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529 results for “panopticpen”
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@GossiTheDog does the following seem a plausible near future, given current trends? What do you think?
@cstross
what about a new fiction novel where the hero (winston?) talks along these lines?"Given current technological evolutions, efficiency ministry actions of deleting humans from the control loop, and the last trends in huge investments annoncements by gov.corp, it seems that they could try to make all of us ruled by their far right biased AIs and their facists supporters using:
- iots and predictive behavioral analytics to ensure the security of their fascist gov.corp and control of production/distribution lines.
- biased cryptomoney (traceable via the gov.corp
AI running their blockchains, only for middle and low class to detect and respond threats to gov.corp and their landlords, rich man transactions do not appear on the blockchains)
-autonomous robots/drones (police, soldiers ,...). Used also to lead wars against other nations.
- autonomous research without any factual check on drugs produced by their AI simulated labs before release in the wild. No more complaints, take the drug now (insurance companies?)
- endpoint data analytics on individuals where only metadata/neural net embedded mobile AI chips analysis results (behavioral deviance opposition) will be sent centrally to AIs/digital twins analysis. This is inline with social network analytics for individual targeting and seems in line with recent events (fiction events inspired by "recall" feature enabled "by error" in one gafam os, edr capabilities and failures - cfr crowdstrike disaster, face recognition based on neural nets un mobile chip,...).
- iots datas (cameras, doorbells, mobile, smart tv, smart watch,...) and mobile datas feeded blockchains recording all abnormal behavior of individuals creating a "digital twin" of each of us to predict what we will do next and prevent any resistance by "pushing out" of this "new order" the most important " nodes" of resistance found in the digital twin social graph.
-deepfakes created using sample conversations for work and/or private life via internet (inspired by covid and today's tech level) .
- the resisting people see their payment means (digital Wallet) blocked by the gov.corp AI on their mobile operating system if they do not obey.
- the resisting people start to disappear physically and are replaced by their digital twin and deepfakes online.what they seem to want to impose is not limited to usa. It is also in the process to be imposed everywhere else (Europe, ...). This is not a putsch against the usa, this is a putsch against all the human race freedom of people by extremely rich religious madmens/bigots/extremists that believe they are in a dark enlightment moment, that they will reach singularity, will get rid of workers via strong leader ruling imposed by AIs/robotics and will bring sentient biased maximal efficiency AI,with sociopathic features similar to their own, as our new leader (no more elections).
This is how they will maximize efficiency and rule on it by destroying freedom and society.
And do not believe that you can vote with your feet by moving to other company or nation, they and their AIs will own all of them with different apparent flavors with the same disgusting value: all fascists to their core.
In such a panopticon world, they do not need people to protect other people from the bad guys. No cybersecurity specialist, no nuclear reactors specialists, no CISOs, no human police , no human military, no regulator , no science or even democratic gov to avoid their technological bigotry excess or abuse of power based on rule of human centered law and more importantly " human values". These are now obsoleted by efficiency and optimisation of profits for shadowy shareholders thanks to their AIs controlling the market by using digital twins predictive analytics and minority of shares in most companies to block décisions that would not be acceptable for the AI plan.
They are the bad guys ruling the world through their owned AIs, iots and robots for physical constraints. No more human in the loop than the richests man on earth (or mars).
Fuck them. They are disgusting. Wetware brains that created these AIs, the decentralized internet and were the first generation of cipherpunks of history are coming back to support resistance for freedom and push back revenge. And...Satoshi is back and is on our side to help design it."
Villains inspired also from
Recent history of USA, tech oligarchs actions, supporters of https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dark_Enlightenment
#ooda #resist #respond #recover #democracyhacked #freedom #liberty #notofascism #ai #blockchain #behavior #society #blackmirror #hackers #novel #scifi -
By Angry Metal Guy
Once upon a time, Månegarm was an apex predator of the blackened folk metal scene that took metal by storm (er, Storm) in the early-to-mid-2000s. For a brief moment, as Heathenfests proliferated and white guys from Wisconsin,1 fell in love with songs about Vikings and runes, the Viking metal/folk metal subgenre was the Next Big Thing, fueled by a surprisingly liquid supply of fiddles, jaw harps, gallops, and flask-swinging choruses. Yet, time wasn’t kind. Turisas ghosted us after leaving us a weird note, Finntroll got lost in the woods and returned changed, and even Thyrfing and Moonsorrow have slowed to a crawl. But Månegarm has never stopped.2 With the impending release of Edsvuren (Oathbound or Sworn), their thirteenth full-length and fifth since signing with Napalm Records, this Swedish trio stands as one of the last standard-bearers of this once-ferocious scene.
Månegarm’s arc explains how we got here. From Havets vargar (2000) to Nattväsen (2009), Månegarm was among the hardest-hitting of the folk metal vanguard. They blended black metal’s blasting intensity with violin counterpoint (and solos), and Erik Grawsiö’s gravel-throated roar. But following Nattväsen, Månegarm underwent a serious change. With the departure of their violinist and bassist, Grawsiö moved to bass, but more importantly, they emerged with a retooled sound. By 2013’s Legions of the North, Månegarm had begun shaping themselves towards something more akin to Amon Amarth’s mid-paced crunch than the blastful abandon of their black metal roots. Edsvuren continues the same trajectory, letting the flames burn low rather than trying to rekindle the blaze; content to let the embers glow.
When the wind blows right, however, Månegarm’s fire burns bright. When these Swedes go heavy, the results are still vital—some of the best metal they’ve released in years. The opening trifecta demonstrates this: “I skogfruns famn” brims with trem-picked harmonies, fiddle, and melodies and pacing that evoke Isengard or Lumsk. “Lögrinns värn” picks up the pace and builds on Amon Amarthian heft, while “En Blodvittneskrans”—one of the album’s standout tracks—crackles with surprisingly punk-inflected drumming and tremelos that transport me to Bjoergvin. On the album’s back half, we again find heavy tracks that brim with harmonic minor riffing, fantastic vocal harmonies, and creative songwriting. “Skild från hugen” stretches into a seven-minute epic, weaving gallops, fiddle, and a doomy interlude where Elinor Videfors’ smoky alto helps to elevate the song. While “Likgökens fest” follows with another blast of urgency. In these moments, Månegarm is vibrant and confident, with a powerful sound and presence.
Much of Edsvuren, however, lives in the embers. Acoustic folk tracks like “Rodhins hav,” “Till gudars följe,” and “I runor ristades orden” aren’t filler; they’re beautiful. The production places each acoustic strum and hand drum with care, and Videfors’ voice adds a crystalline, haunting quality. Ancient and evocative, these songs are built on droning harmonies and modal folk melodies. And they sound great. In listening to these, I’m reminded of Panopticon’s Laurentian Blue, folk music with fiddle and a deep melancholy.3 The problem is proportion. Nearly half the record lives in this slower, acoustic, or mid-paced heavy space. And when stacked back-to-back (“Rodhins hav” through “Hör mitt kall,” and then again in the closing pair of songs), the album sputters. At 51 minutes, Edsvuren isn’t overlong, but there are moments when the pacing lengthens the album.
The vocals provide the oxygen that keeps Edsvuren burning, showcasing some of the finest arrangements Månegarm has ever recorded. Grawsiö’s extreme vocals remain commanding, but it’s his cleans—gravelly and full,4 at times evoking throat singing—that unite Edsvuren. The interplay with the guest vocalists—Elinor Videfors, Grawsiö’s daughter Lea on “I skogfruns famn”—is well balanced. And at its best, the record gives the impression that you’re sitting around the campfire and listening to them sing. Choruses bloom into layers of voices that feel almost ritualistic—but at least communal—and are balanced expertly in the mix (“Till gudars följe”). There’s an almost Finntrollian playfulness in the vocal arrangements at times (again, “Till gudars följe”), while at other times the harmonies are clinically tight like harmonic minor Bad Religion or early Soen. Even when the riffs tread familiar ground—or the album feels like it’s slowing down too much—the vocals continually elevate compositions and keep me hooked.
Edsvuren is an album that’s easy to like, but tricky to love. But I can say with confidence that it’s my favorite Månegarm since the Napalm run began in 2013. The heavy material is vital, energetic, and it reminds me of why I fell in love with these Swedish wolves to begin with. The folk songs and feel are brittle and beautiful, and give the album character and variety. Unfortunately, the overall balance of the record leans a little too hard into mid-tempo riffs, rock feels rather than blastbeats, and acoustic folk music—resulting in pacing that makes it feel less than the sum of its Very-Good!-to-Great! parts. I enjoy the songs, I admire the craft, but taken as a whole, they leave Edsvuren a little low on bite. Edsvuren may not spark anew Månegarm’s flames, but it tends the embers—keeping them warm enough for fellowship, beer, and song.
Rating: Good!
DR: N/A | Format Reviewed: Stream5
Label: Napalm Records
Websites: linktr.ee/manegarmofficial | manegarm.bandcamp.com
Releases Worldwide: August 29th, 2025#2025 #30 #AmonAmarth #Aug25 #BadReligion #Edsvuren #Finntroll #FolkMetal #HavetsVargar #Isengard #LaurentianBlue #Lumsk #Månegarm #MelodicBlackMetal #MelodicDeathMetal #Moonsorrow #NapalmRecords #Nattväsen #Panopticon #Review #Reviews #Soen #Storm #Thyrfing #Turisas #VikingMetal
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By Angry Metal Guy
Once upon a time, Månegarm was an apex predator of the blackened folk metal scene that took metal by storm (er, Storm) in the early-to-mid-2000s. For a brief moment, as Heathenfests proliferated and white guys from Wisconsin,1 fell in love with songs about Vikings and runes, the Viking metal/folk metal subgenre was the Next Big Thing, fueled by a surprisingly liquid supply of fiddles, jaw harps, gallops, and flask-swinging choruses. Yet, time wasn’t kind. Turisas ghosted us after leaving us a weird note, Finntroll got lost in the woods and returned changed, and even Thyrfing and Moonsorrow have slowed to a crawl. But Månegarm has never stopped.2 With the impending release of Edsvuren (Oathbound or Sworn), their thirteenth full-length and fifth since signing with Napalm Records, this Swedish trio stands as one of the last standard-bearers of this once-ferocious scene.
Månegarm’s arc explains how we got here. From Havets vargar (2000) to Nattväsen (2009), Månegarm was among the hardest-hitting of the folk metal vanguard. They blended black metal’s blasting intensity with violin counterpoint (and solos), and Erik Grawsiö’s gravel-throated roar. But following Nattväsen, Månegarm underwent a serious change. With the departure of their violinist and bassist, Grawsiö moved to bass, but more importantly, they emerged with a retooled sound. By 2013’s Legions of the North, Månegarm had begun shaping themselves towards something more akin to Amon Amarth’s mid-paced crunch than the blastful abandon of their black metal roots. Edsvuren continues the same trajectory, letting the flames burn low rather than trying to rekindle the blaze; content to let the embers glow.
When the wind blows right, however, Månegarm’s fire burns bright. When these Swedes go heavy, the results are still vital—some of the best metal they’ve released in years. The opening trifecta demonstrates this: “I skogfruns famn” brims with trem-picked harmonies, fiddle, and melodies and pacing that evoke Isengard or Lumsk. “Lögrinns värn” picks up the pace and builds on Amon Amarthian heft, while “En Blodvittneskrans”—one of the album’s standout tracks—crackles with surprisingly punk-inflected drumming and tremelos that transport me to Bjoergvin. On the album’s back half, we again find heavy tracks that brim with harmonic minor riffing, fantastic vocal harmonies, and creative songwriting. “Skild från hugen” stretches into a seven-minute epic, weaving gallops, fiddle, and a doomy interlude where Elinor Videfors’ smoky alto helps to elevate the song. While “Likgökens fest” follows with another blast of urgency. In these moments, Månegarm is vibrant and confident, with a powerful sound and presence.
Much of Edsvuren, however, lives in the embers. Acoustic folk tracks like “Rodhins hav,” “Till gudars följe,” and “I runor ristades orden” aren’t filler; they’re beautiful. The production places each acoustic strum and hand drum with care, and Videfors’ voice adds a crystalline, haunting quality. Ancient and evocative, these songs are built on droning harmonies and modal folk melodies. And they sound great. In listening to these, I’m reminded of Panopticon’s Laurentian Blue, folk music with fiddle and a deep melancholy.3 The problem is proportion. Nearly half the record lives in this slower, acoustic, or mid-paced heavy space. And when stacked back-to-back (“Rodhins hav” through “Hör mitt kall,” and then again in the closing pair of songs), the album sputters. At 51 minutes, Edsvuren isn’t overlong, but there are moments when the pacing lengthens the album.
The vocals provide the oxygen that keeps Edsvuren burning, showcasing some of the finest arrangements Månegarm has ever recorded. Grawsiö’s extreme vocals remain commanding, but it’s his cleans—gravelly and full,4 at times evoking throat singing—that unite Edsvuren. The interplay with the guest vocalists—Elinor Videfors, Grawsiö’s daughter Lea on “I skogfruns famn”—is well balanced. And at its best, the record gives the impression that you’re sitting around the campfire and listening to them sing. Choruses bloom into layers of voices that feel almost ritualistic—but at least communal—and are balanced expertly in the mix (“Till gudars följe”). There’s an almost Finntrollian playfulness in the vocal arrangements at times (again, “Till gudars följe”), while at other times the harmonies are clinically tight like harmonic minor Bad Religion or early Soen. Even when the riffs tread familiar ground—or the album feels like it’s slowing down too much—the vocals continually elevate compositions and keep me hooked.
Edsvuren is an album that’s easy to like, but tricky to love. But I can say with confidence that it’s my favorite Månegarm since the Napalm run began in 2013. The heavy material is vital, energetic, and it reminds me of why I fell in love with these Swedish wolves to begin with. The folk songs and feel are brittle and beautiful, and give the album character and variety. Unfortunately, the overall balance of the record leans a little too hard into mid-tempo riffs, rock feels rather than blastbeats, and acoustic folk music—resulting in pacing that makes it feel less than the sum of its Very-Good!-to-Great! parts. I enjoy the songs, I admire the craft, but taken as a whole, they leave Edsvuren a little low on bite. Edsvuren may not spark anew Månegarm’s flames, but it tends the embers—keeping them warm enough for fellowship, beer, and song.
Rating: Good!
DR: N/A | Format Reviewed: Stream5
Label: Napalm Records
Websites: linktr.ee/manegarmofficial | manegarm.bandcamp.com
Releases Worldwide: August 29th, 2025#2025 #30 #AmonAmarth #Aug25 #BadReligion #Edsvuren #Finntroll #FolkMetal #HavetsVargar #Isengard #LaurentianBlue #Lumsk #Månegarm #MelodicBlackMetal #MelodicDeathMetal #Moonsorrow #NapalmRecords #Nattväsen #Panopticon #Review #Reviews #Soen #Storm #Thyrfing #Turisas #VikingMetal
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By Angry Metal Guy
Once upon a time, Månegarm was an apex predator of the blackened folk metal scene that took metal by storm (er, Storm) in the early-to-mid-2000s. For a brief moment, as Heathenfests proliferated and white guys from Wisconsin,1 fell in love with songs about Vikings and runes, the Viking metal/folk metal subgenre was the Next Big Thing, fueled by a surprisingly liquid supply of fiddles, jaw harps, gallops, and flask-swinging choruses. Yet, time wasn’t kind. Turisas ghosted us after leaving us a weird note, Finntroll got lost in the woods and returned changed, and even Thyrfing and Moonsorrow have slowed to a crawl. But Månegarm has never stopped.2 With the impending release of Edsvuren (Oathbound or Sworn), their thirteenth full-length and fifth since signing with Napalm Records, this Swedish trio stands as one of the last standard-bearers of this once-ferocious scene.
Månegarm’s arc explains how we got here. From Havets vargar (2000) to Nattväsen (2009), Månegarm was among the hardest-hitting of the folk metal vanguard. They blended black metal’s blasting intensity with violin counterpoint (and solos), and Erik Grawsiö’s gravel-throated roar. But following Nattväsen, Månegarm underwent a serious change. With the departure of their violinist and bassist, Grawsiö moved to bass, but more importantly, they emerged with a retooled sound. By 2013’s Legions of the North, Månegarm had begun shaping themselves towards something more akin to Amon Amarth’s mid-paced crunch than the blastful abandon of their black metal roots. Edsvuren continues the same trajectory, letting the flames burn low rather than trying to rekindle the blaze; content to let the embers glow.
When the wind blows right, however, Månegarm’s fire burns bright. When these Swedes go heavy, the results are still vital—some of the best metal they’ve released in years. The opening trifecta demonstrates this: “I skogfruns famn” brims with trem-picked harmonies, fiddle, and melodies and pacing that evoke Isengard or Lumsk. “Lögrinns värn” picks up the pace and builds on Amon Amarthian heft, while “En Blodvittneskrans”—one of the album’s standout tracks—crackles with surprisingly punk-inflected drumming and tremelos that transport me to Bjoergvin. On the album’s back half, we again find heavy tracks that brim with harmonic minor riffing, fantastic vocal harmonies, and creative songwriting. “Skild från hugen” stretches into a seven-minute epic, weaving gallops, fiddle, and a doomy interlude where Elinor Videfors’ smoky alto helps to elevate the song. While “Likgökens fest” follows with another blast of urgency. In these moments, Månegarm is vibrant and confident, with a powerful sound and presence.
Much of Edsvuren, however, lives in the embers. Acoustic folk tracks like “Rodhins hav,” “Till gudars följe,” and “I runor ristades orden” aren’t filler; they’re beautiful. The production places each acoustic strum and hand drum with care, and Videfors’ voice adds a crystalline, haunting quality. Ancient and evocative, these songs are built on droning harmonies and modal folk melodies. And they sound great. In listening to these, I’m reminded of Panopticon’s Laurentian Blue, folk music with fiddle and a deep melancholy.3 The problem is proportion. Nearly half the record lives in this slower, acoustic, or mid-paced heavy space. And when stacked back-to-back (“Rodhins hav” through “Hör mitt kall,” and then again in the closing pair of songs), the album sputters. At 51 minutes, Edsvuren isn’t overlong, but there are moments when the pacing lengthens the album.
The vocals provide the oxygen that keeps Edsvuren burning, showcasing some of the finest arrangements Månegarm has ever recorded. Grawsiö’s extreme vocals remain commanding, but it’s his cleans—gravelly and full,4 at times evoking throat singing—that unite Edsvuren. The interplay with the guest vocalists—Elinor Videfors, Grawsiö’s daughter Lea on “I skogfruns famn”—is well balanced. And at its best, the record gives the impression that you’re sitting around the campfire and listening to them sing. Choruses bloom into layers of voices that feel almost ritualistic—but at least communal—and are balanced expertly in the mix (“Till gudars följe”). There’s an almost Finntrollian playfulness in the vocal arrangements at times (again, “Till gudars följe”), while at other times the harmonies are clinically tight like harmonic minor Bad Religion or early Soen. Even when the riffs tread familiar ground—or the album feels like it’s slowing down too much—the vocals continually elevate compositions and keep me hooked.
Edsvuren is an album that’s easy to like, but tricky to love. But I can say with confidence that it’s my favorite Månegarm since the Napalm run began in 2013. The heavy material is vital, energetic, and it reminds me of why I fell in love with these Swedish wolves to begin with. The folk songs and feel are brittle and beautiful, and give the album character and variety. Unfortunately, the overall balance of the record leans a little too hard into mid-tempo riffs, rock feels rather than blastbeats, and acoustic folk music—resulting in pacing that makes it feel less than the sum of its Very-Good!-to-Great! parts. I enjoy the songs, I admire the craft, but taken as a whole, they leave Edsvuren a little low on bite. Edsvuren may not spark anew Månegarm’s flames, but it tends the embers—keeping them warm enough for fellowship, beer, and song.
Rating: Good!
DR: N/A | Format Reviewed: Stream5
Label: Napalm Records
Websites: linktr.ee/manegarmofficial | manegarm.bandcamp.com
Releases Worldwide: August 29th, 2025#2025 #30 #AmonAmarth #Aug25 #BadReligion #Edsvuren #Finntroll #FolkMetal #HavetsVargar #Isengard #LaurentianBlue #Lumsk #Månegarm #MelodicBlackMetal #MelodicDeathMetal #Moonsorrow #NapalmRecords #Nattväsen #Panopticon #Review #Reviews #Soen #Storm #Thyrfing #Turisas #VikingMetal
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By Angry Metal Guy
Once upon a time, Månegarm was an apex predator of the blackened folk metal scene that took metal by storm (er, Storm) in the early-to-mid-2000s. For a brief moment, as Heathenfests proliferated and white guys from Wisconsin,1 fell in love with songs about Vikings and runes, the Viking metal/folk metal subgenre was the Next Big Thing, fueled by a surprisingly liquid supply of fiddles, jaw harps, gallops, and flask-swinging choruses. Yet, time wasn’t kind. Turisas ghosted us after leaving us a weird note, Finntroll got lost in the woods and returned changed, and even Thyrfing and Moonsorrow have slowed to a crawl. But Månegarm has never stopped.2 With the impending release of Edsvuren (Oathbound or Sworn), their thirteenth full-length and fifth since signing with Napalm Records, this Swedish trio stands as one of the last standard-bearers of this once-ferocious scene.
Månegarm’s arc explains how we got here. From Havets vargar (2000) to Nattväsen (2009), Månegarm was among the hardest-hitting of the folk metal vanguard. They blended black metal’s blasting intensity with violin counterpoint (and solos), and Erik Grawsiö’s gravel-throated roar. But following Nattväsen, Månegarm underwent a serious change. With the departure of their violinist and bassist, Grawsiö moved to bass, but more importantly, they emerged with a retooled sound. By 2013’s Legions of the North, Månegarm had begun shaping themselves towards something more akin to Amon Amarth’s mid-paced crunch than the blastful abandon of their black metal roots. Edsvuren continues the same trajectory, letting the flames burn low rather than trying to rekindle the blaze; content to let the embers glow.
When the wind blows right, however, Månegarm’s fire burns bright. When these Swedes go heavy, the results are still vital—some of the best metal they’ve released in years. The opening trifecta demonstrates this: “I skogfruns famn” brims with trem-picked harmonies, fiddle, and melodies and pacing that evoke Isengard or Lumsk. “Lögrinns värn” picks up the pace and builds on Amon Amarthian heft, while “En Blodvittneskrans”—one of the album’s standout tracks—crackles with surprisingly punk-inflected drumming and tremelos that transport me to Bjoergvin. On the album’s back half, we again find heavy tracks that brim with harmonic minor riffing, fantastic vocal harmonies, and creative songwriting. “Skild från hugen” stretches into a seven-minute epic, weaving gallops, fiddle, and a doomy interlude where Elinor Videfors’ smoky alto helps to elevate the song. While “Likgökens fest” follows with another blast of urgency. In these moments, Månegarm is vibrant and confident, with a powerful sound and presence.
Much of Edsvuren, however, lives in the embers. Acoustic folk tracks like “Rodhins hav,” “Till gudars följe,” and “I runor ristades orden” aren’t filler; they’re beautiful. The production places each acoustic strum and hand drum with care, and Videfors’ voice adds a crystalline, haunting quality. Ancient and evocative, these songs are built on droning harmonies and modal folk melodies. And they sound great. In listening to these, I’m reminded of Panopticon’s Laurentian Blue, folk music with fiddle and a deep melancholy.3 The problem is proportion. Nearly half the record lives in this slower, acoustic, or mid-paced heavy space. And when stacked back-to-back (“Rodhins hav” through “Hör mitt kall,” and then again in the closing pair of songs), the album sputters. At 51 minutes, Edsvuren isn’t overlong, but there are moments when the pacing lengthens the album.
The vocals provide the oxygen that keeps Edsvuren burning, showcasing some of the finest arrangements Månegarm has ever recorded. Grawsiö’s extreme vocals remain commanding, but it’s his cleans—gravelly and full,4 at times evoking throat singing—that unite Edsvuren. The interplay with the guest vocalists—Elinor Videfors, Grawsiö’s daughter Lea on “I skogfruns famn”—is well balanced. And at its best, the record gives the impression that you’re sitting around the campfire and listening to them sing. Choruses bloom into layers of voices that feel almost ritualistic—but at least communal—and are balanced expertly in the mix (“Till gudars följe”). There’s an almost Finntrollian playfulness in the vocal arrangements at times (again, “Till gudars följe”), while at other times the harmonies are clinically tight like harmonic minor Bad Religion or early Soen. Even when the riffs tread familiar ground—or the album feels like it’s slowing down too much—the vocals continually elevate compositions and keep me hooked.
Edsvuren is an album that’s easy to like, but tricky to love. But I can say with confidence that it’s my favorite Månegarm since the Napalm run began in 2013. The heavy material is vital, energetic, and it reminds me of why I fell in love with these Swedish wolves to begin with. The folk songs and feel are brittle and beautiful, and give the album character and variety. Unfortunately, the overall balance of the record leans a little too hard into mid-tempo riffs, rock feels rather than blastbeats, and acoustic folk music—resulting in pacing that makes it feel less than the sum of its Very-Good!-to-Great! parts. I enjoy the songs, I admire the craft, but taken as a whole, they leave Edsvuren a little low on bite. Edsvuren may not spark anew Månegarm’s flames, but it tends the embers—keeping them warm enough for fellowship, beer, and song.
Rating: Good!
DR: N/A | Format Reviewed: Stream5
Label: Napalm Records
Websites: linktr.ee/manegarmofficial | manegarm.bandcamp.com
Releases Worldwide: August 29th, 2025#2025 #30 #AmonAmarth #Aug25 #BadReligion #Edsvuren #Finntroll #FolkMetal #HavetsVargar #Isengard #LaurentianBlue #Lumsk #Månegarm #MelodicBlackMetal #MelodicDeathMetal #Moonsorrow #NapalmRecords #Nattväsen #Panopticon #Review #Reviews #Soen #Storm #Thyrfing #Turisas #VikingMetal
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@evacide A hypothesis I haven't tested but think we can assume unless someone wants to do the necessary web archive scraping:
Every porn site that would ever follow "age verification" laws—every site subject to any of the applicable jurisdictions—already had
metatags for adult content before those laws were ever bills. Minimum adequate parenting of "digital native" children—thus minimally adequate implementation of device administrative access and parental controls—would already block every site that would ever comply with the laws.Therefore (as @404mediaco have also predicted), relative to porn access, the only real effect of such online panopticon laws is to direct people away from sites subject to democratic jurisdictions, which at least attempt to lawfully moderate content, and towards sites outside such jurisdictions, which deliberately distribute CSAM and other sex trafficking and SA content.
Legislatively outsourcing parenting onto the porn sites thus increases harm to everyone such laws claim to seek to protect.
#uspol #surveillance #censorship #privacy #idVerification #ageVerification
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Stop scanning us! #FacialRecognition
Home Secretary Mahmood, revealed her chilling vision of building a “panopticon” where “the eyes of the state can be on you at all times”
Your #passport photo now being searched by police, even if you have done nothing wrong
#Driving licence photos are next
If we don’t set clear limits now, our rights to #privacy, #FreeSpeech, #protest & access to information are at risk
Sign:
https://you.38degrees.org.uk/petitions/stop-scanning-us-all-with-facial-recognition -
→ Oh, good: Discord's age verification rollout has ties to Palantir co-founder and panopticon architect Peter Thiel
https://www.pcgamer.com/software/platforms/oh-good-discords-age-verification-rollout-has-ties-to-palantir-co-founder-and-panopticon-architect-peter-thiel/“And listen, I know people harp on this a lot, but it's a company literally named after an orb that lets the most evil force in the world spy on your thoughts.”
#age #orb #spy #evil #Thiel #Discord #Palantir #thoughts #panopticon #verification
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"The U.S. military-led group supporting “stabilization efforts” in Gaza has put forward plans for a housing block for Palestinians in Gaza in an area under full Israel military control. According to materials circulated by the Civil-Military Coordination Center (CMCC) and obtained by Drop Site News, the “planned community,” if developed, would contain and control its residents through biometric surveillance, checkpoints, monitoring of purchases, and educational programs promoting normalization with Israel.
The CMCC was established by U.S. Central Command (CENTCOM) on October 17, one week after Hamas and Israel agreed to an exchange of captives and a ceasefire was supposed to go into effect. The center, which is based in a large warehouse-style building in Kiryat Gat in southern Israel and involves dozens of countries and organizations, is supposed to “monitor implementation of the ceasefire” and “help facilitate the flow of humanitarian, logistical, and security assistance from international counterparts into Gaza,” according to CENTCOM.
The CMCC is led by U.S. Army Lieutenant General Patrick D. Frank and includes both U.S. and Israeli military officials along with personnel from dozens of countries, including France, Britain, Germany, the United Arab Emirates, and Egypt."
#Palestine #Gaza #USA #Israel #CMCC #Surveillance #PoliceState #Panopticon #PoliceState
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Panopticon by Miles Johnston
#illustration#art #bnw #panopticon #portrait #profile #MilesJohnston #Johnston
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“To be GOVERNED is to be watched, inspected, spied upon, . . .”
‚Thus begins Pierre-Joseph Proudhon’s famous quote defining the function of the political state. The surveillance states already in formation in Britain and the U.S. are nothing new. Only its technology and its capacity for totality. But this is a key consideration. No more escaping across the county line or hiding out in the hills. Everywhere and anywhere today is a social panopticon.
In earlier times of political opposition to the rulers, the names of rebels would be written in ink in a large ledger and later, on 3X5 cards, following reports from observers, undercover agents, and provocateurs. This was often sufficient to keep track of those who threatened the rule of capital and the state. Enough to often fill prisons and dungeons with those who refused their duty as loyal servants of the system.‘
https://freedomnews.org.uk/2026/04/26/files-on-the-fifth-estate/
#FifthEstate #Surveillance #FBI #Technology #Repression #State #UK #USA #Europe #Antireport
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Waldgeflüster – Knochengesänge I and Knochengesänge II Review
By Killjoy
Waldgeflüster has been around for a while. Based in Bavaria, Germany and led by Winterherz, they’ve been weaving nature-themed atmospheric black metal since 2009. Waldgeflüster has passed through the hands of several atmoblack aficionados before me. El Cuervo enjoyed the Panopticon/Waldgeflüster split in 2016 but was less impressed by Ruinen later that year. Doom_et_Al found 2021’s Dahoam to be disappointing and unmemorable. Waldgeflüster used the four years since then to create double albums Knochengesänge I and Knochengesänge II. I is a more traditional atmoblack record, while II is a reconstruction of the same melodies from the standpoint of various non-metal musical genres. An intriguing idea, to be sure. Is Knochengesänge so nice you’ll want to listen to it twice?
That may not be entirely accurate because, despite being born from the same place, Knochengesänge I and II grew into very different beasts. I will sound much more familiar to those who know Waldgeflüster’s prior work. It shares a deep kinship with the folksy trem-picking of Panopticon, not to mention that both groups put out double albums this year. Austin and Bekah Lunn even directly contributed their musical and photographic talents to Knochengesänge. II is a patchwork of different musical styles. It ranges from acoustic folk (“Das Klagelied der Krähen”) to overcast post-rock (“Frankfurt, 19. März,” “The Little King and His Architect”) to semi-upbeat alt-rock (“A Crusade in the Dark”). Both records conclude with different renditions of the traditional Scottish song “The Parting Glass.”
Knochengesänge I sees Waldgeflüster attempting to escape the shadow of similar, more influential atmospheric black metal groups. It’s telling that, despite the band’s longevity, no AMG writer to date has ever tagged Waldgeflüster in another band’s review as a reference point. Indeed, much of I passes uneventfully in a Harakiri for the Sky haze, but I tend to like it best when Waldgeflüster adds their own folksy flavor. The melodies of “Der kleinste König und sein Architekt” are especially crisp, and the song really comes into its own at the end when it transitions to a warm folk section with hearty clean singing and subtle violin strings. Charlie Anderson’s violin appears frequently, adding a great deal of poignancy. “Knochengesang” and “Bamberg, 20. Juni” are other notable examples of Waldgeflüster using strings to elevate their sound.
Since this is a double album, you already know what the primary flaw of Knochengesänge is—bloat. However, the problem runs deeper than mere minute count. Even if each track were halved in length, many would still have an uphill battle maintaining my attention. This is the case with both parts but particularly true of II, most of which seemed to drag on for an eternity. The greatest exception is “Singing of Bones” almost at the very end of II, a pleasant folk number with acoustic guitar and violin working in tandem. Even though II is all over the place stylistically, most of it isn’t so wildly different from I that it couldn’t have conceivably been integrated. I even tried reordering the tracks into each album’s corresponding pairs and found that many covered each other’s weaknesses decently well (again, except for bloat), which supports my suspicion that these two mediocre albums could have been distilled into one really good album.
Knochengesänge began with an interesting double album premise that, sadly, yielded little of note during its 109-minute combined runtime. I and II may be highly symmetrical but they are only mildly codependent. I can’t recommend listening to them back to back and, in fact, II can be safely disregarded by most listeners. Fans of the Panopticon aesthetic should find enough to enjoy in I, but it may fall a bit flat for everyone else, especially given that newcomers like Autrest are offering a much more potent take on this type of atmoblack. A frustrating refusal to self-edit is what holds both records back the most; nearly every track is 8 minutes or longer, and few fully justify their length. I respect Waldgeflüster’s desire to explore new musical avenues and I’ll keep an eye on them in the future, but I don’t expect to return much to Knochengesänge.
Rating: I: 2.5/5.0 | II: 2.0/5.0
DR: 7 | Format Reviewed: 320 kbps mp3
Label: AOP Records
Websites: blackmetalwaldgefluester.bandcamp.com | waldgefluester.com | facebook.com/blackmetalwaldgefluester
Releases Worldwide: November 7th, 2025#20 #25 #2025 #AOPRecords #AtmosphericBlackMetal #Autrest #FolkMetal #GermanMetal #HarakiriForTheSky #KnochengesängeI #KnochengesängeII #NotMetal #Nov25 #Panopticon #Review #Reviews #Waldgeflüster
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Welcome to the Panopticon
When reading a discussion of an unrelated philosophical issue, I realized that we’re living in a contraption proposed by Jeremy Bentham, the author of utilitarianism.
This is a sketch of the “panopticon”, a prison where the prisoners, “A”, lived in open, illuminated cells, all facing inwards toward a darkened central rotunda where there might be a guard, “B”, or there might not.
Although it is physically impossible for the single guard to observe all the inmates’ cells at once, the fact that the inmates cannot know when they are being watched motivates them to act as though they are all being watched at all times. They are effectively compelled to self-regulation [Wikipedia 1]
Bentham was just trying to reduce the number of guards per prisoner, per worker, patient or student.
Michel Foucault
However, the mechanism was looked at Michel Foucault, the French philosopher, who recognized it as a specific example of his theory of disciplinary power.
As an equation, it was control = hierarchy + normalization + examination [Wikipedia 2]
- Hierarchy is the structure than enables observation. There is a superior and inferiors.
- Normalization is the superiors being able to set norms. Deviation from the norms becomes visible and seen as abnormal.
- Examination is the knowledge of being watched. Being examined makes people aware they are subjects of scrutiny by their superiors. Conversely, they lack any way to have scrutiny over the superiors.
At this point, the inferiors realize that they could be outed as abnormal. To avoid that they “internalize the surveillance”, they regulate their own behavior so as to always appear normal.
Freedom becomes an illusion when you’re constantly aware that your behavior may be being observed and evaluated against norms you didn’t choose.
An Exercise for the Reader
Consider the internet, social media, closed-circuit TV, workplace monitoring, insurer access to your health records, learning management systems, credit scores and the like. Does being observed by them affect your behavior?
Are you in a panopticon, and if so, how many?
#closedCircuitTv #foucault #philosophy #politics #socialMedia -
“He is seen, but he does not see; he is the object of information, never a subject in communication”*…
Plan of Jeremy Bentham’s panopticon prison was drawn by Willey Reveley in 1791 (source)We’ve looked before at digital regimes that seem a little too close for comfort to Jeremey Bentham‘s notion of the Panopticon. Surveillance has continued to intensify. 404 Media’s Jason Koebler and Joseph Cox bring us up to speed…
It’s nearly impossible not to be watched these days. It can start right at home with your neighbors and their Ring cameras—a company that sold fear to the American public and is now integrating AI to turn entire neighborhoods into networked, automated surveillance systems.
Head out a bit further and you’ll likely be confronted by Flock’s network of cameras that not only track license plates, but also track people’s movements with detailed precision. And as the Trump administration raids cities across the U.S. for undocumented immigrants, tech giants like Palantir are powering tools for ICE, including one called ELITE that helps the agency pick which neighborhoods to raid.
To better understand what exactly we’re looking at in this dystopian hellscape, 404 Media’s Jason Koebler and Joseph Cox joined r/technology for an AMA.
Understandably, people are worried about violations of their privacy by companies and the government. And many wonder, is there any way to go back once we’ve released all this AI-powered, surveillance tech?…
The (lightly edited for clarity) transcript is a bracing– but critically-important– read: “From Flock to ICE, Here’s a Breakdown of How You’re Being Watched,” @jasonkoebler.mastodon.social.ap.brid.gy and @josephcox.bsky.social in @404media.co.
* “Bentham’s Panopticon [at top] is the architectural figure of this composition. We know the principle on which it was based: at the periphery, an annular building; at the centre, a tower; this tower is pierced with wide windows that open onto the inner side of the ring; the peripheric building is divided into cells, each of which extends the whole width of the building; they have two windows, one on the inside, corresponding to the windows of the tower; the other, on the outside, allows the light to cross the cell from one end to the other. All that is needed, then, is to place a supervisor in a central tower and to shut up in each cell a madman, a patient, a condemned man, a worker or a schoolboy. By the effect of backlighting, one can observe from the tower, standing out precisely against the light, the small captive shadows in the cells of the periphery… He is seen, but he does not see; he is the object of information, never a subject in communication. – Michel Foucault, Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison
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As we feel seen, we might recall that it was on this date in 2000, that the dot.com bust effectively began. Between 1995 and its peak five days days earlier, on March 10, 2000, investments in the Nasdaq Composite stock market index rose from 1,006 to 5,048—a 400% gain fueled by the conviction that the internet would render every prior valuation framework obsolete. It did not.
On March 13, 2000, news that Japan had once again entered a recession triggered a global sell off that disproportionately affected technology stocks. Soon after, Yahoo! and eBay ended merger talks and the Nasdaq fell 2.6%; still, the S&P 500 rose 2.4% as investors shifted from strong performing technology stocks to poor performing established stocks. The market held steady on the 14th. Then, on this date 26 years ago, the broader market begin to drop… and kept dropping. By the end of the stock market downturn of 2002 (the “second chapter” in the correction that began in 2000), stocks had lost $5 trillion in market capitalization since the peak. At its trough on October 9, 2002, the NASDAQ-100 had dropped to 1,114, down 78% from its peak. It took 15 years for the Nasdaq to regain its March, 2000 peak.
#autocracy #Bentham #business #commerce #culture #Foucault #history #JeremyBentham #MichelFoucault #panopticon #politics #privacy #surveillance #Technology -
Human beings are very creative about how they create a surveillance state.
#panopticon #foucault #surveillance #police #state #sociology #anthropology #writerhttps://survivorliteracy.com/2026/03/04/35-the-panopticon-4/
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Human beings are very creative about how they create a surveillance state.
#panopticon #foucault #surveillance #police #state #sociology #anthropology #writer -
By Alekhines Gun
Arguably more than any other subgenre, doom metal is as much about aesthetic as it is raw substance. The meshing of tone with riffs of tectonic heft to compensate the substitution of speed with glacial pace is key to the formula, with many a genre great being defined by the two elements in equal measure. Long running doom outfit Slowmatics, first founded in 2004, are here to drop their eighth LP Atomicult, and have opted to modify this approach a little by making a cosmic themed album. Being a sucker for space and all its aural manifestations, I was intrigued to see whether such a relatively rare framework could mesh well with the force and requisite black-hole summoning doom is known for. Strap on your jet packs and pack extra oxygen, and let’s take a quick dip through the cosmos!
Atomicult is an album of two blended flavors. The first is the doom traditional, with slow-moving riffs coated in meteor debris. Not quite as outlandishly bass-shaking as the best of Electric Wizard nor as immediately in your face as Weedeater, the tone offers adequate fuzz to carry the plodding tempo with enough depth to qualify for dooms requisite heaviness. The vocals of Marty (who also serves on drums) have a positive, uplifting quality to them, all cleans with a solid timbre, making them somewhat comparable to more simplistic power metal in their positivity and charm. “Relics” offers a break from the doom proper for a Panopticon-esque strummed and plucked interlude where guitarists David and Chris show off some different songwriting chops while Marty gets to drop an octave and show off a little more of his range. Anyone looking for a more oppressive or depressive quality won’t find such things here, as Atomicult reaches out for a much more celestial approach.
The second flavor helps in this presentation by drenching the majority of the album in synthscapes. If you were a stan for the last Blood Incantation release there’s a lot for you to enjoy here, with tracks like “Night Grief” and “Physical Witching” slathering the guitars in all kinds of electronic leads and ambient fillings. These elements are no mere flourish, but a main staple of the album (only missing in a handful of songs) emphasizing the attempt at a genuinely ethereal journey. Atomicult isn’t an album for you to wallow in your sorrow or declare war on your enemies, but instead sounds in theme like it would be a blast to hear live if you were baked off your biscuit at a laser light show.
The problem is I am neither baked off my biscuit1 nor at a laser light show, and stripped of its contextual placements Atomicult has absolutely nothing to recommend it over its peers. Riffs are boring, meandering, and far from catchy, with nothing to justify their repetition. The tone lacks the violence to carry the minimalism, and the synths only work to serve as a saccharine distraction rather than imbibe a true sense of heavenly beauty in the void, both guitar rooted and otherwise. It doesn’t help that Marty has a nice set of pipes but keeps his vocals constrained to the limited spaces of the riffs instead of carving out melodies for counterpoint or emphasis, with only his oft-repeated lyrical refrain of “Behold the moon, the sun, the stars, the sky”2 hitting a melody anyone could call sing-along inducing. Literally everything across this offering hits the target of “Just enough”. The tone is just heavy enough, the riffs just heavy enough, the synths just colorful enough, the vocals just pretty enough to prevent me from declaring anything bad, but absolutely nothing here is engaging enough for me to call anything good.
In the end, Slowmatics have presented an album of all aesthetic and very little of substance. It’s clearly doom, it’s clearly space themed, and it’s clearly pretty, but it doesn’t captivate, stimulate, or in any way command attention from song to song and nothing sticks to the listener when the album ceases to play. This is disappointing, as I like doom, space themes, and pretty things, but Atomicult manages to aspire to check off the labels in name only. If you’re still on the prowl for extraterrestrial music or need more doom in your life in general, there’s certainly more unlistenable out there, but nothing here to make me recommend it as anything worthy of attention but for the deepest of the genre aficionados.
Rating: 2.0/5.0
DR: 8 | Format Reviewed: 320 kbps mp3
Label: Majestic Mountain Records
Website: Album Bandcamp
Releases Worldwide: September 12th, 2025#20 #2025 #Atomicult #BloodIncantation #DoomMetal #ElectricWizard #MajesticMountainRecords #Panopticon #Review #Reviews #Sep25 #Slomatics #UKMetal #Weedeater
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A lot of work on #FAIR has been rather cosmetic and focused on the easy F and A parts. For universities, it can often be a box-ticking exercise. As the excellent #WorldFAIR outputs indicate, it's often been about placing datasets on shelves rather than making the data reusable and accessible.
But I would push back and argue that, when #FAIR is used as a lens to see data from the standpoint of future (re-)use, it is a massive leap forward. Of course, it's then really a call to adopt robust data engineering at all stages in the data pipeline.
This is even more important in the age of #generativeML. Proper documentation of data provenance, licensing, transformations, structure and semantics is essential if we are going to keep track of what ostensible data comes from actual sensors or human observers or has been generated in predictable well-understood ways from such observations.
The CARE principles are also really important as they go into the ethical considerations for how we collect, manage, use and share data.
My only hesitation is not with the CARE principles or with the wording or with the fact that is immensely important for us to decolonialise our approach to information gathering. It's with the fact that they've become a reason to compartmentalise management of Indigenous knowledge and data and to treat the ethics of using those data as a narrowly defined issue. Focus on Indigenous data will help those already inclined to consider these issues to do so, but it risks making an exclusionary culture-war-adjacent issue.
Without in any way wanting to reduce our focus on the excellent reasons for #GIDA and others to foreground these principles, the challenges they address are the same ones that we all face in a capitalist and authoritarian #panopticon.
The CARE principles are part of what should be a much broader rallying cry for consent in data management everywhere. Of course, my suggesting this may just contribute to devaluing the proper concerns of Indigenous communities in this area, but I can only really see foresee the necessary IT underpinnings and practices getting mainstream adoption if they are seen as a central issue.
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@UlrikeHahn
> as Bluesky grows ... a company that performs sentiment analysis on social media activity about brands could easily create a whole-network indexDataFarming much? E tu, BS?
This is one of many unsavoury reasons why the ATProto network absolutely depends on a central 'firehose', designed to give any intermediary that operates a Relay a global view of the network.
The ATmosphere is a panopticon, *by design*.
(1/2)
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I'm pretty sure the "staging" environment is usually non-public, but I guess good enough to hand to an HOA. Seems unprofessional, but maybe not a huge deal.
And hey, look at #WebFlow getting those panopticon bucks.
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“A Marvel of Ingenuity” – The Library’s Main Reading Room – Timeless
Timeless Stories from the Library of Congress, ISSN 2836-9459
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“A Marvel of Ingenuity” — The Library’s Main Reading Room
December 4, 2025, Posted by: Neely Tucker
—This is a guest post by Jane A. Hudiburg, an analyst in the Congressional Research Service. It also appears in the September/October issue of the Library of Congress Magazine.
In 1888, Ainsworth Rand Spofford, the sixth Librarian of Congress, detailed his vision for the public reading room in the new Congressional Library — now known as the Thomas Jefferson Building. The space should follow the example set by the British Museum Library and be “circular or octagonal in form, so that all parts of it may be commanded” from the center.
To realize this panopticon concept, Spofford provided specifications for a “massive circular desk” that would give librarians and the Main Reading Room superintendent a view of every researcher, the card catalog and each alcove representing a major realm of knowledge.
Meanwhile, from the eye of the room’s domed ceiling, the figures in the aptly named painting “Human Understanding” could monitor the books springing forth from conveyor systems that connected the control room under the central desk to the stacks, the Capitol and eventually the John Adams Building and beyond. In her memoir “Thirty Years in Washington” (1901), Mary Cunningham Logan, the widow of Sen. John A. Logan, called the entire process — identifying, requesting and delivering books — a “marvel of ingenuity.”
The Library’s Main Reading Room as seen from high above. Photo: Shawn Miller.Since that observation, the ingenious process has changed. The computer catalog replaced the card catalog; Electronic Book Paging phased out the call slips sent by pneumatic tubes; the book carrier pulled by continuously moving chains ceased operation, as did its replacement — a specialized elevator that lifted books from the control room into the reading room.
The tunnel to the Capitol, which once allowed the quick transport of materials to members of Congress, closed prior to the construction of the Capitol Visitor Center. And, the Library began providing content online, allowing researchers all over the world to access its digitized collections. Still, the mahogany central desk remains a powerful symbol — a direct connection between knowledge and its seekers and the never-ending quest to deepen and expand all human understanding.
Continue/Read Original Article Here: “A Marvel of Ingenuity” — The Library’s Main Reading Room | Timeless
Tags: Blog, Library of Congress, Library of Congress Blog, Main Reading Room, Timeless, Timeless Stories from the Library of Congress#Blog #LibraryOfCongress #LibraryOfCongressBlog #MainReadingRoom #Timeless #TimelessStoriesFromTheLibraryOfCongress
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🤬 Panopticon patch Tuesday: Twitch requires Peter Thiel-funded Persona ID verification for some Affiliates to get their first payouts 🤬
#twitch #twitchnews #twitchaffiliates #personaid #persona #firstpayouts #peterthiel #idverification #faceid #streaming #gaming #creators #gamers #streamers #tech #technews #privacy #techbacklash #ageverification
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Eighteen Years Under One Banner: The BolesBlogs Constellation at Thirty
Today marks the eighteenth anniversary of the Boles Blogs Network gathering under a single domain. That formation date is 2008. Writing under one of the network’s earlier names, however, began much earlier, in 1996, when Go Inside Magazine opened a small storefront on a web that still ran on dial tone and patience. The full arc now covers thirty years, fourteen blogs gathered under the BolesBlogs banner, a sister site on SquareSpace launched during the pandemic, and a stubborn argument about what publishing ought to feel like when the writer answers to nobody but the reader.
Go Inside Magazine arrived in a year when the web was still a frontier rumor. There was no Facebook, no Twitter, no Substack, no Medium, no YouTube, no LinkedIn newsletter, no TikTok essay format. There was almost nothing except homemade pages and the hum of a 28.8 modem. We were all volunteers from day one. Nobody was paid then, and nobody has been paid since. No banner ad has ever loaded on the page. We wrote because the act of publishing without a printer felt new, and because the conversation that came back from readers, sentences typed into a comment field by a stranger in another country, made the whole enterprise feel like a workshop the size of the planet. That ethos has not moved an inch in three decades.
The reason for starting Go Inside in 1996 had two halves, and the second half mattered more than the first. The first half was the obvious one. I wanted to publish my own work without asking permission. In 1996 the traditional path for a young writer ran through agents who said no, magazine editors who said no, publishing house slush piles where manuscripts went to die unread, and gatekeepers at every threshold whose job was to keep most writers out. The web removed every one of those doors at once. The other half was less obvious and turned out to be the harder commitment. I wanted to find new writers looking for their first break and put their work in front of readers who would never have encountered them through the traditional channels. Over thirty years that ambition has produced over one hundred writers whose first published byline ran on a Boles property. Some kept writing for years afterward. Others wrote one piece, took the credit they needed, and moved on to the next thing in their lives. Both outcomes count. The honor of being the place where a writer’s first word reached a stranger is the kind of honor that does not require the writer to remember you afterward.
There is an irony hiding inside the second half. Discovering writers and publishing them means deciding which work goes up and which work does not, and that is the textbook definition of a gatekeeper. I have made my peace with the irony by preferring a different word. A gatekeeper says no by default and yes by exception. A publisher says yes by default to writers worth backing and treats the no as the rare and reasoned outcome. The job I have done for thirty years is the second one. The clearest evidence is the rejection record. I have never refused an earnest writer who came to the door looking for publication. Earnest is the operative word, and it carries weight. An earnest writer is one who has actually written something, who wants the work read, and who is willing to do the work of getting it ready. When the draft was rough, we revised together. When English was the writer’s second language, we edited line by line until the sentences carried the meaning the writer had intended in the first place. When a piece needed structural help, we rebuilt the structure together rather than handing back a rejection slip dressed up as feedback. The point of the open door was that the door actually opened. A publisher who keeps that promise has chosen a harder job than a gatekeeper, because the gatekeeper’s no closes the file and the publisher’s yes opens an editing relationship that can run for weeks. Thirty years of weeks adds up. That accumulated labor is the part of the operation that nobody sees from the outside, and it is the part that earns the word publisher honestly.
There is one more piece of the arrangement that deserves to be on the record. Every writer who came through the door knew the financial shape of the operation. No money was being made. New contributors were not paid. The regulars who stayed for years were not paid. I was not paid either, which was the part that mattered to most of them. Symmetry of zero is a different kind of contract from one-sided exploitation. A publisher pocketing revenue while telling writers their work is its own reward is running a scam. A publisher absorbing the costs out of pocket while putting other writers’ words in front of readers is running a magazine. Everyone who ever submitted to a Boles property knew which one this was, because the financial reality was never hidden. Writers chose to work to know rather than to be paid to write. That choice was theirs, made with full information about a venture that was never going to pay anyone, and three decades of contributors making the same choice is its own form of evidence about what the operation was.
In 2004, Go Inside became Urban Semiotic. The change marked a turn in voice and discipline. Urban Semiotic took the magazine impulse and pressed it through a tighter analytic lens, looking at the city as a sign system, the body as a text, the daily news as a rolling argument about who counts as visible and who gets erased. Writing sharpened. Readership shifted from curious browsers to people who came back twice a day to see what the next post said about the system they were already living inside.
Four years later, in 2008, the constellation gathered itself under BolesBlogs.com. By then the side projects had multiplied. Some had been running on TypePad since 2003. Others had been built on Movable Type going back to 2001. The federation had become difficult to maintain across three platforms with three login systems and three export routines. WordPress had matured enough by 2008 to absorb everything. The migration took months. The fourteen blogs that emerged on the BolesBlogs banner included sites that have since become standalone books on the Boles Books imprint: Scientific Aesthetic, RelationShaping, Carceral Nation, Panopticonic, and even Urban Semiotic with more in the production queue and more still in the drafting stage.
That movement from blog to book is worth pausing on. A blog post is a draft for a draft. The writer publishes a thought, lets the comment field test it, watches which sentences get quoted back, and revises in public over years. By the time a blog has run its useful course on a single subject, the manuscript is already written across hundreds of posts and thousands of reader responses. The book is the act of pulling the argument out of the archive and letting it stand on its own paper. Scientific Aesthetic ran for years as a working theory before becoming a manuscript. Carceral Nation accumulated case after case before the institutional autopsy could be written down in one sustained binding. Panopticonic watched the surveillance state thicken in slow motion across hundreds of posts before the book made the case in a single arc. The blogs were the laboratory. The books are the published findings.
In 2021, with most of the world locked indoors and gyms closed by public health order, BolesBells.com opened on SquareSpace. The pandemic had broken every publishing routine in ways nobody had time to think through clearly while it was happening. Sites went quiet. Some doubled their output. Readers were home, scrolling, reading more than they had in years, and looking for any voice that sounded like an actual human thinking through an actual situation. Kettlebell training had migrated from gym corners to living room floors during that period, and adult readers who wanted history, argument, and serious prose about the practice had almost nowhere to find such writing on a web filled with rep-count videos and supplement marketing. BolesBells.com opened to fill that quiet space. The site stayed on SquareSpace rather than WordPress, both because launching a clean new identity was easier outside the heavier BolesBlogs platform and because the visual register of the new venture wanted distance from the analytic prose of the older constellation. The series running there has expanded across The Get-Up, The Swing, and The Press, with The Bell Itself in development. Covid produced few good things. A small lineage of careful writing about the kettlebell tradition, hosted on its own page, written for adult readers, is one of them.
There is a sharper observation to make about thirty years of free writing on the open web, and it deserves its own paragraph. Every word on Go Inside, every word on Urban Semiotic, every word across the fourteen blogs of the BolesBlogs constellation, every word on BolesBells.com since 2021, has been published without a paywall, without a login wall, without a subscription tier, without a captcha barrier between the reader and the page.
That openness was a gift to readers. It was also, without our knowledge or consent, a feedstock. The expectation through 1996, 2004, 2008, all the way to 2018, was that the open web meant human readers reading at human pace. Industrial scraping for commercial training corpora was not a use case any writer on the open web of 1996 could have anticipated, opted into, or priced into the decision to publish for free. The robots.txt convention assumed good faith. The terms of service on personal blogs assumed good faith. Good faith turned out to be a one-way door. The large machine systems that now sit on top of the publishing economy were trained on text scraped from sites exactly like ours. Three decades of unpaid labor by volunteer writers, written for human readers in good faith, was harvested into training corpora and used to build commercial systems that now compete for the same attention the writing was meant to earn. Ethical accounting on that has not been settled. Lawsuits are working their way through the courts. Some writers will be paid. Many others will not.
The scraping itself was not the new problem. Other sites had been mirroring our work since the late 1990s. Pirate operators would copy articles, strip the byline, drop them onto a domain in some friendly jurisdiction, and assume distance and speed would protect them. The DMCA takedown system handled it. We filed. Hosts complied. Pirate sites either removed the stolen posts or had their service yanked at the upstream provider. Every notice we ever sent worked. The fight was visible, adversarial, sometimes slow, and on our side. Three decades of practice had built a reflex for spotting unauthorized republication and shutting it down. That reflex was useless against the new pattern. Machine-scale scraping arrived without notification, without preview, without an upstream provider to pressure, and without any removal mechanism after the fact.
By the time any of us on the open web understood what had happened, the words were already out of the barn and repopulating the new web inside machine outputs that nobody could trace back to a single original sentence. There is no DMCA for a training corpus. Text that landed inside one stayed there.
A note on platforms. WordPress has carried the bulk of the constellation since 2008 and carries it still. Two exceptions stand outside the WordPress install. PrairieVoice.com lives on its own stack to keep the documentary work clean of any infrastructure dependence on the larger network. BolesBells.com lives on SquareSpace, where it has run since 2021, kept separate to give the kettlebell writing a distinct visual identity and to spread platform risk across more than one vendor. WordPress itself, in 2026, sits in a strange and uncertain place. A civil war inside the WordPress ecosystem over the past two years has rattled long-time publishers.
The company that gave independent writers a printing press has spent recent quarters defending itself in public against its own commercial neighbors. Future direction of the underlying software is harder to predict now than at any point in the last fifteen years. We will keep watching. If we have to move, we will. Writing is the asset, the platform is the truck, and trucks can be replaced.
A note on blogging itself. The form is older now than most of its critics. Eulogies for blogging have been written and rewritten since 2010, when Twitter was supposed to kill it, and again in 2014, when Facebook was, and again in 2018, when Medium was, and again last year, when machine summarizers were. Every supposed assassin has been outlived by the form itself. The reason is unsentimental. A blog post is a piece of writing under the writer’s full control, on a domain the writer owns, in an archive the writer can take with them. Every other publishing format on the open web puts the writer inside someone else’s container. Container companies rise and fall. The writer’s own domain stays. As long as that asymmetry holds, the blog will hold. That hold is narrower than thriving, of course. Independent blog traffic has collapsed across the industry as search engines reward branded content and machine-generated summaries replace the click. The argument here is structural rather than commercial. The form has advantages no replacement format has matched. Survival is the claim being made. Growth is a separate question with separate answers.
The reader has been the silent partner in all of this. Eighteen years of comments, thirty years of email replies, a long conversation that has changed the writing more than the writing has changed the conversation. The best part of running a public archive is the reader who reads a sentence, thinks about it for a day, and writes back with the same sentence pointed in a direction the writer had not considered. That kind of reading is rare anywhere on the modern web.
It has not become rare here. Comment fields still work. Emails still arrive. Thinking still comes back. Thank you, in the most literal sense the words can carry, for being the reason the work is worth continuing.
What about the next eighteen years? Honest prediction is harder now than at any point in the last three decades. Machine summarizers are eating the publishing surface, stripping writing out of its source pages and feeding it back to readers without attribution or compensation. Platform consolidation and platform fracturing are happening simultaneously, sometimes inside the same company in the same week. Reader attention is being trained by recommendation systems to expect shorter forms, faster gratification, less argument. None of these forces are friendly to the long-form blog. None has killed it yet.
Will the BolesBlogs constellation be celebrating its fortieth anniversary in 2048? The writer who opened Go Inside Magazine in 1996 will be eighty-three years old by then. By 2048 the web will be unrecognizable from the web of 2026, just as the web of 2026 is unrecognizable from the web of 1996. Writing of some kind might still be here. This domain might still be here. Some version of the reader will still be here too. The bet is the same bet it was in 1996, which is that the act of publishing a true sentence on an open page, free of charge, with the comment field still open at the bottom, is worth doing for its own sake. That bet has paid off for thirty years. No reason exists to think it cannot pay off for thirty more.
A word about the accusation that surfaces every few years from readers who cannot believe what they are looking at. The charge is some version of “you must be working the backend,” meaning that a hidden revenue stream has to exist somewhere, a sponsorship deal off-page, a kickback, a quiet check from someone with an interest in keeping the writing online. People who make that charge cannot imagine anyone publishing at a deficit. Server costs, domain renewals, hosting fees, SSL certificates, backup storage, plugin licenses, all of it has been paid out of pocket for thirty years. No advertiser has ever cut a check, no sponsor has ever underwritten a post, no affiliate code has ever been embedded in a sentence. The answer to the accusation is the dullest answer available. We wrote because we loved writing. We published because we wanted to share thoughts and experiences with the wider mind we respected and sought out. Some readers found us. Some left us. Many stayed for thirty years. The math on the blogs themselves has always been negative on the spreadsheet and positive everywhere else.
To the readers who have been here from Go Inside, from Urban Semiotic, from the fourteen blogs that became BolesBlogs, from BolesBells across the Covid years, from the books that grew out of the posts: the work has always been for you. Without the reader, none of this writing would have purpose, and none of these archives would have weight. Eighteen years of the banner. Thirty years of writing. Whatever comes next is already underway.
#18Years #30Years #advertising #anniversary #blog #blogging #bolesBells #bolesBlogs #movabletype #prairieVoice #publishing #relationshaping #scientificAesthetic #substack #typepad #urbanSemiotic #wordpress #writing -
Eighteen Years Under One Banner: The BolesBlogs Constellation at Thirty
Today marks the eighteenth anniversary of the Boles Blogs Network gathering under a single domain. That formation date is 2008. Writing under one of the network’s earlier names, however, began much earlier, in 1996, when Go Inside Magazine opened a small storefront on a web that still ran on dial tone and patience. The full arc now covers thirty years, fourteen blogs gathered under the BolesBlogs banner, a sister site on SquareSpace launched during the pandemic, and a stubborn argument about what publishing ought to feel like when the writer answers to nobody but the reader.
Go Inside Magazine arrived in a year when the web was still a frontier rumor. There was no Facebook, no Twitter, no Substack, no Medium, no YouTube, no LinkedIn newsletter, no TikTok essay format. There was almost nothing except homemade pages and the hum of a 28.8 modem. We were all volunteers from day one. Nobody was paid then, and nobody has been paid since. No banner ad has ever loaded on the page. We wrote because the act of publishing without a printer felt new, and because the conversation that came back from readers, sentences typed into a comment field by a stranger in another country, made the whole enterprise feel like a workshop the size of the planet. That ethos has not moved an inch in three decades.
The reason for starting Go Inside in 1996 had two halves, and the second half mattered more than the first. The first half was the obvious one. I wanted to publish my own work without asking permission. In 1996 the traditional path for a young writer ran through agents who said no, magazine editors who said no, publishing house slush piles where manuscripts went to die unread, and gatekeepers at every threshold whose job was to keep most writers out. The web removed every one of those doors at once. The other half was less obvious and turned out to be the harder commitment. I wanted to find new writers looking for their first break and put their work in front of readers who would never have encountered them through the traditional channels. Over thirty years that ambition has produced over one hundred writers whose first published byline ran on a Boles property. Some kept writing for years afterward. Others wrote one piece, took the credit they needed, and moved on to the next thing in their lives. Both outcomes count. The honor of being the place where a writer’s first word reached a stranger is the kind of honor that does not require the writer to remember you afterward.
There is an irony hiding inside the second half. Discovering writers and publishing them means deciding which work goes up and which work does not, and that is the textbook definition of a gatekeeper. I have made my peace with the irony by preferring a different word. A gatekeeper says no by default and yes by exception. A publisher says yes by default to writers worth backing and treats the no as the rare and reasoned outcome. The job I have done for thirty years is the second one. The clearest evidence is the rejection record. I have never refused an earnest writer who came to the door looking for publication. Earnest is the operative word, and it carries weight. An earnest writer is one who has actually written something, who wants the work read, and who is willing to do the work of getting it ready. When the draft was rough, we revised together. When English was the writer’s second language, we edited line by line until the sentences carried the meaning the writer had intended in the first place. When a piece needed structural help, we rebuilt the structure together rather than handing back a rejection slip dressed up as feedback. The point of the open door was that the door actually opened. A publisher who keeps that promise has chosen a harder job than a gatekeeper, because the gatekeeper’s no closes the file and the publisher’s yes opens an editing relationship that can run for weeks. Thirty years of weeks adds up. That accumulated labor is the part of the operation that nobody sees from the outside, and it is the part that earns the word publisher honestly.
There is one more piece of the arrangement that deserves to be on the record. Every writer who came through the door knew the financial shape of the operation. No money was being made. New contributors were not paid. The regulars who stayed for years were not paid. I was not paid either, which was the part that mattered to most of them. Symmetry of zero is a different kind of contract from one-sided exploitation. A publisher pocketing revenue while telling writers their work is its own reward is running a scam. A publisher absorbing the costs out of pocket while putting other writers’ words in front of readers is running a magazine. Everyone who ever submitted to a Boles property knew which one this was, because the financial reality was never hidden. Writers chose to work to know rather than to be paid to write. That choice was theirs, made with full information about a venture that was never going to pay anyone, and three decades of contributors making the same choice is its own form of evidence about what the operation was.
In 2004, Go Inside became Urban Semiotic. The change marked a turn in voice and discipline. Urban Semiotic took the magazine impulse and pressed it through a tighter analytic lens, looking at the city as a sign system, the body as a text, the daily news as a rolling argument about who counts as visible and who gets erased. Writing sharpened. Readership shifted from curious browsers to people who came back twice a day to see what the next post said about the system they were already living inside.
Four years later, in 2008, the constellation gathered itself under BolesBlogs.com. By then the side projects had multiplied. Some had been running on TypePad since 2003. Others had been built on Movable Type going back to 2001. The federation had become difficult to maintain across three platforms with three login systems and three export routines. WordPress had matured enough by 2008 to absorb everything. The migration took months. The fourteen blogs that emerged on the BolesBlogs banner included sites that have since become standalone books on the Boles Books imprint: Scientific Aesthetic, RelationShaping, Carceral Nation, Panopticonic, and even Urban Semiotic with more in the production queue and more still in the drafting stage.
That movement from blog to book is worth pausing on. A blog post is a draft for a draft. The writer publishes a thought, lets the comment field test it, watches which sentences get quoted back, and revises in public over years. By the time a blog has run its useful course on a single subject, the manuscript is already written across hundreds of posts and thousands of reader responses. The book is the act of pulling the argument out of the archive and letting it stand on its own paper. Scientific Aesthetic ran for years as a working theory before becoming a manuscript. Carceral Nation accumulated case after case before the institutional autopsy could be written down in one sustained binding. Panopticonic watched the surveillance state thicken in slow motion across hundreds of posts before the book made the case in a single arc. The blogs were the laboratory. The books are the published findings.
In 2021, with most of the world locked indoors and gyms closed by public health order, BolesBells.com opened on SquareSpace. The pandemic had broken every publishing routine in ways nobody had time to think through clearly while it was happening. Sites went quiet. Some doubled their output. Readers were home, scrolling, reading more than they had in years, and looking for any voice that sounded like an actual human thinking through an actual situation. Kettlebell training had migrated from gym corners to living room floors during that period, and adult readers who wanted history, argument, and serious prose about the practice had almost nowhere to find such writing on a web filled with rep-count videos and supplement marketing. BolesBells.com opened to fill that quiet space. The site stayed on SquareSpace rather than WordPress, both because launching a clean new identity was easier outside the heavier BolesBlogs platform and because the visual register of the new venture wanted distance from the analytic prose of the older constellation. The series running there has expanded across The Get-Up, The Swing, and The Press, with The Bell Itself in development. Covid produced few good things. A small lineage of careful writing about the kettlebell tradition, hosted on its own page, written for adult readers, is one of them.
There is a sharper observation to make about thirty years of free writing on the open web, and it deserves its own paragraph. Every word on Go Inside, every word on Urban Semiotic, every word across the fourteen blogs of the BolesBlogs constellation, every word on BolesBells.com since 2021, has been published without a paywall, without a login wall, without a subscription tier, without a captcha barrier between the reader and the page.
That openness was a gift to readers. It was also, without our knowledge or consent, a feedstock. The expectation through 1996, 2004, 2008, all the way to 2018, was that the open web meant human readers reading at human pace. Industrial scraping for commercial training corpora was not a use case any writer on the open web of 1996 could have anticipated, opted into, or priced into the decision to publish for free. The robots.txt convention assumed good faith. The terms of service on personal blogs assumed good faith. Good faith turned out to be a one-way door. The large machine systems that now sit on top of the publishing economy were trained on text scraped from sites exactly like ours. Three decades of unpaid labor by volunteer writers, written for human readers in good faith, was harvested into training corpora and used to build commercial systems that now compete for the same attention the writing was meant to earn. Ethical accounting on that has not been settled. Lawsuits are working their way through the courts. Some writers will be paid. Many others will not.
The scraping itself was not the new problem. Other sites had been mirroring our work since the late 1990s. Pirate operators would copy articles, strip the byline, drop them onto a domain in some friendly jurisdiction, and assume distance and speed would protect them. The DMCA takedown system handled it. We filed. Hosts complied. Pirate sites either removed the stolen posts or had their service yanked at the upstream provider. Every notice we ever sent worked. The fight was visible, adversarial, sometimes slow, and on our side. Three decades of practice had built a reflex for spotting unauthorized republication and shutting it down. That reflex was useless against the new pattern. Machine-scale scraping arrived without notification, without preview, without an upstream provider to pressure, and without any removal mechanism after the fact.
By the time any of us on the open web understood what had happened, the words were already out of the barn and repopulating the new web inside machine outputs that nobody could trace back to a single original sentence. There is no DMCA for a training corpus. Text that landed inside one stayed there.
A note on platforms. WordPress has carried the bulk of the constellation since 2008 and carries it still. Two exceptions stand outside the WordPress install. PrairieVoice.com lives on its own stack to keep the documentary work clean of any infrastructure dependence on the larger network. BolesBells.com lives on SquareSpace, where it has run since 2021, kept separate to give the kettlebell writing a distinct visual identity and to spread platform risk across more than one vendor. WordPress itself, in 2026, sits in a strange and uncertain place. A civil war inside the WordPress ecosystem over the past two years has rattled long-time publishers.
The company that gave independent writers a printing press has spent recent quarters defending itself in public against its own commercial neighbors. Future direction of the underlying software is harder to predict now than at any point in the last fifteen years. We will keep watching. If we have to move, we will. Writing is the asset, the platform is the truck, and trucks can be replaced.
A note on blogging itself. The form is older now than most of its critics. Eulogies for blogging have been written and rewritten since 2010, when Twitter was supposed to kill it, and again in 2014, when Facebook was, and again in 2018, when Medium was, and again last year, when machine summarizers were. Every supposed assassin has been outlived by the form itself. The reason is unsentimental. A blog post is a piece of writing under the writer’s full control, on a domain the writer owns, in an archive the writer can take with them. Every other publishing format on the open web puts the writer inside someone else’s container. Container companies rise and fall. The writer’s own domain stays. As long as that asymmetry holds, the blog will hold. That hold is narrower than thriving, of course. Independent blog traffic has collapsed across the industry as search engines reward branded content and machine-generated summaries replace the click. The argument here is structural rather than commercial. The form has advantages no replacement format has matched. Survival is the claim being made. Growth is a separate question with separate answers.
The reader has been the silent partner in all of this. Eighteen years of comments, thirty years of email replies, a long conversation that has changed the writing more than the writing has changed the conversation. The best part of running a public archive is the reader who reads a sentence, thinks about it for a day, and writes back with the same sentence pointed in a direction the writer had not considered. That kind of reading is rare anywhere on the modern web.
It has not become rare here. Comment fields still work. Emails still arrive. Thinking still comes back. Thank you, in the most literal sense the words can carry, for being the reason the work is worth continuing.
What about the next eighteen years? Honest prediction is harder now than at any point in the last three decades. Machine summarizers are eating the publishing surface, stripping writing out of its source pages and feeding it back to readers without attribution or compensation. Platform consolidation and platform fracturing are happening simultaneously, sometimes inside the same company in the same week. Reader attention is being trained by recommendation systems to expect shorter forms, faster gratification, less argument. None of these forces are friendly to the long-form blog. None has killed it yet.
Will the BolesBlogs constellation be celebrating its fortieth anniversary in 2048? The writer who opened Go Inside Magazine in 1996 will be eighty-three years old by then. By 2048 the web will be unrecognizable from the web of 2026, just as the web of 2026 is unrecognizable from the web of 1996. Writing of some kind might still be here. This domain might still be here. Some version of the reader will still be here too. The bet is the same bet it was in 1996, which is that the act of publishing a true sentence on an open page, free of charge, with the comment field still open at the bottom, is worth doing for its own sake. That bet has paid off for thirty years. No reason exists to think it cannot pay off for thirty more.
A word about the accusation that surfaces every few years from readers who cannot believe what they are looking at. The charge is some version of “you must be working the backend,” meaning that a hidden revenue stream has to exist somewhere, a sponsorship deal off-page, a kickback, a quiet check from someone with an interest in keeping the writing online. People who make that charge cannot imagine anyone publishing at a deficit. Server costs, domain renewals, hosting fees, SSL certificates, backup storage, plugin licenses, all of it has been paid out of pocket for thirty years. No advertiser has ever cut a check, no sponsor has ever underwritten a post, no affiliate code has ever been embedded in a sentence. The answer to the accusation is the dullest answer available. We wrote because we loved writing. We published because we wanted to share thoughts and experiences with the wider mind we respected and sought out. Some readers found us. Some left us. Many stayed for thirty years. The math on the blogs themselves has always been negative on the spreadsheet and positive everywhere else.
To the readers who have been here from Go Inside, from Urban Semiotic, from the fourteen blogs that became BolesBlogs, from BolesBells across the Covid years, from the books that grew out of the posts: the work has always been for you. Without the reader, none of this writing would have purpose, and none of these archives would have weight. Eighteen years of the banner. Thirty years of writing. Whatever comes next is already underway.
#18Years #30Years #advertising #anniversary #blog #blogging #bolesBells #bolesBlogs #movabletype #prairieVoice #publishing #relationshaping #scientificAesthetic #substack #typepad #urbanSemiotic #wordpress #writing -
By Alekhines Gun
Arguably more than any other subgenre, doom metal is as much about aesthetic as it is raw substance. The meshing of tone with riffs of tectonic heft to compensate the substitution of speed with glacial pace is key to the formula, with many a genre great being defined by the two elements in equal measure. Long running doom outfit Slowmatics, first founded in 2004, are here to drop their eighth LP Atomicult, and have opted to modify this approach a little by making a cosmic themed album. Being a sucker for space and all its aural manifestations, I was intrigued to see whether such a relatively rare framework could mesh well with the force and requisite black-hole summoning doom is known for. Strap on your jet packs and pack extra oxygen, and let’s take a quick dip through the cosmos!
Atomicult is an album of two blended flavors. The first is the doom traditional, with slow-moving riffs coated in meteor debris. Not quite as outlandishly bass-shaking as the best of Electric Wizard nor as immediately in your face as Weedeater, the tone offers adequate fuzz to carry the plodding tempo with enough depth to qualify for dooms requisite heaviness. The vocals of Marty (who also serves on drums) have a positive, uplifting quality to them, all cleans with a solid timbre, making them somewhat comparable to more simplistic power metal in their positivity and charm. “Relics” offers a break from the doom proper for a Panopticon-esque strummed and plucked interlude where guitarists David and Chris show off some different songwriting chops while Marty gets to drop an octave and show off a little more of his range. Anyone looking for a more oppressive or depressive quality won’t find such things here, as Atomicult reaches out for a much more celestial approach.
The second flavor helps in this presentation by drenching the majority of the album in synthscapes. If you were a stan for the last Blood Incantation release there’s a lot for you to enjoy here, with tracks like “Night Grief” and “Physical Witching” slathering the guitars in all kinds of electronic leads and ambient fillings. These elements are no mere flourish, but a main staple of the album (only missing in a handful of songs) emphasizing the attempt at a genuinely ethereal journey. Atomicult isn’t an album for you to wallow in your sorrow or declare war on your enemies, but instead sounds in theme like it would be a blast to hear live if you were baked off your biscuit at a laser light show.
The problem is I am neither baked off my biscuit1 nor at a laser light show, and stripped of its contextual placements Atomicult has absolutely nothing to recommend it over its peers. Riffs are boring, meandering, and far from catchy, with nothing to justify their repetition. The tone lacks the violence to carry the minimalism, and the synths only work to serve as a saccharine distraction rather than imbibe a true sense of heavenly beauty in the void, both guitar rooted and otherwise. It doesn’t help that Marty has a nice set of pipes but keeps his vocals constrained to the limited spaces of the riffs instead of carving out melodies for counterpoint or emphasis, with only his oft-repeated lyrical refrain of “Behold the moon, the sun, the stars, the sky”2 hitting a melody anyone could call sing-along inducing. Literally everything across this offering hits the target of “Just enough”. The tone is just heavy enough, the riffs just heavy enough, the synths just colorful enough, the vocals just pretty enough to prevent me from declaring anything bad, but absolutely nothing here is engaging enough for me to call anything good.
In the end, Slowmatics have presented an album of all aesthetic and very little of substance. It’s clearly doom, it’s clearly space themed, and it’s clearly pretty, but it doesn’t captivate, stimulate, or in any way command attention from song to song and nothing sticks to the listener when the album ceases to play. This is disappointing, as I like doom, space themes, and pretty things, but Atomicult manages to aspire to check off the labels in name only. If you’re still on the prowl for extraterrestrial music or need more doom in your life in general, there’s certainly more unlistenable out there, but nothing here to make me recommend it as anything worthy of attention but for the deepest of the genre aficionados.
Rating: 2.0/5.0
DR: 8 | Format Reviewed: 320 kbps mp3
Label: Majestic Mountain Records
Website: Album Bandcamp
Releases Worldwide: September 12th, 2025#20 #2025 #Atomicult #BloodIncantation #DoomMetal #ElectricWizard #MajesticMountainRecords #Panopticon #Review #Reviews #Sep25 #Slomatics #UKMetal #Weedeater
-
By Alekhines Gun
Arguably more than any other subgenre, doom metal is as much about aesthetic as it is raw substance. The meshing of tone with riffs of tectonic heft to compensate the substitution of speed with glacial pace is key to the formula, with many a genre great being defined by the two elements in equal measure. Long running doom outfit Slowmatics, first founded in 2004, are here to drop their eighth LP Atomicult, and have opted to modify this approach a little by making a cosmic themed album. Being a sucker for space and all its aural manifestations, I was intrigued to see whether such a relatively rare framework could mesh well with the force and requisite black-hole summoning doom is known for. Strap on your jet packs and pack extra oxygen, and let’s take a quick dip through the cosmos!
Atomicult is an album of two blended flavors. The first is the doom traditional, with slow-moving riffs coated in meteor debris. Not quite as outlandishly bass-shaking as the best of Electric Wizard nor as immediately in your face as Weedeater, the tone offers adequate fuzz to carry the plodding tempo with enough depth to qualify for dooms requisite heaviness. The vocals of Marty (who also serves on drums) have a positive, uplifting quality to them, all cleans with a solid timbre, making them somewhat comparable to more simplistic power metal in their positivity and charm. “Relics” offers a break from the doom proper for a Panopticon-esque strummed and plucked interlude where guitarists David and Chris show off some different songwriting chops while Marty gets to drop an octave and show off a little more of his range. Anyone looking for a more oppressive or depressive quality won’t find such things here, as Atomicult reaches out for a much more celestial approach.
The second flavor helps in this presentation by drenching the majority of the album in synthscapes. If you were a stan for the last Blood Incantation release there’s a lot for you to enjoy here, with tracks like “Night Grief” and “Physical Witching” slathering the guitars in all kinds of electronic leads and ambient fillings. These elements are no mere flourish, but a main staple of the album (only missing in a handful of songs) emphasizing the attempt at a genuinely ethereal journey. Atomicult isn’t an album for you to wallow in your sorrow or declare war on your enemies, but instead sounds in theme like it would be a blast to hear live if you were baked off your biscuit at a laser light show.
The problem is I am neither baked off my biscuit1 nor at a laser light show, and stripped of its contextual placements Atomicult has absolutely nothing to recommend it over its peers. Riffs are boring, meandering, and far from catchy, with nothing to justify their repetition. The tone lacks the violence to carry the minimalism, and the synths only work to serve as a saccharine distraction rather than imbibe a true sense of heavenly beauty in the void, both guitar rooted and otherwise. It doesn’t help that Marty has a nice set of pipes but keeps his vocals constrained to the limited spaces of the riffs instead of carving out melodies for counterpoint or emphasis, with only his oft-repeated lyrical refrain of “Behold the moon, the sun, the stars, the sky”2 hitting a melody anyone could call sing-along inducing. Literally everything across this offering hits the target of “Just enough”. The tone is just heavy enough, the riffs just heavy enough, the synths just colorful enough, the vocals just pretty enough to prevent me from declaring anything bad, but absolutely nothing here is engaging enough for me to call anything good.
In the end, Slowmatics have presented an album of all aesthetic and very little of substance. It’s clearly doom, it’s clearly space themed, and it’s clearly pretty, but it doesn’t captivate, stimulate, or in any way command attention from song to song and nothing sticks to the listener when the album ceases to play. This is disappointing, as I like doom, space themes, and pretty things, but Atomicult manages to aspire to check off the labels in name only. If you’re still on the prowl for extraterrestrial music or need more doom in your life in general, there’s certainly more unlistenable out there, but nothing here to make me recommend it as anything worthy of attention but for the deepest of the genre aficionados.
Rating: 2.0/5.0
DR: 8 | Format Reviewed: 320 kbps mp3
Label: Majestic Mountain Records
Website: Album Bandcamp
Releases Worldwide: September 12th, 2025#20 #2025 #Atomicult #BloodIncantation #DoomMetal #ElectricWizard #MajesticMountainRecords #Panopticon #Review #Reviews #Sep25 #Slomatics #UKMetal #Weedeater
-
By Alekhines Gun
Arguably more than any other subgenre, doom metal is as much about aesthetic as it is raw substance. The meshing of tone with riffs of tectonic heft to compensate the substitution of speed with glacial pace is key to the formula, with many a genre great being defined by the two elements in equal measure. Long running doom outfit Slowmatics, first founded in 2004, are here to drop their eighth LP Atomicult, and have opted to modify this approach a little by making a cosmic themed album. Being a sucker for space and all its aural manifestations, I was intrigued to see whether such a relatively rare framework could mesh well with the force and requisite black-hole summoning doom is known for. Strap on your jet packs and pack extra oxygen, and let’s take a quick dip through the cosmos!
Atomicult is an album of two blended flavors. The first is the doom traditional, with slow-moving riffs coated in meteor debris. Not quite as outlandishly bass-shaking as the best of Electric Wizard nor as immediately in your face as Weedeater, the tone offers adequate fuzz to carry the plodding tempo with enough depth to qualify for dooms requisite heaviness. The vocals of Marty (who also serves on drums) have a positive, uplifting quality to them, all cleans with a solid timbre, making them somewhat comparable to more simplistic power metal in their positivity and charm. “Relics” offers a break from the doom proper for a Panopticon-esque strummed and plucked interlude where guitarists David and Chris show off some different songwriting chops while Marty gets to drop an octave and show off a little more of his range. Anyone looking for a more oppressive or depressive quality won’t find such things here, as Atomicult reaches out for a much more celestial approach.
The second flavor helps in this presentation by drenching the majority of the album in synthscapes. If you were a stan for the last Blood Incantation release there’s a lot for you to enjoy here, with tracks like “Night Grief” and “Physical Witching” slathering the guitars in all kinds of electronic leads and ambient fillings. These elements are no mere flourish, but a main staple of the album (only missing in a handful of songs) emphasizing the attempt at a genuinely ethereal journey. Atomicult isn’t an album for you to wallow in your sorrow or declare war on your enemies, but instead sounds in theme like it would be a blast to hear live if you were baked off your biscuit at a laser light show.
The problem is I am neither baked off my biscuit1 nor at a laser light show, and stripped of its contextual placements Atomicult has absolutely nothing to recommend it over its peers. Riffs are boring, meandering, and far from catchy, with nothing to justify their repetition. The tone lacks the violence to carry the minimalism, and the synths only work to serve as a saccharine distraction rather than imbibe a true sense of heavenly beauty in the void, both guitar rooted and otherwise. It doesn’t help that Marty has a nice set of pipes but keeps his vocals constrained to the limited spaces of the riffs instead of carving out melodies for counterpoint or emphasis, with only his oft-repeated lyrical refrain of “Behold the moon, the sun, the stars, the sky”2 hitting a melody anyone could call sing-along inducing. Literally everything across this offering hits the target of “Just enough”. The tone is just heavy enough, the riffs just heavy enough, the synths just colorful enough, the vocals just pretty enough to prevent me from declaring anything bad, but absolutely nothing here is engaging enough for me to call anything good.
In the end, Slowmatics have presented an album of all aesthetic and very little of substance. It’s clearly doom, it’s clearly space themed, and it’s clearly pretty, but it doesn’t captivate, stimulate, or in any way command attention from song to song and nothing sticks to the listener when the album ceases to play. This is disappointing, as I like doom, space themes, and pretty things, but Atomicult manages to aspire to check off the labels in name only. If you’re still on the prowl for extraterrestrial music or need more doom in your life in general, there’s certainly more unlistenable out there, but nothing here to make me recommend it as anything worthy of attention but for the deepest of the genre aficionados.
Rating: 2.0/5.0
DR: 8 | Format Reviewed: 320 kbps mp3
Label: Majestic Mountain Records
Website: Album Bandcamp
Releases Worldwide: September 12th, 2025#20 #2025 #Atomicult #BloodIncantation #DoomMetal #ElectricWizard #MajesticMountainRecords #Panopticon #Review #Reviews #Sep25 #Slomatics #UKMetal #Weedeater
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Panopticon – Laurentian Blue Review
By Mystikus Hugebeard
With the mammoth1 Panopticon ranking and the electrifying Månegarm review behind us, we can now look towards the album that the ranking was made in anticipation of: Laurentian Blue. What we weren’t quite expecting was that Laurentian Blue would be an unusual album to follow the ranking. After ten albums of post-black metal, this is the first standalone Panopticon work of purely dark, folksy Americana.2 It goes without saying that Americana has ever been a key component to the Panopticon soundscape, so do not mistake “unusual” for “unwelcome.” After all, Laurentian Blue is unquestionably a Panopticon album, for it embodies the same soul of Panopticon’s music that Thus Spoke eloquently illuminated in her introduction to the ranking: “an immense sense of drama, emotional intensity, and an unpretentious, honest heart.”
Not only is Laurentian Blue a dark folk/americana album, it is unapologetic about it. Laurentian Blue is confidently written and deliberate in its minimalism. The instrumentation is kept strictly to the bare necessities: Lunn picks and strums away at his guitar as he sings with the warmth of a crackling fire, with sparse, harmonizing violins as accompaniment. The consecutive exceptions come in the twang of “An Argument with God” (which is also the only song with any percussion) and the bluegrass “Irony and Causality,” which serve as welcome jolts to the pacing, but the bulk of Laurentian Blue is the sort of somber Americana in “Ever North” and “This Mortal Coil’s Rusted.” It reminds one of the Appalachia iteration of Osi and the Jupiter, with a stronger country lilt heard most clearly in “Down Along the Border.” While the guitarwork in Laurentian Blue is enjoyable, whether it takes the form of wistful melodies (“The Poetry in Roadkill”) or steely strumming (“Ever North,”) the focus cannot help but rest on Lunn’s voice and lyrical work.
As always, Lunn is a commanding songwriter fluent in the emotions he wants a song to convey. Nary a note or a word wasted, cutting straight to the heart of what he wants to express. Laurentian Blue is resolute in its deeply depressive lyricism, which becomes inescapable due to the music’s minimalist nature.3 Lines like “And if I needed you to watch me slip away // I’ll find you on the other side some day” (“Down Along the Border”) and “the lie that I forced myself to believe // that I never wasted a breath…” (“Ever North”) carry a catharsis that engulfs you, further strengthened by the preternaturally well-timed violins. Sparse though they may be, they’re beautifully implemented, often swelling at just the right moment like in the chorus of “The Poetry of Roadkill.” With focus this unhindered, lyrics that fail to connect are a greater danger to a song’s impact. The Hemingway-esque bluntness of “And morality ain’t dogmatic // but instead practical // and an individual // type of thing” is compelling, but it lacks the poetry present in the rest of the album, and the accompanying music doesn’t sustain the six-minute runtime.
Through the poetic lyrical work and musical minimalism, Laurentian Blue is emotionally consistent, yet therein lies what also makes it a more challenging album. Lunn’s voice is kept adamantly deadpan throughout, indifferently asking you to engage with Laurentian Blue according to its own terms rather than manipulating your emotions. This can create a disconnect; as the violins swell and the notes ascend when Lunn sings the first “Look for me // ever north,” (“Ever North”), I selfishly feel unfulfilled when the notes dispassionately descend in the second. Other times, his singing style makes for some compelling friction. “Irony and Causality” is easily the most energetic song, and is a fascinating backdrop for the deadpan delivery of “Nothing matters when you die // you can only hope time flies // and someone will visit your grave.” Maintaining such a somber tone across the album is a deliberate choice, one that works through Lunn’s songwriting finesse. But it’s a sadness that’s more aptly felt when you’re already predisposed to such feelings.
Laurentian Blue will not be for everyone. It’s a singular emotional work that doesn’t guide your feelings, but rather presents its own emotions with understated grace and indifference. But it’s only natural that the appeal of a work this personal will ultimately come down to personal preference. Regardless of one’s taste for Americana and dark folk, Laurentian Blue is nevertheless a well-written collection of songs by a well-proven songwriter with a strong connection and understanding of the genre. You might need to be in the right mood for Laurentian Blue, but if that mood should find you, then Laurentian Blue will be a knowing, empathetic embrace.
Rating: Very Good
DR: 12 | Format Reviewed: 320 kbps
Label: Bindrune Recordings
Websites: facebook | bandcamp
Releases Worldwide: August 15th, 2025#2025 #35 #AmericanMetal #Americana #Aug25 #BindruneRecordings #Country #DarkFolk #LaurentianBlue #Panopticon #Review #Reviews
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Weft – The Splintered Oar Review
Black metal and the violin go together like peanut butter and jelly, which makes it particularly exciting when…
#NewsBeep #News #US #USA #UnitedStates #UnitedStatesOfAmerica #Music #2025 #3.0 #AmericanMetal #americana #BindruneRecordings #BlackMetal #Dec25 #Dzö-nga #Entertainment #FolkMetal #Panopticon #ProgressiveBlackMetal #ProgressiveMetal #review #reviews #Saor #TheSplinteredOar #Weft #Windfaerer
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