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Friday, January 30, 2004
Friday, January 30, 2004
Currently considering the possibility of moving to London. I've known for the last three years that I wouldn't able to find a decent job around here, and I can't drive, so I'm limited to either moving to a city (with the public transport benefits that a city brings) or finding a job with accommodation within walking distance.
But I never seriously considered London before. I've got the offer of free bed and board down there until I find employment, the jobs pay much better than they do elsewhere and it'd be a change of scenery, if nothing else.
My only worry is the loss of freedom that comes with the capital. Here, ten minutes' walk and I've got complete solitude. That's what I love about living in the country. It's about all I love about living in the country, but it's a pretty big thing to give up, nonetheless. Other cities still carry some of that sense of freedom and nature, albeit to a lesser degree - Brighton has the seafront, while Edinburgh mixes the benefits of both styles of living perfectly. London's just a sprawl of human habitation, small areas of green fenced in by brickwork and traffic in a half-hearted concession to nature. The time I spent there as a kid was fun, but it was fun because it was something different for a short while of time. Permanent residence is an entirely different matter.
Decision by this time next week? Maybe...
E. Randy Dupre's brain told him to write this at 15:29
Tuesday, January 27, 2004
Tuesday, January 27, 2004
Listening to Future Pilot AKA's Tiny Waves, Might Sea right now, which has led to the official website and his track by track notes for the album. Sometimes this kind of appendix to a record can spoil the listening experience, but here it enhances it. The linked news blog mentions a new album, Salute Your Soul, and a quick googling confirms the release date as 23rd Feb.
The last album was, for the most part, a thing of rare beauty (I've pimped Ananda is the Ocean to so many people that it could get a part playing Third Street Walker in TJ Hooker), so this is one that I'm really looking forwards to.
erasing clouds have a Future Pilot feature online, for those who are interested.
E. Randy Dupre's brain told him to write this at 14:31
Monday, January 26, 2004
Monday, January 26, 2004
Just tripped over Plus Magazine. I've only glanced at it, but it looks like a good read for anyone of a mathematical bent.
E. Randy Dupre's brain told him to write this at 17:03
Saturday, January 24, 2004
Saturday, January 24, 2004
At first I thought I'd misread the paper. But no, John Lydon is part of the line-up for I'm A Celebrity... Get Me Out Of Here.
Old punks never die, they only get fat, self-obsessed and complacent. It's not long since Julien Temple allowed him to regain a bit of dignity, either. Maybe McLaren was right all along.
E. Randy Dupre's brain told him to write this at 19:41
Friday, January 23, 2004
Friday, January 23, 2004
It may not exactly have revolutionised the form as we know it, but Otogi was/is easily the most beautiful videogame ever created, both visually and aurally. Until you've seen it in action, you just won't understand. Levels that introduce your character to the field with a swirl of cherry blossom. Spectral mists, fairy tale forests, enormous mansions decorated in shimmering gold. Audio tracks that aren't so much music as ambient sound. Sure, your interaction with the game world may have been limited to knocking things about with a variety of weapons, but the atmosphere immediately gifted the game with a sense of purposeful grace and delicate, fragile splendour.
Just out in Japan, Otogi 2:
This had better come out over here, else I'm likely to cry real tears. It's got a proposed US release, which is more than I thought would happen, but the whole unfortunate Sega/Sammy situation doesn't fill me with hope and I doubt that European sales figures for the first game will justify a UK release in the eyes of most other publishers.
Don't really want to have to chip the Xbox, but if anything makes me do it, it'll be the non-appearance of this game.
E. Randy Dupre's brain told him to write this at 19:06
Thursday, January 22, 2004
Thursday, January 22, 2004
New series of NYPD Blue on Channel 4 tonight (sometime just after midnight). Can't wait to find out the answers to last season's cliffhangers. So many posers:
When will the name be changed to better reflect the content (I'm thinking something along the lines of NYPD Cyan, here)?
Will I be able to suspend my disbelief when (SPOILER) the pretty young female detective falls for Sipowicz?
How long will it take for the writers to slip in her inevitable nude scene?
How many times will the C4 announcer refer to the series as "gritty"?
Will the guy who played Sorenson, whose name I can't remember at the moment, be opening up a career of TV movies for himself by quitting the show, a la the guy with red hair from the first couple of series whose name I also can't remember at the moment?
How many times will Greg be used for laffs?
How many of those arrested during the series will be A) black, B) junkies, C) both of the above, or D) upper-middle-class white kids who believe themselves to be "above the system"?
Will I still be completely hooked despite myself?
E. Randy Dupre's brain told him to write this at 16:14
Wednesday, January 21, 2004
Wednesday, January 21, 2004
Inevitably, the whole degree course has gone out with a bit of a whimper. I've just received confirmation that, yes, I've already completed enough modules for the Hons without having to sit this coming Friday's exam. Which is just as well, really - I've spent the day trying to revise for it and largely come up blank. Even acing it wouldn't be enough to lift me from a 2.1 to a first, so I'm sitting here wondering whether it's really worth the stress. I mean, I've known for the last few weeks that I've been taking this module for the sake of it - it's something else I can claim knowledge of, after all - and I've produced the work as required for the same reason. But an exam - well, you don't actually learn anything by sitting a pointless exam, do you?
But then, if I don't sit it, I deny myself the satisfaction of any sense of finality; there's no real full stop to the last three and a half years. Yeah, I've still got the demonstration of the project to go through, but that's a fairly informal thing.
Current plan: carry on trying to get a model answer written and revised for Friday morning. See how that pans out - get the train to Uni as usual on Friday morning, do some further revision there, then decide whether or not it's worth time sitting the exam.
Don't you just love internal monologues?
E. Randy Dupre's brain told him to write this at 21:53
BBC2 are repeating their history of Country, Lost Highway. The second episode's on tonight after Newsnight (11:15-ish).
It's about time they repeated the excellent Dancing in the Street. My box set was 'borrowed' some time ago, and the series doesn't appear to have been granted a DVD release yet. I can't even find a mention of it on the Beeb's website, which, considering it's one of the best series they've ever produced (and won shit-loads of awards, iirc), is more than a little stupid.
E. Randy Dupre's brain told him to write this at 16:37
Tuesday, January 20, 2004
Tuesday, January 20, 2004
Anybody else watching Boss Swap at the moment? Anybody else noticed what an amazing job the car salesmen have done of reinforcing the traditional image of their profession?
E. Randy Dupre's brain told him to write this at 21:51
Sunday, January 18, 2004
Sunday, January 18, 2004
One of the best things about owning a blog is following the path that people have travelled in order to get here. It can throw up some strange results.
This is one of the strangest I've had for a while - a page of Google search results for "related:www.tma.co.jp/page_top/yokoku/chichiren/chichiren.html". Interesting, because Jack Fear's blog is result #2 and mine is #3. Also interesting because of the presence of both Penny Arcade and B3TA in there.
So, intrigued, I decide to see exactly what lies at www.tma.co.jp/page_top/yokoku/chichiren/chichiren.html. And it seems to be some kind of promotional video for a soft-core porn (judging from the root URL) Power Rangers-meets-Barbarella. Unfortunately (or fortunately, depending on your point of view), my connection isn't up to the job of showing the video - I just get the first couple of seconds of visuals, but all the audio. I'd love to know exactly what it is that links me and Jack to a picture of three women in Japanese superhero suits with the breastplates removed.
E. Randy Dupre's brain told him to write this at 17:44
Saturday, January 17, 2004
Saturday, January 17, 2004
I got a letter from the government the other day. I opened it, read it, it said they're incapable of constructing forms which are possible to complete.
"Please can you fill in the details of any jobs you've had since 25th August 2002."
Tick: Unemployed. Date: 25-08-02 - 17-01-04. Reason: Full-time education. Skip the bit about pension contributions as it's N/A.
"Please fill this section in all all cases. What is your date of birth?"
Enter my date of birth.
"Is your new job your only job?"
Eh? What new job? The only job I've currently got is filling in forms which make no sense.
E. Randy Dupre's brain told him to write this at 13:11
Does anyone know how Amazon go about organising themselves? Are they a kind of international franchise, or something? I ask, because yet again I've fallen foul of their complete lack of common sense.
I fired off a query to the marvellous Mr. Fear earlier tonight, requesting his assistance in reading up on Japanese mythology, which is something I've long meant to do. He points me in the direction of, among others, Kwaidan and Akira Kurosawa's Dreams. Off I pop to Amazon.co.uk, only to find that they've never heard of them. Fine. Okay. Why, then, can I get them "usually delivered within 24 hours" from the US? It's not as if they've got any qualms about issues of dubious grey market legality - they're always perfectly happy to ship stuff over here (apart from videogames, which I've always presumed is more down to worries about people not being aware of territorial lock-outs on consoles). If you order a DVD they give you a warning that it might not work on your player, and that's it. I know - I've had to go through the process more than a few times.
Would it really be so difficult to integrate the sites? Let me browse for things that are available from the US, Japan, France, etc., present me with a message about increased shipping costs and let me place the order? Quite apart from anything else, it'd make searching the non-English sites just a little easier. For "just a little easier," read: possible.
And so begin my post-University blog entries. Not with a bang, but with a "concerned of Chelmsford" moanathon.
E. Randy Dupre's brain told him to write this at 00:21
Monday, January 12, 2004
Monday, January 12, 2004
I might even get time to write some stuff for Barbelith Reviews now. That's Barbelith Reviews, for those that didn't catch it the first time.
Not at all disheartened by the fact that, out of a supposed 3,000-odd people, Barbelith Reviews got something in the region of 60 visitors when I posted the link at Barbelith. Sure, I'd kind of imagined that Barbelith Reviews being a Barbelith off-shoot, there might be a few more people interested in taking an active part than the three who emailed us about it. Don't think I'm likely to go complaining about the webzine not getting updated in future, though, seeing as it suggests a pretty good reason as to *why* the webzine's not been updated. Kind of puts the apathy into a worse light when I remember that even this blog got more views than Barbelith Reviews when June mentioned to the board that I'd stuck a photo of myself up here.
But no, not disheartened. Barbelith Reviews will keep going, I'll keep on shoving it down everyone's throat (did I hear somebody at the back whisper the word 'troll'?) and if the general Barbelith population still aren't interested then, well, nads to 'em. It's been linked to elsewhere and got more traffic through those links than it did from the board it was created for, so there's interest.
That's Barbelith Reviews.
E. Randy Dupre's brain told him to write this at 03:20
That latest Belle & Sebastian album's pretty good, no? I didn't have high hopes after the previous one, but this is much better. It's a real progression (finally) - the sound's all big and poppy, the tunes frighteningly memorable. The fey "look at us - we're students!" stylings have been abandoned (well, nearly - there's still one track that has that particular irritation factor intact). There are some odd echoes in there, too - the Cure get a nod in the background of If She Wants Me, lots of Stay Loose sounds like The Specials doing This Year's Model.
But what sticks out are the tunes. The tunes, man! Roy Walker, If You Find Yourself Caught in Love and I'm a Cuckoo (but *especially* I'm a Cuckoo) are things of beauty - the latter's got an absolutely fucking enormous melody bouncing around. It's not like they've... cough... 'dumbed down' or anything, but instead they've suddenly realised that they've got this ability in them - the ability to write a song that catches in your brain and refuses to shift once there, and to combine that with lyrics that are about something other than being bullied at school (I mean, how fucking old are the people in this group?) - and that's something to be very happy about. It is a cause for joy, my friends. To think, my B&S-hating mates have been raving about this record since its release, and I only got around to grabbing it last week.
And it got me through the last 48 hours of that bleeding project, too.
E. Randy Dupre's brain told him to write this at 02:05
Erk. Just written a post about how the project is virtually finished - software done and dusted, easily the best piece of work I've ever produced, kids' section of the system something I'm immensely proud of (even got the opportunity to knock up some Flash cartoon characters for it thanks to the intended age group, which was brilliant fun), report written and proof-read, just last half of the second copy to print out (printer ran of ink) - when the old PC decided to crash on me.
This PC never crashes. It just doesn't happen. It may look like a piece of shit thanks to the fact that I didn't have enough cabling when I was sticking it all together, so the main hard drive's behind the floppy slot and the floppy is in the huge hole at the front for a third CD/DVD drive, covered over with a home-made door flap, but it's the most reliable computer you'll ever come across. It's never crashed before - never. I only got around to installing anti-virus software on it a few months ago because of the Blaster virus - it's never been infected with anything before.
It'd better not an omen. I'd better not wake up tomorrow to find that the last month's been a dream and I've *not* actually spent every waking hour of every day on this work.
E. Randy Dupre's brain told him to write this at 01:50
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Losing the fight against mediocrity for the last few years. Fire a volley |
