19/03/2006
This blog is metamorphosing
As you may have seen, I haven't blogged much lately. Apart from a
drought of thoughts, I've had enough of HTML updating, Thingamablog
(good as it is) and being unable to update from anywhere other than my
own broadband connection.
So I'm off to wordpress.com for a trial period. It's a bit of a step
down being unable to customise my blog, and to have to use someone
else's look and feel, but if it's one I like then I don't really mind.
Besides, it gives me so many advantages - I don't have to worry about my
HTML code not working properly, I can write from anywhere, and
it's free. I can't run Wordpress myself because blueyonder don't provide
MySQL, and I'm a bit of a cheapskate, so it's the best I can do.
Old articles remain here, but for the meantime...
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28/02/2006
I should really add an "Unfortunate Celebrity Deaths" category
Linda
Smith, RIP.
She was responsible for my favourite recent I'm Sorry I Haven't A Clue
moment: doing Talking Heads' "Psycho Killer" to the tune of Renee &
Renato's "Save Your Love" with such passion and overwhelming enthusiasm
that it became even funnier than it would normally have been. Another
too-young cancer casualty.
And Jim Davidson still lives.
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11/12/2005
R.I.P. Richard Pryor (1940-2005)
Damn,
damn, damn.
"I had some great things and I had some bad things. The best and
the worst... In other words, I had a life."
Fuck, this has been a bad year for comedians...
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26/11/2005
Random links
Just a few random things...
-
RIP George Best.
Shame it took so long.
-
Most
unnecessary reunion ever?
-
"Dick
and Dom slam BBC over quiz". Nothing whatsoever to do with
the fact that their truly dire Saturday morning show has just been
cancelled, of course... (I do agree it was really badly done, though,
but I thought D&D were the main reasons for it.)
-
Actually,
this isn't actually a bad idea as far as road tolls go; the
headline £4 toll only applies between 4PM and 6PM (like the current
system, only one way), and only for single-occupancy cars; if the car
has more than one person, it's £2, and at non-peak it stays as it is
(currently £1). Since the Forth Road Bridge is falling apart, it
really does need fixing, there's park-and-rides all around the
Edinburgh area...
-
Aerial rocks. So does AFX's Hangable Auto Bulb
compilation.
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17/11/2005
Consensus politics in action
The new, more open, "Have
Your Say" format on the BBC News website has turned into a
cesspool of idiots spouting received opinions, despite most discussions
supposedly being fully moderated. It's not quite unreadably crazy yet, but
it's getting there.
What's depressing is the kind of comments people are voting for - the
format provides a comments rating system that appears to be used by
people to bolster each other's stupid bollocks. The first sensible
comment out of all the highest ranked on this
bullying discussion is on page 3 - Mark Fairman pointing out that
bullying was in fact an accepted part of school life in the 1960s and
70s, from teacher down (see: Kes, Scum, Richard Branson's
and John Peel's autobiographies, your parent's recollections, much
of this b3ta discussion etc) and things are in fact getting better
in that bullying is now recognised as a problem. Of course, the kids are
still screwed anyway. Most of the rest of it is "bring back corporal
punishment! bring back borstal! bring back h...old fashioned punishment!
political correctness gone mad! revoke the Human Rights Act!" - all
absolute crap, but sadly believed by many.
It is this kind of consensus-jumping which caused the "TRAITORS!" front
page on the Sun, and it has absolutely nothing to do with the
truth. I know full well how little schools actually care about bullying;
one of my brothers recently had to spend a long period out of school
after being near strangled by someone that "no-one saw" (in a crowded
corridor, uh-huh), and I had a truly horrendous time at that very same
high school. I was attacked in a corridor in between the two papers of
my Higher English examination; I'm still amazed that I managed to keep
enough control in order to pass the thing. I've always suspected that
some of the stuff done to my brothers, who are all very different
individuals to me, was entirely because I was related to them; shit
filters down. Can't prove it, but I know.
The fact remains, though, that quite a lot of it is a "Code
of the Schoolyard" situation; the kind of thing that the Simpsons
skewered so well back in 1990, and not anything to do with the school's
(lack of an) anti-bullying policy. If no-one will talk, like in the case
of that assault on my brother (and other such assaults on both me and my
other brothers), then no-one can be punished - even in the best case
scenario, it's he said he said, and in the worst case scenario, it's
he's had to go to hospital for two days and stay out of school for a
fortnight but he doesn't know who his attacker is and no-one else will
even dare say anything happened, and it's this more than anything else
that stops people from going to teachers in the first place. Crappy
enforcement of existing rules, and wholesale ignoring of anti-bullying
policies, is definitely a problem, but bullying is an odd issue; this
almost omertà-like
enforced silence is a symptom of the fear that bullies cause and
administer, and of entrenched societal attitudes that are not being
confronted often enough.
And as for societal attitude, look no further than this
Guardian Weekend article on homophobic bullying - the type of
bullying that earns you a "Get Out Of Trouble Free" card. As the guy
from Stonewall points out in the article, you don't even have to be gay
to suffer from homophobic bullying; you just have to not be within
someone's Straight Stereotype. And since schools still think they're
working on a Section 28 agenda, if you get bullied that way
you're probably doomed.
I wrote a TV script some years ago, in a bout of depression related to
rememberances of my high school years, called School's Out;
conceived as a series of satirical sketches about the education system,
it instead evolved during writing into an interlinked venomous rant,
occasionally taking setting ideas from things like the deep-fat-fryer
torture scene from Spooks, aimed at no-one and everyone in
particular (and, cheerfully, bookended with a teenager committing
suicide to a Mogwai song; I was listening to "Happy Songs For
Happy People" a lot at the time). It's way too raw to even consider
sending it anywhere, but possibly with some toning down and serious
restructuring/rewriting it might at least become readable. So that's my
new writing project - making a School's Out serious revision that
I feel secure enough, at least, to post on here.
Probably won't happen, but I can always hope...
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07/07/2005
I really can't think of anything to say at this point
...
...
...
...
...
My
condolences to the people of London.
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02/07/2005
Live 8 blogging #2: Bollocks...
...Venus Williams won. I thought Lindsey Davenport deserved it for her
first two sets, and the way she was handling that all-out assault in the
third... Still, it's not that bad, at least Venus was playing extremely
well (from the second set tie-break onwards), so congratulations to her.
The problem with Live 8, musically, is that all the interesting acts
aren't doing the British concert. Pet Shop Boys are in Russia, Bjork was
in Japan, the Cure and Muse are in Paris, Brian Wilson and Roxy Music (avec
Eno) are in Berlin. There is good news, though; Duran Duran are in
Italy. The London gig has Paul McCartney and the Floyd, but
that's about it. It may make for good ratings to have several hundred
Coldplays and Robbies, but it turns me off and I'm sure it turns others
off too.
And I mean, come on, UB40? For crying out loud. (I didn't even
know they were still going...)
More blogging for the Floyd. And maybe even before.
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23/06/2005
Reasons for BitTorrent #1...
I've just obtained another huge cache of I'm
Sorry I Haven't A Clue MP3s. Some kind souls have dubbed their
entire radio-tape collections into MP3 format going right back to
episode one, and posted them on the ukn*** torrent site; meaning that I
have hour after hour of Humph and co available at my disposal. And it's
really good to have, too - there's nothing better than having an instant
laugh available at a hit of the RANDOM key. Courtesy of the various
torrents, I'm not missing that many ISIHACs - and mostly early
ones, I'm complete from 1996 onwards - and 32kbit MP3, which most of
them are in, is still very listenable for speech radio.
Not much of this will ever be released on tape or CD - there's seven
whole days of it - and BBC7 won't repeat everything. So torrents like
these provide a sort of public service - preserving the programme's
memory. Besides, this form of sharing isn't new at all - tape traders
have been doing it since the invention of the cassette recorder, and the
Internet simply allows the rest of us to get in on the act. Plus there's Just
a Minute (right back to the very first episode) and Radio Active
and The Mary Whitehouse Experience and much much more unreleased
brilliant material out there, and that's not even counting the archive
TV... Some torrent sites are about more than porn and warez, you know,
and it's all the better for it.
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05/06/2005
There's bad news and good news...
Bad news: Richard Whiteley is having to take several months off Countdown
because of his pneumonia.
Good news: one of the guest presenters is apparently going to be Stephen
Fry. That's going to be unmissable.
For those of you unfamiliar with Countdown, it's possibly one of
the strangest long-running programmes on British TV. Wikipedia
has a decent article. It's one of those programmes that just shouldn't
work - it is run at a completely sedentary pace, by rights the games
should be mind-numbingly boring, most of the airtime is taken up by
Richard Whiteley's godawful puns, the prizes are legendarily poor and
there are Stannah Stairlift adverts in the commercial breaks. And yet it
does: it is one of the last survivors of the classic British game shows,
those where what counts is the competition rather than the prize money
(Countdown doesn't even have prize money), and it survives
because it just works. Everything from the bad jokes to Carol
Vorderman actually makes sense when put together - in a way they
wouldn't separately.
It does help that the game format is extremely simple, yet so hard to do
well - it allows everyone to join in, attempting to one-up each other,
and even the contestants on screen. And because it's so universal, even
the contestants are interesting; recently, an eight-year-old boy managed
to win two episodes, for example, even getting nine-letter words and the
Conundrum. It's fantastic that at least one old-style game show survives
to this day; I much prefer a game show which is actually about
intellectual challenge to something like the Weakest Link where
getting the questions right is actively discouraged, for example. And
it, University Challenge and Mastermind are the last
examples of their kind - shame, isn't it?
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24/05/2005
Campaign: Buy The Coldplay Single. Now.
Not because it's any good, but because you can prevent C**** F*** from
getting to Number One by doing so. Having Chris Martin on Top of the
Pops instead of the marketing-led horror of galactic proportions that is
the C**** F*** single would restore some of my faith in the people of
Britain that has been so, so hit lately.
BBC:
C**** F*** 'heading for top spot'
Do it now. Before it's too late. And if you do it, please post here!
And to the HMV guy in the article: I'm a student, and I want that frog
boiled now. There's your kitsch appeal.
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19/05/2005
Whew, that was a scare...
Finally got the blog back up and running, and looking even better than
the adapted thingamablog layout - I binned the non-working-in-IE kludge
involving my layout, one of Movable Style's and a lot of HTML coding,
and instead worked from V2.0 pages and added in the thingamablog control
code in order to create templates from scratch, and it's working and
looking even better than ever. So call it ISX.networks/2.5, like the
Winamp dudes.This version is better for people with text browsers, too,
although I'm not sure I get that many people who need them.
Now it's possible for IE users to actually see my blog, welcome all!
Although I do recommend you get
Firefox anyway, just because (although if you're using
Safari/konqueror/Opera etc, there's no urgent need.)
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18/05/2005
The real winner of the 2006 Console War will be...
...IBM. No question about it. Three cut-down, speed-emphasised PPC970
cores in the XBOX360, one cut-down PPC970 core and several vector
arithmetic units in Sony's 'Cell' PS3, and some form of PPC in the
Nintendo Revolution.
So, now they're all announed, where do the awards go to?
Design: Unquestionably Nintendo Revolution - that's one SLEEK
puppy, and it might even get smaller.Take
a look over at that and say it's not truly beautiful...
Second place: PS3, which might look nice in its black version. 'Nice
try' award goes to XBOX360, which might look a lot better in the flesh
than it does in pictures.
Games: Who the hell knows? Unreal Engine 3.0 looks amazing on the
PS3, though, and that was pretty much the only actual in-engine demo
there.
Feature list: It's well known that the PS2 is a pig to code for,
and Sony look like continuing that tradition with PS3 - which uses a
completely different paradigm to that used by most game developers, and
requires HiDef to boot. OTOH, now dual-core is coming to PC it's more
likely that games makers will make parallelisable engines; Unreal 3.0,
in fact, will probably be the first mainstream example of this, and
hence Cell might not be such a pig to code for if you're writing a lot
of maths-heavy (and especially physics-heavy) code in parallelisable
form. And the NVIDIA G70 graphics core they're using in the PS3 looks to
be another speed-demon; almost as big as the GFFX-6800 jump again
(says a 6800GT owner), so will be capable of the huge HDTV resolutions
Sony will demand of it. Also, it's got Blue-Ray, GTA and Gran Turismo.
XBOX360 may or may not be backwards compatible, but its aim is to become
your home media centre - it has MCE Extender built in, it also gives
HiDef, and it has Halo 3. It's tri-core, but they're all the same
(3.2GHz and watercooled) - so it's just like programming SMP on a PC.
And, like PS3, it has wireless controllers. Never underestimate the
power of the Vole.
Nintendo is being vague about what's actually in the Revolution, but we
do know it'll be able to play the complete Nintendo game library through
an Internet service, and have direct GCN compatibility. This is a Unique
Selling Point - a lot of geeks own modded XBOXes for XBMC and emulators,
and Revolution will make that second option unneccessary (while XBOX360
makes the first unneccessary, unless you don't have Windows MCE). There
is also a rumour going around that Revolution will provide a fan-game
capability, which could quite possibly be huge - take a look at the
homebrew GBA scene and realise exactly how vital it is, and take a look
at what's happening with the DS even so soon after release. Could
Nintendo finally have worked out that these people are to be cultivated,
not legalled out of existence? If they have, it could be, indeed, a
revolution.
Pricing: With the consoles being of such power as they are - 3GHz
RISC processors, watercooling and all - I don't expect them to come in
at any less than £299 for 360/PS3. Sony don't lose cash on consoles -
they made humongous profits on the PS2 right from the start, and there's
a shop down the street from me selling PSP Value Packs at £199 (which
isn't that far away from the official Sony UK price when it comes out) -
so this is almost certain. Revolution might come in less, because it's
almost certainly a much less powerful machine; but it will be the most
intriguing one. And XBOX360 will be out the gate first, coming out this
year; PS3 is a paper launch, and Revolution was just a sneak peek.
So fasten your seatbelts... it's going to be war.
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14/05/2005
Election 2005 - post-mortem
I did, in fact, stay up for the election. Instead of blogging, however,
I was on the #ukbloggers IRC channel gratefully hosted by Nick
Barlow, qwghlm.co.uk and
others, for whom I'm extremely grateful.
So, it's a third term and another big but more controllable majority for
Tony Blair. Not really a surprise; a surprise would have been if Howard
got in. Not very many surprises on the night, in fact; the only biggies
were that George Galloway somehow got back into Parliament (I'm not a
fan) and the fact that the Lib Dems made as few gains on Labour as they
did, despite having a very large percentage of the vote. And,
unfortunately, Blunkett's back in the Cabinet; ironically overseeing
Child Support; even worse, Blair replaced Geoff Hoon with one of the
only less suitable men in Parliament, the indescribable John Reid, and
Ruth Kelly's still there. My MP, Alistair Darling, got relected with a
reduced majority. Such is life.
The fact that Labour got a majority of 68 on only 37% of the vote means,
of course, that we need a much more proportional electoral system than
we have now; something Jack
'master of doublespeak' Straw doesn't seem to be able to comprehend
(link courtesy Nick
Barlow) in an article so godawful I'm surprised the Guardian
even agreed to print it. Nick makes the argument about as well as I
would, pointing out the 1997 manifesto commitment to an electoral reform
referendum (swiftly forgotten post 170-majority) and the ignoring of the
Jenkins commission. We may well not see a decent voting system from this
government, and it's a real shame - FPTP should have been consigned to
the history books long, long ago.
And may I just extend my commiserations to Tim Ireland (of Bloggerheads
and Backing Blair fame),
who is about to suffer four-to-five years of Anne
Milton... shame, really.
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08/05/2005
Welcome to ISX.networks/3.0!
Courtesy of a piece of software called Thingamablog,
I am now in the progress of converting the weblog over to a more, um,
'organised' look and feel... It's still not as easy to update as, say, a
MT weblog, but it's also a lot more secure and at least I can keep my
look and feel. I'm going to shift over all the old articles, so it won't
be a problem. Also, the Time page is staying -
I'll move it over to the new look in due course.
In the meantime, enjoy RSS feeds, a proper working archival and category
system, and much much more!
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05/03/2005
"Making Your Mind Up"
I'm watching BBC's reality-TV style Eurovision candidate show, Making
Your Mind Up, named after by far Britain's least subtle entry
to the ESC. Good things: Terry Wogan (you've got to love Wogan) and
Jonathan Ross, who is slagging off almost everything without care for
the consequences. Bad things: everything else, especially Gina
G (who was crap the first time) and Jordan/Katie Price, who really
shouldn't be doing this.
Song 1: Javine, ex out of Pop Rivals (kicked out of Girls
Aloud, controversially, in the knockout stages). Sounds like last year's
Eurovision winner, so quite frankly I'm all for it; Britain needs a
chance. Popjustice are gunning
for Javine and I may well end up going with them; you can vote online
(from 6:35pm), tee hee.
Song 2: Tricolore's "Brand New Day" (a G4-ish 'popera' hybrid)
has almost certainly the worst Eurovision candidate lyric for years:
If we could see the world through the eyes of a child
> We'd see
the dawn of a brand new day
Jonathan Ross is right about this one - as a ripoff of the Lion King
music - so of course is getting pasted by the audience. Hmm.
Song 3: Gina G. Flashback to the music. Rewind to 1996. Generic
Pop Song with nothing adventurous going on at all. So of course it will
do well.
Now they're going around Britain a la the real ESC to show
televote verdicts. I like Eurovision. I'm not sure I like this, though...
Song 4: Another ex-reality TV 'star', Andy Scott-Lee, relative
to Z-list celebrity Lisa. The problem with this song is basically that
it's a Westlife song, and there's nothing I hate more. It's a truly
horrible one too.
Song 5: "Jordan, aka Katie Price, or the other way round." Why
exactly is a six months pregnant, ex-Page 3 model, I'm A Non-Entity,
Get Me Into Here! 'star' doing entering a contest which she
probably won't be able to fly to? Surely she wouldn't be sick enough to
get an early Caesarean in order to go out there? Worse, the song's awful
- it comes from the same Generic Pop Song place as the Gina G song,
although is slightly catchier and much worse produced. Jonathan Ross is
claiming it's the best song, but this may be just because her dancers
rip off Fischerspooner's one-step clothes removal technique (she
doesn't, fortunately.)
To vote, send an email to eurovision@bbc.co.uk with the heading and text
reading 'SONG 1', 'SONG 2' etc. I recommend SONG
1, if only as the least worst option (why is it that no-one decent
ever tries entering?) Vote closes at 7:30pm, so get going.
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19/02/2005
Um... kinda late here, but... Roundup time!
entry posted by Inquisitor at 20:30
(permalink).
edited on: 08/05/2005 18:55.
categories: Misc
, Music
Yes, there has been yet another long break in transmission, mostly due
to my laziness. Also, I only just installed Dreamweaver on my new PC -
there were much more important things to do with a system with a
powerful graphics card, like Doom III - so have finally got around to
writing.
So it's time for a Culture Roundup. New Order's new album, Waiting For
The Sirens' Call, has what looks like Peter Saville's worst cover ever,
and it's a shame since from the unmastered MP3 leak I've heard it's
really a rather good album. Who knows, maybe there's something special
on the actual packaging; I wouldn't put that past Saville and Associates
(the people that brought us the Blue Monday sleeve that cost more to
manufacture than the price of the record) at all. Bloc Party are being
called the new Franz Ferdinand by people who haven't heard the Bloc
Party record, and by NME critics with nothing better to do. Michael
Jackson is 'ill'. And Pete Docherty's out on bail. Again.
What is it with Pete Docherty? How many different times has he been in
rehab? How many times has he been in jail? How many of Sanctuary's
millions has he blown on speed, coke, smack, crack, media publicity,
Kate Moss, and drugs rehabilitation he hasn't got the slightest want to
do? And how many really shitty songs does it take for Q and the NME to
stop comparing him to Kurt Cobain? The answers, as Dylan put it once,
are blowing in the wind.
And when he does kill himself, as he inevitably will (the only other
option is turning into a Shaun Ryder/Shane McGowan figure, since he
doesn't have the talent or the luck to be a Keith Richards, and I can't
see him doing that somehow), what's going to happen? Are we going to
have a black-bordered NME? They did it for John Peel, which was rather a
surprise since the modern NME doesn't give a toss about the real
alternative scene that John championed throughout his DJing life, so
Pete Docherty definitely doesn't deserve one. He'll get one, though. And
someone will refer to it as 'The Day The Music Died', probably a Q
writer. Damn, I'm getting depressed already.
Q really has gone downhill, hasn't it? It's really been pronounced over
the last two years; from providing an entirely readable magazine, to
doing features on Christina Aguilera, to dumbing down the reviews
section to the point where Britney Spears got a four-star review, to
putting paparazzi photos in the news section (the point where I stopped
buying), to running incessantly similar top-100 lists in every single
issue, and most importantly where a staff top 100 list put 'Definitely
Maybe' as the best British album of all time when it isn't even the best
British album of 1994 (Blur Parklife, Pulp His 'N' Hers, Manics Holy
Bible, Massive Attack Protection, Portishead Dummy, Radiohead The Bends,
Aphex Twin Selected Ambient Works II, Prodigy Music For The Jilted
Generation, and Morrissey Vauxhall & I are just some I can name) and so
on. I'm terrified its stablemate, MOJO, will go the same way; it, UNCUT
and Observer Music Monthly are the only three decent remaining music
magazines, and one of them comes free with a newspaper. (Tomorrow, by
the way.)
Unfortunately, commercial pressures mean it probably will, like it
killed off Select, Melody Maker and the non-awful NME; can't piss off
the Big Four, can you?
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