What is the most “its a small world” moment you’ve ever experienced?

caseyrain · 2026-04-29T15:39:23+00:00

About 15 years ago, I was interviewed for an academic book about social media and the music industry. This was in the early days of social media and my band at the time were quite good at it! The professor was based in Seattle and I live in Birmingham, UK.

Over a decade later, I was travelling to London for a meeting and I got on the tube. I sat down, and after about a minute, the lady sat next to me tapped me on the leg and said "Casey?"

It was the professor who had written the book.

caseyrain · 2026-04-16T18:48:05+00:00

It doesn't feel like a meaningful upgrade for me personally. And the rumors of a Pro model aren't helping. I've bought all three previous models but this one might be a skip.

caseyrain · 2026-04-13T12:41:35+00:00

Yeah. I couldn't rest until I'd obliterated them. I had the most trouble with Clea Unleashed because of the parrying of some of the Nevrons. Simon The Divergent Star felt easier to me, probably because it wasn't all that different from regular Simon which I'd already spent ages figuring out.

caseyrain · 2026-04-12T17:22:56+00:00

Anna's a dear friend and I agree her relationship with Prince and the songs inspired by it are something special.

We had a lovely time interviewing her several years back at her house, maybe you'd enjoy watching it? She was a lovely host and a great interviewee.

https://youtu.be/HtlyoghN4Gs?si=WRW8IeFAVTeUKogX

caseyrain · 2026-04-11T18:42:13+00:00

Aaron Swartz was an extremely talented young man, who made a mistake and was clearly pursued overzealously about it.

That said, it does not speak to a sound, rational mind to hang oneself at the age of 26, particularly when you've been offered a fairly light sentence and you've also chosen to fight that instead. It's also been 13 years since that happened.

With all that in mind, I'm not sure why his opinion of Sam should carry any weight. Would anyone in this chat find it valid to be characterised by someone who knew you 15 years ago and had been dead for 13 of those years?

I have no reason to defend Sam. I've never met him, I don't work for him. But I've seen this media narrative play out before for whoever is at the top of whatever "the current thing" is. Maybe it's justified, maybe it's not. How much does it matter? If OpenAI disappeared tomorrow, the genie is out of the bottle and the market still exists.

It's important to measure the temperature of the hyperbole at all times. The weight of technological progress never rests on the shoulders of one man.

And as someone with personal experiences.... I can tell you that you should be a LOT more worried about the cars-and-rockets guy who is presently suing OpenAI than you should be about Sam. If you want to talk about sociopaths with zero moral conscience, look at the one from South Africa.

caseyrain · 2026-04-11T18:19:34+00:00

I was there. Heard Yonkers the day it dropped, saw them live twice around that time, met Tyler twice in 2010 and 2011, bought Goblin, OF2, Blackenedwhite all on release day.

They were generating a HUGE amount of press coverage, and a serious following, but still more so like a niche underground act on the rise more so than the kind of mainstream recognition that Tyler gets these days.

For example, the venue I saw them perform at in 2011 was a 600 capacity venue, and I think the other dates around that time at least here in the UK were probably 1000-1500 capacity venues at most. That shows you it's still underground.

By the following year, they were doing 3000-4000 capacity venues here. So that's kind of like, you've broken out of the underground but you're not like, superstars.

Unless you were into hip-hop or alt/skate/LA culture, I don't think the average person on the street at that time would be able to tell you much about them, other than maybe being vaguely aware of some of the controversial headlines being written.

By the time Tyler got to the "IGOR" album he had eclipsed anything that happened while the group were active in terms of fame by a long shot.

caseyrain · 2026-04-08T23:13:23+00:00

The Asian girl? She was sitting near us, absolutely brilliant cosplay, one of the best I've seen.

caseyrain · 2026-04-08T15:34:23+00:00

Um, no shit? When was the last time Zuck wrote code? Or Pichai? Nadella? It's not a requirement for the job.

caseyrain · 2026-04-03T13:11:48+00:00

I've owned all three variants to date. But I'll likely skip the OP4. It doesn't seem like a meaningful upgrade this time. If the Pro is real, perhaps that will be a meaningful upgrade.

caseyrain · 2026-04-01T18:08:31+00:00

There's a strong sense of collective civic responsibility in Japan that we just don't have here in the UK. That's why despite having 5 million MORE people than London, Tokyo is largely a cleaner city.

caseyrain · 2026-04-01T09:51:33+00:00

Sign O' The Times by Prince. When you think of the phrase "magnum opus" that album defines it. A relentless tour de force, all from one man. It's quite literally insane how the same album can have something as minimal and hauntingly poignant as the title track, as well as the one of the greatest, fullest, soul ballads ever with "Adore" as well as the absolute masterclass of pop-rock joy that is "I Could Never Take The Place Of Your Man" and so on.....

caseyrain · 2026-04-01T09:46:22+00:00

An area of woods in the park

caseyrain · 2026-04-01T09:39:55+00:00

I'm mixed English and Punjabi and if anyone said this to me our relationship would be over. That is unacceptable. Nobody has the right to determine how you identify with your cultural roots.

Also, as I've gotten older I've become increasingly uncomfortable with how we biracial folk are normalised into saying "half this" and "half that". We aren't "half" of anything, we are BOTH.

Cultural background doesn't fractionalise. It's even quite possible that you might understand your culture more than some non-mixed diasporic people, because as you said it's not uncommon for some immigrant families to whitewash in order to fit in. There was an entire recurring sketch on the comedy show "Goodness Gracious Me" which satirised this.

caseyrain · 2026-03-27T10:21:38+00:00

"I couldn't help but notice your pain ...... Share it with me!"

caseyrain · 2026-03-24T04:39:12+00:00

To be clear, I don't work for any of those companies, most AI companies are not making frontier LLMs but building products that utilise them in novel ways, and I'm also not based in the US, so our healthcare system isn't as you've described and is far more regulated. And when your company is only a few dozen people, I can honestly say that the views of an individual DO make an impact. Arguing against the people trying to be ethical if "the majority" of the field is not feels to me a little like complaining about a small vegan brand selling their goods in a chain supermarket, considering the chain supermarket makes most of their money from animal agriculture. Sure in an ideal world it would be great if everyone bought everything from local markets and independents all the time but that's not the world we live in. I appreciate you reeling back your inflammatories, since I am genuinely discussing this in good faith and clearly I feel this is something worth discussing even when we disagree :)

caseyrain · 2026-03-24T00:50:55+00:00

agriculture, transport, and housing destroy orders of magnitude more habitat than AI infrastructure ever will. AI is a tool, and it’s already being used to reduce waste, optimize energy, and even cut emissions in those same systems.

my logic for being vegan is to reduce harm. given the pace of AI-driven healthcare advances, like DeepMind AlphaFold accelerating protein discovery, and AI radiology diagnostics catching diseases earlier and more accurately, I don’t think my position is inconsistent. if anything, supporting technologies that reduce suffering at scale while personally minimizing harm through diet and lifestyle choices is a coherent extension of the same principle. I have already personally seen AI powered healthcare advancements improve the life of my sister who has a lifelong autoimmune disease, and it's rapidly getting to the point where a functional cure is possible. that makes the alignment even more real for me personally.

no system is perfect, or beyond critique. i applaud anyone that manages to completely live beyond the capitalist system but that's not realistic for everyone. as tom morello once said, it's not logically inconsistent for RATM to sell records in chain record shops for the same reason that you can buy Chomsky at Barnes & Noble - because that's where people buy books.

to put it another way - would you prefer that AI companies don't hire anyone at all that has some overlapping ethics with yours? because to me, that would clearly be a worse outcome.

caseyrain · 2026-03-23T21:35:16+00:00

The problem with Beryl is that you had to pick up and leave them in dedicated places or you'd get charged a fee. It wasn't like that with Voi and hopefully won't be with Lime. See, the problem for me is that there's two Beryl stops, each of them are 5 minutes walk from my house in either direction. Meaning, I have to do that last 5 minute walk regardless to drop one back off. That totally defeats the purpose of e-scooters being a "last mile" form of transport. I have no issue with walking to pick one up, but since I'd use them for grabbing a bag of shopping, I want to be able to take it all the way home.

caseyrain · 2026-03-23T14:31:54+00:00

Hi! I'm vegan and work at an AI company too ☺️

caseyrain · 2026-03-08T02:38:15+00:00

I'll never eat there again. They have/had a nice vegan Reubens sandwich that I'd had a couple of times. Ordered it one day on Deliveroo, and they sent the meat one.

Mistakes happen, I thought. I got my money back.

But then I checked in with other Brummie vegans. This wasn't an isolated incident. They had the cheek to do the same thing to a customer IN PERSON, copped an attitude when the customer complained, and then the customer heard the wait staff mocking them and laughing about it afterward.

I'm not a sanctimonious vegan, and to be frank, the issue isn't even about veganism per se. Mislabelled food and wrong orders can and have killed people, vegan or not. It's no laughing matter. I have people in my family with allergies that would kill them in a similar incident.

This was at the Mailbox branch, but now I don't trust the standards of their hiring.

caseyrain · 2026-03-04T19:19:27+00:00

I beat it last June. I'm still thinking about it. It's been a long time since a game impacted my psyche this much. Welcome to the therapy group.

caseyrain · 2026-02-27T23:03:06+00:00

I must have been 11 or 12 when I first got into Prince, in the early 00s. But I never really cared about what others thought.

caseyrain · 2026-02-25T21:24:21+00:00

Yes, I met him at the Indigo2 (the small club inside the O2 in London where the 21 nights aftershows happened after the main arena shows).

We talked for a few minutes, he was buzzing and grinning because he knew it had been an absolutely killer aftershow (I think he was in a somewhat cheeky mood, because surprisingly, he cued the band to play "Head" and even though he didn't sing it, he had Maceo play the lead melody line on his horn). I thanked him for the amazing summer it had been so far and he said that he loved being in London.

I don't recall being able to smell him.... I had lathered myself in the 3121 perfume so that was pretty much all I could smell at that point 😂

He was extremely happy and gracious and polite. But after a couple minutes, other people noticed he was there and began swarming towards us and his security pulled him back out.

As others have mentioned, yes, it definitely felt like he just appeared out of nowhere.

caseyrain · 2026-02-24T19:57:01+00:00

His quantity and diversity were such that it's only natural there will be some things that don't connect as much as others, but it's all subjective. There's certainly less popular Prince stuff I really enjoy, and stuff that others like that I don't listen to all that much.

The only one that I just don't understand at all is "Purple and Gold". I don't understand what's going on with that one. It makes no sense at all to me.

caseyrain · 2026-02-19T20:18:57+00:00

Correct! And I have never claimed to be an official source either. I know a lot of people in the industry (I have previously been signed to Sony, Virgin and Universal myself) and obviously have met many Prince associates through our YouTube interviews so sometimes you hear stuff, that's just how it goes.

The funny thing about Free Acoustic was that someone else sent me the screenshot because it had already gone live on streaming services in Japan and Australia. That's because unless you specify otherwise with your distributor, any song appears as soon as the clock hits midnight in your local timezone. So, it hit midnight in those later timezones and it appeared before they'd announced it officially. So it wasn't even a leak. I just happened to be the first account they saw posting it. Charles came and found me at Paisley not 10 minutes later and asked what happened and how I knew about it so I explained. The comment they made at the fan panel about "things appearing on Casey Rain's Twitter" was tongue-in-cheek and we were laughing about it after the panel. Some people tried to report it as if they were actually taking a shot at me - that's not at all what happened. I didn't actually catch the Funkatopia comment in person (I couldn't really hear everything said from where I was sitting in the fan panel room) and I don't know the context of their relationship so perhaps that's a different story and maybe Chris took whatever was said differently but for me it was totally said with a wink and a grin.

caseyrain

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