2025.10.21

Here’s some static for people nostalgic for the old web.

No SNS. No Paywall. Just random thoughts jettisoned into space.

I’ve been a longtime listener to the critical media studies podcast hosted by Michael Repici and Barry J. Faulk.

Trying to figure out how changes in media consumption have led us to this altered state of reality.

Currently reading The Siren’s Call by Chris Hayes

Not as good or as interesting a book as Filterworld by Kyle Chayka

But probably a more digestible read for most people.

My basic synopsis: technology and media have screwed discourse

and discourse dictates ideology, society, reality

and there could be guardrails, but there are no guardrails,

and governments aren’t interested in understanding or addressing the problem,

and people are programmed to pay attention, consume, believe, and interact

building up what is ripping their world apart

so here we are. 2025.

Weather: strange.

Future outlook: misery.

Stock market and Bitcoin: Record highs.

Manosphere, UFC: Solid. Shredded. But inside, empty. Insecure. Sad.

Listening to Tropical Fuck Storm, and their new album Fairyland Codex

The second song “Goon Show” is a washed out synth dirge to broken empires.

I would describe “Goon Show” as

Goth, psychedelic oompa-loompa anti-capitalist disco.

Big bird slamming benzos, hugging a handle of whiskey, slobbering purple ooze from his beak onto a stained white shirt.

Smurfs tripping on acid in slow motion, playing paintball in an abandoned motel with real guns.

Folded over addicts next to green dumpsters, needles sticking out of their thin arms.

During the siren, clang banging, shredded guitar face-melting breakdown of a Tropical Fuck Storm, I’m reminded

of twisting the cable wires connected to the back of my parent’s T.V

to try and get the Playboy channel unfuzzed.

In “Goon Show” Gareth Liddiard declaims

”It's a golden age of assholes
And the triumph of disgrace
Howling winds turn cornfields into rags
Yeah, I've seen the cell phone footage
And it's raining cats and dogma
You can rob a bank but you don't really rob the bank

'Cause if they lose they win
And all they need's the wind
That blows where people wave their flags at people waving flags”

Moments of supernatural clarity, twisting the cable just right

there’s a nipple breaking through the fuzz.

Tropical Fuck Storm

No band sounds more like 2025.

Thank you Fiona, Erica, Gareth, and Lauren.

Also, they were just on KEXP. Excellent. Just excellent.