Basement Archaeology

Ah, 2013! What a strange year it’s been.

Much happened. On a personal level, there was a crushing degree of uncertainty before the largest project of the year could take off: we moved house. This brought with it a new town, “a new job”, new people, new projects, and a different view of the horizon ahead.

In preparation for the move, we got rid of a lot of deadweight by way of outdated media, documents and obsolete hardware. As they get hauled off to the “Elektroschrott Wertstoffhof”, memories of certain items are being kept alive via digital eulogies, which, surprisingly, have visitors from primarily Arabic countries, India/Pakistan, Poland, but mostly Russia/Ukraine coming by to pay their final respects. Ironically, the vacuum left behind soon got filled by other electronica literally falling from the sky such that I now have more old laptops than I know what to do with. So I nuked one of them.

What also fell from the sky in February and was spectacularly documented by Russian dashcams was the meteorite over Chelyabinsk. Other disasters of the year include supertyphoon Haiyan which wreaked havoc across the Philippines, floods which caused untold damage in southern Germany and Austria, and the Rana Plaza building’s collapse in Bangladesh that killed over 1,100 factory workers. Oklahoma got hit by another tornado. Continue reading →

If you’re reading this, you might have noticed that the world didn’t end on 21-12-2012 as supposedly forecast by the Mayans. Our little blue marble continues to spin and orbit around the sun although, lest we forget, an asteroid named “4179 Toutatis” did make a close fly-by a scant few days ago. All the hype was for nothing, as was the fearmongering about the possible black hole caused by firing up the Large Hadron Collider.

No, as this past year has proven, humans are quite adept at destroying themselves the old-fashioned way; in 2012 there were more shootings and mass-killings than I can remember: US soldier Robert Bales went on a drunken rampage and shot 16 civilians (Kandahar, Afghanistan), another dimwit shot several “The Dark Knight Rises” movie-goers (Aurora, Colorado), some 19 churchgoers at the Deeper Christian Life Ministry got mowed down (Okene, Nigeria), and a maniac killed children and teachers at the Sandy Hook Elementary School (Newtown, Connecticut). Not to be outdone, a man knifed some 22 children (nobody died) in a village named Chenpeng (Henan, China), some 34 striking mine workers got massacred by police at Marikana (near Rustenburg, South Africa), and a right-wing idiot named Wade Michael Page shoots six Sikhs whom he mistakes for Muslims (Oak Creek, Wisconsin).

The latter incident prompted 2012 to be the first year that real censorship took place at Discogs: Wade had played in a few white power rock bands; their albums were soon banned from the marketplace.

Continue reading →