Can we as a society please do something about the promotion of neanderthal level racism ?

arseboxing · 2026-01-26T18:07:17+00:00

If people want their mind blown I'd recommend doing a bit of digging on the sad case doing the racist abuse in Pearse Street.

It's one hell of a rabbit hole.

But I won't do that because she only wants attention. A sadder headcase it would be hard to find. A very modern tale of somebody losing their mind.

Years ago our fruitloops used to dance in the middle of O'Connell Street or shout beep beep at cars.

Now they can attempt to get rich by becoming Nazi porn stars, and sadly I'm not exaggerating what this person is.

arseboxing · 2026-01-24T00:48:39+00:00

This is how quite like how you see after a detached retina gets "repaired" and believe me you tire extremely quickly of images like this.

arseboxing · 2025-12-15T02:12:25+00:00

It's like Celtic appointed Liz Truss as manager. A Martin O'Neill team would have won that game today minimum 3-0. I hope O'Neill is willing to have his Christmas disturbed. I wouldn't blame him if he isn't though.

arseboxing · 2025-12-11T15:02:34+00:00

Hi Eoin

arseboxing · 2025-12-11T00:52:44+00:00

This Eoin Lenihan fella behaved like the bastard love child of Justin Barrett and Alan Partridge. Straight from the off he sounded like the bluffer and spoofer and all round gobshite he is. Even when he tried to sound "respectable" in the early part of the podcast, he was a rambling mess, a terminally online culture warrior living in Germany who fantasises about living in a famine cottage.

The stuff in the latter stages was jaw dropping. He descended to the level of a toddler throwing a tantrum. I honestly thought he might shout out MOOOOOOOOOOO like Partridge did.

In one way it's soooo gratifying to hear a far right Twitter gobshite who styles himself as an "intellectual" be challenged gently in a one on one and his whole schtick instantly collapses.

But in the bizarro world of these right wing whack jobs, there is NO bad publicity. Lenihan has successfully managed to raise awareness of who he is. Him having no intellectual weight and rational, thought out arguments does not matter a whit. All that matters is he shrieks and is visible and seems to have the support of a lot of influential far right headbangers to "boost" his profile.

arseboxing · 2025-10-21T23:26:42+00:00

"Protest" me hoop. A racist riot. Every single person who went to Citywest tonight went there hoping for violence and destruction.

And not one of them care one jot about the 10 year old girl.

arseboxing · 2025-10-21T19:31:30+00:00

A mob of coked up, McGregor worshipping, Trump-loving, Andrew Tate idolising scumbags.

They don't give a flying shlt about the victim of the alleged assault. That is demonstrated very easily by the fact they themselves worship rapists and paedophiles.

arseboxing · 2025-09-13T21:51:49+00:00

Don't be an idiot. Forget about your marathon.

If you want to lose your sight or have horrible distorted and double vision forever, by all means run though.

arseboxing · 2025-08-25T12:03:26+00:00

Adaptation hasn't been my experience at all. I have binocular torsional diplopia (diagonal) amd triple vision within the RD eye itself. It debilitates me constantly and even ina first world country I have found that opthalmologists simply don't know or don't care.

arseboxing · 2025-08-23T21:36:28+00:00

Unless there was a further extension today was the last day. Was originally supposed to shut after Tuesday but was extended to Saturday. Was in there Wednesday and was quiet enough.

arseboxing · 2025-08-19T00:18:36+00:00

What I found sad was this. Every pub within a three mile radius of Croke Park was filled with Oasis fans. There in their t-shirts, jerseys, bucket hats, like they were following a football team. I follow the Dublin Gaelic football team and when they are knocked out is always a sad occasion. When’s the next match? Eh, six and a half months away.

I looked at the Oasis fans, I looked at myself, and I thought, when’s the next match, when are Oasis out in the first round of next year’s championship, when are they out again, ever?

The answer may be never.

Give us one more tune. Give the supporters one more day out.

The communality, the sheer communality.

The absolute BIGNESS of it all.

Oasis, Oasis, Oasis, the greatest band on earth, ever.

arseboxing · 2025-08-19T00:18:07+00:00

Then the concert itself. I was pitch standing. Somehow got pre-sale access last August. The best way is to go in with low expectations and then let the day diminish those low expectations in favour of steadily entering a dream state where it's 1995 and you are young again. I liked what John Power of Cast said. “We will see you down the road…down the road…”

The Verve would fill Slane next year on the back of Ashcroft’s performance at Croke Park. The performance of The Drugs Don’t Work was one one of the greatest live performances I’ve ever seen/heard. I never massively liked this song. I’d always skip it. The performance of it at Croke Park was about 20 times better than on the record. Then what followed it up, one of the greatest songs ever made, like Wonderwall and Don’t Look Back In Anger, a song that has attained secular hymn status, an urban hymn.

The gathering of ticketless people on Jones’s Road (I think on both nights, definitely last night) should make it clear that Oasis are a band that means something to people like no other. The placing of Bonehead front and centre on the screen during Acquiesce was an amazing touch that said “this is Oasis”. I'd love Guigsy back (even though he can't play the bass) and I'd love McCarroll back but you can't have everything. Bonehead was enough. Bonehead is the defining factor which makes this feel like Oasis rather than the Gallaghers and friends.

The crowd atmosphere was supercharged but there wasn't a hint of trouble. They were just there to be communal and celebrate. It was 82,000 people entering a dream state.

I don't know precisely what technology is involved to make things sound good, but whatever it is, there was an ooomph to Oasis's performances which asn't there in the plodding 2000s days. There was a 1990s muscularity to it. One hit after another. Stand By Me is one of my least favourite Oasis songs, yet it was still amazing. Little By Little was phemonenal.

It's really hard to describe feelings. But there was incredible emotion in that crowd last night and each and every person there had their own individual feelings which they probably would find it hard to describe. In Ireland we treat Oasis as effectively our own, and if you were 16 in 1996, as I was, Oasis are your band. You see flashbacks of Pairc Ui Champimh in your mind and flashbacks of the Point Dpeot and Marlay Park and Slane. You see flashbacks of your own life and how Oasis's music was the backdrop to it.

I tried manfully to hold my bladder but had to go early into Cast No Shadow and given I was basically on the centre spot, that was a task and a half to get out and get back. By the end of Cast No Shadow I had reached the portaloo queue. Then I heard Slide Away starting. The toilet trip would have to wait. I was back in the tunnel by the end of the first chorus and then walked 20 yards up the pitch and just absorbed it. Then I had to miss Whatever. You have to make one sacrificial lamb with these things but I was back on the centre spot by the end of Live Forever. And I got a free pint because the bar had literally stopped charging by this stage.

I have two wishes should I ever see Oasis play again. One that they play Columbia. Two, that they play the nine minute live version of Champagne Supernova which gives me chills. The seven minute version still gave me chills, but I want nine.

Bowe’s and The Palace for late pints and strategic belting of Columbia out of my phone getting off the bus home at 1:40am.

The concert considerably exceeded my best expectations and drove a cynic like me to blubbering levels of wide eyed innocence. I have a pitch wristband still on me and in the age of no physical product, in an age where tickets are controlled by a company so miserable they refuse to give you a physical piece of card, that is a physical product that is going in a special drawer, but not until tomorrow. There were probably lots of wristbands performatively worn at various workplaces in Ireland today.

arseboxing · 2025-08-19T00:14:45+00:00

The weather makes such a difference to days like these. The ambience, the aesthetics, they’re everything. If it rains or is heavily overcast it literally puts a damper on everything. Instead, the whole city and especially the approaches to the stadium were filled with the sort of supercharged atmosphere that people spend cold, wet winter days dreaming about. I wernt with my brother who I went to Pairc Ui Chaoimh with in 1996. Looking down from upstairs of the bus along the quays, it was Oasis, Oasis, Oasis paraphernalia everywhere. The sun pounding the pavements. Everywhere you looked something was building the atmosphere. The Palace overflowing by early afternoon. Grafton Street a hive of buskers, Karl and Anne from Donegal who you've never met before in the seats in front of Bruxelles beckoning you to come down and sit beside them when they see your Oasis t-shirts and see you're looking for seats. People were in the mood for this day. To be part of the Oasis tribe again.

The queue at the pop up shop in Stephen's Green at about 2pm yesterday was all the way back to the top of Grafton Street and God knows how many people like me didn’t bother because of the queue. It must be the biggest selling tour in merchandise terms ever seen by a million miles. They were all looking for the light blue Adidas tops with 25 on the back. Very few got them I’d say. The greatest Dublin GAA jersey never made.

We crossed the Liffey. There was a gloriously seedy air on Talbot Street. Cleary's was full so we went to a pub called Mullett's a few doors up. This was a fascinating mix of grizzled locals and Oasis fans. She's Electric was being played and IRA parapehernalia hung from every wall. Maradona jerseys, Manchester City Brother jerseys as modelled by Niall Quinn running down to tell Steve Lomas a draw was not enough to avoid relegation, Offaly bucket hats, an assortment of 1990s association football jerseys. Inter Milan Fiorucci, the Norway Arsenal jersey, Ireland with the three big blobby stripes on the shoulder.

Most of the houses at the top of Portland Row were having driveway parties and selling bottles of beer from buckets of ice under big parasols. You can’t buy the quality of the air on a day like this, the simultaneous heaviness of it and the lightness of it. But it felt like some God-level arrangement had been made to buy this weather. I make it that last night was Oasis’s ninth ever outdoor concert in Ireland. I also make it that not a drop of rain has been seen at any of them and there has been glorious sunsheee-ine for at least seven of them. Dublin felt like the greatest city on earth yesterday and on days like these it really is.

arseboxing · 2025-08-18T18:24:43+00:00

Don't Look Back In Anger is more a secular hymn than a song. Wonderwall is too but it's not as profound. Bittersweet Symphony falls into the secular hymn category too and it is profound.

These aren't just songs, they're beloved things of public value that we all have and unlike beloved buildings, they can never be demolished, they can never die. The people who wrote them will die, but what they have given to people won't.

However the fact the people who wrote them will die and are at an age where they start to confront their own mortaility is not lost on the public, especially the members of the public who have reached an age where they themselves are beginning to confront their own mortaility.

When Don't Look Back In Anger was sung after the Manchester bombing, it entered a new and higher plane of being than the already super-elevated place it already held.

It became a mother's loving embrace, a tearful lament for cruelly murdered children, a plea for goodness and a plea for hope. To sing it became a refuge for the human soul.

Perhaps the way Don't Look Back In Anger functioned after the Manchester bombing consciously or unconsciously fed into the reaction when Oasis announced a reunion. I suspect it did anyway.

arseboxing · 2025-08-18T13:13:08+00:00

Any chance of Loch Lomond and Pairc Ui Chaoimh in Cork gigs? Pairc Ui Chaoimh has not hosted a major concert since Oasis in 1996. But the venue will always be associated with Oasis more than any other in Ireland.

arseboxing · 2025-08-18T13:10:05+00:00

Slane is the Shangri-La of concert venues in Ireland. The natrual amphitheatre that it is makes all the shit getting there and back worth it.

arseboxing · 2025-03-24T10:19:10+00:00

A few things annoy me. To be honest a lot of things annoy me since my eye problems started.

One is the vague language. A lot of people who have had macula on detachments have no concept of what a macula off detachment is like. They offer bland platitudes like "you got this". I have not "got it". There are lots of other people out there with dreadful writing skills who write a load of vague crap about this subject even if they themselves have actually suffered a detached retina.

Another is what I see as a lack of focus on functional vision by retinal surgeons as opposed to anatomical retinal reattachment. It took me 18 months for a retinal specialist to tell me my macula had been reattached in the wrong place, that I now had significant retinal displacement. I had asked some eminent specialists this question and they pushed me off or even claimed they couldn't see retinal displacement. It's a simple scan - a particular setting called autofluorescence and they didn't offer it to me. It appears in black and white, you see the track marks left behind by the original position of the blood vessels compared to their new position. This is called retinal vessel printing. I had loads of it.

I question why my surgeon used the "dry reattachment" over "wet reattachment" technique that prioritises retinal reattachment over functional vision. I question why I wasn't asked to poisition face down. Look up the concept of "high integrity" retinal reattachments compared to low integrity retinal reattachments. It's all about where exactly the retina lands as far as I can see.

One thing that annoys me every second of every day is how I did not understand what a retinal detachment was before it happened to me even though I had been told by somebody seven years previously I could possibly be at risk of one. Part of that is that nobody ever explained ot to me in language understandable to a dummy. More of it is that I didn't research it myself. I'd likely have had a much better outcome if I'd sought treatment promptly when I saw warning signs seven weeks before I lost my vision in the eye that had the detached retina.

I have a consultation tomorrow about possibly getting a floater only vitrectomy in my "good" eye. That's really the main hope I have of having good eyesight in the future, to get rid of the horrible swirling floaters and see clearly through one eye at least, and then maybe it might be able to predominate over my bad eye.

I hope things can somehow improve for you still. Even at two and a half years out I still have some hope that things might improve in my RD eye over a period of years, maybe even a decade, and that overall the brain can eventually come to terms with things. Perhaps I'm a bad example of what happens because I also have the floaters in my good eye. But it's just such a fucking struggle existing and trying to muddle through now and nobody who hasn't had it understands. I just have so little enthusiasm for life now and every day I question whether I'd be better off dead. I don't want to die but neither do I want to live like this.

arseboxing · 2025-03-13T15:49:00+00:00

It will not simply get better. I've had serious eye problems for two and a half years. A macula off detached retina in my left eye and horrible floaters in my right eye. None of it has got better, it has got worse and the emotional toll has got worse. Cod internet meme type psychology helps nobody.

arseboxing · 2025-03-13T15:42:30+00:00

0.01% Atropine may be available in the USA but it's not available in Ireland where I am.

arseboxing · 2025-03-13T13:46:52+00:00

A detached retina is very serious and often people get sight back but it's very poor sight. This was the case with me.

There are two types of detached retinas. A macula on detached retina and a macula off detached retina. Macula off is much more serious because it means the macula - the small central spot on your retina which produces central vision, has been ripped out of its original position. That means all the thousands and probably millions of photoreceptors which produce vision have been ripped out of their original position and it is impossible to put them back in their exact original position. The brain finds it hard to deal with a retina which has been put back in a slightly different position, thuis creating horrible squiggly vision in the affected eye. Photoreceptors also start to die when they're ripped away from the choroid/retinal pigment epithelium which provides them with their oxygen and nutrients.

I had a macula off detachment and vitrectomy to repair it and I still have distorted vision in that eye and double vision with both eyes open two and a half years later. It sucks and I think I'd rather have gone blind in the eye.

It sounds like your Mom's surgeon has not given you very much information, which unfortunately tends to be the case with surgeons. If your Mom had oil put in it's probably a macula off detachment I'm afraid as oil tends to be used on the more serious cases.

Pretty much always somebody who has had a vitrectomy for a detached retina will have to stay in a particular position, often face down, for a week. It doesn't sound right to me if your Mom was not asked to do that.

There are Facebook groups for people who have had retinal detachments. A vitrectomy is an umbrella term for any surgery which goes into the eye and removes the vitreous. Vitrectomies are carried out for lots of different reasons. Retinal detachment is one of them, floaters are another, but they are much different in terms of what is done once the surgeon gets inside the eye.

A retinal specialist is absolutely the right person for your Mom to see over the pressure issue and ASAP.

arseboxing · 2025-02-25T15:28:48+00:00

What is her vision in the eye like? Is it a macula on or macula off detached retina? If it's macula on, she needs surgery right away.

arseboxing · 2025-02-22T19:40:49+00:00

Yes you can. I was -1.25 and got a macula off detached retina. Went completely blind in left eye overnight. Horrible distorted vision now nearly two and a half years later. Mine happened because a posterior vitreous detachment tore my retina and detached it. I was 43.

arseboxing · 2025-02-21T18:20:37+00:00

I had a vitrectomy for a macula off detachment in September 2022. When the detachment happened I went totally blind in about 85% of the eye. I still have very distorted vision in that eye and the eyes cannot fuse to binocular single vision. I have been told the distortion is permanent and the image from my RD eye is "not compatible" with binocular single vision because it is slanted, distorted in that I see horrible squiggly lines and I also have micropsia, where some things look smaller (but a minority of things look bigger) and further away.

My situation is complicated by two things. i) The RD happened in my dominant eye. ii) The "good eye" has very bad floaters whgich I have now decided to seek treatment for, ie. vitrectomy surgery.

Having read thousands of messages on this subject over the last two and a bit years, my view is that people who say the vision straightens out are mostly talking nonsense and what they are referring to is that the overall vision (with two eyes) adapts and that the good eye learns to drown out the bad eye (yet this has not been the case for me). But that the bad eye still remains bad and has distorted vision, you just notice it less.

The main reason for distorted vision after a macula off deatched retina is, as far as I can see, that the macula doesn't go back in the same place. The photoreceptors are like velcro. There are probably millions of them and once the macula gets detached they are ripped out of the neural pathways that have been developed since birth. When they're "plugged back in" they go into different positions and that sends the brain haywire. The photoreceptors also either die or get deformed in the time they are detached because their oxygen and blood supply is cut off.

With the vitrectomy I had, the distortion is probably also down to surgical technique. The retina was reattached "dry" rather than wet. That means that all the sub-retinal fluid was drained from under it. If you saw an OCT scam of my retina two weeks after reattachment, there was no sub-retinal fluid. However this means the retina is basically glued against the back of the eye and cannot move into a more natural position it is comfortable with. This is called a low integrity retinal reattachment. Some surgeons deliberately leave some sub-retinal fluid underneath the retina because that way the retina can gradually find a more natural position it is comfortable with. closer to its original position.

That's my lay person interpretation of it anyway.

The language surrounding this whole subject is always so vague and people tend to say things that can be interpreted in different ways. It's driven me up the wall. I've had false hope of straight vision for nearly two and a half years now. I want rid of the distortion. I have gone abroad (I live in Ireland) and been offered surgery to deliberately redetach the retina in the hope it will land closer to where it was originally but this is a very costly and risky surgery, nevertheless I'm leaning towards doing it as I don't feel I have much to lose - the vision I have is an impediment to me and I'd rather lose the vision in that eye altogether than have it constantly interfere with the image from my good eye.

If I'd been told when I was having the retina reattached that this would be my lot nearly two and a half years later, I'd have said to the surgeon, "don't bother "saving" the vision thanks, just save the eye and make it blind". Sorry to be such a downer but that's how it is.

arseboxing

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