Watching
I know what I’m watching today; The premiere episode of MoonLight Real Girl on Klash Media!
This is really the introductory episode laying out the direction of the series and bit of info on your two hosts: Myself (No introduction needed) and my partner M, aka Erika Klash. Please support the video if you can with a like, a share and a comment. There are more episodes to come!
Reading
I go in depth in a very special “Uncategorizable” er… category this week but I recently was introduced to a site with a bunch of cool reading sites/tools. And one tool that I am gaga over is Press Released.
It’s basically a tool that will get around all those pesky paywalls that these big newspapers and magazines use on their websites. I know, I know, I’m such a boomer, these things have been around forever, LTTP loser! Yeah yeah, well I am an elder Millennial at this point so give me a break.
Also, before I found this tool I was perfectly contented to borrow these magazines from the library. Though, the library doesn’t usually have the magazines day one and there are often website exclusive articles that obviously won’t be in the library. So, I have been on an article reading tear the past few weeks.
Along the same lines, freemediaheckyeah also has links to telegram groups that just rip PDFs of daily news papers and magazines. It’s fucking great.
MM
ALSO it’s voting time in LA! And there’s nothing I hate more than a voter’s guide that is just a list of recommended candidates. Sure they should exist for ease of use but I don’t want an unbiased rehashing of a candidate’s platform that I coulkd read off of their mailer. I want a knowledgeable and incendiary voter’s guide written from a left perspective.
Under Trump 2.0, Bass has half-heartedly attempted to cast herself as some sort of resistance figure. This is laughable. Days after Trump defeated Kamala Harris in 2024 Bass appointed Jim McDonnell as chief of police — the very same Jim McDonnell whose coziness with ICE led to him becoming the first Los Angeles sheriff to lose reelection in 100 years. This utter lack of concern for immigrant Angelenos is an example of how rudderless her office is.
Meanwhile Bass sat on her hands as LAPD began cracking the heads of anti-ICE and anti-Trump protesters. She took no action to protect her own constituents, who she claimed to support, from shocking violence at the hands of her police. Instead, she fought tooth and nail to give LAPD raises and new positions at the expense of city services — literally, the police defunding the rest of us.
We haven’t even mentioned her failures surrounding the Palisades fire, but we figure Spencer Pratt can do that for us, since it’s pretty much all he talks about. The reality-TV-star-turned-MAGA-goon is running for mayor on a platform of ignorance, petty cruelty, and personal grievance. It’s easy to take a measure of the man: his own memoir shows him to be a thief and opportunist, desperately greedy yet irresponsible with his finances, dishonest with his friends, and deeply gullible and superstitious.
Pratt (or PRLATT as rendered on his merch) is completely unfit for office on every level. The attention he received reflects the desperation of the raving right wing and the fecklessness of a news media who somehow hasn’t learned their lesson about giving free airtime to racist reality TV stars.
I go to Knock LA for every major voting season, they do great work.
Listening
I am a noted Gorillaz enjoyer so I’m glad I finally had the time to sit down and listen to their latest album: The Mountain.
Now listen, I am completely aware that I am not the most musically inclined person out there. I can’t tell you why the fist two Gorillaz albums are good I just know they are good. I can’t tell you why Plastic Beach is bad, but it’s bad. I can’t tell you why I love the first half of Humanz so much but I fucking love it. So when I say that I don’t really care for the “eat pray love” vibes of The Mountain, please take that with a grain of salt.
But people seem to like it and I can’t seem to get past the “I went to India for a weekend and it’s my entire personality now” themes. It’s giving British colonialism.
Anyway I do think it works better in bits rather than a whole, so here is my favorite song so far.
Also, I reserve the right for this to grow on me.
As expected, Jamie Hewlet’s Disney inspired album animation is sublime.
Uncategorizable
Since starting on video projects with my partner, I am trying to make more assets for our videos; Logos, backgrounds, title cards etc. And since I am, by all accounts a broke bitch, I can’t afford to hire an artist off of Bluesky to make stuff for us (The goal is to use any money we do make to hire some folks some day), let alone the $340 a year subscription to Adobe suites. A solution -that I’m sure every creative is tired of hearing- is: Why not ask ChatGPT or Google Gemini to make you a logo?
Disrespectfully: FUCK THAT. Whatever I make with my limited knowledge, skill and talent means more to me than having a good looking logo. If that keeps me poor then so be it.
Also, I know there’s a ton of free software out there but how do I find it? Doing a little research led me to a website I never knew existed (and to the point that I think it is willfully suppressed.) freemediaheckyeah.
This site rules. Within five minutes I was working on a free graphics design program to make some title cards for our videos. It also led me to a website with tons of free and royalty-free PNGs for those designs that I spent hours imagining what I could make next. Are my designs perfect and professional? Hell no! But they’re mine!
Freemediaheckyeah’s collection is extensive. Just look at the number of categories under “reading”:
And that’s not even all of them! Each category has 10 to 20 links ranked by usefulness. Often a site will also have mirrors posted as well because they are unfairly attacked by rights holders and the likes since these sites often skirt the edges of legality.
In an effort to make a theme song for our show I looked up some free music editors. Nothing I made is going to be used (LOL) but I had a really good time TRYING.
This leads me back to the AI argument: If I had just gone to Gemini or GPT and said “Here, make this.” I never would have found this freemediaheckyeah site. I never would have tried to make something. I would be just as dumb as when I started and probably even a little dumber.
There’s is just so much negativity around creation that people, myself included, get hung up on being perfect out of the box. That’s not life. AI presents the ever tempting low hanging fruit of easy creation with minimal effort.
Other Notables
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