#(GOOD+PROFESSIONAL ARTISTS + MERCH Artists DO EXIST!!! YOU JUST HAVE TO FIND THEM + reach OUT TO THEM!!!!)

[diarrheaworldstarhiphop]

In late November, the Justice Department unsealed indictments against eight people accused of fleecing advertisers of $36 million in two of the largest digital ad-fraud operations ever uncovered. Digital advertisers tend to want two things: people to look at their ads and “premium” websites — i.e., established and legitimate publications — on which to host them. The two schemes at issue in the case, dubbed Methbot and 3ve by the security researchers who found them, faked both. Hucksters infected 1.7 million computers with malware that remotely directed traffic to “spoofed” websites — “empty websites designed for bot traffic” that served up a video ad purchased from one of the internet’s vast programmatic ad-exchanges, but that were designed, according to the indictments, “to fool advertisers into thinking that an impression of their ad was served on a premium publisher site,” like that of Vogue or The Economist. Views, meanwhile, were faked by malware-infected computers with marvelously sophisticated techniques to imitate humans: bots “faked clicks, mouse movements, and social network login information to masquerade as engaged human consumers.” Some were sent to browse the internet to gather tracking cookies from other websites, just as a human visitor would have done through regular behavior. Fake people with fake cookies and fake social-media accounts, fake-moving their fake cursors, fake-clicking on fake websites — the fraudsters had essentially created a simulacrum of the internet, where the only real things were the ads.

How much of the internet is fake? Studies generally suggest that, year after year, less than 60 percent of web traffic is human; some years, according to some researchers, a healthy majority of it is bot. For a period of time in 2013, the Times reported this year, a full half of YouTube traffic was “bots masquerading as people,” a portion so high that employees feared an inflection point after which YouTube’s systems for detecting fraudulent traffic would begin to regard bot traffic as real and human traffic as fake. They called this hypothetical event “the Inversion.”

In the future, when I look back from the high-tech gamer jail in which President PewDiePie will have imprisoned me, I will remember 2018 as the year the internet passed the Inversion, not in some strict numerical sense, since bots already outnumber humans online more years than not, but in the perceptual sense. The internet has always played host in its dark corners to schools of catfish and embassies of Nigerian princes, but that darkness now pervades its every aspect: Everything that once seemed definitively and unquestionably real now seems slightly fake; everything that once seemed slightly fake now has the power and presence of the real. The “fakeness” of the post-Inversion internet is less a calculable falsehood and more a particular quality of experience — the uncanny sense that what you encounter online is not “real” but is also undeniably not “fake,” and indeed may be both at once, or in succession, as you turn it over in your head.

The metrics are fake.                        

Take something as seemingly simple as how we measure web traffic. Metrics should be the most real thing on the internet: They are countable, trackable, and verifiable, and their existence undergirds the advertising business that drives our biggest social and search platforms. Yet not even Facebook, the world’s greatest data–gathering organization, seems able to produce genuine figures. In October, small advertisers filed suit against the social-media giant, accusing it of covering up, for a year, its significant overstatements of the time users spent watching videos on the platform (by 60 to 80 percent, Facebook says; by 150 to 900 percent, the plaintiffs say). According to an exhaustive list at MarketingLand, over the past two years Facebook has admitted to misreporting the reach of posts on Facebook Pages (in two different ways), the rate at which viewers complete ad videos, the average time spent reading its “Instant Articles,” the amount of referral traffic from Facebook to external websites, the number of views that videos received via Facebook’s mobile site, and the number of video views in Instant Articles.

Can we still trust the metrics? After the Inversion, what’s the point? Even when we put our faith in their accuracy, there’s something not quite real about them: My favorite statistic this year was Facebook’s claim that 75 million people watched at least a minute of Facebook Watch videos every day — though, as Facebook admitted, the 60 seconds in that one minute didn’t need to be watched consecutively. Real videos, real people, fake minutes.

The people are fake.                        

And maybe we shouldn’t even assume that the people are real. Over at YouTube, the business of buying and selling video views is “flourishing,” as the Times reminded readers with a lengthy investigation in August. The company says only “a tiny fraction” of its traffic is fake, but fake subscribers are enough of a problem that the site undertook a purge of “spam accounts” in mid-December. These days, the Times found, you can buy 5,000 YouTube views — 30 seconds of a video counts as a view — for as low as $15; oftentimes, customers are led to believe that the views they purchase come from real people. More likely, they come from bots. On some platforms, video views and app downloads can be forged in lucrative industrial counterfeiting operations. If you want a picture of what the Inversion looks like, find a video of a “click farm”: hundreds of individual smartphones, arranged in rows on shelves or racks in professional-looking offices, each watching the same video or downloading the same app.

This is obviously not real human traffic. But what would real human traffic look like? The Inversion gives rise to some odd philosophical quandaries: If a Russian troll using a Brazilian man’s photograph to masquerade as an American Trump supporter watches a video on Facebook, is that view “real”? Not only do we have bots masquerading as humans and humans masquerading as other humans, but also sometimes humans masquerading as bots, pretending to be “artificial-intelligence personal assistants,” like Facebook’s “M,” in order to help tech companies appear to possess cutting-edge AI. We even have whatever CGI Instagram influencer Lil Miquela is: a fake human with a real body, a fake face, and real influence. Even humans who aren’t masquerading can contort themselves through layers of diminishing reality: The Atlantic reports that non-CGI human influencers are posting fake sponsored content — that is, content meant to look like content that is meant to look authentic, for free — to attract attention from brand reps, who, they hope, will pay them real money.

The businesses are fake.                        

The money is usually real. Not always — ask someone who enthusiastically got into cryptocurrency this time last year — but often enough to be an engine of the Inversion. If the money is real, why does anything else need to be? Earlier this year, the writer and artist Jenny Odell began to look into an Amazon reseller that had bought goods from other Amazon resellers and resold them, again on Amazon, at higher prices. Odell discovered an elaborate network of fake price-gouging and copyright-stealing businesses connected to the cultlike Evangelical church whose followers resurrected Newsweek in 2013 as a zombie search-engine-optimized spam farm. She visited a strange bookstore operated by the resellers in San Francisco and found a stunted concrete reproduction of the dazzlingly phony storefronts she’d encountered on Amazon, arranged haphazardly with best-selling books, plastic tchotchkes, and beauty products apparently bought from wholesalers. “At some point I began to feel like I was in a dream,” she wrote. “Or that I was half-awake, unable to distinguish the virtual from the real, the local from the global, a product from a Photoshop image, the sincere from the insincere.”

                                       The content is fake.                        

The only site that gives me that dizzying sensation of unreality as often as Amazon does is YouTube, which plays host to weeks’ worth of inverted, inhuman content. TV episodes that have been mirror-flipped to avoid copyright takedowns air next to huckster vloggers flogging merch who air next to anonymously produced videos that are ostensibly for children. An animated video of Spider-Man and Elsa from Frozen riding tractors is not, you know, not real: Some poor soul animated it and gave voice to its actors, and I have no doubt that some number (dozens? Hundreds? Millions? Sure, why not?) of kids have sat and watched it and found some mystifying, occult enjoyment in it. But it’s certainly not “official,” and it’s hard, watching it onscreen as an adult, to understand where it came from and what it means that the view count beneath it is continually ticking up.

These, at least, are mostly bootleg videos of popular fictional characters, i.e., counterfeit unreality. Counterfeit reality is still more difficult to find—for now. In January 2018, an anonymous Redditor created a relatively easy-to-use desktop-app implementation of “deepfakes,” the now-infamous technology that uses artificial-intelligence image processing to replace one face in a video with another — putting, say, a politician’s over a porn star’s. A recent academic paper from researchers at the graphics-card company Nvidia demonstrates a similar technique used to create images of computer-generated “human” faces that look shockingly like photographs of real people. (Next time Russians want to puppeteer a group of invented Americans on Facebook, they won’t even need to steal photos of real people.) Contrary to what you might expect, a world suffused with deepfakes and other artificially generated photographic images won’t be one in which “fake” images are routinely believed to be real, but one in which “real” images are routinely believed to be fake — simply because, in the wake of the Inversion, who’ll be able to tell the difference?

                                       Our politics are fake.                        

Such a loss of any anchoring “reality” only makes us pine for it more. Our politics have been inverted along with everything else, suffused with a Gnostic sense that we’re being scammed and defrauded and lied to but that a “real truth” still lurks somewhere. Adolescents are deeply engaged by YouTube videos that promise to show the hard reality beneath the “scams” of feminism and diversity — a process they call “red-pilling” after the scene in The Matrix when the computer simulation falls away and reality appears. Political arguments now involve trading accusations of “virtue signaling” — the idea that liberals are faking their politics for social reward — against charges of being Russian bots. The only thing anyone can agree on is that everyone online is lying and fake.

                                       We ourselves are fake.                        

Which, well. Everywhere I went online this year, I was asked to prove I’m a human. Can you retype this distorted word? Can you transcribe this house number? Can you select the images that contain a motorcycle? I found myself prostrate daily at the feet of robot bouncers, frantically showing off my highly developed pattern-matching skills — does a Vespa count as a motorcycle, even? — so I could get into nightclubs I’m not even sure I want to enter. Once inside, I was directed by dopamine-feedback loops to scroll well past any healthy point, manipulated by emotionally charged headlines and posts to click on things I didn’t care about, and harried and hectored and sweet-talked into arguments and purchases and relationships so algorithmically determined it was hard to describe them as real.

Where does that leave us? I’m not sure the solution is to seek out some pre-Inversion authenticity — to red-pill ourselves back to “reality.” What’s gone from the internet, after all, isn’t “truth,” but trust: the sense that the people and things we encounter are what they represent themselves to be. Years of metrics-driven growth, lucrative manipulative systems, and unregulated platform marketplaces, have created an environment where it makes more sense to be fake online — to be disingenuous and cynical, to lie and cheat, to misrepresent and distort — than it does to be real. Fixing that would require cultural and political reform in Silicon Valley and around the world, but it’s our only choice. Otherwise we’ll all end up on the bot internet of fake people, fake clicks, fake sites, and fake computers, where the only real thing is the ads.

#technology #technocapital #acceleration

[grad701-katie-shepherd]

Formative Feedback

Negative/dumb

Note 1 Branding is cool, but a little standard – is there a way to make it pop/more contemporary? Is Bauhaus overused? Will you include all-gender toilets? The dash marketing is a good avenue!   Social media is a good outcome. Merch is cool but can you be more original? See the Gen Less tote bag/backpack.   Sketches are cool! Clear. AT lite; ooh nice logo!   Commute: it takes me 1 – 1.5 hrs to get from Glen Eden to AUT on bus/train/bus. Not too bad; faster in some ways than car. Agree need more trains, trams, or light rail etc. Investigation: excellent focus question. Have you seen the murals on the trains? Stop, look, listen by Floc etc.

Note 2 Would love a light rail. Designing and selling merch where 100% of the profits go towards the construction of the rail will not bode well with 90% of residents and would piss a lot of people off. Taxpayer dollars are already spent towards these projects and people who are hardworking will not spend their additional leftover income on this. Particularly when transport projects are always delayed, and the cost is always more than the proposed budget. Shouldn’t the t-shirts go toward a social initiative? Or something that’s giving back to the communities.  

Note 3   In a design sense, would it not be more beneficial to create a new logo/company as Auckland's transport, rather than slapping ‘Lite’ at the end”?

Note 4 So, you’re advertising an already planned council project? What part of the visuals are authentically your own? The logo and visuals of maps and trains are council property, aren’t they? BE CAREFUL WITH PLAGERISM!!!

Note 5 How are you working around the expanse of the money issue? It would close much more than people could give, and would the money end up towards the train?

Note 6 Seems to be quite similar to AT. Perhaps you could use another name with the same idea? Love the designs!  

Note 7 Auckland topography (landscape) has so many hills and dips, how would you work around this? Also, areas of land/under buildings aren’t structurally sound to move Research that for more blog posts, haha :)

Constructive Feedback

Note 1 “Stuart Hall. Talks beautifully about modernism in terms of society.”

Note 2   “Instead of Bauhaus a very European and German design style why not make decisions to incorporate NZ landscape/Maori designs/patterns to make it unique and different to the rest of the world.”

Note 3   “Paula Scher did New York train lines  - interesting and timeless designs” “Clean design and very well thought out campaign.” “helpful to have all output supporting each other”

Note 4 “Possibly make sure you identify if this is your personal campaign or a contribution towards the pre-existing light rail project”

Note 5 Could make the train more colourful.

Note 6 Really need to sell it to people.

Note 7 Essential to locate in the now – the lauding and the collective information. Selling the idea to the public on getting funded How are you asking the population to participate? What do you want to know from the audience? Have you seen the train signage for the stop and look campaign? Collaboration with artists? An idea is to bring nature into the design of the trains, showing kiwis it’s a more eco way of traveling.

Note 8   Make sure that the designs are completely different to refresh the appeal to the new train love the app idea.

Note 9   Way finding could investigate augmented reality.  

Note 10 And the film on Helvetica that shows NY subway.

Note 11 If you use “...” you need a page to reference it properly

Note 12 Check the brand and infographics of London underground.

Note 13 Check if it is not too much in terms of outcomes it is quite a lot. Have you reached out to AT? They will have lots of info to help you and permission to use their logo. The outcomes are very thought through and cover all important aspects and some fun additions like the app.

Note 14 Agreed! Taking the bus takes so long! Really like your proposed visual styleHave you contacted the team working on the lite rail? They might give you some interesting insights.

Note 15  It’s easy to say that AT-lite will be more reliable and efficient but how can you make people believe this? Maybe through experiments from the game/app”

Positive Feedback

Note 1 Good job on the thorough research. As someone who often uses public transport, I’m very interested in your project. Looking forward to the final outcome.

Note 2 Really like the Bauhaus inspiration + look of your campaign – really well thought out.

Note 3 Well thought out project; the different design artefacts will work well together. Bauhaus style will work well with the goal for the project.

Note 4 Love the imagery and motion graphics

Note 5 I really like the combination of transport to design

Note 6 I really like the logo ideas.  

Note 7 Great concept sketches. Love that you guys went in depth with what you will be creating. Allows audience to understand well. It’s smart how you’ve used a simple, clean art movement for your aesthetic.

Note 8  Love the topic, Auckland Transport sucks and needs to be improved. I liked the poster series of the trains getting closer – simple but eye catching. Very professional looking.

Note 9 “Very well thought out design outcomes, can’t wait to see them.”

Note 10 “Very creative idea :)”

Note 11 “Presentation was super clear and well laid out, great topic and choice of artefacts.”

Note 12 “Well contextualised and good research.”

Note 13 “Love the design problem. Great way to give yourselves a nice baseline for design but also has enough gaps for you to design for.”

Note 14 “Very interesting, you are idealists, and the world needs more people like you.”

Note 15 “Cody, you opened well!!”

Note 16 “Well planned presentation, all of you spoke concisely and confident.”

Note 17 “Bauhaus design I think will work very well with your topic and help all your artefacts look cohesive.”

Note 18 “Wooow, I wish public transport was faster and more reliable. Sometimes it takes me nearly 3 hours to get home from uni. Love living in Pukekohe :) Your campaign looks like it is going to be sick! All of your inspo looks cool. Can’t really think of any feedback, just make sure you don’t over commit yourself, so you are happy with your final outcomes!”

Note 19  “Love the examples of driving times from each area.Like how you had graphs as part of your research.

Note 20 Love how you included logo design development + storyboards.Love the train wrap idea!

Note 21 Like how you’re using Bauhaus as inspiration”.

Note 22 “Great research! Really supporting why you chose to undertake this project.

Note 23 “Great research. Easy to understand”

Group Reflection

As a group, we organised and discussed the different areas of feedback for which we received.

In terms of negative feedback, there were some concerns around the overused nature of Bauhaus. However, our research supports our decision for this influence given its success throughout history and within railway designs around the globe. There was a suggestion to possibly look into more Maori native patterns and relate it more to NZ culture. Currently there is a lot of Maori culture used as a differentiation point for branding and systems in New Zealand however so we feel that perhaps our researched visual approach could be more refreshing and applicable. This could still be further discussed. And/or investigated if deemed relevant at a later stage (future thinking?). There was also some additional negative feedback, which we discussed; however, this was possibly feedback coming from a place where there was a lack of understanding.

There was then also feedback around our branding and how it would sit alongside AT. There was nervousness for the possible plagiarism of their branding, confusion around whether we were a separate brand/campaign to this system etc. We have considered this in-depth and made the decision to sit as an integrated brand with AT given the credibility it would give the brand. Additionally, the system plan is already existing, and it sits with AT so to ensure that our project is feasible we are approaching it in this way. Furthermore, we also believe there may have been some miscommunication where some of our peers may have thought the logo, we presented was the existing branding for AT lite when in fact it was logo we are currently developing. “In a design sense, would it not be more beneficial to create a new logo/company as Auckland's transport, rather than slapping ‘Lite’ at the end”?

Additionally, some feedback questioned the engagement of the logo as well as how considered simply “slapping lite on the end of AT” was. However, this was a researched approach based on existing AT branding methods e.g. AT. Metro etc. Additionally, there is the presence of an icon, which was not emphasised enough in our presentation. It is currently still in development, and this will be considered. There was only a couple of negative comments around the branding however, which allowed them to be heavily overweighed by the considered positive feedback around the same things. Additionally, we take confidence in our supporting research and development for our approach still.  

Feedback also raised the concept of feasibility. It asked us to consider the infostructure around the topographical landscape of Auckland as well as how we could ensure the system is faster etc. However, this is something we originally began approaching in the early stages only to realise, based on extensive research, feedback, and discussion, to be an approach, which is not so applicable for us Graphic Designers. Hence, we are well research in taking an approach of campaigning and branding around getting people to engage with this new system. The operational nature and funding are a responsibility held by Auckland Transport. This is currently just a concept that will be developed over the coming five years.

Despite the negative/constructive feedback given above, there was still an overwhelming amount of support for our project. People recognised the need for improvement to Auckland’s transport systems, discussing with us their own negative experiences with travel within the city. They felt we were well research with a clear focus point, and many appreciated the Bauhaus influence and basis for our projects visual approach. There was a lot of enjoyment for the range of design outcomes and how they would interconnect.

Moving forward, there are some additional points of reference/interest suggested to us as bullet-pointed below:

- Paula Scher - New York train lines and their interesting and timeless design - Stuart Hall - talks beautifully about modernism in terms of society - Helvetica film that shows NY subway - Brand and infographics of London underground - Reaching out to AT and/or the team currently working on the light rail -  -  -(something we are already currently considering)  - Investigation of augmented reality for wayfinding - Train signage for the stop and look campaign - collaboration with artists like Flox

Overall, the feedback we received for our formative presentation was supportive and encouraging for us moving forward, providing us with possible points of research and design direction.

[noiseartists]

Shoegaze, Dreampop And Nugaze: The Facebook Group

Shoegaze, Dreampop And Nugaze is a Facebook group created by Kevin Cleary. The group is arguably the biggest one on Facebook counting over 40 000 members. Noise Artists meets the moderators.

How long have you been and admin for this group?

Mark: I joined the group back in January 2019 and joined the admin team shortly after as a mod so i'm the new kid on the block.

Darren: For several years now. Too long to remember when it all started.

Kev: I created Shoegaze, Dreampop & Nugaze in 2009. My reasoning at the time was to find bands that kept the shoegaze candle burning (damn that sounds cheesy, lol). Acts such as Airiel, Ides of space, Resplandor, the Meeting Places, Astrobrite, Mystery Machine, etc.

Nico: I can’t remember, I got asked maybe a year and a half ago? What are the perks of being an admin?

Mark: Meeting all the cool bands and fans.

Darren: To be able give a platform for new bands to be heard and discovered by a new audience.

Kev: Over the years I've become a bit introverted, don't belong to a band and not hitting shows the way I once did (Dad life). The biggest perk is the music that I would never have discovered otherwise and the friendships that have developed. No gaze orgies, groupies, monetary benefit, drugs, etc. Maybe things would have been different if this was 1993, lol.

Nico: I guess, it’s like running a fanzine back in the days? it’s a lot of work for very little reward but you do it cause you like music more than anything else

What are the drawbacks of being and admin?

Mark: Dealing with disputes and arguments on the group. Why cant we all just get along people?

Darren: Having to moderate the troublemakers and haters.

Kev: "Why did you delete my Radiohead post?!Facist!!!!" It hasn't been all that easy and trust me, the page burns me out at times. Pet peeves include, getting tagged in a post bashing the group, reading a post from a FB friend, "sorry Kev, but the page....." A lot goes into running a page with over 45,000 members! Thank the Gods for the current (Darren, Mark & Nico) and past mods.

At some point we got in a war with WHIRR, which apparently wasn't the band but someone moderating their social media.

Oh shit, the whole Pranav Agrawal thing!

Where to even start with that one?! Pranav was a professional English swimmer, living in India with his boyfriend Matt. Yes. He was one of seven of us managing the page.

We were a tight bunch, often chatting several days a week. He was an integral part of the page, with great ideas and input. Things got weird when one of the mods forwarded a google image of a professional swimmer Daniel Goodfellow. Pranav had created this entire persona based on the swimmer! We called him out and poof, just like that, he was gone! Keyer Soze style.

Nico: Oh definitely the people with zero social skills and a lot of issues who are desperate for attention but know only how to seek it in negative ways. They clearly need to be educated but you can’t do that publicly because they want the attention so the only way to deal with them is to not give them any, delete, block, gone. Is there any perks? groupies? drugs? free music? 😉

Mark: The only "perk" i've had so far is some boudouir snaps of my fellow mod Nico Beatastic! I still havent slept since seeing them.

Darren: I occasionally get free music. People often reach out to me directly to share music that they feel I'll enjoy.

Kev: Ehhhh, not so much for a 46 year old married dad like me. The free music that group members send me! Ooooo, I listen to it all and totally appreciate it. Another perk is hearing or reading about the page in a positive light. Nico: the true perk is having Mark to send my boudoir pics to, I know he truly appreciates them.

What do you like best about the group?

Mark: The community spirit. The shoegaze community is incredibly tightknit and supportive.

Darren: Always being turned on to new music and forgotten treasures.

Kev: The music I've discovered and friendships that I've made over the last decade. Wow, talk about generic answers! There was a time when Darren, Rayanne, Greg, Romini, Liam, Pranav and I would drunk message for hours most every Friday/ Saturday. Mind you, we were all in different time zones. Those were fun times!

Nico: when shoegaze started it was called the scene that celebrates itself, people were supportive of each other, I think that’s mostly the case, also it’s never been about who’s got the biggest one (it’s Mark) , there’s no macho bullshit.

What do you like the least about the group?

Mark: The posts that begin, Its not shoegaze but.... or What is the most shoegaze <insert inanimate object here>. Wasn't funny the first time, not funny now. Stop it

Darren: Just because some music has elements of shoegaze or exists on its peripheral, doesn't make it shoegaze. It's hard to draw the line sometimes and that comes from someone who's been listening to this music for 30 years, let alone for people who are new to shoegaze.

Kev: Damn, if I let the cat out of the bag it will invite in hundreds of trolls! Like the teenage British invasion of 2015. Darren is the only mod who was around at that time and it SUCKED!! So my lips are sealed on this one.

Nico: the little wars, the negativity, the group is meant to post music you like, no diss music you hate. If you don’t have anything nice to say , don’t say anything.

If you could have anyone join the group, who would it be and why?

Mark: Kevin Shields of My Bloody Valentine for he is our lord and father. All hail the Kev!

Darren: Erik Blood. He's my favorite producer and has had a hand in recording/producing/creating/performing some of the best music from the Pacific Northwest for years.

Kev: We've had quite a few genre icons come and go throughout the years. Rachel and Emma were both members until they were called out in numerous posts. I was blown away when the lead of my favorite band joined several years ago!

Nico: I’d have my fave musician ever, Billy Corgan

Who should be an admin?

Mark: Elliott Frazer from Ringo Deathstarr as i inadvertantly removed him from the group. That would let him get his revenge on me.lol

Darren: Someone who loves music, music debate, and has an insatiable hunger to hear and discover new music.

Kev: Easy; Darren, Mark and Nico! Now i'm going to try and name everyone who has helped moderate the page over the years. Rayanne Die, Vic Winters, Dean Bromley, Steven Webb, Romini, Mike Contreras, Liam Doyle, Greg Wilson, Krissy Vanderwoude.

Nico: Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson, Nick Cave, Henry Rollins. You can’t mess with them and they’re good with words. I’d love to have The Rock turn his boot sideways and stick it someone’s arse when they make a homophobic/racist/rude/mean comment.

Who should never be an admin?

Mark: Anyone who posts Its not shoegaze but.... or Whats the most shoegaze <insert inamimate object here>.

Darren: Someone who is thin-skinned.

Kev: Anyone not ready to put time into building and maintaining. I'm grateful that we have a great team running the page now and for all of the past admins.

Nico: I agree with Darren.

What is the sweetest thing you've seen happen in the group?

Mark: I seen a member post that they had just had a bad break up with their partner and was looking for tunes to cheer them up. The comments below that post were 100% supportive and full of some of the best music. It was testament to the family vibe we are proud to have on the group.

Darren: I've seen small unknown bands and musicians grow into being leaders of the scene that celebrates itself.

Kev: Krissy Vanderwoude and Andy Jossi collaborating! Two phenomenal musicians. I also love seeing obscure, unknown bands grow in part due to this group.

Nico: I think each time anyone posts a band they like, it’s an act of communion with the world , we share what we want so we can improve other people’s lives and that my friends is what life should be about.

Have any couple met on the group and got married and have children?

Mark: i have no idea. One of the other more learned admin may know.

Darren: If so, send me pics of them making babies.

Kev: I haven't received any wedding invites. Not to say that it hasn't happened. A group member did create a Shoegaze romantic connection group.

Nico: Mark and I are expecting ;)

What is the best band you've discovered through the group?

Mark: That’s not fair. There’s too many AMAZING bands ive discovered via this group. If you absolutely forced me to name one id have to go with The Stargazer Lilies. Occabot blew my tiny mind.

Darren: Flyying Colours

Kev: Oooooh, a "best band?" As far as my personal favorite, I'd have to say Echodrone. Dean "Shoegaze" Bromley, one of the original page members/ past admin, turned me onto them. There are SO many greats that I never would have heard of if it wasn't for SGDPNG!!!

Nico: that Russian shoegaze scene is pretty cool. Maybe Pinkshinyultrablast ?

How did it get so big? (the group Mark, the group!

Mark: We have an open door policy and we get a lot of people inviting friends. We also have a lot of members who are in bands. It means they can interact with our members directly which is a huge thing for fans.

Darren: People love shoegaze and want a place to share and learn more about it.

Kev: Be careful of what you wish for!! There were waves of growth starting with the MBV/ Slowdive/ Lush reunions. Then there was the whole "bro gaze" movement, not the happiest of times on the page.

Nico: The big 3 coming back , the old school gazers have older kids now so more time on their hands and the brogazers. I went to see Slowdive a couple of years ago and the audience was clearly 14 to 60, lots of kids. The Rachel look is quite iconic, it appeals to a lot of young women.

Have you ever thought of making tshirts? mugs? merch?

Mark: I’d love that. We did that in another group i admin. See what King Kev Cleary has to say. He's the boss!

Darren: I would love if one day we could release music by some of the bands that we discover in the group.

Kev: A few years back I created a website with the intent of doing just that. Never materialized. I remember what Greg Wilson, one time page mod, went through getting DKFM to where it is today. Don't have that sort of time to dedicate.

Nico: it’s all very doable, especially a compilation series, that would be fairly easy.

#Facebook

[someonetotaketheedgeoff-blog]

3.03.2018 – Journal: Dreams And Selling Out & Relationships As Products

Opened my laptop and it didn’t turn on. I thought maybe it was fucked. In my head I was like – ‘Aw yeah sick, don’t have to write anything’. Which’s weird. Why would I prefer my laptop to be broken than write? I guess it’s the 9 – 5 feel that inevitably comes with being creative. Everything gets boring in the end. If you do stuff only when you feel like it, nothing ever really gets done. I think that’s the difference between a child and an adult. Or an amateur or a professional, it’s finishing shit. Anyone can start a thing. But to finish a thing’s what matters.

Listened to an interview of the great comic Greg Fleet. In the interview he said he can practically sleep on stage, he feels that comfortable. He said the one hour of the day he was on stage was the easiest hour, the 23 others were the hard ones. Very interesting. At this point it’s the 5 minutes on stage that are hardest for me. However, the most exhilarating.

Dreams And Selling Out

Always hated the desperateness and ultimateness when it comes to people and their ‘dreams’. It has a disgusting sense of desperation.

People are afraid to publicly talk about their dreams. And that’s good if you’re afraid - you’ve picked the right shit. If you’re afraid of expressing what you want to achieve in this life, it’s sign you care about said shit. And it’s scary to admit it because then if you fail it, you may feel as if your life has been a failure. Which is all important and whatever, but it’s really got nothing to do with anyone else.

An icky uncomfortable feeling you experience in relation to the desperateness comes from people telling their ‘dreams’ and they’re just ridiculous, borderline impossible or actually impossible, or they severely lack the talent, or the dedication and/or awareness, or it’s something they’ve thought of literally that afternoon after watching the documentary Jiro Dreams Of Sushi on Netflix and suddenly want to be a sushi chef. You know those people. The ones that every time you see them have some new plan, some new bullshit, some scheme, some new course they’re entering. All of this’s fine. In my opinion it’s exactly what you should be doing – searching. Searching for something you love and can use to unearth the whole 360°s of your soul to the world and universe. It’s just the smugness, the assurance, the deluded confidence, the lack of commitment, the enrolling and dropping out and the never ending - ‘getting my shit together’. It’s the inability to just say publicly that they’re searching and that’s irritating. It’s probably just a problem of the western world – having to always present a façade that everything’s fine, sorted and organised to the public. Because there’s an acute fear of a social witch hunt if you express the fact that your just as lost as everyone

How do I know all this shit? Because I’ve been doing it for years.

Another uncomfortable thing about people’s dreams is the impossibility. Like a deluded and lonely guy that’s really into a girl he met twice. Everyone else sees he’s deluded and she doesn’t want anything to do with him/or doesn’t even realise what’s going on. Everyone around them grits their teeth and can’t bring themselves to tell them that they maybe should give up on that shit.

The ugliness of the desperation comes from the incompleteness so obviously displayed by the person. It just screams – I won’t be happy, fully happy, until I get that thing. Which’s funny because how do you even know it’ll make you happy? What I’m sort of subconsciously describing’s a sort of American, L.A., Hollywood, ‘X’ country has talent type desperation, which is the wrong type of desperation.

‘If I was to win Australian Idol that would be a dream come true, it would be the happiest day of my life’.

… Makes me shift in my seat. Yuck. Sort your shit out.

It’s a heavy focus on the love you’ll receive. Rather than the craft. Love is a main component of wanting to be an artist. I’m not going to deny that. But it’s that bit you must wrangle. That and the potential to sell out. And I’m not talking about ads at the beginning of The Joe Rogan Experience type of selling out, that’s fine, I’m talking about Logan Paul selling out, where every 13 seconds he plugs his merch and screams some bullshit into the camera and then breaks a plate for no reason.

The current cultural definition of ‘selling out’ is kinda bizarre. It’s this interesting thing that’s kinda like an inner, cultural, arts world meme. Almost like a joke you associate with 9/11 conspiracists, tie dye wearing, dreadlock flicking, MDMA smashing, drug fucked, angry, easily triggered, guy at the end of the bar, occasional busker, full time unemployed people.

But if you’ve ever entered the world of the arts you’ll know it’s very hard to make a living. This year I’m finally going to try and figure it out. So stay tuned.

There’s still a strong part of me that wants to be like Frank Zappa. Well, not like Frank Zappa. But I want to work hard like Zappa, so I can reach a point where creatively I can do whatever the fuck I want when I want.

Maybe the whole concept of a ‘dream’ is a childlike thing. When you’re a child you say all types of crazy shit. Like I’m going to be policeman or an astronaut. Then you get into your mid-twenties and you’re like – ‘Ah, I don’t know man… Fuck knows…’. Followed by the quiet gurgling of a bong and Wu-Tang Clan playing quietly in the background. The universe’s too big for a human life span.

Most of modern life’s designed to minimise your experience by taking up your time working. Most jobs are repetitive and mundane, some completely pointless, many are simply the maintaining of machines that create popular products. You work so you can afford a place to live. Then you buy products to enhance, streamline, to indulge in or escape. Modern life minimises your variety of experience by how much you must work to still be apart of modern life. To be involved is fucking demanding work. And for the majority you must use your body to make money, doing labour orientated jobs that at this point should probably be done by robots. I think it’s funny how they talk about jobs becoming automated and soon will be done by robots. What would happen if the robots developed to the point of conscious awareness? Is that then ethical to make them work? The irony is it’s already been happening with humans forever.

I’m not saying work is bad. Working is good. Challenging work, passionate work, work to progress humanity, helping others, working towards a more harmonious society, all that shit. But it’s the fact you must work. And that sometimes minimum wage doesn’t line up with the cost of living. After a while you can feel like you’re being fucked. When I worked fast food jobs I’d be paid around $13 dollars an hour. I’d work roughly 35 hours a week. That’s fucking 450 dollars a week for half my weeks’ time. Just so I can exist within a house.

The problem is making fast food in this weird sterile world of extreme organisation, regulation, wearing hair nets and gloves, clocking on and off with a fingerprint system, dealing with horrible customers, learning the combinations for different burgers has nothing to do with your actual survival. It’s a very removed, almost virtual reality-esque existence. Like an acoustic, organic attempt at a virtual reality - the management of the animal. Quite bizarre.

I fantasise about disappearing into the woods. Living in a tiny house, isolated from people for at least a few kilometres.

I will make as much art as I can until I’m around 40. And if I’m still alive I’ll look back and say – ‘Alright am I happy? Am I satisfied? Was it worth it? Did it make me happy? Am I wrong, or right?’. Then I’ll collect up the money I have or don’t have and disappear for a bit. Spend some time thinking and contemplating for a few years and decide - do I need to do it to be happy or not?

I’m sure it won’t be as abrupt as reaching ‘x’ age and disappearing, but I really want to try and be an animal at some point. It’s an important thing to do in this life, to experience the origin of what we are/were. It’s much closer than we acknowledge. I wanna get in there and see what I find.

Relationships As Products

I think relationships are advertised as a product. Heartbreak as well. Something to yearn for, to strive for, to purchase.

I remember walking to school in year 7 listening to blink-182, pretending I felt the same way Tom Delonge and Mark Hoppus felt whining about girls in their songs. But at that time, I’d never really had a girlfriend or anything and I was just wishing I was sad. Why’s that? Did I want to be cool? Did I think being depressed and whingy was cool? I don’t know. I still don’t know. But it’s a product just like anything else in this current reality. The idea of a romantic relationship has so much cultural narrative. It’s also sort of all we have now. No more God just things to consume and relationships to have.

One of the solutions to morality that Ernest Becker proposed in his book The Denial Of Death was romantic love. The idea of a connection between 2 people would beat time and space or some shit like that. I’ve always thought this was a wishy-washy argument, and one that does makes sense in the throes of passion and love-retardation during a honey moon stage of being really into someone but beyond that seems stupid. I’ve always tried to understand what he meant by this argument, but I’ve never been able to work it out. What’s ironic is I kinda believe in it, so I must be in some sort of love right now.

Relationships are a product. They’re also a complete wild west. No one knows how they work. The smartest cunts in the world still break up with people and still pick wrong people to be with. There’s no manual, no guide, your parents, even if they’re highly intelligent, well rounded and kind are still blinded by their own relationship.

In the Uber a generic song came on the radio. Prior to the song a more modern song had played. During a verse they’d dubbed a massive ‘BLEEP’ over a swear word. Which reminded me of music on the radio in the 2000s*. Then the next song came on. It was a song about love and relationships, all that bullshit. It was painful to be listening to due to the context I was in. And probably more painful for you because I’m giving you no context to this story or blog, not now, not ever. But it was painful and almost embarrassing because even though the song was so generic and shit it couldn’t help but strike a chord within me and make me feel gross. I felt almost ashamed like I’d got emotional during The Big Bang Theory.

But it was emotional. She was in the backseat. She pocked me on the shoulder, the finger jabbing as if impatiently trying to get the doors in an elevator to shut.

‘Do you have any glue sticks at home?’.

‘Ah… Yeah… Um… Yeah I think we do… Surely we do…’. I said.

‘OK, cool’.

Even an exchange so pointless and minimal is so sad to me. I can’t even be bothered verbally expressing myself because if I do I’ll cry and then she’ll cry. I don’t know why I’m avoiding that really. Maybe it’s something vain. Maybe it’s emotional vanity. Maybe I’m just done showing physical weakness to anyone. Maybe it was what that girl said to me that one time. Maybe I just would prefer to be sad privately. Maybe I’ll get it all out through writing. Maybe I currently can’t see what the best thing is to do.

I think it would probably be easier if I didn’t spend every moment with her before I leave. But then that’s all I want to do. But it’s sort of paralysing me. I can feel the emotions I’m tying down. I’m like Steve Erwin wrestling a crocodile, smiling as he looks at the camera, talking as if it’s all normal shit.

‘Yeah you can see she’s a bloody feisty one this one here! …’.

‘Now the thing you must remember is never let the pressure off the centre of the snout, it’s this big nippers achilles heel. Now remember, don’t try this at home. If you see an emotional breakdown in the wild just keep still, and back away slowly, don’t try and tackle it like I’m doing here’.

 *The ‘BLEEP’ is an interesting type of censorship because it’s telling the audience there’s something naughty there but won’t tell you what. As years past it became more fashionable and practical to manipulate the swear words in songs. If you’ve ever listened to radio versions of Eminem music, it’s quite interesting. The most interesting is a version of his first hit song My Name Is. When I was around 13 my Dad forbid me to listen to any Eminem until I was 16. I had an iTunes gift card and I wanted to buy some music but being so terrified of my parent’s judgement I didn’t want to buy any tracks that were labelled ‘explicit’ so I bought ‘clean’ versions of songs. I bought the ‘clean’ version of My Name Is and it was bizarre. Words were completed distorted in strange ways, like if you’ve ever listened to Stairway To Heaven backwards so you could hear the intro to Satan’s podcast. There were also completely new verses I’d never heard before. And darker verses cut out.

This type of censorship is far scarier to me than the simple ‘BLEEP’ because it’s completely erasing what was originally there. It’s like in 1984 where it’s some people jobs to completely re-write history.

#Someone To Take The Edge Off #liam donnelly #Comedy #Hoabrt #Tasmania #Melbourne #Australia #Stand Up #Podcast #Relationships #Dreams #Selling Out