I, I, I am waiting on the other side, sigh
Looked out into everything and I lie
Tell myself it’s nothing, when it’s quite right
Everything grows, everything growsI, I, I am watching, I am waiting
I, I, I am waiting, I’m not breaking
I lie, tell myself it’s okay, when it’s not quite
Everything grows stronger in the light
‘People Who Aren’t There Anymore’?? Sounds like Twitter these days, ammi right?? Aaaaaaaaah, hahahaha.
So we’re all supposed to go to Bluesky now. The US election (which I’ll get back to talking about later on this countdown) was the final straw for millions of people, where Elon Musk became one of the biggest examples of someone taking their divorce so badly that they ushered in fascism since Benito Mussolini fractious split with Jelena Lewitzki in the early 1920s. Musk had already spent the previous couple of years laughably and repeatedly showing his pasty weird shaped arse to the world since buying the company – which had never really previously made a profit – for a hilariously and stupidly inflated $44 million, and this new exodus is just the latest rat to scurry off a ship being absolutely tanked by its owner’s incompetence. Elon still has his admirers among the clinically stupid, but that just shows you how, if you’re brought up to be a bootlicker, no amount of evidence is going to convince you that a significantly richer person isn’t naturally better than you and deserves to be admired.
Apparently. I didn’t really notice any major changes, personally. People would rightly complain about the app being flooded with brain dead reactionaries, but I don’t follow any brain dead reactionaries, so I never noticed. Are these psychopaths talking about the “For You” feed?? Why would you ever look at that?? The whole idea is that you limit your connections to people whose opinions you respect, and yet you’re still thinking “Nah, let the algorithm just spoon some populist filth to me”. I’ve got a miniscule Twitter following, so maybe the bots and the ░M░Y░P░ U░S░S░ Y░I░ N░B░I░Os never thought I was worth whatever effort it takes to spam someone – my audience is generally tech savvy enough to see through bots and middle aged virgin enough to be absolutely terrified of vaginas. Check mate. “Ah! But what about the ‘election interference’??” Mate, what ‘election interference’? You mean the money Elon Musk spent?? America has long decided that money be the central pillar on what the country’s built upon, so it’s kind of a requisite that this kind of ‘electoral interference’ happen. Yeah, of course it’s gross that Elon spent $250 million to support Trump. But only about a quarter as gross as The Blue Team spending eight hundred and eighty one million dollars on their campaign. A campaign that they lost. At least Musk bet on the winner, something he hadn’t done since he bet that Tesla workers couldn’t afford to live if he fired them after they unionised. “But he’s on The Red Team! That’s gross!” True. The Red Team are neoliberals, who we can all agree are super gross. But the Blue Team are proudly neoliberal, and I sometimes think admitting to supporting them is way worse. And I’m not American, so every US election is, as فوفو المُتَوَحِّش said perfectly on (appropriately) Twitter, “just a gender reveal for the bombs fired at the middle east“.
But I also started a Bluesky account. Because I just really, really, really hate Elon Musk. There’s no sound ideological basis behind this. This isn’t a “I Found This One Rich Person Who Is Purely Motivated By Greed And Will Always Support Fascism Over Socialism!”, because that’s all of them. I don’t really care about Twitter – I chiefly use it to download funny wrestling videos to send to my friends on WhatsApp (and that business is still booming!). His position as the richest person in the world automatically marks him out as the worst person in the world, but until the workers own the means of production almost every product I consume will be owned by some abhorrent cunt. He just gives me the absolute ick. He’s the most obnoxious, most pompous, most horrendously boorish individual in the world. He’s living proof of why the rich aren’t allowed to tell jokes, because they come out with some human rights abusing stinkers if nobody around them ever dares to tell them how much they stink. The guy also makes me cringe so hard that I can actually feel it in my stomach, like a mutating cyst. So yeah, fuck him, I just kind of wanted to play a part in tanking his company.
But, enough about Musk, I was talking about Bluesky…
Well, OK, I was actually talking about ‘People Who Aren’t There Anymore’ by Future Islands, but just let me have this little rant and I’ll get back to the album soon, you know how I be. I’m being honest, it’s the title of the post, it’s pretty unlikely that I’ll forget to mention it, just stick with it.
And Bluesky is… very nice… Everyone there is… so much fun, and… generally… the kind of people… that I would… normally… enjoy… being around… Oh, who am I kidding? Bluesky fucking sucks.
When I first started using it, literally every other post was someone saying “Gosh, it’s so nice to be away from all the bots and the Russian trolls on that other place” or “Gee, sure is good to know your data isn’t being mined and used to fund the Trump campaign, unlike the other place” or “Golly, people here are so much nicer and Bluer here, I’m convinced that Donald Trump won the election now that I’ve left that other place“. They would all censor names like Tr*mp and El*n and G*nocide, but would still get upset when I’d reply calling them all cunts. What, so we’re still censoring that word?? So are these the new swear words that have replaced the old ones, or are you just adding to the already canonised list?? You need to be clearer!! What am I supposed to do with all my ‘cunts/c*nts’?? I thought the pompous, self-congratulatory, fart sniffing celebrations of how much better than Twitter Bluesky is would stop after that big post election surge, but… no… that’s kind of the whole app’s modus operandi. It’s a feature, not a bug. I literally just found this one from an hour ago. I don’t know who John Cooper is, but perhaps he is just the scum of the Earth?
The rest of the posts are either “FOUND A RED TEAM VOTER!!! MAKE SURE YOU PILE IN!!” or starter packs. Jesus, the starter packs! I clicked on a handful to follow when I first started, and now most of the time I’m on the app I’m steadfastly unfollowing reality challenged liberals with names like ‘BLUE THRU AND THRU’ that I’ve unwittingly allowed into my personal space by way of one of these early starter packs. The insanely high percentage of Team Blue voters means that Blue Sky is just a big echo chamber of some of the most deluded people on Earth.
As always, let me use wrestling as an example. I’m a huge AEW fan, I’ve been at both Wembley shows in person to post reviews, and peppered last year’s Legit Bosses with my favourite moments from the first five years of the show’s existence. I love it, it reawoke my love of wrestling, and it’s a far bigger part of my life and identity that any fucking social media platform. It’s also been pretty dogshit for maybe two years by this point. Frequently great, obviously, but all too often pish. As a fan, I could actually talk at length about how and why it’s been so pish, and I trust you would believe that I was doing in good faith and wasn’t just taking shots at the other side.
On Bluesky though? Nah, toxic positivity all the way. AEW is actually perfect and the only people who would say different are probably jealous people from the other side. The HATERZ!!
No. Not right. Not everyone who disagrees with you has some weird vendetta. Although, the only way you could get me to say I ‘enjoy’ AEW in 2024 would be by paying me bribes, so I have to question your motives. What was your name again? Oh yeah:
‘Echo Chamber’ is one of those overused phrases that needs to go in the bin alongside ‘gaslight’ (“I have to wear pants at your wedding? STOP GASLIGHTING ME!!”), and it’s so often misinterpreted to mean that you need to have a liberal ‘hear both sides!” approach to any issue. There’s nothing wrong with an echo chamber though: surround yourself with people who generally share in your respect for human kind and you’ll probably have a far better time. My circle of friends does not contain one fascist. All of my friends agree that climate change exists. None of my friends have ever furthered the idea of Jewish Space Lasers. I’m glad of that echo chamber and I do not wish to diversify it.
Bluesky though – for Blue Teamers, for AEW fans – has instead become a comfort blanket where you can go and claim that everything is great and nobody would be as impolite as to argue otherwise. It’s a bubble that you can enjoy and spend the rest of your life being validated inside as having made the right choice and being part of this imagined better society not like those loud uncouths on the other side. It’s a place to go and live out the rest of your deluded life slowly choking to death on the smell of your own farts.
I had planned to only post this countdown to Bluesky this year, rather than Twitter. Then at the last meeting of the Manchester Branch of the Communist Party the idea was floated that The Party also move its Twitter account over to Bluesky. The Chair made two points that really made me think: Firstly, they stated that Bluesky was the home of soft, middle-class liberals, who really aren’t the people most likely to listen to the Communist Party’s message and risk losing that second home in Crete. They pointed out that the working class people who have recently seen themselves betrayed by both the Blue Team in America and the Labour Party at home, even if they currently mistakenly believe themselves to be right wing, are the ones that The Party needs to be reaching out for and still mostly reside on Twitter.
But most importantly, they reminded us that our posts on Twitter still get a lot of traction. So I thought I’d just post this list to both 🤷.
Future Islands though! Their first entry onto this list since 2014’s breakthough ‘Singles‘, and now more than ten and a half years since that David Letterman performance became that rarest of rare things – a US Talk Show segment that even a single person outside of America gave the shiniest shit about – and introduced the (actual) world to the astonishingly layered vocals and passionate performances of Samuel T Herring. And, to be honest, this gorgeously composed collection of exquisite pop songs could have been released the week after that Letterman performance in March 2014. There’s no real evolution here, there’s nothing new, if you’ve ever heard Future Islands before then you already know what this album sounds like. Perhaps you could argue that this is Herring’s best collections of vocals yet, but his own standard was already so high that the distinctions are minute.
It is, however, fantastic. I always say my mantra is either take your sound to new places, or just be the absolute best version of you that you can possibly be. On the band’s previous two albums – neither of them bad – they kind of failed to do either, just knocking out slightly inferior versions of ‘Singles’. ‘People Who Aren’t There Anymore’ is yet another go around the mulberry bush. Only they do it really well this time.
Listen, I don’t make the rules, I just conceive, document, and enforce them.
The Album Title as AI Image
What?? Fuck you, WordPress AI! Are Future Islands the only act that can beat the machines?? Let me try Picsart…
Nightmare fuel. The machines fight back…
Necessary Evil 
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