Undercover - Never let her slip away (1992 Essential mix)

FFXIV OST Amh Araeng Theme #1 ( Sands of Amber )

Warhammer 40,000: Mechanicus OST - Noosphere

The Bucketheads - The Bomb [These Sounds Fall Into My Mind] (Official Vi...

The Jab

    People at the office were talking about these vaccines like you would talk about buying a car. Which brand is better? They talk about the efficacy of the vaccines like one would talk about how strong a pickup's engine is. It's not like people have a choice. It hasn't reached the point yet where people can buy the vaccine they want at the local 7-Eleven. You can only get what's available.

    More choices will only add to the "vaccine hesitancy" anyway. To be honest, I'm hesitant to take the vaccine. I admit that my reluctance comes from a bad gut feeling, I won't bother talking "science", everyone has already made up their minds. I don't see the point. Even if you're vaccinated, you can still catch the Chinaflu and spread it around. 

    I would rather wait and see but the day will come when I can't put it off. The social pressure to take the vaccine is too much. Individual choice is an illusion and it always was. It probably won't kill me but if it does, I can enjoy a good "I told you so" moment at the very least. That's not too bad.

Low Roar - "Easy Way Out"

Bonobo & Totally Enormous Extinct Dinosaurs - Heartbreak

Depeche Mode - Suffer Well (Official Video)

Fuel - Shimmer

Deathstreaming Live

As I lay on my bed to sleep every night, I think a lot about death. I think about how I and everyone I know will die at some point and there's not a thing anyone can do about it. It is inevitable and you never really know when exactly it's going to happen.

Like everyone, I hope my death is quick and painless. That's the best anyone can hope for. However, in this information age, there should be one more thing to add - that our death won't be uploaded on the internet. 

Nowadays everyone has a camera on their phone. Social media is full of photos of people acting like the banality of their lives is worth broadcasting to the whole world and be kept on record for all eternity. When something out of the ordinary happens, you better believe a mass of idiots are gonna whip out their phones and start recording. A baby could be bleeding to death on the sidewalk and it's perfectly reasonable that a segment of the population is going to think of recording it first instead of doing anything helpful.

This was a problem long before social media and has only become worse with technology. Newspapers love to splatter their front page with as much blood as they can get away with. Nobody questions how morbid and tasteless that is. Now,  could you imagine dying in public and the last thing you see is some asshole shoving his phone in your face? All you end up being is fodder to get likes and traffic on some website? 

So what does it matter if you're dead anyway? That's a fair point but it's not about the deceased, it's about the people left behind, the people who actually cared about him. I doubt anyone wants to see the corpse of their child put up on websites for all to gawk at and comment on. Nobody wants to see the deaths of their friends and family playing on a perpetual loop in cyberspace. But alas, that's the world we live in now. Nobody really cares about hurt feelings. There's no privacy, not even in death.

Quick, painless, and anonymous.

Streets of Whiterun (by Jeremy Soule) l Andy McKee

Annus Horribilis

Happy new year? Well, we'll just have to see about that, won't we?

So 2020 wasn't so hot. At the beginning of the pandemic, I was uncharacteristically optimistic that someone it would get the mess sorted and figure something out. What has become clear is that the people at the top can't really do much and a lot of the ordinary people are selfish. 

There also seems to be a lot of distrust of institutions. Is it really the people's fault though that their leaders give very little reason to trust them? This is the age we are in now. There's just to much information out there to piece together and make sense of. Everyone has an agenda, even the media. By all means, puzzle it out for yourself. There are a lot of interpretations out there, some of which are unfairly labeled as "conspiracy theories". I never liked the way "conspiracy theory" is treated as a dirty word. Conspiracy theories are cool. I believe some of them. It's the effect of info overload so don't blame me. We're destined to become conspiracy theorists sooner or later.

So what of 2021? Who knows, really? Wishing someone "happy new year" is like wishing them a "safe trip", as if there was a damn thing we can actually do about it. Still, it helps to be optimistic. 

So far I've broken only half of my new year resolutions; a pretty good start.