Death metal thrived from 1985 to 1994. The early material of the proto-underground nature — Sodom, Master, Possessed, Bathory, Hellhammer, Slayer — solidified its metal/hardcore roots into something much more expressive by 1985, and then it was simply a matter of creating the classics.

By 1986 we had Sepultura Morbid Visions/Bestial Devastation, Morbid Angel Abominations of Desolation, and a rack of bands ready to move from their first to second demos as they outlined the new sound, which just three years later was fully represented.

It probably peaked in the 1990-1991 era when all of the foundational bands got enough musical aptitude to bash out second and third albums which pushed limits, but by 1994 almost all bands were reverting to influences or reading the past material as input, which works as badly on humans as it does on AIs.

In my view, death metal had a lot to say and still has a lot to say, but people focused too much on differentiating form (style, musicianship, aesthetics, production) and not enough on digging into the philosophy (probably Aurelius and Emerson) and literature (English Romanticism) behind it.

As a result, the bands fired off initial shots and then got down to the job of being bands, at which point it was not much fun, and they puked out as professional a platter as they could until their contracts ran up, then disintegrated into the long-term PTSD arising from abusive childhoods in a dying regime.

This leaves us now with a simple goal: go back to where the error was made and try again by looking within to find the why instead of the methodology and aesthetics.

~~~

Draugveil – Cruel World of Dreams and Fears: aimless songs, emo melodies, and bouncy hard rock rhythms give little room for black metal but work in a mid-tempo version of the Dimmu Borgir clones hybridized with the depressive shoegaze variety, creating a hybrid that like most things with unclear parentage lacks any purpose except to project a self-indulgent self-pitying mode that hates reality and worships the self like a good metrosexual Christian Socialist at a “No Kings” protest.

Disgustingest – Purging Suppuration: pig squeal cadence deathcore is its own animal, less rap-influenced and more based on edging by chromatic rhythm riffs with less bounce and funk than slam or nu-metal, but while Disgustingest bring nothing new to the table and depend on simple rhythmic clashes for their songs, the band keep songs together and express something distinctive in each even if each thing is very much like all the others.

Grog – Sphere Of Atrocities: it is hard to hate this metalcore release because unlike most of the genre, it goes back to grindcore and pop roots, making catchy little songs that would make Phil Collins or Michael Jackson proud, even if the main hook is in the guitars and the main continuity is driving percussion that understands how to shadow a riff without dominating it.

Witchrot – Soul Cellar: quick, grab whatever you need to survive in the woods and let’s go, there is no time, get out the fucking door, the normies have found us; when I was a youngun I used to hang around dive bars and bum cigarettes, but they always had music like this coming through the wood panel walls (breakaway for 21 beer salutes) and it is utterly typical and pretentious without delivering any transcendent or even sensual experience. To the woods!

Hessian – Hessian: aiming for a heavy Darkthrone, Havohej, and Necrovore influence, this band make droning two-and-a-half riff songs that sound more like hardcore in their fast midtempo rhythms and simple power, but each song achieves its own atmosphere and develops it into an intensified version of itself, producing an atmosphere that is not so much angry or despairing as a form of rejection and reconstruction through radiating drone.

Retching – Charming the Decomposed: cool logo bro and wow that sure is a lot of tshirts for sale (do you have mugs?) for this band that hybridizes retro-Swede with late hardcore style death/grind hybrid in pop song format like Exhumed or Nunslaughter but with much more of a focus on mid-paced songs, with lots of speed metal trudge and symmetrical workaround riffs that spider themselves into oblivion through repetition.

Burial Oath – The Cycles of Suffering: while this band upholds the late 1990s standard of black metal, its problem is that between songs without personality — no inner motivation besides making black metal — and repetition of well-known black metal tropes in placid forms, this album is boring and gestures at nothing other than a participation award.

Resistant Culture – Welcome to Reality: this band has always suffered from trying to be too many things to too many people, and despite members of this cadre making one of the better Terrorizer albums, without that framework they rocket between grindcore, Amerind-themed hardcore, and raging punk that incorporates powerviolence and grind with some emo elements, resulting in a tiring listen that fails to bring out their best attribute, riffcraft.

Damnation – Destructo Evangelia: songs fit together smoothly and seem to have themes in this Eucharist-Darkthrone hybrid that specializes in droning melodic riffs with intense percussion under them, and each song stands out, but really this is just necrophilia of the past, trying to resurrect things that are best dead or at least left in the past, and cannot be recombined into creativity that makes them new again. Respect the mold!

Sigh – I Saw The World’s End (Hangman’s Hymn MMXXV): this band takes an over-the-top Disney ride approach to Death SS and Venom, so you end up with something out of Pirates of the Carribean or The Hobbit, which just gets more ridiculous as time goes on, and any artistic or entertainment points it wanted to make are washed out by the pulsing need to distract from emptiness.

Dawn of Solace – Affliction Vortex: emo with gothic verses accompanied by post-metal but venturing into sludge for the choruses, this band conveys exactly what we detest about ordinary pop, but in metal form, all for a few minutes of glory and some streaming income that might someday buy a whole large cheese pizza at an apartment in Encino decked with Motley Crue and Britney Spears posters.

Baest – Venenum: almost zero of the Swedish death metal tribute bands have understood what made the music great, which was an immense sense of space and contrast, but in this instead we get a speed metal band dressed up as death metal but using mostly modern metal formless riffs in order to emphasize vocals, which are really great but add very little to each composition.

Vortex – Alien Realms: pounding urgent death metal that detours into Dimmu Borgir black metal with Swedish melodic death metal overtones on the choruses, this band comes across more as a presentation (maybe even a PowerPoint) than an organic musical expression of something the band themselves wanted to hear done well, but even more, does not recycle any of its well-trod paths into a recombination of any significance.

Filth – Time to Rot: do you want to visit the days of mid-paced death metal stranded somewhere between speed metal and technical death metal? This reminds me of Gutted or Macabre in its use of uptempo syncopation but then it deviates into doom-death Incantoclone zones, and while it has no glaring flaws, it also lacks any reason to listen to it except nostalgia for a more boring era.

Mortual – Altar of Brutality: this band at least keep intensity high and the parts relate to each other, unlike pure “riff salad” which works by contextless contrast or studied quirks, but trying to mix Cruciamentum and Revenant with a few speed metal influences introduces a heavy load of hammering out compatibility between the bits that sometimes misses the goal of whatever each song is trying to represent or express.

Shutdown – By Your Side: when people introduce this band they use the word “hardcore” a lot but this is an emo band who writes straight punk riffs so that they can be dominated by the sensitive vocals and socially progressive topics, which makes this band both irrelevant and as much of a dinosaur as the Grateful Dead at this point.

Lüt – Opp Ned: creative pop punk that melds in some indie and stoner doom riffs at mid-tempo for crashing choruses but has too much Blink 182 and Offspring in it for anyone to listen for more than five minutes while having a pedicure in an Eritrean salon somewhere in mid-town across from a construction site where the sounds cycle much like these jangly guitars.

Last Retch – Ergotism: Canada is like one of those dumps that is between diarrhea and solid, lots of little bits falling out among the turds and lavaging discharge, and this band mixes really solid creative death metal riffing with tedious bits of metalcore-modern hybrids and speed metal style repetitive downstroke songs, but when the band picks up momentum, it does reasonably well until it goes back into its influences.

in this house of mourning – Enlevèment: cool funeral doom aesthetic but reliance on too much conventional heavy metal methodology makes this album a promising gesture that falls short of being internally solid enough to listen to on a regular basis, despite good use of Winter-style keyboards on a Skepticism-themed album.

Praise My Pain – To Die Today: modern metal that combines Pantera, The Haunted, and the Offspring to make a vocal-driven, ranty and aimless form of music which throws in a few cool variations of known riff types and shows remarkable flexibility with rhythm, but has no idea how to compose songs except to promote one moment of stark difference that is supposed to make the exception reject the rule instead of affirming it as it does.

Cromlech – Of Owls and Eels: the name signals Darkthrone but this sounds like later Necromantia, down to the use of amusement park haunted house keyboards and Scooby Doo rhythms, but really unless you have already decided to listen to this intensely, nothing will grab you because like Satyricon, it is based on distraction and opposition to the previous instead of building toward the next.

Yedd – Yedd: most musicians end up playing in bar bands where they try to be quirky and unique because the music is neither unique nor particularly relevant (a combination of realistic, mimetic, and insightful) which results in high school theatre level dramatics paired with the same tired blues-rock plodding that television producers love to use on their boring shows to signal good times, and here is has a hard rock take on fast stoner doom which is still boring.

Quadvium – Tetradōm: nothing here is terrible, but this is basic jazz fusion which combines rock formats with jazz technique, sort of like what Cynic did, and would be unexceptional in that genre, so it should not get points for awkwardly working in some metal riffs, especially since songs seem to have no center which makes the entire thing into rapidly scrolling sonic background imagery that emphasizes color notes and structure-from-harmony but little else.

Refusal – Venomous Human Concept: combining classic Swedish death metal with Discharge-clone influences, this band make a highly listenable album with no surprises and not enough character of its own, which makes it a pleasant incidental listen but unlikely to survive in regular rotation, since most of its appeal lies in evocation of past greats and we will just throw those on instead.

Aldaaron – Par-delà les cimes: this style took over after DSBM and consists of lots of fast lead-picked riffs followed by surging formless rhythm riffs and extensive use of melody that has more to do with playing on higher-pitched strings with open intervals than any construction of melody; you really have to love sweep-picking and very cyclic songs to appreciate this style and this instance of it.

~~~

The haunting question of this documentary was, “what now, now that death metal is getting popular?” No one could mention Darwinism, but it was clear to me that either Darwinism or “equal mediocrity” was the future.

We had to choose, and the labels will always choose mediocrity because it gives every average fan a chance to express themselves and feel relevant for the years 15-28 when they buy music. Then it’s time to get serious about running that cell phone store, managing the storage unit complex, coding up those web apps, or whatever other mind-numbing nonsense society has to hand to us.

DMU keeps losing commenters to law enforcement:

Aldo Hernandez, 26, burst into Corpus Christi Church in Mineola at just after 5 p.m. during a Spanish-language Eucharist celebration and shattered two religious statues — including a Sacred Heart statue that was 100 years old, cops and church workers said.

Hernandez was charged with second-degree criminal mischief and was set to be arraigned Monday at First District Court in Hempstead.

Also, what we always suspected about Finnish alcohol turns out to be true:

“In 2024, Finland had the highest price level for alcoholic beverages in the EU, at 110% above the EU average,” Eurostat’s study noted.

Finland was also found to be 10 percent above the EU average for the prices of food and non-alcoholic beverages, or 10th overall in that category. In terms of tobacco prices, Finland was the sixth most expensive nation in Europe last year.

Overall, consumer prices in Finland were about 24 percent above the EU average — which is very similar to the result from the same study last year.

I guess if you turn your nation into Martha’s Vineyard, Nordic-Finno-Ugric version, you might have fewer problems with drive-by idiots, benefits shoppers, grifty bureaucrats, and runaway American fast food corporations.

We give thanks to Israeli pedophiles who allegedly (this source is flaky af) wrote some lyrics for us:

“I suffered painful sodomy, truly felt like I was splitting in two. It’s a terrible experience, but there’s something about these things, perhaps in their strangeness, that’s like… maybe the hardest component is that if you tell people about these things, they’ll think you’re crazy. I remember many types of severe sexual abuse, but there’s something about these ritualistic abuses that makes them the bottom of darkness.”

“I remember a pentagram on the floor, usually in red. When the ceremony was in the forest, the pentagram was marked with a hoe and surrounded by lit candles in a circle. The rabbi would bless, ‘Blessed who releases the bound,’ men around prayed with prayer shawls, sometimes dressed in black, while the rabbi wore a white robe. There were several men and boys around the ages of 16-17 who participated in ceremonies for spiritual transcendence.”

Sounds like a typical Generation X childhood. Well, not really — our parents specialized in psychological abuse manifesting as PTSD-like symptoms decades later — but your average Boomer would consider rabbinical pentagram sodomy to be a teachable moment.

The review queue is now a bunch of reviews that say basically people are treating these releases like jobs, studying the comparables, injecting disruptive innovation, using Agile methodology, and then making a competitive product. Unfortunately this is Hegelian; they are reacting to the near-past and distant past, but missing the goal of the distant past.

I am unimpressed by metal labels. The “barns” crank out lots of stuff with low investment (r-strategy) and the “boutiques” drop a few things with lots of precious writing about how ironic and unique they are, but are focused on surface aspects only (K-strategy, sorta).

No one is focused on inner quality because to be fair there are almost no people in metal who can produce it, and even the big names are totally inconsistent or churning out interpretations of older works.

It turns out that living in cities makes you a music hipster:

An international team, including scientists from Cornell University, Deezer Research in Paris and Max Planck Institutes in Germany, sifted through 250 million listening logs from 2.5 million users in France, Brazil and Germany and determined that living in a metropolis broadens our musical horizons, and makes our playlists less alike. Their study, “Mechanisms of Cultural Diversity in Urban Populations,” was published in Nature Communications.

Across all three countries, the larger the city, the more distinct people’s musical tastes were from their neighbors. They found there’s less of a single, shared musical taste in big cities.

They found that people living in larger urban areas also tend to listen to a broader variety of music, expanding their personal musical repertoire.

You listen more widely; on the surface this seems good, but underneath, it means you have no idea who you are and just want something to distract you. Anyone who is real and not just a soulless meatsuit has some kind of preference even if it does not break down along genre lines.

Apparently distortion is growing in popularity:

“Human and nonhuman animal vocalizations produced under intense emotion have specific sound features that can induce strong effects in listeners,” Bryant said.

“That kind of response is biologically adaptive, but how it affects behavior depends on the context, like making a baby stop crying or avoiding an angry person,” he continued. “Music that contains similar features will attract people’s attention and could end up being quite provocative.”

“In other words, people get used to something and then there’s pressure to make that thing a little more extreme, and people get used to that, ad infinitum,” Bryant said of this phenomenon. “People develop tolerances and preferences, and artists adapt.”

Either that, or we could call it what it is: its own language created from the technique required to make distortion into something beautiful or at least interesting, sort of like how death metal invented its through-composed phrasal riff style from moveable power chords and distortion-sustained tremolo.

We always like to take notes on death here, including dying of methane ignition:

An investigation into the death of Raymond Feige, 59, preliminarily found he had been welding on the sludge vessel before the blast Saturday, sources said.

Methane from sewage may have got trapped in a tightly enclosed space on the ship — and ignited when it came in contact with the welding torch’s flame, according to the sources.

*Fweet*

BOOM

One cannot talk about distorted music without revisiting stochastic resonance:

Stochastic resonance is said to be observed when increases in levels of unpredictable fluctuations—e.g., random noise—cause an increase in a metric of the quality of signal transmission or detection performance, rather than a decrease. This counterintuitive effect relies on system nonlinearities and on some parameter ranges being “suboptimal”. Stochastic resonance has been observed, quantified, and described in a plethora of physical and biological systems, including neurons.

But what if not everything is ideal? Can an ideal system always be implemented in practice? The answer is of course no; engineering is about designing systems with tradeoffs between different conflicting objectives. The same could be said of evolution. Given this, there are circumstances—see below — where unavoidably present noise or unpredictable fluctuations can be used purposely, or deliberately introduced to lead to a benefit.

In other words, noise is all the stuff except for what benefits us, and its presence highlights the why behind the benefit in nature; in the brain, the dead signals make the living ones look relativistically more alive; in music, the randomness brings out harmonies in the buried signal.

And in nature, it can lead to spontaneous emergent order:

The amazing thing is that even though the crucial atoms in murunskite are arranged completely randomly and irregularly, the magnetic properties are neatly ordered, even at surprisingly high temperatures, and resembles those of iron-pnictides. Analogously, in the cuprates, a particular kind of metallicity — one that might be associated only with exceptionally clean systems — emerges despite a lot of local disorder, along with the high-temperature superconductivity.

“In this case, we speak of emergent order,” explains Davor Tolj. “Even though the atoms do not follow any geometric rules, they form magnetically ordered clusters — ordered islands in a sea of disordered atoms that, in a sense, agree on a common magnetic direction.” These clusters network with other clusters, so that despite the lack of geometric order, a magnetic order emerges that pervades the entire crystal.

Metal is based on a paradox, how to make beauty from ugliness, which is the same esoteric path that transcendence embarks upon: how to find a beauty in a world that is partially very ugly. There must be a beauty in function which animates beauty in aesthetics including the contrast of darkness.

That emergent order can have healing properties, including metals and PTSD-enabled Generation X metalheads collapsing into alcoholism and depression:

A team from Sandia National Laboratories and Texas A&M University was testing the resilience of a small piece of platinum suspended in a vacuum using a specialized transmission electron microscope technique to pull the ends of the metal 200 times every second.

While the observation is unprecedented, it’s not wholly unexpected. In 2013, Texas A&M University materials scientist Michael Demkowicz worked on a study predicting that this kind of nanocrack healing could happen, driven by the tiny crystalline grains inside metals essentially shifting their boundaries in response to stress.

A possible explanation involves a process known as cold welding, which occurs under ambient temperatures whenever metal surfaces come close enough together for their respective atoms to tangle together.

It also turns out that Schopenhauer was correct and music is nerve impulses without the translation of language:

Neural Resonance Theory (NRT) maintains that rather than relying on learned expectations or prediction, musical experiences arise from the brain’s natural oscillations that sync with rhythm, melody and harmony. This resonance shapes our sense of timing, musical pleasure and the instinct to move with the beat.

The theory suggests that structures like pulse and harmony reflect stable resonant patterns in the brain, shared across people independent of their musical background. According to NRT, how we hear and produce music can be explained by fundamental dynamical principles of human brain mechanisms that apply from the ear all the way to the spinal cord and limb movements.

On that note, a book bound in human skin seems to have fascinated the normies:

The work is understood to be made using the skin of William Corder, the man convicted of killing Maria Marten in the Red Barn Murder in 1827, and will go on display alongside a similar item at Moyse’s Hall Museum in Bury St Edmunds, Suffolk.

Books were often created in the 19th Century to punish executed prisoners or by doctors who wanted a keepsake.

Book of the dead, pages bound in human flesh
Feasting the beast, from the blood the words were said
I am unseen, dreamt the sacred passage aloud
Trapped in a dream of the necronomicon

A random paean to Generation X:

But Gen X — born somewhere between 1965 and 1980 — has been largely forgotten about (although even saying that has become a cliché of sorts). Alongside all of this finger-pointing among the generations are claims that, actually, we were the cool ones—no, it was me! But what if it’s none of us? What if the cool ones are actually those unbothered people that nobody talks about?

Young people today dress like they just stepped out of 2002—in slouchy jeans and long sleeves under T-shirts, or else spaghetti strap dresses and ugly shoes. Without playing down the millennial-ness of it all, it was Gen Xers who actually wore this garb first. And sure, bootcut jeans were sort of invented by cowboys, but would they have been what they were if they weren’t the go-to uniform of Gen X? Sometimes I watch old episodes of The Real Housewives of New York (and by “sometimes,” I mean often) and think: no, but these girls ate. They weren’t averse to a knee-high boot in the club and they also knew how to properly let loose (Gen Xers weren’t waxing lyrical about, like, 12-step skincare routines).

The 70-74 births were the core of Generation X; the kids born after that tended to grow up with rap music and Spongebob Squarepants, and it permanently shaped their expectation of reality to be wonky, plus they were not of the old Anglo-Saxon strain.

Speaking of ancient ways, LINYC HxC seems to be thriving despite being mostly boring floggers of 1985 tropes:

After then-Mayor Rudy Giuliani’s sweeping nightlife restrictions in the 1990s, the hardcore scene moved to the New Jersey and Long Island suburbs, where shows were initially held everywhere from dive bars to VFW halls.

Today, Amityville Music Hall (AMH) is the center of Long Island’s hardcore universe and will host roughly 250 events in 2025.

“Hardcore is punk rock with heavier elements, like screaming and big breakdowns that get everyone moshing,” Payne said. “Emo is a more vulnerable, melodic subgenre that spun out of hardcore in the mid-1980s and during emo’s 2000s commercial heyday, it had a good deal in common with pop-punk as a catchier, more accessible, less intimidating punk rock.”

Emo replaced hardcore, in other words, because it was more commercially viable but still edgy. Is there a Hot Topic still extant on Long Island? Where the fuck is Long Island anyway? Oh right, it’s the site of a recent anti-Christian activist event:

The unidentified SUV operator swerved off the road at high speed and crashed into the Quaker Society of Friends Meeting House in Manhasset off Northern Boulevard in Nassau County just before 6 a.m., instantly engulfing the vehicle in flames, authorities said.

Cops said they are investigating why the driver swerved into the historic building and refused to rule anything out, including whether the incident could have been a targeted attack or a hate crime.

The meeting-house site dates back to 1650, when a structure was originally built there and obtained by local colonial Quakers in 1703.

I hope he screamed out “Allahu Ackbar!” as he rammed the RAV4 straight into the heart of Christendom. Between the Baptists, Catholics, and Quakers the religion of Christianity impressed upon me from an early age that it was insane and stood in the way of a trve relationship to the gods.

It is funny how religion and politics mostly work by giving people a free license to atavism, as our old buddy Aldous Huxley reminds us:

“The surest way to work up a crusade in favor of some good cause,” wrote Huxley, “is to promise people that they will have a chance of maltreating someone… To be able to destroy with a good conscience, to be able to behave badly and call your bad behaviour ‘righteous indignation’ — this is the height of psychological luxury, the most delicious of moral treats.”

Elsewhere, goony slibs are rediscovering physical music after getting anally tooled by streaming services companies:

When Napster, and filesharing, and eventually Spotify emerged, I couldn’t believe my luck. I instantly abandoned my archaic – and expensive – CD habit in favour of a digital jukebox that could play every song in the world. I’d cue up new albums by artists I liked or people I’d heard of and embraced a world of infinite listening. But then, predictably, I got lazy. As Spotify started getting to know me, its recommendations became more and more obscure. Before I knew it, Spotify would have moved from the new Gorillaz album that I’d asked it to play to some weird jazz folk nonsense that I hadn’t, and, crucially, didn’t like. Invariably, I’d be too lazy to turn it off. Listening to Spotify was like talking to a music snob who thinks they know more about music than you, and not in a good way.

The cost of my Spotify subscription recently went up, so I cancelled it and went back to my old CD-buying ways. I now read reviews in NME and the Guardian, and use Shazam to identify things I like the sound of on telly, as I did with Silk by Wolf Alice after hearing it on the T2 Trainspotting soundtrack. Instead of listening to random Spotify suggestions, I’m back to my own musical free will. Sure, it involves lining Jeff Bezos’s pockets and playing: “what time will the Amazon delivery man turn up?” But you can’t beat the feeling of holding something physical in your hand. It’s worth every penny to marvel over the album artwork and scrutinise the inner sleeve.

Plus, I can listen to the same album over and over [because] I no longer live with my picky university flatmates.

And yet he still listens to normie music. Normie music unites the two threads of individualism, humanism and dualism, by delivering what people want to hear because it flatters their self-identity and sense of all that they do not fear.

I guess the fairest thing to say is that I hate popular music, or rather, see it as a degraded form of art. That includes rap metal, but Pantera is a bigger offender, and even the big cheesy bands are terrible. I do not like the rock format at all; pentatonics are inherently anti-structure, and the pop verse-chorus is designed for repetition of rhythm not development of melody.

Pop influenced metal back in the day went straight into the cutout bins. Black metal purists bought them for full retail price and now keep them in the attic next to the portable sitz bath, great aunt Tillie’s miniature lighted Christmas village, and the extra parts that came with the vacuum cleaner they sold ten years ago when Sears went bankrupt.

And now, who remembers Aura Noir, Nifelheim, Dimmu Borgir, and all the hook-driven war metal bands? Things can get even worse with AI-generated metal:

It all began last Friday when an album by Czech black metal artist Draugveil was uploaded to YouTube. Its striking cover art of a young, long-haired knight draped in corpse paint laid upon a bed of roses caught the eyes of many, and its popularity snowballed instantly.

But something else caught the eyes of some, that the roses seemed a little off. The rose stems protrude from the ground in an unrealistic fashion. So, in line with the times, accusations of AI trickery arrived swiftly and spread fast.

Soon, the music itself was accused of being AI, or outlines of songs fully formed once put through the generative music program SUNO. There’s no indication that this is the case, and the music is in line with what one would expect from a one-man black metal project in the vein of Judas Iscariot and Burzum, but then if AI was asked to create music in a black metal style, that is probably what it would decide to generically produce and spit out.

I am going to shit on some heads here, but if someone can pull off AI-generated metal that is interesting, go for it. The average in metal now is so bad that AI can hardly do any worse. It is like blogging: the content got so samey and so surface that AI is really not any different.

If we are honest about AI, it will be used for manufacturing and agriculture primarily. It is here to replace Mexicans, just like illegal Mexicans were here to replace Africans, and Oriental Asians will someday replace the Mexicans unless automation obviates this.

The little AI toys we play with now are basically statistical AutoCorrect and are really good at summarizing search results on the surface, generating Wikipedia-style blather, which because Wikipedia is a group blog, is very much like the bloggy breathless vapid surface texts of the regular blogs.

Can AI do worse than most of what is in the review queue? The thought process between AI and humans is in parallel here: clone the past but recombine it enough to be edgy. This is why all black metal sounds both different and the same these days and has zero emotional impact.

~~~

The gods have listened to those of us who hoped for more cannibalism in the news.

Allegedly a Russian invader in Ukraine decided to eat one of his comrades:

In the recording posted by HUR on Telegram, a Russian commander is heard telling a subordinate that one soldier, referred to by the call sign “Brelok,” killed and consumed his fellow service member “Foma” over a two-week period.

Maybe we can hire this guy at American prisons to kill and eat the condemned. Cradle-to-grave recycling at its best! In other news, hearing our Chuck Schuldiner Died of AIDS appeal, the world delivered a promising HIV/AIDS vaccine:

Researchers from MIT and Scripps have unveiled a promising new HIV vaccine approach that generates a powerful immune response with just one dose. By combining two immune-boosting adjuvants alum and SMNP the vaccine lingers in lymph nodes for nearly a month, encouraging the body to produce a vast array of antibodies. This one-shot strategy could revolutionize how we fight not just HIV, but many infectious diseases. It mimics the natural infection process and opens the door to broadly neutralizing antibody responses, a holy grail in vaccine design. And best of all, it’s built on components already known to medicine.

Maybe give it to Breloch in case Foma had a little dalliance with the world-famous Ukrainians prostitutes before getting killed, eaten, and defecated into a battlefield trench.

~~~

Who is the loneliest man in the world? My guess: the man who accepted the brutal realities of life along with the pleasant ones, instead of opining against them.

Most human activities consist of tantrums. People express judgments, desires, feelings, symbols, and emotions about life but do not engage with the external world as it is, or their own inner selves which know the world by intuition.

To fall out of that mental pattern is to become a lonely man isolated from others.

This occurs not so much through ostracism, including censorship, but in simply being out of step. Most of what concerns others is irrelevant to you, so by relativity, most of what is relevant to you is ignored by or invisible to others.

Welcome to walking the sunset path, where the world is falling away and yet you have miles to go until dawn.

We live in an overly social time. Humanity beat back the sabre-tooths and dysentery, conquered fire and made it into engines, then with the ensuing wealth boost decided to get neurotic and look within but not to the essence, only to the distractions.

We became a solipsistic species of “talking monkeys with car keys.”

Generation X produced underground metal because it saw the disaster coming. Boomers were the first System People, raised on television and education instead of culture, and in their behavior their kids saw the collapsing that would be the future.

Consequently these kids turned everything up to eleven when they made music. They embraced myth, history, and Romantic topics like death, war, and tempestuous nature. They peered into the occult and related it to everyday reality. They found metaphors for the darkness and need for sanity.

It finally occurred to humans that perhaps symbolic religions were not good. Since these are based in symbols, they need absolutes like “good” to orient people because they have rejected results in reality, and this requires an explanation of why good fails, so we get “evil.”

The fantasy of living for the pure world of Heaven instead of an Earth ruled by Hell infected minds and turned people into zombies. It was followed by the union of Civil War and American Revolution mythology with the Napoleonic quest for total equality, and borrowed fragments of Communism.

All of these things have one thing in common: they are confidence jobs, scams.

Scams always start with denying that reality is real, asserting that only the scam is real, and then narrowing expectations to a symbolic representation of reality. “This product will make you popular!” focuses on only one aspect of reality and conveniently forgets the rest.

Religion tells us to focus on Heaven/good and fight Earth/evil; these are binaries and implicitly condemn reality as bad so they can assert the symbolic reality as absolute good. This scam causes us to deny reality so we can become tools of enforcing the symbol on others.

Liberalism is another scam. It pursues the symbol of equality (=) instead of the symbol of good (+) that contrasts evil (-). As a result, you eliminate all “evil” methods like aggression and war, and are left with permanent problems that you must manage and therefore perpetuate.

Consumerism is another scam. You are told to focus on your job, so you have money and power, and can pay taxes to subsidize the others so that they buy your products. You end up enslaved to a job, buying stuff you do not need, and consumed by a sucking void within from the knowledge that you are wasting your time on useless activities simply for social approval.

Advertising of course is the classic con. You go from thinking about all of the things you need to do in life to watching a commercial where a bunch of hot girls flounce around some dude because he uses a certain body spray. It would make life so simple, if that was all you needed.

The scammer relies on your projection. Projection is how humans assert that we are in control. We are drawn to that which we cannot control, but we generate expertise about it, and use that to make ourselves feel that we are in control. Your projection fills in all the details the scammer does not mention, and so you make assumptions that are to his benefit and not yours.

All of these scams begin by discarding the whole of reality and replacing it with a narrow measure. Often this is symbolism, other times it is simply image. Almost all of it is keyed to social popularity. This is how humanity self-destructs.

The loneliest man in the world recognizes that this era is overly social, therefore anything realistic will be unpopular, which means that anyone who pursues realism will wander alone at least metaphorically but perhaps literally. Welcome to your trailer in the desert with wi-fi poached from passing buses.

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Draugveil version 0.1b

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