Profound. Love this review.

Beginning a sentence with “but.”

Needs a comma here.

It’s Transfiguration Time

Extratone will be refocusing as a dedicated electronic music magazine with print issues on hand before 2018 is out.

It’s been far too long since I last came to you with compelling news truly worthy of anticipation, but I’m relieved to do so today in a somewhat-epiphanous certainty that the past two and a half years of my very meticulously-documented struggle to give this project a clear direction will soon feel well worth the experience for all involved.

This week, we’re inaugurating our new top-shelf Music section with a comprehensive tour throughout the history of the streaming platforms who’ve both nurtured and ripped off the voices from an entirely new generation of artists followed by an album review which will be sure to blindside you in your kidneys with a fundamental truth I know you’ll love, (but could never guess.) Don’t think we’re crying wolf (or is it “passing go?”) this go-around: /music is going to become the singular subject of our attention for the foreseeable future.

We’re going to take Extratone full circle and make an Electronic Music magazine for the new underground (who are more logged on than they are subterranean.) The online community of friends who’s talents have continued to compel me to figure this thing out have only become more and more extraordinary in their crafts, pushing the whole network further and further upward toward its inevitable penetration of the churning, relentless surface discourse in what has become an awkwardly treacherous Indie Ocean. While a few flagships of the American underground techno magazine like Trax have managed to remain afloat, they’ve been worn down into complacency by the mellowing of their scene and unavoidably shifting priorities after the years they’ve got on us. It’s been alarmingly apparent since 2012 that music journalism would be totally unequipped to spot the heroes of the genre and DAW busting Twitter gang in the crucial moment.

For this moment, suffice it to say, the destiny of our music is at hand, and I’ve happened to acquire just about got all we need to build a big fucking boat.

Here’s what the rest of 2018 is going to look like.

For the next two months, I’ll be combing through the entire King James’-worth of stories we’ve published since launch and meticulously arranging the best of them in a hefty, visually-unbelievable sort of print anthology, which you’ll soon be able to preorder. This issue will represent the whole of my being’s effort for like… half my 20s (if you’re rounding up,) and I know getting my hands on the first proof is gonna make me cry like a toddler, so you can be damned sure it’s going to be something very special and you’d better feel damned guilty if you pass it up.

However, it’s also not something I intend to do on my own. I will undoubtedly be paying for art, illustration, and help with print design, so do please email me with your favorite pitch for magazine art and/or that secret masterpiece of an InDesign template you’ve been sitting on. (Cover art is way more difficult than I expected. Please help me.) Don’t be afraid to join in the novelty of seeing a message (or dumb anime reference) of your own in print — I plan to pepper the issue with little messages, so stop by our Discord and chat me up.

In the meantime, you can help tremendously by forgoing just one soda every four weeks for a hardcore cause to subscribe for $1 via Patreon. As of today, our new support goal is to raise $30 to pass immediately along for a single freelance album review per month.

By winter, we’ll be set to hose down the server in digital baptism so that we may start anew on the future from the best possible foothold when 2019 rolls around. I’ll be in touch with regular updates and more specific calls for freelance art very soon.

Update: I was much too hasty in this proclamation.

Having now pounded through a few thousand words with LibreOffice Writer running on Linux Mint 19, I must now follow up soon in one form or another. This isn’t a “night mode” function by name, but it may as well be: it takes just 30 seconds to search out and change color settings across the whole application.

When did you first begin using Bandcamp as an artist?

How has Bandcamp performed for you as an artist differently from other online music distribution services like SoundCloud or Last.fm?

What do you like best about Bandcamp as a platform for music distribution?

How do you think Bandcamp could improve on its artist publishing tools?

How could Bandcamp improve editorially to best curate and distribute YOUR work?

Percy Hole, Editor at The Sun, Dies Pursuing Rock Springs Story

Percy Hole, who in his seven years at The Sun contributed in no small part to its resolute commitment to the Superior community throughout a key period of change and transition, died nobly on Wednesday in Rock Springs while pursuing a story fraught with sensitive historical currents to which he had committed himself for the better part of the past year. He was 29.

Stuart Stud, the Editor-in-Chief of The Sun, announced the death to the staff Thursday morning. Mr. Hole, who had moved to Superior after being scouted by the paper upon receiving his bachelor’s degree in fly fishing from New York University, succumbed to a catastrophic failure of his liver after allegedly “consuming a far greater-than-recreational quantity” of alcohol during an informal interview with an auxiliary source, according to someone familiar with the matter within the Sweetwater County Coroner’s Office.

In title, Mr. Hole climbed quickly from Sports Editor to Executive Daily Editor, but colleagues cited several integral, unpaid roles beyond his official functions in the newsroom.

“He was a real winner,” said Hilary Hutch, who Hole had groomed personally to replace him as Sports Editor, “by far the sexist human being to grace this pokey office. An impossible talent. We were so lucky to be work alongside him for so long. There was no better wordsmith in the whole industry. He definitely deserved a huge raise. A true legend.”

His responsibilities as Executive Daily Editor included arranging the entirety of The Sun’s print edition singlehandedly every morning, answering every staffer question with heroic brevity, captaining the paper’s infallible ethical prestige, editing all copy with an eye matched by not a one of his contemporaries, lifting and carrying all materials and equipment over 150 lbs. along with the entirety of the office’s championship-winning, regionally competitive basketball team as point guard.

“I’ve never seen anyone move like that,” said Ms. Hutch of her experiences playing on the team, “it was like he was some kind of super-evolved proto-human. We were really just baggage, mostly — decoration — but he was generous and humble about it. He never hogged the glory even though he almost always had every right to.”

Mr. Hole’s colleagues also described his stellar performance and natural talent as generally unappreciated in bolstering The Sun’s late entrance into digital publishing and web 2.0.

“Pivot to video,” said Mr. Stud.

‘Mom and Dad’’s Discrepant Defense Against Stale Industry and the Population Problem

A “fun” movie.

The Earth will reach its maximum occupancy load (12 billion) when I am in my mid-fifities, meaning there’ll be more than twice as many gorging, shitting, shooting, complaining, and lying human beings than there were when I started, and perhaps Brian Taylor’s Mom and Dad is in fact a reasoned argument for a particular solution to our inevitable plight. I’m still not sure what a “cult” movie is, precisely, but I can’t imagine what sort of cult could possibly sustain itself around the ethos of this film alone, despite its concise, agitating, at once lighthearted, yet genuinely-disturbing trip. No, it is probably not propaganda. From the experts, you’ll get precisely the same review, varying only in length. The New York Times’ Glenn Kenny couldn’t be bothered with more than 250 words, but RogerEbert dot com’s Simon Abrams shelled out a whole 1000. They are suspiciously close to these big round numbers — perhaps each was written to respective quotas, and perhaps you could say all that could reasonably be said in 10, but I don’t care.

The tropes here are polished to a miraculous sheen — two emotionally-stunted, middleaged, overly preoccupied-with-their-lost-youth suburban parents (Nicolas Cage and Selma Blair) who’s existing envies & irritations regarding their own classically bratty teenage girl (Anne Winters) and her mischievous little brother (Zackary Arthur) is merely agitated by a sudden TV static-bound killer instinct into bloodlust, not originated. I’m not sure any pill dealer would actually flip off their customers after a fair buy — even in high school, but drugs, a black boyfriend, and a stinkbomb? in the old Trans Am!? I’m going to kill you!

Somebody, somewhere knew all the best sources on suburbia and how to put them to good use. The Camry, the golf bag, ping pong smashing, sweat-stained Big Sur tee, and Dr. Oz, for Christ’s sake! Granted, talking to your girlfriend/boyfriend on the phone at all is a bit dated — especially while riding a BMX — and I don’t think Froot Loops are generally accepted middle-class chow anymore. These are staples from my youth, and I am very old. Technically, the iMessage bubble graphics are more chronographically appropriate, but with great consequence, I fear — if we’re going to accept them once and for all as authentic mechanisms for telling stories set in the present, they are going to age faster than Nick’s new jowls (unless we’re all soon killed by our parents.) It’s been two years since I knew anything about music, but I seriously doubt even the gothest fifteen?-year-old girls are listening to Father-esque post-Memphis horrorcore in class — there’s something about SoundCloud that really clashes with chokers.

If there was ever a film in which to use grimy dubstep-influenced electronic slaps, buzzes, chirps, and great grating clanking, it’s this one. It’s a terrific disappointment that Hollywood feels so timidly about their use of the most intimate medium. One forgets its potential to control the nuances of an audience’s fear, anger, discomfort, and panic beyond cheap jump scares until they experience an irritating, distressing, ghastly gross, all-possessing feat of accentuating audio production such as that of Mom and Dad. If you want to judge Academically the effectiveness of a nominee’s work for an award with a title like Best Sound Editing (as opposed to whatever the hell criteria was met most fully by Skyfall,) you must give the little golden man to these folks, whoever they are.

When’s the last time you saw a truly, believably shitty modern parental pair on a big screen? I really can’t remember, myself. Brent and Kendall Ryan are masterpieces of character craft — both a perfect précis and thoroughly-defined exploration of miserable white suburbanites. They’re even named unimprovably, which reflects a quality in care and attention to detail that I very much appreciate. They are vain, vulgar, impatient, selfishly afraid, and careless, freely feeling and saying it all directly in front of their children. I love being told explicitly which characters to hate (no joke,) and in this case it’s the whole damned lot. Brian Taylor and Nicolas Cage scream it over and over (as I’d like to imagine) a single afternoon of one-take filming, considering that the latter took it upon himself to first memorize the entire screenplay and its prose, vanilla to perfection, before photography began, and I hope it all stays with him forever, especially “my mom is such a penis.”

Mom and Dad could conceivably be Nicolas Cage’s I Am Legend if for no other reason than the total lack of possible stand-ins for Brent Ryan — even the standard by which all white suburban Dad performances have been measured in the 21st century, Jason Bateman. Nick himself described it as “punk rock, rebellious, irreverent, original, badass,” and the “number one” movie he’s made in the past ten years (disqualifying National Treasure, in case you were worried.) No surprise, I must agree — this one is a wonderfully raucous and feral thing, but the scene involving the attempted murder of a newborn by her mother (Kendall’s sister) came very close to crossing the line. However, I am old and the intensity of my paternal instincts has probably outpaced my understanding of them. You could also argue, of course, that pushing such boundaries is a core function of a film like Mom and Dad. Nobody ended up vomiting or anything.

This fun thing shouldn’t feel as foreign as it does in cinema, but you already knew that. With all its implicit grapples with overpopulation, kids and gun violence, class, and racism — truly, this is a film charged electrically with current issues. Or maybe not. Ultimately, I can at least tell you for certain that Brian Taylor made exponentially better use of his resources (I couldn’t find a solid number for its production budget) than the Fucking Spierig Brothers did with Winchester (just so you know what a disaster looks like,) and managed to be refreshingly original (astonishing that nobody’s had this specific idea before.) A spectacular riot, Mom and Dad does all you could possibly want it to do. With just eighty-three minutes to lose, it’s worth the commitment just to hear Nicolas Cage whimper and say “anal beads.”

The world today is a wealth of topics and perspectives, but daily biological functions are universal.

Everybody gets hungry, and we are in the everybody business!

Carter Wilkerson has been hungry for some time now, according to someone familiar with the matter. Yesterday, in agony, he resolved within himself to cease the toleration of his famine, and bravely typed a message on Twitter to Wendy’s — a national chain of restaurants where people often eat — pleading for justice. He wanted to know just how many supporters would have to stand up for his wellbeing before the company would do the right thing, and provide him his deserved nuggets.

As the whole world watched, they replied: 18 million retweets, and Carter will be able to eat.

Helping Carter is very easy: just retweet!

You won’t just be helping him, either. You’ll be letting all of your followers know — along with anyone stopping by your profile — that you like it when people eat, and that you like to eat, too! That passerby might just be looking for someone who also likes to eat and decide to follow you! Bonus!

The previous retweet record is about three million, so it’s going to take a lot of supportive allies, but hey — what’s more important than eating!?

I love eating and food more than anything else in the world, and that sentiment — as well as sharing it with others — is an essential component of my identity. I’m so lucky that my lifetime is spanning the greatest renaissance in the history of human communication.

Without intellectually and culturally enriching technologies like Twitter, how would Carter tell the world that he is hungry?!

How would I?

Thanks in large part to our generation, the exchange of ideas is more democratized than ever, and Twitter has played a huge role in establishing today’s current social media palette. If the speculation as to the likelihood of its demise has any basis in reality, perhaps it’s time for us to begin securing its legacy.

I don’t know about you, but I want to be remembered for my food memes, not my stance on whatever current affairs garbage happened to be bouncing around.

Regimes, ideologies, public figures, corporate entities, and human lives come and go, but I will always have to eat!

I mean, come on.

I don’t give a shit about Syria; I’m hungry!

And you don’t want to talk to me when I’m hungry! I lose all self-awareness and abandon any control of my person!

My friends (the ones who like to eat) and I have been using a new word we made up to describe this primal, pitiful state of being: hangry. Hungry and angry!

The best jokes are always the ones involving the consumption of food and its tremendous power over my life.

Hangry me? Unprincipled. Rabid.

A thief? Possibly.

A liar? Probably.

An abuser? Who knows?!

Food is everything to me, and meals are the milemarkers of my life.

What am I doing after I finish this piece?

I’m going to eat.

What would I do if you walked in the room at this moment with a delicious, gooey chocolate cupcake?

Abandon the job, of course!

And give you everything.

Good email.

Actually… I think you can do both, sorta.

The latter would seem to be a spreading disease at the moment.

and yet we’re still forgiven

see what we have asked of this land:
juicing zea jabbing through
chapped flats

see what we have asked of her soldiers:
contentment,
submerged alone in nuggets of 
petrified human safetyglass

shower of obliterated abstracts;
white like love,
but no shards large enough to make out a face

The language here is some of the most insightful I’ve ever seen on the subject, if I’m interpreting effectively. (I could just be extrapolating.)

You cannot make a living as a “writer.” That is — the ability to effectively (or even extraordinarily) arrange words has no inherent value. It’s a good start, however, for some of the writing professions in which you can.

Journalist, copyrighter, editor, even poet or (now) blogger can be lucrative, technically. But you should never, ever launch into any of them expecting to profit in the near future. (For the latter three, probably near-not at all.)

I can’t think of a single notable author who considered fiction a money-making pursuit, and there’s reason for that: if you set out with the consideration of your audience required to write-for-profit, you’re going to end up with something generic and still unprofitable. And — if there is any objective ideal for a creative work — is it not originality?

Forgive my self-promotion, but I recently spent a good many words around this subject, sorta. (Keep in mind that they have no inherent value.)