2022-01-24 | Bland, Crunchy and Dense.

Intro

Hello there my people. There are no people probably but I'm still going to try and write stuff here. I haven't posted in a while but really nothing interesting has been happening. Whoops!

What I've Been Up To

I am halfway towards buying a MacBook thanks to Mobiloo though I feel I will need another source of income as there isn't much to do there and the progress I've made so far was mostly banked from the past couple of years.

I haven't been on any particularly interesting walks. I had a minor trip and went around the block but other than that I have been staying indoors except to go to the shop.

I smoked a couple of cigarettes and totally forgot where I put them so now I am stuck vaping. Smoking is rather unpleasant but sometimes it feels right I guess. I think I burned my throat by smoking as it has been very painful to swallow in the days following.

I have had twice the daily recommended dose of spinach today in the form of a risotto. The risotto was fully vegetarian and tasted great. I have also figured out how to fry an egg finally. The secret for me was to add way more oil than I originally thought and to break the eggs into a bowl before pouring them into the pan (this helps to prevent the yolk from breaking).

I finally got round to starting my mushroom growing kit. I'm looking forward to tasting them. Hopefully I will be growing lots of different types in the future. I would also be super interested in learning to forage. I wonder if there is a mushroom identification app- that could be a good way to learn what the different species look like. That said going out with a human guide would be more interesting for sure since they'd know where to look.

I have had the battery in my iPhone replaced. I hope I can find a use for my previous phone, it would be a shame to waste it over nothing but a broken screen. The new battery is awesome, I've gone from charging multiple times per day to lasting a full day on each charge under normal use including a bit of music listening and some internet browsing. Definitely workable if, dare I say it, comparable to my Android phone.

'Damn.' Album Review

I have listened to the album Damn a lot recently (at least three times; perhaps skipping a couple of tracks on the third go around). I think it is very good. Definitely worth a listen before you read further.

I liked the production, it was very rich if at times deceptively simple. It gets away with that simplicity easily because you aren't listening to that aspect at all the first time around due to its absorbing lyrical flow.

It is a deep album i.e. repeat listens offered more and more insight. There were lyrics which at first seemed to mean one thing but on closer inspection turned out to mean something completely different. Maybe I was just slow on the uptake but a certain track had something of a twist, something I can't recall ever having experienced in a piece of music before. In the track XXX. Kendrick describes a man, Johnny, who is involved in gang violence. Kendrick describes him losing a love of books only to tell us that he has killed somebody. The setup describing him like a ne'er-do-well schoolchild allows the listener to empathise and lightens to blow of the murder he perpetrated. Kendrick then describes to us the other side of the story and highlighting how gang violence leads to revenge killings. If he'd jumped straight in and not humanised the instigator one could more easily dismiss both sides as bad people. By showing us that every killer starts off innocent Kendrick illustrates the fact that anybody can go down a bad path and subsequently gives us a rare glimpse into the thought process of a murderer in his description of the protagonist's need for revenge.

Post-Review Review Review

Feeling like my "review" is very pretentious at "lyrical flow". I feel dumb for missing basically the entire message of 'XXX.' until writing this. Feeling okay now I've finished it. I think I had some genuinely useful insight here. It's several years too late but if I'd read this review after my first listen to the album I would've been encouraged to give it another listen right then and there to see if there was more I could discover for myself. I think I'll leave it at "revenge" for now and maybe give the album one more listen to see if anything really jumps out at me. Doesn't seem to pretentious now I've come back thirty minutes later. I do think that my "insight" might be a little obvious but it wasn't to me.

The Magic Section

Yep you heard that right I'm including a whole magic section in this blog because I will always have enough content to fill at least a paragraph or two. This time I experienced what seemed to have been intentionally engineered synchronicity from Spotify. The ramifications of this being intentional are frankly terrifying. I also experienced demonic possession (not sure if this has happened to me before).

The synchronicity went as so. I started writing a short story about an insane murderer. While writing I had music playing in the background. The longer I kept writing the weirder the story got until I was just writing about writing and about myself and all kinds of shit. The music would frequently feature a word or phrase I had written at exactly the same time I was writing it. There were mentions of me by name. Lots of lyricists spoke about catching up with me (presumably catching up by reading what I had written up to that point).

Later on I decided to have a mess around with hypnosis. I first relaxed myself. Once I was sufficiently relaxed I stopped moving entirely and using only my thoughts was able to cause my entire body to convulse involuntarily (stuff happening to my wrists has always freaked me out enough to cause a physical reaction so I thought about that). My thoughts tried to convince me through various guises that what I was doing was messed up which made me laugh just by listening to their arguments. Wow I sound crazy. I really hope nobody is reading this.

'Senorita by Arca' was playing while I wrote about hypnosis (note the lyrics about wrists).

Conclusion

Basically not much has been happening lately, just another several days in my life. I hope this has been helpful for you to read. Have a great day!

Bye! x

P.S. I figured out what the mystery spaces are about. They appear when nothing has been typed in order to store the style information you have saved. To reproduce this issue change a styling option like font size with nothing written in the post and a space will magically appear.