David Cassette

Stay creative! Towards the end of my 20's my head was full of thoughts like "have I lost my youthful creative spark?" & "am I too old for this shit?" but my 30's turned into one of the most creatively productive periods of my life. Keep on making stuff.

I'm @ $460/1300 to raise by 10/11 to pay the final half of the out-of-pocket costs for the (long overdue) dental surgery my youngest son will have on 10/14. Anyone who donates $50+ can get a custom song from me; I'll begin recording the next two in my queue this weekend! 🎵🦷❤️ #HelpFolksLive2025

I'm not. My only real active social media presence is here. I am on instagram but haven't logged in since the beginning of the year due to some toxic and manipulative DM's I was getting. The music community here seems better than most places online.

it makes me sad to see young folk wanting to leave spotify but feeling as though they can't find new music to listen to without being fed it by a corporate algorithm. You don't need that shit, kid!

So here's a thread of tips on finding the good stuff the old fashioned way:

Curmudgeonly today. Feeling depressed and listless.

So apparently spotify are running ICE recruitment ads now. How anyone that claims to be progressive is still ok with using that shit is beyond me. Funding fascism rather than making a tiny sacrifice of personal convenience.

Some Strange Things You Should Watch for Halloween 20 short weird, scary, funny, and surreal films you can watch right now.

I assembled a list of short films you can watch right now for free this Halloween. Scary, strange, surreal, and sometimes funny, this list includes live action, stop motion, and animated films from around the world and from filmmakers you've never heard of before

also: she isn’t talking about Oxford, Cambridge, St Andrews here! Conservatives would be apoplectic if you said *those* students shouldn’t study literature or classics. They only mean the slop people, you see

Matango: Attack Of The Mushroom People (1963) A weird, sometimes goofy, sometimes impressively atmospheric Japanese monster movie. Little gem of mushroom mutant horror, which is entirely my cup of tea

I don't talk enough about movies on here. Mostly as I don't really watch a lot of recent ones. But I do love films, particularly older horror films and Halloween is fast approaching so I'm going to do a thread talking about some of my favourites. No particular order or number ratings:

Geeshie Wiley and Skip James aren't even on there at all!? Who wrote this utter trash?

This list is an atrocity. Joe Bonamassa? piss off

we actually had something like this at one point, although sort of covertly. the Fuse scheme in the late 90s/early 2ks allowed artists to claim benefits for a couple of years without being bothered by the dole office -- you just had to periodically 'sign in'

dream me was dream-drunkenly thinking "hey I should learn the 'Allo 'Allo theme tune on the Accordion"

Had one of those long, meandering dreams last night that shifts through different locations & scenarios at random but the highlight was a gig in an off-model version of the Pickwick's grotty basement where a series of bands all played different takes on the Are You Being Served? theme tune

I'd rather people fly giant pictures of Noel Edmonds from their houses

I lived through the 90's so I've already seen a thousand lifetimes worth of union jacks and it just hasn't got any better. put that garish shit away.

The ones with giant flags in their windows are the worst. literally destroying your own access to sunlight to annoy the wokes. withering into calcified mummies in a dim and lurid living room to remind people you're racist

some dweebs are really going overboard with the flag fucking. no need for eight st george's crosses on your house mate. We get it. You have no personality or depth so have attached yourself to a tacky veneer of english identity to compensate.

Lots of people don't have access to therapy. It's either expensive or in the case of the NHS where I love so underfunded that it's inaccessible to most.

Wow. It's so great that the UK has brave politicians like Helen who aren't afraid to tell it like it is!

And by "brave" I mean petty, vindictive, ill-informed shitheads with no understanding of mental illness who happily take tens of thousands of public money in expenses for a job they're shit at.

I dunno, if you've ever had slurs yelled at you online or in the street it is quite difficult to take the "AI slur" discourse seriously

Girl on a Bradford street corner, 1969, photo by Nick Hedges.

Never be afraid to strip your art down to it's barest components. Even just as a creative exercise it's always a worthwhile approach.

After this threw a spanner in the works of my recording plans yesterday I dug out my Ferguson shoebox cassette recorder. Just a little mono thing with a built in mic so no overdubs. Recorded an entire albums worth of songs. Sometimes equipment failure is just a window into a different approach.

Ah so maybe the “depictions of fictional violence is the same as real violence” people and “ChatGPT should have personhood” people are maybe the same type of people

I might sometimes affect innocent wonder at how we’ve kept on going this long, but I know the answer: sheer bloody-mindedness.

Just picked this up. Listening to it now and it is so freaking good! Tighter and heavier than their first full length. Joel's guitar is gnarlier than ever and Rosie's drumming is dynamic and bristling with energy. Love the back and forth vocals too.

#indierock #bandcampfriday

Looks like my trusty Tascam portastudio has packed in. Hopefully it's something fixable as it's the last working 4-track I have. Time to get the toolbox out.

"They're trying to convince people they can't do the things they've been doing easily for years - to write emails, to write a presentation. Your daughter wants you to make up a bedtime story about puppies - to write that for you." We will get to the point, she says with a grim laugh, "that you will essentially become just a skin bag of organs and bones, nothing else. You won't know anything and you will be told repeatedly that you can't do it, which is the opposite of what life has to offer. Capitulating all kinds of decisions like where to go on vacation, what to wear today, who to date, what to eat. People are already doing this. You won't have to process grief, because you'll have uploaded photos and voice messages from your mother who just died, and then she can talk to you via AI video call every day. One of the ways it's going to destroy humans, long before there's a nuclear disaster, is going to be the emotional hollowing-out of people." - author and filmmaker Justine Bateman from a piece by Emine Saner for the Guardian

Author and filmmaker Justine Bateman on generative AI