The martian question

http://thefreelancepolice.com/?p=74

So, every time I find out more about this project of my brother's, i get more and more amazed.

He first mentioned the idea to me, i don't know when exactly, but a few years ago we were talking about ideas we had and I'm sure it was one of those. Just to find out he's instantiating an idea is marvellous.

But then I read deeper, and I realise how impressed I am with him, layer upon layer. He stood up in public - a real achievement for dan - and pitched his idea to an organisation. That's amazing enough. They then  said 'yes, we want to see that made, here's some money to hire professionals to do that'.

The quality of these professionals is outstanding. As an avid consumer of Speculative Fiction, with a degree in Politics, Philosophy, and Economics (three flavours of made-up crap, from the point of view of real scientists [citation needed]), Dan is working on a hard-as-possible-sci-fi game/story. He's got the ear of Colin Pillinger, no less, as scientific advisor. In my demographic, Pillinger is a hero, an open-university lecturer who launched an interplanetary probe seemingly from his back garden. It's great that he's involved. The rest of the team, while not people I've heard of, I've come across their work without even trying.

It does leave me wondering, where will the story go, if they're making it ultra realistic; because the real Mars is not, currently, a very interesting place. But that only makes me more excited about what they're going to do, and what they're going to draw out of it.

I just want to say, well done Bruv, I'm really happy for you and excited about what you're going to do.xx

Broken

sorry to have a boring tech post, but it seems that google are determined to make my life harder to use than it was before with 'upgrades'. they've replaced their rss reader with 'currents', a pretty aggregator that doesn't really aggregate feeds but keeps them entirely separate, which is completely pointless as in that case, i might as well just read the original webpage or whatever that it is a feed _of_.

then they upgrade google music by removing the 'shuffle all' button from everything except all songs. I used to be able to click on Folk, then 'shuffle all', which is exactly how i like to listen to my music genres. now, this simple action is made harder, i suppose i could build a playlist of all my folk and then shuffle that, but why make it harder?

then they upgrade google talk into google hangouts, and remove any indication of who is currently online. as a talk client, this is now useless.

I'm sorry if idon't understand how hangouts are meant to work. i just don't get it at all. i just want to leisurely type messages to my friends who happen to be online, and maybe once in a while make a video call. please let me do that.

I'm not saying 'if it ain't broke don't fix it', because that is utterly conservative and not how nature works. i'm saying, sure, make an improvement, but save a damn copy first in case you ruin it for everyone. why not just let me choose?

The Bishop Fuckers: a review

I've decided I'm giving my self 10 minutes to do blog posts, so that I can keep stringing together thoughts longer than two sentences long.

For a start, I've been meaning to review The Bishop Fuckers ep from 2002.

The Bishop Fuckers are ancient history now, but very important in my rock family tree, as our band the Toys of the Fishermen supported them twice and collaborated on a memorable jam of 'grilly's christmas song'; and various combinations of the former members have provided a musical life-line over the years ever since. So finally, after eleven years, I was able to get hold of their 6-track mini-album.

I've seen most of these songs performed tens of times, and thought I remembered them quite well. So after ten years of adoring the thought of them, what stands up? what's now just studenty crap?

The songs fall into two camps - anti-authoritian Prog rock songs (which are The Crucifiction and DICCU) and student-life reports (Don't Text Him, About Last Night, and Aidan). The first thing that strikes is the musicianship is fantastic, just as I remember. Listening to 'The Crucifiction', I'm swaddled in layers of intricate piano and lead guitar. But the student-union politics and the pretentious prog style grow a little wearysome. DICCU preaches again, this time against preachy religious people (and by extension, authoritainism).

The Studenty songs are less interesting. About Last Night is musically a fairly simple rock track, with strong vocal performance. Don't Text him is a funk rock workout, with lyrics about a friend's relationship; it sounds irrelevant and gossipy now, but at least it's writing about what you know. Aiden, a hit at the time, now feels like a fairly limp wedding band run through a popular eighties ballad.

There are some songs I'm surprised by the lack of inclusion: Bar Full of Cunts and the Dale-penned Song for the Baffing were particular favourites of mine.

Surprisingly, the stand out track for me, listening to it now, is the harrowing song Ambition is Futile, which strikes a chord with me that it didn't ten years ago. It doesn't fit into either of the two categories above, and maybe that's why it's not as dated. It has an existentialist anger that still catches me, that I think a lot of indie would love to own, but combined with a cool jazz-rock insistence, it just cuts you through, like a smiths with the romantic poetry replaced by someone explaining, statistically, why you should be depressed.

Right, I'm over time and the record has finished. I'm stopping.

They say you should never go back, but I'm glad to have this memento of that time. It doesn't change my memories.

You don't understand the Internet, you idiot

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Physical music really is deader than dead

yeah i know i said i was on a hiatus. i guess what i mean is, don't expect me to be updating this anytime soon. but here's an update anyway.

i found myself in the westfield centre in stratford, which is a large modern shopping centre. it's about a year old, so it's a pretty good way of seeing how someone would build a shopping centre right about now.

i had some food shopping to do, and a grandma to pick up, but i felt i had enough time to maybe go and impulse purchase on a cd, which i haven't done for a super-long time. I really feel like i need to be challenged by some music. it's an odd feeling, that i've settled a bit into too much of a rut.

incidentally, two of my most recent purchases are both a) too heavy for me, which i didn't think possible, and b) french. wierd correlation. when i say too heavy, i love both of them, but one (whourkr) is heavy at the expense of song. it's like i can't hear the music, and i didn't realise that was important. the other, deathspell omega, i can listen to, but it's really disturbingly heavy at a very fundamental level. it fits the 'intellectual black metal' tag very well.

so i had a look at the map, and under 'music and books' there was two shops: foyles (that's the books then) and hmv. HMV! they're not even successful enough to be considered mainstream as any more, and therefore are now indie! right?

so i popped into foyles, which sold books (no cds, unlike the really massive soho one), and then tramped to hmv, the only music shop listed in the whole shopping centre. and it was not a big hmv. and only one quarter of it - literally just a corner - was cds. i mean about 6 racks. it wasn't big enough to have a metal, or a jazz, section. what metal there was - whitesnake, blacksabbath, slipknot, avenged sevenfold et al - was lumped in with rock and pop.

i'm not complaining about hmv being rubbish, which we've all known about for ages -

there was this one time i was in the big one in manchester looking for the new quickspace single after eharing them on peel. a shop bod gave me their entire band history and told me it would be out in two weeks. wonder what he's doing now

- but the fact that there is just virtually no music for sale, anywhere in the whole place. like it's just not something people do anymore.

it's not for lack of music; the centre was flooded with music, achieved by having hundreds of speakers lining the ceilings. it felt completely ubiquitous, and utterly fluid, because as you moved around there was no change in the level of sound. it felt like a soundtrack, the opposite of diegetic. but it wasn't there to be bought, or owned. or recognised or valued.

i also had a dream over the holidays, that i was doing a big shop (which i can do now when i have the car). and this old woman was pushing in front of me. and i thought, hey, why on earth should i have dreams about people pushing in front of me? get out of my dream. so i made the old woman vanish and tried to replace her with something more interesting, but then i thought, hang on, if this is my dream, why the hell am i dreaming of doing a food shop anyway? and then that was too much and i woke up.