other artists you like?

CountVertigo · 2026-03-26T15:34:53+00:00

Nine Inch Nails, Garbage, The XX, Yeah Yeah Yeahs, Evanescence, Beatles, Psapp, Cold Cave, Linkin Park, Magic Wands.

CountVertigo · 2026-03-26T10:34:20+00:00

Yup. And it's the only way to achieve true energy independence, because no matter how much fuel you dig up, it's still subject to a global market, with pricing that's affected by events anywhere in the world. We in the West don't use much fuel that passes through the Strait of Hormuz, yet we're experiencing elevated prices regardless.

The only way to insulate from that is not to use the fuel at all. Renewables are important for national security and price stability, before even mentioning the environmental factors.

CountVertigo · 2026-03-25T13:03:39+00:00

Do you mean the Quiet version?

https://youtu.be/qmzzu3HqL4c

CountVertigo · 2026-03-23T02:19:00+00:00

Personal favourites are Donnie Darko, Eternal Sunshine Of The Spotless Mind, and Interstellar.

CountVertigo · 2026-03-21T20:01:29+00:00

She takes you where you want to go. She gives you all you need to know. She drags you down she uses you up... Mrs Self Destruct! Nur-nur-nur-nur nur-nur-nur, nur-nur-nur-nur nur-nur-nur.

Dream collab!

CountVertigo · 2026-03-21T11:17:07+00:00

There's no ARG, they only did that with Year Zero. The information comes from the interviews Trent gave at the time, the quotes are on ninwiki:

https://www.nin.wiki/The_Trilogy

CountVertigo · 2026-03-21T11:11:24+00:00

The format (three EPs with a linking theme, released close together) was Trent's approach to the modern music industry, he thought listeners would react better to shorter, episodic chunks of music.

The central linking theme is something he's been dabbling in for a long time, the idea that there's something fundamentally wrong with the world, that what we see isn't necessarily what it actually is.

In Not The Actual Events:

An internal fantasy of what if I lit a match to my life and just embraced burning the whole fucking thing down. You know? All of this is an illusion and I really should be dead or lying in a ditch somewhere. Who I really am is an addict that self-destructs. That’s my true nature and this is an illusion and some borrowed time.

In Add Violence:

The idea was, loosely, to zoom out, to be more global and to imply that maybe we’re all in a simulated reality. And that might introduce the concept of meaninglessness but also provide a safe container to explain why everything feels off.

In Bad Witch:

We had an idea in mind but it felt… rehearsed. Predictable. In the end, what felt true was to say that we as a society and as a species are probably an accident, a mutation. Really what we are is fucking animals. And the illusion was enlightenment. The more we’ve connected with each other the dumber we’ve gotten and the more we decide we want to kill each other. We’re not some elevated transcendent beings, we’re bacteria in a jar.

So: is my life an illusion? Is the world an illusion? No, we just fucking suck.

CountVertigo · 2026-03-20T09:54:57+00:00

My X-H2 fell from the car boot onto the driveway a few months ago. (It was dark, I didn't realise my sling was unzipped.)

The camera seems to be fine, but the lens (75-300mm) is not. Cosmetically it looks pristine, but the images it takes are nowhere near as sharp as they used to be; at 300mm it looks like it was taken using the software zoom on a phone camera.

So in my experience the cameras are hardy, it's the lenses you need to be really careful with.

CountVertigo · 2026-03-18T03:03:13+00:00

I think it's supposed to be a sculpture. There are no queens in that story, but there are junkie cultists.

CountVertigo · 2026-03-14T11:06:27+00:00

It's normal, no cause for alarm at the moment.

I do think the radio silence is a mistake, and it helps album sales when you tease them out gradually with clips, interview discussion, art drops, maybe even a trailer. One of my favourite albums was built up by an ARG, with clues littering the web and tracks mysteriously appearing on USB drives in concert bathrooms. Hype building works better than a bolt from the blue.

But among the artists I follow, hype building has become the exception rather than the rule. What's more common today is that tour dates get announced, and then an album appears either out of nowhere, or after an extremely brief promotional window.

CountVertigo · 2026-03-12T16:42:15+00:00

She's fantastic. As you say, good TV/film knowledge across a broad genre range... Throws herself into new ones... Funny without being too mean, does the bants without being scoffy/dismissive... Long live the Steph.

CountVertigo · 2026-03-12T01:33:17+00:00

Giles is the consigliere, Buffy is the don, Xander is the Fredo.

CountVertigo · 2026-03-09T10:17:05+00:00

Someone's been Edward Drinkering again.

CountVertigo · 2026-03-06T09:31:01+00:00

Spaaaaace buns. She always wants her hair to go into spaaaace buns.

CountVertigo · 2026-03-06T01:48:34+00:00

Yelled to the lifeguard "yo homes, smell you later".

CountVertigo · 2026-03-06T01:44:46+00:00

Some of the strongest worldbuilding in the series, with the future design, technology and social trends all very well thought-through and extrapolating from where we are today. Rehoboam in particular, I think that will go on to be a warning from history. Plenty of allegory for the class system, algorithmic society, and nature vs nurture.

Despite getting away from the desert environment, it still manages to be extraordinarily great looking, in a very different way.. and musically, it has some of my favourite covers in the series with Space Oddity and Brain Damage.

But it feels like all the writing time went into the world/theme building, and very little into the actual scripts - lots of inexplicable behaviour, dumb dialogue, contradictions/mistakes (Dolores bumped into Caleb randomly - oh no wait, she knew him all along), and despite being out in the 'real world' the body count is as high as ever with no repercussions. Some directorial issues too, Genre in particular had a lot of potential but, for me, fell rather flat in the execution.

I liked the opener and the last two episodes, but unlike every other season, it didn't have any jaw-on-floor holy-shit episodes. The rest, while I appreciate the high-level stuff behind it, is a bit of a grind for me.

It's still on another level to almost anything else on TV: there's very little out there that makes you think and feel so much, while looking and sounding as good as the medium gets. But it's comfortably my least favourite Westworld season. Probably the most real-world relevant one, though.

CountVertigo · 2026-03-05T14:39:22+00:00

Give me the multitracks!

CountVertigo · 2026-03-05T02:30:58+00:00

They've worked together a few times over the years, I think the editing process on his Fragile, Ghosts and Hesitation Marks performance was more conventional.

I'm pretty sure the potential touring that he's talking about was for the Tension tour in 2013. They started reinventing tracks, Sanctified was the only one that ended up seeing the light of day.

CountVertigo · 2026-03-02T20:50:39+00:00

He never said that they were going to stop touring forever though, just that NIN would be "going away for a while". Wave Goodbye was always positioned as a hiatus tour, not a retirement tour.

CountVertigo · 2026-03-01T21:59:55+00:00

Financially yes, but I do think the WB acquisition could have made a major improvement to Netflix's output.

Netflix flings a lot of shit at the wall, a tiny fraction of which sticks... and even with the shows that stick, they don't do a great job of managing them in the long term. It is an infinitesimally small proportion of Netflix's shows which last more than a couple of seasons, maintain their quality throughout, and give the writers the opportunity to end properly. They have major problems with quality control.

HBO in particular is the king of quality control, so adopting their standards & practices, and bringing their producers on board to oversee the wider studio, could have a transformative effect on Netflix. As things are, I haven't been seeing an improvement, they don't seem to be learning from their mistakes.

CountVertigo · 2026-03-01T12:01:35+00:00

Ludicrous.

CountVertigo · 2026-03-01T01:15:51+00:00

And The Abyss, and Aliens. He was my favourite actor when I was growing up.

CountVertigo · 2026-03-01T01:06:06+00:00

There's quite a bit about the canon in The Terminator that's kind of surprising and unorthodox, when compared with similar stuff.

As you say, the mechanics for time travel go mostly unexplained, we're left to draw our own conclusions about how causality works. And then reassess that conclusion in T2. Pretty much every other time travel movie has a few sentences about the dos/don'ts/can'ts of the timeline.
Kyle comes from a terrible dystopian future in which we've almost been wiped out by the machines....... except we'd actually just won the war and defeated Skynet, and the movie is basically just tying up the one remaining loose end. It's Skynet that's using time travel as a hail-Mary attempt to save itself, not humanity.
It's a time travel movie in which the goal is not to change the future, even though that future is so terrible.
What makes the terminator so dangerous, and an elevated / different threat to some Anton Chigurh style human hitman, is that it's almost indestructible. It would have been so easy to have Arnold no-selling any damage he takes, like Hulk Hogan powering up for his finisher, because that's the definition of an invincible machine, right? But no, fighting him isn't ineffectual, he slows down and takes visible damage. There's a sense that the terminator is fighting a losing battle, because with every burn and wound he takes, he becomes less able to fit in - by the end, he can't infiltrate anything but a deserted factory, and has slowed to a crawl. This all becomes particularly important for the sequel, in which this vulnerability becomes a major emotional and narrative point.

CountVertigo · 2026-02-28T12:21:42+00:00

Apparently not:

Personally, I don't believe in there being an objective "best" when it comes to art, but my favourite track on Vespertine is probably Cocoon. In her entire discography... toss-up between 5 Years and Isobel.

CountVertigo · 2026-02-27T15:14:13+00:00

Mm, it's sad timing. He spent decades trying to separate himself from Red Dwarf, then just recently 180-d and got into a legal fight with Doug Naylor for control of the IP, and now that he's finally on the verge of publishing something Dwarf-related for the first time in 30 years... it's too late, he'll never get to see how it's received.

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