Tag: amazon

2 SPELLLING: The Turning Wheel

~ Lex Leeson ~ Leave a comment

2019 #10

Gee, thanks a lot Christmas Day…

Now I’ve got to start at the first day again! And finish, because it’s currently close to midnight on Boxing Day while I write this, and numbers two and one of this year’s list will be announced before many of the millions (and millions) of fans of this blog get out of bed. Isn’t it a damn shame that I had to stop at fifteen consecutive days though? I hear that when you reach twenty consecutive days you actually start earning money for writing. New York Times columnists get paid $350k a year, and you know how? They just never stop their daily streak! Charles Blow is currently on a 16,939 [SIXTEEN THOUSAND NINE HUNDRED AND THIRTY NINE] day streak! He started on his fifth birthday by harshly critiquing the level of presents that he was somehow expected to enjoy that year (“A Space Hopper, mother, really? And how, exactly, is one expected to improve one’s life by simply bouncing around on an inflated orange ball? What epiphanies is one expected to reach? Am I expected to gaze into that lifeless face and see myself reflected in his sad eyes? Perhaps this is intended to be Gerald Ford, whose ‘bouncing’ support is laughably intended to keep myself and others like me precociously and intermittently above the bottom line of the hard ground below us? And you said it talked. It definitely doesn’t talk, you fucking whore”. Yeah, some of Blow’s early work can seem a little problematic to modern sensibilities), and has just popped out another article every day since. Admittedly, he can sometimes obviously be struggling for material, His fourteen thousand eight hundred and seventy second article was just him ranking the different noises his chair makes when he sits down, his fifteen thousand and twelfth post was just the entire lyrics of Scatman’s World by Scatman John followed by the sentence “Is it not still the case? #ScatmanDidItFirst”, while his sixteen thousand four hundred and second post was just a piece of clickbait suggesting that Kylian Mbappe might be sighing for Liverpool. But you know what he did after writing each article? A spellcheck, yeah? To check the spelling? Or, perchance, the Spellling?? See, it all fits in, don’ tell me how to do my job.

I’LL BE RIGHT HERE, LITTLE DEER

20 Poppy Ackroyd: Pause

~ Lex Leeson ~ 2 Comments

2018 #21

Up one place since her last album! If the unbelievably talented Brighton-based pianist/multi-instrumentalist continues on at this rate, and with a similar schedule between albums, then she’s going to place #1 sometime around Necessary Evil 2081! Will we all be dead by then. No. You will, obviously, but I’m never going to die. And neither will my pet Pomsky, Zeus Bertha Pepper, I wuv hm sooo muuuuuuch! But, erm, yes, you’ll all be dead. Zeus Bertha Pepper will have likely killed you, he has quite the bloodlust. Have you read that 2018 review though? Yeah, I loved the album muchly – I even suggest she score the recently released movie Bumblebee, which is of course meant as a compliment, how could it not be? – but I seem like I was in a pretty bad place on that particular day, doesn’t it? Three years on, has my brain’s general countenance improved? Today, absolutely. These past few months, definitely. This past year… weeeeeeeeeeeeell, there was a bit of a struggle that I invited it into.

I’ve touched on how toxic and damaging my 2020/21 marriage was, and how it left my self-belief, my mental comfort and my dang desire for life in the absolute toilet. Well, this post is going to be the final reckoning, the complete and total exorcism, the slicing open of old wounds so that they can bleed completely out and not poison me again. Starting on the 14th December 2020 I started keeping a diary of how much the marriage was hurting me, it ran until abruptly stopping on the 29th January, likely because my illness became too much to leave time for such pathetically solipsistic concerns. There were thirty three entries.. I think this was in response to my wife showing disbelief that I could be feeling that way, or perhaps she had challenged me to name instances in which I was hurt and my decrepit old brain struggled to give precise details when called up on it. Whatever. I started writing them down and put them in a password and fingerprint secured OneNote file. I never showed or even mentioned them to my wife, and before recently I hadn’t looked at them myself in months. It was actually reminding myself what I said about Poppy last time around that convinced me to dig them up. I couldn’t remember the password and had to keep guessing until about three in the morning, but I got in! And here the entries are.

Now, I don’t want to make this feel like I’m piling on my ex-wife – she wasn’t right for me I wasn’t right for her, but she otherwise deserves all the love in the world. I don’t come out of these records looking great either, please just take this all as evidence of how incredibly awful the relationship was. Oh, and I’m sure there’s roughly a dozen trigger warnings I should be offering here, so maybe just don’t read any further if you’re having anything like a decent day that you don’t want ruining, or if dark depictions of mental states or terrible relationships are likely to set in motion grim and traumatic thoughts of your own, then get out now! Seriously, not many jokes on this one…

AT YOUR PERIL

Necesary Evil 2020 pt.8 (40-36)

~ Lex Leeson ~ 2 Comments

#40 Princess Nokia: Everything Sucks

Yep, Princess Nokia states that ‘Everything is Beautiful’ and only makes it to number 70, but when she simply throws up her arms and declares that ‘Everything Sucks’ she opens our top 40. What does this prove? That’s right- absolutely fuck all, as this list is an absolutely meaningless vanity project by some egotistical, fat, ginger, middle aged man frivlously listing albums he’s listened to this year in no real order despite knowing next to nothing about music.

I joke, of course, this list is an entirely scientific exercise. The real reason that the other album that The Princess Regent of Nokia and its Territories released in 2020 ranks so much higher is because, yeah, maybe everything does suck.

…at the crotch don’t look at the crotch don’t look at the crotch don’t loo…
Continue reading “Necesary Evil 2020 pt.8 (40-36)” →

Frankie valet Force a Little Exception of Their Own

~ Lex Leeson ~ 4 Comments

“Everyone is speechless from afar”

Frankie valet, Nakid 2020

“By removing art from capitalism while allowing capitalism to thrive elsewhere unfettered we are in danger of removing any benefit of speaking in the first place so the artists may as well remain speechless. From afar, I guess. Yeah, that works”

This Blog, This Post, just now

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(it was suggested that these pieces should link to the album at the start rather than the end. So here it is, now please stop sending me those abusive text messages)

I’m old enough (late, late, late late* twenties) to remember a career in arts being at least a quasi viable life choice. Nobody would kid themselves that they would make it to be ‘Goo Goo Dolls Big’, where you would earn enough money to finance a daily trip to Mars to wave stacks of Molybdenums in the seediest strip clubs of Tharsis’s Northern Edge and get yourself some of that sweet, sweet Martian poontang (John Rzeznik really lived the dream in that sense), but you’d be able to comfortably exist composing your Romo paeans to Garry Flitcroft without too many people getting on your case. You’d likely do a handful of Peel Sessions before you even released that song about his fringe. I mean, sure, people would still get on your back about getting a ‘real job’, but that’s just because back then a ‘real job’ meant a job that you absolutely hated and that made you seriously consider taking a sledgehammer to your knees each morning just as an excuse not to subject yourself to one more day to the joyless and soul destroying churn of capitalism. Y’know, the same as today. You created something, there were more options for getting people to experience that thing you created, and if people liked that thing enough they would pay you a bit of money to experience it whenever they want. Maybe they’d never been able to hear it, but it had received such good reviews from the reams of art review magazines (that they’d already paid £2 for) that people decide you’re worth the risk and buy your Flitcroft Fantasies CD single backed with a Groove Armada remix and acoustic cover of Lisa Loeb. Hopefully they’d buy the next thing you created as well, maybe the next thing after that. Maybe not the next thing after that, because let’s face it that was absolute pants, but the next thing after that would be hailed as a return to form so they’d jump back on board.

Continue reading “Frankie valet Force a Little Exception of Their Own” →

2019’s Best Movie: Sorry We Missed You

~ Lex Leeson ~ 2 Comments

Yeah, I know, continuing my proud tradition of naming the year’s best movie alongside the albums of the year countdown. ‘Under the Skin‘ was named 2014’s movie of the year, but the award went unclaimed in 2015, 2016, 2017, 2018, and indeed every year before 2014. However, the (latest) masterpiece by Ken Loach, ‘Sorry We Missed You,’ was such a powerful piece that inspired such painful bolts of recognition and sheer fucking anger that I had to make space in 2019 to talk about it.

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Oh, and by the way, this isn’t going to be one of those “Ooooooh, look at the camera angles! isn’t the mise en scène lovely?! Hints of Akira Kurosawa’s vagina dentata, perhaps??” reviews, as I have no interest in actually talking about the movie. Instead, these is mainly going to be a thousand words or so of me ranting about the twisted nature of capitalism in 2019. Like I said, it’s gonna be a lot of fun.

Continue reading “2019’s Best Movie: Sorry We Missed You” →

Entry #4 Marina and the Diamonds: Obsessions

~ Lex Leeson ~ 11 Comments

What is the point of this blog? I mean, really?

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Don’t answer that.

I don’t mean to say ‘don’t answer that’ as a joke, like the answer would somehow be difficult to hear, it was an entirely serious suggestion. An order, really. It would really slow this entry down to a standstill were I to pause now to open it up for reader’s suggestions. It’s pretty much the definition of a rhetorical question, see? I’m not actually expecting you to answer, merely just asking it for dramatic effect. Do you see? Good.

Continue reading “Entry #4 Marina and the Diamonds: Obsessions” →

30 Jherek Biscoff: Quartet for Delores +

~ Lex Leeson ~ 5 Comments

The internet’s given us tons of cool shit. Now, for the first time since I spent musch of my young life scrawling obscene graffiti onto the wings of backpoll warblers before they migrated across the Atlantic I can quite casually call a 12 year old in Arkansas a ‘faggot’ to wonderfully exorcise my dangerously incompetent belief in what freedom of speech is. Jamie in Arkansas can even call me a ‘faggot’ back, if he could catch a backpoll warbler to save his life and I was doing something as irredemably faggy as attempting to capture the flag in Call of Duty 6 armed with only a M1903. What the fuck are you doing, Jamie?! Quit being such a faggot!

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It’s also given every person on Earth ability to hear from a previously unimaginable variety of voices and perspectives. If you ever hear somebody say that ‘people are offended too much these days’, what they actually mean is that their killer joke about a black lesbian picking the seeds out of her watermelon used to do gangbusters when the only people who ever heard them tell it were horrible white men. Now, women, gay people and other ethnicities are hearing it. They don’t like it. Because it’s offensive. And they’re the people being offended. Don’t blame the internet because suddenly people can hear how gross you are.

Continue reading “30 Jherek Biscoff: Quartet for Delores +” →

69 Noname: Room 25

~ Lex Leeson ~ 1 Comment

“My pussy teaching 9th grade English/My pussy wrote a thesis on colonialism/In conversation with a marginal system/In love with Jesus”

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When Noname released her second album back in some time in the past (there really is no way of knowing), Amazon offered the opening (and possibly best) track, Self, to listen to as a sample. Early in the song she states “Y’all really thought a bitch couldn’t rap huh?/Maybe this your answer for that, a crack era/The Reagan administration that niggas are still scared of?”, and being the sucker I am for commentaries on the (still) worst US President of the modern era. Soon afterwards, she utters the aforementioned bang up the elephant line that you really should be well aware of by now, and I was sold. I immediately chucked £7.99 at Noname and her scholarly vagina. I later found out that she was also on Bandcamp, so purchased it again in the assumption that she was likely to see a lot more of the money, judging by the amount of cash Amazon siphoned off when I published a couple of books a couple of years ago. For that reason, ‘Room 25’ is the only 2018 album that could be considered so good that I bought it twice.

The thing is though, what does that line actually mean?

Continue reading “69 Noname: Room 25” →

82 Ash Koosha: ‘Return 0’

~ Lex Leeson ~ 5 Comments

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The human race is kind of resigned to losing all of it’s jobs to robots. In their March 2017 paper, ‘Robots and Jobs: Evidence from the UK Labour Market‘, Acemoglu and Restrepo found that the addition of one more robot per thousand workers reduces the employment to population ratio by about 0.18 – 0.34 percentage points and wages by 0.25 – 0.5 percent.

Of course, I wouldn’t be the widely lauded and routinely celebrated investigative journalist that I am if I didn’t investigate their findings and see if such statistics could be replicated in the UK job market. Unfortunately, Manchester Refugee Support Network only employs 5 people, so in order to get a proper reading on effect on one robot per one thousand employees I had to measure the effect of

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one two hundredth of a robot on our work. I think. There’s really no way of knowing exactly what the maths are, but that’s what I did so it has to be correct.

It’s hard to truly say what would represent 0.5% of a robot, but my contacts in the robots industry* tell me that equates to roughly a robot eyeball. With this in mind, I introduced a fully automated eyeball to the office at MRSN. Well, I initially assumed it was a fully automatic robotic eyeball, but later examinations have suggested it may in fact be closer to a chocolate ball wrapped in tinfoil. Again, there really is no way of actually knowing, but talks conducted with my contacts in the scientific research industry* have confirmed that this trivial matter should have had no effects on the findings.

Continue reading “82 Ash Koosha: ‘Return 0’” →