So, the government’s picking up the funding slack… right?

… right?

Nothing escapes, not even light… awesome song, everything Arjen touches is gold.

I don’t know what to think about housing anymore, I’m just so tired. The new builds around my parents house look shoddy and just plain ugly, not to mention first thing developers do is remove any and all trees and put concrete over the entire block. “Nimby” has become such a buzzword and a scapegoat but like, it’s hard not to have a bit of empathy, and anecdotally lots of people would be supportive of these new developments if they weren’t all shit. These concrete jungle suburbs will be around for decades at least. But also, the housing crisis is real and developers are saying that red tape around building quality is slowing them down. I desperately want a place to live, nothing fancy but at least safe and liveable. Is it genuinely impossible to have density and build quality?

Been meaning to get into these guys. Album artwork is sick, awesome growls, and cool mastodon vibes in the music too. Will definitely listen to some more!

I think we agree here in the sense that MSO are within their rights to dismiss him. But I think that the public backlash is very predictable outcome, and the public are right to feel outraged at the MSO for this. I can understand they’re in a tough position but cancelling the soloist’s performance was really the nuclear option. The cancellation is a much bigger political statement than the soloists comments (which were ultimately about the composition anyway), and if that’s the statement the MSO wants to make they’re free to do so but they need to accept they’re being perceived as not only silencing their own artists, but also defending war crimes (whether that was their intention or not). Just terrible management of the situation.

Concert security is getting really stringent atm. With the government raising the terrorism threat to probable, large events are increasing security measures. Given how much publicity this has gotten, how controversial it is, plus how intensely passionate people are about the palestine/israel conflict, I can see why they wouldn’t want to go ahead with this. Someone was stabbed at a world music concert at the Perth concert hall last sunday too!

Eh, they played the ukranian national anthem before concerts in 2022. I could see where you’re coming from if the soloist actually said something controversial but his statement was literally along the lines of “war crimes are bad” - cancelling his performance for that is a much more inflammatory political statement (hence the huge backlash) than what he said in the first place imo.

It does seem like whatever integrity there was in politics is quickly vanishing. I’m relieved we don’t have quite the same attitude towards religion compared to the US at least. I think Australia is a long way off being a theocracy, whereas the US could be one as soon as next year.

Can’t mentally decline if you were never sound of mind in the first place!

The Mountain is probably their best and it’s also pretty accessible.

Pure nostalgia for me. I went on a small road trip for my high school leavers and had some Ayreon CDs playing the whole time. By the end of the trip everyone was singing along. Absolute classic.

Dutton’s so much of a spud I’m almost glad he’s in charge of the LNP instead of someone more charismatic. Hopefully he never sees any real power. Can’t believe that this is even a political issue up for debate, just delay delay delay and never so anything.

The two main reasons stopping me are lack of infrastructure (I haven’t ridden a bike in ages and there’s no way I’m going on a road with any traffic lol), and climate (Perth is often hot as hell, or rainy, neither of which is great unless you have a shower at work).

Shame, i thought Furiosa was awesome, although there were only about 5 people in the cinema. The critics seem to be giving pretty favourable reviews too, would definitely recommend going and checking it out. Hope this isnt the nail in the coffin of Mad Max.

One opening at Curtin Uni (WA) today as well. Curious to see how universities handle it, the demands seem pretty reasonable to me.

I don’t hate him but I wish people would watch his videos with a bit more critical thinking. I’ve talked to a few left-wing people that were swayed into voting Labor (or in one instance, Bob Katter) because he did a video before the last federal election that ridiculed preferential voting. I watched this video and it was filled with straight-up misinformation (I’ve worked as a vote issuer/counter many times before). In my experience he’s not actually made Australia more progressive, I don’t know any of his viewers that have switched from LNP to Labor, but a few that have gone from Greens to Labor. I don’t know if they still do it but he used to have a brigading group on Facebook, which always spread his videos around and filled them with positive comments on Reddit and the like. I know he’s popular outside of that but it’s hard to determine exactly how organic his reach is.

Ehh that’s a very cynical and kinda misleading take of how it works. This may be generally true in the house of representatives but still 12% of the seats don’t end up funnelled to the two major parties. In the senate a quarter of senators aren’t affiliated with either major party and at the moment it requires Labor to collaborate to pass bills, so although we do have two major parties we are nowhere near being a two-party system.

I get that it makes sense to have laws to protect people against racially aggravated harassment, but this feels like a stretch and a huge waste of time and resources. That said, Sam Kerr is a role model and this kinda behaviour shouldn’t be seen as ‘based’ or anything imo.

Sorceress feels a bit underrated. It feels like a creepy record from the 70s that you play at 4pm on a summer afternoon.

Imagine stumbling home after a night out and you see fucking Barnaby Joyce on the road haha