at a loss for

I’m confident that I’ll get back to semi-regular updates by August. Remember how I said that these emotions on the edge of the Plutchik wheel don’t exist for me? If I did say that, anyway. Well, that’s not quite true. I’m confident about things but not full of confidence.
Sometimes I think the variants are going to reduce all our efforts to naught and sometimes I think we're at the phase in the pandemic in which it's mostly gone but people still want the excuse to kill off institutions quietly.
I don't want Figment to end. Figment had a place in a pre-Trump world as it must have a place in a post-Trump world. It's like Pride. Things got way better and yet Pride is still a thing.

So this is just me speculating here but the reason BLO isn’t doing Madame Butterfly has fuck and all to do with this current situation with stopasianhate or whatever and everything to do with the future not being so set in stone that they could put on a popular opera at half-capacity at best.

Without concerts, I’ve reverted back to the old ways of discovering music. Well, not the old ways, because that would involve listening to a station that no longer exists and even if it did, it would be playing the same exact shit they played ten years ago. Not those old ways either, because that would involve going on last.fm and browsing similar bands.


Unicorn Ensemble - Mari Stanko
Jenny Dee & The Deelinquents - The Moon Was Low
Drill - Painted Pictures
Ladyhawke - Chills
Deftones - Urantia
Los Silvertons - Por Ti Estoy Sufriendo - One of the things I’ve discovered on Radio.Garden is a Peruvian station in Chelsea, MA.
Charlotte Dipanda - Aléa Mba - and a pop station in Yaoundé, Cameroon. Tirana, Buenos Aires, and Montevideo all have really good classical stations.
Charlotte Mbango - Mbemba Iyo - Putumayo is really good in certain milieus, that is to say, South Asia, Latin America and the Caribbean, the Middle East and North Africa, West Africa, Western Europe. But they have some glaring blind spots, that is to say, East Asia, Southeast Asia, Central Asia, East Africa, the Horn of Africa, the Balkans, really, the entire former Soviet Union, Scandinavia, Finland.
Jean Bikoko Aladin - Jolie Yèm - Really, anything formerly communist aside from Benin, and don't bother pointing out that they have a Cuba compilation because Fidel Castro is just a conservative wearing a beret.
Team Teamwork - Lyrically Inclined (J-E-N-O-V-A)
Circus Trees - The Theft
Strange Passage - Beneath the Flowers (and the Clovers)
Georgia - Started Out - You can debate about music as a whole all you want but I think pop music has definitely gotten better in the last five years. That's the second most controversial opinion I'll share this year.
William Basinski - O, My Daughter, O, My Sorrow
Airiel - Bloom
Roomful of Teeth - Just Constellations
Ludwig van Beethoven - English Bulls - Did you know that Beethoven did a cycle of Irish songs? Because I sure as hell didn’t.
Men I Trust - Tailwhip - There are songs I like enough to seek out, there are songs I’ll tolerate but don’t really care enough about them to find out what they are or who they are by, and there are entire genres I’ll dismiss out of hand which we will get to later.
Hennah Kendall - Spark Catchers
Numinous - Vipassana
Värttinä - Seleniko
Henry Cowell - Concerto for Koto and Orchestra
Calico Blue - Santa Fe
Hadestown - Flowers
Molly Pinto Madigan - Swansong
White Hinterland - Mon ami la rose
Carissa Johnson - Somewherebound
Parannoul - 오늘의 하늘은 맑음 - I miss Best Music From Worst Korea
Kinoko Teikoku - フェイクワールドワンダーランド - I can understand a lack of Japanese pop because the record industry in Japan is basically like “how dare non-Japanese people listen to our music” but you’d think the Korean pop industry would be the opposite and submit stuff to Putumayo for compilations. I understand Iran because they haven’t had a music industry in 40 years.
Tomas Luis de Victoria - Requiem
Jorja Smith - Rose Rouge - It took me a few listens to get the lyrics.
Kaija Saariaho - Cinq reflets de ‘L’amour de loin’ - Ogg. For when you want all the disadvantages of mp3 and all the disadvantages of flac but none of the advantages of either.
Kindling - It Will - Huh, I must’ve downloaded some stuff from their bandcamp and then forgot about it.

Dishonorable mentions:
I take back what I said about Shake it for the Squirrels. Yes, it’s vapid. But it reaches the bare minimum of competence. They can play their instruments, although they probably shouldn't. And I only really mention it because obviously, it’s about the dumbasses that are known as grey squirrels. American red squirrels don’t go that far south. They’re mostly northeastern and midwesstern and mountain western, although they do have a presence in the mountains of Tennessee. Not Georgia. It could be about chipmunks but it would specify chipmunks because most people are only dimly aware that chipmunks are a type of squirrel.
There’s a song that may or may not be by Florida Georgia Line (I don’t think it is from a very very cursory look at the video, but then again, I could only stand to listen to FGL’s Long Live for about 3 seconds total. However, it is by far the most famous work of bro country that uses "long live" in its lyrics and it's impossible to find anything else) in which during the chorus, the singer yarls out "Looooaaaaooonngg liiiieeeeevvvvvvv" like an exceptionally amorous fox got his foot caught in a bear trap.
There were signs that the world was growing weary of bro-country but someone said that the coronavirus revived it.
People call bro-country hip hop for white people who are afraid of black people. That isn't accurate. You want to know what I think? Post-grunge, which is very dudebro, was by far the most dominant form of rock music in 2001. After 9-11, all of a sudden it became cool to be a good old boy because Bush had that folksy persona and Toby Keith was singing about putting a boot in your ass because that's the American way, and that siphoned off all the post-grunge people, and they just kinda sang about the same vapid shit but added a dopey fake southern accent and maybe a banjo. Even the Canadians. Except for My Darkest Days, apparently. Also, you had a period where every fading singer went country. No, I am not over Aaron Lewis. You're from Springfield, MA.
Kid Rock doesn’t count because he’s always been bro-country adjacent, even before bro-country was a thing.
I agree with Lauren in that I don’t like country unless it’s Johnny Cash or has some good fiddlin’.

As far as I can tell, Latma TV is defunct. And even if it wasn't, I doubt I'd be listening to their take on the latest war in Gaza. I have my own take. Hamas wants to make it clear that occupying Gaza is not worth the effort. Israel agrees with them. Meanwhile, Fatah doesn't give a shit, they just care about suspending elections indefinitely. Israel’s policy towards the West Bank is to just let Fatah do its thing until some settlers decide they want to live there. Or if they get too sympathetic towards Gaza. You are not allowed to relocate from Gaza to the West Bank but you are allowed to relocate to Gaza from the West Bank. In fact, Israel will make it super easy. Great weather. Beautiful views. Great fix-er-upper. $199999 or best offer.
If these recent post-treaty flareups are an attempt to force people from the West Bank to Gaza and then they can rule Gaza through Fatah, then somehow I don’t think they thought their cunning plan all the way through.

Speaking of worse music, 4chan’s /mu/ put out an album of Kid A covers. Um. It's bad. I’m not even sorry to say this. The only thing that really stands out is their cover of the National Anthem, which replaces the angry traffic jam trumpets and/or trombones with some guitar cacophony. And the vocals are exceptionally bad, even by kid /mu/ standards. It has two stars on Rate Your Music, which is more than it deserves.
the instrumentation on the whole thing is decent-ish (that might be my low expectations speaking) so it sounds like someone badly singing karaoke.

Continuity:
I ate a dragonfruit and I agree with both Primrose and the guy who lives alone and gets lonely so he buys swords to cut dragonfruit in half, and by that, I mean a dragonfruit tastes like a watered down kiwi.

Alyssa has tattoos of elemental sigils, of the moon going through its phases and of the planets, of the fuck-me light from Shadow of the Colossus, a game I need to play because I am reminded of the fact that there is a very good PS4 port. I didn’t seek out the PS3 port because I’ve heard it was a disaster. Not Mortal Kombat for Game Boy levels but nothing reaches that level. Oh, wait, there actually is worse: Ninja Turtles for DOS, which is literally unbeatable.

Tori has tattoos of the dust spirits from Spirited Away.
This actually happened last year.

The Happening World:
North Korea banned South Korean pop and it’s kind of understandable given that North Korea maintains control over their country by convincing them that as bad as things are, people are worse off literally everywhere else. Aside from the isolation, they really are just a bog-standard authoritarian state. The only really nasty thing they have is imprisoning entire families.
Myanmar maintains control with good old fashioned violence.
I honestly think that if North Korea wasn’t, you know, North Korea, it would get a partly free rating by Freedom House. Like Uganda. Like Mali. Like Zimbabwe. Like Aung San Suu Kyi’s Burma. Like Aung San Suu Kyi's Burma when it was committing genocide.
Oh yeah, there was a coup in Burma. I'm not sure why because Aung San Suu Kyi was just a rubber stamp for the army. Mali also had a coup. I'm not going to mourn Aung San Suu Kyi but Mali's different. Mali had one of the better political systems, and I say this, but it was a double-edged sword. On one hand, you won't get the Republican party degrading into the white people party, but on the other hand, ethnic groups and regions don't really get to air their grievances politically. The state of rebellion the Tuaregs have been in for the last fifty years tells me that it is far from a perfect system, but it's a far sight better than what they have now.
I would go into more detail about this had I went to the Actors’ Shakespeare Project’s The Merchant of Venice. I’ve read that it was a response to Marlowe’s The Jew of Malta, which was anti-semitic.

Burning question: Are robots like cops, in that they have to say "yes" if you ask them if they're robots?