So I have been playing around with image manipulation in AI a bit this week. Or if you have a vivid imagination I have been time travelling. It is very addictive, though I have also managed to fit in a gig at an old venue and written some music and started recording it as well. I got a migraine possibly triggered by too much screen time as well. Not fun at all.

I survived the gig at the Red Lion, everybody in the band was going at it full on. Never seen them light up like that before. Slight dodgy sound on the first couple of numbers but I sorted that. First time I have played with a full band at the Red Lion in about 10 years. Shame we couldn’t have filmed it. Felt fucking intense! like being back in Elephant Shelf though quite possibly a tad too loud. Blew all the Charlie Kirk and SC Judgement shit clean out of my mind for a while. I do wish they would repair the door locks in the ladies though. Still busted since 2015. That’s Rock and roll.

The moon landing deniers make me laugh. They rode in a tin cans (like the bowie song)on top of some fireworks and used a lot of maths to make sure they got there and got back with aid of more fireworks. Navigation was much like it would be on ship at sea with a sextant and taking position from the stars. The computer only displayed number codes so they had to look up what the numbers meant in a big bound manual to see what it was telling them when they pressed buttons. The slightest bit of bad maths and they would have died. It was a fantastic achievement but any kid with a slight interest in science and able to do basic maths who saw it on TV live could have made a good stab at explaining how it was done in the 60s and 70s. It was incredibly high risk, but they boldly went and it matters.

Here is a jazz tune from me.

A few reasonable nights sleep recently, sleeping right through sometimes. That’s not happened for a couple of years. Maybe related to herbal meds helping or not who knows. A little bit weary with the state of things still though. I am a bit anxious about doing stuff generally at the moment though. I am not sure why though, maybe its just the hostile vibe generally.
I am trying to find a better way to record violin as I am not getting the tone I want a lot of the time. Sometimes things just don’t work do they?

Is it possible to ignore the barbarians at the gate as so many seem to?

The Uk it seems is now becoming a place where hate speech is normalised and often promulgated in main stream media. We have politicians pushing exclusionary often xenophobic rhetoric but also openly transphobic speech as well and in not speaking out against hate speech towards other minority groups. 10 years ago much of what we are hearing would have been considered unacceptable in the mainstream or would have been challenging but is now allowed to go unopposed. I can’t understand why these ideas are being pushed and by whom. Who is pushing this ultra nationalist verging on racist ideology. In the last ten years its arrived seemingly out of nowhere?

What possible good does it do?

A lot of the ideas seem to come from the worst aspects of American notions of libertarianism. So who is pulling the strings behind the public figures we see? It feels as if something is often. I would like to believe that I am wrong but every day some new toxic quote floats into the either. Some soundbite built on lies to appease and or inflame the lowest common denominator. It’s really depressing, I used to believe we were better than this, but I feel that a brief Camelot moment is now fading, king Arthur’s turned into King Lear raging at the world whilst his faculty’s decay.

Try and stay safe people, if you can. The world is burning and you are next on the list…