Dead1

Welcome aboard!

34 minutes ago, Spiderlix said:

WTH?!I always thought Australia was first tier.Especially at policial/security terms.The only time that i had an experience with cops was when a guy invaded my home.Cops arrested him.

Understood.

Holy crap - home invasion!  Glad you're Ok!

Compared to rest of world, Australia is alright..  

However I live in Tasmania which is the poorest state in Australia and has major issues with poverty and social decline.    Lots of drugs and alcoholism.  

Crime is becoming a major issue - hell, I saw the cops arresting two guys on one of our major streets yesterday at 5:15 pm!  Yes, they were doing their job for once.

I see criminal activity or results of criminal activity at least once every couple of months - public drunkenness, fighting, vandalism, drug taking (or in one case a young woman being stretchered out of a popular park after overdosing) - all in broad daylight.  I work in the CBD and go for walks during my lunch.

The only place worse in Australia are some of the remote areas eg Northern Territory which is definitely getting worse.  However crime is skyrocketing in some major cities too (https://www.abc.net.au/news/2023-06-15/teenage-burglars-behind-rise-in-victoria-youth-crime/102483786) 

29 minutes ago, AlSymerz said:

The picture of Australia is as bad as one wants to draw it, but not all drawings show the same thing.

 

I've noticed you seem to refuse to acknowledge the country is changing for the worse - growing poverty, growing homelessness (including in rural and regional areas), growing drug and alcohol consumption, growing desperation. 

Haven't you seen all the headlines about stagnant wages (since 2008), inflation pushing people into poverty, housing affordability etc?  

And this is  both statistically and anecdotally.   I've never seen as many homeless as I have the last two years.  I now see criminal activity in broad daylight at least once every couple of months.

15 minutes ago, AlSymerz said:

That why I live in a country town and leave all the cop bashing to you big city folk who hate cops and think the system doesn't work.

Well it doesn't work when you call the cops and they don't turn up (and I've called them at least 4 times - they only came twice - first time the cop literally ashes and makes a mess over the area he is dusting for prints and the second time they didn't even get out of the vehicle and drove past after they struggled to even get the city right).

In fact my department was told by police they don't guarantee call outs to rural areas either.  We were looking at improving safety of our rural based community staff.  Part of it was to have a duress tag that would go to a monitored service who would then call police in case our staff needed it.

Cops said they wouldn't commit to anything as they couldn't guarantee call outs in rural areas.  Most of the rural police stations have been closed or are unmanned.

They're now looking at closing even more rural stations and consolidating them into larger ones though this means greater wait times.

Same for ambulances and even in the cities - one of our friends' kids has a pacemaker.  Pacemaker stopped working and kid went unconscious.  Parents called 000 and were told there were no ambulances available and they should take the kid to the hospital themselves.

Or at our kids' school when one of the kids was seriously hurt.  Again no ambulance available and school staff had to take them to hospital. 

Tasmania is far more dilapidated then people think.

The church is lovely.  Hopefully well looked after!

Musically - you guys sound very professional.  Track's good and I appreciate the production (polished but not as over polished as say modern Blind Guardian).  However it is too melodic for my tastes.

11 hours ago, JonoBlade said:

 

The technical staff must hold their collective heads in their collective hands and say "shit guys, we do our job, why can't you come up with a half decent/original plot!?"

The question is "why can't anyone in Hollywood come up with a half decent plot?"

Most movies and tv shows are sad tropes - in fact most movies now have generic "It's all good then the protagonist gets cocky and then must redeem themselves" plot.  And I am amazed at how often writing is disjointed or just terrible eg new Witcher.

I actually really liked Andor - it was about as realistic as Star Wars can be.  I really enjoyed the bad guy characters and also how the rebels aren't exactly all nice heroes but a collection of the misguided and the hypocritical.  There was a fair bit more depth than usual Star Wars.

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The Mandalorian had a genius central premise of a babysitting bounty hunter

Actually it wasn't such an original premise.  Mandalorian was inspired by Japanese Lone Wolf and Cub manga and movie series from the 1970s.

Kind of like how the 1960s movie Magnificent Seven was basically a westernised Seven Samurai.

1 hour ago, Spiderlix said:

But didn't you call the police?

No point in calling the police in Australia.  They don't show up and are generally incompetent.

I have called them several times for serious issues including domestic dispute that was turning violent (as well as threats of murder)  as well as burglaries or extreme vandalism.  They don't show up and in one case where they did the guy didn't give two fucks and literally made a mess of the crime scene he was dusting for prints.

Last time I called them (26 July 2023), they ended up calling me half a dozen times to clarify details, confirm city I was in (radio room is centralised and in another city and the operator didn't write down details I told them), confirm street, tell me to go to station (they sent me away) and then called me up to ask me about some other issue not related to me (someone's stolen car in another city).  They couldn't get the city right, the street right, the location right.

After half an hour they then told me to go to the crime scene which I did and the cop just drove past and never stopped.

Now this was in broad daylight and the crime happened on our city's main CBD street only 2 blocks from main police station.

My wife works in criminal justice system and she has even less nice things to say about them - suffice to say some of them don't believe domestic violence is an actual crime.

Cops here are just useless and corrupt. Basically cops are just bad guys with badges.    It's why I feel no pity when they get killed by criminals.

1 hour ago, GoatmasterGeneral said:

I find it irritating and distracting. What would you say I listen to that's atonal?

Well ironically that Omega album that started this discussion was more atonal than Venom in the vocal department.

But you listen to death metal and grindcore which are atonal, especially grindcore and you hate the "bouncy/groovy" stuff in those genres eg Pig Destroyer's newer stuff.

6 hours ago, GoatmasterGeneral said:

Altars of Madness in particular sounds to me like a record that's being played backwards. 

 

Intro to Altars of Madness is the opening few bars played backwards.

First half of the album is some of the best death metal out there IMO.  It peters out a bit in second half but still very listenable.

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If it weren't for the extreme levels of atonality I would very likely be a fan of all 3 bands.

I don't hear any atonality in Venom though Morbid Angel and Pantera can get atonal at times (eg Pantera's 25 Years before the time change) if you think about it in terms of disjointed stuff that doesn't follow standard norms  (when it comes to atonality I think about a lot of Immolation (eg Close To A World Below), Brutal Truth around Sounds of the Animal Kingdom), Meshuggah and most definitely stuff like Pyrrhon and Imperial Triumphant).

Oh and Napalm Death, Nails, Noisem and most other grindcore and power violence is atonal.  But then I enjoy stuff like From Enslavement To Obliteration 

Venom are playing essentially punk and heavy metal tunes.  There's standard rhythmic patterns in there.  There's occasional atonal solos if that was an issue I wouldn't be listening to Slayer and Celtic Frost either.

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Nothing even remotely "catchy" about their music

Strange cause most of your music is not catchy or memorable.  When I hear Live Like An Angel or Black Metal or Manitou, Poison or whatever I can generally guess it straight away.  

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I really like that record, bought it when it first came out, but it's hard for me to even hear it as "punk" anymore because it's so smooth and so catchy it sounds like pop music to me 46 years later.

Punk music was catchy - I mean listen to the Ramones, early Clash, the Saints etc.  

Sex Pistols is still one of the most abrasive, obnoxious, ugly albums out there in my opinion.  It's rawer than a lot of metal including huge chunks of modern Nuclear Blast style death and thrash.

And lyrically man they can still be offensive by today's standard - eg Bodies.  In many ways more extreme than Cannibal Corpse cause the Pistols made it realistic and not horror movie clichés.

4 hours ago, MarkhantonioYeatts said:

.....he played bass in FLOWERS OF ROMANCE, his first band with Keith LEVENE and if you listen he actually is decent sounding

Wow didn't know that about Sid. 

6 hours ago, GoatmasterGeneral said:

But what's important is it sounds that way to me, and atonality is something I just can't tolerate, not even a little bit. And I hear it in places where others don't. 

It's strange because a lot of what you listen to it atonal.  

7 hours ago, JonoBlade said:

I think this is relevant to a few observations of @Dead1 about Singapore.

Live to 100: Secrets of the Blue Zones Documentary Explores Areas of the World Where More People Live Longer - Netflix Tudum

Apparently, Singapore is the happiest place on Earth (not Disneyland as they would have you believe) which is surprising for an Asian country where you'd have thought they were under high pressure to perform at school, at work etc.

What struck me about the last episode (I only watched the last episode because my wife flagged it) was that politicians in Singapore actually seem to implement policies that are best for their citizens, even if not popular to begin with. I was really shocked by that. The nerve of those people.

I have always maintained the world would be better if it was all run by Singapore and have joked that Australia should contract Singapore to run Australia.

It would mean compromising some of the excesses of freedom but then freedom in its current format is a fucking planet destroying disaster.

Anyhow watching:

Ashoka - Decent enough, not as good as Mandalorian S1&2 and certainly no Andor but still fun enough.

Superstition - Basically Supernatural but set in a southern town.  Mario Van Peebles is in it.  Fluff and occasionally a bit disjointed but still enjoyable. 

Personally I think Venom shits all over most of the obscure most black, death and thrash bamds people fawn over on this site.

Catchy, memorable raucous tunes played with blistering energy.  They invented extreme metal and did a pretty good job of it.

Sure they weren't serious about being evil or Satanic but that was the point (in any case you guys all denounce the serious actual evil of 2nd wave black metal and most of you are probably not practising Satanists or Neo-Nazis or Pagans). 

They might not have been the best musicians either but neither were the Sex Pistols. 

Venom encapsulates extreme metal.   They kicked serious arse.  Sure they fucked up at times but so did everyone else (Cold Lake, Black album, a lot of Bathory's 1990s catalogue,Turbo etc etc).

5 hours ago, GoatmasterGeneral said:

Omega - The Hell Patrol, Greece

 

There's a lot of Venom worship in this one.  I don't mind it even though it's a bit amateurish compared to even Venom's initial efforts..

Enforcer

5 hours ago, SurgicalBrute said:

Stälker - Black Majik Terror

 

Great album. Thanks for sharing!

On 9/16/2023 at 6:10 AM, SurgicalBrute said:

No man, crust is mainly a mix of the late 70's/early 80's hardcore/anarcho punk sound and the rougher sounding, early 80's speed metal/1st wave black metal bands. Depending on if you want to set the mark with Amebix and Antisect or with stuff like Hellbastard and Doom, it could either be considered to predate death metal by a few years or to have developed side-by-side with it, but either way it exists independent of it

Would agree with this.

I'd say Celtic Frost were also a massive influence on crust punk (also surprisingly on grindcore).

4 hours ago, AlSymerz said:

Metal doesn't need genres, people need genres.

Ironically metal is a genre.

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I agree progress and innovation in metal are minimal these days.  The genre is now 53 years ago so it's to be expected.  The fact it has survived and thrived to this day (ignoring mid-late 1990s) is an amazing testament to its appeal.

Great list Surgical.

Helloween - Walls of Jericho and self titled EP

Running Wild - 1980s material

Grave Digger - early stuff

4 hours ago, Kristiko said:

Carcass - Surgical Steel (album)

Great album!

Arch Enemy - Burning Bridges

Carcass - Heartwork

Just listening to demo from a mate of mine - NWOBHM with death metal vocals.  So new it's currently only files on a Dropbox link.

11 hours ago, RelentlessOblivion said:

Yes, I’m aware, I’ve owned that album for a decade or so, my point was it’s at odds with the, generally speaking, softer sound of say Sigh for example, possible typo there  sorry

Or the demented punkiness of a lot of Japanese speed, heavy and thrash metal. 

3 hours ago, GoatmasterGeneral said:

 

Thanks for the warning, now I can safely skip it. 

I actually lost interest.  It gets way too meandering.

Anthrax - Persistence Of Time

Earth Crisis - All Out War

Earth Crisis - Breed The Killers

Entombed - Wolverine Blues

Iron Maiden - The Number of the Beast

Tomb Mold - The Enduring Spirit

Much cleaner sounding and far more tech/prog death vibes now.  Sounds even more proggy than Blood Incantation's Hidden History of the Human Race.

Oh and in case you are wondering where I fit on incompetent to lazy government worker scale:

1. I have always heen incompetent.i was even told when Igot my job I only got it because no one else applied.

2  These days I am lazy as fuck.  Why push yourself when no one else cares and everyone else is lazy or picks and chooses what work they do.

My job is basically  $110,000 a year social welfare.

Lots of others in same boat but they are delusional in thinking what they do somehow matters.

Sometimes I get a burst of delusional enthusiasm which is crushed pretty much as soon as I interact with equally incompetent and/or lazy upper level management.

Running gag between me and colleagues is we are all here just for paycheck.

2 hours ago, AlSymerz said:

Evidence means nothing in court these days. Government departments have been recording calls since the 80's, they've had CCVT footage since the 90's. Yet people still cause problems. If it became a system where people had to go to court to get their services reinstated there would a whole bunch of government hating lawyers all tying up the system with stupid cases that solve nothing. There is already a shit load of court cases happening around the country against government departments for people who feel they've been wronged, that would spiral out of control if the government was suddenly able to make up their own rules and hit people where it hurts.

The problem is an archaic bastardised legal system that again is mainly driven by financial concerns.  

Note you could funnel these people to ombudsmen or other complaints bodies.

I am a firm believer we need more social democracy but we also need a bit more Victorian style draconianism.

(Note I am not an Australian (government recently made that painfully clear) and my value set is closer to that of Jugoslav socialism and Balkans barbarism than Anglo-Saxon niceties).
 

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Sure the government is rotten from the top down, but it's not the entire government, therefore just getting rid of top tier staff isn't going to solve anything. Even if the the could weed out the shit,  many of those would have to be replaced, a time consuming and expensive task. It's also a task that is doomed to repeat it's own history because employment of managers in government departments is so poorly handled under most circumstances.

 

True on all accounts.

But it's increasingly more and more of the government services that are shit or corrupt or deliberately neutered.  It's been happening for 30 years.

Government no longer even maintains institutional knowledge on areas that are exclusive to government (eg defence or trade or running hospitals) and now hires private consultants for everything. 

Privatisation has seen the best move out of government and set up their own services (government funded of course - basically middle class welfare at its worst).

Hence you're left with basically the useless ones in many government services.

Eg here in Tasmania, good quality nurses and doctors no longer want to work in public health.  So we employ third rate staff from third world or really junior people with no experience.    The senior staff are usually useless dregs or lazy fucks or political animals out for career development.

Anyone good leaves the service.

The mentality is bums on seats. 

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Then at the very bottom of the pit is abusive and threatening customers. Such customers have risen something like 55% since the pandemic and when you're dealing with 10K or more calls a day that's a lot of grumpy people abusing staff. Again it's not all the customers but they can't just get rid of the problem ones.

My father used to say people need either fear of God or fear of government to stay in line.  And people no longer fear God and increasingly don't fear government.  They don't even fear the old social sanctions/stigma.

They are now hyper individuals who are convinced the world revolves around them and they should be given everything they believe is due to them.

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Somewhere in the middle there is a bunch of grunts working to solve problems they can't solve in 5 minutes and get sick of being abused just because someone had to wait on hold for 30 minutes. There will of course be a percentage will be dead weight or workers shit at their job, in the middle too, that goes without saying, but no rule change can fix those all those issues. Maybe it would be nice if someone tried, but it's not going to happen while the system is working, even if it's working badly.

 

Hence my point services are badly designed, don't have clear or realistic outputs/KPIs, aren't managed properly and the people running them are often useless or lazy or don't care.

If the system was efficient, you probably wouldn't have a as many people calling call centres/help lines.  They wouldn't be on hold for 30 minutes (or more).

You'd still get entitled cunts because the government and media have spent 40 years forcing neoliberal dogma down our throats - literally a culture of "I do what I want" and "fuck everyone else."  (Literally every single Disney storyline is essentially this - "You have to accept who I am, I don't have to compromise and there are no repercussions for what I do").

They call this freedom.

16 hours ago, AlSymerz said:

Government might make the laws but they still have to be sensible and fair, cutting someone off from government services isn't like stopping a kid from going on a school excursion. There can be real world ramifications from cutting services to people the government doesn't like.

 

That's the point.  It's called responsibility and it's something most Australians never encounter much and certainly avoid if it comes their way.  The system has to be carrot and stick - ie there are rewards for participating properly in society and repercussions for not.

As mentioned government run services are now a dumping ground for people from lower socio-economic backgrounds, a lot of whom are bogans with no concept of acceptable social interaction. 

Better funded private services just say no and cut people off (even if those services are government funded).  I think government services should have a right to not offer service to difficult people who refuse to behave appropriately.

Perhaps forcing private providers to accept more difficult clients would help alleviate pressure on government run services. 

Or even better nationalise all health and education.

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Not to mention that there is always two sides to every story, he said she said stories would fill the courts in no time as people used the free legal system to fight cases that shouldn't even go to court.

However thanks to The solution here is simple - record every call centre interaction (they probably already do) and have video surveillance in reception/public areas and key interaction areas (eg meeting rooms) (I'm also not 100% on privacy (or in fact many other stupid western concepts).

That way you have evidence.