The spite, hate, rage, apathy and mild irritation thread...

[morange]

I was thinking the other day how the digitization of currency has only made it easier for the rich to keep it away from the rest of us. You can kill them, they're only human, but you can't get your hands on their wealth. But currency is an abstraction, and it's value is based on the assumption that it will eventually exchanged for something IRL. Currency that is never spent is nothing; it may as well not exist. It's no loss to society for billionaires' unspent fortunes to disappear into nothing.

[Blackened Soul]

That’s why escape from la is the best ending

[dubkitty]

when i went in for my most recent eye examination they found that my cataracts had progressed to the point that my right eye is just producing a fuzzy blur that my brain screens out, so i have to get them taken care of. the procedure itself is one thing...people i know including my girlfriend have had them done with no trouble, but i'm afraid of doctors and hospitals because i was sick so much as a kid so there's that. so much so that my back has been giving me terrible shit for the last 2 years but Becky had to bug on me to set up an evaluation (so i have that to look forward to as well...woo hoo). it's also incredibly time-consuming; i have a total of eight appointments (SO FAR!) spanning 6/3 to 8/26, with the actual stuff happening 7/9 and 7/23. i really didn't need this level of complication when i'm already pretty overloaded, but i kind of need to see, you know? speaking of which, the optometrist also informed me that i exhibit "the earliest stage of macular degeneration" so if i live long enough i have blindness to look forward to. maybe the fascists will have killed me by then.

i'm also dealing with Becky, having injured her back while driving and aggravated it in a fall at home, currently being in a UVA (University of Virginia...the abbreviation is another odd local custom) Hospital-associated rehab facility getting physical therapy and other treatment. she's currently wearing a huge back brace that embraces her torso like some kind of weird alien life form. obviously this is very stressful for her, so i'm going over there every day for lunch and dinner. it's only 12 minutes from my apartment so it's not a huge hassle, but over time it gets kind of draining. i'm all she has, though, so i have to take care of her. and it's not as if she's been in rosy good health for the last 5 years, either...with her medical history there's a non-zero chance she'll drop dead at any minute. but as the Super Chicken theme says, i knew the job was dangerous when i took it.

https://youtu.be/FKss2pBYQ6Y?si=V4ExpF46G4RwFXO3

[dubkitty]

when i'm in a bad mood i point out my health problems and advise people not to get this old if they can help it. it's no fun when fundamental shit stops working properly, and at 68 that's becoming a bigger factor as time goes on.

[dubkitty]

i’m also a bit off-kilter because my antidepressant dose was decreased…i’ve been backing down the dosage from the huge amount i took in the 10s, but this was unintentional. the psychiatrist renewed my prescription at 100mg rather than 150. he’s been sick for months and was about to get a pacemaker. i figured “OK, this is my time to go down another 50mg.” i’m not significantly more depressed, but the bipolar 2 shit is creeping in. i’m busily obsessing over a raft of projects, ordering stuff right up to the edge of zero balance, and am fairly hypersexual. which i don’t mind because my depression had me fairly indifferent for a couple of months. always fun to discover what your brain wants to do as it’s actually doing it.

if i do all right at 100, there’s no therapeutic dose much lower than that. i wouldn’t mind stopping if i could do it without blowing up my life…i hate the persistent side effects that have been troublesome for years. not doing it any time soon though…with the cataract thing and being evaluated for potential back surgery/treatment i’ll need to hang on to what stability i possess. so that wouldn’t be till autumn at the absolute earliest.

[dubkitty]

here’s a small but infuriating thing: i’m curious about tje Guild Kim Thayil model Polara because it allegedly has repros of the 70s oversized ‘buckers in his favorite OG Polara. can i find a single demo that does anything but regurgitate his riffs in his (distorted) settings? no, of course not! why would anyone want to do anything else with it?

[Gone Fission]

I had quite deliberately left thanks on one video for that Tom Delonge Fender Starcaster for the use of non-BLink 182 riffs. I get it.

(I really wonder at people who sound the same as their heroes on their heroes’ gear. From my own experience and a lot of stories of famous guitarists figuring out their own gear thing that seems totally unnatural.)

[dubkitty]

if i cared to make the investment i could do a better Jerry Garcia than at least 85% of the guys who play in Dead copy bands. mot to mention a better Phil Lesh than at least 50% of the bassists. i’d sooner do just about anything else, though…the total corruption of everything in that scene left such a bad taste in my mouth that i listen to them once every couple of months, and they were my favorite band for decades.

but that’s a whole other level of spite, rage, &cie.

[dubkitty]

i managed to find a Polara demo that included enough clean sounds on all pickups that i could get a feel for it. as i rather expected, i like the DeArmond GoldTone humbuckers in the DeArmond M-75 better. if i didn't have it, i would probably be interested. they are rather nice-sounding pickups, and the price is startlingly reasonable. NOTE: these are not the same pickups as in the Polara Deluxe or any other Polara model. as a public service, here's a link that should go right to the clean sounds:

https://youtu.be/XJhz1Mj47yQ?si=zv7Jd2Noq-aHgoKc&t=440

[Gone Fission]

Your Guild jaunts are making me question my younger life choices. When I was a kid used shops used to be lousy with Guild electrics and they had no cachet at all. But I probably would have been an idiot and replaced the stock pickups if I had gone down that road.

[Blackened Soul]

I only remember seeing the bluesbirds and acoustics outside of vintage ones and used pilot basses in the mid 90s… a think I saw one Polara at a guitar center and it was $$$ still… when it comes to guitars of the grunge gods it’s the coolest one

I rembemer when they rolled out the de armond stuff a lot of it was cool, but still to expensive for me at the time…

[dubkitty]

yeah, that was a classic blunder by FMIC. too nice to be budget, too expensive for what they were.

i was never that much of a Guild guy at all. stumbling over the used Aristocrat in a shop was what did it. after that i was like "what else do you guys have that i like?" i always loved the Chicago blues guys who played Starfires, most notably Buddy Guy and Son Seals, but i would no sooner copy Buddy than Hendrix. some things you don't fuck with. plus i already had an ES-335. and i never took the DeArmonds seriously until i wound up with the M-75T as part of an intended parlay where i bought it along with a Guild Jetstar with a repaired neck break...people on the Gretsch Pages HATED them because they weren't "accurate" and the DeArmond 2K pickups looked but didn't sound like Dynasonics. sometimes letting community sentiment be your guide gets you stuck up the river. the only things keeping me from going more Guild/DeArmond crazy is that most of the DeArmonds aren't that interesting and sometimes, as in the case of the X-155 archtop, sell for as much as a new Guild, that some of their output is redundant to things i already have, and that i'm not really in the market for a jazz guitar because i do not play no jazz. i would leap at the opportunity to get a Starfire bass or their Aristocrat short-scale M-85. i've wanted a Starfire Bass since i was a kid watching Jack Casady on TV.

[dubkitty]

i still don't understand why FMIC fumbled Guild so badly while doing so well with Gretsch. i have to think that some of it was Joe Carducci, the guy who was Gretsch's biggest promoter. i think he was officially their product manager. that dude lived and breathed Gretsch, and cared about what the enthusiasts thought of their stuff. they made changes to the product line based on what folks on the Gretsch Pages argued for, and traveled around the country hosting "Roundups" where Gretsch fand would gather, jam, and such and Joe would give away thousands of dollars of merchandise. some of it was string packs and those tiny tweed amps they did in the 00s, but at one a woman got a brand new Country Club which at that time was over $3000 new, and at another someone got a Black Penguin which was similarly pricey. when he retired they went a bit wonky.

NOT THE JOE CARDUCCI WHO RAN SST RECORDS. 2 different guys.

[dubkitty]

the Guild i'd still like to get hold of is the Thunderbird, the Jetstar-shaped manic fantasy with its crazy headstock and plethora of Jaguar-esque switches that Muddy Waters and Zal out of the Lovin' Spoonful played. it did come out as part of the FMIC lineup but disappeared too soon. you never see them on sale in the used market. i think the reissues are actually rarer than the OG version. right now there are 4 vintage examples on Reverb but no reissues at all.