Donated today because this campaign has actually mobilized people to do material good for those living in the district and provides a model for how politics should work. Also you get a cool picture of a cat.

Max Ward sang for SCHOLASTIC DETH, a fastcore band active for a few short years around the turn of the millennium. Today, he’s an associate professor of history at Middlebury. This week, I posted a pair of articles on this band and on the book he wrote in 2019. Both are from a zine I did in 2023.

Without further ado, here’s this week’s post. Max Ward, vocalist of SCHOLASTIC DETH, became a professor. (The band members weren’t kidding about being nerds.) In 2019, he wrote “Thought Crime: Ideology and State Power in Interwar Japan.” In 2023, I reviewed it for a zine I was doing. Read it here.

Forgot to include the other punk song from the same-ish era about black metal. Here’s ATOM AND HIS PACKAGE with “Me and My Black Metal Friends.” “They’re pretty evil and they do not like God / I don’t care if they burn down churches, but they better not fucking touch a synagogue”

In a preview of the post going up tomorrow on The Tall Rob Report and a connection to this past week's post, please enjoy SCHOLASTIC DETH with "We Think Metal Music Is Awesome But Everything Connected To It Sucks...Including You" which is about punk kids wearing sketchy black metal shirts at shows.

Hahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahaha

Happy Bandcamp Friday! Not a huge FUGAZI fan but an Albini Mix of one of their albums (with proceeds to charity) is a no-brainer FEMINAZGUL is one of the best band names I’ve ever heard I already have the CD & LP of these MERCYFUL FATE albums, but why not send them some $ for the digital version?

I don’t know why we have to fund the Large Hadron Collider at CERN when you can get the same subatomic particles for cheap at the

I don’t know why we have to fund the Large Hadron Collider at CERN when you can get the same subatomic particles for cheap at the

You don’t need to know much of anything about Communism or black metal to engage with the book. Not sure if the logo says anything… Shout out to Torn Light Records of Chicago for having this book on their shelves. Great shop! www.tornlightrecords.com

Bill Peel wrote a book exploring the affordances black metal (as a genre of music and associated scene) has to teach Communists about certain social practices. Yes, I was confused, too, when I first saw the book. Those practices include distortion, decay, secrecy, coldness, and heresy. Review here:

Bill Peel’s book “Tonight it’s a World We Bury: Black Metal, Red Politics” is a response to a question few have asked: what can Communists learn from the social practices of the black metal scene? There’s quite a lot! Read my review of the book in this week’s installment of The Tall Rob Report.

Add some music to your day… Listen to “Heartbeats” by The KNIFE and the read what I had to say about it.

Add some music to your day… Listen to “Heartbeats” by The KNIFE and the read what I had to say about it.

An imperfect measure of the seriousness of this action is which apps tell you about it. Dreading a push notification from a banking app.

… #iranscam “It’s a bunch of fucking shit, man…”

He doesn't know what to say / He doesn't know what to do / If things are gonna get worse / Might as well use the nukes His public image / Has lost its touch / He can't wait for the bomb / He wants it so much

Can you hear the sound / of an enormous door / slamming in the depths of hell? / The possibility of life's destruction Can you hear the cries of pain / the mournful sound? / The possibility of life's destruction

Weather’s nice. Reposting a blog about “my favorite song” and exploring what that phrase means. It’s not a springtime / nice weather song necessarily, but it fits the mood this Friday at 4PM when it is nearly 60°F in the greater Chicagoland area.

This is an excellent job of explaining *why* AI-written papers fall short of providing thoughtful analysis. LLMs don’t have experiences & emotions & motivations to draw from. As Parker states in the portions I’ve highlighted, this “idiosyncratic thinking” is how we make meaning from text.

Tom Capone fucking rules!

make your silly little art as a fukk u to the people telling you ai has destroyed the need for making it. there’s just as much (or as little) need for it as there ever was.

Last week at the gym, I saw downhill snowboarding on TV and it reminded me of a snowboarding video one of my roommates played incessantly about 20 years ago. It featured “Heartbeats” by The KNIFE as its backing track. If that’s not my favorite song of all time, it’s at least one I’m obsessed with.

My local Jewel-Osco store was playing “I Try” by MACY GRAY, so I reached into my pocket to turn the volume up on my phone like that’s how it works.

Props to Jack Hughes, or as he’s likely to be known in some parts of Canada, “J’accuse!”

Looks like Brown Hoodie Guy got a two-day suspension for throwing the “OKAY” punch. The dweeb who recorded the video (with his META RAY-BANS, because, of course…) also got a one-day, in-school suspension for video recording in the school.

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And once again, NUIT NOIRE with “Scrapheap.” I hate you, fucking cars, 'cause you kill the animals Grinding their bones, bursting their veins and making them agonize I will crush you as you crush them, you will taste my lunar sword You won't be able to run anymore, you will become a scrapheap

A trend I’ve noticed since the onset of the pandemic is that drivers in the U.S. are engaging in wilder behaviors than before. Like a car in the center lane taking advantage of the left turn arrow at a 4-way intersection because there were no more cars on “our” left turn lane yet to go. 1/2

Reposting for the morning commute. Watch out for the animals. thetallrobreport.blogspot.com/2026/02/life...

One important shift Goodyear and Gordon ask of us is to use “crash” instead of “accident” because the elements that lead to a crash can reveal who is at fault or what could be changed to prevent future crashes. @thewaroncars.bsky.social thetallrobreport.blogspot.com/2026/02/life...

“Is there Life After Cars?” ask Sarah Goodyear & Doug Gordon in their recent book. Yes, and it is achievable in our time. Read my review of Life After Cars in this week’s installment of The Tall Rob Report. @thewaroncars.bsky.social

Wait... I think this may be a new career path. A matchmaker but with an early literacy focus. I'll administer spelling bee words to the pool of prospects my clients bring me. "Yeah he's hot but when I had him spell 'meet,' he said M-E-A-T before I could give him the definition of 'a greeting'."

The 13-year-old in me is way stoked at this choice of cover song. It’s not like they were gonna do something by SARCÓFAGO or SEX TRASH or what have you. Still kinda funny though.

The other day, a friend of mine sent me a video of FALL OUT BOY covering SEPULTURA at a show in Brazil in 2014. Seemed like it would along with this week’s post on The Tall Rob Report. #falloutboy

The other day, a friend of mine sent me a video of FALL OUT BOY covering SEPULTURA at a show in Brazil in 2014. Seemed like it would along with this week’s post on The Tall Rob Report. #falloutboy

Let's play a game called "Name that Band Based on the Music Critic's Description": 1 - "Trendy electro-disco beats go hand in hand with choirboy melodies (not cloying!) and a merry-go-round of neo-folksy synths to make a perfectly uncontrived pop soufflé."

All time? Donald Rumsfeld Rahm Emanuel Charlton Heston But also Liz Phair Bobbi Brown Virginia Madsen While I was there… Chris Cox (inventor of FB’s News Feed) Jaimie Branch Joe Trohman Liesel Matthews Beck Bennett

Here are the two flyers for the show where Joe Trohman gave me the FALL OUT BOY demo on CDR. This was in 2001. I think the flyer with the revolver has the correct lineup. I kind of remember The KILLING TREE playing and I probably left after NO WARNING played.

I’ve removed the photos that I had put in the original version of this review. They’d appeared in a zine with low circulation, so I feel weird about sharing them on here. Later, I will scan and post the flyers from the show where he gave me the FALL OUT BOY demo, though.

Even though I haven’t spoken to him since 2001, I can still hear how he’d have set up this story as a monologue if he were to tell it to me in person. thetallrobreport.blogspot.com/2026/02/none...

Joe also showed that he was bound for a life beyond our suburban high school with his webzine, A Helping Hand. I was meant to do show or record reviews as “The Angry Green Giant.” I never ended up doing that but he got some interviews done. thetallrobreport.blogspot.com/2026/02/none...

One of the parts of the memoir that was hard to read was about the kids who were a grade above me in high school brutally severing ties with Joe, who was a year below me. It didn’t seem to faze him in the long term but it had to sting at the time. thetallrobreport.blogspot.com/2026/02/none...

I was thinking about Joe and his band and the scene we came from as I was replying to this thread from last week.

For this week’s Tall Rob Report, I have a lightly revised review of Joe Trohman’s memoir “None of This Rocks,” which came out a few years ago.

Yo they changed the display but the text is still misspelled.

For this week’s Tall Rob Report, I have a lightly revised review of Joe Trohman’s memoir “None of This Rocks,” which came out a few years ago.

lol Hamburger Straße

The names of the teams in Super Bowl LX can be parsed as two-word sentences: Pat riots. Sea hawks. [a person named Pat engages in rowdy public behavior] [a body of water makes a sound akin to clearing the throat] Combined, they form a sentence implying cause-and-effect: Sea hawks; Pat riots.