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He went missing for half an hour and came back to tell us that he'd met Jacob Bannon from Converge, and that they had, yes "just chilled out with a few beers and had a good laugh." Bannon is straight-edge.

I did a search for Converge to see if there'd be anywhere appropriate to put the following story, and, yeah, turns out right here is the appropriate place! A French model has stated that she is the actual Jane Doe, contrary to Jacob Bannon being on record as saying his artwork wasn't based on any original image:
https://www.facebook.com/audreymarnay/posts/304754048121761

From their Facebook page:

Just to be clear: This is definitely one of the sources for the original stencil/mixed media piece for the "Jane Doe" album. Most of my work always been collaged cut/paste based (and still is). Hundreds of images were xeroxed and repainted/inked in a loose style to create the release artwork. This process is similar to everyone from Shepard Fairey to Francis Bacon. Over time my work has evolved into something more much more refined, but the roots will always be in this style. I wonder if folks will still insist that it is actually from the cover of Slayer's "Reign In Blood"?

The original goal was to create ghost-like forms that embodied the concept of "Jane Doe". In recreation identifiers are removed from physical forms, making all humans become relatable and stoic. We see what we want to see in them, and often times, it's a reflection back onto our own life experiences, etc.

Thank you.

-J.

Translation: I got caught but I'm calling it art so it's OK.

From the comments:

It is/was a recreation and proven at the time of creation. We hold the trademark on it because of this...

...My goal as an artist is to be inspired, then create work in terms of character and visual story telling that tells a new story. I feel that all visuals do this to a degree. There will always be remnants of influence in all work, but it's narrative and medium is entirely different...

...it was a full spray/ink piece in its final form. It was far enough from source material that it was now it's own fully formed artwork.

The fact that comments are now closed and there are only positive comments left up is telling.

My favourite bit is " In recreation identifiers are removed from physical forms, making all humans become relatable and stoic." Funny that the aim is to make the image anonymous and yet it's still almost identical to the original.

Big vat or bucket
2 bottles of buckfast
1 litre of vodka
4 cans of cider
2 cans red bull

Tastes lovely actually and good times await 🤣

Ah christ I remember a bucket challenge years ago, fucked loads of rum and orange juice in as well as some cider, all sorts of rubbish. Bet my mate a tenner he wouldn't drink from the sick bucket, probably the best-earned tenner I've ever seen.

Maya Angelou's I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings is pretty stark. The book just covers up to around the age of 15 or so, christ knows how mental the rest of her life will be if she ended up writing another seven memoirs. I read both this and Albert Camus' The Outsider at the weekend, both of which I highly recommend. I'm know on Peter Marshall's history of anarchism, which I've started a few times before, always broken up by having to move house, so hopefully this isn't a bad omen.

Years ago I saw a band called Vesania which was apparently a side-project of someone from Behemoth. They were on tour with Cryptopsy and killed it. Bought the record and a t-shirt then never heard anything about them ever again.

I've remarked to different male groups of friends I've been part of over the years, either retrospectively or on the spot, that if any one of them were homosexual, they would have found it almost impossible to come out, since the vibe of the group was so casually homophobic in that "harmless" yet omnipresent kind of way. And I'm talking about in such liberal strongholds as Paris...and even Greystones!

These days, in Europe, once a guy comes out he'll have no problem finding lots of other LGBTQ+ people to hang out with, etc., but from my experience very few would have felt truly comfortable among the friends they may have grown up with. What would you call that if not a direct effect of discrimination and the vestiges of archaic views of what is and isn't "normal"??

Exactly, and I'd say that was, and is, true of many male groups. It pains me to admit this but I'd definitely include my own group of friends in that group when I was growing up.

Anyone who thinks that people who are homosexual or trans aren't still discriminated against can trying walking down the high street with anybody of the same gender, or alternatively simply attending any church in the country on a Saturday night or Sunday morning.

Nice one🤣

On the subject, the concept of 'heteronormativity' (I'm startled that that word comes up in my spellchecker) and it's negative connotations. Ya but most people are heterosexual so by definition, it's normal.

It doesn't seem like anyone disputes that a majority of people are heterosexual, is the idea not that the fact that this is used to make people who aren't heterosexual discriminated against?

Jesu > Godflesh

Ah no, not even close for me. Jesu's output is much more patchy than Godflesh's catalogue. Jesu actually have a few stinkers in there, although I do like and listen to the majority of it. I won't hear a bad word about the first Jesu album, or the Silver EP but after that it starts to get a little less good. I can understand at the same time why some people would feel as you do, though, Godflesh isn't the easiest to get into and the vocal style can be a bit off putting for some, but for me Godflesh are untouchable at what they do. On the face of it it seems very simplistic but JK is a brilliant guitarist, Benny Green is great at what he does with the bass and Machines is a brutally effective drummer. The way the rhythm underpins everything and Broadrick pretty much wrings the fucking neck out of his guitar (

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=76vGiZS6zFY check this if you have time I love this performance from him) all comes together quite beautifully.

I find with most people they are either in the camp of "fuck this is brilliant" or "I don't see the big deal with these lads at all". Jesu probably has a more broad appeal due to the softer nature of the sound although there are of course many similarities between the two.

Godflesh are pummelling live, they are so, so heavy. Some of their later stuff and their love of putting out an endless amount of remixes isn't great but their top stuff is incredible.

I've flown through Yuval Noah Harari's 21 Lessons for the 21st Century this week. His two previous books, Sapiens and Homo Deus are brilliant as well, can't recommend these three highly enough.

Jesus, Gossipmongers is amazing

Love the stories, wish they didn't have the shite music in between though. The spaceworm story from the first series is amazing.

Fucking hell that was a bit long, I've split it into two parts, what a laugh I've had remembering all of this though:

Another lad who grew up in the same village as him was one of those lads who tries to be a fan of every sport possible, but always claims some deep spiritual link to a team. He has simultaneously claimed US, Canadian, Scottish and Irish ancestry (his surname is Casey to be fair), as well as being a cousin of Jeremy Irons. He followed New England Patriots and the Toronto Maple Leafs because his grandad played for both, when he started watching rugby at Wigan with us it was because his grandad was the timekeeper (the worst made-up reason I've ever heard for anything ever), and he was also surely the only person in history who supported both Roscommon GAA and Glasgow Rangers, due to the ever-prolific grandfather as well. As soon as he heard I was moving to Ireland he dialled up the GAA love again and told me he'd been having trials with the Lancashire hurling team (unbelievably this is real thing... the team, not the trials) despite never having played before. If there's any sport you surely can't just pick up in a couple of weeks it is hurling, although for a man who has, wink wink, variously had trials with Everton, Liverpool, Lancashire's cricket team and various England ice hockey teams, perhaps the clash of ash is not beyond him.

Another lad back home I've known for years is generally sound but he reckons he's met every celebrity ever. Inevitably you'll be drinking and some lad comes on the TV or up in conversation, then the same story comes out that he saw him at the pub and offer him a beer. Like Alan Partridge's book, where inevitably each story ends with "Needless to say, I had the last laugh," Mike always ends every celebrity pint session with is "everyone just had chilled out with a few beers and had a good laugh." Myself and friends have heard this story told about Scott Ian, Jason Robinson, Wade Barrett, Roy Evans, Ricky Tomlinson, pretty much any band that has played at ArcTanGent and the entire Leeds Rhinos rugby team. He came to Temples in Bristol with us a few years ago and stuck to us like glue for the entire weekend. He went missing for half an hour and came back to tell us that he'd met Jacob Bannon from Converge, and that they had, yes "just chilled out with a few beers and had a good laugh." Bannon is straight-edge.

Last but not least is a lad I knew in sixth-form, who had been christened Jonny Q Bullshit by lads who went to secondary school with him. He was a decent guitar player but way overstated his tools. He had the same Squier strat everybody does when they are 16, no shame in that, but he claimed it was some high-end Paul Reed Smith, and that he stuck a Squier sticker on (and scratched the serial number off!!!!!) so it wouldn't get nicked. One morning he came in and immediately told everyone that he'd tried to learn a Dream Theater solo for two hours the previous night, but couldn't do it so trashed three PRS guitars in a fit of rage, and that his producer had threatened to quit because he was too extreme (I'm hoping that's where Morbid Angel and Heavy D got the song title from). Another time he claimed to be the all-time highest poster on the Fear Factory forums and that Dino Cazares invited him to tour with them because he used the same guitar and sounded like "he could play the songs as well I can". I'm not sure I'm 100% correct but I think Dino had left the band by that point.

In second year he claimed to be going out with a girl in first year and that he'd introduce us when he got the chance. My brother kept bugging him to do it, knowing it was absolute horseshit. After a couple of weeks we are in the canteen and he points to a girl saying it's his girlfriend. He walks over to this girl while she's with about five or six people, puts his arm around her, and give her an extended kiss on the not-quite-cheek-not-quite-mouth, then immediately walks out the canteen. This girl looks mortified and all her mates are screaming and laughing. We're trying to gauge what has just happened when a lad he went to school with asks us why Jonno just got off with his younger sister. I didn't hear anything about this lad after I left college in 2005 until about a month ago when a woman accidentally posted a photo meant for her secret Instagram account to her regular account. Turned out that she was making some decent coin as a femdom on onlyfans and tagged his own secret account in the post as a thank you for contributing. Only problem is that his wife knows the woman and recognised his username because it's also his Steam username. Fucking fantastic.

New 1349 record is decent. I really rate this band but I never seem to find out about their stuff until after it comes out. Other than that I'm trying to ride the good weather while it lasts, and George Harrison's All Things Must Pass is a great record in this weather, or any weather for that matter.

Ah christ lads like this absolutely make my day, and I've been lucky enough to encounter a few of them in my time. My favourite thing is how the lie is always so pointless or easily proven as a lie. I can half-forgive it happening when you are a kid as they often seem a way of fitting in or getting an identity (see the first two below), but people doing it as adults just smacks of arrogance and thinking everyone will believe your shite.

Grew up in a village where a farmer had hired quite a few Portuguese people as labourers. After one of their kids picked up a local bird, a lad told everyone that he was half-Portuguese and had lived there for a few years, thinking a bit of Latin spirit would help with the lasses. First chance we got we asked the lads who was actually Portuguese to start a conversation with him, which popped the bullshitter's balloon pretty quickly. He tried to row back by saying he spoke a different dialect, but his race was run at that point. We started secondary school around the time that Will Smith released 'Miami' and he told us him and his dad had gone to the wedding wearing the palm tree suit that the Fresh Prince wore in the video.

In the first or second year of high school, WWF hit that wave of popularity it gets every now and again and the same lad immediately told us how his dad used to take him to all the pay-per-view events. This was turn of the millennium so it wasn't unreasonable for him to get to a Manchester or London show once a year, but he was all in for every Wrestlemania and the like. One Tuesday morning he came in to roll call and started loudly yawning every few seconds, holding his eyes open with his fingers and the like. When we finally gave in and asked him what was wrong, he said he'd flown in from Monday Night Raw and had come straight into school. We asked him what the results were, needless to say we hit those 56k modems for all they were worth when we got home and saw that every single match and result was complete bollocks.

After we all started getting into rock and metal music around 2000, he told us that the reason Slipknot had used slipknot1.com as their website was because he owned slipknot.com, and that they'd flown him to California a couple of weekends in a row giving him free merch and tickets trying to get him to sell it. One week he told us he was heading to LA for the weekend to meet them again, even though they were halfway through a European tour, and even so someone saw him on the Saturday morning paper round. He then told us his cousin (presumably not on the Portuguese side) was the singer in a decent emo/post-hardcore band called Hell is for Heroes. We had tickets to their gig in Manchester that May and he promised to meet us there and get us backstage, needless to say he never showed up and said that he'd got into a fight on the train to the gig.

Last I heard he was unfortunately struggling with alcohol, but he was attempting to pass himself as a 'Grade 8 guitar teacher', but his adverts stressed that he'd be teaching TABLATURE EXCLUSIVELY. Weird to get all the way to grade 8 only to sack it all off for some .txt files on ultimate-guitar.com.

The Industrial style Blut Aus Nord albums are much better than the organic BM style ones.

All over this, love those later records, same with Ulver.

Carpathian Forest have no business being anywhere near as big as they are.

Been getting into Civ 6 games with my mates from back home on Steam, makes the game so much quicker and enjoyable, especially having undeclared alliances organised over WhatsApp the tearing on of the computer empires to pieces. The new expansion pack includes earthquakes so we're going to start a game tomorrow night and max out all natural disaster settings just to see what happens.