NokturnalBoredom

Dude, don't even think about that shit for any reason. As someone who bought a 9mm carbine and began sticking it in his mouth two years ago "just to see how it felt" as my relationship with someone I wanted to have kids & a life with was falling apart rapidly, please go talk to someone right away. The fucked thing about suicide is that these kinds of thoughts are how it starts and it may seem like a beneficial thing for the family, or a way out, but you have to think about the damage that you'd do to the people who survive you and are going to be asking why you did it, even when your financial situation seems insurmountable & horrible. I promise you that even if you think that you have a good reason, people are going to miss you much more than they're going to be thankful for a life insurance payment. I have prior attempts on my own life. I tried to hang myself but the fixture I tried to do it from ended up collapsing. I also tried to OD on drugs and simply just got really high for days (and probably did permanent brain damage and heart damage in the process). I am on meds now that make me realize that suicide is never an option because as bad as things get (and they're going to get bad societally for me in the next few years), I'd rather force the authorities to kill me so I can escape the reeducation camps & political prison than die by my own hand and have the remaining few people who love me wondering why I did it and why I chose to leave them here without me. Don't do it. Talk to someone. There are things that are preferable to life and I get it completely, but those things are not here yet although they are in the process of coming down the pipe.

The worst thing about being a DM is creating a world, writing out a huge campaign, and then having nobody around to play it because they all went to college. This happened to me and it was irritating as hell, and is what made me put away my D&D rulebooks as something from teenage years now gone. The thing is, I probably still have the campaign data somewhere in my house. In some forgotten box in my closet.

NP: No Sun Rises "Ascent//Decay" (I am trying to like this album, since someone gave it to me as a gift but the fact that it's "post-black metal" just doesn't really do much for me.)

I like a lot of metal from different time periods, but I can't definitively say that the 80s or 90s were better for metal than the current era. A lot of truly legendary albums came out of the 90s: Goat Horns & Nechrist (Nokturnal Mortum) Thousand Swords (Graveland), In the Nightside Eclipse & Anthems to the Welkin At Dusk (Emperor), Stormblast & Spiritual Black Dimensions (Dimmu Borgir), Angels Fall First & Oceanborn (Nightwish), Wildhoney & Clouds (Tiamat), Sleep's Holy Mountain (Sleep) Down (Sentenced)... I mean tons of great stuff came out of the 90s; a lot of albums that really set the standard for what I think that metal should be, but that doesn't mean that good albums aren't coming out now. Some of the best albums I can think of that came out recently: Evil Sound Screamers (Acid Witch), Eternal Hails (Darkthrone), The Heresiarch (Nupraptor), Worm Ritual (Nekrofilth), Roads to the North (Panopticon), Evil Strikes Again (Witchtrap), Hour of Ragnarok (Graveland)

I just had a salad and some noodles tonight. Nothing fancy. I might have some ice cream in a little bit.

I haven't checked out a lot by Tristania, Widow's Weeds is the only one I ever had because it was the only one that I could get my hands on back in the CD days.

Got one this afternoon after I got out of work, but I reloaded and the forum came back up.

NP: Burzum "From the Depths of Darkness"

Wildfire was the first album I heard by them, so it was the one I fell in love with and I just ordered a copy of it and Cold Steel for an Iron Age from HHR the other day. Really looking forward to those getting in because Phoenix Rising has convinced me that I legitimately do like D666. Next week I'll probably order Terror Abraxas and some more Cemetery Lust (Rotting in Piss most likely), because I really liked the album I got by them in my last order.

Oh I guarantee if it happened, I was not aware of it. And with some of the places I've worked in my time, it likely did happen. I remember one of my employers tried to not pay me for 10 hours OT that I worked, so on the way out to a jobsite, we drove out to his house with my timecard and forced him to cut me a check out of his personal checkbook. He claimed that he didn't see it, but he was pretty bad about paying people for Saturday work and would always try to find a way out of paying you OT. Then there was a guy who flat out said that he "didn't pay overtime" and that he "just paid you cash" but that was definitely a way of screwing his employees and is why I only worked for him for one week... especially when he wigged out and started slapping his wife in the shop. I don't work for woman-beaters. And to be fair, when I was younger, wage theft probably did happen to me somehow and I was just too naive to realize it because conditions for workers in Florida actually seemed a lot worse when I was younger. Granted they aren't great now and part of the reason I'm at a corporate gig and not in local construction anymore is because construction companies are beyond exploitative to their workers... they basically want people that they can keep as perpetual laborers, run into the ground, and never actually train them to be a qualified journeyman so that they do all the work of a journeyman, but cannot command a journeyman wage. One of my biggest regrets is that I don't know a trade. I know I'm still technically young enough to learn one, but I need to be serious about a job from here on out and stick with something. Unfortunately I think that something is going to be McDonald's which is a thankless job and one that you're treated like a moron by society for doing, but it pays my bills and there is potential to make decent money there as I've already laid out previously if you climb the ladder. It's just hard work, not so much physically but it's just mentally taxing. I quit a job once because they told me that I had to come in at 6am to "get ready for the day" but that I wasn't allowed to punch in until 7am. Not really sure how they got away with that, but remember that Florida is a "Right to Work" state, so employers down here are allowed to get away with the equivalent of capitol murder in terms of violating employment laws. Many construction gigs do not provide you with any sort of PPE to do the job like they would in a union state. But when I move back to New York, I might look into a union construction job again because I always wanted to be a union man and get a lot of pride from work.

NP: Iggy Pop "Hippodrome-Paris 77" (Live album)

Yuck. Supposedly that goes on in America as well, but I cannot point to any examples where I have personally experienced wage theft... or maybe I have and I didn't realize it, I don't know. Exploitation of workers is huge though in America and you usually don't have a lot of recourse because a lot of states, including where I live in Florida, are "Right to Work" (which really just means that labor unions are not allowed & your employer can shitcan you for any reason at any time). It has in America as well. Although most people don't believe that we've had 50 years of Neoliberalism because they actually think that Ronald Reagan and George W. Bush were "conservatives" (they were just socially far-right neoliberals, as neoliberalism is inherently right wing economically, "supply side economics" and all that nonsense). Union membership is at it's lowest in America at any point in time in the past 100 years iirc because Reagan set out to bust unions in the 80s and union labor was already on the decline then anyway. In the 90s, Clinton merely finished the job with NAFTA (Neoliberalism Always Fucks The American) and then after 9/11 we really saw the plutocracy take off and the divide between the wealthy and average person got wider than it ever was before until it culminated in the biggest upwards transfer of wealth in human history around the time of the CARES act/COVID19. Like I'm well aware that McDonald's isn't truly paying me what my labor added value is to them, but there's nothing I can do about it so I just make do and don't bitch because it's better than being unemployed like I was for the past year.

NP: Iskra "Ruins" (blackened crust, but more on the crust side than the blackened side. I don't know any of the lyrics and am not going to bother trying to decipher them from the liner notes, because each song's lyrics are really long and detailed despite it just sounding like the chick is randomly screeching)

Yeah but I already get paid way more than I'm technically worth because Mickey D's was hard up for employees. I started off making $12/hr (the same I was making to install windows and sliding glass doors) despite knowing NOTHING about the job. A few days ago, I had a performance review a month earlier than I was supposed to get one and got a $0.25 raise, which yeah it's not much, only an additional $2 per day, but still, that's an additional $10 a week, $40 a month, you get the picture. Mickey D's pays surprisingly well. When I was working at Culver's for three years, I never even broke $10/hr and did way more work because everything was cook to order. Now I'm basically just taking orders on the drive thru and barista-ing (I make all the McCafe items and there are a lot) and getting $12.25 an hour for it. So I'll take the extra $8 for working the holiday and I lucked out and got my Friday schedule shifted to 6am-2pm, which is good because I have to work at 4am-12pm the following day so it gives me a little more time to do laundry and eat dinner when I get home instead of just going straight to bed. I don't hate all capitalists. I guess I am a capitalist because I am trying to build a small business as a vinyl distributor, but I get the point that most capitalists suck... but then again, most communists suck exponentially worse, as they just kill you for getting in the way/opposing their ideology whereas capitalists literally don't give a shit about you and will leave you to die if you can't provide any value to them (in addition to paying you less than the value you add with your labor. For instance, if I make $20 an hour for McDonald's, they will only pay me $12.25 instead of the $20 I'm actually bringing in for them). They both suck and not to get into a big thing here, but David Graeber had a great quote that I really like: "The hidden truth about our world is that it is something that we make, and just as easily, could make differently". Since communism and capitalism both suck, there has to be some sort of a middle ground between the two that we haven't yet tried that sucks less-- takes ideas from both and combines them into something that sucks far less than either capitalism or communism. Even our managers are not mostly salaried. They make about $15/hr to start and can earn as much as $18 before climbing the ladder higher. Our GMs make $55k a year to start and are eligible for $25k in performance bonuses, so a good GM with a solid crew can make $80k a year. They're also trained in Chicago at Hamburger University for a week on how to completely run a McDonald's restaurant and respond to any situation that might go sideways on a given day. So realistically, being a GM of a McDonald's is a pretty good career move because they make more than my mother makes as a legal assistant at a local law firm & that's where I want to be by the time I am older.

NP: Deadsy "Commencement" (In a goth mood)

The UK is as bad with creating very specific subgenres of music as the black metal scene is. You guys have trip-hop, grime, and now "drill"" music when simply "electronic" and "hip-hop" would have sufficed.

It's fun to play on bass and fits in well with the Florida lifestyle. I can enjoy it if it's done well, as it's frequently happy-sounding music.

Depends on what you mean by "emo music". If you're talking about bands like Rites of Spring, Embrace, Fire Party, & Hoover, then yeah I like some emo music. If you're talking about haircut bands from the 2000s like My Chemical Romance & The Used, then no, I don't like emo music at all. When all that stuff was the rage, I was still listening to Burzum, Emperor, and Dimmu Borgir.

There are plenty of women in metal. The idea that there is a "sexism problem" in metal is nonsense & I have my suspicions as to why that narrative exists but I won't go into it. Metal has been very accepting to women and the idea that there are "misogynistic lyrics" is no more true about metal than it is about hip-hop music. There's always going to be lyrics out there critical of women but the idea of pigeonholing all women into the "easily offended" category and thinking that those lyrics apply to them as individuals is the problem with the narrative that people are members of an "identity" before they are individuals, in reality individualism is what everyone should be striving for before thinking of themselves as part of a group & there is a reason why people are being conditioned now to see themselves as part of a group rather than individuals and be offended on behalf of that group identity as a giant social engineering project on behalf of advertisers and corporate power, but that's not terribly important enough to really break down and is irrelevant to what we're talking about here. Like some of the best metal bands out there wouldn't be as legendary as they are if it weren't for the women in the band. Like would you really want to listen to Nightwish if it was a guy singing the majority of the vocals? I probably wouldn't. Is that something that you chose yourself because it's something that you care about? Or was the fact that it deals with women assigned by the course instructor and you found a way to relate it to metal? I ask because I'm very curious as to exactly what a gender issue has to do with the English Language and how that's supposed to teach anyone about English.

Right now I'm listening to jazz. I like John Coltrane, Miles Davis, Dave Brubeck, and Grover Washington Jr... but I don't know a lot of jazz that well. It's not the most accessible genre out there and it's one of those ones where you really have to do the work of searching out good music. It doesn't just come easily for me the way metal does. Other genres I listen to are hardcore & crust. I have a lot of hardcore & crust LPs and 7"s, as a matter of fact most of my 7"s are in one of those two genres. I also listen to a lot of post-punk & gothic rock: Bauhaus, The Cure, Joy Division, Siouxsie, SILENCE; and because of that I listen to post-hardcore as well.

I'm thinking about how I don't want to go to work tomorrow, but that I am glad that I get to go home at 2pm. Gotta work on Thanksgiving too, but I get an additional $1 per hour for that. Is my Thanksgiving holiday worth an extra $8? Not really, but I'm being forced to work and I'll take what I can get.

NP: John Coltrane "Giant Steps" ...I don't listen to metal all the time, just most of the time

That sounds like something I could potentially get into if I could find other people around here who did it. There used to be four gaming/comic shops in this area, unfortunately all of them have closed down as far as I know. One of them sold a small amount of 40k and regular Warhammer stuff, supposedly people would play there too but I never saw anyone playing when I would go there to hang around. Big problem with this area is that as far as independent businesses go, nothing really lasts that long. Generally only a few years, if that. Raw corporate power comes in and forces cool restaurants and shops to close down because they cannot hope to compete & it's a damn shame. I used to like to hang around those stores and play M:tG and occasionally have D&D sessions there. Going out to play games on Friday nights after work was a weekly ritual of mine for a while, but like all scenes, eventually people move on and they dwindle until there is nothing left. I'm going to look into historical war games though, that might be something I can try to get into when I move to NY in another year or so. It might be a good way to meet people and maybe make some friends, because making friends is more difficult when you're in your thirties.

NP: The Old Firm Casuals "Holger Danske"

I've never listened to them.