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Folks, got the young lad an Alessis Nitro e-kit for Xmas as below

https://www.thomann.de/ie/alesis_nitro_max_kit.htm

Tbh, I'm getting more use out of it than him! However, id like to get the drum sound out of a speaker rather than through headphones.  Alessis do their own one which is quite small and mounted on the frame, some of the reviews suggest the sound is a bit weedy and im looking for something with a bit more punch. Completely clueless about this stuff. Not looking to break the bank either.
Any recommendations?

Absolutely, as long as he gets something out of it, it's all good with me. He wrote his own song a few months back and his guitar teacher transcribed it to tab (apologies, I'm not exactly familiar with the terminolgy) so we printed it out and it has pride of place on his bedroom wall. That captures the spirit of the whole endeavour, to my mind. However, going back to the whole AI thing, if he just threw a few inputs into AI and came out with a fully fledged composition, it just wouldn't be the same. Obviously, not being a complete cunt of a parent i hope, I'd still tell him it's great and all!

Yeah, I had a suspicion that may have been the case but I'm so far out of the loop when it comes to that stuff. Are any of these big releases though? I'd imagine it's just youtube shorts etc. Either way, I'd have no inclination to watch.

Had a look at some of that and it's interesting (and concerning). I'm not a musician so don't have much skin in the game, but as someone who tried and failed miserably to play an instrument, I dont feel like I need to fill that void. Dunno what that lad (the fella who created it) is banging on about, why on earth should music be more like video games? He seems to be suggesting that there's not enough music out there or that more music can only be a good thing. No, it can't. There's enough shite out there as it is. Interesting that the respondents to yer man's survey indicated that they only really listen to their own creations. Seems to be a purely narcissistic endeavour.
It's just an aside really but my eldest lad (11) is doing guitar lessons at the moment. I'd be half concerned that he has inherited my lack of musical ability as he's doing grand but it doesn't come naturally to him either. But the sense of joy is evident from him when he manages to belt out a bit of Enter Sandman or Teen Spirit. I can't see anyone getting that same sense of reward from inputting a few prompts into a program and getting a fully formed song back.

That's what I was thinking, pretty much the standard method of preserving anonymity which has been used for years. As stated, it wasn't that blindingly obvious that I immediately picked up on it, but then again I just had it on in the background for the sake of passing a few minutes. When I did notice, it became fairly distracting. One of the anonymous persons was a friend and colleague of Lucy Letby, so not only did they have to digitally represent the person during the interviews, they also had to digitally alter photographs from the past depicting the two of them together. Look, it's all fairly low stakes stuff but I wouldn't like it to become a thing either. We can't be too far off entire movies or series created entirely with AI.

Just watching the Lucy Letby doc on Netflix. Nothing remarkable about it, usual true-crime fare.
But (and this may have been done before, if it has i haven't seen it) the use of AI is a bit jarring. There are real life persons who have been 'digitally anonymized', which i didn't initially pick up on. The article below explains it a bit better, and it's not a big deal in the grand scheme of things, but there was just something about it that rang a bit weird.

Why The Investigation of Lucy Letby's 'Digitally Anonymised' Documentary is Causing Controversy https://share.google/YBJVcyVLptADwWbyk

Prendergast, aside from that cross-field kick, had a shocker. He can't shoulder all the blame though. The scoreline flattered us as well. Ireland seem to have a recurring pattern of decline and recovery over the years, this is very much a team in decline atm and I'm optimistic enough that we'll find our way back again. But certainly not this tournament.

I think it's fair enough to say that new ideas are a rarity in Hollywood these days, but another Dracula film? Really? There's hardly been a scarcity recently with Nosferatu, Last Voyage of the Demeter and Renfield in as many years. And yeah, I heard its a fairly shameless rip-off (sorry, homage maybe) of the Coppola one.

It's the 'advocating necrophilia' line that gets me 

Bump for another completely clueless review from the Raw archives. Written by Kerrang numpty Phil Alexander.

YouTube is as bad as FB, Instagram and the likes...its all just a minefield of AI garbage now which had rendered it almost unusable. I reactivated an Instagram account just to check out various bands, tattoo artists etc (given that actual websites are seemingly a thing of the past) but its hard to navigate through all the usual nonsense...videos of ICE behaving badly, clips of Joe Rogan extolling the virtues of taking food dye to ward off depression, dickheads with cameras asserting themselves as 'citizen journalists'. Fuck off.

Can't recall if it was here or the old MI forum, but there was a topic about the "Iceberg of metal" and how it's only possible to scratch the surface given the amount of stuff out there. This kind of applies to me in that (I think) I have amassed a reasonably large collection of music over the years but nowhere near enough that I've exhausted all the older, classic material. Occasionally a newer band might pique my interest but there's so much I've overlooked, i tend towards older stuff and dont feel a real need to check out new material. It's only recently I paid Autopsy much attention. Ditto earlier stuff from the likes of Sodom, Kreator. Greek BM, RC aside, pretty much passed me by.

I'm gonna say maybe 89-99...89 cos that's roughly when I started with G'n'R and progressed from there, and 99 was when the fatigue set in from years of over exposure to the likes of Metal Hammer and the whole nu-metal scene. I was conscious of the early BM scene but it wasnt what I was into at the time, perhaps I was too invested in the Roadrunner sound of the early 90s. The early 00's was when I started getting more into the BM stuff I'd previously overlooked, and apart from the likes of maybe Converge, Isis etc, I was definitely looking 'backwards'. I'm still the same now tbh, and am more likely to pick up something I may have missed at the time than listening to newer stuff.

I don't have any real issue with the more experimental side of BM...can get completely on board with what the likes of Oranssi, DHG, Blut Aus Nord etc are doing but they still have some semblance of bm at heart. Ulver kinda lost me at Perdition City as well. And it hasn't aged well for that matter. 

Hey, do these merit their own new topic? On the strength of the music, not in the slightest. But I guess there's plenty curious enough to check them out (myself included), so with that in mind, here's two new singles

https://youtu.be/jmrbPEEi0tk?si=uuj_IzZn-XE6X168

https://youtu.be/gJng5qD7Nhw?si=JB8x3QL5sRTJBzRC

I wasn't actually aware until now that Guns had released material subsequent to Chinese Democracy. I'm going to assume they're every bit as bad as these. Something about that second song there puts me in mind of the opening credits of the Golden Girls.