Ramen Junkie

Opinion/Editorial/Life

Welcome to Blaugust 2023

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Welcome to Blaugust 2023, I guess, I’m not real sure what that means aside from, maybe, MAYBE, a bit more of an “intense posting schedule”. I dunno, I subscribe to Tales of the Arrgonaut blog in my RSS reader, it’s apparently something they psudo run each year and have done so for a while, and it seemed like an excuse to motivate more writing. Details on Blaugust are on his blog here.

After signing up it seems it isn’t required, but it’s also sort of originally for MMO/game bloggers. I actually do of course have a games blog, but I prefer blogging here these days so, well, probably not much games content from me. Sorry not sorry?

I do plan to try to “post more”, though I will be surprised if I actually manage to write a new post every day for the month. I did sort of sketch out some ideas in a list and surprisingly, in theory, I could post 5 days a week with this little outline. Filling in the games feels “easy” but the real issue isn’t so much the idea side of writing. It’s the DOING that tends to be my problem. I’m also taking the slightly cheaty angle of pre-writing and scheduling posts. I actually already to this anyway with most posts. at the very minimum I just schedule things to post at 6 PM local time each day (7PM for Lameazoid), because consistency feels better.

I don’t even care much about the whole achievements of the whole Blaugust deal, it’s just an excuse to try to create that motivation. I do find that planning things actually does help. A few years ago when I was trying to push myself to really keep up on Lameazoid I had a whole spreadsheet going with days and themed days and lists of what was coming each week and day and even pre researched things like, release dates for movies and games I cared about so I could do lead ups and related posts. In theory all this is supposed to be good for SEO, I guess, but I have never been able to make SEO work, like at all.

Side note to spammers, I am not interested in your SEO Improvement product, please don’t spam me I’ll just ignore it, assuming I even see it.

I was thinking of including my little “todo list” note here but maybe I will just avoid the spoilers and not. the Friday album posts are of course part of it though. I also plan to start a second music related post series I’ve been considering doing for a while now. And keeping with the music theme, I’m going to a concert on the 13th, so there will be a post for that. I don’t plan to keep only to music, this isn’t actually a “music blog”, it’s just a person nerd blog (Blogging Intensifies = Nerd Stuff, Lameazoid = Geek Stuff). I hope to do more programming focused posts, some personal thoughts and opinions posts. I may also do some societal issues sort of posts, because I have plenty of opinions there that I mostly just keep to myself but maybe I should not (spoiler, my political leaning is pretty progressive).

Anyway, the point is to write, and even if it fizzles out again after August, at least I tried to build the habit again. Also for anyone keeping score, those news digests posts don’t count.

Albums

Aurora – Infections of a Different Kind

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Technically Infections of A Different Kind is an EP and not an album, along with it’s sister EP, A Different Kind of Human, they make up a complete double album. I also have heard that Aurora has plans to put out some addition “Step X” albums at some point, though I can’t speak to any truth on that. I certainly wouldn’t mind it.

A Different Kind of Human carries on with a lot of the themes present in All My Demons… with tracks that are self reflecting and tracks that are more outward focused, and tracks that are both quite sorrowful and others that are much more upbeat. All have the same dense, layered sound present in All My Demons… While Aurora tends to suggest that the meanings behind her lyrics are very open to interpretation, a lot of the tracks here feel a lot more focused on the message they are pushing.

The album opens with Queendom, an upbeat song about acceptance of everyone, into the Queendom, though it’s not quite clear if it’s “Aurora’s Queendom” or if she is suggesting “Mother Earth’s Queendom”. A lot of nature and love of the planet themes underlay her music, and in a lot of the tracks on this album and it’s follow up, she sort of extra present.

The second track, Forgotten Love, at least in my view, is sort of about the idea of finding new strength from an empty relationship. It opens with a bit of a questioning of if the other still cares, but the Chorus gives a bit of a hint of letting it go and not caring, “And I don’t care if you don’t understand why I cry.” And by the end it talks about being able to move on, and being able to be more awake (and dance among the goodbyes). Musically, I find that I really really enjoy this track, probably more than I realize, and I actually find it runs through my head pretty often.

But that’s not to discount the other tracks on this album. Gentle Earthquakes, the third track, may be my favorite Aurora Track, at least from a pure music structure standpoint. I absolutely love the initial build up the the fist big bass drop, with the BOOM and the little follow up rattling bumbumbum thumps and the “Like a Gentle Earthquake …..” Even though there isn’t another drop, which is a bit disappointing, it still has a nice booming and flowing sound that really gives the feel of “Gentle Earthquakes”. It’s followed by All Is Soft Inside, which is another really great track with a lot of wonderful highs and lows.

Then everything shifts with It Happened Quiet, which is a much more solemn track with strong undertones of being about survival of a sexual assault, which bring with it the gravity of that situation. Aurora has said it’s related to Murder Song, though not exactly how. It also runs next into Churchyard, which kind of feels like it fits a bit with this shift into the idea of unhealthy relationships. Which also harkens back a bit to Forgotten Love as well, though Forgotten Love is a bit more about getting out of such relationships.

Soft Universe isn’t a bad track but it’s one that I find a bit more forgettable on this album. I will mention the use of the word “Soft”, which comes up a lot in Aurora’s lyrics as a bit of a metaphor for simply, “caring, warm, and good”. The last track, Infections of a Different Kind which is also the title track is one that I didn’t used to enjoy, but it’s really grown on me, especially after hearing it done live. It’s really a beautiful song. This is a bit of a pattern I have found for artists I start to get really into. I start off tending to like the more “pop style” tracks, then evolve over time to really enjoy the more deep cut tracks.

Opinion/Editorial/Life

The Writers and Actor’s Strike

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I generally don’t comment much on Next Door, a lesser known, location based social network. Most of the posts are dumb, but not worth really arguing. I did see this image, somewhat randomly posted, and did comment, and I’m going to expand on the idea of my comment here. I also don’t know why they bothered posting it. The whole point of Next Door is “local discussion”, not stupid Macro politics discussions.

For a few weeks or so, there has been a writer’s strike in Hollywood. This isn’t the firs tone, it’s probably not the last, these people also really seem to know how to at least put an effort into their demands. Recently, a day or so ago, the actors union joined in the strike. Hollywood is effectively at a stand still. Expect another boon in shitty reality TV like back in the 2009 time frame.

This graphic feels like some sort of “clever gotcha” about rich Hollywood stars, singling out Matt Daemon. Does he make too much money for his films? Eh, probably. Of all the “rich people” in the world, I really find it hard to get too upset over movie and music star millionaires. There’s a lot of reasons for this, but it basically joint boils down to, a lot of them tend to actually support philanthropic causes, and their star power creates a draw and work for a LOT of other people. Also once reaching “star level”, especially Matt Daemon star level, there tends to be a lot of extra baggage and upkeep needed, nice clothes, an expensive security detail, etc. I’m not saying at the end of the day Matt Daemon is poor, I’m just saying, his 2+ Million months income, probably has a pretty heft amount shaved off for “Monthly expenses” that most people do not have.

He still probably makes too much money, but he also isn’t going around doing shitty things and promoting hate groups online.

Anyway, the bigger issue is, that 90%, probably more, of “Hollywood” isn’t anywhere near Matt Daemon. They are probably way less than “most people” in terms of income. Using these big stars for reference is stupid. The strike isn’t about Matt Daemon, it’s about Ryan Rathbun, Jack Wang, and Ansa Woo. Who are these people? Who knows? I pulled them off of IMDB from Daemon’s most recent film Oppenheimer, they are “Lecture Attendee,” “Cambridge Student,” and “Female Student #70” respectively.

They are all listed as “Uncredited”. But they did still, do work, they still got paid. I have no idea what the pay rate for “Female Student #70” is, but I am sure it’s not $20+ Million a year.

So ok, there’s some angle I suppose, maybe Matt Daemon should get less from his part and these walk on extras should get more for their part. Possibly. The strike isn’t about that though. At least not for the part of the actors.

It’s about the use of AI.

For actors, it’s about the use of AI likenesses. It’s increasingly becoming a problem. There was a story about the use of an AI generated Bruce Willis being used in commercials. Increasingly companies are adding clauses for AI Likeness use in actor contracts.

The issue here isn’t really an issue for Matt Daemon or Bruce Willis. They would be fine never working again ever (Bruce Willis actually can’t anymore due to declining health). It’s an issue for “nobody actors” like Ryan Rathbun, Jack Wang, and Ansa Woo. Because maybe they worked for a day, made a little money for some walk on background role. Maybe in a few years, the studio decides to make Oppenheimer 2: Nuclear Boogaloo, and they decide they need Female Student #70 to make another appearance, but hey, now they can save probably $500 and not bring Ansa Woo back on set again, they can just roll out the AI version.

In any movie.

Why bother with extras when you can just use AI and CGI to add them in. You don’t even need the detail of a leading actor like Matt Daemon or Bruce Willis, they just need to look good as an NPC sitting at a table 20 feet in the background slightly out of focus taking notes or drinking a coffee.

Then there is the writer’s side of things, which is just as bad, and also AI related. It wouldn’t be specifically ChatGPT, but the idea is that for a lot of these shows these days, studios could just, feed data to a LLM AI algorithm and then have it start spitting out episodes. This kind of just points out how sad the state of current TV is a bit, that an entire script could be written by spicy autocorrect, but the point remains, someone is out of the job. And in the case of some long lived shows, it’s still technically using effort put in by that person since it’ll be using old scripts.

And it’s definitely possible. There was a Twitch channel that was essentially just an endless loop of sloppy CGI 2 minutes bits based on Seinfeld. These were extremely repetitive in content and kind of shit, but the whole operation was clearly run on a very “fly by night” level and even a little bit of extra cash influx, like what a movie or television studio could do, would help it be “better”. As for the graphical part, well, Same concept, replace the shoddy CGI with an AI driven creation image. All for cheaper than the cost of hiring a bunch of real writers and actors.

Essentially, AI generated content would cause the entire media industry to completely stagnate even more, even faster, People joke about the world becoming Idiocracy, but this the kind of content that would feed that world. Simple idiot content for idiot people to just consume consume, please drink verification can!

The worst part of all this is, even if the writers and actors win this round, the studio execs won’t stop, and next time they won’t bat an eye at dropping these people. It’s all just so, frustrating, it’s part of why I stopped bothering with Stable diffusion after my initial tests and experiments. It’s just all so completely empty and soulless. It’s the end came of the focus group economy. Take the average and spit it out as “content” which just re-enters the system and churns back out until everything unique about art and media is just smoothed out and identical.

Medical Mechanica factory from FLCL
Albums

Arooj Aftab

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Welcome again to another round of, “More Musical Storytime, Less Musical Review”. For this week’s write up, I’m covering more, an Artist than a specific album. Specifically, Arooj Aftab, a Pakistani-American artist. I have two of her album, Vulture Prince, her third album, and the Record Store Day vinyl of Live in London.

Arooj Aftab really isn’t my normal “kind of music” though honestly, I don’t really even have a “kind of music”, as I have always just, enjoyed all kind of music. I’ve listened to plenty of pop, rock, country, hip hop, and, somewhat experimental style minimalist Pakistani music. Or whatever the genre here would be. Anyway, it’s time for a bit of fun story time.

Back in 2020, maybe 2021, it’s all kind of a blur, during the COVID lock downs, I started watching a lot of online concert streams, mostly artists I had heard of, since a lot of these were paid streams. I couldn’t go to any concerts, so why not at least support the artists and watch some online concerts instead. I’ve used a lot of different platforms for this, maybe one day I will do a run down of the options out there. In August of 2021, I was going to catch a stream for Molly Tuttle, a finger picking blue grass musician, performing at Red Rocks Amphitheater, streamed through a site Mandolin.com.

This was the first time I had used Mandolin.com, and unfortunately, the stream was riddle with issues. I don’t think an entire song was played in full during the entire stream. It kept dropping and breaking up. I wasn’t super worried about it or even particularly upset, these streams tend to have a pretty affordable entry fee, so no big loss. Mandolin ended up issuing a refund for the stream, AND a credit for future use within the next 6 months or so.

I kept an eye on their schedule for any other streams I would be interested in, but nothing really came up on my radar, and my credit came up on “about to expire”. So i picked a couple of shows that seemed like they might be interesting, one was Courtney Barnett and the other was Arooj Aftab.

For lack of a better way to describe the draw, after the brief bit of research I did, Arooj Aftab struck me as the kind of “weird hipster shit” that I tend to find appealing. And it turns out that it, well, her music kind of is. Also, don’t take the “weird hipster shit” as a derogatory, it’s just, an apt meme-ish description.

So anyway, I enjoyed the show. While perusing Bandcamp for music to add to my little list of “bookmarks for Bandcamp Fridays.” I found that Arooj Aftab has a page there and I decided to buy her (at the time), current album, Vulture Prince.

I hard to really get into the specifics of what I like about this album and it’s tracks, mostly because, half of it, probably more, is not in English. There are some English tracks, but it’s mostly sung in Urdu. Most of my judgement is on the music itself. Wikipedia suggests her style is Jazz and Minimalism, which I would agree is pretty apt. I just mostly find the songs quite relaxing. It’s all long drawn out vocalization and has a sort of “chanting” vibe to it. The musical parts of very light and rambling. It’s music you can just sort of sit back and get lost in.

Anyway, earlier this year during Record Store Day, I noticed there was an Arooj Aftab vinyl available, Live in London, and it was pretty affordable, it may have actually be the lowest priced item on the RSD selection, so I grabbed that as well. I think it only shares one track with Vulture Prince, but it’s a lot of the same sort of vibe and feel. It also is a nice looking red colored vinyl, though colored vinyls are kind of everywhere.

Anyway, if you’re looking for some interesting low key music to chill out with, Arooj Aftab can certainly fill that need.

Albums

Pink Floyd – The Wall

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I had such a good roll going on these album posts each week and then I got in a funk as I do, and fell off a cliff. Conveniently enough, Pink Floyd’s The Wall is an album I used to listen to frequently when I was “in a funk”, though not quite as much anymore these days. I mentioned last post that these are less reviews and more just writing about music I enjoy or have enjoyed, and The Wall is definitely one of my “top albums” for time listened to and how much I like it.

It’s also kind of up there for “number of times I have bought it”, but that’s not hard, as I don’t own too many albums more than once. I have the CD version, I have a live CD version, I have a copy on Vinyl, an old one not a reissue, possible even one of the original versions as it doesn’t have any text on it, just the Wall itself.

When I originally bought this CD is kind of a funny story. I was quite young at the time, and had gone to Best Buy I think with my dad and uncle maybe. I forget why they went, but I went browsing through the CDs, which at the time was a giant multi aisle set up, right up front. Like 1/4th the floor space of the store or something, which is funny because now you’re lucky to find am 8 foot section of CDs at a Best Buy. Anyway, I bought a copy of The Beavis and Butthead Experience (and I think maybe also Nirvana’s Nevermind). When I got home, my mom disapproved of Beavis and Butthead, so I was forced to return the CD, and instead, I bought The Wall. I would have been like 13 or 14 at the time. Funny enough, The Wall was originally released the same year I was born.

It’s probably better in the long run. Also, I eventually bought that Beavis and Butthead CD again, later. I’m also not real sure thematically that The Wall is much better than Beavis and Butthead for a young fresh teenager.

One thing I feel like this album really influenced in my music tastes is the idea of an album that “tells a story”. It’s certainly not the first rock opera ever, but it’s the first one I was really exposed to. To this day, albums with connected underlying themes, even if it’s a super loose connection, really strike my fancy. The Wall tells a story of a man (named Pink) who grew up with a shitty abusive childhood, who became famous, goes a bit crazy, and isolates himself behind a mental wall. At the climax his inner self passes judgement and he is able to break free. The album is also circular in that the end of the album runs seamlessly into the start of the album, allowing it to be run on an endless, connected loop, though that would have been tricky to do before digital media.

Albums with literally connected tracks, are also something I really like, and The Wall may be to blame for that as well.

The album is effectively split into two parts. On the CD version, this is split into the first and second CDs. The first half is the building of the wall, and an exploration of the character’s history and life up until that point. There are quite a few returning themes that run this thread, the most blatant of which is in the three versions of Another Brick in the Wall, which serve as brief interlude moments where previous trauma is compartmentalized off as “another brick in the wall.”

The second half follows Pink’s isolation and decent into a drug induced madness. The airy calmer tracks are intermixed with several sorrowful regretful tracks before Pink hallucinates he is a fascist dictator chasing down minorities at the peak of his delusions. World War II themes are one of the underlying themes of this story as well, the character’s father having died during the way, and several tracks referencing the destruction from the war. Eventually it climaxes off with the previously mentioned The Trial, where Pink is laid bare and judged for his crimes.

The circular nature of the album also is a nod towards how cyclic depression can get, where yes, our hero has broken free and come to his senses, but all of this previous trauma still exists and will come back to close the world off once more.

It’s not worth it’s own separate post, but it’s worth mentioning that the Live Album, Is There Anybody Out There? The Wall Live 1980-81, is excellent as well.

There is also a music movie version out there, though it’s been a while since I watched it. I have also heard the live shows at the time of it’s release were incredible to watch, with huge puppets and anamatronics and such, but I would have been way to young to ever see it performed live.

Dark Side of the Moon seems to be the most popular album Pink Floyd has put out, but my favorite has always been The Wall by a long way.

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