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📷 Katie Douglas by Sarah Krick

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Katie Douglas request #259  @herlittles

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Power Rangers Ultraverse teams 49-64

Status Post #8396: Folder | List

49. Space Squad (same name as Japanese version but this one is an Ameritoku version)

Ryan Steele / VR Alpha

Kaitlin Star / VR Beta

JB Reese / VR Delta

Sam Collins / Servo

Jo McCormick / Red Striker Beetleborg

Dex Stewart / Masked Rider

Jack Landors / SPD Red Ranger

Elizabeth Delgado / SPD Yellow Ranger

Andros / Red Space Ranger

Karone / Galaxy Pink

50. Astro Rangers (Rangers comprising of science fiction characters)

Adam of Eternia (He-Man) / Red Astro Ranger

Ahsoka Tano (Star Wars) / Green Astro Ranger

Son Goku (Dragon Ball) / Orange Astro Ranger

Mako Mori (Pacific Rim) / Blue Astro Ranger

Takashi "Shiro" Shirogane (Voltron) / Black Astro Ranger

Jaylah (Star Trek) / Purple Astro Ranger

Ladios Sopp (The Five Star Stories) / Gold Astro Ranger

Nova Maxwell (Power Rangers) / Silver Astro Ranger

51. Dino Elite Rangers (superteam comprising of dino-themed Rangers)

Jason Scott / Red Tyranno Ranger

Kira Ford / Dino Thunder Yellow

Koda / Dino Charge Blue

Nelida Valensis / Brave Charge Black

Lauren Shiba / Red Samurai Ranger II

Eric Myers / Quantum Ranger

52. Ninja Elite Rangers (superteam comprising of ninja-themed Rangers)

Adam Park / Blue Wolf Ranger

Shane Clarke / Ninja Storm Red

Leanne Omino / Thunder Storm Yellow

Sarah Thompson / Ninja Steel Pink

Delphine / White Aquitar Ranger

David Trueheart / White Ninjetti Ranger

53. Titan Rangers (Rangers comprising of Young Justice/Teen Titans)

Timothy "Tim" Drake / Red Robin Ranger

Conner Kent / Black Superboy Ranger

Bart Allen / Silver Impulse Ranger

Cassie Sandsmark / Gold Wonder Ranger

Anita Fite / Purple Empress Ranger

Greta Hayes / White Secret Ranger

Cissie King-Jones / Crimson Arrowette Ranger

Grant Emerson / Orange Damage Ranger

Jaime Reyes / Blue Beetle Ranger

Kiran Singh / Yellow Solstice Ranger

M'gann M'orzz / Green Martian Ranger

Virgil Hawkins / Navy Static Ranger

54. Mutant Rangers (Rangers comprising of New Mutants/X-Force)

Danielle "Dani" Moonstar / Blue Mirage Ranger

Samuel "Sam" Guthrie / Orange Cannonball Ranger

Xi'an Coy Mahn / Pink Karma Ranger

Roberto da Costa / Red Sunspot Ranger

Rahne Sinclair / Crimson Wolfsbane Ranger

Douglas "Doug" Ramsey / Yellow Cypher Ranger

Amara Aquilla / Gold Magma Ranger

Illyana Rasputin / Black Magik Ranger

Russell "Rusty" Wilson / Orange Firefist Ranger

James Proudstar / Silver Warpath Ranger

Evan Daniels / Silver Spyke Ranger

Laura Kinney / Tan Wolverine Ranger

55. Sentai Strike Force (a mix of Sentai and PR)

Captain Marvelous / Gokai Red

Nanami Nono / Hurricane Blue

Ian Yorkland / Kyoryu Black

Luna Konokoe / Midoninger

Ryan Mitchell / Lightspeed Titanium

Ashley Hammond / Yellow Space Ranger

Robert James Finn / Purple Wolf Ranger

Sydney Drew / SPD Pink Ranger

56. Sentai Elite (a mix of Sentai and PR)

Tsuruhime / Ninja White

Masato Jin / Beet Buster

Yuri / Time Pink

Akira Nijino / ToQ 6gou

Leelee Pimvare / Vampire Black

Conner McKnight / Dino Thunder Red

Veronica "Ronny" Robinson / Overdrive Yellow

Merrick Baliton / Silver Wolf Ranger

57. Avatar Rangers (Avatarverse)

Aang / Avatar Orange

Katara / Avatar Blue

Sokka / Avatar Navy

Toph Beifong / Avatar Green

Zuko / Avatar Red

Suki / Avatar Emerald

Korra / Avatar Cyan

Mako / Avatar Crimson

Bolin / Avatar Teal

Asami Sato / Avatar Indigo

58. Voltron Rangers (Voltron Alliance)

Keith Kogane / Voltron Black

Allura Aquilla / Voltron Red

Lance Azul / Voltron Blue

Katie "Pidge" Holt / Voltron Green

Hunk Garrett / Voltron Yellow

Acxa Nova / Voltron Purple

59. Netflix Rangers (Rangers comprising of characters from Netflix animated originals and films under Dreamworks, Wonderstorm and other animated studios)

Callum (The Dragon Prince) / Red Netflix Ranger

Rayla (The Dragon Prince) / Green Netflix Ranger

James "Jim" Lake Jr. (Tales of Arcadia) / Silver Netflix Ranger

Claire Nuñez (Tales of Arcadia) / Pink Netflix Ranger

Jake "Stretch" Armstrong (Stretch Armstrong and the Flex Fighters) / Blue Netflix Ranger

Carmen Sandiego (Carmen Sandiego) / Scarlet Netflix Ranger

Adam (The Hollow) / Black Netflix Ranger

Adora (She-Ra and the Princesses of Power) / White Netflix Ranger

Alucard Tepes (Castlevania) / Gold Netflix Ranger

Miko Kuroda (Devilman Crybaby) / Silver Netflix Ranger

60. Cartoon Network Rangers (Rangers comprising of characters from CN, Boomerang, WB Animation, Hanna-Barbera and Warner Animation Group shows and films)

Ben Tennyson (Ben 10) / Green CN Ranger

Gwen Tennyson (Ben 10) / Blue CN Ranger

Lion-O (ThunderCats) / Red CN Ranger

Cheetara (ThunderCats) / Yellow CN Ranger

Jack (Samurai Jack) / White CN Ranger

Juniper Lee (The Life and Times of Juniper Lee) / Purple CN Ranger

Jonny Quest (Jonny Quest) / Black CN Ranger

Kiva Andru (Megas XLR) / Silver CN Ranger

Rex Salazar (Generator Rex) / Orange CN Ranger

Kimiko Tohomiko (Xiaolin) / Pink CN Ranger

61. Disney Rangers (Rangers comprising of characters from Disney Channel, Disney XD, Jetix, Fox Kids, Disney and Pixar animated shows and films)

Goliath (Gargoyles) / Black Disney Ranger

Elisa Maza (Gargoyles) / Orange Disney Ranger

Mason "Dipper" Pines (Gravity Falls) / Blue Disney Ranger

Mabel Pines (Gravity Falls) / Pink Disney Ranger

Jacob "Jake" Long (American Dragon: Jake Long) / Red Disney Ranger

Kimberly Ann "Kim" Possible (Kim Possible) / Indigo Disney Ranger

Robin Hood (Robin Hood) / Gold Disney Ranger

Fa Mulan (Mulan) / Green Disney Ranger

Charlie Landers (Aaron Stone) / Silver Disney Ranger

Alita (Alita: Battle Angel) / Navy Disney Ranger

62. Nickelodeon Rangers (Rangers comprising of characters from Nickelodeon, Nicktoons and Paramount Animation animated shows and films)

Daniel "Danny" Fenton (Danny Phantom) / Black Nickelodeon Ranger

Samantha "Sam" Manson (Danny Phantom) / Purple Nickelodeon Ranger

Mahad (Skyland) / Red Nickelodeon Ranger

Lena (Skyland) / White Nickelodeon Ranger

James Isaac "Jimmy" Neutron (The Adventures of Jimmy Neutron: Boy Genius) / Blue Nickelodeon Ranger

Bloom (Winx Club) / Pink Nickelodeon Ranger

Arnold Shortman (Hey Arnold) / Green Nickelodeon Ranger

Jenny Wakeman (My Life as a Teenage Robot) / Silver Nickelodeon Ranger

Casey Jones (TMNT) / Green Nickelodeon Ranger

Charlie Watson (Bumblebee) / Yellow Nickelodeon Ranger

63. Sentai Showdown (a mix of Sentai and PR)

Sokichi Banba / Big One

Remi Hoshikawa / Five Yellow

Hayate / Ginga Green

Rin / Houou Ranger

Chad Lee / Lightspeed Blue

Vesper Vasquez / Black Hyperforce Ranger

Ivan / Dino Charge Gold

Clare Langtree / Gatekeeper Purple

64. Sentai Prime Force (a mix of Sentai and PR)

Kaoru Shiba / Princess Shinken Red

Gaku Washio / Gao Yellow

Hyoko Hayase / Sieg-Jeanne

Masumi Inou / Bouken Black

Emma Goodall / Megaforce Pink

Ziggy Grover / RPM Green

Kiya / Blue Omega Ranger

Tyzonn / Overdrive Silver

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📷 Katie Douglas on Instagram (by Andrew Obtinalla, Paul Smith & Tyler Nemeth)

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(HOT TAKE) Notes on a Conditional Form by The 1975, part 1

In the first instalment of a two part dialogic HOT TAKE of The 1975′s latest album, Notes on a Conditional Form (Dirty Hit, 2020), Maria Sledmere writes to musician and critic Scott Morrison with meditations on the controversial motormouth and prince of sincerity that is Matty Healy, the poetics of wrongness, millennial digression and what it means to play and compose from the middle.

Dear Scott,

> So we have agreed to write something on The 1975’s fourth studio album, Notes on a Conditional Form (Dirty Hit/Polydor). I have been traipsing around the various necropoli of Glasgow on my state-sanctioned walks this week, listening to the long meandering 80-minute world of it, disentangling my headphones from the overgrown ferns, caught between the living and dead. Can you have a long world, a sprawling fantasia, when ‘the world’ feels increasingly shortened, small, boiled down to its ‘essentials’? Let’s go around the world in 80 minutes, the band seem to say, take this short-circuit to the infinite with me. I like that; I don’t even need a boat, just a half-arsed WiFi connection and a will to download. I’m really excited to be talking with you, writing you both about this; it’s an honour to connect our thoughts. I want writing right now to feel a bit like listening, so I write this listening. When my friend Katy slid into my DMs on a Monday morning with ‘omg the 1975 album starts with greta?????????’ and then ‘what on earth is the genre of this album ?!’ I just knew it had to happen, this writing-listening, because I was equally alarmed and charmed by the cognitive dissonance of that fall from Greta’s soft, yet urgent call to rebel (‘The 1975’), into ‘People’ with its parodic refrain of post-punk hedonism that would eat Fat White Family on a Dadaesque meal-deal platter ‘WELL, GIRLS, FOOD, GEAR [...] Yeah, woo, yeah, that’s right’. Scott, you and I went to see The 1975 play at the Hydro on the 1st of March, my last gig before lockdown. I’d been up all night drinking straight gin and doing cartwheels and crying on my friend’s carpet, and the sleeplessness made everything all the more lush and intense. Those slogans, the theatrical backdrops, the dancers, the lights, the travellator! Everything so EXTRA, what a JOURNEY. And well, it would be rude of me not to invite you to contribute to this conversation, as a thank you for the ticket but also because of your fortunate (and probably unusual) positioning as both a classically trained musician (with a fine-tuned listening ear) and fervent fan of the band (readers, Scott messaged me with pictures of pre-ordered vinyl to prove it).

> It seems impossible to begin this dialogue without first addressing the FRAUGHT and oft~problematic question of Matty Healy, the band’s frontman, variously described as ‘the enfant terrible of pop-rock’ and ‘outspoken avatar’ (Sam Sodomsky, Pitchfork), ‘enigmatic deity’ (Douglas Greenwood for i-D), ‘a charismatic thirty-one-year-old’ and ‘scrawny’, rock star ‘archetype’, not to mention ‘avatar of modern authenticity, wit, and flamboyance’ (Carrie Battan, The New Yorker). ‘Divisive motormouth or voice of a generation?’ asks Dorian Lynskey with (fair enough) somewhat tired provocation in The Guardian, as if you could have one without the other, these days. ‘There are’, writes Dan Stubbs for The NME, ‘as many Matty Healys here as there are musical styles’. So far, so postmodern, so elliptical, so everything/yeah/woo/whatever/that’s right. Come to think of it, it makes sense for The 1975 to draft in Greta Thunberg to read her climate speech over the opening eponymous track. Both Matty and Greta, for divergent yet somehow intersecting reasons, suffer the troublesome, universalising label of voice of a generation. Why not join forces to exploit this label, to put out a message? I’ve always thought of pop music as a kind of potential broadcast, a hypnotic, smooth space for desire’s traversal and recalibration. More on that later, maybe. What do you think?

> You can imagine Matty leaping out of a cryptic, post-internet Cocteau novelette (if not then straight onto James Cordon’s studio desk), emoji streaming from his fingertips like the lightning that Justine wields in Lars von Trier’s film Melancholia (2011); but the terrifying candour of the enfant terrible is also his propensity to wax lyrical on another (bear with my clickhole) YouTube interview about his thoughts on Situationism and the Snapchat generation. It feels relevant to mention cinema right now, if only in passing, because this album is full of cinematic moments: strings and swells worthy of Weyes Blood’s latest paean to the movies, but also a Disneyfication of sentiment clotted and packed between house tracks, ballads and rarefied indie hits. Nobody does the interlude quite like The 1975. Maybe more on that later, also.

> Where do I start though, how to really write about this, how to attain something like necessary distance in the space of a writing-listening? Matty Healy, I suppose, like SPAM’s celebrated authorial mascot, Tom McCarthy, poses the same problem of response: how to write about an artist whose own critical commentary is like an eloquent, overzealous and self-devouring, carnivorous vine of opinion?  

> Now, let’s not turn this into a discussion about who wears pinstripes better (we can leave that to readers - these are total Notes from the Watercooler levels of quiche). There seems to be this obsession with pinning (excuse the pun) Matty down to a flat surface of multiples: a moodboard, avatar, placeholder for automatic cancellation. He’s the soft cork you wanna prod your anxieties through and call it identity, you wanna provoke into saying something bizarrely, painfully true about life ‘as it is now’. Healy himself quips self-referentially, ‘a millennial that babyboomers like’. I don’t really know where to start really, not even on Matty; my brain is all over the place and I can’t find a critical place to settle. I’m lost in the fog and the stripes, some stars also; I haven’t even washed my hair for a week. Funnily enough, in 2018 for SPAM’s #7 Prom Date issue I wrote a poem called ‘Just Messing Around’ where the speaker mentions ‘pinning my eye to the right side / of matt healy’s hair all shaved / & serene’ and you don’t really know if it’s the eye that’s shaved or the hair, but both I guess offer different kinds of vision. Every time I google the man, IRL Matty I mean, I am offered a candied proliferation of alluring headlines: ‘The 1975’s Matty Healy opens up on his beef with Imagine Dragons’, ‘The 1975’s Matty Healy savagely destroys Maroon 5 over plagiarism claims’. Perhaps the whole point is to define (or slay?) by negation. Hey, I’ll write another poem. The opening sentence comes from Matty’s recent Guardian interview.

Superstar

I’m not an avocado, not everyone thinks I’m amazing. That’s why they call me the avocado, baby was a song released by Los Campesinos! in 2013, same year as the 1975’s debut. In the am I have been wanting to listen and Andy puts up a meme like ‘The 1975 names their albums stuff like “A Treatise on Epistemological Suffering” and then spends 2 hours singing about how hard it is to be 26’ and I reply being 26 IS epistemological suffering (isn’t that the affirmative dismissal contained in the title, ‘Yeah I Know’) I mean only yesterday I had to ask myself if it’s true you can wish on 11:11 or take zinc to improve your immune system or use an expired provisional license to buy alcohol like why are they even still asking I thought indie had died after that excruciating Hadouken! song called ‘Superstar’ which was all like You don’t like my scene / You don’t like my song / Well, if you Somewhere I’ve done something wrong it seems a delirious, 3-minute scold of the retro infinitude of scarf-wearing cunts with haircuts, and yeah sure kids dressed as emos rapping to rave is not the end of the world, per se, similarly I had to ask myself is there a life in academia is there a wage here or there, like the Talking Heads song And you may ask yourself, well How did I get here? Good thing I turn 27 next month Timothy Morton often uses the refrain, this is not my beautiful house this is not my beautiful wife to refer to those moments you find yourself caught in the irony loop and that’s dark ecology the closer you are the stranger it feels like slice me in half I’ll fall out with more questions you can plant in the soil like a stone or stoner, just one more drag of does it offend you, yeah? will I live and die in a band Matty sings the sweet green meat of my much-too-old -and-such-youthful experience of adding healthy fat to conference dialogue, like ‘Avocado, Baby’ was released on a record called No Blues I believe a large automobile is hurtling towards me now in negative space and the driver is crooning Elvis and reciting my funding conditions and everything feels like there aren’t not still people who believe the new culture of content is a space ‘over there’ and you can still have earnest power ballads about love if you want them =/ to cancel (too many tabs don’t make a tableau but in the future facebook has a paywall) and fame is a drag the pressure we put on the atmosphere, like somewhere you’re alive and still amazing asking wtf I’m reading this novel by Roberto Bolaño set partly in 1975 before we had internet it seems poets got laid a lot that year in Mexico City before I was born to pick up video calls with a spliff in one hand in the splendid, essential heat like a difficult knife in my side you can put me on toast, grind the pepper over me gently and say fucking hell this has taken forever.

> I guess I want or wanted to begin with this question of difficulty that rises when responding to Notes on a Conditional Form. How do you approach an album whose delayed release places it in a position of considerable hype, an album whose world tour and promotion is again delayed by global pandemic, an album shrouded in the ever-shifting controversy of Matty’s persona, an album whose length and sonic variety risks collapse into litanies of zany superlative and necrophilic attempts to revive musical category as vaguely relevant here? As beautiful as it is to catalogue the offbeat Pinegrove vibes of ‘Roadkill’, the shoegaze croons of ‘Then Because She Goes’ and the pop-punk, chord-bright euphoria of ‘Me & You Together Song’, I could keep going and going with this. I could just list and just list this. The album is a generous offering: a tribute to the album as form in an age where attention tapers away on high-streaming playlists set to conditioned, circadian moods curated by the likes of Spotify or Apple Music. The album is a Borgesian plenitude of multiple pathways, multiple timelines, infinite feed, choose your own adventure; a hypertext of cultural reference almost worthy of Manic Street Preachers at their Richey Edwards era of paranoid, intellectual peak; a metamodernist feat of oscillation between irony and sincerity, an extended tract, a drunk millennial ramble, a journey that loops from house party to club basement to the streams of sexuality repressed and expressed encounter...and yet. It is both more and less than these things. In trying to capture Notes on a Conditional Form with some pithy, journalist’s statement, I’m doing it all wrong.

> Sidenote: I recently listened to Rachel Zucker give a 2016 lecture on ‘The Poetics of Wrongness’ as part of the Bagley Wright Lecture Series. She makes a case for wrongness in poetry and critique, rejects the poem of pithy essence, the short, pretty and to the point lyric whose meaning is easily digested in a greetings card, or A Level exam paper, say. ‘Instead of the Fabergé egg of the short lyric, I prefer the aesthetics of intractability and exhausted exhaustedness’, the mistakes, lags or aporia made along the way in one of these long and winding poems. Notes on a Conditional Form is full of what some might deem mistakes, digression, exhaustion; but it is also peppered with the gloss of almost perfect pop ‘hits’ such as ‘Me & You Together Song’ and ‘If You’re Too Shy (Let Me Know)’. A wrong poem should be, ‘ashamed and irreverent’, which feels like a decent description of The 1975’s general orientation towards artistic conception. There is cringe and incongruity, there is by all intents and purposes ‘too much of it’, whatever we mean by ‘it’. And yet, that is its beautiful poetics of wrongness, the sound of wrongness, which ‘prefers the stairs’ to the easy elevator pitch (as Zucker puts it), that ‘prefers a half-finishing crumbling stairwell to nowhere’. I like to think about this 1975 album as a kind of exhausting Escherian scene of shifting, crumbling stairwells, shuffling and reassembling against the glistering backdrop of the internet’s inverse void, where everything, literally everything is translated to a starry excess of 1s and 0s, our collective binary data, the white hot, unreadable howl of our noise. What do you think Scott, would Matty find this image agreeable? Does that matter?

> Pushing dear Matty aside, say what you like, let’s start (again) with the title: Notes on a Conditional Form. Following 2018’s A Brief Inquiry Into Online Relationships, it’s fair to position these records as gestures towards philosophical statements ‘of the times’. Important to recognise the resistance to total or dominating knowledge built into the titles: these are not complete tracts or theses, but rather ‘a brief inquiry’ and ‘notes’. It’s obviously the ancient yet *hip* thing to do in capital-P Philosophy, to put out your statement on aesthetics and ethics, and I think The 1975 are playing with that tradition and its failure. You can imagine if his attention span were different, Matty Healy would’ve already written a PhD thesis on this stuff and published it as drunken bulletins on LiveJournal in 2007. As it stands, we have the smorgasbord sprawl of this eclectic record to get through in this cursèd year of 2020 — it’s not like we have much of anything better to do right now, when everything feels so futile, beyond reason and even the greatest human endeavour. Haha, woo, Yeah :’(((.

> Let’s stay in that conditional space between crying and laughter. Conditional form is interesting as a term, often used in grammar to refer to the ‘unreal past’ because it uses a past tense but does not actually refer to something that literally happened in the past: If I had texted him back, we would probably have gone to the gig that night. There’s something about the conditional as the ur-condition of the internet, the proliferating possibilities it offers and the hauntological strains of what could have been had we chosen x option over y, z, a, b, c, infinity...As millennials, we often make decisions by hedging, always caught in the conditional state of what it is to be. Hovering in the emotional shortcuts provided by dumb yellow icons, the poetics of abstraction. A verb form’s dalliance with uncertain reverb; and so we live our conditional lives.

> To push this further, we can say the internet is, as ever, Matty Healy’s natural habitat. In a recent podcast interview with Conor Oberst for The Face, Healy tells his favourite emo-country hero that ‘my natural environment by the time I started The 1975 was the fucking internet’. So how does that ecosystem play into the music? In a damning review for The Line of Best Fit, Claire Biddles concludes:

The 1975’s first three albums are ideal and distinct worlds to inhabit, each individually cohesive but situated in specific contexts — the anticipation of the small town, profundity in the face of vacuous fame, and the horror and isolation of late capitalism. Perhaps because of its broken genesis, Notes has no such common context, and ends up feeling flat, directionless and inessential, where its forebears felt vital, worthy of devoting a life to. For a band with proven dexterity in deftly capturing the nuances and quick changes of contemporary conversation, it is disheartening to witness them with nearly nothing of note to say.

That description — ‘flat, directionless and inessential’ — is kind of how I experience the internet right now, in the paradox of Web 2.0 becoming utterly essential, somehow, to how I live my life, how I love, how I am with friends. The internet as my ecosystem, my utility, my complete environment, my Imaginary — beyond the mere utility of a WiFi connection. Broken genesis might well describe the childhoods of those of us who grew up online, whose platforms collapsed around them, whose adolescent data was lost in the great ~accidental annihilation of the MySpace servers, whose identities were always already fractured, performed, anonymised or exquisitely personalised, deferred into only the (im)possible keystroke of utterance and trace, the fort-da play of MSN sign-ins. ‘My life is defined by a desire to be outward followed by a fear of being seen’, Matty says in a new short film for Apple Music, released in tandem with the album. The internet requires this chiaroscuro destiny: not to burn always with Baudelaire’s hard and gem-like flame (O to be an IRL flaneur beyond times of lockdown) but to endlessly flicker between the bright green light of presence and the shade of what once was called afk, away from keyboard. To live and burn in the gap between extroversion and introversion, to live in this conditional state of tendency. To express with emoji, send pics, is to both reveal and withhold something else, essential.

> I like albums to feel like worlds; I appreciate Biddles’ evocation of the cohesion experienced in the first three 1975 records. But perhaps it is a kind of violence to assume a world must have cohesion to exist. What is even meant by ‘common context’? What pressure are we putting on a singer, a band, a cultural moment to produce something familiar and harmonious, and to whom, at what scale? What does it mean to be the biggest band in the world...for a bit? How does that work when everything is dissonance, transience, noise, interference; both this and not-this; when life itself is lived as the flat traversal of a millioning existential terrains that seem to collapse into this nowness in which I feel myself sliding forever? Can anyone weigh-in on what it means to make music, art or writing that’s ‘worthy of devoting a life to’, because the gravity and force of that condition for good art, good pop, seduces me so.

> Maybe the point is to always be in the middle, to never quite start to write about The 1975, to find yourself always already writing about this album because this album was always already writing about your life. I have said nobody does the interlude quite like The 1975, but I was being coy, because the hottest twentieth-century philosophical double act, Deleuze and Guattari (haters gonna hate), do the interlude rather nicely. The point of a rhizome being ‘no beginning or end [...] always in the middle, between things, interbeing, intermezzo’ as they write in A Thousand Plateaus (1980). I see the musical interlude of a pop record, the instrumental moment without lyric, as a kind of middling gesture that places the listener in that conditional state of presence and absence, a hinge between songs, times and narrative moments. Maybe my favourite moment in A Thousand Plateaus is the statement: ‘RHIZOMATICS = POP ANALYSIS, even if the people have other things to do besides read it, even if the blocks of academic culture or pseudoscien-tificity in it are still too painful or ponderous’. Painful or ponderous might be a fair critique levelled at the enfant terrible vibes of Matty’s lyrics and generic pick’n’mix, but isn’t this tactic a kind of swerving punch at the categorical violence that keeps people out of academia, that keeps academic discourse so often stale in the first place? Unlike most journal articles, let’s face it, pop reaches ‘“the people”’. Perhaps Notes on a Conditional Form is the rhizomatic sprawl of the myriad we need as an alternative to institutional hierarchy, ring-fencing and the language games of academia. Surely the title is a reference to the very ‘pseudoscient-tificity’ D&G mention? I’m gonna quote Richard Scott’s blurb to Colin Herd’s 2019 poetry collection, You Name It here (not least because the indie publishers, Dostoyevsky Wannabe, come straight out of Manchester, home to The 1975, and because Herd’s poetic spirit is pure pop generosity with a platter of theory on the side), because I want to say similar things of this album: ‘Colin Herd’s poems are masterpieces of variousness. They are talismans against Macho demons. They are snatches of theory operating under lavish spills of language’. The good thing about Herd’s poetry and Matty Healy’s lyrics is that the impulse towards romantic or florid expression is always tapered by an interest in the mundane and everyday. Healy is always singing about pissing or buying clothes online or, as on ‘The Birthday Party’, singing about ‘a place I’ve been going’ that seems to consist of the lonely, infinite regress of conversations about seeing friends and watching someone drink kombucha while buying, in the convenient life of rhyme, Ed Ruscha prints.

Ed Ruscher, Cold Beer, Beautiful Girls (2009)

> So what kind of listening does this rhizomatic sprawl demand — does it expand beyond the banal or find a holding space there, a heaven of affect chilled to late-modernity’s crisp perfection? ‘The End (Music For Cars)’ is a luxurious, Hollywood ‘soaring’ moment, all strings and swells, fucking woodwind, and comes as the third track on the album, where normally you’d place it as some kind of penultimate climax, the album’s landscape pan-out or big swelling screen kiss in three-dimensional rotation. The band’s ‘Music For Cars’ era comprises their two most recent records, and you have to take it as a nod to Brian Eno’s 1978 ambient classic Ambient 1: Music for Airports (Matty recently interviewed Eno again for The Face, cool). The thing about cars is you drive around in them, you follow rules but also whims and desires, convictions; you choose to join others or you pursue the selfish acceleration (‘People are afraid to merge on freeways in Los Angeles’ goes the laconic teenage refrain in Bret Easton Ellis’ 1985 debut novel Less Than Zero). You only listen to music half-attentively; you don’t listen close enough to trade in souls. Are we being invited to experience this album as an ambient disruption of figure and ground, presence and absence, here and there, space and place, intimacy and despondency? Driving feels increasingly ‘directionless and inessential’ when the scale effects and obscenities of the anthropocene, of covid and other late-capitalist crises loom in our vision, when the sign systems we used to navigate our lives by seem to shimmer out of focus, or pixelate and deteriorate through endless memetic replication... You can’t help feel like Biddles review kind of misses the point.

Sylvano Bussoti, Five Pieces for Piano for David Tudor (1959)

> What point would that be though, in a world of rhizomatic overlap and intersecting, middling lines, a direction without seeming end? I love the approximation at work when Biddles writes, ‘with nearly nothing of note to say’, because that seems to be a possibility condition for writing in the age of the internet. To write in a way that is almost less than zero and loop back upon some kind of infinity, yet keep it in 2-step. I think back to Rachel Zucker’s image of the half-finished crumbling stairwell, and feel an amiable sense of approval towards this band who always work between the registers of diary, confession, advertising, provocative sloganeering and faux-didactics, never quite settling in to specifically tell you this particular story. It’s all mess, and it’s awful and delicious, I’m sorry. ‘Nothing Revealed / Everything Denied’ is the title of track 13 on the album: that movement between nothing and everything feels like the absolutist, absurdist conditions of ‘truth’ possibility in the Trumpocene/age of so-called ‘post-truth’. ‘Life feels like a lie, I need something to be true’, Healy sings with strained conviction in the song’s opening. But what is at stake in this truth? ‘I never fucked in a car, I was lying’, goes the line, referring back to the dramatic in medias res opening to ‘Love It If We Made It’, notable banger from A Brief Inquiry…: ‘We’re fucking in a car, shooting heroin / Saying controversial things just for the hell of it’. If lying is a pun on telling a mistruth or laying back, practically sexless in a passive state, there’s a deliberate play on apathy, agency and distortion here. It’s something Matty seems snagged on. On ‘I Like America & America Likes Me’ he collapses aesthetic superficiality, capital’s lyric abstraction (‘Oh, what’s a fiver?’) and generalised crisis into this (un)conscious desire for shutdown, expressed in fragmentary bullets of needing-to-know-and-not-know: ‘Is that designer? Is that on fire? Am I a liar? Oh, will this help me lay down?’ And then that impassioned refrain, processed through vocal distortion as if to enact the difficulty in clarity as overcome somehow by the sheer making of noise: ‘Belief and saying something / And saying something / And saying something’. It’s the endless, driving recursion of our lives online, online.

> Back to ‘The End (Music for Cars)’ which really is the middle of the beginning. It’s weird to listen to songs about driving and lying down in the middle of lockdown, drowning in the bloat of social media, on top of our ongoing climate emergency (yeah, remember that, it’s still happening), where high-carbon travel feels like an exhausted, almost impossible concept. A musician complaining about travelling is an age-old subject for a song, but this feels just as much about living in the in-between times of the internet (remember the sweet naivety of the information superhighway) as much as the great Road, for which Kerouac longed as much as Springsteen, Dylan, or Lana Del Rey. Is Matty Healy homesick though? ‘Get somewhere, change my mind, eh / Get somewhere but don’t find it / I don’t find what I’m looking for’. It’s all ‘(out there)’ as the parenthetical refrain goes, but maybe ‘out there’, outside, is the maddening supplement, as Derrida would say, to our lives online, thus revealing their mutual, entwined dependency. Imagine the M6 but tangled up crazily, zanily, like one of those Sylvano Bussoti scores. It’s not like you’re trying to get home, get back, exactly. It’s not like you can just click back on your browser and erase that trace of the touch that enacts it. That’s the weird-ass sensation of being an ecological being: ‘Wherever you go, there you are’, writes Tim Morton in Being Ecological (2018). We’re all pretty alien, even to ourselves.

> If life feels like a lie, as Matty sings, does it matter anymore whether it is or not? Or, to pose the question differently, how do we feel into, attune to something like ‘truth’, a shared reality or feeling? ‘Out there’ is only a state of ellipsis [...] a vine extended, something for the listener, user, consumer and/or human to cling to — or be strangled by. In the aforementioned Apple Music video, Matty takes away the canvas and presents the frame beneath, in a gesture that is comically overwrought with Duchampian pretention around the state and context of the artwork itself. ‘Sometimes I think what is the point of...it’s not my atheism coming out, it’s just my being human coming out’, he muses. The phrase ‘coming out’, with its connotations of closeting, shame and cocoon-like emergence is intriguing here. In a dehumanising, post-internet world of neoliberalism and its attendant microfascisms, its commodification of all kinds of art, its easythink translation of poetry-to-advertising, what would it mean to come out as human after, or better still, in the middle of all this? It’s significant that he trails off after ‘the point of…’, for surely the point itself (of the art?) would be to find yourself here, there, right in the middle of it all. And then in ‘Nothing Revealed / Everything Denied’, it’s like Matty is calling us back from that epistemological and ontological boiling point of knowing and being, like in singing we could go along, we could feel present and ‘true’ again, even with friction and difference. We gotta take hold, cool ourselves down from the rhetoric and into warm emotion, the smell of paint, erotic vibration of bass, in a manner of speaking.

> What if the mode of inquiry were not to investigate but rather to follow the lines of flight, to riff on this world where narrative arcs and chains are replaced by the multiple possibilities of hallucinatory experience, what Deleuze and Guattari call ‘a continuous, self-vibrating region of intensities whose development avoids any orientation toward a culmination point or external end’? To just desire and trace it. This, Scott, is where you come in (and I finally shut up to listen). There is so much more to write about this album, echo for echo, and I feel like I’ve only begun the tracing which was already beginning: I want to know your thoughts on The 1975 and America, on gender and genre, on bodies and football and friendship, on political engagement, those house beats, on the beautiful, sultry appearance of Phoebe (fucking) Bridgers, on sincerity, on the question of ‘What Should I Say’...It’s been playing on my mind that I will never say what I want to, or should, or would say of this album, but this perhaps is what I would otherwise have said. I give you my notes in conditional form.

Read part 2 of our review in Scott Morrison’s response here.

Notes on a Conditional Form is out now and available to order. 

~

Text: Maria Sledmere

Published: 23/6/20

[billdecker]

2018.

 Here we are with the films list again. Bold = watched first time. 

Films.

The English Patient

The BFG

Anna Karenina [1967]

King Kong [2005]

54

Henry VIII and his Six Wives [1972]

The Disaster Artist

Napoleon Dynamite

The Addams Family

Kong: Skull Island

Justice League

The Addams Family Values

Johnny English

Jumanji: Welcome to the Jungle

Wayne’s World

Lady Bird

Westworld

Carol

Green Lantern 

England is Mine

Rush Hour

Pride and Prejudice [2005]

Call Me By Your Name

The Greatest Showman

Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind

Dante’s Peak

Only Lovers Left Alive

Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri

Blade Runner

Moonrise Kingdom

Clue

Get Smart

Darkest Hour

Blade Runner 2049

Lost in Translation

The Talented Mr. Ripley

The Lego Movie

Anchorman

The Shape of Water

Get Out

San Andreas

The Beguiled

Lady Chatterley’s Lover [1981]

Interview With a Vampire

Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy

Song to Song

Atonement

La La Land

Drop Dead Fred

Attack the Block

Another Mother’s Son

I, Tonya

The Sense of an Ending

Forgetting Sarah Marshall

Cold Mountain

Step Up

The Founder

The Fugitive

The Promise

Papadopoulos and Sons

Rob Roy

The Florida Project

Professor Marston and the Wonder Women

Head in the Clouds

Crooked House

Miami Vice [2006]

Miss Sloane

Molly’s Game

Battle of the Sexes

Half of a Yellow Sun

A Quiet Passion

Lady Jane

Anne of a Thousand Days

Mars Attacks!

Zoolander

A Midsummer Night’s Dream

Nina

Pele: Birth of a Legend

2001: A Space Odyssey

A Futile and Stupid Gesture 

The Mask

Phantom Thread

Black Panther

Eyes Wide Shut

The Death of Stalin

Baywatch

Paddington 2

Wonder Woman

Star Trek [2009]

Star Trek Into Darkness

Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them

Star Trek Beyond

Denial

Chariots of Fire

Captain America: The First Avenger

Iron Man

The Incredible Hulk

Borg vs McEnroe

Iron Man 2

Thor

Avengers Assemble

Iron Man 3

Thor: The Dark World

Captain America: The Winter Soldier

Avengers: Age of Ultron

Guardians of the Galaxy

Guardians of the Galaxy: Volume 2

Ant-Man

Captain America: Civil War 

Doctor Strange

Spider-Man: Homecoming

Thor: Ragnarok

War Horse

God’s Own Country

In Bruges

The Big Sick

The Towering Inferno

Magnolia

Our Souls at Night 

Dog Day Afternoon

Willow

Roman Holiday

Sabrina

Annihilation 

North by Northwest

The Emoji Movie

Coco

Grease

Dirty Dancing

Captain Fantastic

The Wicker Man

This is Spinal Tap

Magic Mike XXL

Come Sunday

The Dark Tower

Bill

Avengers: Infinity War

Loving Vincent

Mansfield Park

Three Men and a Little Lady

Oliver!

Rough Night

Avatar

One Last Dance

Girls Trip

Alex and the List

The Dambusters

The Mummy [2017]

London

The Damned United

The Wedding Video

Deadpool

Enter the Dragon

Atomic Blonde

The Red Shoes

The Great Gatsby [2013]

Bram Stoker’s Dracula

South Park: Bigger, Longer, Uncut

Morris: A Life With Bells On

Boss Baby

Solo: A Star Wars Story

Kenny

All About Eve

Lethal Weapon

Lethal Weapon 2

Final Portrait

The Little Mermaid

The Huntsman: Winter’s War

Men in Black 3

Lara Croft: Tomb Raider

Lara Croft Tomb Raider: The Cradle of Life

Tomb Raider [2018]

Crocodile Dundee

Jabberwocky

Legend

Lethal Weapon 3

The Witches

Down With Love

Clash of the Titans [1981]

Clash of the Titans [2010]

I Give it a Year

Terminal

Where the Wild Things Are

The Handmaiden

The Muppet Movie [1979]

Brakes

Ready Player One

Jurassic World: Fallen Kingdom

A Wrinkle in Time

Breathe

Valerian and the City of a Thousand Planets

Eagle vs Shark

Farenheit 451 [2018]

Picnic at Hanging Rock

Mission Impossible

Mission Impossible II

Mission Impossible III

The Saint [2017]

JFK

Ocean’s 8

Deadpool 2

Falling Down

Duck Butter

Peter Rabbit

44 Inch Chest

You Instead

The Deep Blue Sea

Not Another Happy Ending

Punch Drunk Love

The Fast and The Furious

2 Fast 2 Furious

The Fast and The Furious: Tokyo Drift

Fast & Furious

Fast Five

Fast & Furious 6

Furious 7

The Fate of the Furious

Geostorm

Ant-Man and the Wasp

Escape to Victory

Porcupine Lake

The Snowman

The Incredibles

Mamma Mia! Here We Go Again

Daphne

Ingrid Goes West

One Day

My Neighbor Totoro

There Will Be Blood

Rampage

Goodbye Christopher Robin

Incredibles 2

To All the Boys I’ve Loved Before

Belle de Jour

Mission Impossible - Fallout

The Spy Who Dumped Me 

The Meg

Little Ashes

Meet Joe Black

The King of Comedy

Jason and the Argonauts

Flash Gordon

Odette

Strictly Ballroom

Into the Woods

Cars 3

The Book of Life

Murder on the Orient Express [2017]

Kath & Kimderella

Madame Bovary

X-Men: First Class

X-Men: Days of Future Past

X-Men: Apocalypse

All the Money in the World

Quincy

The Post

Becoming Bond

Early Man

Little Women [1994]

Dangerous Liaisons

The Party

Operation Finale 

Nappily Ever After

What’s New Pussycat?

Saved!

A Star is Born [1976]

Modern Life is Rubbish

Jaws

The Mercy

Swept from the Sea

Permission

Venom

A Star is Born [2018]

Far and Away

Heat

Jane Eyre

Braveheart

Film Stars Don’t Die in Liverpool

Juliet, Naked

First Man

Christopher Robin

Vincent and Theo

Pollock

Bohemian Rhapsody

One More Time With Feeling

Interlude in Prague

The Mask of Zorro

The Legend of Zorro 

You, Me, and Him

The Nutcracker and the Four Realms 

Crazy Rich Asians

Bobby [2016]

Outlaw King

Space Jam

They Shall Not Grow Old

The Grinch [2018]

The Big Lebowski 

Fantastic Beasts: The Crimes of Grindelwald

Mulan

The Battle of the River Plate

They’ll Love Me When I’m Dead

My Generation

Batman Begins

Being John Malkovich

Harry Potter and The Philosopher’s Stone

Harry Potter and The Chamber of Secrets

Harry Potter and The Prisoner of Azkaban

Harry Potter and The Goblet of Fire

Harry Potter and The Order of the Phoenix

Harry Potter and The Half Blood Prince

Harry Potter and The Deathly Hallows - Part One

Harry Potter and The Deathly Hallows - Part Two

Widows

Immortal Beloved

Basquiat 

Goya’s Ghosts

The Madness of King George

Charade

Star Wars: A New Hope

Stars Wars: The Empire Strikes Back

Star Wars: Return of the Jedi

Star Wars: The Phantom Menace

Stars Wars: Attack of the Clones

Star Wars: Revenge of the Sith

Star Wars: The Force Awakens

Star Wars: The Last Jedi

Star Wars: Rogue One

The Polar Express

The Hobbit: An Unexpected Journey

The Hobbit: The Desolation of Smaug

The Hobbit: The Battle of the Five Armies

The Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring

The Lord of the Rings: The Two Towers

The Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King

Dr. No

From Russia With Love 

Goldfinger

Thunderball

You Only Live Twice

On Her Majesty’s Secret Service

Diamonds Are Forever

Live and Let Die

The Man With the Golden Gun

The Spy Who Loved Me

Moonraker

For Your Eyes Only

Octopussy

A View to a Kill

The Living Daylights

Licence to Kill

Goldeneye

Tomorrow Never Dies

The World is Not Enough 

Die Another Day 

Casino Royale

Quantum of Solace

Skyfall

Spectre

Superbob

Greenfingers

Mowgli: Legend of the Jungle

A Christmas Prince

Aquaman

Love, Cecil

A Christmas Prince: The Royal Wedding

The Man Who Invented Christmas

Copying Beethoven

The Party’s Just Beginning 

Point Break

Alan Partridge: Alpha Papa

The Sound of Music

The Muppet Christmas Carol

The Muppets

Cars 2

The Holiday

A Bad Moms Christmas

The Holiday Calendar

The Christmas Chronicles

Nativity

Nativity 2: Danger in the Manger

Arthur Christmas

Bobby Robson: More Than a Manager

Zootropolis

Mary Poppins

The Good Dinosaur

Trolls

Rise of the Guardians

Bros: After the Screaming Stops

The Beatles: Eight Days a Week - The Touring Years

Get Carter [1971]

Bottle Rocket

Turbo

Closer

Nothing Like a Dame

Bolt

Make Us Dream

Die Hard

How to Train Your Dragon 2

Porridge

The Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society

Books.

A Book For Her - Bridget Christie

Hickory Dickory Dock - Agatha Christie

Bright Star - John Keats

The Oberon Book of Comic Monologues for Women - Katy Wix

The Oberon Book of Comic Monologues for Women: Volume 2 - Katy Wix

Slaughterhouse 5 - Kurt Vonnegut

Division Street - Helen Mort

The Victorian Guide to Sex - Fern Riddell

A Woman’s Work - Harriet Harman

Help - Simon Amstell

The Princess Diarist - Carrie Fisher

Selected Poems - Sylvia Plath

Ariel - Sylvia Plath

The ‘If You Prefer a Milder Comedian Please Ask For One’ EP - Stewart Lee

The Rachel Papers - Martin Amis

Parker Pyne Investigates - Agatha Christie

Bone - Yrsa Daley-Ward

Pages For You - Sylvia Brownrigg

The Sun and Her Flowers - Rupi Kaur

Different for Girls: A Girl’s Own True-Life Adventures in Pop - Louise Wener

A Single Man - Christopher Isherwood

A Room of One’s Own - Virginia Woolf

Repeal the 8th - Una Mullally

Why Not Socialism? - G.A. Cohen

The Chaos of Longing - K.Y. Robinson

High-Rise - J.G. Ballard

Animal Farm - George Orwell

Fully Coherent Plan - David Shrigley

The Lesser Bohemians - Eimear McBride

The Secret Diary of Adrian Mole aged 13 3/4 - Sue Townsend

Hera Lindsay Bird - Hera Lindsay Bird

Submarine - Joe Dunthorne

In the Penal Colony - Franz Kafka

Babette’s Feast - Isak Dinesen (Karen Blixen) 

The Expelled - Samuel Beckett

Youth - Joseph Conrad

The Life of Rylan - Rylan Clark-Neal

Autumn - Ali Smith

The Cornet-Player Who Betrayed Ireland - Frank O’Connor

Two Gallants - James Joyce

Teaching my Mother How to Give Birth - Warsan Shire

Selected Poems - Edgar Allan Poe

Casino Royale - Ian Fleming

Frankenstein - Mary Shelley

The Door in the Wall - H.G Wells

Terra Incognita - Vladimir Nabokov

Dirty Pretty Things - Michael Faudet

Women  & Power: A Manifesto - Mary Beard

Dear Illusion - Kingsley Amis

Bitter Sweet Love - Michael Faudet

Smoke & Mirrors - Michael Faudet

Girl Meets Boy - Ali Smith

Pre-Raphaelites - Heather Birchall

Conspiracy - Charlotte Greig

The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy - Douglas Adams

Vanity Fair - William Makepeace Thackeray

Sex and Rage - Eve Babitz

Scoop - Evelyn Waugh

The Letters of Vincent Van Gogh - edited by Mark Roskill

Role Models - John Waters

The Great Gatsby - F. Scott Fitzgerald

How Not To Be a Boy - Robert Webb

Animal - Sara Pascoe

Absolute Pandemonium - Brian Blessed

Eileen - Ottessa Moshfegh

A Discovery of Witches - Deborah Harkness

A Handful of Dust - Evelyn Waugh

Sense and Sensibility and Sea Monsters - Jane Austen and Ben H. Winters

Normal People - Sally Rooney

Feminists Don’t Wear Pink - Scarlet Curtis and Others. 

Parsnips, Buttered - Joe Lycett

The Humans - Matt Haig

The Machine Stops - E.M. Forster

Ivanhoe - Sir Walter Scott

Poems for a World Gone to Shit - Various

[thatsnotcanonpodcasts]

Indiana Jones, Youtube, C.O.D Humvee & Lizard Eggs

This week the Nerds invited Dev-i-Boy on again. He'll be joining us for the next while.

First up is a discussion about Indiana Jones 5. Can Indy swing himself back into relevance for a new generation? Not if COVID-19 has anything to say about it. Indiana Jones 5 has been pushed back again due to the pandemic. The Nerds are hoping Actual Cannibal Shia LaBeouf doesn't make another appearance as Indy's son, but we'd be ok with him appearing as a cannibal tribesman. This of course leads into a discussion on Disney's other properties, including the notorious Pirates of the Caribbean and Jungle Cruise. This looks like a rough year for Disney.

Dev-i-Boy has heard that Russians are behind everyone's favourite YouTube channel, Five Minute Crafts. In a story reminiscent of bad Cold War fiction, Russian propaganda is slipped into innocuous seeming YouTube videos. Now we just need a team of teenagers to sneak into the secret Russian video studio lab and uncover their plot.

Activision has pulled off a major win in court against the maker of the Humvee. Modern warfare needs modern weapons, and the US courts have ruled in favour of realism over licensing fees.

Finally, DJ and Dev-i-Boy can't handle the knowledge. An Australian lizard joins the tiny group of reptiles that both lay eggs and give live birth. This revelation is too much for them to handle though, so we move on to the games of the week.

Professor and DJ play Generation Zero, a game about Swedish battle mechs and robot dogs that want to kill you. It's buggy, but generally a good experience. Dev-i played LoZ: Wind Waker again but breaks into a new dimension in VR Chat. Of course, he picked an anime girl avatar. Of course.

On to the usual shoutouts and remembrances, and DJ refuses to wrap up the show by performing Waterloo. Maybe next week.

Stay safe, and we'll see you all next week.

Indiana Jones 5

            -https://www.empireonline.com/movies/news/indiana-jones-2022/

YouTube viral video debunked  

                - https://www.cheatsheet.com/entertainment/how-to-cook-that-creator-ann-reardon-is-debunking-viral-youtube-videos.html/

Call of Duty lawsuit win

            -https://www.hollywoodreporter.com/thr-esq/call-duty-wins-first-amendment-victory-use-humvees-1287882

A lizard can now lay eggs and give live birth

            -https://theconversation.com/this-lizard-lays-eggs-and-gives-live-birth-we-think-its-undergoing-a-major-evolutionary-transition-133630

- https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/mec.15409

Games Played

Professor

– Generation Zero - https://store.steampowered.com/app/704270/Generation_Zero/

Rating : 5/5

DJ

– Generation Zero - https://store.steampowered.com/app/704270/Generation_Zero/

Rating : 4.5/5

Dev-i-Boy

- The Legend of Zelda: The Wind Waker - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Legend_of_Zelda:_The_Wind_Waker

Rating – 5/5

- VR Chat - https://store.steampowered.com/app/438100/VRChat/

Rating – 3/5

Other topics discussed

Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull (2008 American action-adventure film directed by Steven Spielberg and the fourth installment in the Indiana Jones series.)

- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Indiana_Jones_and_the_Kingdom_of_the_Crystal_Skull

The timeline of the Indiana Jones films is the chronological order of The Adventures of Young Indiana Jones and the film series.

- https://indianajones.fandom.com/wiki/Timeline_of_films

Transformers film series (Transformers is a series of American science fiction action films based on the Transformers franchise which began in the 1980s. Michael Bay has directed the first five films.)

- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transformers_(film_series)

Harrison Ford survives plane crash

- https://money.cnn.com/2017/02/14/news/harrison-ford-plane-mishap/index.html

Disney’s Artemis Fowl Official Trailer

- https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fl2r3Fwxz_o

Jungle Cruise (The Jungle Cruise is a river boat attraction located in Adventureland at many Disney Parks worldwide, namely Disneyland, Magic Kingdom,Tokyo Disneyland and Hong Kong Disneyland. For years, Walt Disney Pictures had been toying with the idea of turning the Jungle Cruise into a full-length action adventure motion picture, which it would be loosely inspired by the theme park attraction of the same name.)

- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jungle_Cruise

Bruckheimer is very frank about how he almost passed on the project, which is based on the famous Disney theme park ride.

- https://web.archive.org/web/20080102184110/http://uk.movies.ign.com/articles/425/425848p1.html

Pirates of the Caribbean 6th movie

- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pirates_of_the_Caribbean_(film_series)#Sixth_film

 How to Cook That (Youtube channel by Ann Reardon)

- https://www.youtube.com/user/howtocookthat/videos

Debunking Fake Videos & WHO'S behind 5-min crafts? | How To Cook That Ann Reardon

- https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pvqa8dsBtno

Lonelygirl15 (lonelygirl15, the first of many shows within the fictional LG15 Universe, tells the ongoing story of a group of young adults fighting against a mysterious secret society called, The Order.)

- https://www.youtube.com/user/lonelygirl15

Sex-workers - idubbbz complains by iDubbbzTV

- https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mQLzOuwDu_8

Elsagate (neologism referring to the controversy surrounding videos on YouTube and YouTube Kids that are categorized as "child-friendly", but which contain themes that are inappropriate for children.)

- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elsagate

The FTC action against YouTube and Google

- https://www.ftc.gov/news-events/blogs/business-blog/2019/11/youtube-channel-owners-your-content-directed-children

Why Youtube doesn’t make any profit

- https://www.cbsnews.com/news/4-reasons-youtube-still-doesnt-make-a-profit/

The Simpson – Lionel Hutz vs 10 high priced lawyers

- https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o3hhAH4mlQk

Donald Trump Violated First Amendment by Blocking Critics on Twitter

- https://variety.com/2020/digital/news/donald-trump-violated-first-amendment-twitter-blocking-1203542245/

Temperature-dependent sex determination (a type of environmental sex determination in which the temperatures experienced during embryonic/larval development determine the sex of the offspring.)

- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Temperature-dependent_sex_determination

Dogs (Dogs are autonomous robotic quadrupeds, equipped with a series of lethal weapons.)

- https://black-mirror.fandom.com/wiki/Dogs

Boston Dynamics : Spot

- https://robots.ieee.org/robots/spotmini/

Japanese students hold graduation ceremony in Minecraft amid school cancellation

- https://soranews24.com/2020/03/15/japanese-students-hold-graduation-ceremony-in-minecraft-amid-school-cancellation/

Katie Bouman: The woman behind the first black hole image

- https://www.bbc.com/news/science-environment-47891902

Systers (founded by Anita Borg, is an international electronic mailing list for technical women in computing.)

- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Systers

The Eleventh Hour (The Eleventh Hour: A Curious Mystery is an illustrated children's book by Graeme Base.)

- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Eleventh_Hour_(children%27s_book)

Hareraiser (video game released in 1984 in the UK in two parts: Prelude and Finale, comedian and computer game historian Stuart Ashen described and showed the game play, and called it "quite possibly the worst video game ever.)

- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hareraiser

Animalia (an animated children's television series based on the 1986 picture book of the same name by illustrator Graeme Base.)

- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Animalia_(TV_series)

The story behind Jackie Chan’s stunt in Police Story which involved slides several stories down a pole strung with lights, electricity arcing around him as he crashes through multiple panes of glass into a shop stall.

- https://observer.com/2019/01/how-jackie-chan-police-story-stunts-changed-movies/

Jackie Chan further explains the stunt in Police Story

- https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2ZEVz1V-X4w

Waterloo ("Waterloo" is the first single from the Swedish pop group ABBA's second album, Waterloo and their first under the Epic and Atlantic labels.

- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Waterloo_(ABBA_song)

That’s Not COVID (TNC Podcast)

- https://thatsnotcanon.com/thatsnotcovidpodcast 

Shout Outs

5 April 2020 - Shirley Douglas, actress and mother of Kiefer Sutherland dies at 86 - https://www.hollywoodreporter.com/news/shirley-douglas-dead-actress-mother-kiefer-sutherland-was-86-1288624

Shirley Douglas, an actress in films directed by Stanley Kubrick and David Cronenberg and the mother of actor Kiefer Sutherland. Douglas appeared in Kubrick's Lolita (1962) and Cronenberg's Dead Ringers (1988) and in other movies including Shadow Dancing (1988) and Wind at My Back (1996). In 2003, for her contributions to the performing arts, she was named an Officer of the Order of Canada. Sutherland announced his mother's death on Twitter, saying "My mother was an extraordinary woman who led an extraordinary life," Sutherland wrote. "Sadly she had been battling for her health for quite some time and we, as a family, knew this day was coming. To any families who have lost loved ones unexpectedly to the coronavirus, my heart breaks for you. Please stay safe." She died of complications surrounding pneumonia at the age of 86 in Toronto,Ontario. His son noted her passing was not related to COVID-19. 

5 April 2020 – Anime ending this week 10 years ago according to Japanese netizens - https://soranews24.com/2020/04/05/whered-the-time-go-top-anime-series-that-finished-ten-years-ago-ranked-by-japanese-netizens/

Here’s the top ten of this decade-old anime! Which ones have you watched recently?

10. Kuroshitsuji II

9. Durarara!!

8. A Certain Scientific Railgun

7. Nodame Cantabile Finale

6. HeartCatch PreCure!

5. Fullmetal Alchemist

4. K-On!!

3. Inuyasha: The Final Act

2. Animal Detective Kiruminzoo

1. Hidamari Sketch×☆☆☆

6 April 2020 - ‘Jaws’ actress Lee Fierro dead at 91 from coronavirus complications - https://nypost.com/2020/04/06/jaws-actress-lee-fierro-dead-at-91-with-coronavirus-complications/

Lee Fierro, best known as Alex Kintner’s mom in Steven Spielberg’s 1975 shark attack classic “Jaws,” In her iconic scene from “Jaws,” an enraged Fierro confronts Chief Martin Brody (Roy Scheider) and slaps him in the face. “I just found out that a girl got killed here last week and you knew, you knew there was a shark out there. You knew it was dangerous, but you let people go swimming anyway,” her character says, sobbing. “You knew all those things and still my boy is dead now, and there’s nothing you can do about it. My boy is dead.” Fierro reportedly had "objected to the profanity" of the scene's dialogue as originally drafted, and the director, Steven Spielberg, wanted dialogue that accorded with Fierro's "everywoman looks," so the scene's dialogue was rewritten the day before it was filmed. Fierro went on to reprise her role in 1987’s subpar “Jaws: The Revenge” opposite Michael Caine. She died from COVID-19 at the age of 91.

Remembrances

6 April 1520 – Raphael - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Raphael

Raffaello Sanzio da Urbino, Italian painter and architect of the High Renaissance. His work is admired for its clarity of form, ease of composition, and visual achievement of the Neoplatonic ideal of human grandeur. Together with Michelangelo and Leonardo da Vinci, he forms the traditional trinity of great masters of that period. Many of his works are found in the Vatican Palace, where the frescoed Raphael Rooms were the central, and the largest, work of his career. The best known work is The School of Athens in the Vatican Stanza della Segnatura. After his early years in Rome, much of his work was executed by his workshop from his drawings, with considerable loss of quality. He was extremely influential in his lifetime, though outside Rome his work was mostly known from his collaborative printmaking. His career falls naturally into three phases and three styles, first described by Giorgio Vasari: his early years in Umbria, then a period of about four years (1504–1508) absorbing the artistic traditions of Florence, followed by his last hectic and triumphant twelve years in Rome, working for two Popes and their close associates. He died from fever at the age of 37 in Rome, Papal States.

6 April 1944 - Rose O'Neill - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rose_O%27Neill

Rose Cecil O'Neill, American cartoonist, illustrator, artist, and writer. She built a successful career as a magazine and book illustrator and, at a young age, became the best-known and highest- paid female commercial illustrator in the United States. O' Neill earned a fortune and international fame by creating the Kewpie, the most widely known cartoon character until Mickey Mouse. Her Kewpie cartoons, which made their debut in a 1909 issue of Ladies' Home Journal, were later manufactured as bisque dolls in 1912 by J. D. Kestner, a German toy company, followed by composition material and celluloid versions. The dolls were wildly popular in the early twentieth century and are considered to be one of the first mass-marketed toys in the United States. Their name, "Kewpie", derives from Cupid, the Roman god of love. According to O'Neill, she became obsessed with the idea of the cherubic characters, to the point that she had dreams about them: "I thought about the Kewpies so much that I had a dream about them where they were all doing acrobatic pranks on the coverlet of my bed. One sat in my hand." She described them as "a sort of little round fairy whose one idea is to teach people to be merry and kind at the same time". O'Neill also wrote several novels and books of poetry, and was active in the women's suffrage movement. She was for a time the highest-paid female illustrator in the world upon the success of the Kewpie dolls. She died from heart failure at the age of 69 in Springfield, Missouri.

6 April 2003 - Anita Borg - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anita_Borg

American computer scientist. She founded the Institute for Women and Technology and the Grace Hopper Celebration of Women in Computing. In 1997, Borg founded the Institute for Women and Technology (now the Anita Borg Institute for Women and Technology). Two important goals behind the founding of the organization were to increase the representation of women in technical fields and to enable the creation of more technology by women. The Institute was created to be an experimental R&D organization focusing on increasing the impact of women on technology and increasing the impact of technology on the world's women. It ran a variety of programs to increase the role of technology, build the pipeline of technical women, and ensure that women's voices affected technological developments. Borg passionately believed in working for greater representation of technical women. Her goal was to have 50% representation for women in computing by 2020. She strove for technical fields to be places where women would be equally represented at all levels of the pipeline, and where women could impact, and benefit from, technology. She died from a brain tumour at the age of 54 in Sonoma, California.

Famous Birthdays

6 April 1958 - Graeme Base - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Graeme_Base

Author and artist of picture books. He is perhaps best known for his second book, Animalia published in 1986, and third book The Eleventh Hour which was released in 1989. He worked in advertising for two years and then began illustrating children's books, gradually moving to authoring them as well. His first book, My Grandma lived in Gooligulch, was accepted by the first publisher he sent it to. He was born in Amersham, Buckinghamshire.

6 April 1975 - Zach Braff - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zach_Braff

American actor, director, screenwriter and producer. He is best known for his role as J. D. on the television series Scrubs, for which he was nominated for the Primetime Emmy Award for Outstanding Lead Actor in a Comedy Series in 2005 and for three Golden Globe Awards from 2005 to 2007. He starred in The Broken Hearts Club: A Romantic Comedy, In Dubious Battle, and has done voice-work for Chicken Little, Oz the Great and Powerful, and the Netflix series Bojack Horseman. In 2004, Braff made his directorial debut with Garden State, which he also wrote, starred in, and compiled the soundtrack album for. He shot the film in his home state of New Jersey for a budget of $2.5 million. The film made over $35 million at the box office and was praised by critics, leading it to gain a cult following. He won numerous awards for his directing work and also won the Grammy Award for Best Soundtrack Album in 2005. Braff directed his second film, Wish I Was Here, which he partially funded with a Kickstarter campaign. He was born in South Orange, New Jersey.

7 April 1954 - Jackie Chan - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jackie_Chan

Chan Kong-sang, known professionally as Jackie Chan, is a Hong Kongese martial artist, actor, film director, producer, stuntman, and singer. He is known in the cinematic world for his acrobatic fighting style, comic timing, use of improvised weapons, and innovative stunts, which he typically performs himself. He has trained in Wushu or Kung Fu and Hapkido, and has been acting since the 1960s, appearing in over 150 films. Chan is one of the most recognisable and influential cinematic personalities in the world, gaining a widespread following in both the Eastern and Western hemispheres, and has received stars on the Hong Kong Avenue of Stars and the Hollywood Walk of Fame. He has been referenced in various pop songs, cartoons, and video games. He is an operatically trained vocalist and is also a Cantopop and Mandopop star, having released a number of albums and sung many of the theme songs for the films in which he has starred. He is also a globally known philanthropist and has been named as one of the top 10 most charitable celebrities by Forbes magazine. In 2004, film scholar Andrew Willis stated that Chan was "perhaps" the "most recognised star in the world". In 2015, Forbes estimated his net worth to be $350 million, and as of 2016, he was the second-highest paid actor in the world. He was born in Victoria Peak.

7 April 1964 - Russell Crowe - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Russell_Crowe

Russell Ira Crowe actor, film producer and musician. Although a New Zealand citizen, he has lived most of his life in Australia. He came to international attention for his role as the Roman General Maximus Decimus Meridius in the historical film Gladiator, directed by Ridley Scott, for which Crowe won an Academy Award, a Broadcast Film Critics Association Award, an Empire Award, and a London Film Critics Circle Award for best actor, along with ten other nominations in the same category. Crowe's other award-winning performances include portrayals of tobacco firm whistle-blower Jeffrey Wigand in the drama film The Insider, and John F. Nash in the biopic A Beautiful Mind. Crowe's other films include, L.A. Confidential, Master and Commander: The Far Side of the World, Cinderella Man, 3:10 to Yuma, American Gangster, State of Play, Robin Hood, Les Misérables, Man of Steel, Noah, and The Nice Guys. In 2015, Crowe made his directorial debut with The Water Diviner, in which he also starred. Crowe's work has earned him several accolades during his career, including a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame, one Golden Globe Award for Best Actor, one BAFTA and one Academy Award out of three consecutive nominations (1999, 2000, and 2001). Crowe has also been the co-owner of the National Rugby League (NRL) team South Sydney Rabbitohs since 2006. He was born in Wellington.

Events of Interest

6 April 1896 – In Athens, the opening of the first modern Olympic Games is celebrated, 1,500 years after the original games are banned by Roman emperor Theodosius I. - https://www.history.com/this-day-in-history/first-modern-olympic-games

On April 6, 1896, the Olympic Games, a long-lost tradition of ancient Greece, are reborn in Athens 1,500 years after being banned by Roman Emperor Theodosius I. At the opening of the Athens Games, King Georgios I of Greece and a crowd of 60,000 spectators welcomed athletes from 13 nations to the international competition. In Athens, 280 participants from 13 nations competed in 43 events, covering track-and-field, swimming, gymnastics, cycling, wrestling, weightlifting, fencing, shooting, and tennis. All the competitors were men, and a few of the entrants were tourists who stumbled upon the Games and could sign up. The track-and-field events were held at the Panathenaic Stadium, which was originally built in 330 B.C. and restored for the 1896 Games. Americans won nine out of 12 of these events. The 1896 Olympics also featured the first marathon competition, which followed the 25-mile route run by a Greek soldier who brought news of a victory over the Persians from Marathon to Athens in 490 B.C. In 1924, the marathon was standardized at 26 miles and 385 yards. Appropriately, a Greek, Spyridon Louis, won the first marathon at the 1896 Athens Games.

6 April 1909 - Robert Peary and Matthew Henson become the first people to reach the North Pole; Peary's claim has been disputed because of failings in his navigational ability. - https://www.history.com/this-day-in-history/pearys-expedition-reaches-north-pole

On April 6, 1909, American explorer Robert Peary accomplishes a long elusive dream, when he, assistant Matthew Henson and four Eskimos reach what they determine to be the North Pole. Decades after Peary’s death, however, navigational errors in his travel log surfaced, placing the expedition in all probability a few miles short of its goal. In 1908, the pair travelled to Ellesmere Island by ship and in 1909 raced across hundreds of miles of ice to reach what they calculated as latitude 90 degrees north on April 6, 1909. Although their achievement was widely acclaimed, Dr. Frederick A. Cook challenged their distinction of being the first to reach the North Pole. A former associate of Peary, Cook claimed he had already reached the pole by dogsled the previous year. A major controversy followed, and in 1911 the U.S. Congress formally recognized Peary’s claim. In recent years, further studies of the conflicting claims suggest that neither expedition reached the exact North Pole, but that Peary and Henson came far closer, falling perhaps 30 miles short. On May 3, 1952, U.S. Lieutenant Colonel Joseph O. Fletcher of Oklahoma stepped out of a plane and walked to the precise location of the North Pole, the first person to undisputedly do so.

6 April 1917 - Americans declares war on Germany - https://www.history.com/this-day-in-history/america-enters-world-war-i

Two days after the U.S. Senate voted 82 to 6 to declare war against Germany, the U.S. House of Representatives endorses the declaration by a vote of 373 to 50, and America formally enters World War I. Apart from an Anglophile element urging early support for the British and an anti-Tsarist element sympathising with Germany's war against Russia, US public opinion reflected that of the president: the sentiment for neutrality was particularly strong among Irish Americans, German Americans, and Scandinavian Americans, as well as among church leaders and among women in general. On the other hand, even before World War I had broken out, American opinion had been overall more negative toward Germany than toward any other country in Europe. Over time, especially after reports of atrocities in Belgium in 1914 and following the sinking of the passenger liner RMS Lusitania in 1915, American citizens increasingly came to see Germany as the aggressor in Europe. While the country was at peace, American banks made huge loans to Britain and France, which were used mainly to buy munitions, raw materials, and food from across the Atlantic. Wilson made minimal preparations for a land war but he did authorise a major ship-building program for the United States Navy. The president was narrowly re-elected in 1916 on an anti-war ticket.

6 April 1974 - The Swedish pop band ABBA wins the Eurovision Song Contest with the song "Waterloo", launching their international career. - https://www.mylifetime.com/she-did-that/april-6-1974-abba-won-the-eurovision-song-contest-for-waterloo-launching-their-international-career

Songwriters and musicians Ulvaeus and Andersson first met in 1966. However, it was in 1969 when the seeds of the soon-to-be Swedish supergroup were planted when Björn met his fiancée, Fältskog, and Benny met his fiancée, Lyngstad. Ulvaeus and Andersson knew how to write contagious pop hits. However, Fältskog and Lyngstad’s beautiful harmonies were integral to the global chart-topping ABBA sound. After “Waterloo” won the 19th edition of the Eurovision song competition, the winning tune reached the No. 1 spot on the UK chart and became a top ten hit in the US on the Billboard Hot 100. “Waterloo” sold six million copies worldwide, making it one of the best-selling singles of all time.

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