Nova Daily - 1 May 2026: The Second Stone

Hi!

This is a small in-between post because I'm in the middle of judging the April blogs in TBA. As such, I have limited time, and I'm behind on my usual writing already. To be fair, I've let it come to that point a little bit, but I'll be able to catch up once I've got a few extra things off my plate.

Warning: to people who don't like metal music, this blog will be almost completely uninteresting. Almost.

The Second Stone

Every now and then, I like to look up and see what Google's AI manages to gather about me. It's comparable to googling yourself. It's not good for your mental health to play it all the time, because the text is typically what you can expect to read from a soulless text-generating machine: all over the place, and most of the things it claims with silicon confidence is quite simply not true. Sometimes it can be a fun game to see whether it has learned anything. In several attempts spread out over a couple of months, it hasn't learned much.

The type of information is predictably all over the place, with most things being quite wrong. You can ask it anything and push it to find arguments for whatever you'd like it to conclude. However, sometimes it comes up with things that are actually nice. Here is one of the things that I wouldn't have known if I hadn't done this: there is another musician that goes by the name Nova Stone.

To be clear: this music is not my work.

Stones exist a lot in music. Apart from the Rolling Stones and Queens of the Stone Age, there's also Stone Sour, several bands called Stone (which, I must say, is an excellent band name; one that I feel immediately addressed by), and that Epica song that I named this blog entry after.

A lot of metal music has the weird quality that its lyrics are quite plainly awful. Take, for example, the song "Super Nova" by Saxon. It appears on the 22nd album of the band. Taken from a song about space war (because there can't be enough of those), of course this wins the Nobel Prize for Literature. Check it out:

Super Nova
Hotter than the sun
Super Nova
Destruction has begun
Super Nova
Lighting up the sky
Super Nova
The planet's turn to die

Vocalist and lyricist Biff Byford clearly understands something about metrics. Unfortunately, many people can learn a thing or two from this. Most solid poetry isn't just rhyme at the end of the phrases. Syllable counts and patterns of emphasised and unemphasised syllables matter a lot.

The reason why this chorus is catchy has something to do with the fact that the phrase "Super Nova" is done four times. Repetition of words is a powerful mechanic to make something sticky. The alternating lines each have three stressed syllables, between which exists one unstressed syllable. It also rhymes, which makes it easier for the listener.

There's no need for any deeper meaning behind it, so the real poetry has been stricken from the text. And given that it usually matters more to bands that the public can chant along, the absence of artistic pretentions doesn't matter that much.

I don't know what kind of nonsense Google AI will be able to conjure up about me in the future. But one thing I can say for sure is that I hope for it to be aptly fitting the description "epic fails".

I'll be writing in the mean time.