Years ago, as a teenager, I'd sneak my newly purchased albums into class rooms. Among other deeds, I played the entirety of Necrophobic's The nocturnal silence during gym class over the PA (at a loud volume), with no one complaining or objecting (at least not that I'm aware of). During woodwork/crafts (sorry, I really don't know the appropriate term here), I played the whole Onward to Golgotha album TWICE in a row on a boom box - again with nobody commenting or turning it down. I really have no explanation as to how that was possible, and highly doubt it'd work today. My theory is that teachers told fellow students to just let me have that fun and not intervene. Was I secretly seen as someone with a disturbed personality who's best left alone since they didn't know how to deal with me otherwise? I may never know....but I must add that no one else was a metalhead at that school of about 650 students. The closest was a guy wearing his Kurt Cobain shirt.

I got my wallet picked from my pocket yesterday in Nice. While losing 300 euros worth of cash, and having to kill my credit card, and needing to get a new driver's license is a bummer, I must say that the thing was executed perfectly by an elderly lady and very small and agile dude in his 50's. I was probably singled out as a target because I had to watch over a group of three daughters and their shenanigans when we were going to board a train to Monaco. The lady pushed me a bit during boarding, and the guy just lifted the stuff. Nice work. Real professionals. The second daughter saw enough for us to reconstruct the case, and they were obviously not beginners.

That being said, if you see a fairly dark skinned/well tanned black-haired guy in his 50'5, roughly five feet two inches tall and skinny as hell, picking people's pockets in southern France, please dislocate his shoulder, curb-stomp his gonads, and say hello from me. I'll buy you a beer. Thank you.

Fuck, that sucks. French people are far from being that gentle fairy romances can sometimes tell. Be very careful in popular and touristic places such as Paris or Nice, more globally in the south of France. It's the privileged field for thieves to act. Your description seems to be pretty accurate. Go tell it to the police if not done already, though they won't really care or act quickly... French police aren't very efficient sadly.

Heh, I've never thought the French were lovely. I must say that everybody I've talked to has been very nice and polite here, though. Nice is a very nice city.

I killed my credit card in lass than five minutes of the incident, filed a lost item claim in an hour, and visited the police before the closing hours. In case the insurance cover anything, I have the paperwork done.

This kind of stuff is a bad thing for the reputation of the Mediterranean, and you'd think the police would pay a bit more attention to cases like this, where security footage of the incident is available and the time is known down to the minute, essentially. Getting a pickpocket a day would not be that difficult of a feat, especially considering the amount of cameras and security personnel I've seen. Sure, they are probably more interested in terrorism, but that's not a valid reason not do something about such things. We could offer a perfect description of the incident, I am definitely visible among the crowd, and we even told them about the general, if somewhat crude descriptions of the people involved. If they wanted, they'd have the CCTV footage of it all now, and would know the guy's face. That would be the way to reducing this kind of crime, and I very much believe a few dedicated policemen would do the trick eventually. But no, they had something better to do. Sandwiches, actually.

Nice is alright but I’ve always felt that you should just continue on down towards Italy, instead. Piedmont is nearby and that’s a lovely region.

People in Nice are night and day from the interactions you get in Paris. I haven't been much elsewhere in France, and it's probably just that Paris tourists get the Paris tourist treatment. My experience of Nicois is that they are friendly, helpful, and while they might have a laugh at tourists' expense sometimes, it's all in good fun, and there's no bitterness or resentment involved.

This is my fourth time in Nice so far, and I've immensely enjoyed the time here, including this one despite the incident. Then again, I'm comfortable virtually anywhere, and very few places have been bad in my opinion. The Charles de Gaulle airport lies on the second level of Hell, as everybody who's ever been there knows, and I once got stuck for five hours or so on the Düsseldorf international airport at the time of the European football championships... five hours of sauerkraut and bratwurst odors (both of which I very much enjoy in reasonable amounts), cigarette smoke from the German curing box, lousy and expensive Weizen, and the noise made by extremely loud and drunken German football fans with an average of seven remaining teeth each, combined with the ceaseless soundtrack of Modern Talking ALL THE FUCKING TIME was enough for me to wish the Russians would as soon as possible breach the Fulda Gap and pour seventeen tank divisions and the Third Shock Army into the area. If I had to choose between a bullet in the head and a week on the Düsseldorf airport, the choice would be difficult but eventually obvious. But that's about it. I like it anywhere, and I've never minded someone getting a laugh at my expense. If that makes a waiter's life just a wee bit easier, I'm all for it, their work is hard.

Anyway, the daughters are on the flight home, and I have a full day of freedom ahead of me. I will need to clean the apartment and wash the towels and linen, but other than that, I have a bunch of lamb ribs, a bottle of red wine, and veggies waiting... well, OK, and a fine bunch of beers, too... Life is pretty damn nice now, and I think the offspring also enjoyed the trip quite a bit. And that's what really counts here. Never mind the trivial stuff, when shit happens, you just wipe, change the underwear, and keep assaulting.

And oh, the family of cats on back yard, living next to the table under the balcony, is adorable. The mom cat is SO much better a parent than the French lady yelling at her kids every four minutes in the next building. The kittens are learning how to cat, and they will be mighty predators of small-to-medium rodents in virtually no time.

I wasn't much opposing parisiens and niçois. Indeed, the last ones are very friendly and I had some great times having vacationed there. But famous places for tourists like La Promenade des Anglais in Nice or Les Champs Elysées in Paris are also known for having a high rate of pickpockets.

In my experience, Parisiens were very polite and helpful. I feel terribly let down by stereotypes. I mean, what's next? Educated Australians?

I did my 7th grade, so jokes on you.

You had to repeat it a couple of times, though. I mean, you went outside the lines a couple of times.

Staying inside the lines means you're not being creative.

I would like to thank Morrigan for mercifully closing the absolute abortion that was the Burzum thread. It wasn't even an entertaining dumpster fire thread, it was just awful. It had some good posters early on, and I enjoyed reading peoples' thoughts on the albums, especially about the "post-prison albums" that sometimes get overlooked. (I do not intend for any of that thread to carry over here, I just wanted to finish it in my mind).

Anyway. I will not travel this summer. After I finish my exams, I will be working until the Autumn semester starts. I was lucky to get a summer job, which is not easy in the capital city during these times.

How does a discussion on Burzum even devolve into racism in the...first...place...actually, that makes more sense than it should. Goddammit, Varg.

Surely you've been around these parts long enough to see the last 36 times that happened?

I don't care much for Burzum. Then again, I'm not a big black metal fan.

Also, as for Anthony Bourdain's death... well I've watched only a few episodes of his No Reservations show, but I liked what I saw. They didnt' feel like the typical "food critic goes to a foreign country, tries a few dishes and says they're all delicious". His show felt more like a mix of a travel, food and documentary type of thing. He didn't just stay at nice hotels and go to fancy restaurants. He interacted with the locals and got to know the local culture better. Again, I've seen very little of his show, but it seemed to me like he wasn't just trying to show us the local cuisines, but was teaching us about the world itself. The guy really stepped out of his comfort zone.

So, looks like I'm gonna be going to Chicago for a weekend in August.

On the *exact* dates I'll be out of town, too.

No problem. Wish I had seen and closed it earlier tbh. Remember that the report button exists (as well as the PM button) and can be helpful when bringing awful threads to our attention.

Wait did I miss something?

Oh, by the way, I'm gonna attend the PartySan festival next August. Any feedback?

I actually thought you guys were leaving it open as a 'honey pot' of sorts.

Probably not everything was glorious in the Burzum topic, but it looks a bit too much to me to have so many people banned when entire topics in the market subforum are entirely dedicated to trade of NSBM, RAC and hatecore without ever being disturbed. Some people also post their latest albom purchase that consist, by chance probably, of 100% NSBM, but those are also not worried.

And let’s not kid ourselves. Giving money to that hurts much more than a few stupid kids who don’t know what they are talking about on a forum. If you believe that the money spent on the last Wolfnacht doesn’t support Golden Dawn or money spent on the last Nokturnal Mortum does not support Azov division (or Right Sektor) that destroyed roma camps like last week in Kiev, you are naive. But then, if 100% of your trades and purchases are NSBM, you probably know that and want your money to be put to this use.

They don't attract any attention because those threads don't spiral out of control in a torrential downpour of vile stupidity, that's why. Morrigan herself just said it, if you see something, report it. Otherwise, what you're saying amounts to something like complaining that some criminals get caught while others don't. Yeah, that's the way the world works. Do your part and report the topics if you feel so strongly.

On a note related to supporting racist metal... I was ok with getting into Graveland because of claims on the MA forums that even though Rob Darken is indeed a racist, he does not have that permeate his music with Graveland, and on Graveland's MA page there is a statement that says, "Rob Darken has stated that Graveland is not related to any kind of political ideologies."

After I got my second Graveland album, the Polish version of Creed of Iron, which I like (my first is Immortal Pride, which I also like), I was browsing Graveland's discography on MA and saw that there are a full length and a demo that are titled Following the Voice of Blood, each of which have the song White Hand's Power. You can probably guess by the title alone that the song is very NS, and looking at the lyrics, it very much is. After getting into Graveland a little bit and enjoying them, and hearing supposedly that the band, despite the leader, has nothing to do with racism, this very much disappointed me.

Apparently, this song was not even written by Rob Darken, but by one Capricornus, who was only acting as a guest on the album, so maybe that's kind of a "loophole" to allow this song on the album while also claiming the band has "no political ideologies." But Rob Darken didn't have to use the song, but he did anyway.

Now I kind of feel guilty about listening to my 2 Graveland CDs, and especially about exploring them further, which I would otherwise want to do.

Understood, rexxz.

I am new here, and I was reacting because the NSBM/RAC trade topic having double the amount of views that the Burzum one has, it seemed hypocrite.

As for reporting, you should know that in some countries that historically suffered from denunciation (USSR being the best example), it is not so natural culturally to go and report things.

Please let's not move the whole Burzum/NSBM/race discussion into this place. Not only has it been done to death, but when a thread is closed for being a dumpster fire it is not an invitation to start the same or a similar dumpster fire elsewhere. I already see that's where this is going. Let's nip it in the bud.

ALSO:

C'mon man, we're not the bloody Stasi! We're a bunch of nerds sitting at our computers. The worst we could do is send you a strongly worded email.

Jesus Christ, I just checked out the Spanish doom metal band Misty Grey for the first time, and the vocalist on their old material is god awful. She sounds like a little kid, but looking at her profile page, she is clearly not a kid. Seeing as how she was their former vocalist, I assumed the band got rid of her because she sucked, but on her profile page it says she relocated to Sweden. So did the rest of the band kick her out, or did she leave for Sweden by her own volition, which turned into a lucky break for the band? I don't know.

Before I listened to them just now, I thought it was odd that Shadow Kingdom released their album digitally and on cassette but not CD. But now I think I know why.

If you're curious enough, listen here: https://shadowkingdomrecords.bandcamp.com/album/grey-mist

The only vocalist in all of doom metal that I've heard that's as equally bad is Mercury from Mexico's Violet Magick. But he's male, so he's bad in a different way. He just can't carry a tune with a bucket.

For many nerds sitting at their computers, being told someone thinks they are wrong is the worst oppression imaginable.

Biiiiiiig citation needed there.

The "White Hand" was the symbol of Saruman in Lord of the Rings, which the lyrics are pretty clearly about. Even the line about "degenerated" blood is pretty in line with the orcs.

Honestly, the album The Fire of Awakening is more NS/fascist than the earlier albums.

Indeed, but LOTR is also an important book for the neo-fascist/neo-nazi scum (for example a lot of italian RAC bands have names and lyrics directly inspired from it)

the lyrical ambiguity in the Graveland song was almost certainly deliberate

You were disappointed that the band wasn't racist?

Thta's because Tolkien was actually a true racist. As a fervent catholic, he couldn't bear any of the things that the church despises. I think I've already seen something saying that the orcs were bleeding black in reference to the black people, which were perceived as "non-human" or as "the inferior race".

I haven't looked into this topic at all, but why couldn't that just be symbolic of the evil nature of the orcs, with no strings attached to actual black people? Similar to the way we might refer to evil magic as "black" magic or excessively dark humor as "black" humor or a terrible mood as a "black" mood. No one using those phrases is throwing shade at black people.

EDIT: typos

I just put the first song on and Jesus fuck, you weren't kidding. The riffs are actually pretty good but Christ this singer sounds like my friend's six year old daughter.

Source. Now.

Edit: better drop the question. I'm too tired of the argument, in those days in particular

It's almost as if derigin didn't say to drop the issue and move on.

In other news, how is Cosmic Atrophy coming along, rexxz?

Edit: Sorry, I'll drop it again.





EDIT: fortunately, they have a new singer now. They have yet to release any material with her, so I have no idea how she sounds, but she has GOT to be an improvement almost by default.