Like, Mastodon was fucking great and all, no surprises there, but what we ALSO got was an excellent, entertaining as fuck performance by opening band De Staat.
The bass part in particular was NUTS. Loud, heavy and groovy. It’s something that unfortunately can’t be easily reproduced on video, but I think you can get a decent feel how they are on the stage.
The world around us is rather spectacular. It’s filled with things that may look ordinary for the naked eye but at close inspection can reveal an entirely new dimension.
Take liquid-crystal displays, for example.
No, not the one you’re looking at. The screen in which you’re reading this probably is a modern LCD panel made of billions of microscopic red, green and blue-coloured LEDs which are beautiful in and of themselves. I’m talking about its grand-grand-grand-grandmother, the one which shows these odd-looking, seven-segment digits.
Like many computer technologies, LCDs were pioneered in the 60s. It got lighter and more efficient, sure, but its basic design and function didn’t change drastically through the years.
Its simple, elegant interface’s everywhere: on digital watches, microwave ovens, cameras, audio recorders, musical instruments, elevators, calculators, gym equipment, car dashboards, cellphones — old ones, remember? — and many others.
But one thing these old, primitive liquid-crystal displays possess it’s their peculiar optical properties. Something that’s not quite obvious to notice without a powerful macro lens and additional light sources.
Instagram has a way of flattening lived experiences so that my best years look exactly like my bad ones, and that everything seems pretty good, all the time, for everyone. This, obviously, is not how life works for most people, and ever since Instagram has existed experts have debated what seeing an infinite scroll of other people’s happy moments is doing to our brains.
Then it goes on:
[…] Even when you know it isn’t real, that social media is a highlight reel of people’s lives and you shouldn’t compare yourself to anyone else, that it’s a trap and it will only make you feel bad about your life, which is overall probably a perfectly fine one, Instagram still has real, material consequences. Being good at Instagram is a ticket to more likes, more followers, more tiny hits of dopamine and ultimately more fame and money; a platform to launch a creative project and sell it, to be able to live the life we’re supposed to want.