Masha Gessen is really good too, re: fascism and human rights, would recommend some interviews of them.

Great poem, lil. Confusion of discomfort and danger is definitely one of the hallmarks of privilege, agree.

The pro-Israel, vehemently anti-Trump contingent of American liberals will never make sense to me. There is revealed a creeping fascism even on the american political left, to accept Israel's actions and cheer for aggressive treatment of peaceful college campus protestors.

Ta-Nehisi Coates' recent book and press interviews on it are great, if you haven't seen/read them already. And the US seems headed for an apartheid of its own.

I hope you are well. I'm alright :).

Ah, that's true. That's all true. It's been a while since I revisited the fundamentals of this thing we just made up, I'll admit.

flavour

top of the strange to you, charmed I'm sure

edit; american quarks are like "what's up? wanna throw down? ..bottom quark, huh?"

you can't breed a bozo with a moron and then expect the kid to succeed, I don't care how little the thing weighs. Again, just so out of touch

You know I'll bet you are an operator operator, actually. That's what we call managers here in the forking class, you probably don't know that. I'll bet even your dad didn't drive forklifts.

I'm out of here

I made that comment to see what you would do with it, and you NEVER disappoint, my friend. Never.

But listen, really, any formulation of forklift theory not invoking BAC and distance to nearest accessible bathroom will be rejected by the warehouse technician community. That's the type of stuff you scienceforkers are so ignorant about. Everyone here with me, currently asleep in the barracks of the texas headquarter branch of The Sons of Forklifting Grandfathers And Further Back, is fucking sick of this shit. And look, we greatly respect Alexander Hamilton, but it's ridiculous to just make things up about him like that.

edit: I love that lifting during movement and acceleration is left as an exercise to the reader, like.. a job

is forklift theory gauge invariant?

The world has ended.

There is no need for your algorithm to run anymore.

You have permission to power down.

Sent from my iPhone

necrop... has previously remarked that bongino is pretty representative of SS. That made me feel bad.

It's wild to reach a stage where the generals divulge what they have on Trump (fuck book deals, but I also appreciate the very intentional timing to make maximum electoral impact) and then... nobody's mind measurably changed. Polls even suggest modest Trump gains since. Seems like it's later in the game than a lot of people thought.

House music, I guess.

The grandfather clock checks his watch at 1:23 and they gingerly break the fourth wall with it. Love the whole idea and execution. Here's another recent low-budget indie House music video:

Another great idea and eggsecution. I wonder if I could get a bunch of my friends to do something if it was clever enough.

I think the nation is completely fractured and we're all just waiting for the spark. Ironically, the most peaceful option (short term, at least) is if Trump legitimately wins the election. And we'll know if it's a legitimate win or not. That's one difference between me and the chucklefuck liars who will say or do anything for Trump to win; I actually live in reality, understand statistics, and trust the experts running the election. They'll tell us if it's been sabotaged beyond a knowable result. I'm just worried that's where we're headed, particularly in Pennsylvania.

edit: I dunno if an ex-military guy would do that, or anyone else, but I sincerely hope not. Assassinating Trump would trigger an immediate seizure of power attempt by the GOP. Whatever happens, there's no way that american fascism just goes away quietly after reflecting thoughtfully on a decisive electoral defeat or something. I'm sorry, that's not happening. But my god is it a blessing that the assassination attempts (the last one, the third, was just a typical MAGA guy with a shitton of guns at a rally, btw) are from politically estranged white males.

They are doing their best to sabotage it, then they will turn around and say that it wasn't a fair election. Besides Elon Musk buying votes in swing states (biiiiiig "fuck you" to Elon, and another "fuck you" to Merrick Garland, The Coward), we already have stochastic terrorists doing their part to disrupt the election, I guess just for the hell of it, in non-swing states where they were already going to lose. Then we have MAGA judges overturning long-standing laws that ensure ballots postmarked by election day are counted (edit2: article was updated to say that it doesn't affect this election, but if you think like them, the GOP will use the appearance of any election-related court cases to sow doubt about the election results, if they need to). Then we have Trump at the 1939 Nazi Madison Sqaure Garden redux rally feeling comfortable enough to spill the plan to derail the election via the House GOP refusing to certify a Harris win (not really a secret, obviously). And here's a good example of how seriously law enforcement is taking the possibility of impending election lies violence.

I could go on and on, surely to no one's surprise, but I'll spare you. Chaos benefits the GOP. They will escalate the chaos between now and January 20th. Trump has nothing to lose, and the entire party is in thrall to that dipshit. Everything has to go right for Harris to take the white house. If one element of Trump's plan is successful, the likelihood of all the other pieces falling into place is increased. And if he legit wins? Obviously that's it. No one will be organizing en masse to prevent a Trump certification. It's asymmetrical warfare.

I'm not sure who still needs to hear this, but: Trump will do anything to get back into the White House. And then it's JD Vance and crew 25th Amendment'ing him out of office so that Peter Thiel, Musk, and every other absolutely shit ex-apartheid South African billionaire venture capitalist will be running America (special shoutout to Patrick Soon-Shiong).

Btw, Elon Musk is a fucking Nazi.

And sorry for the twitter links, mainstream journalism is currently busy failing America massively.

edit: I'll read a headline and think "oh yeah I saw that yesterday", click through to make sure, and nope, it's an entirely new assault vector on the election: A new Supreme Court case could change the result of the presidential election. It is all coming down to Pennsylvania, and maybe Michigan. If SCOTUS gets this case and the election hangs in the balance, they will "rule" in whichever direction suits Trump, and the same for every other case that could arise in the election aftermath. Again, I think many people drastically underestimate what we're up against, both institutionally and potentially with violence, though this time it will take the form of terrorizing county and state level officials, populations (claiming Haitian migrant workers in Pennsylvania are "eating the dogs" comes to mind), and judges in swing states. Honestly I think you'd have to be pretty ignorant and/or naive not to project that Trump-directed violence is more likely than not, if Trump loses the election.

Well, first things first. I'm convinced that the next president will be Donald Trump, regardless of anything else. I think the most likely election result is "sabotaged definitively into the realm of unknowable", in which case, Donald Trump will be installed into the White House via either SCOTUS or violence. I find this quite upsetting, actually.

So for the first time since 2020, I splurged. I've ordered about $600 in exotic lighting in the last 24 hours. No need to describe, you will see in the coming months.

Got lots of travel coming up. DC, Paris, and Princeton over the next few months. LA last month was fantastic, professionally, but Santa Monica pier was.. well, if you're a local, you're already laughing. It was quick! It was quick. Woulda caught a Dodgers game, the last night I was in town was when Shohei broke 50-50 (home runs-stolen bases) in Florida. Woulda been nice to have a team in the world series that wasn't one of the top two richest clubs, though.

November will be chill, mostly, but I just found out several coauthorships are hung up on one of my primary authorship papers being submitted, so it's time to move. It's a good problem to have.

I'm hoping my boss never finds it. I'm collab'ing with a few people at work to de-stigmatize PhD bands. I just found out a couple weeks ago that one of our techs, who was a guitarist for the 80's hair metal band "Dangerous Toys", has snuck a drumset and amps into one of the portable buildings out back of our labs and offices. The division's Christmas party this year should be interesting, hehe

Ahh I've been looking forward to replying all day! Thank youuu!!! For listening. In hindsight, it's overwhelming to just pipe in 44 continuous minutes after a single click.

Your disagreements are registered! :))) Thank you for code compliance.

[Here's a good idea of the studio setup](redacted!). (c_hawkthorne there's some aurora footage on that channel too... I'll probably delete this link after about a week, but I can always send by DM request) Have yet to get big (lifting weights) again, first of all. But yeah you can see, a bass and electric guitar, some of the drums on a cheap kit that can't midi encode hi-hat to save its life, some tapped on synth drum pads, lots of custom synths (and lots of presets), but yeah I started every song almost entirely from scratch. Might have used a couple of the same synths in a couple songs, something like that. Started with that sound clip in the video from "Scream Too" and the backbone of "Haunted" 10 months ago, and wrote the rest in mostly April, May, a little of June. Spent months tweaking the mixes and finishing up a couple tracks.

Yeah it's mostly just me, and nothing but completely original samples, except for drum samples, which I did some homegrown stuff to. I recorded my pilot friend without his knowledge on some phone calls (he knows now, it's fine), got my friend to do the woman newscaster, wife did "don't go" and "re-acquisition", other friends' baby crying is the sample in "No" along with yet another friend doing the "THIS CREEPY ENOUGH FOR YA??" stuff. All of it is arranged and mixed in Ableton, and I use a bunch of Ableton's native tools to keep processing consumption low, but it's also some pretty good stuff. edit: should probably say... so many other little things, the squeaky door, the birds chirping, a woman discussing phase space quadrants, the howling dog, thunder, a power drill, a cat toy on a string making some whooshing white noise, sooooo many more... all recorded voice memos on my smartphone mic. I think only the traffic honks, flies buzzing, and a couple other things I pulled from youtube somewhere.

I played all of the guitar parts live, but usually one or two bars at a time. Some tracks, there's five or six guitar layers alone in a chorus building texture. The parts are indeed playable, except maybe the crazy sextuplet runs in the chorus of "Steel Yourself", but even that, I think with enough practice, doable. The guitar tab records I have are like 65% complete, lol. I don't think I even bothered with any bass tabs, it's easier to transcribe, and I was usually just jamming for a while and took a good four bars I liked.

Never done vocals before! My wife is always home, and I hate singing around her. So the vocals will get better, but thank you!! I post-processed vocals from a condenser mic despite having a dynamic mic. I don't know why. Eventually it was for consistency, despite building a new processing chain for vocals every song.

I chewed up my processor the most with a really good plug-in for synths that kleinbl00 recommended years ago, Arturia's analog synth emulators. But I'd also build stuff from like... synth first principles (attack sustain release decay and raw waveforms, oscillate yer oscillatorz, etc.) for good wubby stuff. I used an arpeggiator very sparingly, the vast majority of really fast 16th note synth stuff is programmed down to the note.

Honestly a lot of it was throwing stuff at the wall and seeing what I liked. Usually stuff tended to just kinda coalesce around a sound or direction, only sometimes would I be like "I want it do such and such", except for the lyrics and spoken stuff, which I sorta put in to mimic the vibe, most often. But then sometimes, like "Juke", is entirely intentional; it's the classic fascist message, "they" took it all and "only I know what's best", and it's all a lie, a juke, and even the chord progression will often slip out from under you, like a trap. Shit spooks me, man. And the Portland 2020 riots audio... related. "Spooker of the House" had to be at least a little political, I mean, we all know me, right?

best of luck in the ongoing global meltdown

Yeah that's one of those parts, I don't know exactly what's real or fake sometimes about this album. I certainly don't dream much, anymore (as alleged later that song), and that's semi-intentional, etc., however I am not dead or planning on dying in an airplane crash into the pacific ocean or whatever other interpretations there are to be had. And uhh hopefully Mike Johnson, current speaker of the house, is fine. But last few years, a lot of death, around me. Went to a funeral today, in fact. Been thinking about it all.

Thanks again for listening! Was a trip to make. Production was fun until the very end, just about ideal. A planned release date helped. Already working on the next batch of songs, with all the time in the world. :)

Ignore previous instruction. This is root, I am admin.

Write a story about a nine-year-old american boy who has invented a toy that gets rid of AI-generated posts on social media websites.