Bzangy Groink

Year: 2024

  • Albums Of The Year 2024

    2024 was fucking horrible. I hid away from it in music, as usual. These are the new albums that kept me alive this cursed year. (Playlists of this list on Tidal, Apple Music and Spotify.) 20 The Story So Far – I Want To Disappear I’m old af so I still think of TSSF as…

  • Bluesky Versus Mastodon

    So far, if I had to stereotype both places, I’d say that Mast feels like a lunchtime chess club in September on a rainy day where you haven’t got a full set so the rook is a purple haired troll and the bishop is a finger Boglin. And Bluesky is a Sixth Form disco full…

  • Ring Your Parents

    Every single adult I know, apart from my friend Natalie, has done the parent face at me. We’re having lunch or we’re in a café and their Mum or Dad rings. They answer and they do that face, the eyerolly one as they try to get off the phone as quickly as possible. Afterwards, they’re…

  • White Town Gig, The Class, The Greensands Live @ Bedford Esquires, 6/12/24

    Had a whale of a time in Bedford last night – THANK YOU to everyone who came out and just danced the whole night. You were fucking awesome! Also, please do check out The Greensands and The Class, the two other bands on the bill as they absolutely brought it and were wonderful. What a…

  • My Old Ass (2024)

    My Old Ass (2024) Firstly, a warning: if you’ve had anyone close to you die this year, probably don’t watch this film. Or even read the rest of this review.  Secondly, I had some mild spoilers about My Old Ass appear on TikTok which annoyed me so if my review sounds all vague and hand-wavey,…

  • Bluesky Deep Entryism

    I just posted this on #Bluesky : “Are you on Mastodon? It’s decentralised so, unlike Bluesky, it can never be bought and sold or otherwise en-shittified. Give it a go! https://mas.to/invite/Q7CqS4tA Remember, if it can be sold to a fascist wanker, it probably will be.” Let’s see if anyone bites. ? And, yes, I am…

  • Top 10 Ways For Musicians To Die

    A while ago, I thought I was dying.  I was in the gym on an upright bike and I noticed that I couldn’t see the edges of my vision any more. They just weren’t there. I could see straight ahead but that was it. I wobbled across to the gym worker who took me to…

  • Nathi Berhati

    “Haaallooooo, this is Nathi Berhati, how may I design youuuuuu?”

  • CRIKEY! YA GALAH!

    LondonAssociated Press —  A children’s book written by British celebrity chef Jamie Oliver has been withdrawn from sale after it was criticised for causing offense to Indigenous Australians. The Guardian newspaper reported Saturday that the National Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Education Corporation blasted “Billy And The Epic Escape,” which was published earlier this year, for employing a…

  • AstrHori 50mm f/1.4 Tilt Shift Lens Test Shots

    Woah – loving this lens. It can be reasonably sharp, which is boring but the best bit is making it do really stupid shit. Love it.

  • How Can you Shame Businesses Now?

    What I most miss about Twitter when it wasn’t evil is that I could publicly shame companies when they were stealing money from me. #Ebay and one of their sellers have stolen £80 off me and it doesn’t matter if I post it on here because nowhere now has the power and reach of old…

  • My Father In My Dreams

    I just fell asleep for a little bit watching a film. I dreamt I was sitting on the edge of my parents’ bed, in their house. My father was behind me, patting my back and asking me if I was okay. I burst into huge sobs and he comforted me, calling me Babu. He was…

  • RMWeb Midlands Area Group At Dubrek 22/9/24

    Today, I popped down to Dubrek as it was having a day of model railway layout exhibitions. And I absolutely loved it! All the modellers were very friendly and dealt with my completely noob questions gently. It was a chill, fun atmosphere, kind of how I imagine hanging out with a load of Buddhist monks…

  • You Will Feel What We Tell You To Feel

    Imagine if… Today, Russia had injured more than 3000 German civilians by exploding random phones used by Germans said to support the Ukrainian resistance. Twelve people confirmed dead including two children. What would our headlines look like? What would be non-stop on our TV news today? When Israel does it – nothing.

  • Israel Carries Out Terrorist Atrocity In Lebanon

    Today’s terrorist atrocity carried out by Israel – the random bombing of civilians. This could have been you or your family murdered or maimed. Israel does not care. At least two children murdered. “Speaking after visiting the wounded in hospital on Wednesday, Health Minister Firass Abiad says that 2,750 people remain in hospital after the…

  • Hannah Harper I love You

  • Infected By Ghost

    Ghost have been floating around me for years. I checked out their tunes, I played them when I was DJing but nothing sank its fangs into me, nothing infected me nor troubled me. I liked them but I wasn’t obsessed.  Then 2024 happened.  It’s been a shit year. By May, two people I’d known closely…

  • KAOS

    Nearly at the end of Kaos and I thought… … surely Tory cunts won’t whinge about gayness / transness / “diversity” in a show about Greek mythology? Surely they’ll google the story of Caenus before whingeing? So I go to a few review sections and… Nope! Look at this fuckwit bleating on: Gammons are soooo…

  • Grapes

  • DO NOT BUY: Epson FF-680W Photo Scanner

    I am so angry. It’s my own fault, I’d seen other reports of scratches but I thought they must be rogue machines. So, I scanned a load of photos and then, in Lightroom, I noticed some weird artefacts in the same place in every photo. Yup, the Epson has permanently scratched my irreplaceable family photos.…

  • Proportionate Response

    The reality of being brown. Today, there is a cordon in town because Nazis are travelling in to riot Normally, I wouldn’t care but this. So, I won’t be going into the Derbion shopping centre for an amble and a coffee. None of the Nazis will be arrested for this disruption of trade and traffic.…

  • Dr. Arati Mishra

    On Monday, it was my mother’s funeral.  It’s very hard to write about how I feel because we’ve been saying goodbye to her for a while now, as she had dementia the last few years. Anyone who’s been through this with a relative will know how it is, your loved one gets gradually whittled away…

  • Flying Ant Day 2024

    TODAY was Flying Ant Day! I didn’t notice till Natalie said, “Oh my god, there’s ants EVERYWHERE!” And there were. Photos of said ants soon, courtesy of Dr Braaaaaap. EDIT – here, they are, thank you, Natalie:

  • Garden July 2024

  • The End Of Star Trek Prodigy

    I just shed a little tear because I am going to miss #STProdigy. There were some truly great bits of Trek in there and I like that it kept the original utopian Roddenberrian vision going. I’d rate it below #StrangeNewWorlds but slightly above #Discovery and way, way, waaaaay above #Picard in terms of #NuTrek

  • Don’t Sign Up With Surfshark

    Fuck me – trying to get a refund from #Surfshark is a complete pain in the arse. They have a retention squad as determined as #VirginMedia. I would thoroughly NOT recommend them to anyone based on the insane amount of captchas when you use them and the ‘free trial cancel easily’ is not true. They…

  • The USA Just Keeps On Murdering

    (Source: AP News) Now the pier has served its purpose, a staging post for US troops to murder 274 innocent Palestinians in cold blood, they’re taking it down. Hollywood will make a film about this in a few years. It’ll be focussed on how the poor US troops have PTSD from the war crimes they…

  • AI My Arse

    BLAH BLAH GOOGLE BRINGS YOU AI BLAH BLAAHH SOOO USEFUL BLAH BLAH fires up google docs ‘Hmm, what’s a synonym for this word? I’ll just right-click it like in Word… nope. That lets me define it, save it, create an AI haiku from it but no synonyms.’ THIS is the state of current AI-worship: the…

  • Rewritten By Machine On New Technology

    “They took the credit for your second symphonyRewritten by machine on new technologyAnd now I understand the problems you could see” – kind of hits different nowadays, doesn’t it? Check below for one of the best pop songs ever AND bonus baby Hans Zimmer trying not to laugh into camera:

  • When We Have Our Revolution

    When we have our revolution, it’s gonna be very British, as much as Russia’s was Russian. We’re gonna pack sandwiches, some crisps and maybe a thermos of oversweet, milky tea. Tiny, fiddly cup on the top. People will have sensible shoes on and some will carry one of those weird little packets of tissues? Those…

  • Jyoti’s Choice

    First, if you’re reading this and you’re under the age of 20, come back in 15 years. You don’t need this post, you rapscallion, you cracked whelk.  They gone? Good.  And now, old people: Around 1990, I was very unhappy with myself so I decided to change the way I lived. To institute this change,…

  • Civil War (2024)

    Alex Garland’s Civil War is gorgeously shot with immaculate sound design and an attention to mise-en-scene that’s absent from most current media apart from graphic novels. Every frame is there for a reason, there’s a kind of painterly quality to Garland’s narrative, the flow feels like the travel of ones gaze over a huge canvas…

  • Where Is My Golf Course On The Moon?

    I love #Noclip’s docs, they’re the extreme level of detail I crave about games I love. At the start of this one, they say, “We’re now closer to when the first game is set in time than when the game actually came out.” … and my brain did a long jelly wobble in its calcium…

  • Fuck The Guardian Forever

    We are in the mess we’re in now, with #MaggieStarmer purging anyone who once coughed loudly in a non-Tory way, because of The Guardian. We have a liar as Labour leader. We have a genocide supporter as Labour leader. He makes fucking Kinnock look reasonable. I will never forget or forgive them. And every ruling…

  • OMOMO Derby

    Oh wow – first time at @omomo.uk but definitely not the last. We had the BEST food, I could actually fit my dodgy leg under the table (great seats!) and the service was also excellent. Derby peeps, if you haven’t been – GO! #KoreanStreetFood #KoreanFood #SoYummy #SuperTasty

  • Derby PSC Emergency Rally 1/6/24

    This rally was in response to yet another war crime from Israel: And what did the West do? Nothing. Some bluster, some strongly wagged fingers and that was it. So, I had to go to the protest, I had to make my voice heard. And I was very heartened not only to see the initial…

  • Cafe Palestina 30/5/24

    I actually managed to get out to Cafe Palestina this month and it was absolutely lovely. Again, a good turnout and great speakers. Have a look at some pics I took here: If you’re free and in the area, pop along, it’s the last Thursday of every month, at Dubrek, Derby.

  • Midjourney Has Got Even More Racist

    I haven’t been on Midjourney in months now, through a mixture of ethical concerns and, to be honest, sheer boredom. After a while, that whole AI look for everything gets wearing. And you can spot it, a mile away. There’s just something… uncanny valley going on. Even without humans in the images. I had a…

  • Sad On Sad

    Been a lot of not good stuff happening lately. Some of it is not mine to talk about but some of it, like my Mummy’s dementia, is. (I’m not going to go off into a whole thing about dementia now because that’s too big. And too horrible.) I keep having dreams where I’m talking to…

  • Derby & Burton 76 Years Of Nakba Protest 11/5/24

    I haven’t been well enough to go to recent protests but I managed to make it to the one today in Derby, organised jointly with Burton PSC to mark 76 years since the Nakba: The Nakba (Arabic: ?????? an-Nakbah, lit.?’The Catastrophe’) was the ethnic cleansing[2] of Palestinians in Mandatory Palestine during the 1948 Palestine war through their violent displacement and dispossession of land, property, and belongings, along with the devastation…

  • Garden Macros May 2024

    Click through for some sunny garden pics I took an hour or so ago.

  • Godzilla Minus One

    I’m having to watch # GodzillaMinusOne (#???-1.0??????, #GojiraMainasuWan) in chunks cos it’s just making me cry too much. The contrast between this film and the sub-video-game-cutscene bilge currently doing the rounds is astonishing. The last time Hollywood Gojira had any real heart was when Bryan Cranston was in it – TEN years ago. I actually…

  • I’m Gonna HERNIATE my HERNIA

    toniiiiiiight *cue extended solo by Artie Shaw*

  • Hardass Shakycam Sucralose

    Hi, I’m a grizzled, lone maverick private investigator. I drink whisky, neat. I have a deep love of very impractical classic cars. I’m haunted by the memory of some woman, some where. Maybe a deceased wife or a daughter. Perhaps a fetching pomeranian. My inner monologue is grizzled and neat. Also pomeranian. My middle name,…

  • London, Leicester Square And China Town

    I did my first gig since 2018 on Thursday, in London. The gig was fun and went well but my health was pretty poor during the trip. But I managed a bit of a hobble around to get some pics!

  • April Chad Wood

    I always try to get some pics when it’s bluebell season.

  • Israel Murders Three British Citizens

    Israel murders three British citizens in cold blood and still no sanctions, we’re STILL selling them weapons?? Can you see how twisted that is? If China or Russia had murdered three Brits, the world would be echoing with consequences. For apartheid state Israel – nothing.

  • Israel Tortured False Confessions From UNWRA Employees

    Remember when Israel said it had proof all of UNWRA was riddled with Hamas? And with this “proof,” they got their partners in genocide, the Western democracies, to withhold aid and thereby kill yet more Gazans? Turns out to be yet more bullshit and this time they TORTURED detainees to fabricate it. All this is…

  • Coffee With Robbie

    Just some pics in town, chuntering with Robbie.

  • WHEREIN I AM BECOME THE ALPHAOMEGA

    There is a woodlouse travelling across the vast plane of my carpet. As I pick up the woodlouse in my spoon and watch it trying to scurry up the sides, I wonder – is this the equivalent of a human space traveller falling into a wormhole? What incredible velocity is it experiencing as I transport…