Month: July 2021

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There And Back To See How Far It Is

Parents are funning creatures. When I was young they had a couple of phrases designed as “in” jokes but possible more widely known, I don’t know. If my parents wanted to go somewhere but not tell us where we were going they would answer with “there and back to see how far it is” whenever we asked where are we going. It’s a vaguely amusing come back which really means “we want it to be a surprise, or maybe it’s somewhere you won’t like, so shut the fuck up”. Another in-joke was whenever we were lost or getting somewhere was taking longer than expected dad would say we are taking “one of mum’s shortcuts”. I guess the implication is that anything mum suggested was terrible? I don’t know, I’ve never really thought of it as sinister until know and I’d rather pack that one back in its little box. We once went to Flatford Mill as a family and it pissed down all day, so if it rains hard someone will normally make reference to Flatford Mill. It’s these little in-jokes that forge a sense of belonging and community [explicit sexism aside].

I’ve got a lovely scenery pack on my computer for X-Plane 11 and it covers the whole of the UK [I think it has Northern Ireland, I ought to check]. But flying around over the UK has limitations I guess and so for giggles one day I decided I would start flying following the coastline. I started at RAF Valley and headed south, I popped over the channel and visited Jersey and then I kept going westwards around France, Spain, Portugal and now I’m in the Cameroon. I’m not sure when I am going to stop this particular journey but at least I’m seeing other parts of the world.

I have spent some time wondering whether I should get rid of my Twitter account as when I look at what’s trending or what people are discussing it seems full of stupid arguments limited by the character limit. There isn’t really any space for nuance and so I use it only as a place to plug tweets into this site. If I get rid of my twitter account then all the absolute glory within these communications will be gone. No one will be able to see my anger and sheer disgusting language over the years. Social media is bad for your mental health. It’s bad for society.

I am going to try and catalogue the rest of my journey in X-Plane on Twitter so that is a good use for the platform. I will not be using twitter for much else, although there are a couple of people I keep in touch with over there.

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Magic Voyage

Somewhere within these communications is about how long it took me to watch the TV series Babylon 5, what I thought of Farscape, Tour of Duty and even Tales Of The Gold Monkey. There’s a part of me that isn’t sure about watching so much television, I wonder if there are other things more productive or helpful to the world or me that I could be doing. But then I think, fuck it I really enjoy watching these shows. I know I can be a snob about a lot of things and I probably like that with TV series but at the same time I don’t think anyone need watch the amount of science fiction that I do.

Yesterday, I somehow managed to time things so that I finished two TV series on the same day. I’d had a recommendation to watch Magicians on Amazon Prime and I also had worked through Star Trek Voyager. Both are now complete and I am trying to work out what to watch next.

I chose to watch Star Trek Voyager because although I was kinda aware of it when it came out I don’t think I had really watched any of them, unlike TNG and DS9. So, it seemed a good choice to work through. I mostly watched STV while eating dinner as it is very dialogue based and so looking at food means you don’t really miss much that’s happening on screen. I have enjoyed the series and I might watch another ST series next.

Jase recommended Magicians to me and I have likened it to Harry Potter but with sex and drugs and rock ‘n’ roll. It’s a good TV show and quite enjoyable. I mean it helps that all the actors are very sexy and easy on the eye, but it’s worth a watched for the sheer fun. I cringed at the first musical episode but it was done well and they made a few more melody based storylines that just worked really well. The funny thing about the magic I guess is that whenever you are stuck in the story line you can just make-up-whatever-the-fuck-you-want. Programmes like Star Trek have too many rules built in to the universe and so you have to follow those or people get upset but the Magicians was all over the place and I enjoyed that.

I had thought I might watch The Next Generation over the next few months but after twenty minutes of the first episode I am less than impressed. I know that it’s a great show and I am aware of a lot of the important canon from it. But in all honesty the mid-80s show doesn’t look good in 2020s television. The sets are bare and the audio echoes. This could be a problem with my TV streaming device of choice but I don’t know. I will give Star Trek Enterprise a go later today and see if that feels better. Oh, and I need to finish Lucifer.

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Doubly Penetrated

Today I am officially vaccinated against Covid-19. Two weeks and one day ago I had my second injection. I can report that I had no side-effects and was able to carry on. I was happy to get vaccinated. I don’t really read a huge amount of social media and I certainly am not affected by all the claims of vaccine-conspiracy. If I was in charge then vaccinations would be mandatory. But I’m not in charge and the socialist authoritarian in me lies dormant.

We should be clear about what the vaccine does. It minimises the risk of you suffering greatly and being hospitalised if you catch Covid 19. It doesn’t stop you from getting the disease it just gives you that extra boost so you don’t get it too bad. Our current government policy is placing an awful amount of hope on the vaccine that hospitalisations remain low and deaths remain low while they can open the country economically bit by bit. It turns out that people “want” their summer. I have found this attitude incredibly amusing and I think the autistic spectrum part of me doesn’t get it.

Let’s be clear about what is happening right now. The daily cases are going through the roof and people are being told to isolate all over the place. Yes, this makes sense. If you get the disease you should minimise the risk of passing it on. It’s called being SOCIALLY RESPONSIBLE AND A GOOD PERSON. I will accept that some people will be struggling financially and that isolation isn’t the best thing for them. But if we had a caring government you would hope they would help. Ultimately, everyone is going to get the disease and we have to manage the outcomes of that. If we can maintain the low death rate then we are doing well. The whole point of lockdown is to ensure that the health services can work. We’ve seen what happens when that is not a possibility.

What we should remember is that this government’s response to the pandemic has been an utter shambles and fucking terrible. They are a pathetic bunch of idiots. I’ve written about this before. Their choices have meant this country has had one of the highest deaths rates and one of the highest case rates in the world. Sydney, Australia recently went into lockdown because there were 40, yes 4-0, cases. There were 48,000 in the UK yesterday alone.

July 2021 Covid Cases
July 2021 Covid Cases

This graph shows quite clearly how terrible certain countries around the world have done. The worst ones are:

  • USA
  • Brazil
  • UK
  • India
  • Hungary

What do all those countries have in common during 2020? Shit-speaking arsehole leaders. Idiots who are in power for the power and unable to empathise or even consider anything other than themselves. There needs to be an extensive public inquiry into the responses of the UK government and there should be court cases after that. There needs to be legal ramifications about preparedness because the next pandemic, and it fucking will happen, could have a higher death rate and truly fuck everyone over.

July 2021 Deaths Covid
July 2021 Deaths Covid

Given how rich this country this the above graph is a fucking embarrassment. Fuck this government and their response to this pandemic. What a bunch of twats.

Covid App Isolation

This headline just shows how widespread the virus is. It shows that the cases are rocketing. It is very clear that the easing of restrictions over the last few months has caused widespread infections and it’s going to get worse. The government’s hope is that the death rates stay low. I hope that is the case too, but we don’t know. We need to remember that death rates run two weeks behind infection rates.

Given that many places are still going to insist on masks and the government is hoping that people are “sensible” we know it’s still bad. The issue with the the Tories hoping that people are sensible is that people AREN’T sensible. That’s why we have rules in place. If there were no speed limits and we let people decide for themselves then road deaths would increase massively. It would be terrible. This is the same as that. Many people aren’t going to be sensible and they might kill themselves and, more importantly, they might kill plenty of other people. We are led by fucking idiots.

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The Lost Children – Disturbed

Now, I know that The Sickness is an awesome album, and it’ll be reviewed later in this series. This particular album I am less sure of. I don’t think I’ve played it that much. The best thing about Disturbed is the singers voice. It’s very distinctive and really makes every song much better than it actually is.

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Keeping Traditions

I’ve been spending some time at Linton Park Cricket Club recently and although I regularly try and walk around the ground a few times each visit I went in the opposite direction on my last attempt. I am normally hanging around in the nets and when I go for a lap I start there and head away from the pavilion. The lap in question started north of the pavilion and so I walked in a clockwise direction [when viewed from above]. It’s always good to approach things from a new point of view and I thought this would just look a little different. I was not expecting the result of this walk to be such a surprise!

LPCC Tree
LPCC Tree

On the return leg towards the pavilion I saw this tree. A whole tree growing in within the boundary. In the year or so that I had been coming to this ground I hadn’t seen the tree. I just hadn’t noticed it at all when I was completing laps in a positive direction [when viewed from above]. Why had I not seen such an obvious thing? Why had this tree not been part of my viewing on the numerous times I would have walked past it in the past? What is going on? It’s clearly not a newly planted tree and given its size it’s been there for a while and anyway, why would you plane a new tree within the boundary? Although the club itself and ground is a lot older than the tree so there are questions I need answered.

There is something called the Mandela effect. It’s not a real thing. But everyone has things that make them question what they know or can remember. The Mandela effect is meant to explain a mis-remembering of an event or thing. When I saw this tree my first thought was – that’s a surprise, how come I didn’t notice it before? My first thought was not – wow, that must have popped into existence from nowhere I am clearly in a new timeline and therefore aliens or whatever bogeyman you want. People don’t understand just how terrible human memories are. The general impression is that memories are like perfect video cameras and we can fast rewind through any event to see the truth of what happened or at least the truth of the experience we had. The reality is that human memory is fucking terrible and can’t be relied on at all. I am dreading being called as a witness to something where my memory is required. It’s quite easy to change how you remember things. Just remember them. Every time you remember something you change your memory. Have fun with that knowledge.

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Slightly More Normal Thing

With the most recent SARS-Cov-2 regulations in the UK we’ve been able to operate some activities at work. So, a couple of weekends ago I spent some time with the officers, CIs and cadets and we ran a “summer camp”. It was only a weekend and there was only one overnight in the open on the school field. But we managed to fill the weekend with school based activities. We are lucky that we have plenty of equipment and also suitable venues within the school site.

Sunday Station
Sunday Station

My job on the Sunday of this camp was to run an orienteering activity. Nothing too hard in terms of map reading but something to give the cadets a feel for orientating the map and basic navigation around a wooded area. It was lovely to be doing something close to normal.

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I Get Scores

The latest version of WordPress, my CMS of choice, likes to tell me how good the titles of my communications are. I think it measures length of the title and how rare the words are? I’m not sure. I do know that it seems to want my communication titles to look like a Daily Mail headline and I am NOT going to do that. This is what I get in the top corner when I save a draft of a communication:

Headline Analyser
Headline Analyser

This was my score for a communication a few days ago. 43/100. Pretty poor. But actually not as bad as this current draft which has the grand total of 0/100. I don’t really care. The whole idea behind this site was that it was for me. Therefore the titles are deliberately vague and make things more “mysterious”. It does make finding things quite tough but the search function seems to work reasonably well.

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Line Infacted

I think I’m managing quite well with the suitable distribution of my income. A while back I wrote that I had stopped spending money on music streaming services and if I want some songs then I will pay for them properly. We all know that Spotify pay very little out to the artist for each play and it’s only the mega-hits that actually make any money. I’d try and link that communication here but the way I write the names of these communications means I might have zero chance of finding it. Here goes! I found it! The point is for more of my money to go to the artist. The website Bandcamp seems the best way of doing that short of Patreon or Venmo [which I have never used!].

This morning I have updated the music list on the iPhone contents page. Not that it’s easy to find the new stuff, there’s an awful lot of stuff listed. But I’ve recently bought a few albums and so I thought it was time to update it. There’s a definite theme within that music list of heavy metal, thrash metal and then German rock along with EBM and aggrotech. If you search that list enough you might even find some songs that could be considered “embarrassing”. Have a look and let me know if you find one. Anything from Top Gun does not count, obvs.

I’ve been listening to the music projects of two main labels over the last few years. Those labels are Infacted Records and Out Of Line Music. My most recent purchases are:

  • Deathless – Amelia Arsenic
  • Requiem for the Hyperreal – Shiv-r
  • Kill God Ascend – Shiv-r
  • That Annihilated Place – Pete Crane
  • Traumatized – Lights Of Euphoria
  • Dark Passenger – Decoded Feedback
  • Domination – Agrezzior
  • Sittenverfall – Schallfaktor
  • Judas – Lord Of The Lost

There’s quite a bit of a mix there from electronic to bombastic over the top operatic rock but it’s all good. Well worth a listen. If you like that sort of thing. I will say that the bass line from “To Love Is To Destroy” by Amelia Arsenic is DIRTY.

When I eventually finish the album reviews the idea is to go back and review every album I’ve bought in the last eight years or so. I’ve tried to avoid writing about all the EBM and Aggrotech in the reviews and I will eventually get around to writing about them. Oh, I’ve had both vaccination injections and am looking forward to being considered fully vaccinated in two weeks.

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