

i also think one's susceptibility to an attack is as much physical as it is mental - i'd been recovering from a pretty nasty cold and had neglected exercise, which probably set the stage. physical health and mental health share a lot of the same territory, though they're obviously not mutually inclusive. although it's the worst thing to think about if you're trying to prevent attacks, i have no doubts that a severe one could trigger something more serious depending on your overall health, which is why it's more important to keep in some kind of shape if you're prone to anxiety. anyway, this concludes a layman's assessment of anxiety attacks, and i hope you're able to divine something useful from it if you or someone you know also experiences them.

[deathisnotalesson]

i keep coming back to that idea of lightning-in-a-bottle inspiration-driven songwriting versus the more cerebral, calculated, fully thought out approach. i'm sure both are necessary to varying degrees and in varying quantities depending on lots of different stuff - who the songwriter is, the song itself, the skillsets and intuitions of the artist, and so forth. if you set out writing a song with no real method or plan and only gusto driving the thing forward, there's a much lower chance that it will come to fruition or reach a state of completion that you're happy with. it's like ufc - if you come out swinging and giving it your all throwing caution and pace to the wind you're gonna end up gassed in the first round. i think that kinda stuff is super important for most people - not for everyone, everyone's different, i mean conor mcgregor and ronda rousey literally do come out swinging every single match and that seems to work for them most of the time. most people aren't like that. it would suck if everyone was like that.

i think it's especially important for self-produced artists. lots of kids get into making music because it can be an incredibly inspiring thing to do, but that causes them to see it as something that should be the antithesis of work. i just never needed anything other than the labor of working diligently on music to enjoy doing it. i've never understood the absolute requirement to have fun while doing it - that's such bullshit. that kind of selfish, masturbatory hobbyist narcissism really hindered my efforts as a producer in my early-mid 20s. i'm not a masochist - i like having fun, i like to get high, i like to drink and kick back and have a good time, but i like making something that's good so much more. and the two obviously aren't mutually exclusive, just like method and madness, conor mcgregor's unpredictability versus rory macdonald's technical striking. i'm sure lots of hits were made under the influence. it's just, that seems like such a dishonest image to be putting out there, because i'm sure at some point in the lifecycle of creating a pop song someone somewhere is doing some really nerdy, technical, laborious shit. it's not all sipping martinis in the lounge and railing cocaine off mixing boards, even if they insist it is.

i just get the feeling a lot of people think you've either got it or you don't. i hate that. "it" doesn't even exist - there is no critical determining factor for being a successful artist. this is a complete myth that's been inculcated by the vast majority of everyone who's "made it" in order to keep what's left of the industry's current apparatus intact. what the current industry is peddling is akin to ufc saying that if you aren't conor mcgregor or ronda rousey, you will never be a successful mixed martial artist. you shouldn't need to be justin timberlake or taylor swift to be a successful artist, but i think you do need a piece of that inspiration. music wouldn't exist without lightning in a bottle, but you need so much more than that.

[deathisnotalesson]

[deathisnotalesson]

i usually violently disagree with hitchens’ views on feminism and the sexes, but this is a pretty good watch; for 1993 his remarks and the remarks of naomi wolf are quite prescient and not in the least anachronistic. it’s weird because as someone who’s been hugely influenced by radical feminists like dworkin and third-wave feminism - feminism in general - having a hero like hitchens has been both alienating and inexhaustibly rewarding. a couple years ago i’d finished watching every single piece of footage of him that existed on the internet, but i’m still not halfway through his body of work as a writer. he was so insanely prolific - an author, a biographer, a journalist, a columnist, an essayist, a contributing editor - and while he preferred to call himself a journalist first and foremost, anyone who’s seen him speak would instantly call him an orator before any of those things. during the ‘80s-‘90s he was very liberal; it’s easy to find him quoting feminist literature and shaming right-wing bigots and assholes like emmett tyrell during this era. as he aged he ended up rejecting any affiliation with both the right and the left and wound up saying some pretty disparaging things about women, often using the word “feminization” as a pejorative.

despite the dissonance there, more and more footage like this keeps cropping up - stuff that i haven’t seen yet - and even though it’s easy to disagree with him and find him offensively old-fashioned, i can’t help but appreciate the conceptual value and the literal archive of information he dumped into the world.

[deathisnotalesson]

i guess i haven't written on this thing for a bit

it's weird, i dunno, i think a lot of people try to keep journals and blogs or whatever but they just end up abandoning them thinking that no one really gives a shit about what they have to say because they don't get a million acknowledgements from the internet.

the older i get the more i realize that i would absolutely hate to have that much acknowledgement - even the paltry, almost unnoticeable amount of hate i get on this thing is nearly enough to make me not want to write on it. i dunno tho, there isn't really a way to say "even if one person finds your writing interesting then it's worth keeping at it" without sounding super corny.

the last couple years have mostly been mental housekeeping. it's crazy to think about the types of mental states i'd fall into only a few years ago, how it was like 90% just my emotions going haywire and my brain trying and often failing to keep it all together. i guess me at my worst is still pretty boring, though. i have the unfortunate predilection of never wanting to bother anyone.

somewhere in the world anne frank's house has been converted into a museum where celebrities write endearing messages in a guestbook.

[deathisnotalesson]

a sad and frustratingly difficult thing i'm beginning to learn with age is how to be equally ungrateful to people who refuse to acknowledge that you've helped them

[deathisnotalesson]

maybe the problem with minneapolis is that it doesn't really know what it wants. it doesn't know if it wants to be a big metropolitan city - or if it tries too hard to be this while never quite succeeding - or a full-fledged pasttimey, smalltowney flyover locale.

i've never really cared about chicago. i'm not sure why. i don't have anything against chicago, it seems cool. i love hotdogs with ambitious toppings, i love italian pizza. i don't really know anyone from chicago, maybe that's the biggest issue i have with it.

i have a lotta respect for wisconsin. milwaukee is what the twin cities metro could've been if we just accepted that we're a lowkey town and that rich assholes actually do only see our city when they're flying over it to get to new york or LA where they brag to their rich asshole friends about spending four figures a night at fancy clubs that only other rich assholes go to.

i generally like wisconsin cities because they're unhindered by the expectation of being places of class or giant, bustling hubs of activity and economic progress. i like that the most notable export of wisconsin is really good american cheese and specialty breweries. these people aren't concerned about looking good in a magazine or a shitty blog. they want the shit - they want cheese curds, they want spotted cow and if you want spotted cow you're gonna have to go into their state to get it. they'll take your money for it, but they're not gonna bend over backwards to get it to you.

i hate iowa. sometimes i have these really bizarre dreams of just being in iowa, it's terrifying. if i had to drive through iowa or be in iowa for any amount of time i'm pretty sure i would either have an anxiety attack or become inconsolably depressed. just, endless golf courses and corn fields mixed with an utterly lifeless case of suburban sprawl. the tallest building in iowa is also known as the principal building. the principal building.

[deathisnotalesson]

i guess dealing with mental illness when you don't have family to turn to for help is pretty tough

judging from how people you don't know whose job it is to deal with you when you need professional help react to it, it seems like most people do get help from their families. still, it seems weird that a whole institution that deals with this kind of stuff just blinks awkwardly at you when you try to describe what it's like dealing with a crippling case of major depression without being surrounded by people who love you and care for you and want to help you through it every step of the way.

i dunno, just seems like there'd be more people that qualify for free healthcare that can manage to see psychiatrists and stuff who aren't like your typical suburban family-oriented folk. i guess not though. it’s pretty shitty that even free healthcare is still a middle-class family luxury when there are millions of people who need it orders of magnitude more desperately than they do.

[deathisnotalesson]

i just began to feel this overwhelming sense of dissonance with everything, with everyone in the area

the more the feeling grew the more i connected with it, the more i felt like i was the target audience and it really began to take hold of me and shape the way i felt about people, music, art, culture, everything, because sooner or later i became aware that almost every single person i used to hang out with was just completely not worth my time. i was really in bad company most of the time and i was just hopelessly oblivious to it.

at first i was just like them - i was a part of the local consensus - if the majority of people thought something was okay, then that meant it was okay. it never occurred to me to question this or formulate my own ideas and opinions about things because in my mind they were always being weighed against the consensus, and if they didn't hold up i discarded them. and the dissonance was just the turning point i think, the point at which my psyche could no longer reconcile the differences between what i knew were legitimate trains of thought and what everyone else actively encouraged/discouraged to uphold this consensus.

back then it was pretty different i think, there wasn't a lot of variety here, it was pretty much all the same crowd of vapid indie fuckwits in which i was totally immersed, and everything was probably a lot more emulsified. there were differing gradients in the weird scenes and stuff but it was all the same thing. now i think there's pockets of people who probably felt something similar to what i eventually did, people who want/ed to try something new regardless of how many asskissing hipster jerkoffs dismiss it or think it's lame or whatever, and that's cool i suppose. i tried to connect with that at one point too but i just couldn't pretend to be some enterprising young artist or enthusiastic about anything, i'm just too morose and depressed of a person.

just the thought of bringing color to this scene in itself depresses me, it just seems so silly. i just can't think of anything valuable that would come out of it. it's necessarily barren. i think people come here to struggle, and they stay here to struggle, and if you're here and you aren't struggling with something you're probably not gonna stay for very long. someone once said if they ever had to leave they'd have to be dragged out kicking and screaming because of how much they love this place but i still believe that if i ever leave i'll be kicking and screaming for entirely different reasons.

[deathisnotalesson]

this is the superlative nightcore album imo

i've been following this guy for quite awhile - i stumbled on his neon violence blog years ago and recognized him as a like-minded mixtape artist back when i was doing lots of mixes and edits and stuff. he's probably way more talented than i am; i heard a rumor that he's like 14 or 15 years old - half my age - which is pretty mind-blowing. obviously “neon violence” is a nod to the tough alliance, and i thought that was pretty clever so i kinda ripped off that idea for the thing i'm doing now. i don't know if i'll keep the same name or not, though i suppose it doesn't really matter.

anyway i always felt a kind of lingering guilt about uploading lazy edits of stuff on soundcloud and my old soundcloud account will probably get deleted really soon because it has two strikes against it for copyright infringement. in retrospect i guess it's not that bad though - i always credited the original artists and labels and have always taken anything down upon request. cool teens is kind of a reaffirmation of that - in a way, the way he's interacting with preexisting stuff is fairly respectable even if not 100% kosher with all of the stipulations of copyright law.

i find it really forward-looking. it's sort of taken for granted that the listener will understand or eventually come to understand that these tracks are not really his, that it's a nod toward sped-up nightcore, that nightcore has always been about taking advantage of the legal ambiguity of creating and uploading bootlegged remixes. the other, less attractive side of this idea is that someone will actually think he created them from scratch and develop a completely wrong idea of what he's doing, which could lead to a great deal of dishonest albeit unwanted self-aggrandizement.

in the long run i think if the listener understands what's happening, their interaction with the music can be way more meaningful than it would otherwise be if he just called the tracks by their original names with a parenthetical "cool teens remix"/"nightcore remix", etc. if the listener has a genuine interest in the music behind the nightcore, they'll take it upon themselves to look up the track by its lyrics to discover its origin - it will force them to actually listen to the original, as well as research some portion of its lyrics that stand out to them, while comparing and contrasting them with their nightcore counterparts.

for me, at least, this has always been an extremely rewarding process. hearing "i want it" before i heard "the best" didn't in any way detract from the impact either had on me, and depending on the mood i'm in my preference can lean either way. same with the three versions of "runaround" - the original, the chordashian remix, or the cool teens nightcore version. in both cases, i never would've heard the originals if not for the cool teens versions, nor would i have dug deeper to listen to little daylight's hello memory or to uncover dragonette's discography.

having said all of this i don't think all nightcore is good - a lot of it just doesn't work, and most of it is literally just sped up top-40 pop songs reuploaded to youtube with some glittery anime art. to me, tampopo summer represents the perfect balance between respectful appropriation and artistic creativity; two things which the vast majority of the nightcore canon simply lacks. along with its sister album, pop dreams, it's a hallmark of a developing artist's burdgeoning yet expansive career as both a dj and a musician - the culmination of dozens upon dozens of heartfelt mixtapes and chipmunked remixes, and i can't wait to see what he does next.

[deathisnotalesson]

here’s a much better version of that lawrence krauss lecture i wrote about in this post awhile back. i really appreciate lawrence krauss. he makes me want to go back to college and study science but my paltry self-esteem always ends up talking me down, reassuring me that i’m not smart enough to make any significant contributions to any scientific field of study even if i tried, and that i should probably just stick to making art.

[deathisnotalesson]

Maqdisi taught Zarqawi, who went to war in Iraq with the older man’s advice in mind. In time, though, Zarqawi surpassed his mentor in fanaticism, and eventually earned his rebuke. At issue was Zarqawi’s penchant for bloody spectacle—and, as a matter of doctrine, his hatred of other Muslims, to the point of excommunicating and killing them. In Islam, the practice of takfir, or excommunication, is theologically perilous. “If a man says to his brother, ‘You are an infidel,’ ” the Prophet said, “then one of them is right.” If the accuser is wrong, he himself has committed apostasy by making a false accusation. The punishment for apostasy is death. And yet Zarqawi heedlessly expanded the range of behavior that could make Muslims infidels. Maqdisi wrote to his former pupil that he needed to exercise caution and “not issue sweeping proclamations of takfir” or “proclaim people to be apostates because of their sins.” The distinction between apostate and sinner may appear subtle, but it is a key point of contention between al-Qaeda and the Islamic State. Denying the holiness of the Koran or the prophecies of Muhammad is straightforward apostasy. But Zarqawi and the state he spawned take the position that many other acts can remove a Muslim from Islam. These include, in certain cases, selling alcohol or drugs, wearing Western clothes or shaving one’s beard, voting in an election—even for a Muslim candidate—and being lax about calling other people apostates. Being a Shiite, as most Iraqi Arabs are, meets the standard as well, because the Islamic State regards Shiism as innovation, and to innovate on the Koran is to deny its initial perfection. (The Islamic State claims that common Shiite practices, such as worship at the graves of imams and public self-flagellation, have no basis in the Koran or in the example of the Prophet.) That means roughly 200 million Shia are marked for death. So too are the heads of state of every Muslim country, who have elevated man-made law above Sharia by running for office or enforcing laws not made by God.

http://www.theatlantic.com/features/archive/2015/02/what-isis-really-wants/384980/

[deathisnotalesson]

i really appreciate coldplay. somehow they managed to survive the shitslide of early aughts narcissism-rock while remaining completely true to themselves, keeping their footing squarely on a plane elevated far above their peers. to this day they are, more or less, uncategorizable.

for me it's weird to think about how less than a decade ago pop music didn't have any noticeable indie crossover potential. what seems like yesterday pop was completely separate, existing solely in shot-fueled nightclubs and corporate disc jockey radiowaves. it was simultaneously oblivious of and irreverent to the indie music scene and its social mores. the weirdos were hipsters; everyone else was normal and didn't actually care about music, only alcohol. in many ways this is still the case, but it seems to me that weird is becoming more the societal norm with each passing hour, and alcohol - well, alcohol isn't going anywhere.

sometime around the turn of the past decade something changed. pop, if you haven't noticed, is now indie; indie is now pop. the tables haven't exactly turned, but the two pools have been intermingling for quite some time, which has led to a great deal of positive growth but also some strange misfires. honestly, i'm still not sure how i feel about all of it - whenever i hear something like local shoegazers covering miley cyrus or some third-rate indie band doing a taylor swift song on our local homogenized fm station, it tends to strike me as a scoring of points.

i guess coldplay is what i'd point to as an example of a band that could be called indie while never really being defined by that categorization, tastefully withstanding compromise to the oncoming barrage of new wave poptimism. but i dunno, i'm pretty guilty of having a mid-20s pop epiphany which culminated right around the same time. i've always enjoyed listening to and playing pop music - i literally cannot write melodies in a minor key, and anything that deviates from a 4/4 signature ends up feeling really awkward and unnatural to me. feel-good, major key poppy melodies and choral harmonies have always been forcibly, angrily discouraged by my peers ever since i first powered up a keyboard and started plonking out notes. it wasn't rock and roll enough. it wasn't dissonant enough. it wasn't angry enough.

so it’s not much of a surprise that getting back to pop was an extremely refreshing and natural process for me. once i realized that everyone who was discouraging good pop music in my life were either assholes or bigots - or both - the transition was as obvious as it was effortless. i get the feeling a lot of people don't really have that background, or the epiphany, and that's totally fine. there needs to be dissonant, angry music. i just happen to be really bad at making that kind of music - for whatever reason my brain isn't wired that way. i'm usually envious of people who can pick up a guitar or sit down at a piano and write something in a minor key without having to think about it.

[deathisnotalesson]