For about a year I have been trying to work out how to make music. I want to make stuff like the OP-1 videos on Red means recording. I have a midi keyboard and LMMS on my desktop but I just can't work out how to do anything.

Does anyone have any tips or resources? Everything I have found has been so specific to a certain tool that I can't use it or so theoretical I don't understand what to do with it.

There was a brief (an oh-so-brief) period in youtube history where all types of non-corporate content thrived. I'm referring, if memory serves, to the timespan from around 2011 - late 2014.

This was after youtube initially got big, but before Google decided that it wanted to step in and maintain the cultural status quo rather than redefine it. Ad revenue paid creators fairly-ish in most cases, and the talk of the town was machinima assfucking it's segment of poor souls that signed into it, rather than youtube pulling the same moves universally as it did a few years later.

(Suffice to say I have no love for the platform).

It's important to note that at this time, Youtube was a bit like a small-scale television enterprise, before it dreamed of deliberately becoming one. Youtube had everything from animations to product reviews, news to reality programming to VFX extravaganzas.

One of the most incredibly important innovations of the time, and one that's been all-but-lost, was the birth (and subsequent heat-death) of youtube news channels.

These channels mirrored cable news, but without the influence of corporate sponsors getting in the way, and without the ravenous need to appease political parties and harebrained cable tv viewers. They were biased - good god were some of them biased - and they weren't perfect, but they were set up in such a way that, had youtube not fucked it up (sigh...) they might've someday dethroned CNN, MSNBC and Fox.

With the next election coming up and shaping up to be a small-scale repeat of 2018s (you're kidding yourself if we're every going to go any other direction than further down at this point - after all, it works!) it's important to remember that there was, for a beautiful gleaming moment, a chance for not a corporation, but a community, to rise up and redefine the way people received news in a way that hadn't been seen since the conception of the newspaper.

Instead, youtube squandered it. Real events and engaging content don't generate views. People can't sit and watch hours of current events like they do for whatever-the-hell youtube trends nowadays (list videos and toy openings, I guess?), and why would they? If you get on youtube to watch today's news, you're not going to stick around for yesterday's. So youtube's 'algorythm', a word I've come to absolutely detest, doesn't favor them just like it doesn't favor basically anything else that once made youtube great.

The icing on the cake: rather than embrace even a tertiary aspect of the community, they went for the safe option and the ad revenue. No Phillip Defranco for you, we'll show you Jimmy Kimmel. No TYT, we'll fill trending with clips of CNN, MSNBC and Fox News. The only real survivor of the era was infowars.

Here's to you, youtube news. Dead and gone, but not forgotten.

Obviously this depends heavily on one's interpretation and subsequent extrapolation of the current geopolitical climate. That being said Nazis, the Soviet Union and generic Middle Eastern terrorists will eventually fall out of vogue and lose their cultural significance with each passing generation. What might come next?

If nothing else, I suspect zombies will remain one of those recurring trends that come in waves.

With Essen Spiel 2018 arriving tomorrow, I was wondering what boardgames you guys are most anticipating.

I've listened to a bunch of podcasts and watched a bunch of top-10 most anticipated videos and there are a bunch of games that are getting me excited.

For example, Treasure Island, which I only found out about yesterday, looks pretty interesting to me. It involves one player hiding some treasure and the other players trying to seek it out (Scotland Yard style). The pirate hiding the treasure has to give out clues that may involve drawing areas on the may in dry-erase marker with a compass, like a ship's navigator.

However I'm most eagerly awaiting more detail on the forthcoming Capstone game, Pipeline and some more details on the Splotter expansion to Food Chain Magnate (even though I don't think it needs an expansion).