hi res photo of stick man from the cover of led zeppelin IV -- I wanted to make a print of this because it was slightly more subtle than simply having the album cover up on my wall and it was more of a reference. Im posting the photo here in case anyone else wants to do the same and doesn't have access to a high res scanner or photocopier
Hello Tumblr, I'm here with a STUPID request...
I asked myself the question 'Is Every Block in Minecraft Someone's Favourite?", and to answer this, I created a survey! It takes two seconds to fill out, and I just really want to know if every block is loved by someone! And that just doesn't have to be for building, it can also just be for how you use it in the game, the sound it makes when you place it, or maybe you've got a memory attached to it!
On the 21st of April, I'll be sharing the results with the survey alongside some hopefully interesting stats. Please help me out, fill in the form and share it around!
https://forms.gle/yhK6PFUPcJ6McPS78
I recently had a fever and in my feverish state I had an epiphany about the existence of free will from a scientific perspective. I don’t know exactly how I came up with this but I can’t think of any reasons why what I’m saying is wrong so I have decided to incorporate it into my worldview.
I do not believe in free will, not because of the existence of a great plan or some higher being controlling reality, but purely because it is a law of the universe.
Ok so the basis of this argument is that time, like our three directional axes, is a direction, and we simply cannot see it as such because we are 3 dimensional rather than 4+ dimensional.
I believe this to be the case for a few reasons: firstly, when graphing, if you have 2 axes, you can use our two basic directions, x and y to show our data. If you want to add a third axis, you add in the third direction, z. If you want a 4th, you have to animate it— there are no other ways to do this on a single graph. In this case we are literally using time as a 4th dimension.
the next reason is a little more conceptual. If you imagine a 2D being (he can see x and y, but not z) and you move him through the third axis, then it would look to him like the objects he can see around him are transforming, when in actuality it is simply a different part of the same object, but in the direction he cannot comprehend. Simply put, moving in a direction he can’t comprehend makes it look like the same part of an object isn’t moving, but is transforming, when in truth it’s not the same part of the object.
as the 2D being moves right, it sees the white rectangle as a line slowly moving up.
To reiterate; when a being moves through a dimension it doesn’t understand, it sees the objects around it transform.
Now, scale this up to us; we can sit and watch an ice cube melt and it looks like it transforms from a solid to a liquid as we move through time.
(Side note, I am not actually saying time is the fourth dimension, but rather every dimension we move through that we do not understand is amalgamated together as time. Time is simply all of the dimensions we don’t understand.)
Now that I have hopefully convinced you that time is a dimension, I have to relate this to free will. If you imagine, for a certain instance of time, an imaginary line between London and Paris. No point on this line exists before any other, including the ends. Now, imagine a line, starting on 01/01/1000, to 01/01/3000, but on a single point, say the tip of the Empire State Building. By this logic, despite it feeling sequential, no point on the line existed before any other, we only assume it does because we ourselves move from past to future.
This means that the timeline all exists ‘at once’. If you were to time travel, then that time travel is on the line from the start.
This timeline came into existence all at once, so the time travelling is already accounted for. If you tried to go back in time and kill your grandfather, then you know you will fail, since your existence itself proves that your grandfather did not die. (This model has the side effect of preventing any time travelling shenanigan paradoxes from happening.)
now the final bit of logic; time is relative, (just as most other quantities are) and so just as time travelling to the past will fail to ever change your present, it MUST be that your actions in the present cannot change the future. You decide on your choices, but they were always what you would have decided on anyway, as that is what the time travel says. This means that you do not have free will. You do not have the capacity to make any other choice than the one you decided on.
another side note. Does this actually count as not having free will? You do still make the choices, you just cannot change what you choose.
Let’s say you played a multiple choice style game with 4 options for each choice. After you finish playing you discover that of the 4 choices, 3 of them tell you “try again” and give you another go until you pick the ‘correct’ choice. You played the entire game picking the correct choice. You still chose everything you did, and no outside forces affected which choice you clicked, but you never had the capacity to do anything but those choices. Did you still choose your path? What if the game designer based the correct choice of the 4 on what they thought you specifically would have picked?
if you actually read this then thank you very much, this has been weighing on me for too long and people are beginning to complain when I bring it up in person. Please let me know your thoughts, or anything that doesn’t make sense :)
I recently had a fever and in my feverish state I had an epiphany about the existence of free will from a scientific perspective. I don’t know exactly how I came up with this but I can’t think of any reasons why what I’m saying is wrong so I have decided to incorporate it into my worldview.
I do not believe in free will, not because of the existence of a great plan or some higher being controlling reality, but purely because it is a law of the universe.
Ok so the basis of this argument is that time, like our three directional axes, is a direction, and we simply cannot see it as such because we are 3 dimensional rather than 4+ dimensional.
I believe this to be the case for a few reasons: firstly, when graphing, if you have 2 axes, you can use our two basic directions, x and y to show our data. If you want to add a third axis, you add in the third direction, z. If you want a 4th, you have to animate it— there are no other ways to do this on a single graph. In this case we are literally using time as a 4th dimension.
the next reason is a little more conceptual. If you imagine a 2D being (he can see x and y, but not z) and you move him through the third axis, then it would look to him like the objects he can see around him are transforming, when in actuality it is simply a different part of the same object, but in the direction he cannot comprehend. Simply put, moving in a direction he can’t comprehend makes it look like the same part of an object isn’t moving, but is transforming, when in truth it’s not the same part of the object.
as the 2D being moves right, it sees the white rectangle as a line slowly moving up.
To reiterate; when a being moves through a dimension it doesn’t understand, it sees the objects around it transform.
Now, scale this up to us; we can sit and watch an ice cube melt and it looks like it transforms from a solid to a liquid as we move through time.
(Side note, I am not actually saying time is the fourth dimension, but rather every dimension we move through that we do not understand is amalgamated together as time. Time is simply all of the dimensions we don’t understand.)
Now that I have hopefully convinced you that time is a dimension, I have to relate this to free will. If you imagine, for a certain instance of time, an imaginary line between London and Paris. No point on this line exists before any other, including the ends. Now, imagine a line, starting on 01/01/1000, to 01/01/3000, but on a single point, say the tip of the Empire State Building. By this logic, despite it feeling sequential, no point on the line existed before any other, we only assume it does because we ourselves move from past to future.
This means that the timeline all exists ‘at once’. If you were to time travel, then that time travel is on the line from the start.
This timeline came into existence all at once, so the time travelling is already accounted for. If you tried to go back in time and kill your grandfather, then you know you will fail, since your existence itself proves that your grandfather did not die. (This model has the side effect of preventing any time travelling shenanigan paradoxes from happening.)
now the final bit of logic; time is relative, (just as most other quantities are) and so just as time travelling to the past will fail to ever change your present, it MUST be that your actions in the present cannot change the future. You decide on your choices, but they were always what you would have decided on anyway, as that is what the time travel says. This means that you do not have free will. You do not have the capacity to make any other choice than the one you decided on.
if you actually read this then thank you very much, this has been weighing on me for too long and people are beginning to complain when I bring it up in person. Please let me know your thoughts, or anything that doesn’t make sense :)
another side note. Does this actually count as not having free will? You do still make the choices, you just cannot change what you choose.
Let’s say you played a multiple choice style game with 4 options for each choice. After you finish playing you discover that of the 4 choices, 3 of them tell you “try again” and give you another go until you pick the ‘correct’ choice. You played the entire game picking the correct choice. You still chose everything you did, and no outside forces affected which choice you clicked, but you never had the capacity to do anything but those choices. Did you still choose your path? What if the game designer based the correct choice of the 4 on what they thought you specifically would have picked?
hello! i've noticed i've been using my blog less! so to get myself to post more here, i thought i'd make post each time i download/buy a new album, given how much i love music and gushing about it!
i've been downloading music for awhile now, cause i don't have Spotify... the result was, i ended up accidentally being forced to consume music the way music used to be consumed - album by album, instead of through vibe-based playlists - cause i had to download songs in batches, and albums were basically the only way i could do that! and it's been pretty fun doing this awhile! :)
Low, "Heroes", and Blackstar.
by David Bowie.
(1977, 1977, and 2016)
so... i've always been a bowie sort of person. (and no, i don't just mean im bi.)
David Bowie, as an artist, is probably best understood from a modern music perspective as a 20th Century equivalent of Radiohead with a lot less pessimism. Avant-garde, and absolutely experimentally poppy... but nevertheless able to compose something musically cohesive and accessible out of elements that you wouldn't expect pop music to be evoked from.
When I was younger, I listened to a scattered ton of his songs. Looking back at younger me's vibe-based playlists, I can see "Scary Monsters and Super Creeps," "Starman," "Space Oddity," "The Man Who Sold The World," "Under Pressure," "Heroes," "Nightclubbing," and even his cover of "Comfortably Numb!" And I'd listened to Blackstar a few times during A-Levels... His song, 'Heroes,' was and continues to be my favourite song of all time, I think! and The Man Who Sold The World was the first song I learned to play guitar while singing to!! Actually - I vividly remember it being one of the first songs I sang to myself, and thinking... "oh... i actually sound... nice, when I sing? i didn't know that..." Looking back, David Bowie has been like, one of the most formative artists in my musical development!
But despite all that, I've actually never "got into him..." He's my sixth favourite artist of all time, but I only knew him from scattered songs when I was younger. And, I hadn't listened to a song of his in like, four years. Until...
One day, I got given a prompt for an Old English essay.
"'We can be heroes. Just for one day.' - DAVID BOWIE. Discuss in relation to heroism in Old English literature."
It's not very often an essay gives you a soundtrack for its own writing! So I downloaded Low, 'Heroes', and Blackstar to listen to while working on the essay. Low, because it was meant to be "his best album." 'Heroes' because it was what the essay was about. And his final album, Blackstar, because I remembered liking its weird genre-fusion a lot when I was younger.
And... wow. It turns out Bowie's a lot of fun!
Low. (1977)
art rock, electronic, avant-pop, ambient... sovietwave???
"something deep inside of me-! yearning deep inside of me!"
Low is the sound of David Bowie trying desperately to get off cocaine. It was ruining his life, his body, and worst of all, his music. And so he fled the druggy land of 70s Los Angeles for his home continent, settling in West Berlin where it would be impossible for him to get his hands on the powdery white stuff.
(in that way, Low reminds me a lot of Oasis' 'Standing on the Shoulder of Giants...' an album made with a similar desire to shift from poppy rock and experiment with arty avant-gardisms to find a new identity in the wake of the ghost of superstardom and cocaine addictions... anyway, i digress.)
From the moment Low starts with the electronic bleeps and bloops of "Speed of Life," you sort of know what you're in for. I saw a review (again, Radiohead comparisons!!) saying that the electronica-rock fusion of Low had not been achieved again by another artist until the release of Kid A by Radiohead - and honestly, I get it. It's influenced by a ton of the krautrock-electronica weird stuff that was floating about Berlin at the time from acts like Kraftwerk and Tangerine Dream. It's the first of many Bowie albums to be produced alongside Tony Visconti - my beloved! - and the ambient pioneer Brian Eno. It laid down a lot of foundations for the genre that we now know and love as post-punk, better known as "USSRrock" or "Sovietwave" in online circles depending on your sexual preference. And so it's popularly lauded by critics as the most pioneering album he ever made!
That being said, I think it's follow-up, 'Heroes,' is better...
Highlights:
"Speed of Life"
i know it's the first song, and lasts like two minutes, and has no vocals... but idk... something about it just is such a vibe. bleep bloop!
"Breaking Glass"
bleep bloop bloop. that punctuating bleeep-boooop gets stuck in my head every now and then....
"Sound and Vision"
the music is so upbeat and fun and poppy!
but the lyrics...
(again, i'd compare it to 'Gas Panic!' by Oasis, written by Noel Gallagher! both darkly propulsive pop songs, all about the cocaine-addiction demons as they seize ahold of you all of a sudden...)
"Heroes." (1977)
art rock, avant-pop, ambient, electronic...
"get me to a doctor's!! i'm under japanese influence and my honour's at stake!!"
Despite containing one of Bowie's most praised songs, 'Heroes' as an album is... underappreciated. And I can understand why... It's a more commercial-pop rendition of Low's experimental convictions. The people who like Bowie for his sweet and catchy pop love his Ziggy-era stuff better, and the people who like Bowie for his avant-garde art rock love Low and The Next Day more. (i still need to listen to the next day!!) I guess that's why critics like Low better - cause it's "more pioneering"? If Low is Kid A, then 'Heroes' is Amnesiac - "everything it did, the album before experimented more with and did it first."
But 'Heroes' is... good. Like, really, really good. From the very first track, you get a taste of what you're in for. Irreverent and experimental, like Low is, but the added pop sensibilities of 'Heroes' gives it this added dimension of sweetness and melodic juice!
Low's second side is full of ambient soundscapes, apocalyptic sounding and dark. Heroes' second side is ambient soundscapes too - but it genuinely beats Low into the dust. Ranging from the slight ominous edge of V-2 Schneider to the actual feeling of being bathed in the Half-Life 1 Xen healing pools that Moss Garden and Neuköln give you... it's just such a masterclass in ambience. Not until, like, Aphex Twin's debut album and Xtal did such resonantly chill vibes get embedded into plastic again. And then it's all topped off with the vocals on "The Secret Life of Arabia," a mad victory lap of a final song!
this is what Selected Ambient Works and the second side of 'Heroes' sounds like to me, okay? don't judge.
And for all that, I really think 'Heroes' beats Low... Low is more brash, punky, electronic, abrasive - and that's such a vibe! But 'Heroes,' the more swimmy, melodic, poppy take on Low's electronic avant-garde art rock just resonates something different in me. That "something" is probably my inner psychedelic coming out...
(It's not that inner.)
Highlights:
"Beauty and the Beast"
such a stellar opening track! irreverent and experimental, like low, but soaked in more pop than a sugar-addicted primary schooler's t-shirt...
lol, as i finished up this post, listening to this song my mum came downstairs and started dancing to it... i guess bowie passes the mum test?
"Heroes" (obviously...)
king crimson's robert fripp playing the swimmy, hypnotic ambient guitar that feedbacks dreamily throughout! my favourite song in the world! as the vocal take continues, tony visconti switches the microphone input to microphones that are further away and need a louder signal to activate - getting bowie to transition from the soft close-up mic voice to that iconic histrionic desperate-crying-out performance that we know and love as the song continues!
"Moss Garden"
a warm, sterilising cleansing bath of ambience for your ears. stellar... delicately sparkly... purifying... and intensely not-talked-about-enough, like all of Bowie's instrumental work!
Blackstar. (2016)
art rock, jazz rock, avant-jazz... hip-hop?? ... d'n'b??????
"Look up here, man... I'm in danger.
I've got nothing left, to lose."
Q: What does someone dying sound like?
Tony Visconti received a call from David Bowie one day in 2015. He'd like to work on another album, he said, after a long time. But first, he needed to talk to Tony in-person. Visconti thought it sounded ominous - he wondered if he was going to be fired. "We're just going to have a little chinwag," Bowie told him over the phone. And when he met the Starman at his office, Visconti noticed his eyebrows were missing. "Uh oh," he thought.
"I have something to show you," Bowie said, taking him inside. He pulled his wooly hat off; and Visconti saw that the famous rock-'n'-roll hair, which had so often graced the cover of the NME back in the day, was all gone.
"I have cancer. It's terminal."
I remember as a little tyke the day that Bowie died in 2016 - mere days after Blackstar's release - and the tightly-kept secret of his cancer spilled out into the world. People on the radio, on the TV, were all stunned and teary about this man who I'd hardly known the music of while he was alive. And this album is his swan song. A final message. In his last days he talked with friends about recording another album after it - he thought, like we all did, that he had more time.
But he didn't. Blackstar is the sum total of his career.
...and what a sum total it was...!
The first song is a ten-minute jazz-rock-avant-pop dark epic. Maybe jazz isn't your thing. That's okay. Because the very next song is a slammy explosive rock number. Then the very next song is a measured, contemplative, swelling ballad that crescendoes with yearning energy. Then the very next song is ... ultrapropulsive frantic drum 'n' bass that sounds like it was made for a high-octane getaway scene?! Then... Kendrick Lamar-inspired hip hop written in... antiquated British gay slang?? What in the world??
Bowie's final work is a show of force. It's him demonstrating that he can do it all, and do it well, and do it while still being David Bowie throughout - and have it all work together as a cohesive whole. And it's amazing, all the way through. Written with his own imminent death in mind, it's a genuine testament to him, his career, his life, his death, and his subsequent afterlife in that great gig in the sky.
Highlights:
"Lazarus"
a really heartbreaking ballad... pondering death, and what's coming for him. it soars, and builds, and swells into an energy-charged crescendo! named after a biblical character who was a close friend of jesus. lazarus dies while jesus is away, and when jesus comes back his mother greets him, crying. jesus is trying to hold in his grief, when lazarus' sister enters, and sees jesus, she starts crying, whispering "oh, lord, if only you had been here, i know my brother would not have died!" jesus starts to break down, overcome by sheer human emotion, and begins to cry badly. he resurrects lazarus, overcome by the grief of his loss and his mourning friends and family...
lol, my little brother asked me what i was doing listening to "soft-rock smooth jazz..." he said the song was "music id skip if i heard it on the radio..." then my mum came in, dancing, cup of tea in hand. mum test!
"Sue (Or In a Season of Crime)"
a mad frantic dash of a song! pulsing neurotic breakbeats, with a sense of propulsion that goes absolutely all over the walls as the song continues!
"Girl Loves Me"
polari was a british gay code-language, used by the nation's secret queer subculture from the 19th century up until the 1960s decriminalisation of homosexuality, and polari was subsequently assimilated into everyday british slang. Girl Loves Me is a hip-hop style track, but instead of doing the AAVE slang that Black hip-hop tends to favour, Bowie's doing British queer vernacular, as a British queer. it's cool!
The cover of "Aladdin Sane," released just as Bowie broke into international music superstardom as the Starman. Unquestionably the most iconic photo of him - and unquestionably one of the most iconic shots of popular culture, up there with the Abbey Road cover...
The final song on Blackstar, and in turn, of his entire discography, is a lilting, dance-ish, moving piece called "I Can't Give Everything Away." It's a goodbye song. A sum-up of his life's work, an epic closing track, and a final bow from one of the most colourful, varied, and important discographies in music history.
And as his final track draws to a close, and draws the curtain on his discography - a harmonica part fades in, taken from a song of his on Low. Situated at the end of Low's first side, that song's harmonica piece is recontextualised from it's origins and placed in the foreground of I Can't Give Everything Away as that final song ends: a farewell to Bowie's incredible musical career.
The original song's name? "A New Career In A New Town."
I hope you're rocking that great gig in the sky, Bowie. ❤️
my mum is currently dancing to the song i'm listening to atm: 'It Ain't Easy' from The Rise and Fall of Ziggy Stardust and the Spiders From Mars.
that's three separate songs from three separate eras. bowie officially passes the mum test.
