Random Stuff

 I've stopped posting on Facebook because every time I post on Facebook I get a response from one or several "friends" on there whose comments suggest that they haven't read my post properly or just haven't understood what I was saying. As a result, I have spent the last five years doing more explaining than at any other time in my life. Sometimes the responses I get are angry ones because the responder didn't understand what I was saying. Sometimes the responses are more along the lines of "are you okay?" because the responder didn't understand what I was saying. Sometimes the responses are stupid jokes that  are only tangentially related to what I said. It seems like the only people using Facebook any more are the slightly autistic or the socially backward, which would track, as those would be the demographics least likely to understand that Facebook isn't being used by fully functional human beings any more.

They did some really catchy songs, but they couldn't do albums. My brother gave me a copy of their second album, Vertigo, which he had tried to get into but given up on, labelling it "boring". I made it through half the album before agreeing with my brother and getting rid of it. A housemate of mine had another of their albums, which was called "Hello Nightclub, Goodbye Country" or something, which I gave a listen, got about three quarters of the way through and gave up on. A while later, someone at work emailed around offering the first taker his copy of Groove Armada's greatest hits as he "didn't like it" despite being quite a big dance music fan. I took the offer but was beaten to it by someone else in the office. Finally, in desperation, I purchased GA's greatest hits from HMV during a sale. It had some decent songs, but not enough to make the album worthwhile, and I finally gave it away during a big CD clearout while moving house.

This week I watched a two part episode of Star Trek The Next Generation, in which the Enterprise gets a replacement captain while Picard is away on a secret mission behind enemy lines. One of the first things the new captain, Jellico, does is to order Deanna Troi to put on a proper starfleet uniform instead of the low-cut onesie she usually wears. I felt like cheering. Up until this point we have had six seasons of Deanna Troi wearing a cleavage-baring outfit for no apparent reason, and that, plus her weird accent (which none of the other Betazoids share) plus her being the official ship's counsellor despite Guinan doing a better job of counselling the ship's crew than her have all piled up to make her the most difficult member of the cast to watch whenever she is on screen. The irony is that the official uniform, when Troi puts it on, actually makes her look better than the more revealing outfit we're used to. According to other STTNG viewers, she drops the accent in later...

 I put on some music while working the other day. First I put on an album by State Azure called Mirror Infinite, which was very ambient and pretty and made me feel depressed. Then I listened to a recent album by Goldmund, which was also very ambient and pretty and made me feel depressed. Finally I put on some music by Manuel Gottsching and kept that on for the rest of the afternoon. To find anything worth listening to, you have to jump back in time 40 or 50 years. At the risk of sounding like an old fart, modern music is vapid and repetitive and more concerned with atmosphere than substance. State Azure is the closest thing to what I like coming out of current musical platforms (Bandcamp, Soundcloud), yet his best stuff is his cover versions of older artists like Tangerine Dream and Jan Hammer.

 The biggest problem with the multiverse in film is not knowing, at any given moment, which version of a character I'm looking at. Is Captain Carter in Multiverse of Madness  supposed to be the same Captain Carter from What If  or a variant of her in a different universe? Is Michael Keaton's Batman in The Flash supposed to be the same Batman from the two Tim Burton Batman films or a variant of him in a different universe? It's that not knowing that makes for a frustrating viewing experience, as you don't know whether the version of the character you've watched in previous films is now being killed onscreen, or some other version of them. You also don't know how many other, identical versions of them exist in the infinite multiverse, which means you don't know how much weight their death carries.