I’m not sure if this will help or not but if you need it then there’s plenty of internet radio to help you out. This is one of my favourites:
Countryside Noise
I wrote a short while ago about the area in which I live and how I would consider it countryside but there’s also the machines of human activity nearby. In that communication I mentioned motorways, supermarkets, train tunnels and an airport. So, here is a map of Eccles’s surrounding area:
And here is a map with various things highlighted. The legend is below the picture.
- Yellow: motorways
- Green: airport
- Blue: high speed train tunnel
- Pink dots: Supermarkets I visit
Below is where I grew up, the village of Hatfield Heath in Essex, and I’ve marked similar things onto that map. Perhaps that is why I like my current village. I spent nineteen years on the Heath and had a very similar environment.
It’ll Still Be Here
I do like living in the country away from things. Well, I’m not really that far away from things; there are two motorways within five minutes, all the supermarkets you could want and I live under the flight path for a small airport, which essentially means this is an almost perfect place to live. It’s generally quiet, even though I can hear the M20 and also the Eurostar as it blasts its way through a tunnel in the North Downs, there are aircraft [at the moment] flying overhead on their way to the money centres of the world and small planes circle around doing their thing at Rochester. So, it’s not quiet but it’s my kind of noise.
My recent angst at all things human society have been calmed by the idea that even if we fuck it all up this planet of life will continue and something will stay here, alive and well. It could take a long time but maybe this planet will once again be an amazing world of life and beauty [beauty being a human property because of the way our brains work]. So, here are some photographs of this wonderful place. It might turn out that everything becomes forested again at some point. Wouldn’t that be great.
The vineyard below won’t exist but something will be there.
I Had A Moment
I wasn’t feeling great on Thursday and ws mostly convinced that “preppers” had got the right idea. I’ve been more chilled out since but I did order a battery operated radio just in case it all goes to shit. I can’t decide if it was paranoia or just plain silly but I did. This is a really strange time and I just don’t know what is going to happen.
I ordered this thing from Amazon. It’s a perfectly functional battery operated radio.
I keep going from wanting to not write anything about all this to wanting to write a lot about this whole thing. I feel it should be documented somehow for me to look back over one day.
It’s Almost As If
Our society wasn’t set up to cope with a massive short term change to the way it operates. By short term I mean in the order of months. We aren’t even months in and it feels as though the world is ending. There’s panic in the supermarkets and many many businesses are going to go bust. People won’t get paid and it’s not going to be pleasant.
If only our society hadn’t been chronically underfunded over the last ten years. If only the “gig-economy” wasn’t a thing. If only companies weren’t driven by responsibilities to shareholders but rather to a social responsibility that means they would look after their employees and make sure everyone had a decent standard of living.
We SHOULD be paying for goods and expecting everyone involved in those process to make them to be paid a FAIR wage. It is utterly immoral that they don’t.
This was meant to be the start of something big but I think I’ll have to leave it for a while. I might keep my ramblings short while we go through this.
Lights
Before all this madness I decided I would buy a new TV. I kinda figured that most screens are similar and so it was other features I wanted. I went for a 4K HDR screen [I’m not fussed about the sound, I have a separate system for that] and also Ambilight. Philips make TVs with the Ambilight system. There are LEDs around the back of the screen and they project colours onto the wall matching areas of the picture on the TV. This is what it looks like:
I do have some sound issues at the moment because my current amplifier won’t pass through 4K signals. I’m in the process of fixing that. But the screen and picture are great. The colours on the wall are pretty amazing. I did have the signal linked up to an LED strip but it was too overpowering! I had to turn that one off.
Frustration
I love Gran Turismo. I have done since I lived in Chicago Avenue in Gillingham. My landlord borrowed a PlayStation from his brother and it had Gran Turismo. He and I would play this game and slowly over time I have gotten more and more into this particular game. I’ve owned every version.
The last few versions have had online gaming and I have a love hate relationship with the online version. Gran Turismo Sport has a vibrant online gaming community and I suspect there are people who race online all the time. I don’t get to see them often because my qualifying times aren’t that great.
Online racing is frustrating at times because I could get knocked off at a corner (or straight) and then I am pretty much in last place. The person who did the knocking will probably get a time penalty but my race is pretty much over. Also, there are times when I get knocked or hit into but then I receive the time penalty. This is what happened in the following clip. I was on the outside of the last corner of the Blue Moon Speedway when a black car rammed the car on the outside of him, then that second car rammed into me and I got a 1 second penalty. On a fast track like this 1s is a disaster and I can only pray for the whole front pack to take each other out to get any decent level of points.
In this clip my car is the dirty orange looking colour. I was racing closely with 9th place “YOUR-INFERIOR”, spelling please, I gave him room in the penultimate corner and then feathered the throttle going into the last corner. You will see 11th place “Golf_RalleyG60” come up the inside too fast and “lean” on “YOUR-INFERIOR” causing them to drift outwards and smack into me. In the second view you can see things from ” Golf_RalleyG60″‘s point of view with a reverse look to see me get my penalty.
Sometimes the racing is really good and there’s an unspoken gentlemen’s agreement as people race. Sometimes the race is full of assholes.
P-Orridge
Genesis Breyer P-Orridge has died. I don’t often write about particular deaths on here because when you read those pieces it’s more of a shout by the writer about themselves rather than the person. This is going to be like that. I pretend it’s about Genesis Breyer P-Orridge but in reality I write about me.
I first came across Throbbing Gristle in the early 2000s. A friend talked about them and I was curious. So, I have some of their music. I listened to it. It hurt. But I liked just how different it was. Then I heard about COUM Transmissions and the ICA installation called Prostitution. When I read descriptions of that show I was fascinated and amazed at the same time. The undercurrents of sedition were real and the establishment didn’t like any of it. I do believe we can thank those early artists who “rebelled” for our liberties today. They planted the seed. The mold breakers have been there in most ages and they push the boundaries allowing people to feel more normal.
The ninety eight percent of you out there who fit the norm of our current society never have anything to fear except your normality being threatened. What you don’t realise is that the other two percent don’t share your views and want to be different and want to feel comfortable in their own skin. Those people with different feelings and needs should be listened to. They should be allowed to exist and feel normal because that is a basic human right.
Genesis Breyer P-Orridge kept pushing those boundaries to the end. I am sad they have died. I am also sad that as I grow older more of those who influenced me die. It’s inevitable and a reminder that one day I too will cease to exist.
Long live the boundary pushers, for the sake of all of us.
More Than That
This headline from the BBC is amazing. I don’t even know what sort of spin they are trying to place on the news. I’ve been trying to spend less time BBC bashing when there is plenty more shit out there but this one needs a bit more explaining and it covers one of my favourite topics: the survival of the planet. It’s easy to go to the Daily Bullshit Mail and rip it apart. It’s easy to look at so many news articles and explain why they are wrong but it’s depressing when it’s the BBc that do it. As I’ve said many times within these communications the BBC is the best news gathering we have in this country and it’s going to be destroyed by the tories.
The use of quotations in headlines is terrible. It allows news organisations to drag you in with a juicy quote from a story without actually telling you anything about the story. Or, as in this case, it is misleading. The real news headline should have been:
Climate Change Report by Think Tank Released.
IP
What happened was a report was released. The headline the BBC used misses an important part of the report which said that the UK can’t go carbon neutral without changes to behaviour. That last bit swaps the whole style of the narrative around and makes the report more positive. It explains the headline. But most grumpy fuckers will read the headline, nod wisely as it agrees with their preconceptions, and then move on without actually learning anything. This headline gives the excuse that there’s no point changing behaviour because we can’t be carbon neutral by 2050. It’s an excuse to let people do what they are currently doing. It’s dangerous.
The UK cannot go climate neutral much before 2050 unless people stop flying and eating red meat almost completely, a report says. But it warns that the British public do not look ready to take such steps and substantially change their lifestyle.
From the BBC article
No one wants to change their behaviour because we don’t like change. But we MUST change and change soon. It is obvious we have destroyed this planet for the next ten generations and massive changes are required NOW to make sure that we minimise the terror. Currently we are breaking every possible system the planet has and we are going to make this place a horror movie in one hundred years or maybe even earlier. I guess we have to thank short-termism politics and the general selfishness of those who seek power and then want to maintain that power. It’s hard to imagine people who push their way to power actually wanting to help people. They do exist but are rare and seen as the odd ones.
I do sometimes think that maybe the best thing to happen to this planet is the extinction of our species. The planet will take a while to recover but it will eventually be a glorious place of life and death and the struggle to survive without our influence.
The weight of this world should be on all our shoulders. But I fear it is held by a few.
Dark Waters
I’m listening to the radio as I write this and they are discussing the leading of petrol, the addition of tetraethyl lead, to help reduce knocking and also allow the fuel to run smoother. As science and others learnt that the lead was dangerous to humans and the environment many people fought back and said all the lead was natural. It wasn’t. But invested parties kept saying that the product was safe. They kept saying that they didn’t think their leaded petrol made any difference to the world. It’s one of those situations where you realise that companies and governments don’t do jack-shit for the people until forced to. It was DuPont who invented this. A side point – the chap who invented the leading of petrol was also responsible for the invention of CFCs – amazing.
I went to see Dark Waters at the Rochester Cinema which nestles next to the tidal part of the river Medway. I happened to notice that the tide level was very low. It was clear because of the mud banks being completely exposed and the rivulets were obvious. I did notice a shopping trolley in the mud and, had I had more time, I would have taken a photograph of it for this publication.
After seeing a film I then rate it on IMDB using a rating scale all of my own invention. You can read how that scale works on within this communication. I suspect that the rating for Dark Waters will be a surprise for some as I haven’t followed my system and am even considering changing my system to fit this score. I don’t want to see this film again but I really enjoyed it, that means it gets a 6 by default. But, I do think that all people should see this film and so I’ve decided to score it a 7.
I rated Dark Waters (2019) 7/10 #IMDb https://t.co/g3wsoDNoL6
— Ian Parish (@iparish) March 8, 2020
I really enjoyed the film. It was very educational and full of anti-hope. This is one of those films that everyone needs to see and take on board all of the lessons of capitalism. Over the last ten years I have become more and more convinced that our capitalist governments aren’t doing the best for the people. They do the best for their own interests and it’s quite frustrating to realise that. Watch this film and try to defend DuPont. It’s a bit like watching The Big Short and then trying to defend capitalism. I am convinced that we need to change our society full-scale t omake it work for the people. To make it humanist.
I don’t think this government and management style is going to change peacefully. I think in two hundred years it will be different but largely because anthropogenic climate change will have ruined the planet and kills around eighty percent of humans. The remaining humans will be working to sustain what is left and priorities won’t be economic growth and making money. I’m hoping the priorities will be looking after the Earth and people. I’m glad I’ll be dead.