Tag Archives: brainy
Shoegaze guitar tone chasing
Four videos from YouTube. The first one is better viewed on YouTube, because it has important links with pedal settings, etc.
Obviously, shoegaze (and its mellower cousin, dream pop), are close relatives to ambient music. A bit more aggressive, but definitely something that has influenced my own music, and will influence any future ambient guitar music I make. These tutorials help me to understand how to get my desired sound better. And like I said before, to help differentiate my own sound from what everybody else is doing.
Thought crimes R us
The human impulse to dehumanize by Jim Goad:
British TV personality Katie Hopkins was born with a very unfortunate nose. Her proboscis is roughly the size of a toucan’s beak. Blonde-haired and with sparkling blue eyes, the poor maiden would actually be visually fetching if it weren’t for her giant, crooked, sloping honker.
What’s more important is that I doubt Katie Hopkins would feel compelled to call the police on me for saying any of that.
The same cannot be said of her many detractors. In recent days thousands of those who hate her—in the name of love and tolerance, but of course—have encouraged the police to arrest her for maligning fat people and Scottish people.
…
This new generation of insta-snitches—and there are endlessly dreary armies of them—who appear to feel justified in having human beings caged merely for hurting their feelings all seem afflicted with a self-absorbed notion that the only possible reason someone could have said something they found offensive was for the singular purpose of offending them…rather than, say, because it’s what they really believed.
But in the case of Hopkins, her allegedly “offensive” comments appear to be rooted in an ethical conviction that being fat is not only unhealthy, it unfairly burdens those who have to pay the fatties’ medical bills. “[Obesity’s] cost to the NHS is more than six billion a year,” she explained during the same televised segment where Szrodecki called the police, “and the Chief Surgeon at Guy’s Hospital said, ‘It’s killing millions, costing billions, and the cure is in our hands,’ and as a taxpayer that’s why I feel I do have a say, it’s because I’m paying for your health.” On Twitter, Hopkins has written, “My hate for fat people has grown from the fact I have to pay to make them better.”
Forgive me for suspecting that her real crime here is criticizing the bloated size of the British welfare state.
I recently mentioned that Anita Sarkeesian represents everything wrong with the modern world. I see more and more examples of this every day. Simply put, nobody has any skin anymore. Soon, everybody, and I mean everybody, will probably find their lives turned upside down for any perceived slight. And, in the case of feminists, if you didn’t say anything, they’ll lie and say you did.
Milton Friedman on socialism
We need Milton Friedman more than ever today.