Hivemind Times Issue #39

Welcome To The Hivemind Times!

My sweet readers, what is happening. I heard the new pope was born in Chicago so I drove my ass straight to the windy city to spend the weekend. Gary Indiana is a hell hole cesspool of toxic waste. Anywho, I got some fun shit for ya this week, most importantly the return of THE SHVINGI, Cronk shares his 2 cents about the greatest songs of all time and his current state as a songwriter, and I’m currently involved in negotiations to get the rest of the team to contribute. I’m sure we will pull something awesome together. 

I hope you enjoyed the unlimited and main channel drops this week, there is one final Brandon Wardell video coming next week! Remember: God isn’t real but Youtube is and I’ll always be here for you - enjoy the read and the tunes PEACE OUUUUUT.

- Riley & Graydon

WEEKLY PLAYLIST

En route to Chicago my plan was to make a playlist of every song I listened to and I managed 13 before I listened to Heavy Metal by Cam Winter in full again followed by Labi Sifre’s Crying, Laughing, Loving Lying before finishing up with the new Samia album Bloodless. Bloodless was the first new listen for me and boy can she write a song, my fav was Lizard! And fuck you if you haven’y listened to Heavy Metal yet. Here’s the first 13 tracks I played before I got into the albums.

- Graydon

CRONK’S UPDATE

Hello all,

This week, my special little interest has been listening through Rolling Stone’s Top 500 Songs of All Time. I got the idea to do this from watching some producer say this is a crucial task for songwriters in an interview. In the hopes of being inspired, I set out to listen to the whole thing.

For anyone really interested in songwriting, this is definitely worth a listen. You would think this list is the most popular songs of all time, but it really is focused on the “best” songs of all time. Every song makes sense to be on there; a couple stick out, but I still get why they’re there. As much as we think music changes, it’s always been the same shit. Most of these pop songs from the ’50s/’60s are two minutes long and get to the chorus in the first 20 seconds. Another thing I noticed from these songs is how effortless listening to them is: they just vibe and flow. The listener doesn’t have to do much work; you just start grooving and get a tingle feeling inside.

I knew that there were a lot of bangers on this listen that I haven’t ever paid attention to. One song from that list that will leave a lifelong impact on me is “Once in a Lifetime” by Talking Heads. I knew Talking Heads are amazing, but for some reason listening to “Once in a Lifetime” and thinking about it being one of the best songs of all time had me sitting there with my brain blown. The whole song is written as if David Byrne was a radio preacher giving a sermon; it’s genius and such an emotional song—god damn, it’s good.

Now I have listened to three Talking Heads albums and I’m halfway through David Byrne’s book about music. Funny how listening through this list led me down this whole Talking Heads fixation. If anyone wants to check this playlist out, here is the link to the article—though you can find playlists of the list on Spotify/Apple Music.

- Cronk

VIDEO GAMES

One of my favorite video games

Today I would like to talk about one of my favorite games of all time called, "Noita". Noita is a 2D roguelite action platformer, but also a sandbox physics game where every pixel on screen is simulated with a physics engine. You play as a tiny wizard that has to fight their way deep underground to kill a giant floating spider named Kolmi.

When you spawn in, you are given 2 random wands and a random potion. One wand will always be an offensive wand with a basic, low damage projectile spell. The other wand will have a terrain destroying spell with limited casts. To progress, you must head underground and fight your way to a purple portal.

On the way to the portal, there will be low level enemies, randomly generated potions and wands, pools of lava, flammable liquids, mysterious glowing liquids, explosive objects and many other things that can basically one shot you. Even picking up a wand a firing it without looking at the spells inside can instantly kill you. You can find hp upgrades and spell refreshers or even a mysterious tablet. Mostly though, you will die, everything can kill you and will kill you.

Once you reach the bottom of the first floor and go through a floating purple portal you are brought to your first holy mountain. This is your "safe zone". No enemies can spawn here, except under certain conditions where a very powerful mini boss named "Steven" will spawn and definitely fuck you up the first 20 times you see him. Holy mountains have a full heal, a spell refresher, a random assortment of either new spells or wands that cost gold (dropped by enemies when they die and comes out of chests and some other stuff), and a choice between 3 randomly generated perks. Most importantly, being in the holy mountain lets you edit your wands.

The wand building mechanic in this game is extremely deep and you can build wands that shoot beautiful, vibrant exploding colors that decimate everything around you. There are teleport spells, terrain removing spells, transmutation spells, spells that are literally just explosions, and many other types of spells to find on your journey. After you exit the holy mountain, it collapses, removing your ability to edit wands for the next floor. Maybe there is a way to exit and re-enter the holy mountain without collapsing it?

You keep going deeper underground into increasingly difficult floors with new biomes and enemies and increasingly powerful wands and spells until you reach Kolmi's lair. Once you defeat Kolmi, you have beaten the game.

However, what happens if you go left or right instead of down every floor? What happens if you go up instead of down? What happens if you keep going down past Kolmi? This game is FULL of secrets, puzzles, quests, and massive bosses that drop extremely powerful spells that can turn you into a god if put together in a proper wand.

I have over 1000 hours in this game and a top 30 any% speedrun, with all of the character drip possible from the end game quests and I still come back to it weekly because everytime I start a new run, anything can happen and it's a beautiful game to look at with passionate devs that created a work of art. Give it a try. Fair warning though, this game is NOT easy and you will die hundreds of times before you beat it once

- Quinn

LIVE SHOW REVIEW

Fontaines D.C.

Sweet boy Ray Coyle was nice enough to take me to see Fontaines D.C at the historic Fillmore theater on Wednesday.

Boy oh boy can those Irish fellas rock the house. Grain Chatten (frontman) is a freaky fuck who can really command a crowd. He didn’t even speak to the almost 3,000 fans until after the fourth song and already throwing the mic stand once but we didn’t need banter, we were united in a sweaty Guiness fueled unity of rock n roll.

I’m always so inspired when I get to witness a full fledged BAND rock such a storied venue and they did not disappoint. If they are coming to your city soon, go see em. Here’s a few stupid pics…

- Graydon

RETURN OF SHVINGI INGËBÖRKSEN

Losing the Plot

I was listening to a podcast about games last year that has stuck in my craw. There was much discussion but really the main point was about how “Western” culture has slipped into oppressive gamification. Competition is all we know. A few threads to pull on.

First, mass digitization has tipped us over into late-stage capitalism and nothing is safe or sacred. All we know to measure is winners and losers. Statistical analysis has completely reengineered baseball and basketball. Liverpool’s director of research has a PhD from Cambridge in computational astrophysics. Even something as banal as pickleball - a sport previously dominated by old people with bad knees–has been completely hijacked by type-A ubermensch millennials and turned into a billion dollar sport. The vibrancy of one’s social circle is measured in bits. People are afraid to walk into a store to buy a spatula without previously doing a Reddit search for “best spatula to buy.” Because a mediocre spatula is simply not worth having; you’d be better off not cooking at all.

Second, “wins” and “losses” are inherent concepts to the human mind. And in this day in age, where we understand less and less, simple and binary measurements are critical. Have you ever listened to economists try and explain to you how global supply chains work? They can’t. Same for crypto “experts.” No one knows how the technology works. Ditto quantum physicists or engineers working on AI models. A pretty small group of ostensibly smart people created a series of digital structures that dominate global commerce and, thus, life, but guns to their head could not explain how they work to a layman.

So instead we’ve applied these structures in ways the mind can more easily understand, i.e. winning. There’s also something here connected to the growing conspiracy-fication of discourse. Because now the systems intrinsic to human society are beyond the human mind’s comprehension. So it’s a lot easier if I can just say “well it’s an international cabal of blood drinkers.” Because vampires I understand more than large language models.

Maybe Chicago Pope Leo has some answers.

- Shivingi

MERCH