Notes from Kaizer

CD Review: Oceansize - Everyone Into position (Beggars Banquet, 2005)

2005-10-09T14:14:00.000+01:00

Girth. Wideness. Voluminousness. Really fucking large humungousness. That's what Brit-brain-rock heroes Oceansize strive for.

That all-enveloping blanket of sound - covering, submerging, bewildering and occaisionally battering the listener with layer upon layer of pink noise. And you know what? It really works.

Everyone Into Position is the second full-length album from the Manchester five-piece, the follow-up to 2003's stunning Effloresce, a record which wowed pretty much everyone that heard it, with its mix of the post-rock sensibilities of Mogwai and the metal nous of Tool. The band aren't ready to rest on their laurels though, and instead of regurgitating the same-old space rock epics, they have been steadily growing their sound into something even more hard to pin down.

The album is at the same time heavier and more chilled than their debut. Tracks like Music For A Nurse and Meredith sound like slow-motion fire, licking at the ears before they build almost inperceptibly to car-crash levels on intensity. Meredith itself contains some of the most monged out sounds I've ever heard - an off key electronic noise hidden behind the music playing havok with your brain. Awesome.

On the other side of the scale, songs such as A Homage to a Shame and No Tommorow take no prisoners, and tear into the listener with glorious three guitar violence and blastbeats that sound more like Sikth than My Bloody Valentine. Obviously building on the experiments on the Music for Nurses EP, the heavy tracks on the album are amoung the most complicated and satisfying pieces the band have ever written, and longtime fans will be shocked and pleased by just how good the band have got. Of course, newcomers will have their minds blown, and that can only be a good thing.

The standout tracks on the album are easily the first single Heaven Alive, New Pin and the final tryptich. The single contains one of the cheekiest, bounciest bass-lines ever put to plastic and rolls along at a perfect head-nodding pace until the chorus takes off like a guitar-fuelled spaceship (a rockship). New Pin also has a perfect rolling tempo mixed with hypnotic, pulsing drums and multi-layered vocal and guitar effects that give the song a pleasantly poppy and relaxingly propulsive sound (although you're never gonna hear this on your local cheesy listening station).

The album closes with perhaps the most epic suite of songs since the Mars Volta's Francis the Mute. Three tracks clocking in at over 21 minutes comprise what the band have called the Church Suite. Featuring organs, angelic vocals, Stephen Hawkings' voicebox (presumably borrowed from Radiohead, another obvious but massive influence on the band) and a really amazing grasp of quiet-loud dynamics, Oceansize really out-do themselves with some of the most kinetic and inventive music of the year.

Combining all the best bits of prog and post rock, moulding them into actual songs and then rocking like giant fucking mountains of noise, Oceansize have made another perfect record for people bored with 4-minute pop songs disguised as rock music and who want a little more depth from an ear-pummeling.

Highly recommended.

www.oceansize.co.uk

Touching base ... ... dammit, might as well shoot myself now...

2005-09-03T16:12:00.000+01:00

Phew! Been a busy week in the Vagus Nerve community. I've been building, then pimping the shit out of my band's new website http://www.vagusnervemusic.co.uk (which I think is looking rather spiffy, thankyouverymuch) as well as getting ready for our next gig at the Tumbley in Farnborough on the 29th of Sept.

It should go pretty well, our last gig there was proper jaw-dropping, and that was with Lewis so pissed that he could barely play his guitar. This time, Mr. Jones (or Chemo, as we're calling him since he shaved his head) has sworn off the evil amber nectar, although the usual routine of getting good and stoned before we play will still be in effect.

It feels like we're actually getting somewhere at the moment. The new EP is, in my unbiased opinion, fucking awesome; the website's looking shit-hot and we're getting gigs again with new, more exciting songs to play at the shows. It's all good.

It is a frustrating time to be in a heavy local band though, as we're going through a bit of an indie-meets-the-Clash phase in rock at the moment, and Vagus Nerve don't really gel too well with these bands. We're just looking for other bands with our music ethic - play loud, fast and interesting rock. All the bands around at the moment are either trying to sound like Franz Ferdinand or Killswitch Engage - there doesn't seem to be much room in the middle for experimentation, which is sad. Hopefully the pendulum of fashion will swing back to heavy, grungy bands, and we'll be ready, primed and fuckin' there.

In other news, I'm adapting to my new job pretty well, even though it makes me more tired than I ever knew existed, I'm enjoying it and looking forward to the pay-packet at the end of the month more than anything!

TTFN!

Notes from... Vagus Nerve?!

2005-08-29T18:56:00.000+01:00

Well, it had to happen eventually, didn't it? Kaizer is dead, long live Vagus Nerve!

For those of you wondering what the hell I'm talking about, my band Kaizer has had to change it's name thanks to the Kaiser fuckin' Chiefs getting so bloody popular that we couldn't tell anyone our name without them going "Ohh, like the Kaiser Chiefs...".

So now we're Vagus Nerve (click here if you're a geek), and if we find any other bands with this name then somebody dies.

To celebrate, we've just recorded another clutch of instant classics over at Earth Terminal Studios in Odiham, with our friend Lewis Childs. The EP has yet to be named, and the artwork is still to be finished but the songs included will be Alpha Rhythm, the epic Jesus the Vampire and the Chav Test Dummies and the classic (in our eyes) Theme for War.

We've been waiting to record these for tiiiiiiime, and we're absolutely stoked with how they sound, and I think that it's easily better than our first effort, Silhouette on White Horizon.

And, as a bonus for you, the trendy-as-fuck blogging audience, is a free MP3 of Alpha Rhythm! Enjoy, and if you listen to it, you must leave a comment! We need feedback people!

Coulda, Shoulda, Didn't

2005-08-27T18:18:00.000+01:00

Well hello out there in internet land. How has your summer been? Good?

Oh, Mine? Shit. Really, really shit.

Okay, lot's to get through in this story of woe, so I'll skip the details and give a blow by blow account of my shitty summer, which not only explains why I've not been updating, but also why I won't be going back to Uni next year...

Following the end of the last semester of year two of my Journalism degree coure, I thought I was all set to start my summer job at a local college. I had been offered it the previous year, so I thought it was in the bag... only it wasn't, and due to budget cutbacks, I had no job to return to. I found this out the ame day I found out my overdraft was shallower than I'd previously thought, and I only had about £10 left. Oh bugger.

As I scrabbled around the local temping agencies, it soon became apparent that there were no jobs in the area. I almost got one, but my reference fell through and they wouldn't let me start, and all the time, I have fuck all money.

I had to give up comics, which was kind of like a piece of me dying inside. Seriously, I've been buying the things for over twelve years - it broke my heart to not be trotting to the comic store on a Saturday to find out what Batman had been up to that week.

At around the same time, my PSU on my PC blew up again, leaving me not only without comics, but without even the internet! Argh!

Weeks turned into months, and eventually, I managed to get little bits and bobs of work - a few days here, a week there, but it's still nowhere enough to live on, and my girlfriend, the saintly Ellie and my mum don't earn nearly enough to support my fat lazy ass.

Eventually, the interviews began to roll in, and I got some neat data-input work that allowed me to fix my PC and get stoned again (can't be doing without that now, can we?) but I was still in dire doo-doo.

All the while this was going on, I completely forgot about Uni, it just wasn't relevant when you're trying to scrape up the pennies to buy dinner (literally). Student loans, work experience - I know it sounds stupid, but I forgot it, until it was too late. This, coupled with the fact that I didn't want to - no, couldn't - spend another year stone broke meant I had to make the decision to take a year off.

So, my Uni friends (all three of you, lol), I'm sad to say that I won't be seeing you much next year. I'll miss the laughs, the learning, the eye candy (you know who you are), but I'll be back the following year to finish my degree, which is the important thing.

In the meantime, I've just started a new job, and my confidence is on the increase again. I still don't get paid till the end of September, so I've got another tough month ahead, but the important thing is, I will get paid, and when I do...

..

COMICS MUTHAFUCKA!!!

Anyone wants to catch up, call me names or send me naked photos, e-mail me.

I know I say this a lot, but normal service will be resumed shortly, I promise!

Update Quicky

2005-05-19T22:55:00.000+01:00

I got my online journalism marks back today, and for those that haven't read the last post, this blog began as part of that module. After a tense, nervous wait thanks to Jim, our sadistic tutor, telling us our results one by one, I found out I got the my only First of the semester with a respectable 75% score.

The plus side of this means this blog is officially awesome, and that I'm beginning to see blogging, and online journalism as a more viable career path than I would've 4 months ago. I've got the summer off Uni as of today, although I am going to have to work a summer job to claw my way out of the finacial black hole I have just found myself in. Through the summer, I'm going to update this blog as much as possible, and continue to add features to my 'personal website' (damn that sounds fey), in addition to the Gaming Surgery feature on there now.

Anyway, it's nice to have a direction, so stay tuned for some actual blogging rather than this odd pseudo-diary. I've just got to stop watching cartoons long enough to find something to write about.

I'm also off to see Star Wars: Episode III tomorrow, and frankly I can't wait. I thought the Clone Wars anime was about as good as it gets - all fanboy-wet-dream lightsabre poses and clone army troopers. Lucas better get this one right, or dammit, I'm gonna set fire to his house (ps, Lucas, this is a joke. Can I come round for dinner one day? Please?).

I'm bad, sue me

2005-05-18T21:27:00.000+01:00

Okay, so I'm a terrible blogger for not having posted for 2+ weeks. I would have an excuse, but I really don't, other than that I've been letting un-real life wash over me like tepid but cosy bathwater. This is a long way of saying that I've been watching cartoons and playing games for a bit. Which was nice.

I did deserve the break I guess, allowing me to recouperate after the clusterfuck that always is the last few weeks of the semester, when all the uni work that you've yet to start is due to be handed in. The ensuring panic means that a) I usually pull some stunning piece of work right out of my arse in the last minute and b) there's no way in hell I'm gonna have time for any blogging or web-surfing (aside from the porn, but that's stress relief, honest).

We're getting the marks back this week. They include an essay for Politics and the Public Sphere about dumbing down, a 3000-word mammoth written over three days with only three books, which got me 69%, or a 2:1. I feel that giving me one point from a First is the tutor's wat of saying "Must try harder". I swaer, I'm going to put that on my gravestone.

Today I got my results for Investigational Journalism, which was a story about why magic mushrooms have been made illegal in the UK. I thought it was okay, but I wrote it all in about four days, from concept to hand-in, because another story fell through. I got 66% for that, which is another respectable 2:1, a fair mark in my opinion.

Tommorow I get my grade for online journalism, which was were this blog came from. The course requirements meant I also had to make a 'personal website', something I hadn't done since I was like 12 years old, learning HTML on notepad. Hopefully, I should get an okay mark for this, after all, I really have enjoyed and (hopefully) done pretty well with, being an online junky anyway.

***

There's the diary stuff outta the way, now I quickly want to talk about cartoons, cause dammit, none of my friends give a shit about them. Just before the uni work was due, I found Iso Hunt, an awesome search engine that actually searches the web for bit-torrents, taking much of the pain of of this awesome file-sharing protocol.

I made my standard search from 'Batman', hoping against experience to find copies of the awesome Gotham Knights cartoon from the late 90's, a show that I'd never seen, and desperately wanted to. When the seach came back with about 200 hundred entries, including both seasons of Gotham Knights, and the new The Batman series, I nearly pissed myself I was so happy.

I'm a massive Bat-fan, and it's always cheesed me off that living in the UK, we never get to see most of the awesome cartoons they show in America. Over here, they're relegated to the backwaters of cable at un-godly hours of the morning or skipped over entirely. Now, I've watched all the old Gotham Knights episode's I'd missed (including some awesome ones with Nightwing, a character who needs more mainstream exposure) and caught up with the new series, The Batman, which is startlingly different.

For starters, they've abandoned the Dini/Timm animation style, and all of the voice cast of the old show, which was a bit of a shock. Nobody does the Joker like Mark Hamill, it's just a fact, and the dreadlocked, cyber-punk Joker of the new series is a pretty redical departure. The new Batman style is pretty cool, if a little jarring at first. He reminds me of Mazzulcelli (Year One)'s Batman rather than the old style.

I've also been dibbing the new episodes of Family Guy and American Dad, which are pretty awesome too. It brilliant that DVD sales can revive a cancelled classic, and it's still as funny as ever, my favourite line so far being Stewie calling Brian a "see you next tuesday" which is about as daring as US TV gets I think. Still makes the Simpsons look like the Waltons.

So now I'm downloading Season one of Justice League Unlimited. Life is good.

Hey, I wonder how illegal this is?

Finally, something cool

2005-04-23T18:10:00.000+01:00

Usually when you read stories on blogs by left-leaning young people about the government, it's gonna be bad. "I'm not going to uni because of top-up fees!" "They're making people racist by demonising immigrants!" "They're making weed class B again?!"

Well, how about a good news story, this time from the American government. No, they haven't released the files on who really shot Kennedy, or let us into Area 51.

Instead, they've compiled a list of 100 'culturally significant' sound recordings, from great speeches to Elvis Presley. Whats cool about this though, is the inclusion of some rather left-field albums, from Nirvana's Nevermind to Public Enemy's Fear of a Black Planet.

See? There are still some cool people left in the world, even in the halls of power! Although I've got a feeling that a couple were snuck in when Tipper Gore wasn't looking...

Click here for the full list.

Choices choices

2005-04-20T09:13:00.000+01:00

It's that time of the decade again, election time. I'm still trying to decide which old person that has no interest in me whatsoever I'll choose to run the country into the ground and start more wars.

If you're in the same boat, try this handy form.

The internet. Is there anything it can't do?

Et tu, Brutus?

2005-04-14T15:51:00.000+01:00

I just got off the phone, and I gotta write this. I just spoke to Byron, the subject of the post below, dealing with pissing people off.

Well, it seems he's really pissed of a certain anonymous somebody, because he's been fired as editor of the uni magazine thanks to his comments on dyslexics thanks to a tip-off.

Shit. We've only had these blogs a few months, and we're already getting into trouble.

The Angry Dome has since retracted and deleted his comments. Speaking to me earlier, he admitted that if he had read what he'd written, he would've deleted it anyway. After all, it's not dyslexic people's fault they have the problems.

The post certainly caused debate, with a number of anonymous surfers venting their spleens with starred out swear words (pussies...), and a classmate vehemently attacking him in her own blog.

Fair enough, he said something stupid, he got flamed. It's the internet, it happens. Well today, Byron learned first-hand the consequences of cyber-life spilling into reality. It's fairly obvious that the anonymous poster on the Angry Dome was the same secret tipster that lost Baz his job (and handy CV filler) on the uni mag.

What really galls me about this, is that this anonymous dobber didn't have the balls to simply walk up to Byron and tell him what they thought. They could have had a debate, Baz most likely would have apologised and the mess would be sorted. Now, unfortunately, that ship has sailed.

The internet offers relative anonymity when posting offensive ideas, but when people you know in the real world find out, you're most likely in the shit. The moral here - don't make friends in the real world, they're not half as cool as the people online.

Anonymous dobber, whomever you are - you probably think you did a good thing, when all you did is hurt someone, needlessly and specifically. All Baz did was rant at an imaginary 'them'. Who's the real bad-guy here? I hope your karma bites you on the arse.

Normal service will be resumed shortly.

The rants are out there

2005-04-13T23:31:00.000+01:00

I like reading blogs by people I know. It's interesting to see what people would say, given the chance to be able to sit and articulate their thoughts before blurting them out. As part of my journalism course at university, we're putting these blogs together, and one of the benefits is that I get to read the ramblings of my classmates.

One such blog is The Angry Dome, run by a fella called Byron. Recently Baz directed his rage at dyslexics, mainly because his student mag had to be heavily edited to accomodate them. It seems the Angry Dome has offended.

Fellow classmate Lauren responded in kind, with this rant directed at Byron.

Now, I'm not gonna condone either/or in this post, primarily becuase I don't really care either way. My point is, that surely, no matter how misguided or wrong, Byron has every right to direct his bitterness at whatsoever target he chooses. Fair enough, you may not like what he says, and that in turn gives you the right to call him a "complete and utter cunt", if that takes your fancy.

In fact, hearing things that make you react so strongly could only be positive. An ill-conceived, bigoted rant is the perfect fodder for crystalizing, distilling and articulating your arguement, especially in a medium that give you time to think before you can reply. In fact, if someone offends you, thank them for giving you the chance to realise how strongly you feel about whatever it was that pissed you off so bad to start with.

Then call them a cunt.

If you like being offended, click here. And here.

By the way, I'm jealous of Byron for the amount of comments he got for the hating dyslexics piece. Why is it people only say stuff when they're mad?

Playing the westy tommorow. Shitting myself.

Go Shorty

2005-04-07T10:12:00.000+01:00

It's my birthday.

Plus, Kaizer, my band, are playing the West End Centre in Aldershot next thursday with the fuckin' Subways, which is awesome.

Move over Mary-Kate and Ashley

2005-04-05T16:30:00.000+01:00

Presenting, for the neo-Nazi paedophile in your life who has everything - Lamb and Lynx: Prussian Blue.

Just when I thought the world couldn't get any sicker, Louis Theroux pops on my telly with with these prejudiced pre-teen pop princesses (ha! How is that for alliteration?), and I felt I should share.

Lamb and Lynx are serperatists - racist white people who want to live in all-white communities and ban inter-marriage and leave the human race (I may have added that last bit myself). This is crazy talk, of course, for many reasons. How would they get decent curry? They'll all get webbed fingers and small chins and go mad and not make those really attractive half-brown people anymore and then forget how to live like real human beings.

Anyway, it appears my rage is echoed.

They're tone deaf and spout the same kind of bullshit that you can hear from every cross-eyed fool around the country, but they're young and blonde, so you never know, they could be hitting the charts any year now.

They also play a charming computer game called "Ethinic Cleansing", which apparently does what it says on the tin. Unfortunately, I can't find a demo of the game on the net, which leads me to think that maybe this game's worse than hate-filled... maybe it's crap. Any kids reading, tell mummy you want this for your birthday. Then send it to me. Ahahahaha.

If you're a total cocksucker, you may enjoy Resistance Radio or Countercultermusic.com.

One voice amid millions

2005-03-31T08:34:00.000+01:00

I've been trawling blogger.com for the past few days, just to see what my contemporaries online are writing, hitting the next-blog button like the mind-addled MTV kid I am. It's taught me a few things about this virtual community. Firstly, there's a lot of spanish people on this thing, and secondly, there's a lot of chicks too. Lotsa pink.

Not that I have anything against the fairer sex, of course. In fact, some of the female-centric blogs I've found are pretty amusing. Check out Better than Hamlet, the adventures of a young student living poor in Paris. The posts are fascinating, dealing wittily with the universal themes of love, friendship and pervy french men.

I also stumbled across, quite randomly, a few sites discussing the Terri Schiavo right-to-die case. For those of you living under rocks (or in MMORPG games), Terri is an American thats been held alive on life support for the past 15 years and has been given the chance to die, with her food and water supply disconnected. Understandably, this has pretty much divided the world into those good ol' pro-life or pro-choice camps.

One Bread, One Body is a Catholic site, which unsurprisingly sits on the pro-life site of the debate, with post titles such as "Terri's murder: Day 6". The posts however, are at least mostly respectful, but incredibly biased, so if that's what you're looking for, here it is. The beauty of the internet. The writer is actually Austrailian, proving that this issue really is a worldwide one.

Moving on, because religious sites make me feel all dirty, The Liberty Files presents a fascinating flipsite to the arguement that never draws conclusions but poses some of the trickiest questions you could face about humanity. When does a person stop being a person? Does Terri know what's happening around her?

Finally on the Shiavo debate, Constantly Amazed, Yet Never Surprised reminds us that even though America is full of fundamentalist nutters, the seperation of church and state is protected by law. So the next time a cross-eyed, hairy faced God-freak tells you America is God's county, tell them:

"The United States is in no sense founded upon the Christian doctrine." - George Washington

Check out http://www.blogsforterri.com if you want more opinions from people you'll never meet.

To lighten the mood, how about some Paragraph Novels, a mad-in-the-face idea that does what it says on the tin, and is well worth a click. Or, if you're down on a Gangsta tip, check this. I'm not sure if it's real, but it made me laugh for five solid minutes.

Finally finally, try the Xtina Fanclub! Apparently, making out is the new hanging out, which makes me a little sad that I'm not 15 anymore, because back then, drinking cider was the new hanging out. Times change, eh?

Lets do the time warp...

2005-03-29T15:05:00.000+01:00

Hello all out there in blog-world. It's been a while since my last post because, honestly, I have a very short attention span and I have been pinging about from one thing to another for the past week, all the while trying to decide what to write about.

My prayers were answered this morning with a package from an e-bayer - a small stack of Total! magazines. For those of you out there that aren't me, Total! was a Nintendo magazine back in the nineties and was awesome. Recently, I have been trawling e-bay trying to find old back issues, and this morning I got issues #1-8, 11, 12 and 14 through, filled with antique Nintendo goodnes.

Aside from the nostalgia jolt (and discovering Join Me's own Danny Wallace used to be a writer there when he was 18), these issues also reminded me of the joys of classic gaming, and that's what we're going to be talking about today.

If you were a child of the Eighties, and were male, chances were you were a console kid. Back then, you were either a Sega or Nintendo. It was like the mods and rockers, but we didn't have pubes yet and we certainly weren't doing it for the chicks. I was in the latter of the two groups, and even to this day I find Sega games to be... distasteful. I have no idea why, other than when you're 10, brand loyalty must be important. Most of us however, have lost, sold or broke our original consoles, and we have no way of enjoying our childhood games, right?

Wrong.

Firstly, how about a portable NES? The Game Theory Admiral (or GTA) appears to be the real deal - a Gameboy Advance clone that plays original Famicom games and for around £40-50, you can't go far wrong with this combo of hi-tech and retro geek chic. Or you could even build your own portable console (see, the internet is good for more than making Semtex!) if you have the solder-skillz. Hell, if you're splashing the cash, you might as well buy one of the original grey boxes.

But paying for stuff isn't what the internet was invented for, so how about emulation? Emulators are programs that pretend to be consoles. You can download NES, SNES, Gameboy, N64 and even Gamecube emulators and then play games on them by finding the game (or ROMs as they are known) in the murkier corners of the Net. Couple your emulator of choice with a half-decent control pad, and you're in for an almost never-ending supply of awesome games, especially the ones you always wanted when you were a kid.

One such game is now the Holy Grail of Nintendo emulation, and that's Starfox 2. The original Starfox was a superlative masterpiece. Featuring a Super-FX chip, Starfox was the first SNES game in 3D, managing to hurtle over *gasp* 100 polygons around the screen at once and provide feverish game players like myself with the first glance at a real 3D world. A touted sequel was built, advertised and lusted after. It was to have free-roaming levels, missions where your ship turns into a land-walking mech-beast and use the FX2 chip, even more pant-wettingly advanced than it's predecessor.

When it never appeared, all but the most hard-core forgot about it and it wasn't until the N64 arrived some 3 years later that Fox McCloud would get another outing. Recently though, leaked versions of this MIA classic have begun to appear on the 'net. First there were incomplete beta versions and then a final beta, or in other words, the finished article. Some talented web-heads have even translated the game, so us Westerners can enjoy it too. ZSNES runs the game remarkably well, with only the occaisional crash (and even they're being worked on).

Thanks to modern programmery wizardry, SNES games can now look even better than ever. Using antialiasing and antistropic filtering, all of the jagged edges can be removed from the sprites in old games, so you don't have to sully your eyes with piss-poor graphics.

Even relatively modern systems like the N64 can benefit from some emulator tinkerage. Resoltions can be increased from the blocky 640x400 resolution of the original console right up to crystal clear modern standards like 1600x1400. You can play Goldeneye 007 with a mouse and keyboard. Even better, new versions of the graphics code mean that all of the textures in the games can be replaced with new, better-looking art. One of the first of these is the Zelda Retexture Project, still in early stages, but looking more and more promising every couple of days. Eventually, they plan to make Zelda as pretty as any modern game. All they need is time.

There. I've left you enough links to get playing with. If you come across any awesome games on your travels, drop me a line!

Easter madness

2005-03-23T16:12:00.000Z

It becomes really hard to defend the life of being a student when you're constantly on holiday. Being the occaisionally slow person I am, I completely forgot that this week and next were Easter, and consequently, the two-week break I'm now abusing was a pleasant surprise last Thursday. My girlfriend is understandably jealous, but I'm fast running out of things to do.

God bless the internet then.

Firstly, I had to do something about my PC. 70 degrees c is far too hot for my processor to be running, I learned. The general consensus was that the Athlon 2800+ should be running at around 40-50 c, maybe up to 58 under a load. I got struck in to reading about case-fan configurations and FSB speeds and came across www.darktheywereandgoldeneyed.com on ebay.

They sell pretty much everything I needed at some pretty sweet prices. I bought myself a snazzy blue LED fan for another cooling intake, and got a cheap-o slot fan to cool my graphics card off. Thankfully, it seems to be sorted right now and even after 2 hours of Half-Life 2 the temperature was only 55 degrees. I think I may have started a new obsession.

In between freaking out I also stumbled across this. What is it? Well, it's sort of a puzzle and I warn you, it's only for the seriously genius-core of you out there. Browsing through its pages, trying to crack hidden codes, constantly Googling for new information, you feel a bit like Sandra Bullock in The Net (only not as shit) crossed with a creepy, Ring-esque feeling that you really shouldn't be here.

The puzzle itself is an impenetrably dense mixture of ancient myths, Native-American codes, obscure meta-physical Japanese fiction and good-old fashioned techno-geekery. And the feeling that something very bad is about to happen to somebody soon, peppered as the site is with references to drowning children and a date/time counting down to June 5 2005.

If it's all a little much for you, you may want to check out this thread on the Cellar. I read most of it, and the discoveries these talented Net-folk make are truely startling. Read from start to end and you uncover a vast story, worthy of a place on any best-seller list. And get this - it's happening right now.

Could the posting board become a new storytelling medium? The Cellar thread is complete, with reasoned arguements, interesting characters, disturbing discoveries and a compelling story. It could make an awesome movie...

Anyway, I have a lot more time off to come, so expect more updates soon, I just found some really cool stuff...

Hey Kids! Free Music

2005-03-16T18:26:00.000Z

Just remembered I never finished writing my band history. One day, I will. Till now, check out my band's site, there are MP3's there of our last demo, Silhouette on White Horizon.

Enjoy.

Lies, damned lies and...

2005-03-16T18:12:00.000Z

From The Guardian:

Niki Hindmarsh, a final-year journalism student, gets up at 4.30am to do a four-hour shift at a local radio station, reading the traffic and the weather report. She's back at Liverpool John Moores University for a 10am lecture, then spends the rest of the day between lectures and the library. She is also entertainment coordinator in the student union and runs the student radio station. When her mates go to the pub in the evening, she's tucked up in bed.

Oh shit, I think I'm going to be a total failure. I can imagine Niki now, her smug little face, cosy in her bedroom (pink, of course), surrounded by grotesque, over-sized cuddly Disney characters. Snuggling down to watch an episode of Dawson's Creek (just the one, mind) from her DVD box-set before enjoying a cocoa and bed by ten. She doesn't have a boyfriend, she's concentrating on her studies (code: can't get one. Seriously, why wasn't that an option in their survey? It's the most common cause of celibacy there is). She'll be an editor by the time she's 23, and I'll have to beg her for a job.

Makes you want to spit, don't it?

The student housing group Unite commissioned a poll of UK Uni students, and apparently, we're no longer a tribe of unwashed, Tricia watching alcoholics. No, we're swots, financial wizards and we chill out with our iPods. Bollocks.

Let me address a couple of these points. There are always a few naturally gifted people in any class. They come to uni becuase they were good at school, they liked it, they want more. These guys look like swots, but they're not, they just know how to do their thing, and they rarely have to work really hard to get good marks.

There are the people in the middle who are bright, certainly, but they really do have to work hard to get the great grades. Now these people, they're not swots, they're survivors. They work to save themselves, keep their heads above water. They probably do better in the real world too becuase, dammit, they want it more. I think young Niki above is one of these. Nobody used to success gets up at four in the morning to work for free. Only those that're hungry enough do.

And then you've got your scum, the people that think Uni life looks really fun based primarily on the Young Ones. They're the mental drinkers, and usually, they're gone after the first year. Thank god.

As for managing our finances - well, we have to, otherwise we'd be homeless. Personally speaking, my student loan for this semester was around £1200, and that was at the start of January. It ran out 3 weeks ago, and the next payment isn't until April 20! Thats right near the end of term! That's £1200 to last nearly 5 months. So I repeat my point - we have to be good with our finances, otherwise we're fucked.

Gadgets though, we are guilty as sin with. As my previous post said, I praise my PC above everything in my flat (apart from my girlfriend, of course... she gets upset when I love the computer more). Living in the modern world is easy if you can grasp the concept that technology is cooler than a cucumber factory.

As for me, what kind of student am I? I think I have kind of a knack for the things that I do, but one day it's going to bite me in the arse. I do love to write though, that's for sure, and that must count when you want to be a writer. Only, I'm not sure what I want to write about most of the time. I think one of the things Uni allows for is that little more time to figure out what it is you want to be. Hopefully, this time next year, I'll be closer to figuring that out for myself. At least, I'd better be.

We've been hit! Damage report, ensign...

2005-03-15T15:00:00.000Z

So my computer blew up. Ahem.

It's like getting kicked in the balls, having your right arm chopped off and watching all your favourite comics get burned (something I occaisionally have nightmares about. . . 'Noooo! I've gotta save this one! It's from 1983 and it's written by Elliot S Maggins. Batman grins in it goddammit!!' . . . ) all rolled into one.

I never realise what a 21st Century cliche kid I can be until my computer dies like that. No more reading stupid pointless random things about old TV shows I get a hankering after, like Captain N - a cartoon I would debase myself for to see again. Or going on a quest to scour the internet looking for some files that will make Doom, a 12-year old game, look better, only to realise it's four in the ay em and I have classes the next morning... or is that had classes..? Not to mention gaming! Killing anonymous Germans dressed as counter-terrorists? Now THATS entertainment.

A computer in the right hands is more than just a tool, or a gadget. Sad as it is to say, it's a life-style. Do I read newspapers? Do I fuck. You get it all for free online. Same can be said for anything digital. I remember the heyday of Napster, just before Lars (bitch) Urich got his teeth into it. It was anarchy, beautiful anarchy. Anything you wanted, it was yours, and nobody but the geek-core knew what was up. Now you can buy Napster vouchers at the Post Office. Just not the same, is it?

*ahem*

Where was I? Me, computer, important. Cool.

At the time of the crash, I was playing Far Cry. For the uninitiated, this is a first-person shooter, set in a jungle. You use stealth, hide in the bushes, stalk these mercs who are looking for you, and kill them all. It's really pretty, trust me. I was having a ball, sniping at them from a tower a mile away when *deeeewwwwwww... * Black screen.

Now, occaisionally this happens, I wasn't so worried, but it wouldn't restart. Shit. I took the cover off, which bugged me, since I had only put it back on the day before after months of running it open. Inside it was like a sauna. I prodded around carefully. What was hot, the power supply, or the processor? If it's the PSU, it's not so bad. None of the real stuff it hurt. If it's the processor though... my mind wheeled at the prospect... new motherboard, new processor... was the RAM okay? This is bad, I thought. I might need to remake the whole bloody thing. This is all I need now, etc.

I moped around for days, feeling thoroughly gutted, looking at my consoles with contempt. You're not as good as her, said the crazy voice in my head (um ... maybe). I was also very sulky towards my girlfriend, which I have since made up for.

That was last Wednesday. Last night I got a call from my saintly Mother, who had kindly taken it in for a service with the people she works for. It was the power supply. New one fitted. Home in a few hours.

YES! AHAHAHA! It's like being told that you don't have cancer. Okay, maybe thats an awful comparison, but you get my drift. New PSU, no cost, me = happy.

Last night, I get it home, ready to pick up where I left off with Far Cry. A quick exam shows no obvious faults, let's rock... for twenty minutes. Before another crash.

Cold sweat. I hit the power button, and it worked, thank god! Quickly, I head into the BIOS to see that the processor is running at well over 90 degress, which, I'm told is not good. But she works, and is now running, naked, at a more comfortable 75.

I think the cover was overheating the machine. I hadn't had it on since I got my new processor, becuase of all the screwdriver work that needed doing then. With the cover on, I was literally cooking my machine. Man that was scary. I wonder if that's what it's like having kids?

Normal service will resume later today.

Notes of the big, fuzzy distorted kind

2005-03-03T04:50:00.000Z

On logging in to do my last post, I noticed on the front of Blogger.com there was a link encouraging people to pimp their bands, blog-style. Wait a sec, I thought. People in bands? Thats people like me. I'm people like me!

I'm from a band called Kaizer, and for the slow amidst you, the title of this blog is a reference to that. 'Oh, Notes from Kaizer! Oh! I get it, very funny. You sir, deserve an award. And ice cream!'

We play what can only be described as dirty fucking rock and roll. This is mostly because we can never settle on which of the myriad of subgenres that the press could stuff us into, and partly becuase what we play is fairly unique, even though it's just heavy-assed rock music. In fact, I have never heard another band that sounds substantially like us.

I've been in bands since I was at school. Then, I was a terrible singer for an awful proto-indie-punk band called the Evolutionary Throwbacks (my name, ithankyewithankyew) with my best friends and a succession of odd, odd drummers including a girl that looked a bit like a man and at the age of 15 was having a weird kinda-affair with a 32-year old lodger. Suffice to say, it didn't last long.

I took up bass guitar when my best friend Sean's girlfriend dumped him, and left as our bass player. My first day on bass I learned to play basket case by Green Day and I thought it was awesome. I'd always loved the idea of playing guitar in the band, but the reality of playing the instrument, with it's small strings and esoteric finger movements confused the hell out of me. Bass, it appeared, was made for me. Big strings, you usually played one at a time, and coupled with a distortion pedal, you could make an awful racket...

We got a guy called Pete Yuen in to sing, who was totally awesome. He sounded like Ben Folds, which gave our Green Day covers (of which at one point there were four) an ironic twist. I was listening to an old acoustic demo yesterday, and apart from my awfulawful basslines, the songs were pretty top. Sean's at Uni in Nottingham now, but we'll have to record hose tracks one day, or I'll post the acoustic demo somewhere.

I'll continue this musical history later, and I'll post some tracks from Kaizer. If you're impatient, try the link to my other website from my profile page.

Laters

Too weird to live, too rare to die

2005-03-03T04:34:00.000Z

Don't you just love it when you get a new favourite show on TV? I usually find that most stuff on TV bores the hell out of me, especially since Buffy the Vampire Slayer ended, so I usually end up watching something really shit. And then Neighbors.

Well, no more. Ladies and Gentle-men, I present to you the TV event of the year, the decade, this millenium or any other... The Sky News dramatisation of the Michael Jackson trial. I tell you, this is TV worth missing Richard an Judy for.

Featuring a bunch of Z-List American actors that may or may not have been extras on Star Trek, this is a docu-drama with a twist. Forget the OJ trial, reality-court TV is so last decade - cameras aren't allowed anywhere near this trial. Instead we're treated to look-alikes in flawless lighting bumping into sets with such quality not seen since the heyday of Crossroads.

This is the future! 21st Century post-modernism on your tellyscreen. Isn't there supposed to be soft yet tense music on this? And I want to see dramatic close ups on the Jackson-for-Rent (Edward Moss to his mother) when the prosecutor says something damning about Jesus Juice or "naked ladies". Already today we were treated to Jackson looking 'bashful' when Thomas Mesereau mentioned his 'artistic genius'. This, my friends, is artistic genius. I hope they release the whole thing on DVD with comentary by Joan Rivers.

The Boston Globe and The Washington Post have some quite humourous stories on this. It makes me jealous we don't get their Entertainment News... http://www.boston.com/ae/tv/articles/2005/03/02/es_jackson_trial_reenactment_is_no_fun/
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A64534-2005Mar1.html

On a less frivolous note, Martin Bashir's (or, at least, his lawyer's) descision not to comment on virtually any of the questions put to him left a somewhat nasty taste in my mouth. It's an interesting ethical debate: does he know something that could damage Jackson's case? If he does, then what reason could he have for not speaking up in a court of law? After all, his documentary was as famous for it's character asassination of Jackson as for anything else.

Conversely, what if all he saw was good? Why couldn't he admit that in a court? What possible reason could he have for not helping to shed light on the case? He's pleading the First Amendment, the general gist being that he won't talk about anything other than the documentary itself, and that includes what he was saying to Jackson off-camera.

That means that all the sucking up he did ("when I see the way you act with children, it makes me want to weep..." ugh.... makes me want to puke, sycophantic little woodlouse), doesn't count in the trial.

Now, according to ITV.com, Bashir may face a contempt of court charge for his tight-lipped testimony. But, in reality, this is not a case about a journalist sucking up to an interviewee, it's about a paedo pop-star, and it comes in half-hourly tea-time bites.

It's frustrating... but that's good telly, right?

Something rumbling in the dark...

2005-02-24T19:11:00.000Z

Okay, so the worst thing about having to write something off the top of your head is thinking about what to write. It's like when somebody says "think". The first thing I do is stare vaguely into space. My mind is completely blank. I can barely even remember my name.

*Sniff*

Nasty cold though, my nose is running like a tap. Outside, it's snowing like the Gods have serious dandruff, but it's not settling, which totally defeats any benefits from this global-warming thingy we've got going on here. What's the point of snow at the end of February if you can't even have a snowball fight? Or sled? For the love of pizza, why can't we sled?

So.... news then. This is the week that the great Dr Hunter S Thompson died. He shot himself, which is an ironic way to die for someone that wrote about 'good natured displays of firepower' from his back porch in 'Hell's Angels'.

If I wish for anything, it's that I don't die in an ironic way, unless I'm around to appreciate it before I go. If there's one thing I hate, it's missing the good jokes.

I think I'm gonna have to get out of my tree and watch Fear nd Loathing again, let it sink in a bit.

Mars Volta - Frances the Mute - fucked in the head. If you like music, you need this album.