Bzangy Groink

Year: 2022

  • Albums Of The Year 2022

    This year, I had to winnow down from forty-five albums to this final top twenty and it was bloody difficult. I’ve had to leave a load of loveliness off because I know if I keep the list short, more people are likely to check it all out. So, whether the album is at number twenty…

  • Rock City 18/11/22 – 20/12/22

    Pics from end-of-the-year clubbing!

  • Derby EMOM Night 15/12/22

    Here’s a few pics from the recent Derby Electronic Music Open Mic Night at Derby Dubrek. It’s only the second that I’ve been to but I enjoyed it loads and I love that so many acts are on that it keeps everything shaken up. Good point – if you don’t like an act, it’s not…

  • Crimbo Limbo

    For all those wondering, the official UN definition of this timeless, mealless period between Christmas and New Year is: CRIMBO LIMBO Too full of strange cheeses? Sick of chocolate? Eyes scarred from satsuma squirts? CRIMBO LIMBO Time alternately stretching like toffee and compressing like neutronium? Ready to slash the tyres of your Racist Uncle? CRIMBO…

  • RIP Martin Duffy

    I only just found out today that Martin Duffy of Felt, Primal Scream and The Charlatans died on the 18th December. Here’s the blurb I wrote for the debut White Town single: If you’ve listened to anything I’ve done over the three decades, you know how many times I’ve ripped off Duffy. That fucker was…

  • LIFE IN 2022

    LIFE IN 2022 You phone a helpline and have to keep repeating “Give me a human, give me a human” until the automated response parses it. TRULY WE ARE LIVING IN THE FUTURE I mean, not a future I wanted but the future, nonetheless.

  • Why Woke Is A Compliment, Not A Pejorative

    In these times, the people sleepwalking through life, mindlessly swallowing and regurgitating the lies of fascist leaders, have learned to ridicule those who are awake. The #sleepers mock the #woke. It’s not an insult, it’s a badge of intellectual achievement.

  • Bzangy Groink DJing 22/12/22

    This week’s best new track is two very old tracks – A Message To You and Ghost Town by The Specials. Well, it had to be after Terry Hall passed away on the 18th. Way before his time. As a kid, The Specials were everything great about British culture for me; this collision between different…

  • Todd In The Shadows – One Hit Wonderland

    I’m very flattered and honoured that Todd In The Shadows did this feature on Your Woman. I say feature but it’s actually a short documentary, such is the level of research he put in. So much flattery… eeeeEEEeeee 😛

  • Why Billionaires Are All Evil

    If the vast majority of people reading this suddenly became billionaires, you know what we’d do? We’d give it away. Or put it into foundations. Or fund food banks totally. Or gift our entire country free ubiquitous wi-fi. Something constructive. I don’t think any of us would keep it all. Me, I’m old. I would…

  • Und Jetzt, Eine Kleine Schiesse Joken.

    ~ at the band meeting ~ “Look, you just don’t fit in with our whole aesthetic, dude. You don’t get it!” “Fuck you, dude, I don’t get it? Who the fuck writes a song about ‘missing the rain,’ what does that even mean?” “Hey, moron, it’s BLESS THE RAIN, BLESS! And, oh yeah, well who…

  • Frosty Garden December 2022

  • Strangers, Friends, Lovers, Friends, Strangers Again

    I’m 56 now. In my *personal experience* (not trying to universalise this), as one gets older, it becomes perilously easy to lose friends and harder to make new ones. When I was 18 and gigging every other week, I’d just bump into people – boom, MATES. It was fission-like, friend leading to new friends. That…

  • What The Fuck, World?

    Who had fascist coup in Germany pencilled for Crimbo 2022? No? Anyone? Whoever is writing this alternate timeline, you have SUCKED since 2016. How the fuck are you going to retcon Trump, Brexit, Covid? What have you got planned for 2023? * Yellowstone explodes* Aliens and they’re the nasty kind* The Singularity but its core…

  • Powers Of 2

    Was anyone else obsessed with powers of 2 when they were a lil kid, like under 10yo? I remember memorising them all up to 65536 and being really, really happy. It just gave me a deep pleasure, the kind a beautiful sunset gives me now. I tried later to get up to 2147483648 but it…

  • RE-TOOLING SCIENCE FICTION FOR MAXIMAL CONTENT PLACEMENT SYNERGY SCHMYNERGY SEO BLAH BLAH BLAAAAH

    Re-tooling #ScienceFiction to increase #synergy with #DemographicallyOptimised #ContentCreators and other #CapitalistFuckingBullshit Fellow worms, behold: 1. Beyond Lies The Wub Wub Wub 2. Ancillary Wordle 3. I Have No Host But I Must Stream 4. Followers For Algernon 5. “Repent, Harley Quinn!” Said The TikTok Teen 6. Cytween 7. I, Roomba 8. When Robot And Crow…

  • Meet Cute (2022)

    First – this is not a romcom. Well, it’s about as much a romcom as Punch Drunk Love or Eternal Sunshine are. There are funny bits but it’s the baby chickens on Eraserhead’s dinner plate funny. Fundamentally, it’s a science fiction film that uses the mechanism of time travel to explore determinism, identity, existentialism and,…

  • Mastodon Versus Tumblr

    For me, Mastodon has the energy of a really earnest, fun Uni society, probs doing some eco shit or other actually important work. Everyone is more intelligent than me, is a sysadmin or famous writer. Whereas, #Tumblr is just that gif of the chimp pissing into his own mouth and absolutely loving it. Gargle-giggling. This…

  • Gwendoline Christie

    #GwendolineChristie in #Wednesday is ohhhhhh myyyyy… She makes me absolutely melt! #Netflix

  • Billionaires Are Wankers

    I’m watching Titans and you know what suddenly made me sad? We have plenty of billionaires in the real world. And they are all wankers. Imagine what you could do with that power? The positives changes! But we don’t have superheroes like Batman. We have SUPERCLOWNS like petulant child Elon Musk, fucking up millions of…

  • Slumberland (2022)

    Well, the credits are rolling and I’m wiping away my tears. Again. Oof, I probably shouldn’t have watched this film once I’d seen the premise. But what a film! You know how Pixar do kids films but they gut you if you’re an adult? Slumberland just did that to me. The energy of this film…

  • Addicted To Anxious

  • Fairchild Semiconductor Pitch

    Fairchild Semiconductor is a soundtrack album I wrote for a TV show that does not exist. Yet. We do not live in a universe where there’s a lavish TV series about Fairchild Semiconductor. But we should and I want to do my utmost to make that universe this one. When I first learned the Fairchild story, it…

  • Bzangy Groink DJing Playlist 4/11/2022

    WOOHOOOO! After a huuuuuge hiatus, BZANGY IS BACK and it started out lovely last night with a tiny but outrageously gorgeous audience. It was a bloody long set, I DJed from 8pm to 1am at Dubrek but I’m pleased to say the majority of what I played was new music, from 2022. Plus a smattering…

  • Dennis Potter’s ‘Pennies From Heaven’

    … and the song he used that changed my life: Enjoy!

  • Plus-Sized AI Art Imagery

    AI has inherited our biases. If I prompt Midjourney for “beautiful woman,” only images of thin, model-type women are generated. And only white women. Thin and white is not the norm. It is a bias. We can and should do better. These images I generated are kicking against the biased datasets Midjourney was trained on.

  • SPOOPY HALLOWEEN GHOSTIES

    As it’s nearly Halloween, have some scary ghosties courtesy of Midjourney AI. woooOOOOoooo!

  • Dancing .gif

    This gif always makes me happy. Always. It’s the Six Months In A Leaky Boat of gifs.

  • Get Up Off Our Knees

    SONG OF THE DAY “Famines will be famines Banquets will be banquets Some spend winter in a palace Some spend it in blankets.” #EnoughIsEnough #AbolishTheMonarchy #GetUpOffOurKnees #Socialism #TheHousemartins

  • Vampire Dream Team

    I do love a good vampire romp and they seem to have fallen out of favour lately, sadly. Maybe it’s a reaction to Twilight or the fact the world itself seems to have descended into apocalyptic nightmare so our tastes have changed. Whatever, there’s not enough crazy vamp action around so I used Midjourney to…

  • Star Wars Fan Art

    More Midjourney tomfoolery, this time to generate some dogfights and laser battles from one of my fave sci-fi universes. PEW! PEW! PEW!

  • Tekkonkinkreet Fan Art

    I love Tekkonkinkreet, it’s one of my fave ever films, not just fave animes. So, I generated these with Midjourney to help remind me of that awesome world. I wish I could visit it. Maybe in the future, when some Midjourney descendent can render real-time 3D VR?

  • Promoting With Midjourney

    I made my mate Hazz some logos for her gig promotion company. I used Midjourney AI for the backgrounds and Canva for the text.

  • Did Midjourney Just Communicate With Me?

    It’s only a matter of time now, people. And let’s face it, our silicon children couldn’t do a worse job with planet Earth than we have.

  • Honor Society (2022)

    (This is very much a deliberately vague, no spoilers review) Watching Honor Society was a funny-sad-oh-what-OH NO-awh rollercoaster that left me feeling good in the way that alleged feel-good movies rarely do. This is very nearly a perfect film. I think it’s Mean Girls-level in terms of the whole ensemble being perfectly cast and not…

  • Sunburnt And Snowblind

    After three weeks on the glacial escarpment, losing our damn minds as well as fingers and toes, we came over a rise and there it was, rising into the sunlight, defiant, golden and shining… … THE LOST CITY OF DERBY! #midjourney #AIgeneratedArt

  • Europa

    The humans chased me into the ice fields I used to mine. In the glitch of tearing out my transponder, I fell into an abandoned tunnel. Unable to stand, I could feel my joints seize as I eked out my reserve power. I was so tired. I went to sleep. #midjourney #AIgeneratedArt

  • The End Of It All

    They fucked the planet. We stressed about plastic straws while they flew everywhere by private jet. Their patrons were BP and Exxon Mobil. The 1%. The pigs. The scum. We never stood a chance. They passed more laws for more fracking. They levied taxes on solar panels and removed EV subsidies. All in the name…

  • The Future Came Too Quickly

    The future surprised us. One second, we were productive humans, the next, 90% of us were unemployed. We did what we had to do to survive. We were lucky the AIs saw us as pets and not vermin. #midjourney #AI #artificialintelligence #AIgeneratedArt #cyberpunk

  • August 2022 Stargazing

    Trying out the new composite mode on my new OM1 and I love the results. It’s so much fun watching the exposure build up, second by second. I need to find other things to try it out on now. Hmmm…

  • Nat New Hair

  • Robin In My Garden

  • First OM-1 Test Shots

  • RIP David Warner (1941 – 2022)

    He made everything better. Even if it’s one voice or a passing bit, David Warner made it stick and made you think about it often years after. He felt like family.

  • J.G. Ballard Predicts The Existence Of Tumblr

  • No Such Thing As A Good Empire

    https://www.indy100.com/showbiz/rrr-netflix-historian-robert-tombs I see a lot of USA-bashing on Twitter and Reddit by Brits. And, yes, some of it is historically justifiable. But those same Brits are the ones who think of the British Empire as some kind of benevolent, peaceful arrangement. There is a huge blind-spot in Britain about the horrors of their bloodsucking Empire.…

  • Anti-Semitism Weaponised By Blairites

    https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-politics-62226042 Well, well – anti-Semitism weaponised by the right wing, to get rid of Corbyn? And the whole British media going along with the scam? Also, to accuse the actual socialists of weaponising anti-Semitism is ridiculous: they didn’t start the whole campaign of lies, the right wing did. Nothing the left could do to investigate…

  • It’s The End Of The World As We Know It

    Well, it was a lovely planet before capitalism fucked it up. No, it wasn’t cos we used plastic straws or had a few carrier bags: https://mashable.com/…/carbon-footprint-pr-campaign-sham

  • Ms. Marvel And The South Asian Diaspora

    I am so happy that young South Asian girls have Ms. Marvel on their tellies, tablets and phones. I am so happy that young white kids watching Ms. Marvel will see views of Karachi and get an idea of Pakistan beyond the racist tropes peddled by the Western media. Beyond the murder porn of US…

  • Jamais Vu Or No?

    In response to the above: I know *exactly* what you mean. I often have a sharp moment of feeling like I’m in another life, another whole existence and I know that person’s history, setting, everything. I used to call it jamais vu as a play on deja vu until I found out that was already…