Category: Rant

KEYBOARDISTS – GET FUCKED!

Jyoti

I play keyboards. If I was in a band, I would be called ‘the keyboardist.’

But I am not a keyboardist, I am a motherfucking SYNTHESIST. 

The difference is this: 

If I was given the new Moog One polyphonic synthesiser to demo for a YouTube video, I would do two things. First, I would play it mainly polyphonically. Secondly, I would create patches to show off the power of the first Moog poly since the Memorymoog.

I would not take a hugely expensive polysynth and do endless monophonic blues widdling with a generic hard sync patch that’s older than my fucking balls. I wouldn’t just skip through presets without showing the actual power of the synthesis architecture. 

If a new, flagship piano was released , they wouldn’t give it to me to demo. You know why? BECAUSE I’M NOT A FUCKING PIANIST. I can fake piano, sure but I haven’t got the classical or jazz chops to give a full, informative demo of the timbres a new instrument of that type is capable of creating.

Imagine if I did a video with a new grand piano and proceeded to just play the bassline to Blue Monday for ten minutes. And then gave it a 3/10 cos there was no aftertouch. 

My stereotype of keyboardists is that they had piano lessons as a kid but then gave up. They have some chops but they’re neither pianists nor synthesists. They’re preset bashers with little to zero interest in sound design / patch creation. They can play every wedding reception favourite song ever but all with no feel. None of them can keep time. And they love doing generic blues soloing. Boy, do they love doing generic blues soloing. Give them a crappy “guitar solo” patch on a synth and you’ve got eight hours of predictable notes coming your way. Which, ironically, is something actual guitarists struggle their entire fucking lives to avoid.

This is what used to happen when I used to go to Turnkey in London to have a go on a new rompler. I’d get to the new synth I want to see aaaannddd…

…. some keyboardist would have beaten me to it. They call up an organ patch: blues solo. They call up a bassoon patch: blues solo. They call up a polyphonic orchestral patch: blues solo. They call up a drum kit: two seconds of intensely arrhythmic tapping and then off to find another patch to blues solo over.

Do you seem my rather laboured point? A keyboardist just plays the same licks on every bloody keyboard they encounter, on every patch. A synthesist would play a violin patch in a violin style, an acoustic guitar patch in the note/string order of an actual acoustic guitar, a haunting Sakamotoesque patch in that style. And, most importantly, a synthesist creates NEW sounds, NEW styles. Synthesists are not frustrated guitarists, we have our own thing. 

We dream of caressing a polysynth like the Moog One. Three oscillators per voice… mmmm… creamy. Classic Moog ladder and other filters? How can we fuck that up? Multiple arpeggiators that we can assign multitimbrally? Time to patch up my own drum kit and maybe throw in some Karplus-Strong via the multi-effects. 

I would love to see more synthesizer demos by synthesists. 

Please. 

HARD BREXIT – SCOTLAND TRIUMPHS!

Jyoti

I shall now put on my Dave Hutchinson SF hat and say:

Imagine Britain goes hard Brexit. The nations are in uproar! Scotland holds a snap referendum and votes for independence and to stay in the EU.

Now, every company that is based in London can have an English-speaking UK base if they just up sticks to 400 miles north.

SO THEY DO.

The reverse starts happening in Northern Ireland – companies scramble to move south and into EU Eire.

WALES SECEDES FROM THE UK and is welcomed into the EU as an independent nation.

England now stands alone. Toyota leave, Nissan leave, every major bank moves either to Scotland or France. Every EU-funded research project moves to Scottish universities.

There is a huge brain drain and money flume to Scotland, Wales and Ireland.

England becomes a backwater, surviving mainly on tourism and Cornish pasties until CORNWALL SECEDES as they never liked the English anyway.

Scotland experiences a 21st century re-birth and becomes a cultural, financial and academic hub of Europe.

The only fly in the ointment is the wash of illegal immigrants from England. The Scottish President, Adrian MacCormick proposes a wall to keep the desperate, impoverished English hordes out.

2028, work starts on Adrian’s Wall…

Been Sold A Pup

Jyoti

You could say that in terms of the reality of Brexit, the vast majority of people who voted for it have:

been sold a pup. 

In the days following the Brexit vote, I heard many stories from non-white friends about an increased level of racist attacks. They were harangued at bus stops, in shops, just walking through town by people demanding to know why they were “still here” when the Brexit vote was to “take our country back.” This anecdotal evidence is sadly backed up by numerous reports and actual scientific research.

Now, I’m not saying that everyone who voted leave did so for racist reasons but let’s look at the issues around that campaign in the form of this handy tag-cloud generated by ITV at the time: 

Hmmm… what’s that big word in the middle? I can’t quite make it out? Oh yeah – IMMIGRATION! STOP THUH IMMIGANTS STEALIN OWR JOBS!!! AND WIMMINS!!111!!  BRINGIN OVER THEH SEASONED FOOOD AND NON-ROMAN NUMERALS!!!!!

Now, you may be reading this and thinking, “This is an outrage! I voted for Brexit and some of my best friends are darkies!” Well, fucking congrats to you ~ you’re the one person who voted in Chancellor Hitler purely because of your concern for train timetabling. But let’s be honest about the company you keep, eh? 

Moving on… the hilarious thing about the fuckwit racists having a go at my fellow non-whites is that their votes will mean that the first people to leave Britain will be foreign European workers. I know Poles, Lithuanians, Germans and others who are thinking of moving back to their respective homelands because of Brexit. All of these people happen to be as white as new-fallen snow. 

Do you see? 

The Brexit campaign whipped up a xenophobic frenzy, promising, in the eyes of the people it was swindling, a return to GREAT BRITAIN, a Britain free from immigrants. And when racists hear the word ‘immigrants,’ the first ethnic groups they think of are not white, trust me. 

And then what happens? SURPRISE, WE’RE ALL STILL HERE!

Which leads me inexorably back to: 

The idioms pig in a poke and sell a pup (or buy a pup) refer to a confidence trick originating in the Late Middle Ages, when meat was scarce, but cats and dogs were not.[1][2][3] The scheme entailed the sale of a suckling pig in a poke. The bag, sold unopened, would actually contain a cat or dog, which was substantially less valuable as a source of meat. The French idiom acheter (un) chat en poche (to buy a cat in a bag) refers to an actual sale of this nature, as do many European equivalents, while the English expression refers to the appearance of the trick.[4]

This trick may be the origin of the expression “letting the cat out of the bag“,[7] meaning to reveal that which is secret (if the would-be buyer opened the bag, the trick would be revealed).[4]

 ~ Wikipedia (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pig_in_a_poke)

I feel that the massive lurch to the right of Brexit is a perfect opportunity to inform people that con jobs aren’t new; they are so commonplace that we have enshrined this particular scam in languages from Britain to Vietnam. 

Nationalism is a perverse stupidity necessarily contained within borders. Wisdom is truly international. 

So, be careful when you see those buses emblazoned with how much extra money the NHS will get if you Vote Boris. Because you’re probably being sold a pup. Or, as the Zulu say, ” Ukuthenga ingulube esesakeni!”

Heteronormabored

Jyoti

One of the things I find most tedious about het porn is the INEVITABILITY of the sequence of sex actions. It’s always shit dialogue, oral (usually only one way, mind), vaginal, cumshot. Maybe they’ll throw in some anal, maybe they’ll go foot mad or something. But that’s it.

as an old, old man who remembers before it was all quarks round here, I am dulllllled dulll eduelsl argh by this.

Why not start with vaginal penetration and end with a light cheese omelette? And, no, I don’t mean a cum omelette ~ we’ve ALL eaten a cum omelette, I mean a piquant cheese omelette with a souffle-ish texture and a sprig of parsley on top. Hold the blat. 

Why not have the bloke come in an eggcup, put it on the roof of his car and then drive to the seaside? You could dub some oldey-timey Harold Lloyd music over this bit. It’d be mint. I wouldn’t know whether to wank or clap. 

Why not have the woman dressed up as godzilla and do that metallic SKRREEEKKKKK with every penile thrust? Perhaps she could shoot metal fire out of her arse when she fake-came? 

I mean, they say everything has been done but that’s just a lazy excuse dreamt up by postmodernists because they couldn’t be arsed to open their curtains in the morning. Those ideas above are FRESH and EDGY and NOT BEEN DONE BEFORE. 

god, I’m bored of porn. 

tumblr4lyf

Jyoti

i stfg, I come on here at fucking stupid o’clock, wishing I was dead and feeling worse inside and then one of you twats will do a post of statements wherein all the reactions are SPONGEOB SQUAREPANTS and I just fucking lose it.

I’m crying more than the end scene of blue is the warmest colour

in other news, a woman in Birds actually called me ‘duck’ when I went in to buy a cob earlier and i had to have a little cry in the car before going home

in other other news – the a52 is still fucked up and wth is going on in notts?

Nude Shoot With Tania

Jyoti

Last weekend, I did a nude shoot with the lovely Tania, as pictured above.

I’ve published one nude book so far and done numerous shoots but most of them are kept private as the models are sensitive about families / partners and what they’d think. 

So, it’s great to babe able to actually publish these shots, LIVE, on the nets! Woohoo!

I was nervous because it was a paid shoot, we had limited time and I have very definite ideas about what I don’t want to do. For a start, you will never see retouching on any of my pics. You will see digital cropping, levels, colour vibrancy and the very, very occasional spot removal at the request of a model. 

What you won’t see is the plastic-faced Stepford Wife ideal that is, apparently, sponsoring a whole new wave of how women can feel bad about themselves. 

I regard women as naturally beautiful. It’s my quest as a photographer to try and capture how *I* see women and share that with the world. In my non-nude portrait work, models will regularly say to me, “Oh, you’ve made me look beautiful!” And I have to correct them, no I didn’t. The beauty is all theirs; all I did was stand at the right spot at the right time and capture the right rays of light. 

Fundamentally, if you’re retouching the shit out of your portraits or nude work until the women look like bizarre Uncanny Valley replicants, then you are doing something wrong. Here’s my advice to you: 

STOP. CONSIDER THE DAMAGE YOU ARE DOING. WOMEN ARE SEEING YOUR IMAGES AND WONDERING WHY THEY DON’T LOOK LIKE THAT. YOU ARE PART OF THE PROBLEM. 

Look, I’m a sociologist, I’ve read enough Kristeva and Barthes and Bazin to realise that every photographic image is not only a construction, it is an argument. I’m not arguing from some naive stance of ‘realism’ or ‘essential truth.’ I believe every image is a semiotic hand grenade, fling them around without concern and you will be hurting people. 

To stretch the metaphor past breaking… this nude shoot was a minefield for me! I want to represent Tania’s beauty and personality, I want to show how the light hugs her hips and kisses her abdomen. BUT I don’t want to be part of the same old bullshit discourse where all naturalism is lost in the effort of creating an ephemeral, anonymous ur-female, in trying to capture the immanent. 

So, have a look at my pics of Tania. Question how they make you feel. Question why I made them – what the fuck am I trying to say? What can I say in nude female photography that hasn’t been said a million times already? 

Then, when you have the answers… write a book about it, don’t send it to me! 😛

Tania

Radio 1 DJs – “What Are Furries?”

Jyoti

@BBCR1 #furries If you’re gonna talk about a subculture, it might help if your presenters don’t piss themselves laughing at it whilst introducing the clip. *hint* don’t become sociologists… ?

Seriously, though. First of all – who under 40 hasn’t even heard of furries in 2018? I cannot believe two YOUNG AND HIP AND HAPPENING Radio 1 DJs are so fucking out of it that they’re like, “WHAT IS THIS? PEOPLE DRESSING UP AS ANIMALS?”

For fuck’s sake CSI had a furry episode way back in 2003. 

FIFTEEN FUCKING YEARS AGO!

I suggest Radio 1 hire people with at least half a fucking clue about contemporary (sub)cultures OR train the current roster of Mike Read-school mundanes to be a bit more broad-minded, eh?

Being this out of touch, this ridiculously unhip is probably one of the reasons Radio 1 is haemorrhaging young listeners at a disastrous rate.

But, leaving that aside – what gives these DJs the right to laugh at another group of people? So they like getting dressed up as animals and having conventions and making like-minded mates? Is that just not 18-pints-of-lager-and-a-shag-outside-a-chip-shop enough for you?

I’m reminded of all the fucks who used to laugh at me for liking comics when I was a kid. Bullying starts with laughter.

Arizona Cops Are Bastards

Jyoti

“The Mesa Police Department in Arizona voluntarily released surveillance video footage showing a group of officers brutally beating an unarmed man.

The video shows several police officers kneeing and punching Robert Johnson.”

(Source: BBC News)

TODAY’S all coppers are bastards.

Funny how the headline leaves out that the victim of this brutal attack was black…