punctured neighbour

Moffat Toffees ("spoilers")

2012-01-25T17:32:00.002Z

This has been simmering for a while, but I've really got a bone to pick with Steven Moffat. This started with what went atrociously wrong with the last series of Dr Who, but extends into similar things that have crept into Sherlock. The two series are so similar I regularly call them the wrong way round, and finished a series in the last year with the main character faking their death to their companions.

I jumped onto the Dr Who revival only when Moffat took over with Matt Smith as The Doctor. I hadn't taken to Tennent or the other one, but something about this incarnation got me going, and despite its hit-and-missity, I really enjoy it. Mostly the concurrent plot line with River Song and her tragi-romantic relationship with The Doctor. However, the last series really disappointed with the revelations, and I'd have let this slide if Moffat and his team weren't making the same mistakes with Sherlock.

Series 6 of The Who promised so much and fell so flat. It had a great set-up, that The Doctor is seen being killed by someone in a space suit who just walked out of a lake: the eponymous 'impossible astronaut'. Over the first couple of episodes we establish that the occupant of the space suit is a little girl timelord - what could be more exciting? Rubbish episodes (like the stupid piratey one, the not-scary-at-all-for-the-most-part child's bedroom one, and the didn't-need-to-be-a-double flesh one) aside, the mid-season-should-have-been-a-double-episode cliffhanger - River is Amy's daughter, bred and conditioned to kill The Doctor, meaning that he *is* the one she is in prison for killing, but is now lost in time - was tremendous. And it was very nearly ruined by the follow-up Let's Kill Hitler, which commited the unbelivable crime of 'making up a new character who everyone is supposed to have known for years but never mentioned'. This was shamefully done, on a par with Curb your Enthusiasm, except that that is a lean, episodic sitcom, and this is a drama with every opportunity to put some mention of the character Mel in at some previous point. They had a series and a half to introduce some reference to her, but her appearance was a total shock. Also, naming her Melody is a causal paradox and The Who is supposed to avoid those.

So Mel, still reeling from her childhood brainwashing, kisses the dr with a deadly poison. She is identied as is killer by a third party. Then she dies and regenerates as River Song.

The reason that i'm going over all this garbage in so much detail is because, at the end, it doesn't add up. She's already tried to kill him. Then she over-rides her programming and saves him by using up all her regenerations (with absolutely no foreshadowing that this was possible). Then, later in her life, she gets kidnapped by the whoever and put inside a space suit again, against her will, and apparently the space suit is in control? So she's not even particpating in the killing of The Doctor? Which renders her whole part in it pointless.

This isn't the way it was meant to be. We've already seen the little girl (who we now know is River) in the spacesuit. We know that River kills the doctor. What needed to happen was that it would be the young River Song who killed him, who then went on to meet him and grow to love him, knowing all along that one day (in her past) she will kill him. What a fantastic tragedy it would be, only possible in a time-travelling sci-fi.

And then there's the fact that leading up to the season finale, we had two perfect get out clauses built for the doctor: The flesh and the perfect impersonating robot. Both of these things fill the same function in the plot, a thing that can look like anyone. Why would Moffat need a choice of body doubles? It's the most superfluous mcguffin in existence; and it's made even worse by the fact that he's probably plaid the same trick again in Sherlock since, for all intents and purposes, Watson saw Holmes throw himself off a roof and got a good look at his bloody body on the floor? It's going to be a body double, again, isn't it? And again, we've got a superfuidity of options because a) we know that Holmes can make convincing corpse dopplegangers, Since he got one supposed to be Adler past Mycroft in 'scandle' and b) we know that Moriarty had a sherlock mask or something because the girl screamed when she saw him. Same escapement, same problem of not knowing which mcguffin was used.

Without going into theories of how Shelock avoided his death, I wanted to talk broaderer about the similar failings in the two shows. And succsesses; They're both superbly acted and engaging. But Sherlock can be a complete ramble. Take the Irene Adler episode; There wasn't even a crime that had been comitted, just some photos with no ransom note. Adler had no apparent agenda, motives, or demands. This might make for a gripping character study in literature, but at 9 o'clock on bbc 1 on a sunday night, I want a body, dammit, I want an apparently unsolvable mystery, and at most I want a conspiracy that goes all the way to the top. Anything else is just noise. There were times in 'Scandle', when I wasn't even sure who was meant to be in the room. And even with all that, it was a great watch.

The same with The Who; it's become too much revelation and not enough story. Too many plots are constructed entirely out of ideas and feel paper-thin. I like philosophy, I like allegorical sci-fi, but sometimes The Who strays *too far* into timey-wimey hand-wavey stuff, to the point of their being no actual action or anything happening, just a monster made of tears that only exists in their minds or something. The main problem here was put to me (and the world) on twitter by Rob Florence, along the lines of: 'my daughter doesn't get Dr Who anymore, it's over for us.' He also said "When you can barely explain the story of Doctor Who to your daughter, it's time to find something else until it straightens out." but I'm sure that wasn't the original quote.

Convoluted is the word. It feels in Dr WHO that they're sometimes building episode plot lines around revelation and nothing else. In the golden age of the X Files, I remember episodes that seemed completely stand-alone until the last ten minutes when you spotted someone or somehow it related back to another episode and you went 'ah!' In sherlock, with shorter serieses, it's a different but related problem; playing mind games with the Ultimate Villian seem to take up about a third of the series.

I just want my prime-time family friendly dramas to be... I don't know. what am i trying to say again?

Oh yeah and moffat also has wierd views on women. But that's another story.

a quick tought

2012-01-17T22:32:00.003Z

should the amount of people you're emailing affect the number of Xs? do they get divvied up between the recipients, or is the amount you put in an average of what you would normally send to the recipients?

songs of 2011

2012-01-13T16:34:00.000Z

2011 by Dj Gallowslutt on Mixcloud

So I did the above mix, and then realised I'd left out a track off the portal 2 soundtrack. I don't know how that happened, but I began to realise there was a whole bunch of stuff that I hadn't put on from this year.

So what's the story of my music this year?

First off, we've got the usual characters popping up as always: Euros Childs, Half Man Half Biscuit, 65DaysofStatic; you can pretty much take those as read. Network-related artists always turn up: Girls Girls Girls, Marmaduke Dando (my next door neighbour knows him), Muddy Suzuki (FOAF via two routes), Blue Bambinos (Justin from work's band, who sadly left at xmas), Aaron, and a whopping 3 tracks from myself: two from the forthcoming album and a not-entirely-successful demo for something I want to do after that. I'd include Cats In Paris in that list, but I don't think they were around long enough to become an utterly predictable choice for me to include (didn't stop me [putting them on almost every mix in the last 4 years)

What's new is, I think, a shift towards black metal (as oppose to math metal or spazz) and synthesisers. In fact some of the tracklisting started out as a synth-based mix tape that got subsumed by the 2011 goblin. Profanum represent the bottom of the black metal barrel I think, a sign of how bad things have got when you're listening to nothing more than drums, screaming, and simple MIDI orchestration. Anaal Nathrakh represent a deeper, more intense barrel bottom. I first heard 'hyperblast' on their website around 2005, but that mp3 was utterly distorted. Sounded brilliant, but I've waited until now to mix it since it came up on a UK black metal compilation I got for xmas.

I finally bought Orbital's 'Insides', after a wait of about 13 years. It's really good, and the 12 minute cut of 'the box' is superb. There's some real John Carpenter vibes around my head atm. Also the track sounds massively like radiohead's 'where bluebirds fly'. I've found myself listening to more and more ludicrous music like Igorrr on Ad Noiseam, whose label samplers are always a joy.

Anyway, time to move on and see what 2012 brings. Have fun with these.

Further to 2011 by Dj Gallowslutt on Mixcloud

UFOEU

2012-01-01T17:00:00.000Z

So, as an addition to the last post, I've been playing a bit of UFO:EU again to compare with my recent recursion to Syndicate Wars.

This in itself is not unusual, I frequently get the old UFO bug again and fall back into it every few years, like the Silmarillion. But in light of some of my recent comments about it, and about save games, I've developed some more thoughts.

Firstly, I tried playing the game, from the start, without saving and loading. It was impossible. Even playing 'perfectly' - saving time units for aimed shot, meaning walking forwards at a snails pace - does not guarantee your troops survival. A shot from a hiding alien can come out of literally no-where, from your first step in a mission, and your defenceless grunt falls over nine times out of ten. First mission: 5/8 made it back. The fallen were replaced, but second mission, all were dead in a few turns. So I started trying to judiciously save before each mission, and loading only if it all went wrong, but before long, I was saving every time I made a good move, and loading every time a troop was iced. It's just the only way I can get through the game, especially early night-time terror missions. It's like having infinite free re-rolls, and to be honest, breaks the game, because it becomes a dream walk-through.

This changes considerably after you research the heavy plasma gun. I clearly remember the first play through with my brother, or atleast the first one after we'd got the hang of it. The game starts with only primitive, 20th century tech available. We dilligently worked our way through all the research topics that were presented to us, through all the iterations of laser weapons before looking into the items recovered from excursions. By the end of the game, we had everyone equipped with the heavy plasma gun, met mere weeks into the game. Now, I know better; skip everything, head straight for that weapon. It's now 2 months in, and already my squad are unstoppable. the time cost is lower and the power and accuracy way up, meaning you can stroll forwad while carrying it and still have time for an aimed shot, which now almost certainly hits and kills. my lot, with barely four missions experience, are picking off sectoids ss soon as they see them. I know it'll get harder again, but still.

But stiller, UFO is not a game you can win in the battles. You can try, but eventually you will be overrun. The whole thing is about winning the battles but losing the war; each mission won merely puts off the inevitable defeat of earth for another day. I preferred playing it when I didn't know what to do. It's a great game to dick around in, to be directionless in, because even when you've got no idea of how to progress, there's still the day to day running of your organisation to do.

The story is completely simplistic, but I think that's an inevitable consequence of having such a free-form, replayable, game structure. Not that it's inevitable for a computer game to have a simple story; for instance, an RPG like Torment's replay value comes from the fact that any one play through will only show about a quarter of the story. But a linear plotted game like, say, a classic Lucasarts graphic adventure, has less replay value, because a playthrough shows you pretty much everything there is.

SO how can you improve this game? I can't think of another game that gives you so much control and freedom. There really are not many ways of improving the game, but the only thing I can think of is making the enemy less lethal. Some rudimentary armour, available from the beginning, just to keep your people from dying so quickly, would make it... fairer. Towards the end of the game now, with all my troops in flying power suits, they usually don't feel being hit, or get away with a few wounds. It's quite surprising there's not a flack jacket or something amongst the random things you get given at the start - like hi-explosive, flares, and rocket launchers. But the only way to play the game from the start is by breaking it through saving and loading, which sets a dodgy precedent for the rest of the game.

And as I have nearly finished the game, again, with nothing left to research, and the last mission is in sight, I must wonder why I have wasted so much time on it, when I've got so much other stuff to do. Because it seems to fit into those little five minute slots I have, when I don't have time to sit down for a few hours and work on music. Even if those little slots turn into hours. It's a 'brainy' game, but I still don't really have to think while I'm playing. Not compared to doing the things that I really enjoy doing. And then I go and write a bloody boring blog post about it, because it's taken over such a huge part of my brain. I'm quite embarrassed by this, but it feeds into something I think I'll save for a future post regarding the lack of conversation on the internet these days. So... mu. bollocks to it. I'm posting this complete waste of time because it's better than deleting it. I apologise.

sequal like a pig

2011-12-11T17:45:00.000Z

So, as a person who doesn't play many computer games anymore, but still has a large interest in them for some reason, I'm intrigued by the revivals of games that meant something to me. Both Syndicate and UFO: Enemy Unknown were quite formative.Especially intriguing that these two games should be hyped at the same time, because i remember them from the same period of my life. They both came out in 1993, and though I didn't play syndicate at the time, I remember having an argument with Wij about which was better, both of us only having played one. We sparred off each other with feats that we thought only our game could do. Research, upgrading your team, tactical squad-based gameplay... They sound quite similar on paper.

Later, when I had syndicate wars, I realised how different they were. As well as the matter of real-time vs turn-based, Syndicate gave you absolutely no punishment for killing civilians. Bystanders were little more than hedges, although they could be captured and armed, and oh the joy of working your way up the hierarchy of civilians, police, and eventually agents to capture. Syndicate gave you the freedom to do anything - murder citizens or local police, steal cars, rob banks, nuke office blocks - without consequences. UFO let you do anything, but everything had an impact one way or another. To different extents, these both both hugely emergent games. UFO's levels were randomly generated from set pieces; you had no idea when you landed what you were going to face. On the other hand, Syndicates cities were set-up to deliver unexpected consequences to your actions, and to reward improvised solutions to problems. They were sandbox-y enough to work as both living environments and missions.

I've just been playing syndicate wars again recently, and what strikes me is how much of an action game it is, when it's remembered more for tactics and strategy. Syndicate was already a lot more like Doom than UFO; it was fast (when the action kicked in), and it was your reactions and aiming that was the defining factor, not the qualities in your team. In Syndicate, you screwed up when you missed (and missing with the LR rifle sometimes meant all four members of your squad couldn't shoot again for ages); in UFO, you screwed up when you didn't sufficiently plan for the risk of your troops missing. Syndicate had some of the trappings of tactics and rpgs, but wasn't really a plan-ahead strategy game; on the one hand, you couldn't save mid-mission, and the missions could be big, so there was a lot of casing of joints, a lot of reconnaissance, and then only as a last resort, loading when things went wrong; but mostly, it's a trial and error game of learning to respond to ambushes before they happen. The only stats bonuses your drones get are the three levels of 5 different cybernetic implants on offer, and I've just maxed all those out by half way through the game.

With the 'remakes', Both the trailers for these games have similar, 2010s trappings - linearity, cut-scenes (press x to extract chip OMFG), sops to rpg elements with lame-o-rama upgrades, and chest-high walls. But I can totally forgive a large amount of the changes in Syndicate; the remake actually seems to capture some of the atmosphere. Hacking into people's brains is totally what Syndicate was all about (in that it ripped off loads of cyberpunk), even if the choices you have when you've hacked them is only 'suicide'. And bundling a four-way co-op into the bargain is great, because Syndicate Wars offered the same thing. XCOM, on the other hand, has thrown the baby out with the bathwater, and kept nothing but the name and the vague concept (which only bears as much relationship to UFO as to any other game ever. It might as well be a remake of R-Type).

What I really resent about both remakes is that they put you into the action. In the old syndicate games, you controlled brainless drone cyborgs in trenchcoats, expendable up to the point of having been financially invested in. In UFO, your people were incredibly valuable to you - but you were not one of them. Now, maybe these plot elements were dictated by the available technology, and the fact that in 1993 people were still more used to playing action games from a third-person view (like alien breed or chaos engine). But the change of perspective makes you the action hero, not the boss. It means your the actor, not the director or script writer. The story of the game was always the same, but the details were all up to you. But now every play through will be the same. So why call the new UFO game XCOM at all? I could ask the same thing about the new Syndicate; while it might capture the spirit of the original, the setting is so hackneyed that there's no sense in just taking the name. My point is, the perspective makes the game. It dictates the feel, and it grows stories from the missions in your head but never get put into words. Are we looking at the death of emergent gameplay in mainstream games? No, as exemplified by the popularity of GTA and Elder Scrolls. But I find it a worrying trend.

There's a more sinister point. Only a small minority of gamers today were playing games 20 years ago, when the originals came out. And they are not the ones these reboot/sequals are aimed at. So why acquire the licences at all?

Because of this lot (I mean games journalists. I googled 'games journalists' and a picture of Gillen came up, albeit in his role as a comics writer). The fact that these games have something - anything - to do with games from the fondly-recalled childhoods of the people currently rating and reviewing games for the mass market, is basically free advertising. The companies know that it means the game will get talked about, talked up, and given an extra chance when they might not have deserved one, as oppose to just flopping out of the industry like every other fresh-faced product. It's the cynicism that's so depressing. Despite the fact that the games aren't sequals, aren't in the same universe, aren't anything to do with the earlier games, doesn't matter. It's like a Led Zeppelin tribute band, who are allowed to call themselves Led Zeppelin, and play songs that LZ didn't perform.

It's like when they made Inspector Gadget: the movie, and showed The Claw as a person from the outset. The whole point of IG is that you never see The Claw beyond his eponymous hand, you don't even know if he's human. Sigh.

So Why do I have time for 1998's Battlezone - a remake arguably as flimsy as the ones I've discussed above?
BZ was so far removed from the simplistic gameplay of the 1980 original (note the similarity in timespan) that it could have come from two directions: either they said 'let's make a new 'battlezone' game', and just not stopped adding more and more cool stuff; or, more depressingly, some creative types had this wonderful idea for a game, set in space, that combined strategy and fps elements, with a plot, where you could build and ride around in tanks; and then the managers said "did you say it has tanks in? let's call it battlezone, for some free publicity!".

Ultimately, it's just a good game, irrespective of it's licence, which meant nothing to me at the time. But maybe I'd only heard of it because of the backroom shenanigans that led to it being given a name familiar to games journos of 1998.

So I suggest remaking another classic 1993 top-down strateg-action game: Cannon Fodder.

Remake cannon fodder? As a linear, cover-based FPS? Could it be done? Of course. Because it needn't have to be anything like the original; As long as the name's there, and the journos are excited, the bosses are happy. let's do it. Jools and Jops for 2012!

Where's Nick Clegg?

2011-11-30T15:53:00.001Z

Today is strike day, and I'm ill in bed. This is a shame. Its a waste of a good day as I'm technically still striking.

So lying here, my thoughts turn to the coalition government, or as they're also known, the tories. Because as someone who watches and reads the news quite a bit, I have to say I can't remember when I last saw clegg. I remember seeing cable, looking grumpy in the wings like an understudy waiting for the lead actor to die, while osbourne announced his horrifying/unzurprising news that things are worse now than when he started.

But where's clegg, who made all those promises in the campaign, who everyone sucked up to? he's vanished from be media, like a discarded mascot lost in a 'merger'.

A merger like when sky and bsb merged to become... Sky.

Or a merger like when 2000ad and starlord merged to become... 2000ad.

Or a merger like when HSBC and midland merged to become HSBC, or when santander and abbey merged into satander, or when walkers and smiths merged to become walkers.

What I really hate about the lib dems is that they have given the tories the pretence of having won an election, and thus legitimate control of the country. They didn't, and they don't have it. But thanks, clegg, for giving your name to everything they're doing, and then fuckjbg off, so that everybody who voted for was tricked into voting tory.

Where did it say that, in your manifesto, clegg? Because if you can't find it written in black and white that this was your plan, I think we've got a caseof false advertising.

Never was a politician so aptly named after a race of alien lizards.

Things I don't need on a sunday

2011-11-27T19:48:00.001Z

*spex breaking, improvised repairs.
*hot water bottle bursting on me.
*two counts of illness, with bodyaches and headache for me and the long-suffering being sick all through the night.
*having to plan a lesson to be judged on for tomorrow.
*dishwasher breaking (and then turning out to be fine but still).

I can't wait for wednesday.
On the plus side, I get my golden hello this week. Do you accept cash? Chaching.

day 06 - a song that reminds of you of somewhere

2011-11-19T13:04:00.001Z

In at number 6: "You just stepped off the curb..."

I know Kemo City so well; I drove a cab there a few months, looking for a way out. I would always feel so lost, exploring new parts of town, but every area had such character that I would quickly learn the way around the main thoroughfares and the districts they carved the city into.

Okay, so bullshit attempt at NGJ aside, This song on the quarantine soundtrack puts me straight back into the game when I hear it. Bugged as it's engine was. Quarantine was the first game I was aware of to have a 'proper' soundtrack, pre-empting Quake's cd or GTA's radio stations. Most like GTA, you had a whole city to explore by car, and one of the best features of the car was the built in cd player. This was the DOS era - no multi-tasking. If you wanted to listen to your own music while playing a game, you had to use your actual hifi.

These places are as real to my brain as physical spaces I've genuinely travelled to. I know the architecture of the levels of doom and quake so well because i've wandered round those strange, pointless spaces so many times, looking for secrets or just replaying for fun. And while this song, from the soundtrack, brings me back to Kemo city, there's other songs that remind me of other virtual spaces; Captain Beefheart's Zig Zag wanderer instantly transports me back to the ice level of Dark Forces, Mansun's Legacy e.p. was on continually while I played Quake, and Blectum from Blechdom (and other bands featured on the 'structure of scientific misconceptions compilation) bring me back, bizarrely, to Shadowrun's hitech backstreets (I downloaded the snes emulation around 2003).

This is something that games, especially first person games, have that movies and books don't. Sure, hearing the music from Brazil reminds me of the film and makes me shudder, but it doesn't remind me of being in that world. hearing NIN's blasting opening to quake reminds me those cathedralic corridors, doors and lifts. I'm back in those spaces.

And then I went all mp3, and by the time I was playing Planescape: Torment (surely, the The Wire of computer games?), my soundtrack was a random mix of everything I listened to, and nothing stuck. I didn't even listen to the Torment soundtrack, regarded as a classic. No music reminds me of torment now. And most games I play, being indie, don't have much music. I'm listening to the Portals soundtrack now, and while it's great, I don't remember a note of it from the game and it doesn't bring me back to it as a place. Not like Kemo. That's a real place.

that gig from last night

2011-11-12T13:21:00.001Z

So last night I did my first gig in a huge long while. In reflection of the times in which I live, it was a solo show, similar to the christmas show i played at with girls girls girls the year before last. No hang on, what's the chronolgy here?

I remember playing at betsy trotswood with the band and girls girls girls.
I remember playing at betsy trotswood solo with girls girls girls around christmas time. oh yeah, this was two years ago because: I debuted intelligence and paradise gas, and I played killing in the name because 'it's a christmas song'.

That time, I remember someone complimenting me on my combination of electric guitar playing and picking style. So, sans band, I thought I'd run with that idea, with a two-amp setup and a few choice effects.

I got home from work, ironed out a 'burnt ogre' t-shirt (logo by Corey), was fed pies and mash by the long-suffering, and threw my things in a taxi.

Upon arrival and unloading from the £7 taxi for a 1 mile journey, I learned of a tragedy having befallen headliners The Feminists: they'd left their violin in Berlin, and had been up to Watford and back to obtain a new one. But that had broken a string. Where are you gonna get violin strings from at 7 o'clock in Hackney? Well if only they'd asked sooner, there's a music shop 30 seconds from the venue, but never mind that now. I opened my big fat mouth and said I had a violin somewhere in my flat, although I couldn't remember where. Upon protestations that the string was 'essential', Sam and I turned tail and drove the 5 minutes back to my flat, where Sam went gooey over Esmeralda, and the violin was nowhere to be found. A guitar string was made to suffice; thus I missed my opportunity to sound check. oops.

Barish's band, 'the outfit glitch', were on first, and played a familiar kind of accessible and pleasant grunge.

I played:
Oh, Esme
Fumito U
Flim (by aphex twin)
Intelligence
Waitrose
Paradise gas
Encore: Purple Milk

My set was, as far as I could tell, a shambles. Having not had time to balance my levels, The effects just didn't sound right; the flange felt too crude, the delay feedback felt too long. The two distortion volumes weren't balanced. I didn't feel comfrotable on stage, unable to see the audience for the lights. My playing was so-so, and I was barely even trying to hit the right notes on my first vocal song, 'Fumito U'. My finger nails felt slightly too long, great for picking but on the verge of breaking (especially when i was going for my trademark plectrum-free pinch harmonic)

After the first three songs, all in open D major (DADF#AD), I had to retune up to standard tuning for intelligence, and broke the e string. I'd toyed with the idea of having two guitars, to get around this, longest, retuning point. I should have trusted my instinct, or not trusted the crummy strings the shop put back on the guitar. Either way, I had to shout out for a guitar to borrow; out came Jeremy's (should have asked for Barish's! he has the same guitar!), which had a totally different tone and a strap that went down to my knees. How does anyone play with any precision down there? So I took the strap off and grabbed what looked like a stool to sit on, which was actually a monitor stand that went down a few notches when I sat on it and felt like it was about to collapse, and I had to rest my feet on the top of the breadbin.

So I started playing intelligence, and stopped when I realised I hadn't found my note at all. I started again, having tuned up my voice. Waitrose should have gone better, but it sounded muddled and lost with the guitar sound. Then Jeremy came up to play his organ on paradise gas and it sounded great. I asked for requests and Sam shouted for purple milk. I couldn't remember the chords at all when i started playing, just dicking around in C; it came together with the first chorus, and I could hear Sam singing along. There was someone I didn't recognise asking for one more when I finished, but that was it.

Girls Girls Girls were on next, and you know what? it was a really entertaining show, as Lizzy Hawkins and I both agreed, having been watching them play for about ten years, these new songs were top fun. At times reminded me of a mix between roxy music and 10cc; at times, reaching their chaotic hilarity that they do best. I played Jez's organs on 'dogs', which probably went better than my entire set.

In between the bands, Mat, Nikki, Lizzy, Carol, and Carol's friend and I talked about the new edition of Star Wars... ok that's all I can remember.

I've got a theory you see, I might have mentioned it in a previous post; we should put our money where our mouths are, and pay McGregor, Portman, Oz, and McDiarmid to star in a 'real' star wars prequel. I want to see a moment in it where Kenobi and Yoda think they've rumbled Palpatine, only to find that they're too late; everything's in place for him to take over the republic. And I realised that this technique is exactly what Alan Moore uses in both Watchmen and V for Vendetta; Watchmen when Ozymandias monologues, safe in the knowledge that he's already done what he's talking about and the heroes have failed, and in V when the detectives realise that everybody else to do with the Larkhill camp is already dead. It's the same moment, viewed from different angles (although the detective in V is a very sympathetic character). Where else does it turn up? not often, because in mainstream stories, heroes don't often lose.

Headlining, as I said, was Sam's band The Feminists, and blimey, I haven't seen such incredible musicians acting so daft for, perhaps, ever. They'd played together for 5 years as an instrumental rock band, and then one day saw Sam busking; and decided he was the one. He simply stood, pointed, helped 'alright', thrusted his crotch, took off his sunglasses, put them on again, and lept. Meanwhile 5 technically super-competent and imaginative players took off in every genre of rock, from zappa to 'schlager' (The bassist was very happy with his purchase of the UK mono edition of Zappa's 'cruising with ruben and the jets', which he assured us 'sounds completely different').

Minutes after performing, Sam very kindly and gently drove me home. He's an absolute treasure and I can't wait to see him again, which I know will not be soon. But what a magical night it was. I'm going to go and practice guitar now.

Hey Record Labels, stop being idiots

2011-10-11T19:20:00.002+01:00

So I had a bit of a splurge today and bought a couple of cds from various record labels.

I love buying music direct from the artist or the label; it gives me a sense of enormous well-being. It feels like fair-trade or something. I get stuff cheaper, they get more money. Everybody's happy, except rough trade who keep having to find new reasons to exist (cafe, bike racks, guitar strings, a one-day-a-week gourmet synthesiser shop; literally every time i go in, there's a new stupid, desperate thing in that shop).

But this particular shopping trip has given me a bad taste in my mouth.

I've recently got more into vinyl. I needed a good record player, so I bought one, so I thought I might as well make the change to 12" as my main listening avenue (other than mp3, obviously). So I've started looking for the vinyl option more.

But both Monotreme and Probe Plus records have thwarted me, by 'giving away' the cd with the vinyl. I don't want two copies of most albums (a couple i've bought in both formats... stupid, i know). I can buy the cd without the vinyl; I can't buy the vinyl without the cd.

Just give me the vinyl and the mp3s (or flacs). That covers all my bases - the lounge for the vinyl, everywhere else for the mp3s. What do I need the cd for as well? It sounds just the same as the soft copy, but takes up space. The vinyl copy sounds different and better (I actually think this now, after comparing analogue and digital versions of Cephalic Carnage's 'Anomalies'). How ever much I can save by not including the cd in the package, I'd like to save that money please. It must be an actual number, cds can't be so cheap as to be free.

So because of the lack of a pure vinyl (plus mp3) option, I've resorted to buying the cd version of two albums. It seems really wrong, but I just don't want two of every album. Vinyls are big enough as it is, without me having to store the cd as well.

Or am I looking a gift horse in the mouth? Is the cd version really really free?

Robert Webb BBC3 Filler Fan Fiction

2011-10-10T22:03:00.000+01:00

Famous Movie Title Inconsistancies, starring robert webb
episode 1: the Final Destination series

"hi, i'm tv's robert webb. you might remember me from 'robert's webb' and 'great movie mistakes', as well as 'britain's top 100 dance crazes'.

The final destination series has one of the most inconsistent naming formulae in recent cinema history. The first three were fine, aside from the awfulness of having sequels to something that started off as supposedly 'final', with the aptly named 'final destination', 'final destination 2', and 'final destination 3'.

It all started to unravel with the fourth film in the series, 'THE final destination'. This reboot-style gambit would have paid off, if the next film had not been called 'final destination 5'. Surely, 'THE final destination 2' would have been a more apt title, or simply 'final destination 4'. Their choice of title totally undermines the logic so far, unless at some point they decide to release a different film as 'final destination 4' in the future. People like me wait, earnestly, to see how the film titles will resolve themselves."

jesus, grilly, wasn't plinkett fan fiction enough?

originally posted as a comment on cawreigh's facebook update of "We're waging a fierce war of incompatible computer OS security settings and missing ports...all this, just to watch Final Destination"

The Page You Made

2011-10-09T17:47:00.001+01:00

The Page You Made: Remixes, 2005 - 2010 by DJ Gallowslutt

Today is the 9th of the 10th of the 11th, and it's been a year since I've added anything to the 'ongoing remix project' that is DJ Gallowslutt's 'The Page You Made'. So, in accordance with my mantra 'if you don't use something for a year, get rid of it', I announce the project closed, completed, and retired.

I might still rework tracks, but I think I'm done with the dj gallow slutt persona, and this era of recording. I guess in times of austerity, you gotta makes some cuts. Enjoy the album, and kudos to the grist.

Things I learnt from SUPERUNKNOWN

2011-10-08T10:17:00.001+01:00

Soundgarden's 'Superunknown' was one of the first rock albums I fell in love with. I was 12 when it came out, in 1994, and I remember 'Black Hole Sun' being on the radio, and it being about the same time as Primal Scream's 'Rocks', which I think I knew was a fraudulent pastiche even then.

I gave it a listen yesterday, and noticed a huge amount of pointers in the record I've just stolen whole heartedly. I was writing about covers in a previous post, and how SFA and Bravecaptain influenced me to incorporate the remix into the song (my song 'tofu' on the forthcoming album has elements of this now); but listening back to superunknown, there's a whole slew of themes that I've been casually using that I didn't even realise went straight back to this record.

1. Odd Timings Are Cool
You can hardly call Soundgarden 'mathcore'. They're don't play that way. But it's an album where 4/4 can hardly be called the norm; it opens and closes the album*, but only features in about half the tracks. My first impressions of the album were that it was self-indulgent, but the odd timings here aren't that odd in general. There's lots of dropped beats; Notice in the similarity in the rhythm of 'The Day I Tried To Live' and my song 'Tofu', both have a jaunty (7+8)/4 (I use this to mean alternating bars of 7/4 and 8/4). But even the predominantly common-time songs have dropped beats all over the shop - like 'Mailman' - or some fantastically perverse ways of arranging 4/4 time. 'Fresh Tendrils' has some awkward back beat, likewise, 'Head Down' manages to make 4/4 sound like a chaotic eruption.

I wonder now if the reason I'm fascinated by odd timings is that i suffer from dysrhythmia; Moby's 'honey' sounds completely wrong to me. I just can't resolve the beat on it. I had a lot of trouble with e1m9 on doom, too; I've literally only got the rhythm right in my head for it in the last year, 19 years after it was released. Maybe these songs sound normal to other people. Anyway, if it hadn't have been for superunknown, I might never have become interested in anything outside 4/4.

2. Odd Tunings Are Cool
You wouldn't know from listening to the record that the band are playing in anything other than in drop-d and standard tuning. When I looked up, and printed off, the transcriptions on the internet, I was amazed by the plethora of unusual tunings (also, it was a clear indication they'd been ripped off the official songbook). A bunch of songs are in tunings that you could only play that one song in - 'My Wave', for instance with its ludicrous E-E-B-B-B-B tuning, 'Like Suicide' with its D-G-D-G-B-C tuning (for non-musicians, let me explain: you'd never normally tune a guitar so that two strings are only a semi-tone apart. This is a very specific tuning to make one particular riff sound 'just so').

I was a fairly inexperienced guitarist at the time, and this completely opened my mind not just to drop-d tuning, but also the whole idea that a guitar should be tuned for the performer. Often, since then, I would find a melody or riff, and decide that the guitar could be set up better to play it. Maybe it would be easier if it were in drop-d, or open G, or open D, or even something entirely new. Or maybe I would start with an odd tuning, and play around, see what comes out. It's a great way to break out of old habits and freshen up the fingers.

As I started playing live with a band, I went back to playing with a standard tuning more often. We weren't soundgarden, with roadies, budget, and hundreds of guitars waiting in the wings to be brought on, ready for the exact next song we were going to play. But in solo shows, I love the opportunity to have a moment of retuning, offer some jokes, some anecdotes, and be more intimate with the audience; the different feeling from different tunings is more pronounced when there's just one instrument on stage. Nick Drake was a great re-tuner as well, but reputedly froze up on stage with no banter, the poor thing.

3. Fretwanking is ok, as long as it's not centre-stage

Bill Bailey look-a-like Kim Thayil is a great guitarist, that's not up for debate; 100th best guitarist of all time, according to rolling stone. I find him a mysterious figure on the record; his lead guitar lines don't cut through the whole song, and he just seems to contribute when necessary. When he's not beefing up the main riff, it's not usually melodic, but improvised, flailing guitar; and then sometimes, he just had some nice simple harmonies. The best example of this is during 'Fell on Black Days'. But when he's fretwanking, it's never the point of the song; many prog-rock and metal bands would have virtuoso instrumental performances as the entire raison d'etre of the band. Here, it's just a touch, it's in it's place, and it's a part of the whole mix. We're not meant to hear it and go 'wow, he's such a good guitarist!', it's not mixed to the foreground, with a sign next to it saying 'listen to me go'. It's expressive, but it's not dictatorial. Maybe this is simply in keeping with the times, the shift away from extended guitar solos; maybe the success of Superunknown helped form that shift. Either way, it taught me that there was a point to guitar soloing, and many of my tracks leave room for an improvised section, usually around particular key notes and phrases. That self-indulgence is ok, as long as it's not the point, as long as you're not force-feeding people your 'genius', but letting it float on the mix instead.

4. Can't Make Your Mind up which take to keep in the mix? Use both
There's lots of double-tracked rhythm guitar on the record; that's usual. It gives more depth and longer-lasting appeal. But what I remember from the record is not just Cornell's vocal range, his variety of styles that he could draw on and switch between - the rock wail, the harmonious voice, and his barely-singing murmer - but how he would use them together, in ways you could only do with overdubs. For instance, 4th of July; a droney-stoner rock song, with the rock vocal lower down in the mix than the soft vocal. The contrast and balance is fantastic; either take would have been good but by putting them both in, we've achieved both simultaneously, plus the contrast.

For the same reason, I love 'Crossing Over' by Cult of Luna, a track that has wonderful doubled vocals. I love the stacked vocals in TV On The Radio songs. In my own recordings, I've usually tried a couple of different takes, then decided the track sounds best with both. This isn't a comment on multitracking itself, but how the interplay of different interpretations is highlighted when they're mixed together. Maybe a more subtle approach would be to do one style one verse, another style the next; that's fine too.

5. Keep The Tracklisting and Instrumentation Varied
Superunknown is a pretty pessimistic album. Opening with 'Let Me Drown' and closing with 'Like Suicide' - a song written after Cornell had to kill a bird that flew into his window, the hook lyric being "love's like suicide" (prefiguring, probably co-incidentally, the similar line in Smashing Pumpkins' 'Bodies') - the lyrical themes are of desolation, apocalypse, despression, and on 'The Day I Tried To Live', the perils of trying to get up and dressed. Meanwhile, the music is as varied a collection of rock songs as you could find outside a Blur album. You could broadly describe it all as grunge, but that doesn't capture the variety of styles in the album. It 'runs the gamut' of rock, from sludgey doom to punk and riffy rock, with a few more things too; actually, thinking about it, this is quite usual for grunge bands. And while the lineup is fairly constant through the record, most tracks have some extra instrumentation that piques the ear a little, such as melotron, extra puercussion, spoons, or simply very bizzarre-sounding guitar. The variety of harmonies, scales, instruments, timings, effects, all add interest and psychedelia to what could have been a very rough, dull, monotonous album. kind of like 'badmotorfinger'.

So yeah. It's a great record, but unlike other great records, I can see so much of what I love about music, and so much of what I love about the music I make started here. I reccomend it to anyone.

*I'm excluding 'she likes surprises' as the official last track since it's a bonus track, but I will include it while talking about the record.

Autumnal Ephemera

2011-09-22T14:11:00.000+01:00

So this is a mix that kind of ended up being quite autumnal. Outside of the brashly seductive 'Willow's Song' (from the wicker man), it's pretty regretful; there's a lot of break-up songs, plus a couple of tracks that are pretty disrespectful to one social group or another; 'Graffitti...' which, in the same vein as 'harrowdown hill', is actually one of the angriest songs i know, and 'Absolutely Free', which both captures the ideals of hippydom and disses flower power. The bitterness seems quite autumnal, like the traces of a betrayal.

day 05 - a song that reminds you of someone

2011-09-20T16:23:00.002+01:00

In at Number 5: "Silence in the Studio!"

I'm a 6th former, being driven to school in my dad's volvo. It's got a CD player built in, and we're got the AAD un-remastered reissue of Pink Floyd's Atom Heart Mother playing. With the stereo seperation enhanced by the front/back separation of the front tweeters and rear woofers, the music fills the car and feels like a quadrophonic concert hall. We slowed the car down and stopped in the car park to wait until it finished, determined not to start the day until we had finished the half-album-long song. Maybe as an act of autism, maybe as an act of respect for the work.

I can't remember if it's the first time I heard it, but the memory of this particular listening session has been branded onto my memory of the song. It was my father who put up with me putting Jan and Dean's 'Dead Man's Curve' on a loop when I came round, listening endlessly to the same few songs by Elvis Presley and the Human League in his city-centre flat. But by the time I got to 6th form I was hunting more deeply into my parent's music collections; trying to understand The Smiths beyond the hit singles, taping Trout Mask Replica for friends, scrabbling for meaning amongst the tapes, records, and cds. This track felt like absolute pay-dirt, and I argued with everyone who would listen about how it was the best thing Pink Floyd ever did, and they were wrong that meddle was better that was rubbish.

It may be the song that showed me what instrumental music is capable of; in fact made me hold instrumental music in the highest regard, as 'true' music, unsullied by cheap sops to expressionist lyrics (I don't want to know what's going through your mind, I want to know how you feel). It definitely influenced particular tracks of mine, such as 'New Boyfriend'. Every time the refrain is played, the orchestration is different, and while it's massive, expansive, patient music, the structure is fairly simple; and so satisfyingly ordered, it feels like a musical landscape painting. It feels like exploration. the return to the opening section near the end, and then into the final coda of the refrain, feels totally suicidalyptic, like superman throwing himself into the sun to save the universe. It makes me feel important, and mortal.

On Paternity

2011-09-17T09:09:00.000+01:00

writings from long ago i never published...

So, I'm a dad now. So it comes.

The day that Esmeralda Rose Griliopoulos was born, I spent a lot of time
asking 'what have I done?'; I was baffled. We'd been up all night; the induced labour
had started at about 11, we went to hospital at about 1, finally got
seen about 3, and Esm was born about half 8, when the morning team
arrived with new energy and actual doctors, and kicked everything up a
notch. We were let out the same day, and got to introduce her to 4 of
her grandparents and her only true uncle. The lack of sleep didn't
help with inability to deal with what I was witnessing.

That day, my perspective on the world changed in two unexpected ways.
Firstly: childbirth. I instantly resolved that the long-suffering
never had to make the tea again. For a start. Every mother I see, I
think, you've been through That. Mothers... jeez. Hats off to all mothers, everywhere. Which really changes what you think as you walk down the street.

Secondly: looking down at Esm, and thinking adoring thoughts of her. And realising that this is the feeling your parents have had whenever they looked at you, for the last thirty years. And feeling massively guilty for every time you didn't appreciate this.

That was stuff from the first day, which I never got around to writing down. But it's important to put it up here.

We're not just a couple now, we're now 'team esme'. We're here to keep her alive. That feels strange. It has changed our relationship, because we're a three-piece now. a family, not a couple.

Plinkett Star Wars Review Fan Fiction

2011-09-13T22:34:00.000+01:00

So I was thinking back about star wars, and the prequels and everything, and I thought that Plinkett didn't go into quite enough detail regarding the character Count Dooku. So I thought I would write some Plinkett fan fiction to psuedo-remedy the fact.

Count Dooku is the worst supporting villain since Darth Maul. They're both total nothings, but while Maul has no character but a face for lunch boxes, Dooku is played by the most prolific actor ever. How did George Lucas manage to squander yet another massive talent? Let's see my lovelies...

Oh and I'm writing this from memory because I don't wanna sit through these crap movies again. I'm sick of editing this stuff down so it looks as though everyone hates George Lucas allatime. I don't need to be watching these crappy films in order to know how bad they are - I'll just have a quick look at the wikipedia pages and ignore everything they say about all the books, and comics, and video games, and popcorn buckets cause none of that shit matters, I don't care if they explained it all in the books it don't matter.

Number one: COUNT Dooku?

The first two things we find out about Dooku are that he's a count, and that he used to be a jedi. A count? A count of what exactly? We don't need to know, I guess, because we never get told. I guess he's a count like Leia is a princess and Padme is a queen, even if being a democratically elected queen totally defeats the point of having that title. It's just a fancy title to make the thing feel more like The Princess Bride... you know, all fairy tale and stuff. Which is why there are so many amputations and decapitations in these movies.

Hey waidaminute... Count Dooku? Like, Count Dracula? One of Christopher Lee's most famous roles? Is that a coincidence? Or did Lucas think, Hey, we've got Christopher Lee over to do some prancing about in front of green screens while I sit and drink my coffee, why not get everyone to call him 'count'? Cause then it will remind people of that other, good film he was in, and that might make people like this piece of crap more. I'm surprised they even bothered with Lee, and didn't just hire Jerry Nelson to do a voice for a cartoon lobster or something.

Cause, you know, Jerry Nelson performed The Count? In Sesame Street? And Frank Oz was on it too, playing Bernie, so it's not that implausib

Number two: The fallen Jedi

So the very second thing we find out is that Witchfinder Dooku used to be a Jedi. Whaaaaat? Since when did people leave the Jedi Order? We've seen these kids being indoctrinated with this monastic bullshit since they're babies, and then one guy just decides to quit? and he's allowed to keep his lightsaber and all his powers, and all of the other Jedi are like, "sure, quit, that's cool, see you around bro." This makes no sense. You wouldn't just let ex-jedi wander about the galaxy, like some rich kid of holiday. If he left the order, if the other jedi didn't kill him on the spot, then they'd at least keep a pretty close eye on him. And who knows, maybe this incredibly powerful ex-jedi would be a prime candidate for this dark lord of the sith that we keep hearing about who never seems to show up anywhere or do anything except by carrier pigeon. Maybe it's that one guy who learned all the jedi powers, then left and became an evil count. Could he be the secret enemy? or does Sidious force powers hide even more of the plot from the good guys than we realised? So that they're not just not allowed to think about Palpatine being a Sith, but they're not allowed to have any intelligent thoughts at all?

So how did Dookie lose his faith, or whatever? Once again, we're told something interesting, and just expected to swallow it. You've skipped the interesting bit, asshole, and moved straight onto the boring exposition. Show us his fall, why he has gone evil. Otherwise he's just some guy who we're expected to believe is a bad just because he's a Count. You could invest something in your characters you idiot, Show, Don't Tell. Go back to film school you just broke the most important rule of fi

The thing is, Chris Lee is a damn good actor, and he's up for anything, no matter how cheesy. So why waste him on this nothingy character? Hey idiots, why not make Dooku the main villain? And while you're at it, Since we're calling him 'Count', Why not go the whole way and totally rip off Dracula? Why not have Anakin and Padme taking their honeymoon in Spacevania, and they go to stay at Count Dooku's Spooky Castle, where the evil Fallen Jedi nearly seduces them to the dark side, and locks them up. Then they could find out that Dooku has been breeding clone troopers to attack Numenor.. oh, wait... that's that other other christopher lee film.

Number Three: Darth Sharku

So at the same time as making this, Christopher Lee was filming The Lord Of The Rings, where Lee played Saruman, who was... a fallen Wizard. Given that Gandalf is pretty much the complete model for Obi Wan and Yoda, a scene where Kenobi and Yoda and Dooku fight is going to be pretty fuckin' similar to a scene where Gandalf and Saruman fight, isn't it?

Well no, because Lucas is such an idiot that he can't even rip things off right. See, in the LordoftheRings film, Saruman is the head of the council, like Yoda, but fallen, like Anakin, because he was seduced by the power that Sauron could give him. It's pretty much a complete analogue. So when Gandalf visits Saruman, realises he's lost his way, and they fight, the scene is beautiful because while they're using magic to move each other around, there's a pretty brutal, raw feel to it all, not to mention the pain of Gandalf having to swallow his disappointment that his master and friend has turned. If Saruman can't resist Sauron, how will Frodo? worse still, how will Gandalf? There's a lot at stake in this fight. It's a subtle fight scene that is both physical and mental. When Yoda fights Dookie, there's no mental edge to it at all, just two computer generated things bouncing off the walls. You don't even get a sense of the pain anybody feels, even when hands get cut off.

It's just so crushing that yet again, Lucas could have made so much more of this character, and totally failed it. It would have been cool if Dooku Manchu dealt with the two younger jedi physically, but then when Yoda showed up, stashed his laser sword and knelt, ready for a meditative battle of wills. This would have been a really good opportunity to use some of those Computer Generated special effects that lucas loves so much, to illustrate what's going on in the force between these two characters. They should have settled their scores with a massive psychic game of Go. Show us elemental Krayt dragons savagely fighting Rancors to the death as a metaphor for the inner struggle they are experiencing. It would have been a beautiful scene, in keeping with yoda's character and showing Dooku's inner strength, and maybe that there is a balance between the darkside and the light side.

Aw fuck it, let's just have little cartoon yoda jumping round the place so that it looks like what he said in the future are the bitter words of a loser jedi. Cause that's what star wars is all about, that in order for the little guy to win, he doesn't have to believe in himself, he just needs to be able to move his laser sword around real fast.

I've been thinking hard about, y'know, hiring Natalie Portman, Ewan McGregor, Ian Mcdarmid, Frank Oz, and Christopher Lee to make a space opera movie, that if you squinted, could fill in for the star wars prequel films we wanted and really deserved. But you know what? For all his previous meddling, horrible filling-in of gaps and such forth, I'd love to see an SW film set between 4 and 5, where Vader goes investigative and finds out exactly who this character who beat him in space combat was . Lucas had basically painted the plot into a corner - Vader had to have no idea that he had children, but had to have fathered them. Tricky situation. Plus, for some reason, Luke is in hiding, and Leia is in full-on public life; clearly some ret-conning went on to make them brother and sister. So vader has to find out that luke is is son, but not Leia, who he lets go. This doesn't make any sense. But still, It'd be nice to see Vader's reaction to the news that he has a son, his realisation that Sidious lied to him, and the start of his plotting to overthrow the Emporer. It must be a fascinating revelation, for someone who until the end of Empire, has really not much personality.

I'd also like to go as far as de-lucasing even the original trilogy, and copy-pasting wookies onto all the child-friendly ewoks he replaced them with (you know how Jedi was meant to take place on Kasshyyk, right?). I mean, why stop with the new films, when there's seeds of his madness in the original trilogy. Take them back, I say. They're our films now.

The new racism

2011-08-28T23:05:00.003+01:00

So yeah, there's a lot of racism around at the moment. But you have to look for it.

I've been watching the red letter media 'half in the bag' reviews with increasing obsessiveness, but the captain america review got me thinking along these lines.

The two critics talk about how the film happily makes historical inaccuracies about 10 minutes in; they're talking about how it makes them uncomfortable that the designs look futuristic, when they should look old but with sci-fi elements. They should look like laser guns that were designed in 1940, not 2100. They're nerds; schticklers for detail. Then they speak about political correctness.

What they say isn't technically racist; they speak about how there were african americans that fought in world war 2*, but they were assigned to separate units and the film should reflect the segregation of the time rather than lie about it. Fair enough; they're after accuracy. But they complain about the ethnically diverse team of superheroes; correctly they point out that there's no women in the team (women obviously have even further to go with their struggle for equality). But "The asian guy with the emo haircut who was talking on his cellphone just threw me out of the movie."

These are not racist comments. But they are striving for historical accuracy above employment opportunities for an ethnically diverse range of actors. Which is more important?

What they don't say - that I was crying out for - was "why set this in world war 2 at all?" Iron Man wasn't set in the 60s, when Tony Stark first appeared; Rhodes, his African American sidekick didn't arrive until 1979, but was included in the film. Maybe Captain America is more strongly associated with national struggles and the military, but there's something more here. I'm deeply suspicious of the current fashion for 50s and 60s-set media, such as 'madmen', the forthcoming 'xcom', and our 'the hour'; historical accuracy is a great excuse for not allowing ethnic minorities on the screen.

(In their review of Rise of the Planet of the Apes, they praise the diverse cast. But I wonder if in this case, the producers of the film wanted to move away from the race metaphors of the original book/film, by casting the main antagonist as a black man. This leads us to think that the the apes are rising - sorry, the planet of the apes is rising - against all of humanity, not just whitey. I dunno, I've not seen it.)

All this, as we enter an age where finally, we have series like Luther, where a black actor, Idris Elba, plays the lead character with no whisper of a plot line surrounding his ethnic heritage. I think this would have been unimaginable even 10 years ago.

Last time I saw a Shakespeare play, it was played by actors of no fixed ethnicity. I had no trouble believing that the Montagues could consist of such a diverse group of people; that brothers would have entirely different skin tones. Some people would argue against this, and the only hope actors from ethnic minorities would have of getting to play the great Dane would be if some visionary director decided to stage the play around a different nationality. It would be segregation again.

Look, I love Lord of the Rings as much as the next person (chortle), but you have to say: it's pretty damn honky. But why are we obsessed with continuing to set fiction in times where discrimination was acceptable? Why does Lord of the rings - a fantasy land - have to have an all white cast, to please the nerds, and yet adaptations of the Earthsea books (where Ursula le Guin stipulated a darker-than-caucasion skin tone) whites? Middle Earth is a fantasy land. Isn't their room for ethnic diversity in there? and I'm not talking about the evil 'Southrons', who stood in for Arabs. I'm really disturbed by the whiteness of LOTR. I can understand that you're going for a certain look; the books were written 70 years ago. But I hold it to be a discriminatory one that I don't agree with. If Idris Elba went for an audition for a part in LOTR, what would they say? 'Sorry, we aren't hiring people of your skin colour?' How is this acceptable?

I seriously suggest that there's something going wrong here, that there's a deluge of productions which conveniently exclude minorities. I'm not suggesting a conspiracy, just a handy work around to maintain a predominantly-white casting policy. Until we get the corollary to mad men - the 'what all the black people in new york were doing at the same time' show - I believe I have a case.

*I actually can't stand the term 'world war 2', but for convience, and lack of a better suggestion, I'll use it here.

David Cameron complaining about the wrong people being greedy.

2011-08-23T22:08:00.003+01:00

"There are deep problems in our society that have been growing for a long time: a decline in responsibility, a rise in selfishness, a growing sense that individual rights come before anything else."

The words of David Cameron, the leader of the Conservative party, talking about the causes of the riots.

Satyr is dead.

album diary 6

2011-08-23T21:29:00.002+01:00

We recorded 7 songs in 5 hours. I was drained from the experience, and the travelling, and despite a good night's sleep, I still am.

The record is so close to being finished now. The latest mixes - 'day five', since every subsequent mixdown is a day's virtual work - sound pretty much like finished tracks to my ears, partly because I've listened to them so much that I just accept them as sounding the way they do. The biggest remaining job, other than the actual mixing and mastering (which I am not doing, no way), has to be the final fixing of the drums, which I'm not looking forward to; Andrew suggested using more sampled beats, which I think is a good idea. I think the biggest deal is just to find a really, really good snare sound.

London Fields Summer Chillout mix

2011-08-02T17:51:00.000+01:00

London Fields Summer Chillout by Dj Gallowslutt on Mixcloud

Interesting for me to be doing a mix with a specific direction, but I felt the need for a mix that *doesn't* go mental, and it wasn't hard to do, since everything I've been listening to has *at least some* relaxing stuff on it, although the track by Igorrr might be pushing it.

Heroes of the moment include Euros Childs, who contributes a solo instrumental, plus, as part of Jonny, the 10-minute 'Cave Dance', highlight of their self-titled debut. I don't think Euros has done anything as gorky'sish for years, and the track is hugely reminiscent of their early, Ankst Musik-released, Alan Holmes-produced, early stuff.

We have a track from the Soundbyte's second album from 2007, which I've only just caught up with. Aaron Spectre (AKA Drumcorps) and a surprisingly jeff buckley-esque number from Igorrr from Ad Noiseam records, both from Ad Noiseam records. See guys: label samplers definitely sell records. I wish more people realised that studying labels is a really good way to find more bands you like, and also see the connections between other bands.

Necro Deathmort turn up as ever, as does Clint Mansell's moon soundtrack. Marmaduke Dando is someone i'm very much in love with atm - like the intersection of The Tiger Lillies and Wild Beasts, but just concentrating on writing very good songs.

But the main hero of the mix is Muddy Suzuki. I've been listening to his latest album, 'Head In The Sand' consistently for several months now, and it's such a massive work. I'm thinking, Stevie Wonder levels of genius. I've not shown his rockier side yet, but believe me there's much more to the album than the two proggy, neo-classical works i've put on this one or last mixtape's touching 'keep taking the tablets'. He's got talent, wit, humour, a stack of literary and musical references, and rocks super-hard. Go listen.

album diary 5

2011-08-01T16:05:00.001+01:00

Scifi films are bullshit

2011-07-31T22:33:00.004+01:00

Sorry to harp on about films - i'll write some stuff about music soon, i promise - but I've watched a slew of rubbish - well, to be fair, merely flawed - scifi films recently. WELL LET ME EXPAND UPON THAT.

I was going to write just about Splice, but I just watched Monsters and, thinking back to other recent films, like Sunshine, there's definitely something going wrong here. spoilers ahead!

All these films seem to be half good. I'll start with Splice, which I watched in a strangely, thematically, appropriate double bill with Fishtank.

The premise of Splice - sidestepping the actual 'science' - is Frankenstein, but with a happy couple instead of a weird student doctor. Two co-habiting gene splicers decide to push the technology to the limits and throw some human genes into the mix. Of course, it's all the stupid woman's idea, but never mind that, what they create is a growing-too-quickly mutant girl, surprisingly human. As the plot unfolds, we learn that the woman of the pair had a difficult relationship with her mother - possible case of neglect and/or emotional abuse - and while initially loving of the creature, begins to play out her parent. The man starts off sceptical - in fact, tries to kill it several times - but soon warms and admits he loves the weird little thing. Up to this point, I loved this film. It was dealing with nature and nurture in an interesting way, it was dealing with a mother-daughter relationship (which is rare as hen's teeth in the father-son-obsessed mainstream cinema world, see Inception below), and it was dealing with the ethics of letting things get too far.

And then it all went Woody Allen, when the man shags his, let's face it, adopted daughter (being seduced by her does not let him off the hook). And then, after it dies, it inexplicably comes back to life as a man and rapes the woman, it's mother. What this says about the writer/director of the film's view of the world, I'm not too sure - possibly that all men want to kill all other men, and all women want to sex all men. The Long-Suffering Girlfriend pointed out how unpleasant it was that men get to be seduced while women get raped. The film was great until the sex got in there; I'm not saying there shouldn't be films about sexual abuse and it's consequences, and you should definitely watch Fishtank for evidence. But Splice started off with a great story, then threw it out the window in order to make space for some alien sex scenes. Is Xenopaedophilia a word? It is now, thanks to Splice.

Then we come to Monsters, which is like heart of darkness but with no characters. It owes most, absolutely and definitely, to Stalker; a perilous journey across an alien-infected zone, on a budget so low that real ruins are substituted in for sets and the beauty of nature is explored and the influence of the aliens is felt obliquely and in the periphery. The main difference is that while Stalker felt like three philosophy students walking slowly across the landscape, Monsters feels like two gap-year dickheads. The conceit of the film is great, I don't argue with the vision, the style, or the use of limited budget to achieve something personal.

But she's a drip, he's just any bloke. There's no charisma between them, such that the ending where they kiss feels like a surprise. oh and there's the father-son bullshit again. It feels quite a lot like jurassic park, partly because of the scenery and the threat from massive things, but mainly because the couple have the sexual charisma of the children in that film (I MEAN NONE). A lot is made of the improvised dialogue, bringing comparisons to Mike Leigh, but while Mike Leigh joints have dialogue and scenarios that have erupted from weeks of intense character study, the dialogue in Monsters feels genuinely just improvised, in the way that they couldn't think of anything interesting to say. They just amble about like blankly yawning wildebeest. Or, as I said above, students on their gap years, with inexplicably long-lasting hairspray.

Sunshine could have been great, I was really enjoying the way that the creators had wreaked enough drama out of these people just doing their misson; up until the point where it turned into a slasher film for some reason. Actually, I got a lot more out of the film with Brian Cox's commentary track, as he explained how the sun was driving them mad, and what happened to the other captain could have happened to them, but I just lost interest in the film and missed what happened at the end (despite it being on in the room), and it's a pretty clear failing of the finished film when you need the commentary track to enjoy it.

Splice and Sunshine both have great ideas, but squander them in a lazy attempt to attract attention through (sex and) violence. Monsters justifies it's brief moments of horror (spoiler: it's called monsters), but it's failings are more to do with the actors, or perhaps the director's misguided approach to improvised acting.

Positive note: cest scifi film i've seen for a long time, then, is Skeletons. you'll love it.

I just want to mention Inception briefly here, as it is a sci-fi, and was quite good. However, it stakes the need even more clearly for a reverse Bechdel Test: one that tests for father son relationships in films (the other all-time great father-son film is National Treasure). Here's a breif outline to give you the flavour:

The Protagonist (di Caprio) of the film is estranged from his son. The protagonist followed in his father (Caine)'s footsteps into the dream-hacking industry, which apparently they teach at university.
The target of the film is also estranged from his father, and works in the family business. The plot of the film is to plant an idea into the target's head, that he wants to start his own business; they do this by convincing the target that his father secretly loved him, despite the tough charade.
The protaganist succeeds, therefore uniting him with his own father, and his son, and putting the target's mind at ease about his father's death.

It's like Noland thought, i've got this idea for a really big clever expensive film, but the only way i'll convince anyone in hollywood to make it is if I put hyper father son relationships into it - at least three should do it.

There are two women in the film.
They speak to each other.
About a man. ("the whole conversation is about how mal needs cobb in her life to feel whole. and that few seconds is basically the only female-to-female conversation in the ENTIRE movie. i'd call this one a pretty clear fail.")

Sample questions for father-son test:
Does the son follow in the footsteps of his father's career?
Is the father estranged from his son?
Is the father too busy to see the son?
Is there a phonecall between the father and son on the son's birthday?
Is the relationship resolved in the course of the movie?
does the father die?

i'd love to see this test implemented.

Hellboy 2 features

2011-07-27T12:09:00.000+01:00

So one of my favourite films is 'the dark crystal', and another of my favourite films is 'the world of the dark crystal'.

I strongly suggest you watch the whole thing:

The hour-long documentary details the two years of preproduction on the film, from earliest concepts all the way through to the filming. One of the reasons I loved it so much is it seems like a forgotten world of actual things made of actual stuff. It seemed like the very height of technology, as what they were doing was inevitably going to be superseded by the computer graphics that were just around the corner. I didn't know of any films that had a more intricate construction, and for the same reason that I love The Thing, from the same year: This, for me, was the peak of a brief period in cinema where the technology existed to create genuinely different, and realistic-looking, creatures, which could then just be filmed. The same year, Tron came out, a film that relished in unrealism, but that started a trend that fantasy films would be easier to realise on computers, which we are now seeing the fruits of. Later years presented Return of the Jedi (mostly people in suits and stop motion animation), Ghostbusters, Gremlins, even Labyrinth, but none of these for me match the achievements of The Dark Crystal.

"Do you remember the material world? Actual things?" said Stewart Lee in his recent run on the bbc. He was satirising observational comedy and nostalgia, but what was great about these films is that they were real things, put in front of the camera. The Thing was such an achievement: an explicit rejection of 'man in a suit' monster films. The techniques employed to create something that just could not exist in reality, but had to be created for the camera, are staggering. Watching the making of these two movies in 2011 is heart-rending. I maintain that all films are animations, and by using actors, puppets, drawings, computers or whatever, what matters is how you feel when you watch the flick-book. But I love the art and the industry that surrounds a physically grounded film. More recently Coraline broke my heart, with the incredible and round-about efforts that went into making the film.

I'm so glad that Guillermo del Toro has shown me to be wrong.

Watching the making of Hellboy 2 - there's 11 hours of bonus materials on the 4-disc hellboy boxset - gives me as much of a thrill as the films mentioned above, but more, because it proves that actual skills are still in use.

Hellboy definitely owes a huge debt to The Dark Crystal and Labyrinth (as well as to 'The Wizard of Oz' in its 'three weird things and a girl learning life lessons' themes, and the troll market is reminiscent of the mos eisley cantina in star wars), in terms of the needless detail of its worlds, the look of some of its inhabitants (the elves not only look like gelfings, they look like they're made out of wood), and the variety of labours needed to be performed to bring it to life. But del Toro is doing this in the 21st Century, with competition from computer graphics and budgetary constraints, because he knows that the best way to get something to look real is to actually make it. Look at the wink character in this back-stage footage:

It looks just as good as in the film. And its not that del Toro doesn't use CGI; he just uses it when necessary, or to enhance the already-elaborate techniques employed in the making of the film. Plus, it's a massive improvement on the first film, which felt clichéd and generic, and repetitive, whereas The Golden Army feels like an amazing and fresh work of imagination. I suppose that's the main thing.

Take the last scene of the film; I was amazed to discover they actually built that rotating set, and got an olympic gymnast in to do those real leaps that the elf prince does. Dangerous stuff. It just feels like a counterblast to (especially) George W Lucas and his incessant star wars fiddling, which employs CGI in it's laziest, worst aspects. I just wonder what del Toro has left sitting in The Hobbit, and vice versa.

Antikythera Furthermore

2011-07-24T15:47:00.002+01:00

Upon re-reading my recent post on the mechanism, I'm reminded of this:

Everything in the heavens is here, moving as the heavens move. This is how to know when... Suns, moons, stars. Yes, the angle of eternity.

Aughra's Orrery in The Dark Crystal is exactly what I described, a device for modelling the heavens and thus knowing what was going to be happening on earth. So that's probably what I was thinking of.

Our Hypothesis is Yes

2011-07-16T11:25:00.002+01:00

Our hypothesis is yes by Dj Gallowslutt on Mixcloud

Much of the music I'm listening to at the moment - and I'm listening to a phenomenal amount, which is a post in itself - has roots in two people: Euros Childs, previously of Gorky's, now out on his own and also out of Jonny; and the more recent find Mat Reznik out of Astrohenge and Necro Deathmort. And a couple of wednesdays ago, both Jonny and Deathmort were playing the same night. Torn as I was, I ended up spending the evening comforting an all-broked-up friend, so at least I was spared the decision.

Elsewhere this mix just gives a flavour of what i'm listening to atm. There's another in the works that will probably be quite similar.

So this is pretty

2011-07-05T16:23:00.002+01:00

We love the antikythera mechanism at grilly towers. It's quite an obsession, since it allows us to rewrite supposed history as to what was invented when, quite a feat for a single find. Hence, it's been incredibly well studied.

I think there's something missing from the analysis though. That is, the mindset of the people who would have used it. I love the device because it's so state-of-the-art; it feels so modern and functional, entirely analogues to modern palm-top computers.

Now, I'm wandering outside the boundries of science here; this is speculation, but I think it's interesting speculation.

The mechanism is, basically, as far as we can work out, a computational calendar. It shows the eclipses, the phases of the moon, the position of the sun, and (possibly, at least according to some authors) the position of the planets, at any given date of the future, just by turning a small handle. It's a model of the skies.

This is no mean feat, for a culture that believed the state of the skies accurately reflected the state of the world. This isn't just a calendar for the fun of it; no-one would design and build such a complicated mechanism just for that.

I think that the mechanism is a fortune-telling device. Knowing the positions of the heavens at any given date in the future would tell you everything you needed to know about it.
If you were arranging a festival, you could look at your mechanism and it would tell you what a good day was, when the gods would be looking favourably on you. When would be a good day to set sail. When would your fortunes change. Of course, it does not interpret anything, which is up to the owner of the device, but you've got the raw data.

And it augments the fortune-teller's art with solid technology. We all talk about our 'offboard memory' now, but this was over 2000 years ago. Think about how much power knowing the future would give the owner. And how much they would want to be the sole owner of that power. Is it a surprise we've only found one of these?

more fun with recommendation algorithms

2011-06-29T13:15:00.003+01:00

so nearly a third of people who look at google laptops decided to just by the bon iver album instead? really?

Poetic Injustice

2011-06-19T16:03:00.002+01:00

This has never happened before:

Someone at work was telling me I was gimpy for wearing a bike hat. That it wasn't cool.

Last week he fell off his bike and hurt himself. He broke his fingers.

Take that, karma.

day 04 - a song that makes you sad

2011-06-14T12:00:00.002+01:00

In at number 4: 'I know you think I've got to be joking, but if you touch him again then I'm going.'

A song that makes me sad is a lot more difficult than a song that makes me happy. almost any song makes me happy, even the sad ones, because if they make me feel anything, then that emotional engagement ultimately results in happiness.

Except Pink Glove.

Although Pulp's 'Different Class' was the first CD I ever bought, after that I totally missed the boat with them. I kept up with what they were doing, but as much as I loved them, I never actually bought any of their other albums.

Eventually I came across 'His and Hers' in a charity shop in 2005, and quite got into it. I can't believe that's 6 years ago, I was sat on the bus home from work in manchester with my awkward portable cd player that didn't have jog correction, listening to Pink Glove, the closest I'd been to tears for a long time.

It's hardly the first time jarvis had written a song about longing after (even porking) his ex - not even 'do you remember the first time?' was the first time (argh clumsiness) - but there's something about the passion and desperation in this song. the prosaic assault on his former lover's new, idiotic boyfriend, who's sapping her personality and trying to turn her into the woman he really wants.

It's awful seeing someone - a friend or an ex - go through that. But from the ex's point of view, being jilted for someone *inferior to you!* is horrendous. Seeing the person who you thought was happily single, you were waiting for the chance to make a move but now she's with *him*? In an obviously doomed long distance romance, more accurately the fall out from a fling with no chemistry-fuel to go anywhere anyway.

This song brought it all back. All the bitterness, all the nastiness, all the *why isn't it me?* feelings. Banging my head against the bathroom wall because she wouldn't be with me. Feelings I'd exegesised in page after page of torturous introspection, in diaries I've got in a box in a cupboard that I hope I'll never open. The knowledge that for all the repairs you'd made to your emotional base-camp, you'd burn it all down again for a chance to be in their arms. Even if you know they're a waste of time and you'd be better off without them. Walking into the garden, looking up at the sky and thinking 'why?'.

Sigh.

You'd better watch what you're wearing,
if you want him to come round and see you tonight.
Uh, uh, uh, oh. Uh, uh, uh, uh. Uh, uh, uh oh.
And he doesn't care what it looks like,
just as long as it's pink and it's tight.
It's what he likes.
Uh, uh, uh, oh. Uh, uh, uh, uh. Uh, uh, uh oh.

Mmmmm, so what should you do?
Should you stop being you?
Just to be how he wants you?
Mmmmm, say you'll visit your mum,
and tell me that you'll come,
and meet me in the afternoon.

Mmmmmmmm
He's got your heart,
You've got his soul.
oh well You might as well know.

Alright, I know you're never going to be with me,
but do you understand now that maybe,
you got it right first time.
I realise that you'll never leave him,
but every now and then in the evening,
you get it right first time.
I know you think I've got to be joking,
but if you touch him again then I'm going.
you got it right first time.
You get it right first time.

And now you've done it once now he wants you,
to wear your pink glove all the time.

Uh, uh, uh uh.

And he says you're a fine looking woman,
So you'll do it again and again, all again,
So he can take, so he can take it off you now.

Mmmmm.

So what should you do?
Should you stop being you?
Just to be how he wants you?
Mmmm, say you'll visit your mum,
then tell me that you'll come,
and meet me in the afternoon.
Mmmmm, he's got your heart,
You've got his soul.
You might as well know.

Alright, I know you're never going to be with me
but do you understand now that maybe,
you got it right first time.
I realise that you'll never leave him,
but every now and then in the evening.
You got it right first time.
I know you think I've got to be joking,
but if you touch him again then I'm going.
you got it right first time.
You get it right first time.

Uh, uh, uh, ah.

Well you'll always be together,
cos he gets you up in leather.
And he knows your friend called Heather
That he never kissed tonight,

So you know what to wear at the end of the day,
and I'd laugh if I saw,
but I'm out of the way.
Yeah it's too long ago,
Can't care anymore,
but I wanted to know;
is it as good as before?
Oh it's hard to believe,
that you'd go for that stuff,
all those baby-doll nighties,
with synthetic fluff.
well it looks pretty good,
yeah it fits you OK,
Yeah, wear your pink glove yeah
you put it on the wrong way.

Jesus, Alright, I know you're never going to be with me
but if you try sometimes oh then maybe
you'd get it right first time.
I understand that you'll never leave him,
but every now and then in the evening.
You get it right first time.
I know you think I've got to be joking,
but if you touch him again then I'm going.
you got it right first time, yeah.

Oh, I realise that you'll never leave him,
but every now and then in the evening
Oh You got it right first time,yeah
Oh I know you'll always be with me
Oh do you understand now that maybe
You got it right first time
Oh you got it right first time...

It never gets me like it did that time, on the bus back from the Salford quays coin store. But it always reminds me. I guess I can't complain, I'm happy now, and I'm glad for the experience. Always thank for jailor on your way out.

Edit:

I forgot to talk about the kind of heart break in the song where someone you love settles for someone boring and you know they'll never break up because they're just so reliable and dull. that's in there too.

Debug Yourself

2011-06-08T17:43:00.002+01:00

debug yourself e.p. by To The Boats

So; what's the justification in me putting three tracks together from 4 years ago?

It's a bit strange, I admit.
Thee tracks have always been on my mind. Situation was meant to turn up on an ex libris records compilation that never happened, the other two tracks were meant to be a single or an album or something, which I tentatively called 'The Gathering' for some reason. I think it says something about the direction my music is headed in now, despite the fact that these are so old. To The Boats was a holiday from complex structures and out-rock. I want to do those things again.

I'm proud of this e.p., even though I feel i can't take the credit for it.

Sleeve notes:

A small but dense collection of archived tracks.

Situation Tragedy was an experiment in acoustic doom-core, improvised and recorded 'mostly live' summer 2006.

The other two tracks were meant to be... something more, but came out of the same era of recording in 2007. The Dirtbox Experience became 'tofu', when performed by To The Boats. Sacred Charm of Making (originally 'reed hove branch') will surface on a future project. While technically demos, they both have something that will invariably be lost by the time the 'finished' version appears.

See individual song pages for more detailed sleeve notes. All in all, I think these are three strange and different takes on metal tropes.

Situation Tragedy:
Recorded at collerabbey studios, portrush, during ex-fest 2006.
Guitar, piano and drums recorded live, one-take. Vocals recorded same day, also one-take.

Ideally the mixdown should be 6 minutes 66 seconds, but the outro was too nice to cut.

Dirtbox Experience:
The main riff here was originally played acoustically, and was written when I was living with Ian out of To The Boats. Back then, we played it in a way that felt like a Jansch/Renbourn Duet. I put this demo together, and the riff came out all distorted like, and when we put it together as a band, in our second iteration without bass-player Sam, it mutated again into a more funky thing.

I think this is a classic grilly track, with far too many incongruous sections, break-neck drum programming, and poor mixing. There's an attempt at a doom-dub crossover in the middle, followed by something that can't work out if it's break-core or spazz-core, followed by something attempting 65daysofstatic-style post-rock. compared to the other 'second batch' To The Boats material, which will comprise the 'In Case Of Emergence' album, Tofu has by far the richest structure, and this demo from 2007 is basically why.

I had the vocal sample, the open monologue from some random hardcore 'jazz' film, lying around for a while. It struck me as both nasty and faintly sad, as well as peculiarly trying to fetishise britishness, and I knew I had to use it somewhere. Also, she had massively overacting eyebrows, but that doesn't come across in the audio.

Sacred Charm of Making:
Originally entitled 'reed hove branch', inspired by my long-term association with that employment agency.

I never quite knew what to do with this track, until I watched John Boorman's wonderfully ludicrous 'Excalibur'. Suddenly I was gripped by using the sections of the song to tell the story of the rape of Igrayne, and wrote lyrics to that effect. Note the appearance of 'Anaal Nathrakh'.

I took it to the band, and there's a recording of us jamming for ten minutes on the middle section, which is quite familiar to a piece by Nick Cave and The Dirty Three, featured on the x-files album. However, they weren't happy about the ferocity of the main riff (possibly the closest riff i've written to my heroes, Ephel Duath) and wanted to slow it down, which ruined it for me. This happened to be the session when Corey announced his retirement.

Consider this a sneak preview of the material that will be featured in my next project, 'Kno', which will hopefully be more along the lines of this.

Album diary 3

2011-06-03T11:13:00.003+01:00

We had a band meeting a few nights ago, in which we decided not to go with a live drummer. Basically, bringing in a new drummer, with their own style and technique, to learn all these songs just to record them felt like a bit of a faff; so the album will be recorded at home, layered, and then sent off for mixing. This is basically what we were going to do, I think, but now I can really see it happening.

It's funny, I sat down this week, and thought, this record is never going to get done. All this drum tracking, dodgy guitar tones, and fluffed takes aren't going to make for a good record.

And then I went back and listened to some of the drum tracks i'd sequenced back in the day, and they were alright. It gave me hope.

The main thing I wanted to talk about in this diary, and didn't, was synthesiser settings. Phasing - not literally phasing (where a signal is delayed by a small but changing amount), but controlling a filter cutoff with an LFO - is something i'm finding hard to get right. I find it hard to get the right amount of subtlety, and part of that is because i'm not hearing the whole mix. That's why I'm so glad I got my midi-usb connection working, because I won't have to worry about the exact sound I'll be getting out of the synth until the final mixdown.

I'll try to keep these videos under two minutes.

oh and another thing

2011-05-29T15:15:00.002+01:00

I've seen two people, recently, wearing an item of clothing with a picture of big headphones on, so that it looks like they've got professional headphones around their neck; and yet, the headphones they were actually using were tiny in ear ones.

This annoys me in exactly the same way as a tshirt that says 'calvin klein jeans'. wear the jeans! don't tell, show. dickhearts.

Payed and Displaid

2011-05-23T21:38:00.002+01:00

And another thing about english: words that start out logical but don't have consistent constructions.

Take the phrase, "This is a pay and display car park. Have you paid and displayed?" It winds me up so much that the modification doesn't make sense. There's no need for it.

Likewise: take the word 'Read', as in, to visually process words. the past tense is 'read', pronounced 'red' (the colour). Now take the word 'Lead', as in, to coerce something along. The past tense is 'led'. Now take the metal 'lead', pronounced to rhyme with 'led', and you think: didn't you get these the wrong way round? shouldn't Read and Lead (prn. reed and leed) both past tense to read and lead (prn. red and led), leaving red and led (nouns) to be homonyms? wouldn't that make more sense?

it's not to late to improve our language...

day 03 - a song that makes you happy

2011-05-21T11:33:00.000+01:00

So not my favourite song, but one that simply makes me happy.

Happiness is a funny thing. Pure happiness will make you sick, something that can only be expressed part ironically. The Todd Solondz film 'Happiness' expresses this best, because the whole story is crushing, since happiness is entirely central to the plot as a mcguffin that everyone is chasing and nobody has. The stories that have truly happy endings are the ones that have unhappiness overcome; and while MJ Hibbett's song "being happy doesn't make you stupid" is utterly true and honest, I still associate pure, unadulterated happiness with idiocy and a shit-eating grin. It feels like a disney con, like a fascist ideal, something to rebel against; how can you be truly happy in an imperfect world? and how can you tell any interesting stories in a perfect world? As Primo Levi quotes at the start of The Periodic Table "troubles overcome are good to tell"; while his later suicide casts doubt on whether he ever really overcame them, the quote reminds us to celebrate what victories we can.

Belle and Sebastian make me happy. 'The Boy With The Arab Strap' brings me back to A levels, minidiscs, and my friendship with Tom Brimelow, who introduced me to loads of good bands, as well as every friend I have shared a love of B&S throughout two universities and everything since. They're a touch-stone for any potential friend; occupying a similar musical fort to early Nick Drake, they're both the strangely rare combination of happy and mellow. Something to stick on the turntable and have a conversation and some very mild narcotics over; tea, real ale, and/or spliffs.

Super simple chords, melodic, a beautiful arrangement, weird little 'whoop' sounds, all-gorgeous harmonies, the music is just what you need. It's warm and comforting and twee and sweet and genuine and unpretentious...

I only knew a few lyrical fragments from 'Sleep the Clock Around'; something about valium, something about 'milk to get rid of taste', something about 'the memory will shine'. Looking over the lyrics now, it's exactly what fits the mood of the song and weirdly in touch with what I've been saying;

And the moment will come when composure returns
Put a face on the world, turn your back to the wall
And you walk twenty yards with your head in the air
Down the Liberty Hill, where the fashion brigade
Look with curious eyes on your raggedy way
And for once in your life you've got nothing to say
And could this be the time when somebody will come
To say, "Look at yourself, you're not much use to anyone"

Take a walk in the park, take a valium pill
Read the letter you got from the memory girl
But it takes more than this to make sense of the day
Yeah, it takes more than milk to get rid of the taste
And you trusted to this, and you trusted to that
And when you saw it all come, it was waving the flag
Of the United States of Calamity, hey!
After all that you've done, boy, I know you're going to pay

In the morning you come to the ladies salon
To get all fitted out for The Paperback Throne
But the people are living far away from the place
Where you wanted to help, it's a bit of a waste
And the puzzle will last until somebody will say
"There's a lot to be done while your head is still young"
If you put down your pen, leave your worries behind
Then the moment will come, and the memory will shine

Now the trouble is over, everybody got paid
Everybody is happy, they are glad that they came
Then you go to the place where you've finally found
You can look at yourself, sleep the clock around

This is about overcoming the mental ogre that stands between you and happiness, over a perfectly jolly riff. Like 'being happy...', it's about throwing down your introspective diary and just living, because the analysis doesn't help the problem - the analysis *is* the problem. maybe. They're actually great lyrics and I'm sorry that I've never read them before (see day 8).

But anyway, for all that this makes me happy, maybe it's just because it's one of the few songs about getting enough sleep. 87)

crash

2011-05-15T19:04:00.000+01:00

Everything crashes now.

My dvd player flips out - crashing when we try to turn off subtitles. My DAW hangs when trying to export a video. Even my delay pedal - analogue modelling and all - became a refusenik the other night, after i'd left it on too long. this has happened in practices too, and me not realising that all the little blighter needed was a power cycle. 'Have you tried turning it off and on again?' should not apply to deterministic audio equipment.

It used to be that a simple tap would mend a t.v. or radio that was wired up a bit faulty - no chance of that with today's printed circuit boards. Our boiler was ruined by a drip of water that killed it's pcb. Every household object now contains a computer, and every computer crashes. I'm not talking millenium bug-type stuff here - I'm talking about basic buffer-overrun type things that stun processors. Everything does it, regardless of whether it needed a brain or not.

Guys: stop putting brains in things that don't need them! Imagine how much perpetual torment they are in.

competition fail

2011-05-09T15:38:00.003+01:00

So.
If i view your collection, I might win a... ipad? Doesn't that utterly cheapen your products?

Giving away a product in a competition makes it seem desirable. That's why 'win an ipod' is such a strong meme, because apple are happy to give away their products as prizes, because they know the sales generated by seeing ipods and pads as desirable items will make up for it.

So to fix fred perry: 'view our collection and you could win some of our clothes (not just 'accessories')' would work wonders. If I'm just coming to your site to try and win someone else's product, something that has nothing to do with your clothes whatsoever (doesn't even fit in the pockets), then I'm going to see your clothes as just not worth anything.

The curious case of Julian Glover

2011-05-03T21:59:00.003+01:00

1979: Dr Who, 'The City of Death': Julian plays the time-fractured alien Skaroth

1989: 'Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom': Julian gets his comuppance as Walter Donovan, Nazi Archeologist:

Did you think he was on set and thought "this is a bit of old hat"?

Are there any other Julian Glover Accelerated Aging scenes that you know of?

Portals

2011-04-29T12:15:00.003+01:00

Have you noticed how 'portal' technology has basically driven first-person shooters? right from their 'true birth', doom, the plot was:

Scientists were messing around with teleportation technology and accidentally open a portal to a dimension full of evil. The army comes over to sort things out.

This is the plot to doom, quake, and half life. What half life did differently was have you playing a scientist instead of a grunt.

But there's something else in doom that has lingered in the background of first personers: have a look at the doom box art:

A bloke, shooting a pistol at a bunch of imps or demons or hell knights or something. I always thought that one in the bottom left looked a little out of place. He breaks the fourth wall of course, his tongue breaking out of the picture and looking at YOU, the hero of the game.

(Still, not as 'I don't remember him from the game' as UFO: Enemy unknown:
)

But let's go back to doom. As always.
Have another look at the art. I thought I knew that picture so well, but I only just noticed that doom guy's left hand is curled up in a 'bring it on!' gesture, while the flash I always thought was from a second gun, is in fact from a demon's fireball.

I just noticed else: another doom guy, at the back, running to help.
This is because doom was originally envisaged as a co-op game from the start. The original level was Deimos Lab, in it's original Tom Hall design state. As far as I remember, and I can't find a reference for this, it was meant to be a four way co-op game, about as likely in 1992 as finding 3 other people willing to bring their stereos round to listen to Zaireeka with.

But while co-op was included in doom and its imitators, it was overshadowed by deathmatch. I guess for all of its many faults, at least Gears Of War had strong co-op, although I maintain that game had more in common with streets of rage than doom.

But now, we have Portal 2. Still with the portals, but in a completely different way; but half the game is given over to dedicated co-operative play, levels that you simply can't play solo, much as you can't really play team fortress solo.

As someone who loves a good co-op game - it's more fun working together against the game than working with the game against each other - I can't wait to get stuck in to the co-op side of Portals (as I call it). Valve have already built a following around action in co-op left 4 dead, which I'm happy about, but this time, we have a problem of waiting for someone to commit to playing it with: I need someone who can commit to not playing it with anyone else, because it's a puzzle game and playing with someone who knew how to complete it would suck. But also, I only have time for the odd casual blast, being a father-thing. So that's been tricky, but I have found someone. It's nice to commit to things.

really lost my way with this i tihnk.

30 day song thing: day 2, your least favourite song

2011-04-29T12:01:00.000+01:00

Gosh; that's a hard one to nail. Despite talking a never ending stream of rubbish about 'things I hate' on this blog, I find it very difficult to come up with a 'least favourite' song. Not least because I'm not sure if that means the song I hate the most, or the song that I have least opinion of. You might be surprised that I can't think of either one.

It's hard to think of a song I have no opinion of, but my head is so full of songs i love that I really can't think of one.

I just asked the long-suffering, 'can you think of a song i really can't stand?'
She said, 'oh yes...' and she sang:

How can I hate a song so much from a musical I love so much?

You guessed it: I'm going to try to answer that question.

Fiddler is a really great musical, and I say that as someone who dislikes musicals generally, as a genre. At one extreme you've got 'Blood Brothers', a musical that takes itself far too seriously, and at the other end you've got pap like 'half a sixpence.' The only type i can stand is usually the knowingly silly but not stupid ones; Unless they don't take themselves seriously, my general take on musicals is 'why are you singing?

The hollywood trend around the time FOTR was made was to 'diageticise' musicals - for instance, Cabaret had it's non-stage songs cut, and consider the wedding scene in FOTR - rather than singing 'Sunrise, Sunset' out loud, the song is played as an internal monologue at a pivotal time. I'm not enough of an expert on 1970s musical films to comment much on this, but "films about actors, dancers or singers have been made as successful modern-style musical films,[examples needed] with the music as a diegetic part of the storyline."

So for me, Miracle of Miracles is the annoying side of broadway musicals, sunk into the classic, transcendent musical that is FotR. It's a cheesy slice of jolly shit pie. Not that FOTR, a multifaceted gem, can't cope with the diversity; it's a story of light and shade, and light in shade. But MOM's exactly wrong for me. I can't even watch it now; It's firmly in the hatefully delirious side of the musical tradition, that otherwise FOTR so perfectly skewers and eschews. It's so, well, happy! We hateses it, precious!

Oh, and how could i forget everything by the black eyed peas? they're SHIT.

Transitions from object to persona: Layers of Reality in The Muppets

2011-04-23T15:37:00.000+01:00

Dear Friends,
Two days ago, I watched the muppet movie, eating croissant and nutella. Today I started watching the great muppet caper, for the first time in years, unlike the muppet movie, and there was something very different about it. It got me thinking...

SO.

The muppet movie is a story of how the muppets got together. As such, all the muppets play themselves. It is framed as a film made by the muppets in cannon with their television show; the only homage to reality is the substitution of ITV's Sir Lew Grade with the similarly named Lew Lord, played by Orson Welles. The only clue as to how accurate the story is to the canonical story of how the muppets got going is the appearance of Sweetums at the end of the film, as per the story they had just shown. Of course, this is a contradiction, because Sweetums had been part of the muppet show for years at this point. TMM has the backstage elements as the framing story - the private screening of the recently-completed biopic.

On the subject of the tv show, The muppet show is a variety show. It is also a comedy about a company putting on a show, but that doesn't detract from the other genuine elements of the show; watching some sketches it is confusing which jokes are meant to be deliberate and which are meant to be accidental. It's a great confusion; musical numbers that crash and burn hilariously are obvious 2nd level jokes, but fozzy's act isn't that he's a bad comedian; his act is that he's a comedian, the joke is that he's bad.

The great muppet caper starts with a different framing technique; here's gonzo, fozzy and kermit with a street dance, during which they announce they will be playing different characters. So this is a story where the characters we know play other characters, admittedly similar to themselves. But this is a muppet production, and for the first time we don't see backstage (although we do see them breaking 'off the script' and talking about 'the movie'). The muppets have always been performers, and we see them both on and off stage, but without the off-stage sections they've now become actors themselves. they've gone a step deeper.

In more way than one, the trilogy of Gonzo, Kermit, and Fozzy that opens the film is reminiscent of the Marx brothers.

Take Groucho; Groucho Marx is an actor, but beneath Groucho is a real actor called Julius Henry Marx. Groucho is a character, who plays parts in films and shows, himself an invention. And this transition from object (puppet) to persona (actor) opened the gate way for the classic Muppet christmas carol, imho their best film. By that time, Kermit was a personality, not an manipulated puppet, credited in films as you'd expect a meat-puppet* to be. There's a similar depth in Garth Marenghi's Dark Place, where each real actor plays a personality who plays a tacky part; The personalities also get off-script moments.

It's a shame that the muppet remake train slowed down with Muppet Treasure Island and fucking crashed and died with Muppet's Wizard of Oz. I'm toying with 'Muppet Pride and Prejudice', matching characters up; The only mistake the otherwise excellent 'Muppet wicker man' made was not having any human guests, so it'd be important to keep that aspect of the muppets: the fish-out-of-water protagonist should have been human, surely.

But BACK TO THE POINT:
The transition is helped by the retirement of many of the original muppeteers, which other actors couldn't achieve. But my main point was simply this point in muppet history, They entered a new depth of reality. Sure, the muppets have always been about screwing about with different layers of reality, breaking 4th walls and so on; for an easy example, take the use of the screenplay in TMM, initially as a throwaway joke, then as a nonsensical plot device in it's own right. But, by stepping in front of the camera and not showing us the backstage elements usually integral to their show, they seem to have ultimately got to the point where their muppeteers weren't even connected to them in the credits. Doing that would break the 4th wall in a way the muppets never could - I don't think there is any point where they even joke about being puppets or less than alive.

*I like to hold actors in low regard, but just joshing. you guys are great.

ALSO:
In The Great Muppet Caper, there was this:

Charles Grodin plays a deadbeat brother, stealing jewels from his successful sister. He just happens to fall in love with Miss Piggy. I can't help but wonder if this is kind of a play on his shickse-appeal Neil Simon comedy 'The Heartbreak Kid' - We all know 'pork', being 'traif' is slang for gentile women. Peter Falk's cameo is a clear riff on Columbo, so why not Grodin?
sadly this is split over two videos, so you'll have to click through to finish it off:

In general, I found TGMC suffers from too much budget, not enough jokes, but is totally worth the watch.

can a cover song ever be 'better' than the original?

2011-04-18T11:59:00.000+01:00

from the youtube comments on Kate Bush's 'Running Up That Hill'*

Placebo version>Kate Bush Version

MY OPINIION

BC1Dan 1 day ago

Just a random yourtube comment I know, but it got me thinking...

I suppose my opinion is, unless the original of a song is either awful or unintentionally good, in which case it can be rescued, it can't be. It doesn't help that in this case, the Placebo cover is a sub-depeche mode-y dirge.

When I think of good cover versions, I instantly think of 'I will survive', performed by Cake.

But That's not 'better' than the original... 'I Will Survive' is a fantastic song, but also remember it was a written song, not a band song.

I'll explain what I mean. Could you take 'Smells Like Teen Spirit' and do it better than Nirvana?

Tori illustrates here that, no, you can't. Even if you do it differently. Two reasons: firstly, part of the song is the performer, and for me the difference between pop and rock is that rock songs are personal. They're not written to be interpreted, as a song written by a jobbing songwriter is. They are written to be performed by ones own self, and that performance is as much a part of the song as... well it is the song.

Back to Kate Bush, this is just fucking shit:

It's the perfect cover in a way, because it takes the original, strips it back to the pure song underneath, and then shits on top of it. It's like a parody-polka or parody-metal version of the song - they're just playing it the way they always play all of their songs. Cake's I will survive is genius because it doesn't sound either like the original or much like a cake song. Cake are identifiable by their unique something, but it's not a certain genre or way of always playing their songs; they have what I think I have, which is a recognisable sensibility rather than a style.

This is a great cover, but it's not better than the original; it's more just a technically great band playing what was originally sequenced metal live, mainly down to Chris Pennie's brilliant drumming:

Secondly, When you write a song, you implicitly create everything there is possible to do with it. By covering it, you're only reducing the potential of the song. and If you add anything - well it's not the same song then. so it's a lose-lose situation.

What if I admit the incorporation of original elements to the song as still being a cover? Well... See this is quite good, but can you really say it's the same song? they've really only taken the words.

I like the track, but really it's a new song with the old song's lyrics over the top. In arranging one track that;s so stuck in one genre for another, they've basically had to fill in the untranslatable trappings of math core with the equivalent trappings of another genre - by writing it again.

This was my cover of The Berzerker's 'Forever', and I'm very proud of it:
forever by To The Boats
I turned the death metal riff into a walking bass line, and strummed the implied chords on two acoustic guitars and a ukelale over the top. Turned it into a twee-folk song. But it is a derivitive work. It can't be anything more than a shadow of the original, I was just emphasising different aspects that were already there.

Now, remixing is different - by dropping a new drum track all over a song, you're not covering it, you're just bringing the different potentials of the original to the fore, but not passing it off as something different. You're collaborating with the source material, or maybe just cynically turning a song of one genre into a song of another genre, so it can be played in both clubs.
That's why I love remixes, but love songs that incorporate the potential remixes into the original song, which is why Radiator/Guerilla-era Super Furry Animals and Bravecaptain were some of my biggest stylistic influences. I had an idea that no two verses should sound the same, they should sound like different remixes of the same song, which is roughly what i was attempting on love and girl in the kid a top.

See what I've notived I do in these posts, is, I start with an idea, then in ranting about it I'm actually trying to work out what my point is.

I think with this one, I've assumed there's a core difference between the jobbing songwriter and the singer-songwriter or band. Is that really true? Have I assumed one is a drone, the other an artist? I don't think so - 'I Will Survive' is a work of art, whether it was written to be put through a production machine or written as an extension of a performer's personality. Or maybe they're all drones. I don't think so - I believe in art, and even if I'm wrong about other people's work being art, If I believe mine is, then it is. La.

*I always get confused between 'running up that hill' and 'cloudbusting', because the video for cloud busting has got a lot of running up and down hills in it. I can't be the only one...

Mixaos

2011-04-16T22:53:00.001+01:00

Mixaos by Dj Gallowslutt on Mixcloud

Mixaos.mp3

2010

2011-04-16T19:37:00.002+01:00

2010 by Dj Gallowslutt on Mixcloud

2010.mp3

30 day song thing: day 1, your favourite song.

2011-04-10T17:19:00.000+01:00

This is a good meme, and if it's worth doing, it's worth doing properly.

Whenever anyone asks me what my favourite song is, what's my standard response? Gorky's Zygotic Mynci's 'Patio Song'? Ephel Duath's 'The Passage'? The Dillinger Escape Plan featuring Mike Patton's 'When Good Dogs Do Bad Things?' Humousexual's 'Humous Is Great?'

All these songs I've grown up with and loved. But what I consider to be my favourite song is a strange treat I might never have heard.

see the waters drifting by
on a winters day in the cold
i am the lover of everything
and i walk with a friend of the trees

the trees softly sing to the waterfall
and the water it sings to the soil
and the sky it longs for the sun

living alone on the riverbank
watching the fish swimming by
i am the maker of everything
and i soar with the birds in the sky

the elm cries out for the summertime
and the oak it calls to the birds
but the maker he sits and he sighs

the snow will fall on the empty fields
and will freeze the heart of the soil
i am the melter of everything
and the snow will flow to the stream

the stream it will flow i don't know where
and the time is past and is gone
and i just sing with the trees

see the waters drifting by
on a winters day in the cold
i am the lover of everything
and i walk with a friend of the trees

the trees softly sing to the waterfall
and the water it sings to the soil
and the sky it longs for the sun

'Lord and Master' really moved me. I heard it on the 'gather in the mushrooms' folksploitation compilation (a entry-level guide to the 60's and 70's uk acid-folk scene) which i bought at Borderline records in Brighton because I saw it and though 'I should own that album'. I knew that what I was buying was really a shopping list.

it's just serenely blissful. I don't know any other song which captures the bucolic charm of a babbling brook on a summers day, even though the lyrics describe a winter scene. The plants and rocks sing to each other and long for the summer to return. The 'Master' does not appear to know anything beyond this scene - despite being the 'lover of everything'. It's such a positive conception of a god. How good would it be, if there was a god, and this is how s/he spent s/his time: hanging out with trees and birds? A god who loves the world, who controls nature and will do so when the time is right - and yet knows nothing of the past and future. There's so much implied meaning in the words, and yet so much is mysterious. I could write an essay on what the song means, but the lyrics and music are there, so you could too.

It feels very tolkienish to me: there are shades of Tom Bombadil, master of his domain and one of the most powerful beings in the world (who calls himself 'the eldest' and 'master'; however, the one ring has no power over him, if that's any indication of his stature) - who lives a small, contented life with his darling Goldberry, a river-spirit.

Heron were a band who reputedly recorded their albums live in a field as an all-male 4-piece (although I'm sure I can hear female vocals in the mix, not mentioned in the liner notes but they must have been overdubbed). The self-titled album it's from has plenty of birdsong interludes, picked up by ambient mics, and was reissued as part of a 2cd roundup by dawn records.

Heron are not my favourite band, nor their debut my favourite album (although it's an excellent standby and often in my 'current listening' rack). I don't think this song is technically the best song ever. I don't believe in god, or spirits, or singing trees. But I just love this song, because it makes me realise how much I love this world.

Heron are still going, their products are available at relaxx records alongside 'complimentary therapies'.

"The Butler did it": Forbrydelsen and the problem of depth-first search in a data-rich world

2011-03-31T11:33:00.008+01:00

(going to try and put proper caps in here)
(plus, SPOILERS!)

So Forbrydelsen (the killing) is over, and guess what? The butler did it.

Well almost; Vagn, the best friend, the persistent companion, handyman, friend to the children, in every episode, always hanging around, never suspected (until the twisty ending)... it couldn't be him, could it? Why, he had an alibi, and no motive*, and didn't fit the psychological profile. Never mind all that - looking at the structure of the story, he's the only person it could have been**. This hurts, actually; for its 20 episodes, forbrydelsen was stuffed full of believable, well-drawn characters, performed sensitively; and they sacrificed them for the sake of a hack ending that jarred. I spotted it was going to be Vagn around episode 10, based soley on the fact that he was the only character to be always there, and my mum claims an impressive episode 2 (she's read a lot of detective books). You could tell it was going to be him, not because of how he acted, but because of his position in the structure and narrative, and that is annoying.

I don't think there's been such a good dissection of life for a grieving couple since 'don't look now', even if the stages of grief seemed to be compressed into three convenient weeks. This is at odds with the contrived structuring of the program, where the car she had been found in appears to have been driven by no less than four people that night, and everybody has a secret alibi, rather than a motive, as would be the case in a classic poirot investigation. Interestingly, "In Germany they liked it as a whodunnit, but you guys seem to be more into the characters."

Now that that's off my chest, I want to talk about something else: the methods of the detectives. not from a police procedure point of view, but in terms of data search.

In search analysis, there are two basic methods: breadth-first and depth-first. A problem space is a network; each node is a piece of evidence and you're looking for the node that gives you the critical evidence that links a particular person to your starting node, which is 'there has been a murder'. You don't know where this node is, so you need to explore the problem space. So you have a choice of how you go about exploring it.

A depth-first approach says

1: Take the first unexplored node attached to your current node.
2: Check if it's the end state.
3: if yes: exit with success! otherwise, goto 1.
4: if there are no other nodes left to explore: backtrack to the previous node and goto 1.

In this diagram, the red lines show which nodes are connected and the black arrows show what order the nodes are investigated.

This recursive algorithm produces a burrowing action that drills down as fast as it can to the bottom of the data. It's unlikely to produce a correct answer straight away (except by luck), but produces more interesting television; it's the technique used by Lund and Meyer on Forbrydelsen. They picked a suspect, assumed they did it, harangued them to death, and ultimately found out the were innocent. And OK, I think the detectives generally handled themselves pretty well given the absolute bat-shit-mad number of people who didn't come forward with vital information because they had something really really important to hide. Then again, the convoluted plot somersaults need to keep the series going for 20 episodes are pretty shameful. For just one example - why did the initial driver of the car not know that it had been picked up when he went home ill? why did the security guard not come forward with blatantly vital information, which would have cut out three suspects (by my count) and about 8 days of police work.

And worse: why did Meyer cryptically say 'Sara 84' on his death bed, rather than 'Vagn shot me'? he knows what vagn looks like and the implication that vagn goes round with his face covered is just to silly contemplate.

Also Vagn - if you're going to steal a vitally important photo from a photo album, don't leave the page saying which photo has been taken in the book: Take the whole book. It's quicker and easier and it's what you would have done without even thinking about it.

Ok, so that was more than one example but so much of the plot was too silly.

So I'll move onto breadth-first search, and in doing so, talk about why I think it's relevant. Breadth-first involves checking nodes for success depending on how close they are to your start node, as illustrated here:

So notice that in this case, the search procedes layer-by-layer.

I like to think about these searches as 'lines of inquiry'. From your starting point, you have several suspects, and as you open up these lines of inquiry, you have different branching facts of evidence, motive, alibis and inconsistencies, &c.

Take the classic Poirot scene: a lounge, with all the suspects gathered, a few days after the event, as Poirot reveals the sum of his findings. The detective has spent days combing the area and suspects, accumulating evidence, and let the facts speak for themselves. With a little creative thinking, he is able to read between the facts, and given a room full of people who all have motives and windows of opportunity, is able to pick out the murderer. He is a breadth-first searcher; he does not accuse anyone until all the facts are out.

I read PD James' "a mind to murder" not long ago, and it's a great example of breadth-first detecting: virtually the first half of the book is police interviews with occupants of the house where the murder took place. That's how police work should be done, but to be fair, I didn't enjoy the book. It was too long before any actual, you know, detecting went on.

This is where the 'hunch' comes in and rescues us from overly-procedural police work. once the basic facts of the scene are established, the detective goes off on their own, follows their hunch, maybe makes a few illegal short-cuts and compromising mistakes. I didn't get the sense of any hunches in Forbrydelsen; it was all or nothing.

In the diagrams above, if the solution to the murder was at node 10, both methods would be as inefficient as each other. But in Forbrydelsen, it was at node 3: the best friend (in this analogy, 1 is Nana, 2 is Theis). And it took the detectives over two weeks to even question him. In fact, in every case, they only took people in for questioning when they suspected them - and this is why I felt, in 2011, let down by the series (which was, in its defence, made in 2007).

We live in a data rich age. The Petabyte Age, to quote Wired. They talk about the end of theory: living in a time when you don't need models and theories because we have so much information. Who needs a theory of evolution when we have so much data on so many different species? The argument goes, we don't need a model, we have the real thing. The first task in police work should be to accumulate as much evidence as possible - regardless of meaning. Once you've got everything laid out in front of you, the suspect should simply emerge.

The point is, detectives have two resources: facts and hunches. The two build on each other, with facts leading to hunches and vice versa; you start with facts, you need to end with facts, but along the way you can develop a hunch to get you through the dry times and give you some direction - called a heuristic in the search lexicon. Too much fact and not enough hunch, and you end up in staid 'a mind to murder' territory. Too much hunch and not enough fact, and you get Armstrong & Miller's 'Force on the Case', where a raving alcoholic ex-policeman repeatedly accuses his book-shop rival of being a murderer.

But in the Petabyte age, we don't need hunches or theories. we just need to accumulate data. That's what I think is sad about forbrydelsen: they don't use facts or hunches. They just blindly follow and exhaust linear enquiries, without considering the whole picture. It's one thing to be overly-procedural, and it's one thing to be a loose cannon; but the detectives in Forbrydelsen are neither, with a paucity of data and no hunch to give them direction. Their only strategy is pure depth-first search.

So the problems with Forbrydelsen are threefold:

1: the answer felt cheap (like they clumsily lumped together a crime of passion carried out by a serial killer),
2: there was the fact that anyone of about 10 people should have come forward with information, but had something else to hide (which is pushing it, and just for the sake of throwing in red herrings and prolonging the series), and
3: the detectives just didn't seem very good at their job - relying on too little data and accusing people to readily. But then, I suppose this follows from point two, as I said earlier, what could they do, as rational actors with a plot this convoluted?

So I'd like to see a 21st century, web 2.0 detective, totally data-led in his methodology. In short: Ben Goldacre PI.

*Yes, he had motives to stop Nana leaving the country, but not a motive to ritually rape and murder her. The killer was described as methodical and not impulsive, while Vagn's actions are totally off the cuff and unplanned.

**The only other person it could have been was Morten, for the same reason of being a 'big bad friend' of another protaganist. It turned out he had his own twist.

two new demos

2011-03-24T18:37:00.004Z

there is a funny story attached to these songs.
I bought a new mixer, and as well as learning to use Reaper, i've been learning to get the best out of it.
I had problems with latency at first, because i'd created an awkward setup , and it's got two speaker outputs - monitor and control room, with importantly different mixes.

Recording through it, i've got both line out and microphone from my guitar amp. but on closer inspection, both the outputs recorded to disk from these inputs had been identical - and what's more, hugely hissy, with only a 12 dB signal to noise difference. i couldn't believe my equipment was this bad. having a fiddle around, i starter to notice something strange, and eventually confirmed this - even with all the levels zeroed, the gain set to zero, and finally, desperately, all inputs to the mixer unplugged - the computer still recorded this awful sounding input. i didn't for the life of me understand.

the culprit: a webcam with built in microphone, using identical USB audio codec drivers, therefore coming in on the mix. with the quality sound.

on 'yentl' below, you can hear the difference in sound quality with the piano sound, which was added after i fixed the problem.

anyway, here's a couple of lo-fi tracks based around picking patterns i wrote recently, having taken paternity leave more than a week before i should have done. but waiting was doing my head in at school. oh my god, a feeling. i haven't expressed one of those on here for a hugely long time. i'd better log off and let you listen to these tracks.

"Info for nerds":striking similarities between the packaging of bruised pilgrim and hello sailor..!

2011-03-22T17:06:00.005Z

1. Use of the 'exclamipsis'

2. Black cover with iconic image centre.

3. Gatefold card CD case.

4. Band picture has some members obfuscated/not included.

5. Tracklisting (centre-aligned) makes reference to two-sided nature of vinyl.

6. One band member standing to the right of the frame, looking left.

7. Surprisingly colourful interior.

8. Sleeve notes in light, serif, font, aligned to edge of packaging, on black background. Sleeve notes have several similarities of content, including the mention of the name 'Andrew Gardiner' at least three times, in mixing, producing, and additional vocal and percussion capacities, plus 'Colerabby Studios'

"Lumious beings are we, not this crude matter": towards a new RPG paradigm

2011-03-21T16:54:00.006Z

(i have a lot of problems with this video, e.g. if size matters not, why can't yoda just crumple the death star into a tiny black hole? if 'try not! do or do not, there is no try', how do i deal with uncertainty - somethings just end in failure no matter how hard you try, through no fault of your own, because there were factors you couldn't know about. but anyway, onwards to my new paradigm)

while waiting for a baby that simply doesn't want to drop, i've been playing a lot of desktop dungeons. it's a lot of fun, and very easy to get far too obsessed by. but while wishing that i could throw 'half a fireball' at a pesky enemy who only has a couple of hp left, i am reminded of an old idea i had that i never got around to developing.

imagine a plane of luminous beings. beings with no corporeal element - their spiritual side is their life force. their energy is their blood. they spend their own power, diminishing themselves, in order to hurt or heal others.

i'm talking about a two-fold change to the typical rpg system -

1: a spell's power is determined by how much power the player chooses to invest in it;
2: no mana bar, no hp bar, no xp bar - just one bar of fluid energy.

balancing these ideas would be tricky. it would be very important not to make it a zero-sum game: if i spend 14 energy points on a spell, then it's no good if it just takes of 14 of your energy points, because then it's just a case of 'who's got the biggest health bar?'.

so from the first point: when a player starts the game, all spells are available to them, but being a noob, they can only use them lightly. there would be a bell-curve effect to the strength of the spell - not a deterministic one. so investing a little power would produce anything from a fluff to (rarely) a medium sized explosion, while increasing the power would stretch - not move - the probability distribution, making fluffs rarer and opening up the potential for devastating explosions of energy. they could try to reach beyond their means, overspend their energy, but the more they overspend by, the more likely it is that it'll be a complete disaster.

from the second point: you don't spend your mana, you spend your you. in order to damage your opponent, you must spend the one gauge you have. there's no need for levelling up, as xp extends the size of the gauge; and receiving damage costs you the ability to damage people back. so there's no real difference between a tooled-up beginner and a wounded veteran.

and this may sound like a problem, but maybe it's another strength. being wounded actually hurts you - and i think we have to back to deus ex to find another example where being hurt actually impairs your character's performance. hurting your opponent means they're less able to hurt you back, and vice versa, making battles struggles to the death as characters fire off at each other with less and less energy. now, being low on health doesn't make strong attacks impossible, it just makes them riskier. the powerful energyblast you need to finish off your opponent looks like a safe bet, until they bring you low. you can still attempt it, but what's changed is the probability that you'll get a positive effect.

therefore there needs to be no absolute zero to the gauge - but past a certain point your attacks become entirely impossible and while still alive, you are effectively neutralised. do this to an opponent, and you've won the battle and can receive your xp (i.e., your gauge goes up). lose the battle, and you need to go and find somewhere to regenerate.

spending a small fraction of your power would produce a confident, low-power attack - low impact, but low standard deviation. therefore a powerful being could cast weak spells more confidently than a noob. the larger the proportion of your energy bar, the more risky - postively skewed - your attempt becomes.

here, let me explain with graphs:
So let's consider two characters - a low-power one (Gilgamesh) and a high-power one (Enkidu). they both attempt to cast a green-powered spell, meaning they both need to put in the same amount of energy. the amount of energy is a greater proportion of Gilgamesh's force bar than Enkidu's, so while the maximum output is the same, Enkidu's probability distribution is more skewed towards this maximum than Gilgamesh's. therefore the mean value of the spell would be higher.

In the second half of the picture, we see Gilgamesh over reaching himself to compete with Enkidu, who confidently attempts the high-power spell. There's a very small chance Gilgamesh reaches the heights that Enkidu easily gets to. What I can't easily illustrate here is the negative affects that a player would be risking by living beyond their means; from this illustration it would appear that it's really worth going over the top, but that's not my intention. it's just really hard to illustrate negatives on the electro-magnetic spectrum.

it has to be balanced so that the risks of over-reaching your power outweigh the benefits, effectively cutting off anything beyond what you should be capable of at any point in the game. this basically brings the system back in line with more traditional methods of 'you can't cast that spell because you're only a level 3 wizard' style mechanics (hell, even characters in the book 'nightwatch' complain about that kind of thing) but i like the expandability of it, the fact that what's stopping you isn't the ability to cast it, just the unlikeliness of it having the effect you want, which is more like how our universe works: it's not held in place by absolute laws, but by the sheer weight of probability.

These two ideas could be combined with a modular, diy spell building system like that of magicka, meaning that you could still restrict the kinds of spells users could cast by not letting them have some key rune, glyph, grimoir, or other way of encoding knowledge. thus maybe you had to learn or subscribe to different elemental powers.

in conclusion, i guess what i'm after here is a way of simplifying rpg tropes into one measure of success, plus a way of scaling magic so that it's accessible to all. back an opponent into a corner, beat them down and they'll either flee or try something super-risky, just when you're at your weakest. personally i think this mechanic has a lot of potential, especially for a computer-based game, where the maths doesn't have to be done by hand. it just strikes me as a really fair way to build a universe.

OGRY

2011-03-19T16:03:00.003Z

Ogry by Dj Gallowslutt on Mixcloud

Ogry.mp3

wtf, google?

2011-03-09T15:50:00.002Z

reviewing the king of limbs after one listen

2011-03-07T21:37:00.003Z

most people threw up some opinions on the king of limbs after just one listen, the day it was released. i'm going to happily share my opinions a few weeks after release, still having only listened to it once.

i listened to king of the limbs in it's entirety on headphones on the way to work, having never heard it before (except for putting it on in the background when we had guests, after 4 other new albums, so it was kind of lost in the mix)

I got about half way through, and realised i was still waiting for something to happen. by the end, i'd heard a couple of fairly nice songs (in a supra-keane sort of way) in the second half, but wasn't satisfied.

listening to an album once is never enough to know it; none of my favourite albums have been so highly regarded after just one listen, and that's especially true of radiohead, whose albums i've always found to be growers. but king of limbs just annoyed me; after one listen, it seems closest to thom yorke's pitiful 'feeling pulled apart by horses' single, while also harking back to the absolutely classic amnesiac b-sides. but four tracks in and i dunno, i just hadn't heard any songs, or riffs.

'In Rainbows' was fantastic. I might not have realised how good it was on the first listen, but it didn't put me off. I don't mean put me off in a 'slipknot' kind of way - hearing that when i was 17 was thrilling, but too much - or in a 'trout mask replica' kind of way - as in, the genius could initially only be drank in in small quantities. or Race Horses' 'goodye falkenburg', which i initially thought was a limp version of their live set, but after a few listens i absolutely adored. not like those; this feels more like ephel duath's 'through my dog's eyes', an album I never found a space for. listening to 'limbs' was a frustrating, empty experience. I want to go back to it because radiohead have never let me down before, and others have said it's good, but i honestly don't look forward to the experience or listening to it again.

So, how did listening to it actually make me feel? like a twerp. The lack of publicity just underlined the disappointment for me, it's like they just weren't bothered by it. they'd done it, they were going to shit it out regardless. it's all puffy, rich beats and nothing else; yorko's warblings come across with no lyrical warmth, no harmony, no clever instrumentalism. i don't remember anything from the album except some piano on track 6. i think i found it irritating, which is often a sign that i'm grumpy about something, perhaps something i can't deal with.

So, i guess i'll give it a few more listens, then maybe give up, then do another 'disappointing albums' post in a couple of years. i hope i realise i was wrong, but part of me just wants to dislike the record. is that because i've got an unreasonable grudge, or is it because i feel dumped by it?

edit:
i think one of the things i didn't like about it is that all the songs are about 5 minutes long and go nowhere. it's like... if you do a two minute track that goes nowhere, well fine, it's just like a flavour, a taster, or something; extending it to five minutes is a trick, a smokescreen, like saying 'there's something in this track that deserves to be 5 minutes long' when there isn't. like blowing a doodle up to dramatic proportions in order to make it look like a work of art, which gives it some meaning it didn't originally have. now, i know music is different; a groove can take hold when jammed out. or it can become annoying. i mean, the first discernable riff on the album is track 3, and that's just such an arbitary melody, like they just found some notes and said 'fuck it, that'll do', without considering whether it was catchy or just sounded like a shit version of 'go to sleep'.

the black swan

2011-03-05T17:23:00.006Z

I am angry with the world of publishing.

A few years ago, a saw a bunch of posters for 'the black swan' (the book, you dolt), and was basically suckered into buying it. it sounded like freakonomics, but more high-brow, and obscure, or something. It looked like exactly the book i wanted to read.

I didn't finish it because it's basically a made up pack of shit, with a very insightful basic idea, which i think i can summarise like this:

let's say there's a power law that relates how things that happen frequently don't change the world very much, and as things get more important, they get more rare. so far, so obvious. Taleb marries this to the long tail, and a pinch of chaos theory - the rarer, and therefore harder to predict, something is, the more it affects the world. right at the end of the tail, you get things that almost never happen, that totally change everything, that you could never predict.

i really like that idea, even if it is pretty pessimistic. but Taleb runs with, makes up a load of fictional evidence - i'm not kidding, he tells a story that he cites as evidence and then admits he made it up - and furthermore, the idea is fairly self-defining and tautologous. but what really irks me is beyond the book, and goes back to penguin's marketing for the book.

my excellent brother Dan recommended i read Iain M. Banks*' books "excession" as grist for the conceptual piece we're working on. i've just finished it, and it's a pretty complex book, but very good if you can keep up with it, or just surf along not understanding, knowing that what's going on will probably make sense when you get a few more chapters in. The plot deals with an "outside context problem", the kind of problem "most civilisations would encounter just once, and which they tended to encounter rather in the same way a sentence encountered a full stop."

i was reading the wikipedia page on excession, and guess what i read: "The situation has been more recently described as black swan theory." The link leads to a page on black swan theory, not the book itself, as if Taleb had any kind of formal definition of the theory, or had written an academic paper not a straight-to-paperback pop-science book.

edit: the link to the black swan theory page is also in the opening paragraph of the article. which is wierd.

this page is basically just an advert for the book (there is some discussion on the talk page as to why it exists and how it should be merged into the page for the book); and what are the chances of me coming across this link - unless it's not as uncommon as i expected. so i started thinking - have they just plastered the link all over wikipedia? what about the rest of the internet?

a quick site search brings up 113 pages that mention 'black swan theory' - many of which are talk pages or user pages and so on. but that's still a lot of pages directing wikipedians towards this page. a broader search brings up 259 pages across the internet that link to it. I'm unable to tell how many of these are people using the term in general parlance, and how many are what i suspect - deliberate insertions of the link across the interweb to boost sales of the book by viral marketeers. I say 'viral marketeers' because they're linking to the 'theory' not the 'book' - they're selling an idea, not a product. they're trying to turn wikipedia, which is freely editable, into a web of adverts. I hate that.

*nothing to do with 'rosie m. banks', the author bertie wooster pretends to be in jeeves and wooster.

On a different tack, the recent controversy over the Old Man Murray page on wikipedia really reminds me of arguments between Minds in Excession. there's something about the anarchy - as in, self-organisation - the independence, the distance between people. we depend upon them, and when individual ones become corrupted by the power, the group steps in to set things right. the user who suspended the OMM page has been reprimanded, and the comments here are just like dialogue between various characterful craft. the thrill of peeking behind the curtain is just the same in excession (where the human's plotline is completely pointless) as with wikipedia.

Ivor cutler's similar artists

2011-03-04T15:49:00.002Z

I think this is pretty fascinating, and self explanatory.

cancer link dump

2011-03-03T21:25:00.004Z

cancer keeps cropping up. i mean, in the news.

well, you can always draw a straight line between two points, but we've got carl zimmer on cancer in whales (or lack of) and the prevalence of a transmissible form of face cancer in tasmanian devils - surely the only case outside dogs, and possibly Henrietta Lacks.*

speaking of which, i might as well throw adam curtis' documentary about HeLa cells because it's brilliant, real *must watch* stuff.

I just think it's fascinating that we've got those two extremes out there at the moment - whales with their inexplicably low rate of cancer, and devils with a form of cancer so virulent that it's threatening their whole species. the killer quote: "Tasmanian devils are so genetically similar to one another that their immune systems don’t recognize infectious cancer cells from another individual as foreign"

i suppose it humbles me, how much we have yet to learn.

anyway, here's cancer: the musical, because mansun say it better than i ever could.

*edit: apparently, syrian hamsters too. surprised that the wikipedia article hasn't picked up on hela cells - while they were not transmissible to other humans, they seemed awfully virulent.

the alternative passover service book

2011-02-09T22:11:00.002Z

...and these bitter herbs symbolise the bitter tears our ancestors cried as they struggled for freedom...

...and this roasted lamb shank represents the sacrifice our ancestors made...

...and this burnt egg represents the new life that we began in freedom, which for some reason has not been fertilised...

...and this apple pie represents the houses we were forced to build in bondage, surrounding the soft, delicious egyptians...

...and this milk and honey represents our culture, transferred from parent to child like a mother's milk, flavoured with the product of communal industry like the kibutz...

...and this gold-rimmed plate represents the 'gilt' which we must bear for not remembering and feeling bad for the hardship our ancestors suffered...

...and this chicken soup represents the watery grave our pursuers died in, when they were swallowed by the salty, celery-flavoured sea...

...and this argument about why we still recite this ceremony represents the arguments our ancestors had with god about the ludicrous acts he had us perform in his name...

...and this horseradish represents the mortar with which we built the egyptians' buildings...

...and this family gathering is smaller than it used to be, which represents the declining population of jews...

...and this hunt for the matzoh represents... ok, i really don't know this one.

disappointing albums revisted 2: new erections

2011-01-31T13:20:00.000Z

The locust, for me, first appeared in a manchester basement and entirely re-affirmed my appreciation of screaming. the first band (local) had a singer who appeared to be yelping the same word again and again - possibly 'R'lyeh' - and i thought, i've had it with screaming. then orthrelm came on, and did something very strange to my head, without any vocals at all. this was all a long time ago...

about this time, when they were touring the 'plague soundscapes' record, i guess you could describe them as 'avant-grind', alongside melt banana and perhaps fantomas. they not only made me love screaming again, but they're the band to turned me onto synthesisers - not the human league, john carpenter, or brian eno, but a californian spazz-core band dressed in uniform gimp suits.

so the 23 minute, 21 track plague soundscapes was a stand-by for me for a long time - years after that, if things got too stressful at a house party, i'd go and put it on and ten minutes in, i'd feel completely refreshed. I read somewhere in an interview that they said while they started as a blastbeat-heavy straight-up grind band, they now used blastbeats more as a punctuation mark than an end in itself, and it's this that i really appreciated - as i see it, this is the main difference between grind and spazz.

their next output, 'safety second/body last' e.p. on mike patton's ipecac records, was a ten-minute synthonic spazzterpiece. the track listing made no sense at all, while the music was arbitrarily divided into two tracks. it wasn't just dynamic, even the dynamics were dynamic - the lows were so long and patient, brooding layers of synth culminating in massive high explosions of noise and colour. when i last saw them play, at barden's boudouir in dalston, they played it straight through and i danced perfectly to every spang, beat, and deliberate misfire. nobody else seemed to get it.

So i was a bit disappointed when 'new erections' came out. carrying on the lyrical themes of body horror and social nihilism, it's still a 20-odd minute album, but with only 11 tracks. i thought this was a bit weird, but the music fits this - it's sludgier, with deeper screams and more legible lyrics. nary a blastbeat on the whole record! i didn't get it, and i didn't get into it.

so i prepared myself by putting on my beloved safety second, body last; then sat down to listen to new erections. and they actually flowed really well into each other. it still strikes me as less 'bonkers' than their earlier records; it's not as yelpy and screechy, but stylistically it has the same patient grumbles.

i enjoyed it a lot more. i realised it fitted better into the, um, 'arc' of their steady altering of their style, from grind to - well, just weird music that can't be described as punk or metal, just arty, angry, music. an album is better when it's a stop on a journey rather than a different iteration of the same formula; maybe that makes me love both their soundscapes-era material and new erections more, and actually stops me writing them off as a band that's lost their way with side-projects. again, when i saw them at barden's and they played the material off of it, i loved it; maybe i just couldn't find the right space for it at home.

so welcome back to my heart, the locust. i'm sorry i doubted you.

StatChem

2011-01-23T21:20:00.007Z

I was Playing Space chem, as you can see from this picture.

what's extra-great about spacechem is how it rates your performance against everyone else's, as you can see from the three frequency graphs on the left.

look at that top one. a perfect positive skew* - but then, a massive modal spike just underneath1000 cycles.

the spike clearly doesn't fit into the population, totally bucks the trend - you can see the shape of the rest of the data is from one population, the spike is an interloper. a separate group hiding in the population, revealed like an x-ray by looking at the data.

So, why the spike? This level has an unlockable achievementy thing - complete it in under 1000 cycles for bonus something. Well, that explains the position of the spike.

But why no smooth curve to blend it in with the rest of the data? Why the anomalous rise and fall? As I said, it's a separate population. people are either just trying to complete the level, or going for the 'just under 1k' mark - there's no points for getting nearly to 1k, it's all or nothing - digital.

I think this graph says something very profound about the effects of achievements on game play, and i'm not exactly sure what. My role as a statistician ends with me pointing out the anomaly. why it's there, and whether it's right or not, is up to the philosophers.

over to you, dan.

*I can never remember if that's a positive or negative skew - neither seems to make any sense.

Edit:

What's also a little bit annoying that StarChem leaves out is the correlation between one form of game play and another - i want to know if the people who didn't use many reactors did it with a payoff of a longer run time, or did they manage to fix both of them? on one level, i was well under for reactors, but massively high for run time - is this usual? is it possible to score well in all areas?

Edit 2:

I just completed this achievement. it's funny how completely optimised you think something can be, but then to be given the incentive to reduce it further, you find something else - one little pathway to shorten. eventually i shaved it down to 1014 cycles, and couldn't find any other way to improve my machines - so i just made the pipes longer to serve as an ad-hoc overflow container and hey presto - while it felt like a cheat, prolonging overflow rather than actually improving the machines, it just about worked. and then i said 'right, got it under 1000. now i can move on.' and that's why achievements are bad.

best unintentional goatse ever?

2011-01-20T17:11:00.000Z

random nerd thoughts 2

2011-01-20T09:32:00.000Z

imagine the scene: the school staff room.

i'd just finished eating a brie and cranberry sandwich. i considered the sandwich box they use:

And I said to Rob, "what does that look like to you?"

Rob looked back at me, knowing exactly what i was getting at.

"a spaceship", he said.

"which spaceship?" i asked, knowing he knew exactly which spaceship.

"a certain spaceship from a certain movie," he replied.

"you mean: an A-wing from star wars" i said, defeated.

now I'm not so sure. the sandwich box has a kind of StarCom feel to it:

anyway: there you have it.

thanks to andrew for putting me onto the plinkett thing.

on mark kermode's top 5 films of the year

2011-01-18T13:51:00.000Z

1: inception
2: of gods and men
3: toy story 3
4: made in dagenham (apparently makes a very good double bill with brassed off)
5: chico and rita
lingering outside the top 5:
the social network
oil city confidential
skeletons
restrepo
kick ass
the arbor
eyes wide open
another year

I have watched a lot of films this year. but i've only seen one of these. that seems very wrong somehow, but i suppose it's because if there's this many good films out this year, it soon stacks up. we're wading through decades of great films.

I had a resolution a few years ago: no more bad films. i wasn't going to waste my time on avoidable shit. and since joining sofa cinema (love film with a guardian-endorsed front end), i've seen some crackers: 5 stars got to let the right one in, the wrestler, waltz with bashir, no country for old men and there will be blood (which weren't as good as a double bill as i imagined from the virtually identical posters), as well as older stuff like psycho, larry sanders, women in love.

but some complete dreck has also somehow crept in. the wicker man remake, muppets' wizard of oz, taken, death at a funeral, primal fear (just to name films we only gave 1 star to). so what are these films doing on my list?

it seems to be a combination of recommendations from friends and the need to go through the motions. muppets' wizard of oz and death at a funeral (directed by frank oz)... i think we knew they were going to be bad, but just had to see it through (we stopped the latter after half an hour of boring uncomedy).

muppets' wizard of oz was such a mis-step. such a very bad film. but what a weird thing, to have the opportunity to have some grand, self-reflexive opportunity for frank oz to turn up and admit that it's all a show, and waste it on a 'hmm, do you have a brother called frank?' quip. and if you can't make a climax like that - which you really can't with the muppets, since they're meant to be 'real', but at least you can have a nod to the audience - don't choose that story. muppet wicker man was much more in keeping with the tradition of muppet adaptations (except the lack of a human 'outsider', but then kermit makes such a good straight man [frog]. oh, and seeing miss piggy's breasts was a bit... um... argh)

i suppose i've got to keep it chancey; you can't avoid watching films because they might be crap. So i think I've fallen into a pattern of alternating between two strategies:
1. If someone says a film is good, or it's directed, written, in someway overseen by someone i like, then i'll watch it, and then watch the review after.

2. If a film is 'meant' to be good, by critical acclaim, i'll investigate a few different reviews first (generally Kermode, then the guardian, then Ebert) to see if it's worth a crack.

this way, some films i don't like will creep in - after all, it's important to keep making mistakes. but hopefully i won't miss anything i might like.

in praise of plinkett

2011-01-15T10:37:00.007Z

So here we are, in 2011. I've just finished watching the Red Letter Media review of Star Wars 3, and while it felt a little over-padded at 1 hour 50 minutes, it was good, entertaining stuff.

Plinkett has made watching the star wars prequels into something more than a waste of time. they now seem like an investment, without which, i could not have enjoyed his feature length reviews.

And then this comes up on the internet - a response to the SW1 review. It misses the mark so tragically in so many ways.

So why do i think so much of plinkett? Firstly - it's so internet. it's so now.
these things simply could not have existed 15 years ago. the technological advancements which george lucas claims he has waited for so that he can get his vision directly from his head onto celluloid (do they still use celluloid?) are the same ones that allow some bedroom filmaker to mercilessly take him to task for his lack of vision. sorry to use 'vision' twice in that sentence. and better still, it's free - you couldn't sell something that steals so wholesale from someone else's work anyway, but it's freely distributable. I'd happily buy a boxset of these reviews, but it's not even an option. of course, there's red letter media's feature films, and you can donate...

secondly - the framing device of 'being plinkett'. plinkett's a good character; a balanced mix of humourous idiot and insightful critic. furthermore, the pornocidal maniac side of him that comes out gradually sweetens the irony - because what kind of a madman would honestly spend this time and energy nitpicking his way through these reviews? and yet you agree with him - reflecting the joke back on you. and you enjoy laughing at yourself, because you like Star Wars.

The humour is so important to the reviews - it makes it all worthwhile. But by comparing the prequels to not just the originals, but to everything from citizen kane to the last starfighter, he shows up just how many specific mistakes lucas makes in his films.

all these qualities are entirely absent from Raynor's response to Plinkett - attempting to parody his obsessiveness by nitpicking _his_ way through 108 pages of pdf.

The first thing that strikes me about Raynor's analysis of Plinkett is you thought SW1 was a GOOD FILM? i had the same response to this post on io9 about going cold turkey from star wars: i can't sit here and read an article by someone who can sit through the prequels and not feel traumatised, especially if that person was partly responsible for Lost.

Raynor argues that by using the written word to criticise Plinkett, he's helping us - we can skim it, we can search through it, it's handier. But it's completely retrograde. Plinkett is brilliant because it's a film, more entertaining than the film he's criticising. It's content and form - he's telling us where Lucas has gone wrong, and showing us how to do it right. What's Raynor doing? an extended, poorly-formatted diatribe in defence of a bad film. This isn't entertainment.

He responds to almost every point Plinkett makes, often with a withering comment, sometimes agreeing with him. But his responses are usually not addressing the point Plinkett is making, and Raynor's obviously having an argument with his monitor, and suffering from the illusion that because he can respond to his monitor and not vice versa, he's won, no matter how weak or inconsequential his remarks are. His attempt at explaining the actual plot of the film still leaves me confused as to who is doing what to whom and why, which just backs up Plinkett's whole point more. "Stoklasa has time to make all this silly speculation, but he doesn't mention the easy explanation that actually works: That the Trade Federation is reliant on trade, and the taxes on trade routes are negatively affecting them. They're blockading Naboo as a protest to the Republic government." wtf? when lorry drivers protested about petrol prices, they blockaded petrol stations. wtf has naboo got to do any of their space taxes? Raynor is right when he calls the space taxes a Mcguffin, but a mcguffin is supposed to be something you understand the importance of - like, hey, the plans to a battle station with the power to destroy entire planets.

I'm becoming Plinkett here, because what he does best in criticising the prequels is make me really appreciate how great the original films are. Every comment he makes, he backs up with a comparison to something that does it well. Raynor's idea of a good film is SW1, so he's onto a loser. By trying to explain the plot, he just highlights how chaotic and/or complicated it is.

Most of all, Raynor reminds me of a bible fan who can't cope with criticism and is just lashing back without actually considering that his opponent's arguments have already taken his responses into account. He just comes across as nasty. the more of it I read, the less tasteful it gets; Raynor seems to have taken Plinkett's attacks as both real and personal, and is responding as such.

So did you see what I did there? I compared Plinkett to Raynor, to show how had the review is and how good the original is, which is like an analogy with what Plinkett did - reviewing the one thing, to remind you how good the older thing is.

It's like it rhymes... yeah?

anyway, let's remember the good times:

why roleplaying games are difficult

2010-12-24T15:38:00.000Z

the wrestler double bills

2010-12-21T10:56:00.001Z

films that the wrestler would make an excellent double bill with:

anvil
this jumps off the screen at you - beat up, middle aged northern americans who are past their former glories and... their are plenty of differences (for instance, anvil are continually trying to get back into the mainstream, whereas the bulk of the wrestler is what he finds himself doing instead of wrestling), but it's the feel of the two films; primarily, bad jackets in the cold. living after the lost golden age. heroes who have rubbish jobs.

taxi driver
both films are about someone with too much time. when the ram has wrestling taken away from him, he tries and nearly succeeds to sort his life out; travis bickle takes the job as a taxi driver because he can't sleep. both films have tragic relationships with two women - and in both cases, one is a professional. in the first case, the relationship between both travis and betsy and between randy and his daughter, while of a different nature, go to show how estranged the man is from society; however, while travis tries to redeem himself through rescuing iris (a working girl), there's a lot of differences here with the wrestler. there's more to this, but i'm getting bogged down in the detail.

taken
taken is a rubbish, laughably bad film; and there's nothing like watching a so-bad-it's-enjoyable film alongside a genuinely quality film. but there are similarities too. both are the story of a man, paid to hurt people, whose job means he never sees his daughter. in both cases, we are watching things unfold after the event: the estranged father trying to fix his relationship after years of neglect. of course, taken projects liam neeson's character as ultimately being right all along - it's *good* that he was never there, see, because when they didn't listen to him about how dangerous paris was, he can use his 'unique skill set' to track down and rescue her - while the tragic core of the wrestler is randy realising and admitting he made mistakes, but not being able to stop making them.

in media res

2010-12-19T11:35:00.002Z

two weeks of unpublished link dumpage:

the unity of maths, music, and architecture: i've never heard of this guy before, but it's a great example of how maths is really all about proportion (ok, there's algebra too).

hahahahahaha: is this the new 'human species may split in two'?

random wikipedia article of the week: Lined_pocketbook

this post represents, for me, the point where i've finally recategorised david macandless from 'insightful and inspirational statistician' to 'nathan barley':

why i love larry elliot: writing economics articles framed around david bowie songs

an excellent summary of the mess we're in; i agree with nick (robinson):

LEGO. MUTHERFUCKING. ANTIKYTHERA.

a pretty good comic, perhaps badly translated, but sufficiently wierd and creepy.

johan hari, being brilliant, writing about prohibition of alcohol and narcotics

because anything that starts with a quote from philip 'prison experiment' zimbardo is going to be great.if you want to know where we would be without ethics comittees, it's 50s-60s american psychology experiments.

and finally: my home studio:

and going all the way back to 2002 (or 3?): dovedale joints is now online.

'spect.

random nerd thoughts

2010-12-05T17:28:00.003Z

how do you know you're a nerd?

is it when you come across this picture on the internet:

... and you think, didn't larry ditillio used to write he-man?

using the internet used to be enough to be considered geeky. going on it to look at crummy d&d monsters is fairly geeky - maybe not as much as my intended destination, the knowledge of what the most deadly d&d creature is. draeden, by most accounts.

i don't even like d&d, because i always thought wfrp was better - and how nerdy is *that*?

help.

the video for single ladies

2010-11-13T16:39:00.003Z

is here (embedding disabled by request).

i watched this in order to sample the if you like it you shoulda put donk on it.

not that i'm interested, but two points:
1: they're trying to do the okgo 'one take' thing, and failing, because if you're actually concious, you notice the jumps in camera work you might have missed if you were just watching the video without paying attention to it.

2: it's sped up. those moves might be possible, but if even beyonce, who's song this is, can't dance in time to her own song, what hope have we got? the impression of her doing these moves elevates her to superhero status, since they're actually impossible.

this is important, because it shows how much beyonce is 1: reacting to, and aping popular trends and 2: faking it in order to do so. ok go never sped up or cut up their routines. where is beyonce's integrity? if she's going to copy someone else's style, in her own way, that should not involve using editing to make it appear like she's a better dancer than it is. the more i write about this, the angrier it makes me.

not to say the video is not stylish; not to say the song is not simultaneously bouncy and threatening (that bass is terrifyingly sinister - and i don't mean left handed! [keyboards have the bass register on the left, so synth bass lines are often played with the left hand, which is also the origin of the word sinister]); but there's some

in media res

2010-11-07T17:51:00.002Z

i was researching how to fix my guitar twanging problem, and came across this gem of a wikipedia page:

Though rarely discussed, one of the most distinctive aspects of Van Halen's sound was Eddie's tuning of the guitar. Before Van Halen, most distorted, metal-oriented rock consciously avoided the use of the major third interval in guitar chords, creating instead the signature power chord of the genre. When run through a distorted amplifier, the rapid beating of the major third on a conventionally tuned guitar is distracting and somewhat dissonant.[citation needed]
Van Halen developed a technique of flattening his B string slightly so that the interval between the open G and B reaches a justly intonated, beatless third. This consonant third was almost unheard of in distorted-guitar rock and allowed Van Halen to use major chords in a way that mixed classic hard rock power with "happy" pop. The effect is pronounced on songs such as "Runnin' With the Devil", "Unchained", and "Where Have All the Good Times Gone?".
With the B string flattened the correct amount, chords in some positions on the guitar have more justly intonated thirds, but in other positions the flat B string creates out-of-tune intervals. As Eddie once remarked to Guitar Player:
A guitar is just theoretically built wrong. Each string is an interval of fourths, and then the B string is off. Theoretically, that's not right. If you tune an open E chord in the first position and it's perfectly in tune, and then you hit a barre chord an octave higher, it's out of tune. The B string is always a bitch to keep in tune all the time! So I have to retune for certain songs.[27]

eddie van halen is now my favourite guitarist, just for mentioning just intonation. fuck knows i'll never listen to his music, but it completely nails why that major third is such a problem when distorted: because it's out of tune, which is exacerbated by the distortion.

tv go home is being re-printed, to cash in on brooker's more recent fame, although it will also expose his more recent self-plagiarism

ex-band father of boon, whom i saw supporting mclusky about 5 years ago in brighton and *loved*, have got their post-humous album out for FREE on otter recordings: it's really good, fun, angular indie.

victoria coren on stephen fry on sex

I quite enjoyed escape from the underworld, and it's soundtrack, although i'm completely stuck on it. i swear i've not heard the 'word' 'metroidvanian' until this week. but it sums up that entire line of games - i think zelda should be thrown in there too, even though it's not a platformer - well it's really just got gravity turned off, like echo the dolphin, with a fake perspective thrown on top. i really enjoyed watching my roommate at uni play through super metroid, i really loved all the back tracking and exploring. it was like... a bad sorting algorithm. every time you get something new, you need to check everywhere you've ever been in case you find something hidden. you really had to know your territory. maybe it's just a logical way to get the most out of a game, but i like how it's zeitgeisting atm. maybe zeltroidvania is the new jrpg?

gosh, i'm struggling with this shit already. maybe a weekly thing wasn't such a good idea after all?

the week in media

2010-10-31T12:17:00.006Z

i thought, fuck it, i've got enough links to do a rockpapershotgun.com-style sunday papers read once a week. it'll save all those hideous link-tweets and actually get me commenting on stuff i'm reading.

excellent article on how impossible touring is if you're a jobbing band, especially when you're 10 years down the road and you've got a life.

i was investigating midi-chlorians out of star wars, in an effort to understand quite what lucas was thinking, and see how quickly they were dropped (they're only mentioned in one official source, you know). i came across something much more fascinating: midichloria mitochondrii, a bacteria that infects mitochondria in ovaries of a species of tick. so you've got a parasite of a organelle of a cell of an organ in a parasite of mammals. is that not completely brilliant?

florence is always brilliant, but i particularly loved this weeks article on how to host a board games night. sample quote:

You visit each of your friends’ homes in succession. And you kill them all, in a board game style.

Friend 1: you roll dice down his throat until his stomach ruptures.

Friend 2: You hack him up and bury his parts in two shallow graves, one marked “Draw Grave” and one marked “Discard Pile.”

Friend 3: You strip him, cover him in wool and take him to an abattoir. You find the conveyor belt carrying lambs to the slaughter and swap him in for one of the animals. You watch as he is killed and hung, having successfully traded him for sheep.

Friend 4: You throw him into an incredibly elaborate and enormous Dice Tower you’ve built, letting his body tumble to the bottom, his bones smashing in a satisfyingly random manner.

the kermode uncut blog is always great - kermode responding to comments, setting homeworks, and being even more of a personality than his review show allows. he's recently started doing 'instant reactions': his thoughts outside the cinema immediately before and after seeing a film. here's his reaction to aronovsky's next film, the black swan. based on this, i cannot wait for this film, despite only having missed everything by aronovsky except pi (which, despite it's bollocks maths, i loved). dr k's reaction "i don't know whether it's good or bad, but it's certainly interesting" is so... me. gillen once said of his own work "i don't know whether it's good, but i know that is clever" which was a bit self-indulgent, but let me tell you this: i'd rather be 'interesting' than 'good'. but, oh, to be both...

the news in me:

continuing my self-indulgent cultural theft of history, i'm re-releasing my 'cloaca' ep from 2003:

it's andrew's birthday this weekend, and so here's a happy birthday andrew mix:

10 - Andrew Gardiner Is 29 by Dj Gallowslutt on Mixcloud

f'oz

2010-10-29T22:45:00.002+01:00

frank oz really is under-appreciated as a director. the ten year stretch of:
The Dark Crystal (1982) •
The Muppets Take Manhattan (1984) •
Little Shop of Horrors (1986) •
Dirty Rotten Scoundrels (1988)
What About Bob? (1991) •
HouseSitter (1992)
and latterly, bowfinger (1999), is incredible. but we could only stand 20 minutes of death at a funeral (2007).

this is the same pattern as anyone good, isn't it? so celebrate their heydays; forgive them for wanting to keep making films/books/albums when they've lost their way; find the new heroes.
co-incidentally, i'm rereleasing my 'heyday' on www.totheboats.bandcamp.com. next month: cloaca.

otter hunting

2010-10-16T15:02:00.008+01:00

so, this summer, we went up to stay in seahouses for two weeks, hoping to see otters.

seahouses, in northumberland, has a unique smell; a mixture of harbour (a smell slightly different to just 'the seaside', harbours have their own slightly-off smell of rancid seawater), coal fire (every cottage was black with soot) and chips. three smells i've never experienced in the same place. it's a very handy little village - not quite a town - for a couple without a car. there's loads to do (although we missed the farn islands breeding season by a week), well when i say loads, i mean, that's considering we wanted to do nothing.

so we went on an otter safari one day, which was a lovely jaunt around various locales and haunts. otters are making a big come back, spreading down from scotland and already making a nuisance of themselves, wiping out whole areas of wildlife rather than spreading themselves thinly and letting the indigenous fish and ducks recover. so we traipsed over hill and around reservoir, but to no avail; we saw plenty of fine sea-birds, waders, lots of gorgeousness, but no otters. our excellent, knowledgeable guide gave us a few more tips, but the trail seemed to be cold.

I wasn't going to let it stop us. at the national sheep dog trials at alnwick castle, I found the local wildlife charity stand and put the question to them: where can i see some otters? they wittered a little, but gave me some very good advice; there's a hand-reared wild-living couple at eyemouth, just over the border past berwick, who are very easy to get to see, but that was a bit far for us... but they also mentioned the river till, between ford and etal, was an easy drive from seahouses (rachel's mum would be coming up with her car the second week), where they themselves had seen an otter previously.

I got really excited about this. I went and bought a map:

look at that river. have you ever seen a more otter friendly river - the straight bit, the curve... imagine the river banks! i got very excited.

so i convinced pam to drive us over there for a picnic towards the end of the holiday; it was the last chance for otters. we got there mid afternoon and began exploring; it turns out there's a miniture railway between henslaw and etal, operating out of a disused mill. a mill! with a water wheel! what could be more ottery? it was fairly late by the time we settled down, laying picnic materials out on the river bank in a cowy field; in feverish restlessness i tracked the river down to ford alone. it looked perfect; quiet, plenty of bracken and undisturbed river banks, exposed roots for otter holts, everything you'd need. but no otters. at the bridge at ford, there were canoeists and private fishing, enough to make me turn around and trek back.

at the end of the day, i decided that i alone would walk up the river in the other direction, and meet rachel and pam at the pub in etal.

View otter hunting in a larger map
you can see the diversion i had to take, due to the dominance of footpaths; the footpaths there were, were in terrible shape, and the path to the main road was only the begining. as i got into crookham, a man with a dog noticed my 'i heart otters' badge and seemed to get the measure of me.

here's the rub: he saw an otter, at exactly this bend on the river, yesterday. a month earlier, he'd seen a couple (probably a mum and pup). but he couldn't let me go down the footpath incidated on the map that led exactly to the curve of the river because a) he owned the land, and b) the footpaths were overgrown and inaccessible.

could both those be true? or do i remember it wrong? nevertheless, even though i didn't see any otters, i had found exactly the spot i was looking for, through a combination of careful questioning, dress, and map-reading ability. the latter is not something i'm known for, but i just knew that the area looked perfect for otters, just from the map. the wildlife folks pointed it out, sure, but if it hadn't looked so perfect, i wouldn't have followed it up.

so anyway, the landowner (such as he was) advised me to take the next path onto the river, which is what i did, hence is indicated by the blue line. the path along the river here was still massively overgrown, and it took me four times as long to reach etal as i'd estimated. i got some views of the dramatic meander below etal, and i've never seen such a calm river, such a high bank, such a poorly walked path... i was furious about the upkeep of the riverside path, and considered writing to the countryside agency about it, but if it were more used, would the otters flee?

shit i had to walk through:

anyway, ultimately, after many phone calls back and forth about my lateness, i found myself across the river from etal, and discovered that there was no bridge as such; there was a shallow weir, and no dry way across, since the stone thing there, some sort of dam, had broken through.

(looking back down the river till)

(the crossing to etal)

and so, i wandered into the bull at etal, damp, barefoot, and otterless, looking for a pair of ladies. it had been a good jaunt, and worth it. we'll get them next time.

9 - Rubix Roulette

2010-10-11T21:04:00.001+01:00

9 - Rubix Roulette by Dj Gallowslutt on Mixcloud

rubix roulette.mp3

your girlfriend experience theme song covers

2010-10-11T15:17:00.003+01:00

The Crystal Maze:

Wolfenstein 3D:

IT Crowd:

gillen

2010-09-30T22:20:00.003+01:00

btw - did anyone notice how gillen wrote some of his best and most forward-looking articles ever, just before quitting games journalism? or is that just hindsight?
narrative via mafia 2
mechanic spoilers
torment (which is old, to be fair)

computer games

2010-09-30T21:20:00.003+01:00

various thoughts on computer games:

firstly: fuck yahtzee crosshaw. i do love zero punctuation, in spite of the laddish overtones, in spite of the air of negativity, but saying "Oh, apparently XKCD beat me to that joke. Well done, you smug cunt, now learn to draw." on twitter is unforgivable. xkcd can draw you schmuck:

calling someone a 'smug cunt' because they said the same thing as you, but earlier? that just makes you the same smug cunt, but later.

so, that's that out of my system. what i kind of really wanted to write about was inspired by something crosshaw was writing about, and walker was writing about, but mostly by the fact the gillen quit games journalism today.

sniff.

it's more of a game-changer than he let's on. he's the most cross-cultural of any games writer i know. but anyway.

i want to write about game difficulty, and save games.

i think save games have ruined computer games. and i think the two things are inextricably linked.

crosshaw was saying that games should have difficulty levels that are adjustable on the fly. i can think of a few games that have done this, none of which he cited.
the earliest was dark forces. complete a level on any difficulty setting, and you unlock the level for future play on any other difficulty setting, earning a bronze, silver, or gold medal (if memory serves me right). these days, getting all silver or gold would unlock goodies, but back in the day, it was it's own reward. each level was thus, in the doom tradition, a stand-alone experience.

thief had a similar thing: at the start of each level, choose your difficulty. however, it would have really benefited from the same 'replay' feature.

the other game i know of which adjustable difficulty was sw:kotor. this let you change up instantly - since it was a D20-system based game, adjusting the difficulty simply meant adjusting the odds stacked against you. this is the most brilliant way to affect the difficulty, but only applies to random-chance based games. incidentally, playing it through on easy meant i never had to engage with the card game or drag racing mechanics of the game, because i didn't need the extra cash to buy the extra healing packs and armour i would have needed, so despite the convenience, it did affect the story arc of the game. i spent less time investing in my characters.

the other thing is save games.
let me tell you about doom. again.
doom is a game that works whether you play it through or you play it as a series of puzzles. i still relish what i call the 50-bullet challenge: start any doom level with a pistol and complete it. any good doom map should be do-able like this: the second weapon should be able to be acquired before you run out of ammo/health with the first one, and so on. the latest and otherwise best iteration of the doom engine, skulltag, has completely missed the point of this craft of level building, and if you die, you restart the level with what you had when you joined. the level becomes a save point, not an experience.

i think this is tragic. often you'll finish a doom level with a good supply of weapons that you've just built up, but physically in tatters. hitting the exit button, or falling into the final teleporter, should be a massive relief. having the opportunity to reset yourself, get 100% health back, but have to work up a new arsenal, is how i've always felt the game should be played. and they've removed that key mechanic.

but the problem here is just an extension of the increasing tendency to let people save wherever they like. it's not good for games. it turns people like me pathological - i might complete a sequence of an action game having taken a couple of hits, and then, terrified that this will put me in an impossible situation in a few rooms time, where i don't have enough health to simply survive, i feel the need to load, and redo the section perfectly. x-com: terror from the deep was ruined by missions so long that without saving and loading, all your people would die from simple exposure to statistics. which ruins the game: the time i've wasted taking a risky shot again and again until it hits home...

then i played doom: the rogue like. saving here is reserved entirely for quitting the game and coming back to it. there's no other way to load. it solves all the problems i had with thief, which are:
1: running round a corner, getting caught, then loading and sneaking round it to black jack the guard (which is basically using the save game as some sort of psychic power)
2: not being able to play the game again, since most of the fun is in exploring the level for the first time.

not being able to save would have made me actually invest in my actions. yeah, i got caught by a guard; i had to deal with it, rather than just loading from a few seconds earlier so i could get a better score at the end. it turns players into habitual f6ers, who can't stand to lose any health at all, in pursuit of the perfect run. it becomes an obsession, and it can be fixed by regular 'forgiveness' points, where the player gets back everything they need. a level should be an evening's entertainment, able to be played through in one sitting, easy enough to beat, tough enough that the player has to invest their skills in it and use up some of those special items they're hoarding.

and then random layouts are brilliant. the challenge is now not to memorise what's around the next corner and pretend to react to it, but in actually playing skilfully. i wish dead rising had had random layouts to the shopping mall - dead rising, the roguelike would be amazing. it also handled save games fantastically, but i can't be bothered to write about that anymore.

oh yeah, and planescape:torment re-invented saving and loading with the whole immortal character thing, but then your companions kept dying, so it kind of worked out the same. but enough said about that game, which is brilliant.

bed now.

disappointing albums revisted 1: through my dog's eyes.

2010-09-15T21:52:00.003+01:00

justification:
over the last few years, all of my favourite 'loud' bands have tanked. most recent albums from 'such luminaries' (wevertf that means) as the locust, dillinger escape plan, and ephel duath left me cold, so, so cold. so i'm going back now and looking at these others, and seeing if i can at least try and appreciate what they were trying to do, if not actually like the music.

so: ephel duath.

I remember exactly where i was when i first heard ephel duath's 'the passage': at my dad's, playing with my half sister, listening to an earache records compilation, possibly 'extremity experiment' i'd picked up on the front of a magazine. dillinger escape plan's 'monticello' from their first e.p. had just been on, which had slightly disappointed me; and then there was this quiet guitar intro, awkward harmonies and timing, and then that eruption of distortion and hot trumpet playing, seguing into break-metal paradise: it was the song i had always wanted to hear. I got hold of the album, 'the painter's pallette', as quick as i could; it did exactly what an album with 'the passage' as an opening track should have done. and with every album, they were doing something entirely different, with a swiftly rotating line up.

[well not really rotating; they started as a synthonic black metal two piece; one left, and davide tiso got in a full band: drum, bass, two vocalists, plus guest electronics and trumpet/trombone. clean vocalist left and was not replaced; bassist left and was not replaced; drummers came and went. when the growly vocalist finally quit after 'through my dog's eyes', davide packed the band in. he started playing with karyn crisis, and formed another 2-piece (parched) who recorded an album of ambient guitar.]

so after the painter's pallette, came the immensely satisfying and progressive 'pain necessary to know' and it's companion record 'pain remixes the known'. then: 'through my dog's eyes', which i have listened to all the way through maybe only twice.

it's a bluesy, grungey mess of an album that doesn't have any memorable parts until the the third act opener, 'guardian'. 'pain...' was a very difficult album, with very few discernible riffs, but what makes it a difficult, labyrinthine listen at first is what made it eventually become in my top two favourite albums of all time, alongside gorky's' 'bwyd time'. while '...dog's eyes' also feels riff-free, but not in a good way; just clanging chords without respite or much dynamic range.

rather than the usual lyrical approach of opaque mystery (one t-shirt proclaimed the passage's refrain, "are you coming to poison my remarks?"), 'dog's eyes' takes its subject matter, as the title suggests from davide tiso's beloved hound, who added insult to injury by dying soon after the release of the album, adding to his personal crisis with record companies and loss of his band, culminating in his moving from italy to america. so the album has some quite legible sequences, all from the dog's perspective: "i'm wagging my tail so hard, my whole body seems to be dancing; I wonder if he knows i'm trying to imitate his face?". it's certainly brave... but... like the rest of the record it kind of falls flat, a directionless, uncaptivating ramble. you can't tell where one song stops and the other starts, and not in a good way. i think that kind of sums up the album; all the things that are usually so great about the duath fall flat here. there doesn't seem to be any substance beneath the noise. every so often, a vocal refrain or hook might emerge, but the underlying guitars just carry on with their detuned sludgery. maybe part of the problem is the huge number of guitar overdubs here - there are so many guitar sounds at any one time - slide guitar, various shades of distortion and chorus-clean, at any one time. other than this army of overdubs, one track has a wierd sax improv, another has synths added, and the finale has glitchy drums courtesy of dillinger escape plan's ben wienman. there's a nice mellow moment - very reminiscent of later work with parched - at the start of spider shaped leaves, which should probably have been plonked halfway through the record rather than towards the end.

davide tiso always hated the 'jazz-metal' label that was attached to his band, but at least it was somewhat accurate. but there's no jazz here, and i use the term jazz very loosely indeed, basically as far as including everything interesting. listening to this again as i write this up, i have been getting more out of it, but it's a struggle. it's hard to dis such a brave musician, but i still just don't find the music on this one interesting. there seems to be too much going on, and also at the same time, not enough really happening.

despite this, the recent announcement that tiso is forming a new one-man band (makes me wonder why he doesn't stick with the ephel duath moniker, since he's now the sole member, or his davide tiso moniker that he went under on the 'better undead than alive 2' compilation) called manuscripts don't burn, out of studio outtakes from his sessions with karyn crisis, is great news. he's even gone all twittery to promote it.

pgce doodles are up on flickr

2010-09-11T12:34:00.000+01:00

shadow of the colossus

2010-08-29T21:06:00.004+01:00

my next door neighbour bought a playstation 2.

i figure, great, this is my chance to re-live my love of shadow of the colossus through somebody.

i own the proverbial SOTC tshirt, and by coincidence, i am wearing it the day i go into hackney's video games shop to see if they have a 2nd hand copy, and by actual real coincidence, the same day yahtzee croshaw posts this video as his weekly game review:

to sum it up, i would describe sotc something along the lines of moby dick meets black beauty.

so the shop does have a copy of sotc: it costs £25, about 15 - 20 quid more than any of the other games around it. a quick search on my nerd device says this is not too much more than the going rate, so i pick it up, along with a copy of soul calibur III which is much more reasonably priced.

the problem with second hand shops, you see, is that they're always full of the stuff people don't want anymore; this is why they're always full of jeffery archer books and celion dione singals. and everybody who has a copy of sotc wants to keep hold of it forever. how much do you think planescaqpe: torment is going or these days? logic says a ten year old game should be peanuts by now, but there's surprisingly few hard copies of the game available for re-circulation. it's precious to people.

so i hand over the two games to my neighbour, letting him know that due to the cost, i have to let him have them as 'extended loans' rather than gifts. then we set off for two weeks to seahouses, northumberland.

two weeks later, i knock on, to find him playing PEGGLE.

this is how i feel.

it crows 2

2010-08-10T19:29:00.001+01:00

It crowd by grilly

8: Salvation

2010-07-26T10:42:00.003+01:00

8 - Salvation by Dj Gallowslutt on Mixcloud

get the mp3 version

fumito u

2010-07-17T17:15:00.007+01:00

this is my new single, first solo release since on benefit. stick it on all your summer playlists...

<a href="http://totheboats.bandcamp.com/album/fumito-you">fumito you (electric) by To The Boats</a>

now with added remix!

this is what twitter actually looks like

2010-07-11T19:49:00.001+01:00

{ "users": {}, "#pagination":"more", "#timeline":"

\n
\n \n @mattleys thanks, man! yes, he was very funny!\n \n \n \n about 9 hours ago\n via Echofon\n \n in reply to mattleys\n\n
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\n \n @mattleys think it went very well!\n \n \n \n about 9 hours ago\n via web\n \n in reply to mattleys\n\n
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\n \n Hopefully! We've just done a pilot for his new series RT: @shongum07829: Is Count Arthur Strong going to be on our tv screens ??\n \n \n \n about 9 hours ago\n via Echofon\n \n \n\n
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\n \n @carrieob dunno! Sorry\n \n \n \n about 11 hours ago\n via Osfoora HD\n \n in reply to carrieob\n\n
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\n \n @_NSL thanks for those! I dimly remember Merlin too...\n \n \n \n about 11 hours ago\n via Osfoora HD\n \n in reply to _NSL\n\n
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\n \n RT @davidwearing: Israel forced to confront an international boycott gathering momentum http://bit.ly/ccRfWV\n \n \n \n about 11 hours ago\n viaOsfoora HD\n \n \n\n
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\n \n @neillockwood thank you!\n \n \n \n about 11 hours ago\n via Osfoora HD\n \n in reply to neillockwood\n\n
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\n \n @kirstenin @divinecomedyhq hurray! It's the gift that keeps on giving!\n \n \n \n about 18 hours ago\n via Twitter for iPhone\n \n in reply to kirstenin\n\n
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\n \n @threefromleith my favourite one!\n \n \n \n about 19 hours ago\n via Twitter for iPhone\n \n in reply to threefromleith\n\n
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\n \n @shotbykim I played that myself on an iPad app!\n \n \n \n about 22 hours ago\n via Twitter for iPhone\n \n in reply to shotbykim\n\n
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\n \n @claire_murray92 I actually had a no profanity rule for this series. Sorry!\n \n \n \n about 22 hours ago\n via Twitter for iPhone\n \n in reply to claire_murray92\n\n
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\n \n @akamrlazy that line came out of total desperation\n \n \n \n about 24 hours ago\n via Twitter for iPhone\n \n in reply to akamrlazy\n\n
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\n \n @boosegoose they grow on me\n \n \n \n about 24 hours ago\n via Twitter for iPhone\n \n in reply to boosegoose\n\n
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\n \n New York Review of Books is on Twitter! @nybooks\n \n \n \n 8:44 PM Jul 10th\n via Twitter for iPhone\n \n in reply to nybooks\n\n
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\n \n @ChicaLolita hurray!\n \n \n \n 7:48 PM Jul 10th\n via Twitter for iPhone\n \n in reply to ChicaLolita\n\n
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\n \n @chrislindores it's Serafinowicz!\n \n \n \n 4:41 PM Jul 10th\n via Twitter for iPhone\n \n in reply to chrislindores\n\n
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\n \n RT @ebertchicago: Final report: There was no Climategate. The global warming scientists were correct. http://j.mp/achTHH\n \n \n \n 4:30 PM Jul 10th\n via Twitter for iPhone\n \n \n\n
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\n \n @Fezzy_Bear thank you!\n \n \n \n 4:06 PM Jul 10th\n via Twitter for iPhone\n \n in reply to Fezzy_Bear\n\n
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\n \n @Bleekster like both bands, but Richard is the real Pivot fan\n \n \n \n 4:05 PM Jul 10th\n via Twitter for iPhone\n \n in reply to Bleekster\n\n
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\n \n @realdannys very kind of you to say, thank you\n \n \n \n 3:37 PM Jul 10th\n via Twitter for iPhone\n \n in reply to realdannys\n\n
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\n" }

it crows

2010-07-10T14:30:00.005+01:00

i love it crowd, so it's a bit of a disappointment to realise we're already halfway through this series. friday's it crowd wasn't as fun, and neither was the second one actually, as the first one - where d&d is the solution to everybody's problems.

it crowd, for me, is a sitcom for people who love sitcoms; while it's so important to have it filmed with an audience, it's also important to have the three protags acting like people who've watched lots of sitcoms, and do what we think we would do in their situation. there's a 'knowing' element to it crowd - so many of the jokes are so ludicrously set-up that they gain another level of humour, yet still work on the base level. consider the friendface episode; when faced with a situation where the lies are becoming insurmountable, rather then screwing up their faces and going 'god, this is madness! how did we get into this awful situation?', the protags play along with it, make the lies even bigger, and eventually escape.

writer and director graham linehan was tweetering about rapid last-minute script re-writes - his 'apollo 13' moment. it's pretty obvious to me where it's going wrong - the lack of cohesiveness in the plots.

the best it crowd episodes have a perfect structure where each protag gets their own plotline out of a single concept and it ends in one scene where the storylines converge. 1 intervention (in the above example, social networking) - 1 plot line for each character - big denoument at the end where all the plotlines are reconciled and everyone agrees not to do intervention x anymore. nice, tidy, sitcom writing. problems that seem awkward slot in naturally and cancel each other out - 'we fit together like two halves of a badly cut bagel'. proper seinfeld/larry david stuff, and i know glinner would take that as the high compliment i intend it as.so what's happening this series?

in episode 1, the intervention is: twenty sided dice. jen has a new job entertaining clients, roy is heartbroken, and moss is eager to get people into roleplaying. three separate storylines, that all merge and in doing so everybody's problems are solved. jen's clients end up loving d&d, and moss roleplays roy's ex, and helps him work through his despair.

episode 2 had a great premise - moss gets involved with an illicit countdown winners' club. his story was brilliant, but roy's and jen's felt like weaker, filler stories, that didn't tie into each other at all, except that they were sometimes in the same room as each other. they both felt painfully short.

friday's seemed to go wrong again because of the same reason - the plots hardly crossed over at all, and it's good to read that they were totally meant to, even though that plot was junked. originally, so i read, roy becomes sweet billy pilgrim's manager, jen dates the keyboard player, but moss has to take over managing when roy is kissed on the bum by his masseuse and trips out on downers (and thus i imagine moss sacks the keyboard player, leaving jen to realise she only liked him because he was in a band). whatever was wrong with this (too much setting up, allegedly), it was obviously worse than what we ended up with, but the it crowd is at its best when everything ties together.

i'm not saying things need to be formulaic - well, i'm saying they're better when they are. part of the appeal of it crowd is how pure a sitcom it is, and linehan knows how to put together a good traditional sitcom. i just hope he doesn't continue to forget the golden rules.

thoughts on interactive art

2010-07-09T23:21:00.006+01:00

written to the tune of 'a towering achievement of indescribable beauty' and 'brood xiv'

so it's half 11, i went to bed, and then thoughts happened and i couldn't sleep so i'm going to bash this out, see if it makes sense linearly, and then maybe try to rearrange some paragraphs and de-obfuscate anything that's too... obfuscated.

so all art is interactive. yes? any artwork is interpreted by the viewer automatically and they form thoughts on it. two people can experience the same piece and 'see' entirely different works based on their own culture, personality, experiences, whatever. what the intention was is important, and perhaps the only working definition of the quality of a piece of art is that the artists' inention is communicated to the audience. we don't need any more essays on interactive, artist-audience collaborations, accompanied by mediocre illustrative artworks, like a jigsaw puzzle where the audience can rearrange the artwork as they see fit, to drive the point home. that's fine if that's what you want to do, but making an artwork that 'explores' the relationship between the artist and the audience is liking making an artwork that eplores the relationship between a canvas and some paint, i.e. it's so bloody obvious that it doesn't need saying anymore, ok?

while we are on subject of 'good' art, a definition of art i like to play with is 'knowing when to break the rules'. craft, on the other hand, is easily appraised - a good table is one that doesn't tip your dinner onto your lap. anything beyond this - a table with an inscription, a painting, or even a table that deliberately spills your dinner into your lap, is art.

contrast this:

with this:

and i think you'll see what i mean.

so. as i said, all art is interactive, in that you have to interact with it to do anything with it.

so what's different about computer games, since being interactive is nothing new to art? they are different and i think what occurred to me as i lay me down to rest just now is i can think of one other medium of art that is interactive in a similar way: sheet music.

for years, sheet music was the dominant form of transmission for music before recordings became widely available. you could see live, community music just about anywhere, but most places had some form of instrument and scenes like this were commonplace:

(admittedly, it's less likely to have been a baby grand in a newyork penthouse)

sheet music isn't like a recording of music, that you put on and it plays through and entertains you, or helps you dodge the void for another half hour or so. sheet music doesn't do anything on it's own. you need to pick it up and play with it for it to come to life. it tells you what to do - it tells you how to use your hardware in a unique way to experience a particular work of art (or maybe the sheet music is the art itself? like a said above, if the sheet music is a good work of art, you should be able to experience the music as intended. now, whether that is a good work of art is another matter). if you want to practise the piece to get good at it, make mistakes at it, improvise on the piece, skip a bit out, do one bit over and over again because you like it - you're free to do that. and you have the same freedom with computer games.

linear games, like rail-shooter operation wolf or click-fest monkey island, have a set number of things that need to be done in a set order for them to be done 'right'. sandbox games give you the freedom to improvise - the much-discussed deus ex (10 years old this month), meaning you can play it your way if you want to. games tell you how to play the game right, but then give you the freedom to mess around if that's what you want to do. the freedom to express yourself. no one would claim that a dixie-land jazz musician, improvising on 'when the saints go marching in' is not expressing himself, just because s/he started with a set tune. so why not with computer games?

so the game itself is like the sheet music, and the console is like the instrument. of course, it is much, much harder to separate the game from the console, as one simply does not work without the other. but there is a strong analogy here.

where the analogy breaks down is that computer games not only let you play your own way; they respond to you, artificially intelligently. the game that made this notion jump out at me was street fighter 2; the game gives you opponents that try to avoid your attacks. it becomes recursive and reflective. this is in someways merely a simulation of a multi-player match, like this one (shit gets real 4 mins in):

or competitive dancing:

but in other ways, it represents an entirely new direction and innovation. not just a static puzzle like the towers of hanoi, or solitaire; not just the rules for a randomised card game you can play yourself, something that takes what you're doing, and feeds it back to you. or at least, appears to, or has the potential to. think i'm loosing the thread here.

and what i love about computer games is that dying (when you can die) is just as valid an ending as completing the game - no game illustrates this more perfectly than planescape: torment, for reasons that it is famous for. this game also illustrates the other potential perfection of computer games, which is the overlap they have with interactive fiction; multiple potential storylines, all perfectly justifiable, just like the potential interpretations of a tune. of course, the rare times we have been offered environments with truly emergent gameplay are much closer to musical freedom, but we're only just starting out here. the question is whether games will continue to give us that opportunity.

however, my worry with games is that while the call of dutys and the halos of this world fulfil the role of action-packed-blockbuster films, we get works of subtle quality too; the game equivalent of 'tilsammens', that gives you the depth and charm of a film like that. or maybe some works of art are suited to different media?

i think that's a train of thought for another night. and so is 'computer games are more like tv shows than films, and should be structured accordingly'.

so yes, in conclusion or something, i reckon computer games are more like sheet music than traditional works of 'linear' art. do i need a conclusion?

7 - heartwyrm

2010-07-09T16:18:00.004+01:00

it's mixtape 7!*
download heartworm.mp3

or stream it here:

7 - Heartworm by Dj Gallowslutt on Mixcloud

Grilly - Help The Disabled 1

Euros Childs - Like This Then Try This 2

The Bobby Mcgees - A Masonic Youth 3

Captain Beefheart & His Magic Band - Circumstances 4

The Prophecy - Adrift 5

Naked City - Reanimator 6

Amon Tobin - Reanimator 7

Mothboy - Beg 8

The Soundbyte - Til Ungdommen 9

Mclusky - The World Loves Us And Is Our Bitch 10

Sparks With Eskimos And Egypt - Angst In My Pants 11

Carcass - Heartwork 12

The Kilimanjaro Darkjazz Ensemble - Embers 13

Euros Childs - Harp I A Ii Ar #2 14

Iw Rawes - Please Help The Disabled 15

nb, both the kilimanjiro darkjazz and the mothboy track come from the same ad noiseam compilation (also, they came out in mono, like all the genghis tron remixes, because *audacity doesn't understand joint-stereo mp3s*. neither do i, but then i'm not a computer program whose sole role in life is to facilitate digital audio).

i love it when different bands use thet same track name - i might start making that a 'feature' of these mixes. i'm not going to go down the '12 songs called love' route though, because i don't want any constraints on what i'm putting down in these.

sparks and mclusky are endlessly entertaining, i'll try not to throw too many of them into these mixes. they could be in danger of becoming default punctuation marks.
i previously mentioned adrift a few posts ago, thought i'd include it here because i'd managed to listen to it enough to calm my outrage at it's amazingness.

*6 is a magic number and not available for use of mixtaping, due to being the title of the second-best album of the 90s.

anvil

2010-07-07T22:00:00.002+01:00

just a quickie:

watching 'anvil: the story of anvil'
laughed so hard i nearly choked on my pappardale
it took so long - it took for my mum to recommend it - for me to watch this. why?

i'm quoting tolkien here

2010-07-06T15:13:00.004+01:00

"here, we have the same mechanism again resorted to - and i think deplorably: for the mere repitition is distasteful, these drinks of grimhild are too powerful or too powerless: why not give one to atli too, and make him forget about the hoard!"

commentry on lines 17-28 of the lay of gudrun, in the legend of sigurd and gudrun.

jrr tolkien writing in the "if you could do that all along why didn't you just -" mode, about the over-powered forgetfulness potion that grimhild used to make sigurd forget about brynhilde (so that he'd marry gudrun), and to make gudrun forget about sigurd after he'd died (so that she'd marry atli [aka Atilla the Hun, who apparently existed contemporaneously with fafnir, loki, odin, &c]). thus he justifies removing the second use of the forget spell in his adaptation of the lay, replacing it with gudrun entering the marriage willingly but unhappily.

I love that he's complaining about this, the same issue that still riles the nerd community today. but as i've written before, tolkien's heroes get around having overpowered abilities by having powers that are poorly defined, and hardly ever used. he even uses a similar 'forgetting' spell cast by the dragon glaurung, that caused a similarly tragic marriage. is he being hypocritical, or is he just trying to write in the style of his heroes?

there are of course two responses to tolkien's rhetorical question: firstly, to counter it, it's a cursed hoard, and andvari's magic probably outranks grimhild's witchcraft. the second is *some other reason why, you can always just invent one in fantasy*.

splendid aftereffects

2010-07-01T10:55:00.002+01:00

so, the doctor who finale."Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from a completely ad-hoc plot device"
—David Langford, "A Gadget Too Far", as a corollary to Arthur C. Clarke's third law

in order to start this post off, i googled 'only fools and horses rodney centurion' and found a picture of 'rory' from the ending couplet; fortunately, they're different, so well done bbc costumes dept.

as i was saying, i find it hard to emotionally connect with a series that simply makes no sense. having a two part episode brings in another problem; how do you try to predict what's going to happen next episode?

take for example, an agatha christie story. poirot might be investigating something, and something doesn't quite add up, and you think "hmm, maybe there's something to that not making sense." it piques your interest, it stimulates your imagination.

but what about when nothing at all makes sense? take for example, all the hints dropped by the doctor that amy's house was too big. this turned out to be because amy's parents had been erased from history by the crack in space - so why was amy still there? surely this is paradox number 1 in time travel stories. but it's not where i wanted to go with this.

someone went to amy's childhood home, and copied her memories and used them to lure the doctor to the pandorica. but pandora's box was a memory from her childhood too - but they'd only arranged to lure the doctor there, because that's when the pandorica opened... or the paradoxica as it might as well be called. the 'not making sense' here isn't a sci-fi fudge, it's a properly careless script that makes no sense at all. it must have been made up as it went along, because you can't start writing a story like this with the end in sight and have it make such little sense. it's entirely wrapped up in it's own bollocks.

still fun though, and i love the asynchronous doctor song character - that's a really good attempt at portraying the chaos that two people skipping in and out of time and each others' lives at different points would experience. i've not read the time traveller's wife but i imagine it's along the same lines.

so there's something else in 'the pandorica opens' i want to relate - 'the perfect disguise, they actually believe their own cover story'.

this is an idea from the 1953 pk dick short story 'imposter', which was also borrowed for terminator salvation (spoilers ahead!). as a trope, distinct from ridiculously human robots, the 'unconscious infiltrator' was probably best used in grant morrison's the invisibles and the filth, where cover personalities are water tight are layers deep. like in the who's tommy, there the revelation of one's true character coincides with enlightenment; in imposter, the main character is hunting down, believed by the authorities to be a walking bomb. the protag is convinced he is not, and just wants to go home. brilliantly, realising he is in fact a robot - finding his original's body - is the very trigger that blows him up. (end spoilers)

so this trope has taken 57 years to wind its way from astounding magazine to prime time, saturday night, bbc1. this is the world we're living in; i don't think pk dick won the ideas war, but it's quite nice that fairly lame versions of his stories are commonplace, 50 years later.

mixtape 5: insight to violence

2010-06-29T13:07:00.006+01:00

blimey, i've not blogged my great new mixtape. it's my favourite one so far too - here's the mp3 for hoarders, and here's the stream, courtesy of mixcloud.com

5 - Insight To Violence by Dj Gallowslutt on Mixcloud

i actually regret putting jabberwocky on there, other than that, i love it to bits. something for everyone on this one. btw, i neologenesised the word 'epiclectic' to describe this mix, and the neologenesised the word 'neologenesis' to describe the creation of a neologism. which i'm also happy about.

new cats in paris song

2010-06-17T10:43:00.001+01:00

i saw cats in paris on friday, they were brilliant and i danced like a dick on my own.

Too Many Colours | Cats In Paris by catsinparis

shoehorn: the musical

2010-06-13T17:18:00.002+01:00

this is an idea i've had for a while, inspired by the insipid torrent of west-end musicals based on increasingly scrape-worthy bands. the challenge: can i write a plot outline for a musical based on a random artist from my collection.

so i hit random and off we go (doing it this way ensures it's weighted by how many tracks of theirs i have), and the dart hits... Nick Drake.

well this should be easy enough...

'Lilac Time: a musical based on the songs of Nick Drake'
Joey is a poor boy who lives in a shed. He's in love with hazy jane but doesn't know how to woo her so he goes to see the river man, and tell him all he can. the river tells joey about the plan for lilac time, so at the chime of a city clock, joey plants a fruit tree. this summons the things behind the sun which fly down and give him a free ride along the way to blue through the saturday sun. it takes three hours. then the day is done and it's sunday. in the blue, joey finds a way to read people's minds so discovers the thoughts of mary jane and how he can find fame. unfortunately the fruit tree withers, and the things behind the sun vanish, leaving joey plummeting towards the ground, where he splats into a road. the end.

acoustic covers

2010-06-09T08:25:00.002+01:00

when i was mixing K, i got out the old soundcard to try to play it through with autocross fade on (basically plugging more memory into the machine, like in the old days). it didn't work, for some reason the crossfade got munged up and i had to redo it by hand, but what it did tell me is that plugging the headphone socket into the line in socket is a valid method of getting around the fact that you can't just hit record and expect it to record the noise it's making.

what it also told me was that my little soundcard still worked (just the line out doesn't) so i stuck my mic into it and recorded a couple of acoustic things i've been playing around with. both open tuned - first in d major, second in d minor. hope you enjoy them.

The Prophecy - Adrift

2010-06-08T16:28:00.006+01:00

i wrote about a track from the code 666 compilation 'better undead than alive 2' which sent my mind reeling. there's something about extreme music that puts your brain into a different state, i swear.

there's another track on the album which gave me quite a reaction. i'm posting it here, because it's just too 'big' for a mixtape. i'm not going to write much about it - you simply have to hear it, i'm sure you'll have the same reaction i did.

i've not heard such a serious genre splicing since sparks' 'dick around', although the two songs are nothing like each other.

i implore you to buy the record, which i hope justifies this infringement - sometimes the only way to tell you is to show you.

mixtape 4:K

2010-06-07T15:09:00.003+01:00

here's mixtape 4, entitled simply 'K'

not as in kula shakur, but as in justin k. broadrick, who features on this mix twice, and death cube k, who also sticks his beak in. justin started out in napalm death, has played in all sorts of bands, including scorn and godflesh, and will be working with alan moore in some way soon. i didn't end up putting any scorn tracks on, because they didn't fit in the mix, and that's more important than sticking to a theme regardless of the flow. but it's pretty much built around the two broadrick tracks, colony collapse and pulp. there's a definite theme there. pulp is a peel session track which came up on random on the tube, it's brutally forthright even though it seems to say not very much.

this mix isn't for everyone. it's pretty brutal, and slow. it's a weird one. it's music that's like music that people have told me is a bit how you feel on the drug K - a sort-of-coincidence. it features with a pallette cleansing gorky's radio 1 session track. enjoy, if you can.

help the disabled remix 5
Death Cube K - Watchers
Zan Lyons - Warring Factions 1
The Mad Capsule Markets - Jag [Exclusive Version]
Genghis Tron - Colony Collapse (Justin K Broadrick Remix)
Godflesh - Pulp
Necro Deathmort - Hurt Me I'm Bored
Sonic Clang - E1M8
Cult Of Luna - Curse
Gorky'S Zygotic Mynci - Cursed Coined and Crucified
IW Rawes - Please Help The Disabled

4 - K by Dj Gallowslutt on Mixcloud

forever DooM

2010-06-03T16:29:00.007+01:00

requisite reading; things people have already said about doom:

vector poem on doom
summary:
doom plays like a topdown game
doomguy is super-maneuverable
doom has a varied bestiary
doom levels were abstract
doom was freely editable

trilobite
summary: doom ditched points in favour of survival

games radar on doom
summary:
infighting
scary enemies
music
fun bugs
total conversions available on cereal boxes

with this in mind, what can i add to the 'what i miss about doom' discussion?
i was playing through knee deep in the dead recently, aware that almost the entire episode was written by john romero. i started to notice just how much of the level design was bonus content.

here's the first level, and the route you need to take to finish it:

it's fairly linear, as you'd expect from an intro level.

the next three are big levels compared to the first, but full of extraeneous space:

in each case, at least half the level is surplus/bonus material. is it there to confuse the player, like a labyrinth? is it there to reward the explorative player with unique experiences? or is it just there because in each case, playing the game is in itself a fun activity, and is a reward in itself? i imagine it's a mix - some players will go for speed run routes, some will try to clear out every level of monsters. the game doesn't reward you for this - it just tells you what you've achieved. the player creates the reward. it must be a mixture - some sections are undeniably labyrinthine, and of course the player won't know which route to take on the first playthrough, and won't have an optimum route worked out until many, many play throughs. i know i would go all the way through the maze sections, going down every dead end, on repeat playthroughs, just for the experience. it was in itself fun.

the next three levels (plus the bonus level - found, again, by exploring in level 3) are about as large, but in each case, need to be explored just to be completed. a route through each level takes in every nook and cranny of each level. the initial levels prepare you for this move, by having all that space but just not using it. levels 5, 6, 7, and 9 use the hub structure that doom levels are more famous for - basically involving a lot of picking up key cards and doubling back through a large central area, that hit its peak in quake 2 and certain sections of half life, before being superceded by the rest of half life.

as an illustration, here's level 5:

a jaunt through the level takes you everywhere. it's worth bearing in mind romero was an rpg creature at the time. the first few levels smell to me of the optional sidequests you find in rpgs, that further your character but not your overall mission. the second half of the episode merely builds on top that these sections are no longer optional, but necessary to complete your mission (apart from the secret areas).

i don't know what we can learn from this. it sort of contradicts the idea that doom level design was all about abstraction - these areas don't do anything in the game, so your brain is tricked into thinking they must be *for* something. this runs alongside the argument that fake doors in games are ok, because it's better than spending all that time prowling through empty rooms with no lockpicks in; so when something in a game is actually for something, to the extent of being useless in game, it should be left out. as i said i don't know. i think i just miss non-linear levels.

ammendum:
i played through the doom press release beta and recommend you do the same.
the most fascinating change, as trilobite point out, is the removal of points scoring items, and the replacement of these with armour and health bonuses. this move further severs ties with previous games' 'coin collecting' ideals; the only things to collect here are things which benefit you, albeit in a tiny way. armour and health fragments were librally littered around the levels, and exactly like coins, they serve as a reverse-breadcrumb-trail, letting you know (if you're lost) if you've already been in an area. they give you the joy of collecting with the little bleep and screen flash, but directly benefit you. also the infant joy i had of trying to work out the optimum traversal path through a field of bonus items...

ammendum 2:
i latterly realise that these levels might well have been go-everywhere missions at first, but were simplified in order to make the first few levels less challenging by simplifying the layout of the items, but keeping the layout the same (since they're great levels). does that undermine everything i said above? i dunno.

Q

2010-05-24T19:49:00.000+01:00

so i finally watched q: the winged serpent. i've been meaning to do this since i read a review of it in the fortean times, back when i used to read it (actually, i think it might have been on a more recent nostalgia-trip).

I started watching the film, and was loving it until about half an hour in, when the interminable subplot about a bungling getaway driver which was threatening to overtake the film finally got too much.

strangely, this is in the same week that the onion a.v. club wrote: "If he weren’t, you know, still alive, this article could be called the Larry Cohen Memorial Inventory, because Cohen has spent decades crafting ingenious, pulpy B-movie premises that were more often than not half-realized" in their feature 'Take two: 22 potentially great movies botched in execution and ready to be remade'.

i couldn't agree more, and on finishing watching the film i could only think how fantastic the themes were and how rubbish the actual film was. the story is, a cultist summons a resurrection of the god quetzalcoatl which makes a nest in the roof of the chrysler tower, manhatten. the monster starts terrorizing new york, swopping down from the bright sky and picking off bystanders.

so we have the equivelence of gods and monsters, public and media hysteria, a great winged serpent that flies out in the midday sun so that people are blinded when they look up to it... and no budget to see it through. larry cohen wrote, directed and produced the film, resulting in richard roundtree saying brooklyn-style dialogue like 'why you should have such big ears, heh?'.

what i think the tragedy is, is that peter jackson remade king kong (which didn't need remaking) and not this (which did). the creature effects were terrible, and it was basically not threatening in the slighest, just a bit gory. Q doesn't play enough of a role in the story; it has no character of its own.

firstly, i think the creature should have been a wyvern, as it really has no need for it's forelimbs, and wyverns don't get enough light these days. the cultists need to play a stronger part in the plot, maybe even having people convert to the cult, like akira, accepting Q as their saviour. attempts to make the plot plausible were stilted and weak, and if you're going to try to have some sort of... oh forget it. never mind. i really reccomend you watch the film, and then afterwards, watch a remake of it in your head - that's what i've done and i've really enjoyed it.

mixtape 3 - tweezers

2010-05-23T20:02:00.006+01:00

it's finally here - mixtape 3.

this is a bit diversionary - a mix of 95% tweecore. i really enjoyed listening back to this one, i hope it tickles you fancy.

a couple of notes on it - originally, it was longer, and went a bit mad and spacey at the end. a bit ambient. it had direction, actually direction into the next mix. and also originally, it was almost legally free downloads. i only realised that retrospectively, then tried to cut it so it *was* only free downloads, then i realised that hurt the music and wasn't what i was doing it for. then i thought it dragged on into ambient misery too much so i chucked all those songs out and threw in some more tweeness, and here you go.

it also includes a as-it-stands demo i've done, currently just called 'tapping', because that's what i was doing when i wrote it. i was thinking about rearranging it as a chiptune track, but why bov? i wrote it on guitar and transcribed into fruity loops, because that's actually easier than trying to record me playing it.

tracklisting is in the mp3 comments tag as always. lemme know if you can't find it and i'll post it here.

sorry. blathering. tired and scared.
x

please help the disabled remix 4
Quadrilles - Noah The Drill
Hugh Cornwell - Delightful Nightmare
Half Man Half biscuit - It Makes The Room Look Bigger
Humousexual - Roundabouts
The Bobby Mcgees - We Never Sleep
M.J. Hibbett & The Validators - MJ Hibbett & The Validators / One Of The Walls Of My House Fell In
Mushi Mushi - Attention Deficit Disco
tapping
he doyouinverts - Subscription Cancelled
Dildano - Brace
Alan Moore, Downtown Joe Brown & The Retro Spankees - You Are My Asylum
Gorky's Zygotic Mynci - Ffarm-Wr
MJ Hibbett - A Little Bit
IW Rawes - Please Help The Disabled

3 - Tweezers by Dj Gallowslutt on Mixcloud

epiphany 12

2010-05-16T20:51:00.002+01:00

well, 12 is a guess. but it was a pretty amazing moment.

my last epiphany was listening to naked city. about halfway through one of their albums, at stratford station i think, it suddenly struck me in the head - quite a lot like pkdick described it actually, being beamed into your head from another galaxy - that all i wanted to play was jazz. my brain was freaking out on the sweet, pure, free music and it wanted that moment to last for all time.

this time was a little different. again i was listening to music - this time to the code666 record described in the previous post. i was walking to work, and the track 'chained in the damnation asylum' by the axis of perdition was kicking my head in. the lyric "let your mind cling feebly to your pre-concieved notions of reality"; and something happened.

something related to the tree of life poster on the wall behind me, previously in the sleep room, and related also to the denoument of my 'Kno' project; the island city of Kno being razed to the ground by a 4-D colossal giant squid.

i thought of the birds, singing in the trees around newbury park. black birds, blue tits, finches. and i just saw them as tendrils of the one great 4D squid of life on this planet. each evolutionary stable form is an info-tentacle, impercetably splitting off from it's sibling species but ultimately forming it's own distinct arm. the squid that has its tail in the primordial soup and its furthest reaches no-one knows where. the auto-phagic crustacean with some of it's arms photosynthesising, passing nutrients onto it's other arms, a complex system of suckers and open wounds. it overlaps and intertwines with itself, it's form can only be seen from tralfamadore.

it was a great moment.

rough tirade/reviews

2010-05-13T15:21:00.002+01:00

so i went into rough trade a couple of weeks ago, specifically to buy chris tt's new album 'love is not rescue'. i thought this was a reasonable goal, since chris is so very rough trade in his style. after wandering about a bit, i thought it was wierd that i couldn't find it on display or in the racks. i asked the staff about it and they said... even they'd had it in and they hadn't reordered it, or they'd never thought to get it in. they took my number and said they'd call when it arrived. they never did.

this kind of service is what's wrong with record shops. rough trade can't afford to treat people like that, or leave their target market unsatisfied in this day and age. i was also schocked that they'd gone even more off the wall and replaced the sandwich fridge with a bike rack. come for the records, stay for the coffee and wifi, stay a bit lock for the bike storage... is their rent really so low they can afford to do that? or is this a worrying sign?

that same day, having been wandering around the shop for a bit, i ended up buying three albums - a present and two scott hull records that i wasn't previously aware of the existence of. now, i have a rule - you buy it where you saw it. i wouldn't have known scott hull - of agoraphobic nosebleed and pig destroyer - had a solo career if it hadn't have been for walking round that record shop, so it's only fair to buy it from them. and i wouldn't have known that his solo output is so wonderful (see mixtapes 1 and 2 for some of his tracks). so i'm really, really grateful that i can just wander through the 'outrock' section of my local record shop, find something i wasn't aware of, and love it so much.

this kind of service is what's right with record shops. i can go in wanting one thing, miss out on it, and find something else brilliant. but that doesn't mean i can be treated rubbish.

so i do a lot of online shopping too, because lots of things only seem to exist online, and like i said, if i find it there, i'll buy it there. i recently went mad and bought 3 records and a t-shirt because of various connections to ephel duath's davide tiso.

i got somma's '23 wheels of dharma', because of eraldo bernocchi, who remixed the entire 'pain necessary to know' record and collaborated with tiso on 'parched'. it seems to be an album of largely improvised hebrew-tibetan jazz-dub. this comes on rare noise records, berlocchi's label, and features bill laswell on bass, like, oh i don't know, every other random purchase. it's... a bit hippy-dippy, and backgroundy. the best tracks are probably the ones they put up online. 5/10.

i got the soundbyte's 'rivers of broken glass', from 2005, because it was the only album to come out on tiso's short-lived vanity label amaranth records. it's great - never bursting into heaviness but very atmospheric, post-metal like the way doves are almost post-rock. 8/10.

and i got the code666 compilation 'better undead than alive 2', which is fantastic. tiso provides interludes between songs, linking the album into something like a conceptual piece by various artists. it's extreme metal, but it feels so fresh and wierd and interesting, perhaps along similar lines to the crucial blast anniversary compilation, but much more structured. i'm really, really very happy with these two records. 10/10.

so aural music, the label in charge of code 666 and amaranth, also stuck another cd in the package for me as a bonus - by a band called carinou. this is one of the worst albums i have ever heard, incredibly weak cyber-rock. lyrically unpleasant, feebly concieved and produced, it's just ugh. obviously they've got a few copies of it lying around, and i'm greatful for the gift, but it's hardly a good advert for their roster. 1/10 (because it was free).

you know what's strange? in all this mixtape-age, i can't find one track off the new dillinger escape plan album i that i want to disseminate. hmm.

oh, and: Scott Hull: Requiem: fantastic. i've listened to this so much since i got it, i never knew i'd love ambient music so much. well it's soundtracky i suppose, but gotterdammerung, it's bloody marvellous. i might put it on for the kids tomorrow.

the legend of andvari's gold

2010-05-10T21:17:00.007+01:00

...of course, odin began to get suspicious when hreidmar also claimed the salmon he'd been given was his son Salmn, who liked to take the form of a salmon, and the bottle of wine loki had just cracked open was in fact hreidmar's son Chardny, and they'd have to pay blutgeld for both of them as well...