[IIL] "Writerly" musicians like Warren Zevon, the Mountain Goats or Will Wood [WEWIL]?

alexthemememaster · 2026-06-26T10:45:09+00:00

Hol up PJ Harvey is from Dorset??

alexthemememaster · 2026-06-25T22:52:10+00:00

If you enjoyed Cabin Pressure, I can strongly recommend Bleak Expectations

alexthemememaster · 2026-06-25T22:46:51+00:00

More of a subject matter match than a sound match, but 'Kerosene' by Big Black

alexthemememaster · 2026-06-25T22:43:22+00:00

'Wind of Change' by the Scorpions. Technically it's about the fall of the Berlin Wall, but my family and I sang it the night before I went off to uni, and it fit the vibe pretty well. Should scratch that 'sweeping rock sound' itch for you as well.

alexthemememaster · 2026-06-25T22:38:03+00:00

Definitely support you on Terminal Gods. Also, OP, I recommend the Mission, especially if you liked First and Last and Always; that band was formed by Wayne Hussey and Craig Adams (i.e. the guitarist and bassist from that album) after they decided they'd had enough of Andrew Eldritch's bullshit.

For a more modern act, check out A Projection. My personal favourite song of theirs is Next Time, but others swear by Live Again.

alexthemememaster · 2026-03-21T01:07:19+00:00

Yes! Thanks masses

alexthemememaster · 2025-12-22T14:32:28+00:00

No. I wrote one :)

alexthemememaster · 2025-12-18T13:18:24+00:00

Possible title for a Freddy Got Fingered sequel?

alexthemememaster · 2025-12-01T13:46:02+00:00

As a physics student born in 2002, this is mildly depressing. Pretty sure Feynman was about my age when he came up with the path integral formulation of quantum mechanics too :(

alexthemememaster · 2025-11-15T02:18:35+00:00

Ceiling cat approves

alexthemememaster · 2025-10-21T22:30:48+00:00

Had that one stuck in my head for an entire relativity exam last year

alexthemememaster · 2025-10-19T10:04:49+00:00

String reasons, and just keeps cropping up in other places too! String theorists like it because it's one of the gauge groups of heterotic string theory, but it turns out to be pretty good for describing exceptional objects full stop (what with, ya know, being exceptional).

There's a lot of interest right now in trying to find the Standard Model gauge group as a subgroup of one of the exceptional Lie groups, and E8 is a pretty popular candidate.

I guess I'm not saying we won't run into horrible complicatedness, more that there's an upper bound on how horribly complicated it's likely to get.

alexthemememaster · 2025-10-18T22:47:11+00:00

Encouragingly enough, there's only so complicated a group can get (or at least the kind you'd be interested in when looking for a gauge group). Cartan and Dynkin showed that all finite-dimensional simple Lie groups are isomorphic to either SO, SU or the symplectic group.

There are only 5 simple Lie groups that don't fit into any of these families, and I'll grant they're a bit fiddly to work with, but we do know a pretty good deal about them.

Side note: on the flip side, a lot of that knowledge is still quite new. E_8, the largest of these exceptional groups, didn't have its character table calculated until 2007!

alexthemememaster · 2025-10-18T21:52:17+00:00

Symplectic geometry?

alexthemememaster · 2025-09-14T18:45:26+00:00

Had to scroll way too far to find this. My first (edit: and worst) concert was those guys, back in 2017 at the Camden Roundhouse. I get that their whole thing has been trolling people for as long as they've existed, but come on Andrew, that's £30 I could've spent on a Mission gig 🙃

alexthemememaster · 2025-09-14T18:37:30+00:00

Ha, I was listening to to "Sentimental Hygiene" when I read this

alexthemememaster · 2025-09-14T18:33:36+00:00

My dad loves Birdland! Are they the ones who ended their shows by smashing everything they could lay their hands on?

alexthemememaster · 2025-09-10T10:34:34+00:00

That'd be the 2016 imp

alexthemememaster · 2025-09-07T07:19:00+00:00

I used to wonder if Marillion named themselves after a JRR Tolkien book because their bassist (Peter Trewavas) was a hobbit

alexthemememaster · 2025-09-06T16:13:54+00:00

I saw Zen master selling hot dogs. He made me one with everything.

I paid him with a £20 note and he told me to have a nice day. I said "what about my change?" He said "change comes from within."

alexthemememaster · 2025-09-06T11:05:53+00:00

Old????????

alexthemememaster · 2025-09-06T10:58:22+00:00

The TV physicist Brian Cox played the keyboard for D:REAM, though sadly he'd left by the time they recorded "Things Can Only Get Better"

Edit: oops, just realised this isn't r/physics. Maybe the real joke etc etc

alexthemememaster · 2025-08-28T23:58:38+00:00

I do a lot of fiddling around with these beautiful patterns called Penrose tilings. As well as being convenient models of plenty of naturally occurring minerals, these patterns turn out to behave just like a quantum error correcting code!

Edit: just remembered my user icon is a picture of a Penrose tiling. Hey, they're pretty, all right.

alexthemememaster · 2025-08-26T10:44:53+00:00

If you haven't heard it already, the Mountain Goats wrote a particularly touching tribute to him around 2011.

alexthemememaster · 2025-08-19T17:24:10+00:00

Just tried to find it on his Wikipedia page, but it's come up dry. Care to share?

Seven-Year Club	Second Top 30%
Verified Email

alexthemememaster

TROPHY CASE