#so rather than compromising and going somewhere else the organisers decided to just hold the protest there anyway

[purple-is-great]

Finnish media: a police officer on horseback rode into someone when breaking up a protest so that the person fell down. that was fucked up and probably not allowed

People in the comment section: well it's their own fault for not moving out of the way. the police told the people to move so anything that happened after that was their own fault.

[shooter-nobunagun]

the dream comes to an end [epilogue]

//Epilogue for “to the beginning”; just to wrap everything up, tie up any loose ends, and to thank all my readers for keeping with me on this incredible 5 year journey for a story that I never thought would go for so long or end the way it did.

Ashes to ashes, dust to dust The Lord bless him and keep him, The Lord make His Face to shine upon him And be gracious to him, The Lord lift up His countenance upon him  And give him peace. Amen.

The dirt is gently shoveled over the coffin, and when his turn comes he’s not sure what to think or say (should he even say anything?) but he throws the dirt over his father’s coffin anyway, all without a word and it moves on down the line.

They were never a religious family—neither his father nor his mother, despite the whole ‘soul’ and spirituality aspect of the e-genes. Churches were attended only out of politeness for some holiday or another, usually only when he visited his grandmum in England. And yet the words serve to soothe him now, to gentle the waves of grief he’s not sure when he’ll stop drowning in. 

Maybe God, or whatever is up there in the great beyond, might decide that someone who embodied the essence of an abhorrent monster like Jack the Ripper isn’t worthy of entrance to heaven, or the afterlife, or...whatever, but for now he wants to believe this God is as forgiving as the priest makes Him out to be. All the anger he held holds no sway now; no matter what his father did, he knows it wasn’t for savage, mindless revenge, but because he couldn’t stand to feel the pain anymore. He quietly wonders how it is he’s been able to hold on, after the deaths of his sister and mother, and why his own father couldn’t. Maybe it’s his youth, maybe his father just suffered too many losses over the course of his life, or maybe it even was due to some still-unknown side effect of being an e-gene holder. Both Dogoo and Hunter admitted they may never fully understand all the inner workings of e-genes or why some holders reacted while others didn’t; perhaps, in that sense he was simply unlucky.

Are you alright?

The words seem so far away, even though his grandmother is standing right next to him, concern lining her greying brows. He nods, not sure what else to say because he’s already said everything he can think of; even then, words won’t bring them back—won’t change the present.

Let’s get back home, then; London’s getting rather cold for this time of the year.

He should, but before they can usher him into the vehicle he turns around, kneeling beside the freshly buried grave. A double-headstone, even though only his father is interred in London while both his mother and sister now lie at rest somewhere in Japan. No amount of pleading or reasoning with the other side of his family could convince his Japanese grandparents to place the family together. He can understand why; they lost their only daughter and then granddaughter, and from what he’s gathered over the years, it seems they never quite got over the fact his mom chose a foreigner for her husband instead of a nice, Japanese man. 

But they loved each other. I know that much.

The best compromise for now is a photograph, to spiritually represent the joining of two souls in the afterlife, after having been denied it in the world of the living for so many years. He can’t help but stare at the photo, showing his parents right after they got married in a traditional Shinto ceremony (they look so young he thinks, more like this peers than parents) and a photo of his sister taken right after her 10th birthday. A small mountain of flowers and memorabilia surround the headstone, left by close friends and family who attended the funeral today. Tomorrow, DOGOO will allow the general public to come and pay their respects—and it is rumored the British Royal Family will also be making an appearance.

Why couldn’t you have held on? Why did you have to go...did you really miss her that much? He knows there isn’t any one person or thing to blame, but he wishes there were. The counselor assured him there’s no right or wrong way to feel, that everybody processes grief and loss differently; yet it still feels wrong to blame the dead for things that are out of their control.

A gentle hand on his shoulder, and this time he nods and gets up to leave. For the time being he’s living in London, but that could very well change. His father mentioned attending university before his death...and now, he thinks, maybe it’s time to do just that. Maybe somewhere far away from everything, in some country he’s never been to before—America, Chile, or even Australia. Maybe somewhere with a good swimming program, since it’s a sport he’s actually good at. Besides, even if he wanted to return to DOGOO (and he doesn’t), the main base repairs won’t be completed for another few months; Saint-Germain and the core group are temporarily operating out of the C. Forrester, crossing the seas from place to place as he did previously aboard the A. Logan. 

Most of the attendees are heading back as well, all dressed in black and talking in hushed whispers even though there’s really no need to be that quiet, he thinks. It might be they fear their words will hurt him; though honestly it feels nothing can shock him anymore, even if they are somewhat unsavory.

It’s unfortunate, but that’s what happens when you try to play God...

I always thought using souls of the deceased was a rather dodgy method, even to save the world...let the dead stay dead, I say. Especially someone like Jack the Ripper...

The whole organisation was founded by an alien, what did you expect?

God cursed them, that’s what; I do hope nothing more happens to that poor lad. He’s suffered more than enough.

And he hears nothing more as his grandmother firmly ushers him into the black limousine, shaking her head at the gossip. Pay them no mind; your parents only did what they felt was best for you. 

Still, as they go home to a small cottage by the River Thames, he can’t help but wonder if they’re right. If God cursed them for being inhuman. For toying with powers and forces they didn’t understand, even if it is to save the world.

He wonders if his blood is cursed, as well.

[bluetapes]

Blue Tapes is an algorithm

The long Q/A version of an interview I did with  Kristoffer Patrick Cornils for the German magazine HHV on the thinking behind the Blue Tapes project.

What was your motivation to start the label back in 2012? What are you goals with the label?

Distracting myself from the doom, really. I think that’s all any creative endeavours are. I started the label as a visual art project to give myself something creative and positive to occupy my time with after I’d been knocked on my arse by a particularly nasty bout of depression. I think it was helpful to just have this little hobbyist project that involved going away and spending a lot of time thinking about colours and sounds. Before starting the label I had been a music journalist and I was sick of the sound of my own ‘voice’ and everyone else’s, really. Doing something small and simple and abstract and just for me was very rewarding. A few months into that, other people found it, and some of them liked it.

Stylistically, you don't seem to have any boundaries. What does a record have to bring to the table to be released through Blue Tapes, or what is the lowest common denominator between Katie Gately, accapella Death Metal and the keyboard improvisations of a 13-year-old?

Blue Tapes is an algorithm. There are three axes and the artists that score most highly along these axes are the ones I choose to work with. The axes could be labelled a) Is this something that people have heard before?; b) Do I like it?; and c) Will other people like it? That last one is the hardest to quantify. I’m never short of finding amazing, innovative music that I love, but I’ve lost so much money through doing the vinyl series in particular that I’ve had to face up to the fact that there’s not much point in releasing records that only a tiny proportion of humans will respond to.

(I mean, having said that, my next release IS a microtonal ambient black metal LP…)

Although there is a lot of musical diversity throughout the series I do put a huge amount of thought into why I might want to release something and it has been curated to make sense as a series, even if the only person that it ultimately makes sense to is me? From a marketing perspective it’s a nightmare, obviously.

How do you find the artists that release on Blue Tapes? Do you do your A&R work on the internet or do you rather use your personal connections?

For the early releases, I would often have an idea of the KIND of thing I would want to release - say an acapella death metal album - and then I’d go online and try and find somebody who with a bit of convincing and a bit of imagination could deliver that. Soundcloud was a pretty invaluable resource for this.

Some very good friends of mine started the 20 Jazz Funk Greats blog back in 2004. I started blogging for it more after starting the label and I found a few of the artists (Plains Druid, Unfollow, Trupa Trupa) through that.

Very rarely it might be somebody who contacts me (hi Benjamin Finger) but mostly it’s me trying to imagine the music I want to release and then finding the nearest thing to that sound in my head in real life. (Without me having to get my hands dirty and make it myself… because I suck at the music.)

In 2014, you have launched X-Ray Records, a vinyl sublabel to Blue Tapes. What was the idea behind that and how do you decide if a record's coming out on tape or vinyl?

This is part of the process that I’m still tinkering with and trying to get right, but mostly it just came down to whether it felt right to do so. I’d had the visual concept for the series in my head for a while, and it made sense to try and reissue some of the bigger tape releases on vinyl cos they’d had an impact and a lot of people had missed out. Mostly I just really wanted to own a copy of the Tashi Dorji album on see-through vinyl so I took out a bank loan to get one! Sort of a foolish enterprise, but I’m unrepentant.

People can subscribe to your tape or vinyl series and even Blue Tapes shirts. What was your idea behind that subscription service and how have people responded to it so far?

There’s a small coterie of subscribers who I guess are kind of at the heart of the BT/XR family.

The first germ of an idea relating to Blue Tapes was that I was really into making cyanotypes at the time and I wanted to find some kind of a purpose for them, to justify their existence, so I had a sort of mad idea to make a series of limited edition t-shirts with cyanotype prints on them, that you could subscribe to. I was quite excited by it as a concept but it probably wasn’t destined to register with the outside world very well! Somewhere down the line, instead of the art being a t-shirt, it became a tape with a piece of music or other sound on it and an image that could collectively be represented by a serial number, rather than a title.

I always thought the subscription element was important in a way, because I think the series does only make sense if you view it as a curated body of work rather than discrete entities, but admittedly that’s not actually how people consume or usually think about music.

Your artwork is very recognisable not only because it's, well, mostly blue. What's the concept behind that and how do you create those washed out effects?

So the process I mentioned before, cyanotype, is a pre-camera photographic technique that uses sunlight and water and chemicals to create images. It was originally developed for scientists and engineers to reproduce diagrams or other plans. Because the chemicals produce a blue-coloured print, they became known as ‘blueprints’.

I find analogue processes a lot more interesting to think about than digital processes, so cassette tapes and cyanotypes made very natural bedfellows for me.

Some of the images are created using other ‘alternative process’ photographic techniques - those very ‘washed out’ colours are done using a technique called transaquatype, where you use water to try and intentionally make the colours run - but I think the best ones are the cyanotypes, particularly the cyanotype abstracts.

The X-Ray series, as suggested by the name, takes a very different approach. Is that perhaps a reference to those literal X-Rays from the Soviet era on which people cut music because they lacked the ressources for vinyl?

The name is a reference to that, for sure. But it also links back to the cyanotypes. The first step in making a cyanotype using the modern method is to create an enlarged negative of your source image on acetate. These enlarged negatives are pretty cool objects in their own right, and I started to think they’d make really cool vinyl packaging. So, for instance, if you take the Tashi Dorji LP, the artwork is actually the negative of the original tape artwork.

Held up to the light it looks a little like an x-ray, so X-Ray Records. It could have been ‘Negative Records’ or something but that sounds way too much like a hardcore label! And, y’know, also the Soviet thing.

Some of the earlier releases lack pretty much any information, which can be quite confusing for people who don't neatly organise their collection like I do, I guess. How do the artists respond to this serialisation? I can imagine that some would see their work compromised if they had to name it after a catalogue number.

No one’s really complained about it, but you’re probably right. I think with this thing it was almost like starting a band or something, rather than joining someone else’s band. I was able to say, look, this is the concept, if you want to be a part of it then cool but if not then no worries. It IS confusing and I would never judge anyone for not wanting to get onboard with it!

But it was important to me to present the series as a process that was configured to output a singular piece of art every month, rather than as a ‘label’, which actually felt more dishonest - it’s not a business, it doesn’t make any money. The aesthetics of the label and its cataloguing were contrived that way to try and make the ‘art’ the physical rectangular object that you hold in your hand, and as a self-conscious attempt to get away from the idea of the ‘album’, which for a while I genuinely thought might be one of the most boring ways there is to present music.

Maybe I also thought that by starving the listener of as much context and extraneous information as possible I might help them to have a more honest/profound relationship with the music, in the same way that music always sounds better when you listen to it in the dark. (Note: This is wishful and possibly deluded thinking.)

The vinyl series has titles, though.

You've put out around 30 records so far, but what would you say is the most important one? Strictly personally speaking or in regards to the label.

In regards to the label the most important one was the Katie Gately tape. It’s also just an important piece of music, I think. It set a new bar.

I do think there is a common trait that unites a lot of Blue Tapes music, despite the disparities in genre, and I think it’s unique to us because I don’t hear it in that much other stuff that I listen to as a music fan, apart from some ancient musics like gagaku sometimes. It’s a quality rather than a sound - and often the releases that have the most of this quality, or ‘feeling’, are the ones I’m most fond of.

It’s entirely subjective and also very difficult to describe, but the way I experience it is like the sensation you might get when you’re really exhausted - like, exhausted to the ends of your nerves - but instead of it being a sick feeling, it’s euphoric. Your brain switches off, stops decoding things, and stimuli wash over you - but not in a passive, bored way, they seep into every nook and cranny of your consciousness and flood it with colour and sensation. Almost like a high, I guess, but a sober, unpsychedelic one. I’m not a religious person but that particular communion I have with this music is the closest I get to something spiritual in my life.

These feelings and ego-annihilating qualities seem to be more present in very minimal music - the Tashi Dorji, Library of Babel and Mats Gustafsson records are swarming with it - but I hear it in some very maximal music, too. I hear it in Jute Gyte.

I don’t know enough about Pauline Oliveros to know if this is what she was describing with ‘deep listening’, but you could reasonably apply the term to the sounds we’re presenting for you.

[unofficial-solar-blog]

Best Strategy To Use For Home Improvements

If you have actually ever questioned the strength of your marital relationship, there is no test like enduring a restoration. Late nights, lost sleep, preparation, and more preparation. The group at Kitchen area Styles has actually belonged of actually countless restorations, and we have actually put together a list of exactly what we feel are the leading suggestions to assist you make it through any restoration whether you have a specialist or you're running the job yourself.

1 Choice fights When it pertains to choosing surfaces, devices, designs, and colours, you and your partner may not have the very same design in mind. We frequently see couples visit our display room and are surprised to learn that they have totally various tastes. Your partner might state that they do not care, that absolutely nothing would make them better than you picking exactly what you like, however never ever, and we suggest actually never ever, does that really take place. There is constantly a minimum of some compromise, so it readies to figure those things out beforehand. This will assist to decrease significant disputes when the time concerns choose as well as assist you more precisely spending plan your restoration. Go to a couple of style centers or hardware shops early while doing so. Make up a portfolio of images on Pinterest, Houzz, online, or take images with your phone. Pictures speak a thousand words and it will make it simpler for everybody to assist accomplish your objectives.

2 Think about function prior to style You desire your area to look great, however designs age; functionality lasts permanently. You might or might not still like the style in 10 years however we can ensure you will not like that cabinet door that cannot open the entire method.

3 Momentary cooking area You understand not having a cooking area will be bad, afterall it is the heart of the house, however till it's gone individuals frequently do not recognize simply how tough it is to operate without one. Usually, individuals who make the effort to setup a short-lived kitchen area are better when the task is nearing conclusion. It might just take a number of days to eliminate and set up brand-new cabinets, however stone counter tops might be a couple weeks behind. Backsplash and trim frequently need to occur last. This can result in a longer duration without a kitchen area than you anticipated. Consuming secure for every single meal builds up, is a blow to your health, and it has the tendency to loose the enjoyable after the 10th time in a row. You 'd be amazed at the meals you can prepare with a little bar refrigerator, barbeque, toaster, and sluggish cooker. Set it up in a close-by space and do not take it down till the task is done.

4 Single bath house reno In some cases you simply do not have an option, that 1970's tile and pink tub simply needs to go. Remodeling a house's only restroom is near the top of the demanding remodelling list. Utilizing the restroom outside may be enjoyable at initially, however it rapidly loses its novelty. The suggestion here to making it through with your peace of mind undamaged is to utilize this as a long time to obtain away. Take the household outdoor camping, go on that journey you have actually been speaking about, stick with a good friend, or at the in-law's location. The bright side is that getting the restroom functional once again generally just takes a week or two, depending upon how excellent you are at preparation. Nevertheless, often it might be longer depending upon the scale of your restoration.

5 A drape wall goes a long method Make the effort prior to you begin tear-out to install a drape wall, it will assist to minimize dust throughout the whole house. Get a roll of thin plastic like vapor barrier, some tuck tape, and some quality masking tape. First use masking tape to the location where you will be hanging the drape wall, then utilize the tuck tape to stick the vapor barrier to the masking tape. Masking tape itself isn't really sticky sufficient to grip to vapor barrier however on unmasked drywall tuck tape can do some severe damage when later on eliminated. At the end of the day having a barrier to minimize dust is absolutely worth it.

6 Treat it like a relocation Make the effort to box up products from the remodelled location. Mark the contents inside and keep them far from the area you're refurbishing. When you undoubtedly require these products throughout the restoration, it will make them a lot easier to discover, and will avoid them from being harmed throughout the task.

7 Get the best individuals on board Whether you're working with a specialist or you are the specialist, getting the ideal individuals on board is not a location to conserve loan. There is sadly no legislation avoiding anybody from beginning a contracting organisation. Do your research study and guarantee you're deciding based upon more than simply cost. We're not stating do not utilize your pals, just put in the time to guarantee they are really received the task. In some cases a pal or member of the family can wind up costing more cash in the long run by triggering damage or carrying out work incorrectly. Similarly essential is validating all trades have up to this day worksafeNB accounts and their insurance coverage is existing when it comes to a mishap. If a specialist decides to employ somebody without employees settlement who is then hurt while operating in your house, the liability might return on you. Likewise guarantee your trades can support their work forever. Scary stories of a professional taking loan and going out can take place anywhere. Specialists can fail and leave you hanging high and dry. If a sub-trade locations a lean on your house for an overdue expense despite the fact that you paid your professional there isn't really much that can be done. Honestly the system is a bit problematic, and while we hope legislation might alter in the future, in the meantime it's purchaser beware.

8 Prepare for the unexpected In our experience normal restorations have less significant surprises than TELEVISION makes it appear, however surprises do take place. It's constantly a great idea to have some cash in a "simply in case" fund. We likewise recommend you postpone celebration preparation till the restoration is really completed. Surprises do take place, items return purchased, and hurrying your trades is never ever a smart idea. Do not prepare that surprise celebration for the exact same night your remodelling is expected to complete. Leave a time buffer and have the celebration when the area is really total.

9 Dead stops When setting up a task most great specialists will enable contingency days. This implies if whatever goes as prepared, in some cases there will be days when absolutely nothing is occurring on website. Those days exist in case a surprise turns up or a hold-up occurs. Possibly item is postponed in shipping, or trades are reserved on other tasks. Development may seem at a grinding halt however it does not always suggest things aren't occurring behind the scenes. Ssually the very best professionals and subs have other tasks on the go at the exact same time as yours. If your task is running smooth, they might be investing a contingency day somewhere else. Setting up numerous tasks at the same time permits them to be more cost-efficient for you. That stated, you can assist to ease some hold-ups however reserving restorations in off seasons. Summer season is obviously the perfect time to renovate however it's normally the busiest time in the building world.

10 Animals

Although it may appear great that your electrical expert likes animals, if he's charging you by the hour; you are rather actually paying somebody to have fun with your canine. Likewise, your house's entryway will likely invest a great deal of time in the employment opportunity and individuals might not keep in mind to expect a family pet. So it's constantly excellent to move them to a relative's or lock them in the basement. Simply keep in mind, it will all deserve it in the end! You might speak to individuals who have actually had excellent and disappointments refurbishing however couple of would inform you that they would not do it all over once again. You have actually included excellent worth to your house, made it simpler to offer, and the brand-new area can be really life altering. Not to discuss the next-door neighbors are completely going to be envious.