these past few days i've done some quite constructive things. and despite being a little hungover today, something i didn't really want to be, i feel pretty pleased with myself.
i bought a huge cd tower on thursday evening, 2 meters in height no less, from.. IKEA. that place is like a rabbit warren, its like some huge experiment in retail. you enter the building on the 1st floor, climb to the third, then slowly decent into home design hell, untill you're in the basement, expecting to see lucifer chained up there after being cast down from heaven when he ballsed up the war all those years ago.
its not hellish in the fire and brimstone way, its even worse, the whole store is like some garden of eden gone retail, every item is the apple, and there are snakes on every corner. i went in for a book case and nearly came out with a cuddly bat for my gf, and two stuffed panda's for gaz and madeline, not to mention all the scented candles i was seconds away from buying. a test of strong willpower indeed!
having passed that particular trial, i thought it was over, but no. the box weighed a tonne, understandably, and it was unweidly. so unwieldy infact that after the 10 minute walk to the taxi rank in ashton, i found it wouldn't go in. so i had to carry the damn thing about a mile and a half up a hill to get it to my parents house. i still bear the bruises on my hips from that journey.
once it was home, i built the thing and screwed it to the wall, job done. its now housing my indie and emo cds. i'll need another one if i buy anymore cd's.
furniture building aside, yesterday i cooked a meal, i say cooked, not took out of the freezer and heated up, actually bought prepared and cooked a full meal for 3. and so far no one's been sick! it was pretty boody nice to be fair, home made egg fried rice, cajun chicken and friend halumi. and it all came together at the same time surprisingly. like a giant mixer, the gas hobs the culinary eq's, the grill a bright red upfader. rice needed a bit of work, the way the packet told me to cook it was, on hindsight, bollocks, so i winged it anyway. next time i'll steam it from the start, because thats what touya does in cardcaptor sakura. next attempts, chicken teriyaki.
i feel like i've done something this weekend, and i cant wait to cook again, get some practice in so i can cook ria some top stuff when i go to greece again in september. and even more stuff when she gets home the following month.
Sunday, 13 July 2008
Thursday, 3 July 2008
nintendo days
recently i was playing on my better halves ninentdo ds, the game i was playing was animal crossing. there aren't really any aims to the game, you just potter about a town doing favors for people and collecting stuff in a kind of mini virtual world.
having set up my profile and named my character, i swiftly moved into my girlfriends house, and was a bit perturbed to find her asleep in a massive groovy polka dot double bed, whereas i was relegated to a tiny wooden thing not unlike you'd expect to find on a pirate ship or in a medieval prison.
anyway i digress, i wandered over to the local shop, to get a job (a fucking job of all things, i thought computer games were for escapism?!) from the owner, who made me plant some trees, and then some flowers. the trees stayed where they were, i nicked the red roses though, and left them as a present for the missus when she next loaded her game.
the original task set was to speak to everyone in the village, so i did, as quickly as possible, as lines and lines of unnecessary dialogue do my head in. only to be told upon completion by the smarmy foxy thing that owns the shop, that i have to do it all again and have actual conversations! at that point i decided i would go and steal more stuff.
unfortunately you can't steal many things in animal crossing, and nothing at all from peoples houses. so the lady with the cool pink stuff is safe from my planned reign of terror. there is also no pub, no drugs that i could find, and a distinct lack of powered vehicles in which to scream round the village in a 4am whilst blasting out cradle of filth.
animal crossing is a digital version of utopia, and not the kind of place i could spend very long at all. i even saw ria, while playing as her character, give a tiger a painting he wanted, that she had just bought, for FREE! i don't care how fucking grrrreat frosties are, if i'd just bought a painting for £250 quid, i'd want a minimum of £300 off that furry jungle dwelling menace, damn call it £500 to cover all the tourists he's more than likely eaten on his travels.
i think my conniving mercenary attitude to computer games comes through when playing games like this. i'm the kind of person who never spends the cash he earns in computer games, i just let it mount up and think what i could buy with it, should i want to. i'm like the scrooge mcduck of the nintendo generation.
thinking about it, i think i games based around the italian mafia might be more my thing, or the high tech virtual hacking of uplink.that said i did enjoy square enix's chocobo tales immensely until it put me up against a cat on a horse and asked me to remember a sequence of sounds a la parappa the rapper. rhythm action games are to me kryptonite is to superman, so i turned it off in a sulk and went to the pub.
having set up my profile and named my character, i swiftly moved into my girlfriends house, and was a bit perturbed to find her asleep in a massive groovy polka dot double bed, whereas i was relegated to a tiny wooden thing not unlike you'd expect to find on a pirate ship or in a medieval prison.
anyway i digress, i wandered over to the local shop, to get a job (a fucking job of all things, i thought computer games were for escapism?!) from the owner, who made me plant some trees, and then some flowers. the trees stayed where they were, i nicked the red roses though, and left them as a present for the missus when she next loaded her game.
the original task set was to speak to everyone in the village, so i did, as quickly as possible, as lines and lines of unnecessary dialogue do my head in. only to be told upon completion by the smarmy foxy thing that owns the shop, that i have to do it all again and have actual conversations! at that point i decided i would go and steal more stuff.
unfortunately you can't steal many things in animal crossing, and nothing at all from peoples houses. so the lady with the cool pink stuff is safe from my planned reign of terror. there is also no pub, no drugs that i could find, and a distinct lack of powered vehicles in which to scream round the village in a 4am whilst blasting out cradle of filth.
animal crossing is a digital version of utopia, and not the kind of place i could spend very long at all. i even saw ria, while playing as her character, give a tiger a painting he wanted, that she had just bought, for FREE! i don't care how fucking grrrreat frosties are, if i'd just bought a painting for £250 quid, i'd want a minimum of £300 off that furry jungle dwelling menace, damn call it £500 to cover all the tourists he's more than likely eaten on his travels.
i think my conniving mercenary attitude to computer games comes through when playing games like this. i'm the kind of person who never spends the cash he earns in computer games, i just let it mount up and think what i could buy with it, should i want to. i'm like the scrooge mcduck of the nintendo generation.
thinking about it, i think i games based around the italian mafia might be more my thing, or the high tech virtual hacking of uplink.that said i did enjoy square enix's chocobo tales immensely until it put me up against a cat on a horse and asked me to remember a sequence of sounds a la parappa the rapper. rhythm action games are to me kryptonite is to superman, so i turned it off in a sulk and went to the pub.
blisters on my brain
It was the year nineteen ***** and I was a lot younger than I am now. On the TV screen was the Wrekked Train, in the standard issue bomber jacket and wasp glasses, sneering his way through Vision Incision as the beats tripped and slipped around his distorted stream of consciousness lyrics. Like some cracked up stacked up urban poet from the future painting pictures of the big smoke, whether that be
This was my first exposure to the gritty twisted world of the Lo Fidelity Allstars, once bitten, never to recover. The seedy slimy inner city dioramas lyrically splattered against the back of my eyes by Dave Randall, vocodered, sliced, cut up and layered over almost but not quite trip hop, the dark under belly of the
Every cloud has a silver lining eh? Well, sometimes. This one did. But when part of your Hi Fi breaks down, it’s always the case.
I’d had the Marantz amplifier for a good three years or more, and not really thrashed it at all, music quality is more important than volume, though with pieces of kit like this, there’s a happy medium around 12 o’ clock on the volume dial itself.
Unfortunately around twelve months ago it started playing up, intermittently deciding it wasn’t going to power up, I’m sure it must have overheated in the summer of ’06 back at my parents but that’s by the by. It finally gave up the ghost last week and is now relegated to the pile of broken amplifiers that lie under my bed. I mean hey, I might meet someone who can repair these things on the cheap. Or at least for a fair price, something I won’t get at the local electrical repair shop staffed by young fellows who say innit a lot.
So after scouring the net for an amplifier that would take the 1v+ signal from my mixer, I came across the NAD C315BEE. Perfect.
Richer Sounds do a pretty cool price match scheme, so off I went to Stockport with a printout of the amp at another online retailer for £30 less. The manager did not want to match it, whether out of a dislike for the company selling it cheaper or maybe I didn’t look the stereotypical sort of clean cut respectable customer who would be spending such a large around of money on Hi Fi equipment, but he did, begrudgingly.
Amp sorted it was time to look around for some speaker stands, as everyone knows bookshelf speakers don’t sound right until they’re off the shelf and on some stands. I picked up some 9-cm high Gale ones for £50. I know they’re not exactly high end but once they’re filled with gravel or lead shot for weight, they’ll sing, or more accurately they’ll be pretty much inert, and help the Hi Fi system to sing.
And after a while cleaning contacts, fitting dum-dums, mounting and toe-ing, it really does. All my old CD’s sound like brand new albums, I can hear bits that id never heard before, notice little things like the sharp intake of breath before each line when Ben Gibbard sings, it brings more depth to the way Francis Mark and Ben Perri’s vocals intertwine.
Yes, today I am going to be listening to a lot of music, and it’s going to sound a whole lot better.
I’d had the Marantz amplifier for a good three years or more, and not really thrashed it at all, music quality is more important than volume, though with pieces of kit like this, there’s a happy medium around 12 o’ clock on the volume dial itself.
Unfortunately around twelve months ago it started playing up, intermittently deciding it wasn’t going to power up, I’m sure it must have overheated in the summer of ’06 back at my parents but that’s by the by. It finally gave up the ghost last week and is now relegated to the pile of broken amplifiers that lie under my bed. I mean hey, I might meet someone who can repair these things on the cheap. Or at least for a fair price, something I won’t get at the local electrical repair shop staffed by young fellows who say innit a lot.
So after scouring the net for an amplifier that would take the 1v+ signal from my mixer, I came across the NAD C315BEE. Perfect.
Richer Sounds do a pretty cool price match scheme, so off I went to Stockport with a printout of the amp at another online retailer for £30 less. The manager did not want to match it, whether out of a dislike for the company selling it cheaper or maybe I didn’t look the stereotypical sort of clean cut respectable customer who would be spending such a large around of money on Hi Fi equipment, but he did, begrudgingly.
Amp sorted it was time to look around for some speaker stands, as everyone knows bookshelf speakers don’t sound right until they’re off the shelf and on some stands. I picked up some 9-cm high Gale ones for £50. I know they’re not exactly high end but once they’re filled with gravel or lead shot for weight, they’ll sing, or more accurately they’ll be pretty much inert, and help the Hi Fi system to sing.
And after a while cleaning contacts, fitting dum-dums, mounting and toe-ing, it really does. All my old CD’s sound like brand new albums, I can hear bits that id never heard before, notice little things like the sharp intake of breath before each line when Ben Gibbard sings, it brings more depth to the way Francis Mark and Ben Perri’s vocals intertwine.
Yes, today I am going to be listening to a lot of music, and it’s going to sound a whole lot better.
Out Of Touch
You know when you're getting old when the activities of youngsters start to become utterly mystifying.
I am officially old, because there seems to be a trend of small people wearing bright pink tutu's in the middle of the day, and I have absolutely no idea why.
See in my day, tutu's were worn by (preferably) slim girls in night clubs, while they consumed vast amounts of drugs and danced to their selected genre of dance music for hours on end. Trance and Hard House attracted a lot of said people. It was fun, and all a bit tongue in cheek. And lets face it, cyber was fucking naff then, and its naff now.
Why groups of 12 year olds are sporting said clothing, wandering around Manchester at half one I the afternoon is quite honestly, beyond me. Have they been to some secret all night rave only for 12 year olds? Did they spend the past 15 hours consuming cans of red bull an eating skittles to keep themselves dancing? Can anyone tell me why on earth these girls are wearing this attire?
Saying that, im not that out of the loop, the other predominant subculture currently alarming the white middle classes is Emo, and working in an office with a big black fringe, skate trainers and snakebite piercings, safely qualifies me, i'd say, as corp-emo. Yes kids, you can have a proper job and still look like this! You don't have to cut your hair, remove the unsightly piercings from your mouth or wear work shoes! Woop!
I am officially old, because there seems to be a trend of small people wearing bright pink tutu's in the middle of the day, and I have absolutely no idea why.
See in my day, tutu's were worn by (preferably) slim girls in night clubs, while they consumed vast amounts of drugs and danced to their selected genre of dance music for hours on end. Trance and Hard House attracted a lot of said people. It was fun, and all a bit tongue in cheek. And lets face it, cyber was fucking naff then, and its naff now.
Why groups of 12 year olds are sporting said clothing, wandering around Manchester at half one I the afternoon is quite honestly, beyond me. Have they been to some secret all night rave only for 12 year olds? Did they spend the past 15 hours consuming cans of red bull an eating skittles to keep themselves dancing? Can anyone tell me why on earth these girls are wearing this attire?
Saying that, im not that out of the loop, the other predominant subculture currently alarming the white middle classes is Emo, and working in an office with a big black fringe, skate trainers and snakebite piercings, safely qualifies me, i'd say, as corp-emo. Yes kids, you can have a proper job and still look like this! You don't have to cut your hair, remove the unsightly piercings from your mouth or wear work shoes! Woop!
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