A Distorted Reality.

Unfathomable clarity: such that diamonds could not even compete; a purity unbounded: the whitest of white light.

The night sky shone as only it could: ostentatiously and without inhibition. Arrogantly. Despite the astronomical distance between the stars and ourselves, their nightly communiqués were all that kept me sane. In spite of all that stood between us: from ozone to the infinite vacuum of space, we talked. I talked, they listened; they replied, I heard. Our relationship was ethereal, but more real than any other I had had: this was a true unconditional. Every night, without any possibility of failure, I would have my time with my celestial lovers: and each time it would be the same magic of their light being poured upon me with no judgement of my past. No pretence whatsoever. This action was universal, but it was also mine and mine alone. I felt… I felt cleansed. I felt like my emptiness was being reversed by the filling of heavenly light into every pore and every orifice of my body. I was pure. I was connected with the world. I was everything.

Why can’t people care about things that matter, or even take a direct action for those causes that they supposedly stand for? We have Facebook petitions and groups as a main line in political activities, and it really is tragic. Yes, collecting 1 MILLION PEOPLE AGAINST ROBERT MUGABE (case left as its group’s owners intended it to be) will really pressure a tyrant into submission. He loves the insignificant ‘voice’ of the digital generation’s pleas so much.

Stop Hillary Clinton: (One Million Strong AGAINST Hillary), 2 Million people against Female Circumcision and One Million Faces Against Malaria are just as redundant: the collections of lists of names is not going to change any one of these things. Voting, not having your female children mutilated and vaccination are the respective answers to these huge dilemmas. Doing something oneself would actually serve to combat these issues, rather than just acknowledge them in passing with your name on a fictional dotted line. If you’re going to campaign about something, get the fuck up and actively do something. Peaceful protests, polite letters to government officials, civil disobedience, violence: I do not care; just make your support for a cause count, no matter how trivial this cause is.

Then we have the practically omnipresent ‘ohmygod I lost my phone and need to tell everyone my new number’ groups: what is the point in this? As you obviously have the people to be invited to the group on your Friends list, you may as well just contact them individually. Expediency is not even a valid excuse: you can send messages to multiple recipients these days. It’s like people don’t care for their privacy: yes, just put your number in the name of the group so that friends of friends can easily obtain your contact details, should you wish them to or not.

The abundance of almost meta Facebook-groups-about-Facebook also irks me somewhat: nobody is ever going to shut down Facebook, so stop trying to get people to join your little group in your vain effort to gather a large group in your name, Anonymous God Complex Sufferer. Then there’s ‘I’m a Facebook Addict’ groups – a sad indictment of the weak will of the common man. Of late, we’re seeing ‘boo-hoo, I want the old layout back groups’, much as happened with Last.fm: it truly is a shame that people do not realise that websites (espeically websites owned by media conglomerates like CBS, in the case of Last.fm) are not democracies. And as a true exercise in redundancy, there are also several thousand (perhaps exaggerated, but a large number nonetheless) ‘Get x on Facebook!’ groups: as x is not currently on Facebook, it is unlikely that they’re going to see the group to respond to the pleas of others.

‘Well, nothing lasts forever. The permanence of nothing is guaranteed: we are born, we consume, we die – the only universal truth; the only infallible transience. Sure there are the perks inbetween the three, of course: we’d all just end life prematurely if we know the true sumtotal of our existence. We’d have nothing to aim for, would we? Luckily, we have the immeasurable distractions of sex; of violence; of bad will towards others. The beauty of biologically pre-programmed evils. We have love, my dear friend, and love conquers all. For a few minutes, at least. Goodbye, old friend: you have exuded your usefulness to me.’

The unnecessary verbosity; the pseudo-political, pseudo-philosophical, half-thought out stream of nothingness: it was comforting somehow – there was some truth in the past. The message was more unsettling by a wide margin: he had been used. He had become a pawn, a tool, whichever other DIY/board game allusions can be made to the state of becoming a facilitator of goals above all else.

Flash: the first meeting. Flash: the continued interest. Flash: the illusory ‘closeness’. Flash: the dissolution of his permanent scepticism. Flash: his trust. Flash: cynicism abated. Flash: this end. Years in months, months in weeks, weeks in days, days in hours, hours in minutes, minutes in seconds: time, in all of its transitory glory, dissolved. The larger picture broken down into smaller, more significant wallet-sized memento photographs. There was no construable sequence of a past: just a series of events which formed the ever fading present – a four-year old’s flipbook.

Shoulders sagged in a plainly observable manner, perfectly in line with the increasing distance between the two. Diaphragm relaxed; ribcage lowered: musculature just giving way, as if itself disappointed – an inch for each inch that grew between them. Lacrimal ducts opened, willing for gushes of unnecessary basal tears to satiate their lust – gushes that would not come. Anything for leucine enkephalin; just something to take the edge off of this revelation. His eyes would not yield to this desire.

Then rage. Uncontrollable, inexpressible rage: the rage of a bull. Muscle tensed as the creeping paralysis of ascending anger contracted every muscle in his body. Adrenaline became the main component of his blood: flight or fight his mental prerogative; and a fight was his brain’s preference. Fists clenched, nails bored into his palms: the sticky, sweet crimson’s exit eased by his hot rage. This was symbolic: a reminder for things to come.

‘Oculus pro oculus‘ was muttered through clenched teeth.

So yes: my iPod arrived; and no: I’m not disappointed with it. I love it, I really do: it allows me to listen to all of my music one one device, something that the other two never could. Being honest, that was the only reason for the change. In the past, I had always spouted my ‘Apple is the devil’ rhetoric: partly out of jealousy for my lack of an ability to afford their goods, but also partly out of a genuine feeling against the company; batteries and hard drives that only last a year, tops? Not cool. Super-fragile screens on £100+ consumer goods? Fucking ridiculous. Of course, my possession of two Creative players made me completely overlook the headphone jack issue that still isn’t fixed in even the newest of players. Thinking back, I sent the Micro back four times and still bought the Touch, which now suffers from the same fault – curse my youthful brand loyalty!

Price

Hah, I always start reviews with price: it’s important, I maintain. I paid £120 for the Zen Micro in 2003, I think; £40 for the Zen Touch in 2007 and £60 for the iPod, last week. Granted, I can’t objectively compare prices when one was bought new and the other two used, but it is relevant somewhat, I suppose: it shows the transience of value for such goods, and what a shame that that is. Clearly, the winner here is the iPod, the features:price ratio is much higher than the other two.

Player Firmware and Controls

I’ll treat the Micro and Touch as one entity for much of this: they pretty much have the same firmware and most functions are carried out in the same way; with the only exception of the dedicated volume control on the Touch increasing its usability above the other two greatly. It really is a tragedy that I have to somehow get to the Now Playing screen on the iPod or open a context menu on the Micro to be able to change a volume which I want to change immediately, not after a few seconds’ fiddling.

The Creative and Apple firmwares are much the same (with Apple leasing Creative’s menu style for their players) in operation and in features: with only the colour screen of the iPod allowing for cover art, photos, video etc.

One (unintended) advantage of the iPod (of this generation) is that alternative, non-stock firmwares can be used, such as Rockbox and iPod Linux (the site of which may be down), allowing for a more diverse range of features. As is oft the tragedy of open-source efforts, neither offering is completely feature-complete, with Rockbox in particular suffering from a terrible battery issue. The stock iPod firmware suffers from a little bit of slowdown, but nothing as bad as the Creative players’ 15-30 second large playlist loading time: plus, it has games, and a calendar!

The issue of firmware is another win for the iPod: the execution is a little smoother, a little slicker, and a little prettier. Again: the games help.

Looks

This is not fair. At all. iPod win again: another 3 years of design-schooling for Californians means that Creative’s offerings just look heinously ugly. The Micro is elegant, but the Touch is just blocky. And fat. Below, we have the players in order of sheer sexiness.

Software

I hate iTunes.

There, it has been said: I hate the single most popular computer media player. Why, you ask? It’s fat, it’s slow, it’s not pretty. Again, yes; I said something which could be considered a cardinal sin. Isn’t everything Apple beautiful?, I hear you scream, and the answer is no: it is not. On Windows, at least, it looks so out of place: the screen elements suit OSX just fine, but look so dreadfully out of place on Windows, and indeed in Linux (through Wine). I can’t see the hubbub about not-even-subtle supposedly-metallic gradients which are not at all pleasing to the eyes. I’m starting to think that Apple are putting something perception altering in the Kool-Aid.

Enough about aesthetics: I also hate the functionality. We have a choice between syncing all files with one computer, or managing everything manually: why can we just not sync with a sole computer and add elsewhere? Oh yes, I forgot: Apple’s yielding to the RIAA and MPAA over the ability to copy music/movies back from the player through an Apple-endorsed method (of course, this can be done through other means). It’s really a chore to add new music from a computer that isn’t at home, not to mention backing up music. I know that I could use something such as vPod, but I don’t feel that I should have to turn to 3rd parties for something that the manufacturer should provide as a courtesy for such a fucking expensive purchase – and such products don’t synchronise album art in such an elegant manner as iTunes. All this said, I love the automatic album art downloader, event though it couldn’t find any for half of my music.

Creative, on the other hand, turned to using MTP for both of my players: a universal transfer protocol engineered by Microsoft and reverse-engineered to support Windows pre-XP, Linux, Mac OSX and BSDs. This was wonderful to use: you could copy and back and forth, without the threat of being labelled a pirate. These were the good old days: these were days of trust. Drag and drop anywhere, without the computer moaning about syncing and possibly destroying everything that you have on your player: they way things should be. The Creative players win here, undoubtedly.

Durability

They are all awful in this regard.

The Verdict?

I like my not-so-new toy: I really do. If I didn’t have to use iTunes, I would like it more, but I will cope with my lack of coding prowess and not expect someone else to fix it for me.

I am always looking for a better deal, more features, whatever: my most succinct abbreviation would probably be the age-old statement of a desire of ‘more-for-less’. Free-market competition does have it perks, it would seem: I have changed hosts often just for the thought of a more beneficial business arrangement. I’ve been with (for A Distorted Reality) Dream-Hosting.co.uk (who currently still host starveinheaven.com), HostGator.com (with whom ADR is current hosted) and CheapVPS.co.uk (with whom we were hosted for the last 20 days or so, and a couple of times before). CheapVPS is my most recent complete experience, so I’ve decided to review my time with them for the benefit of others out there.

Price

Let’s face it: price is very important. It always will be: this is an investment of a medium-term, so it has to be tenable. Here, CheapVPS live up to their name most aggressively: 128MB RAM, 10GB of space and 150GB of bandwidth per month for a mere £4.75 per month, with discounts at 3-month, 6-month and 12-month renewal intervals of 5%, 10% and 15%. Elsewhere, it’s practically impossible to find these prices. DirectAdmin can be added at £5 per month and cPanel at £10 per month.

5/5

Range of Features Available

For the price, you get everything that you could ever need. There are OS installation templates for several flavours of Linux; namely CentOS, Ubuntu, Debian, Slackware, Fedora Core, Gentoo and OpenSuse. There is also an option of a pre-installed control panel with the CentOS template in the form of LXAdmin, which really seemed more than adequate from my dabblings with it. As is expected from an unmanaged VPS, everything was configure-it-yourself; which suited me fine.

The VPS itself is managed through HyperVM: a rather feature-complete control panel. The option to non-destructively re-install the OS-templates is also useful for those moments where you touch something that you shouldn’t have. It did, however, seem a little bloated and slow.

4/5

Uptime and Reliability

The only real let-down from each of my 3 experiences with CheapVPS is the reliability of their service. I got emails stating that Apache had been restarted far too often for my liking: on my own servers, I had never had Apache go down at all. Ever. Each time, I always ended up with some awful connection problems with one service or another, usually SSH and FTP. As much as support would tell me otherwise, I would swear that the problem was node-side, not a problem with my VPS’ configuration: reinstallation of all software and disabling of the firewall would not help me in any way, shape or form. To the credit of CheapVPS, I never had the VPS go completely down: I could always ping it.

2/5

Support

The support team was wonderful: every question that I asked would be answered within minutes, and they seemed to have no issue with me running a Tor node from a ToS or technical point of view. Each time that I had difficulty, action would be taken swiftly, as soon as they had all information that they needed to know that any fault was not due to my wrongdoing. Support claims are even often answered by one of the company’s bigger cheeses, in the form of Rus Foster.

4/5

Overall: 15/20

Aside from the technical flaws with plagued me, my times at CheapVPS were affordable and well-supported. If their reliability could be worked on, it’d definitely be a complete, permanent winner.

Though, I suppose that prices would rise if that did happen.

It seems that, on the whole, the userbase of Last.fm has taken a strong distaste to the redesign of the Web 2.0 music giant’s redesign of the site. Based on past records of website redesigns (see: MySpace, Facebook etc) this shouldn’t really come as a surprise, but this noise usually dies down after a few days. With Last.fm, it doesn’t appear to have done. Personally, I love what they’ve done: this redesign has allowed for the integration of new features and the better organisation of old ones. Here, I aim to examine the changes and prove to any dissonants that the changes are most definitely for the better.

The last.fm library view. (click for full view)

First of all, we’ll look at the new library view, which provides an at-a-glance view of all of the artists which you have ’scrobbled’ to be ordered by plays, A-Z or those artists recently added. This could turn out to be ridiculously useful in analysing the musical tastes of others (or indeed your own) and looking for new artists to listen to based upon recommendations, or in showing trends in your own listening habits in a more descriptive way than the old charts ever could. Another feature of the library is the ability to view, from the artist blurb on the library page, the list of tracks that you have listened to by that artist in order of their play count: potentially useful for identifying your underappreciated albums of any given artist.

Secondly, the charts have been overhauled to be more relevant: instead of the old weekly ‘we only update on Sunday’ charts, we now have 7 day rolling charts for both artists and most listened to tracks. As an example, Explosions in the Sky have entered my top artists for the last seven days in the time taken to write this, even though iTunes says that the last time that I had listened to them was 3 months ago: this immediacy can only lead to a better experience of last.fm.

Recent activity widget (click for full view)

The new ‘recent activity’ feature is also an interesting one: it takes last.fm beyond its previous bounds of music played logger and turns it into a more fully-featured social network-esque service. Of course, some people may worry about the privacy concerns raised by this, but the logger can always be turned off for display on the user’s profile. The ‘events’ feature now even has iCal integration for those using Mac OSX, and RSS for those not.

Last.fm’s user dashboard has also seen modifications in line with the introduction of the library: the first thing that the user is greeted with is now a list of tracks recently added to their own individual library: a nice touch so far a feel of full integration of all elements of the site goes. It’s also a nice indication of where your music tastes have changed of late and what new spice you have added to your musical life.

The music recommendation element of the site has had somewhat of a reinvention, which is something I am really glad of: compared to the old model of a list of artists with their counterparts which you listen to and an ‘obscurity’ slider (which, no doubt, pleased snobs everywhere) and a maximum of about 20 (I think) suggestions, we now have a list of around 40 bands, ordered based upon their suitability for the listener, judged by the number of plays of similar artists – it’s a much better system, and it’s free of any genre ‘class’-bias. It’s a more socialist form of music recommendation, I suppose.

However, in spite of my intentions to only expose the good, I must say that the new site is altogether less aesthetically pleasing, if only for the horrid ’scruffy-edged’ top bar: it seems a lot less sleek than the old model, and it is unfortunately quite a big detriment (to me) to the site’s ease of use. You are constantly reminded that this pseudo-grunge look is so 1990’s, and it really isn’t befitting of one of the 2000’s greatest Web 2.0, gloss-and-reflections success stories.

My conclusion is that the redesign is indeed a success for the experiences of any users using Last.fm frequently, but it is only really let down by its newfound lack of prior sexiness: the internet buzzings of the dissatisfied are merely those of changephobics and inadequates. This redesign should be judged by the new features that it allows people, not by a change from what said people are used to. This is evolution.

Viva la last.fm Revolución!

I found this on my travels across my favourite centre-biased, mixed economy-whoring political blog (pushing their adherence to the status quo, as always), and, after getting over my inherent bias towards thinking that the depiction of socialism as a gun-toting governmental entity stealing from the populace was just oh so wrong, came to the reasoned conclusion that the image is actually a completely reasonable, completely fair representation of the two systems. Now, coming from someone who bills himself as a libertarian socialist, this may seem like an odd statement; but it can be justified in favour of my beliefs.

First of all, the utility that comes of each of the ‘thefts’ must be evaluated: it is practically undeniable that, in spite of the opportunity for the creation of jobs etc, the capitalist repossession of assets or merely using his assets to keep the worker (God, this is going to sound awfully archaic and a throwback to Marx’s bourgeois vs. proletarian class struggle rhetoric) in his defined place only, in all eventuality, benefits the capitalist as an individual. The taking of money from the worker by the state/administrative bodies, on the other hand, serves to, theoretically, benefit the collective as a whole: a far more attractive proposition to the non-egocentric.

The concept of individual property can also be attacked here: the socialist system can be justified and the capitalist vilified (or at least shown to be contradictory). If the state, as it does in capitalist systems, has the right to tax income and purchases, why should it not have the right to take possession of any assets it pleases? Taxation is just as much a theft as the supposed immorality of the reappropriation of resources as seen in socialism. Any arguments of the rights to the whole sanctity of private property rights being necessary in a free-market, capitalist state are clearly negated wholly by the endemic taxation such a system requires – no property can the owned if the state can take part of anything as its own, for its own purpose. Socialism is clearly more moral in being more direct about it; not hiding behind some fallacious doctrine of ‘individual freedoms’, which not to say that people in a socialist state could not be free: it’s just that that seems to be the consensus around those who can only see socialism as what we were fighting against 1945-1990.

Other freedoms are also supposedly ‘infringed upon’ in socialist societies: the most commonly mentioned one being the freedom of action. A capitalist may claim that welfare, business regulations, tariffs and minimum wage laws are immoral as they prevent lives from being lived as some may desire in a vain attempt to discredit a collectivism-based government. A logical mind would see that welfare, business regulations and minimum wage laws are inherently moral through their protection of the unemployed and the unskilled and skilled workers alike; and tariffs moral through the protection of home-based industry and thus the ensuring of jobs for the workers of the nation – negating, in fortunate circumstances, the need for the distribution of welfare: the imposition of tariffs in a supposedly purist capitalist society may even serve to benefit them, as well as proving the lack of a need for an all-inclusive welfare system.

In conclusion, socialism’s alleged oppression is more morally justified than any allegations of oppression on the side of capitalism for the core reasons that:

1. The utility of the masses is ensured above the utility of the individual capitalist.
2. Capitalism’s idea of ‘property freedom’ is contradictory if taxation is involved, so the oppression of the worker is unjustified by its own principle’s shortcomings.
3. Whilst socialism may infringe upon some freedom (such as the freedom of an employer not to pay a living wage), the trade-off of the freedom for its benefits is very advantageous to most.

The debating of the issue of euthanasia brings with it many ethical, moral and possibly even religious factors which need to be accounted for. Over the course of this essay, I aim to explore some of these ideas and come to a reasoned conclusion at to whether it is in real terms ‘right’ or ‘wrong’ as a course of action in cases of debilitating illness.

Some feel that euthanasia is morally wrong, and the Argument of Nature is one argument used by non-supporters of euthanasia to explain their belief. It states that every human being has a natural inclination to continue living and that euthanasia does is damaging to the natural goal of survival. The core point of this argument is that euthanasia is wrong because it is unnatural – this tends to be the argument made by the religious, with the slight caveat that it is God who defines the natural order of things, and that euthanasia is an affront to his/hers/its decisions.

A more semantic argument would be that euthanasia could only be moral if voluntary, and that the competence required for the decision of a voluntary would be a difficult quantity to measure: what makes one competent? What is to say that someone’s judgement is not impaired in order to make a voluntary decision null? The legality of euthanasia would also cast various aspersions upon members of the medical profession, with them no longer having to keep their patients alive with expensive care: it may then be the case that the interests of the patient are not placed first, but rather the finances of their hospital.

There is also a large camp with reasons to permit the idea of voluntary euthanasia: the choice of one to end one’s life should be an option for the individual to make as an ultimate choice; and it can be argued that complete freedom of life (and thus death) is protected under the UN Human Rights agreements. If someone is suffering from a crippling terminal illness, it could be argued that death would provide a better quality of life for them, as much of a contradiction in terms that may sound – no life at all may be better in the eyes of some than a life of suffering.

Possibly more controversial arguments for euthanasia could involve the fact that the deaths of terminal patients would lighten the financial and spatial load upon hospitals for those would have hope of a cure, and thus increase quality of care across the board.

In conclusion, I believe the individual liberties of patients should be put before any religious or pseudo-moral arguments in cases where a long, painful death could be involved in a long-term terminal illness; and even those with people just wishing to die: why subject them to the degrading methods so commonly used for suicide when a medical aide would allow them to do it properly and without the possibly degrading and embarrassing potential for failure?

The welfare state is there, invariably, to provide welfare for the citizens of said state; be they ‘productive’ or not. However, have a debate about the appropriation (or indeed ‘misappropriation’) of state money to those not in work in order that they should survive, you will always get the same results: ‘if I work and pay taxes, why should they benefit from it?’, or any variation upon this theme. The well to do like this answer: it vilifies those deemed ‘below’ them and justifies their (most likely) life approach of hedonism mixed in with a faux philanthropy for those poor children in Zimbabwe or wherever is being highlighted in the Guardian that week – their money should be distributed as they see fit. The simple fact is: most of their arguments against provision of benefits such as Jobseeker’s Allowance do not hold up to any scrutiny.

1. ‘They’re having an easy life, whilst I work hard to fund it’
   It’s not an easy life. An easy life would be a life where you didn’t have to worry about where your next meal was coming from. If we take the figures for a single person living on the standard Jobseeker’s Allowance, it comes to a grand earning of £3058 per annum. Nice and comfortable, right? Say that grocery shopping, if said money-sucking leech wants to eat without growing fat or developing mineral deficiencies or heart disease, is £30 per week: that’s £1560 per year: more than half of the total sum. Said person also needs to clothe themselves: we’ll call that, rather conservatively, £250 for the year. Utilities are pretty much a necessity: the average electricity bill for a one bedroom flat per annum is £536, and for gas around £300 (and rapidly increasing). A telephone is vital for job applications, and will cost around £120 per year in line rental alone. It’s rumoured that humans need water as well: another ~£150 per year. Two assumptions are made here: rent and council tax are being covered by other benefits. After all of this, a sum of £142 for the year, £11.83 a month, is left to live the wonderful life of luxury experienced by all of the unemployed all across the nation. Comfort would be knowing that an unexpected cost isn’t going to completely and utterly cripple you financially; comfort would be knowing that your life is not dependent upon one woman or man deciding that you are doing whatever they deem ‘enough’ to find a job.
   Oh, and how is your claiming Working Families’ Tax Credit or EMA any more justified? If anything, it is less: it is not essential to your survival or even really that beneficial to your existence. Isn’t working hard to fund (essentially) yourself/using the money of others to reclaim some tax money a nihilism?
2. ‘It’s my money: why should they have it?’
   It’s not your money. The moment that any of it is taken as taxes, the money is the state’s, and only the state’s: it will be distributed in accordance with the policies of the party in rule, as per their essential autocracy as majority ruler. If you don’t like it, vote rather than play croquet. Besides, what is allegedly being taken away from you is hardly real: it is a token of no real worth. Society makes it worth something: if this upsets you, again, do something about it: vote. My anarchic bias is probably a little evident here in my ‘property is theft’ rhetoric, but I feel that it is nicely balanced by my encouragement of you to vote for what you believe in.
3. ‘It’s easy to get a job: they’re just lazy’
   It’s not easy to get a job. Well, theoretically, it should be: a 17 year-old can just walk into a shop and get a Saturday job, right, so why couldn’t a job seeking adult? The pedant in me yearns to say that ‘12 hours a week at minimum wage wouldn’t be nearly enough to live on (£3444.48, as of October 2007, before tax)’, but I’ll take this suggestion seriously. Again, it will be a game of numbers; with food, electricity, telephone and gas prices taken as before. A 48-hour week, as per the Working Time Directive, would lead to an annual income of £13,777.92. After tax, this becomes £12,109.34. Subtract the rent of a one bedroom flat in Walsall (as an example) at an average of ~£500 per month: we’re left with £6109.34. Council tax in Walsall is around £70 a month: £5296.34 is left. Now that we’re working, we need to be able to arrive at our workplace in a timely fashion; whilst living in Walsall, it is most likely that our employment would be found in either Wolverhampton or Birmingham. Being civic minded as we are, we will use buses to achieve that end, with the most inexpensive option being a 4-weekly bus pass at ~£50 per 4 weeks. Our pot is now down to £4646.34 before food etc. We then have the issue of National Insurance Contributions: another £1000.77 down the drain. Our final total before our more personal costs is £3645.57. Essentially, 2496 hours of work is worth another £49 per month. A total of £60 per month for ‘luxuries’ (or modern conveniences) is simply not enough in a conspicuously consumerist society – it works out about the same to be employed as ‘on the dole’. And the same point remains as with the first: unexpected costs of more than £60 in a month could really destroy any planning, and saving for such possible occurrences is hardly viable: having a social life (which does, unfortunately, cost money) is deemed to be an integral part of Western society).

My last examples do have a huge fault: it’s not entirely certain that a full-time job would be available for the unskilled or undereducated: the placement of the full minimum wage at age 22 makes it more appealing for employers to hire 16-21 year olds for shop work or other such relatively menial jobs. It is, quite simply, in the current climate, nigh-on impossible for the long-term, perhaps not due to their own actions or inactions, unemployed to find employment.

It’s truly galling to hear middle-classes, who have more than likely never experienced any true hardship in their lives, talk about the way that life is unfair to them whilst the proles starve in council houses as equally as on the streets: if anything, they should feel guilty, with their reluctance to support these people through another percentage of taxation upon themselves effectively leading to the aforementioned squalor of the unemployed. My empty argument will fall on deaf ears, I feel: I forget that we only help those who help themselves by the standards of the well-clothed and well-fed here.

They used to be fun. I swear that they used to be fun. Does anyone else remember the clever songwriting on From Here to Infirmary? The alcohol-metaphor drenched Take with Lots of Alcohol? There was definitely a time when Matt Skiba et al could write with the best in their (admittedly intrinsically cliché) genre of pseudo-gothic dark pop-punk. There were references to unconventional tales of lost loves (usually boiling down to the elegantly macabre ‘I want you dead’ theme), mental illness and the ever increasing allure of the extreme to the disenfranchised: they were songs about real feelings, real people. All of this was accompanied by glorious guitar hooks and drumming which would make even the most virulent strains of the common cold seem like mere 24 hour bugs in contrast to their catchiness. On Agony and Irony, their sixth studio album, all of this seems to have gone: the songs reek the overdone melodrama of boy-meets-girl, girl-leaves-boy and the painful theme of I’d-do-anything-for-you-including-of-course-going-to-hell. It’s truly painful to hear such a once generation-defining band beginning its descent into mediocrity.

From the start of the opening track, Calling all Skeletons, the change which the band has taken is immediately obvious: Skiba’s vocals sound weird. There’s no other real way to put it: they just aren’t his. They’ve lost their playful growl and now find themselves at an overprocessed whine. The vocals seem like the unholy lovechild of Gerard Way and Patrick Stump. It’s hideous. Their hooks and clever basslines have been replaced with palm mutes, a chanted chorus and a synth line which quietly plods away in the background throughout the song. Help Me doesn’t improve much: it’s just more chug-chug powerchords, except this time with a very trebly guitar accompaniment and the hackneyed theme of saving someone from themselves. We even have the ancient pop pastiche of the phonetic ‘la’ being used. Filler syllables. There is not a sole innovative feature whatsoever in these initial two tracks, and it would be a huge leap of faith to assume that there would be in the rest of the album: such a leap I was unwilling to take, which may have made me jaded, but objectivity was always so dull.

However, In Vein does show somewhat of a return to form, with Skiba sounding Skiba-ish again. The hooks are back as well, with a delightfully staccato chord sequence underpinning the entirety of the song. The lyrics seem to be that of the old Alkaline Trio once again, with the wry social commentary of old making a resurgence through ‘kind of like a superhero with nobody’s best interests in mind’ – the societal ills of apathy and misanthropy are dealt with her in a throwaway manner which could perhaps be deemed ironic. A quiet passage half way through the song serves to divide the chaos into an order of sorts and provides the variety which was up until this point so desperately desired and required, it may well have manifested itself through the power of my will alone given any more opportunity.

I refuse to waste words on Over and Out. Just think My Chemical Romance’s Black Parade: it is a complete and utter facsimile, which I suppose would be alright if such an original was your chosen perversion. As for I Found Away, its start of ’strumming through the dark with a broken heart’ just screams the self-indulgence of mainstream acceptance of their genre and a certain arrogance: that line could have been lifted from any notebook of sappy, dire teenage poetry. Including my own of a few years ago, but such things in my life are those which I’d rather forget. Its quiet-loud ascending dynamic across the length of the song doesn’t suit it: it seems forced, a compromise made to satisfy listeners rather than creative desire.

Do You Wanna Know? is another throwback to the Alkaline Trio of the Better Times; infectious hooks and smart lyrics are all that it takes to make me happy. A theme of the transience of emotion also endears the song to me. Or maybe I’m reading too much into it: it could literally be about time-bomb hearts – biological dysfunction is so in Vogue. Live Young, Die Fast is a musical tragedy: a train wreck. It’s sounds like one of AFI’s Decemberunderground b-sides. Which is, most definitely, not a good thing: that album marked the death of another good pop-punk band. From the title, you can just guess what the song’s about: living the fuck out of life, which, whilst a lovely sentiment, is hardly practical – we have societally expected tasks to perform. Like growing old and paying taxes.

Love Love, Kiss Kiss is a Fall Out Boy song. It’s lightweight, flimsy and lacks any real merit. Whilst this may be deemed a harsh assessment, it’s just 3 minutes of oscillating guitars: it’s nothing special. It’s mundane and overwrought.

I’ll be completely honest: I could not bring myself to listen to the last three tracks. Nothing progressive had happened across the last nine, so I couldn’t see it in the next ten or so minutes. It was just the same thing over and over again, with the slight alteration in tempo between songs. I long for the days of old Alkaline Trio. I long for wry wit and infectious riffs.

Failing that, I’ll just avoid their work. Free will is a wonderful thing, no?