disappointing albums revisted 2: new erections

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

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?

random nerd thoughts 2

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

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.