Regurgitator aren't as mental as they used to be, but they still have a Crazy Noise Box on stage with them. 

Slipknot earn their bachelors degree from Crazy Go Nuts University. 

More climbing on top of the drum kit. The guy who's supposed to be playing it is lurking around in the background. Notice also the rubbish tin stuck to the side of the kit. That's for beating with a baseball bat, or alternatively, one's head. 

This would have been a really good picture if all those arms weren't in the way. 

This guy spent more time sitting on top of his drums than actually playing them, but then again, with nine people in the band you can't expect them all to have something to do in every song. 

YEAH! ROADIE!!!! 

Gee, Scribe looks popular! 

Kid Koala. Scratchy decks guy. Also pretty good. 

The line to see Slipknot at the signing tent was bigger than the audience for The Have. 

Gee, who could all these people in black clothes be lining up to see at the signing tent? 

But they were pretty good. 

Not many people showed up for The Have either. 

With only a half hour set, Pluto only had time to play their good songs. 

Not many people showed up for Pluto, but they were fucking good. 

The audience for the Donnas was pretty tepid. 

"Is anyone here on P?" 

"This is a really scary song, and even though it's the middle of the afternoon, I reckon you guys are going to shit yourselves when you hear it." 

We are Deja Voodoo! And this is 'We Are Deja Voodoo!' 

Hey look, some people actually like Steriogram! Who knew? 

People are already using condoms as balloons. 

I'd say something about how I found this gig a bit disappointing, but I hear that the guy in the middle gets his mates together to beat people up who dis the bleeders on the internet. 

My first act of the day: The Bleeders. 

Behold, a mighty throng of munters! 

Punks, Metallers, Goths and general wierdos near the end of their annual pilgrimage to Ericsson Stadium.

Thousands of sweaty munters enjoy an early morning dose of 8 Foot Sativa 

Goddamn Piece of Shit Motherfucker

Get up in the morning. Think very carefully about what I need to bring. Pack bags. Feel like I've forgotten something. Think some more about what I need to bring. Can't think of anything. Fuck around for a few hours. Still feel like I've forgotten something. Think really really hard. Can't think of anything. Get ready and leave. On the way to the airport, still feel like I've forgotten something. Check wallet for big day out ticket. Dismiss feeling as routine paranoia.

Get to airport. Surrounded by screaming kids for four hours. Forget about nagging feeling. Get to mum's place, talk to family, old friends etc. Sit down for dinner.

Goddamn piece of shit motherfucker.

I forgot my motherfucking camera attachment for my phone.

FUCK!!!!

What a goddamn fucking retard. There'll be no moblogging tomorrow. Maybe next year. Hopefully I'll write up something during the weekend, but there'll be no pictures.

This really fucks me off. I was looking forward to doing this moblogging thing.

[...]

OK, just went and borrowed mum's digital camera. We will have pictures, but not tomorrow.

OK Just One More

This guy seems to be a pretty decent writer. And he's used his talents to write gory 'choose your own adventure' stories about zombies. Entertaining but cheesy.

Temporary Cessation of Posting

Tomorrow I'm flying up north to the big day out, so I probably won't post much until next week.

With the exception of course, of my planned BDO moblogging. My phone camera is one of the earlier models, so I don't know how good the pictures will be, but we'll see how it turns out...

Special 'Lonely Depressing Heartbreak Day' Bonus Post

The Top Ten Worst Album Covers Of All Time

Jon Tells It Like It Is

Over at Grumpy Gamer they're talking about why there are no adventure games being made anymore.

Now this is the topic of almost all comment threads over there, the Grumpy Gamer being Ron Gilbert of Monkey Island and Maniac Mansion fame, but as I read it I realised that I have a somewhat unique opinion about this issue.

I think the two reasons that no adventure games are made anymore are that 1) The classic adventure game interface is archaic, and 2) 'Adventure games don't sell' is a deeply held belief of the industry.

Lets start with the second point – adventure's like Kings Quest and Monkey Island were once the best selling franchises in the business, but as PC hardware improved they were eventually surpassed by more fast paced and acronym-mungus genres like FPS and RTS. This followed the trend of the gamer demographic moving from old geeks to 14 year olds who wanted blood and boobies. So it was understandable that the adventure genre declined. Nowadays the mainstream companies view it as a dead medium. But when was the last time one of them ever put out a real adventure game? The last one I can think of was Gabriel Knight 3, and that was over 5 years ago. While it wasn't a huge seller like Halo or Grand Theft Auto, it didn't exactly flop either. Look at The Longest Journey, one of the only attempts in recent times to make a classic adventure game. It was published by a small developer, in an unpopular genre, but still managed to get copies on store shelves even in New Zealand.(On top of all that it was a shit game too).

With the demographics of gamers broadening so much in recent years, you'd think that there would be a large potential audience for a more cerebral, less action-oriented style of gaming. But no, conventional wisdom says 'Halo and GTA made lots of money, lets do that!'. The end of Gabriel Knight 3 involved a series of jumping/timing action puzzles, in contrast to the logic and reasoning based puzzles throughout the rest of the game. Jane Jenson, the writer, said after releasing it that she felt like she had to put those last bits in, because any gameplay element that wasn't immediately obvious to understand made the company execs nod off during their demonstrations, they knew that only Action! and Danger! sold games.

My first point is just that one of the things that turns the modern gamer off recent attempts at the adventure genre is the antiquated interface. In the olden days an adventure game would let you indicate what to do by having a huge list of verbs at the bottom of the screen, (and you'd usually end up trying each of them in order on every object you could find when you were stuck). In later days these were combined into a single mouse pointer which could be changed into a variety of different modes in order to represent different ways of interacting with something. While it kind of made sense at the time, compared to other games out there at the moment, it's very non-intuitive, fiddly, and obstructive to gameplay. No one likes it when you realise 'Oh, I should have used 'turn' on the door handle instead of 'open'. Even Gabriel Knight 3 and The Longest Journey used the same kind of UI, despite their ambitions to break out of the adventure ghetto.

So, if I were given lots of money and told to make an adventure game, here's what I'd do:

1. License the Doom3 engine (or maybe Source). We need lots of nifty graphics to impress the unwashed masses of the gaming press and the coke snorting suits who're paying us to make a game.

2. Get someone with an established reputation like Ron Gilbert or Jane Jenson on board as a writer, to make sure we do end up with a game worth playing!

3. Make sure the damn interface is good! My suggestion would be something along the lines of Splinter Cell. You walk up to something, and a list of potential actions appears. Get rid of the inventory too! No one likes having to try every object on every other one, because there's some obscure combination that will reward you with the solution to the puzzle. If you've got the right object in your position, it just brings up another option in the list when you get wherever you're supposed to use it.
   

It might not outsell The Sims, but I reckon there's no reason a game made along those lines wouldn't make money.

BDO Moblogging

Well, other than Vodafone conspiring to publicly display my cellphone number on the web, it looks like my moblogging test is a success. (That's Mt. Ruapehu by the way, there's really good tramping around there.)

So, this Friday I'll be at the Big Day Out, and all going well I should be doing some live moblogging! I'm not sure if I should feel like a real geek for doing it or not, but it should be fun anyway.

Moblog Test

There should be a picture here.

Update: Changed the title of the post, since Vodafone automatically changes it to 'You have a PXT from XXXXXX'. Wasn't too happy about having my cellphone number posted on the web.

Update2: As Joel points out, the alt text of the photo still had my number in it too....

Bridge of Birds

By Barry Hughart

Yet another book that has been sitting in the 'to read' pile for well over a year. I'm very glad that I finally got around to this one. It's a fantasy novel, but a far from conventional one. While most books in the genre come with several pages worth of maps before the story starts, detailing some weird and unfamiliar landmass (usually with the good guys starting the in the top left corner, and the bad guys living down the bottom right), Bridge of Birds skips all that, and is just set 'in China'.

Most westerners are unfamiliar enough with Asian history and culture that Chinese myths and ancient history make a good substitute for fantasy anyway. I have no idea how much Hughart has borrowed from real Chinese mythology, or how much historical detail is accurate (I'm guessing 'not a lot'), but reading this book made me want to find out. (As if I need anything else on my list of things to read about).

Bridge of Birds is the story of a young man named Number Ten Ox, and his quest to cure the children of his village of a mysterious illness. He is guided along his travels by Master Li Kao, a scholar with a slight flaw in his character (he's an alcoholic). It's a pretty standard beginning to a fantasy story, but the exotic flavour of the setting and characters make it a unique read right from the start. The story is told from the point of view of Number Ten Ox, and Hughart does a great job of evoking a truly exotic culture, a welcome relief from the faux-oriental europe-with-curvy-swords-and-pointy-hats that lesser fantasy authors invariably stick somewhere on their big map.

The book is divided into three parts, and each part is somewhat different in style. The first part starts out fairly dry and formal, but by the third chapter, when they arrive in the Worst Wine Shop in China, it becomes riotously funny. Master Li's elaborate schemes to cheat the wealthy and arrogant are reminiscent of trickster myths from all kinds of cultures, and it's tremendous fun to read about a bunch of clever, good-hearted heroes handily defeating the mighty and powerful with only their wits.

The second part is more of an adventure story, with the character's visiting all manner of strange and wonderful locations in their quest. It's a little weaker than the other two parts, but still very enjoyable.

In the final third, the story becomes more and more mythic, before reaching a poetic and moving conclusion. All the disparate threads in the story are brought together in clever elegant ways. It feels contrived, but this is easily forgivable because it's easy to tell early on that something like this is going to happen, and the book's inescapable charm more than makes up for it.

Heartily recommended. I'm buying the sequel as soon as I can.

Friday Drunken Link Blogging

The Corpuscle is a very literate erudite blog. It has impressed me with the quality of it's writing, and has hence been added to the blog roll. Behold the Miscellaneous Blogs category, as it begins to swell and grow like some unholy cancer!

Real Climate, a blog about the science behind global warming, and why dumbasses like Michael Crichton don't know what they're talking about.

Perry Bible Fellowship. Another funny webcomic.

Chomsky and Zinn deconstruct The Fellowship of the Ring.

Chomsky: [...] Now, again, surely, among these Moria Orcs were some Orc radicals — aggressive, angry, militant radicals. We shouldn't understate that.

Zinn: Well, look how the Orcs grow up. What do you expect?

Chomsky: I mean, what other options have they?

Zinn: I dare say that, were I an Orc, I might possibly be one of those terrorist Orcs, shooting arrows at the Fellowship myself.

Chomsky: Here comes the Balrog. Notice Gandalf's unilateral action. "Quick, get away, I have to fight this thing alone!"

Under Construction

In the absence of having anything of substance to write about, I have updated my profile and fiddled around with my links. If you've got nothing to do, Jeremy's started posting again, so go read what he has to say instead.

Network TV Can Eat Me

So they've started showing Joss Whedon's show Firefly on TV3 at 11pm on Tuesdays. Firefly is the show he started just before Buffy and Angel finished, and it got canned after half a season. I managed to miss the first few episodes, because I was expecting it to show on a wednesday, but quite frankly, tv3 have fucked me off a bit here. I found it pretty annoying having to record Angel when they showed it at the same ungodly hour, and since Firefly will probably be out on DVD within a year, I feel little need to make an effort to watch it on TV.

It really annoys me that tv3 runs these shows so late. I figure they just say "These geeks will keep bugging us until we run this show, but we can get away with showing it in the middle of the night / on sunday afternoon / on friday night because none of them have lives and they'll be happy no matter what time it screens". And yet they have room for half a dozen home renovation shows every week at prime time...

First Day Back At Work

I would like to express my displeasure at the following things:

Getting up at 7am and not being able to have a drink.
Idiots in huge SUVs that almost run you off the road because they can't see you over the side of their big fucking doors.
Rainy weekday mornings.
Sunny weekday afternoons.
Having to go to the gym.
Final Fantasy X minigames.
Early bedtime.
Inscrutable girlfriends.

However at the same time I guess I'm glad the following things are around to mitigate the crap things:

Strongbad emails.
Tool.
Sunny evenings.
Flatmates who can cook.
Inscrutable girlfriends.

The Da Vinci Code

by Dan Brown

My prejudice against mainstream fiction would normally keep me well away from this book, but it was a christmas present so I gave it a try. At first glance the plot is standard thriller stuff, a man and a woman, framed for a murder and trying to uncover the identity of the real killer, but it also involves secret societies, Templars and Freemasons and so on.

Brown is a reasonable writer, I managed to breeze through the book in a couple of hours and it was never boring or a chore to read. The biggest criticism I can make is that the characters are about as two dimensional as they come. Whenever the narrative strayed into the characters private thoughts I felt like I was reading half rate fanfic or something. The other big problem for me was that I found the plot to be incredibly predictable. On the first page we meet a character whose surname is Sauniere. Before too long we meet his grandaughter Sophie. If you know what those names mean, you can probably guess where the story is going to end up.

So I knew the Super Incredible Twist that so blew away the critics quoted on the blurb almost before starting the book. That kind of created an obstacle to my enjoyment of it, but (and I'll use roundabout language here to avoid spoilers) I do find the subject of the twist to be quite fascinating, and there were a few interesting details about it (mostly to do with Da Vinci's art) that I'd never heard before, so I'm glad I read it. I could have done without having to read the generic thriller to get to those bits though. However I will give the author credit for keeping me guessing as to the nature of the baddie all the way up to the cheesy, cliched revelation.

One more note, the version I read was the collectors edition hardback with lots of pretty pictures. The pictures were very pretty and complemented the story very nicely.

What Have You Done To My Little Cable Boy?

Seinfeld Volume 1

The box set of the first two seasons of Seinfeld on DVD. At this stage, the show was still developing, and isn't as funny as it became later on. It's still worth watching though, as there are a couple of classic episodes here, such as The Chinese Restaurant and The Jacket.

The interesting thing is that it's hard to pull individual quotes out from these shows to demonstrate how funny it is. The humour doesn't really come out unless you've seen the episode in it's entirety. The funniest bits are usually at the end, when separate plot threads collide in unexpected ways, or a trivial plot element from the beginning returns with unexpected significance.

A lot of effort has gone into the extras here, with loads of commentaries and interviews by the writers, producers and cast, and the obligatory bloopers and deleted scenes. The best one though is an hour long behind the scenes feature, which tells the story of how the show come to be, and the process of making the first two seasons (fraught of course with interference from the brain dead studio execs, "Jerry and Elaine should become a couple!"). These sort of things are usually damn boring, but I found this one to be pretty interesting.

2004 Roundup

In lieu of a real post today, I'll do one of these question list thingys.

2004 Roundup (from David Farrar)

What did you do in 2004 that you’d never done before?
Visited Europe. Drank a whole bottle of spirits in one day (and, God willing, that will never happen again).

Did you keep your new years’ resolutions, and will you make more for next year?
Nah, I think new years' resolutions are a bunch of shit

Did anyone close to you give birth?
Yup. I've got two new cousins.

Did anyone close to you die?
No, touch wood

What countries did you visit?
Australia, Singapore, Germany, Greece and Slovenia, a very busy year!

What would you like to have in 2005 that you lacked in 2004?
Can't really think of anything. Maybe a bit more satisfaction from work.

What dates from 2004 will remain etched upon your memory, and why?
Dec 26 (tsunami) and probably Nov 2 (Bush re-election).

What was your biggest achievement of the year?
What was your biggest failure?
Too much self-reflection! Jon disdains such indulgances!

Did you suffer illness or injury?
Nope.

What was the best thing you bought?
My shiny red 7 string guitar

Whose behavior merited celebration?
Muse for playing here twice, APC for touring here too and releasing two albums. Neal Stephenson for releasing two huge awesome behemoth books. And in politics, Ashraf Choudhary for voting for the CUB and telling the conservative Muslims to get stuffed (and all the other MPs who voted for it too), and the Supreme Court for telling the SIS to get stuffed WRT Ahmed Zaoui.

Whose behavior made you appalled and depressed?
George Bush and the Republicans

Where did most of your money go?
Towards overseas travel.

What did you get really, really, really excited about?
The Muse concert, buying my new guitar.

What song will always remind you of 2004?
Slither - Velvet Revolver

Compared to this time last year, are you:
i. happier or sadder? happier!
ii. thinner or fatter? thinner!
iii. richer or poorer? richer!

What do you wish you’d done more of?
Reading

What do you wish you’d done less of?
Drinking

How did you spend Christmas?
With family

Did you fall in love in 2004?
Better not say... :)

How many one-night stands?
Depends how you count it. We'll say a half.

What was your favorite TV program?
Angel

Do you hate anyone now that you didn’t hate this time last year?
Nope. My undying emnity remains undiminished.

What was the best book you read?
American Gods - Neil Gaiman

What was your greatest musical discovery?
Slipknot

What did you want and get?
New guitar, keyboard.

What did you want and not get?
Flat screen monitor for my home computer.

What was your favorite film of this year?
Sean of the Dead

What did you do on your birthday, and how old were you?
24. Had a party, drank a whole lot of absinthe and can't remember most of what happened.

What one thing would have made your year immeasurably more satisfying?
Not being single for so much of it.

How would you describe your personal fashion concept in 2004?
Black.

What kept you sane?
Playing guitar

Which celebrity/public figure did you fancy the most?
Toni Marsh

What political issue stirred you the most?
Civil Unions, although there are other close contenders.

Who did you miss?
My sister Lucy and my Dad.

Who was the best new person you met?
My former flatmates who I don't see anymore.

Tell us a valuable life lesson you learned in 2004:
A little P, smoked in moderation, is good for you.

Quote a song lyric that sums up your year:
"Lament for my cock, Sore and crucified, I seek to know you."

Best of 2004 - Part 2

Best Game:
Thief 3
Runners-up: Half-Life 2, The Simpsons Hit & Run

Best Game That Came Out Last Year But I Didn't Play Till This Year:
Beyond Good & Evil

Worst Game:
Sonic Heroes

Best Music:
Doom 3

Icewind Dale 2 Award For The Best Game I Bought But Will Probably Never Finish:
FarCry

Webmasters Choice Award For Special Achievement In T&A:
Final Fantasy X2

Best of 2004 - Part 1

So I just realised that all sorts of other blogs were doing end of year round ups a couple of weeks ago. It never made sense to me to do these things until the beginning of the new year, I mean, what if something really cool came out on Dec 31? Anyway, for this reason I figure the 3rd is as good a date as ever to do my own one of these things. I'll do a music one today, and hopefully I'll follow it up with a games one in a day or two.

Best Albums (in no particular order):
Jordan Reyne - Passenger
Einsturzende Neubauten - Perpetuum Mobile
Skinny Puppy - The Greater Wrong of the Right
Velvet Revolver - Contraband
Slipknot - The Subliminal Verses

Best Concert:
A Perfect Circle
Runner Up - Muse

Biggest Disappointment:
Rammstein - Reise Reise

Most Obnoxious Song:
Hoobastank - The Reason

Honorable Mentions:
Green Day - American Idiot
Maroon 5 - All their shit
Op-shop, Eight - All their shit too
Incubus - Talk Shows on Mute

(OK I could go on forever here...)

Most Unbelievably Overplayed Song:
U2 - Vertigo

Biggest Sellout From A Band That I Thought Was Too Shit To Even Be Able To Sell Out:
Cradle of Filth - Nymphetamine

Trent Reznor Award For The Best Album That Was Supposed To Come Out But Didn't:
Trent Reznor, for both the new NIN album and Tapeworm

The Music of the Primes

by Marcus du Sautoy

I ordered this book of Amazon in a drunken fit of consumerism over a year ago. It's taken me a long time to get round to reading it, possibly because the idea of reading a book about maths didn't excite me that much, but fortunately it turned out to be a pretty easy read.

It's the story of mathematical research into the nature of prime numbers. There's some pretty spooky stuff in there about where maths actually comes from, and a whole bunch of eccentric mathematicians to read about, so it's not a bore to read. The author is very passionate in his love of mathematics, which is good, but he tends to fly off into hyperbole when talking about his favorite mathematicians. He also tends to be dismissive of other pursuits, such as physics and chemistry, and downright insulting towards the humanities. My main complaint however, is that there isn't enough maths in it. It explains, in general terms, the results of the proofs involved, but it never shows any of the actual maths. I guess it's aimed at a more general audience than me. But it's made me think about buying some more maths and science books at some stage. Well at least after I get through the huge backlog of books I've had for over a year.

Apologies

In an earlier edition of the Wildebeest Asylum, we reported that Half-Life 2 finished without explaining any of the story. I am informed that in fact it is all explained, you just have to hunt for it. We apologise for any inconvenience this may have caused.

The editorial board would also like to apologise to anyone who had the misfortune to interact with them on new years eve. Bear in mind that any unpleasantness or discomfort you may have experienced was due to the prodigious feat of the consumption of almost an entire bottle of Bacardi.

The Runes of the Earth

By Stephen Donaldson

Like I mentioned a couple of posts ago, the Thomas Covenant novels were my favorite series of books when I first read them years ago. Twenty years after the last one, he's started a new trilogy. I was initially skeptical, since I always got the impression that he wrote the second trilogy mainly because of fan pressure and worried that a third one might be even more unnecessary. But according to his statement on his website he conceived of the second and third chronicles together, and it's just taken him this long to decide he's become a good enough writer to finish the tale.

The new series starts ten years after the last series, and the protagonist is Covenant's sidekick from the second chronicles, Linden Avery. Once again she is summoned to the Land (a magical fantasy world), where several thousand years have passed since the last time she was there, and encounters Lord Foul, Donaldson's Sauron stand-in. This time Foul is working through Roger and Joan Covenant, Thomas' son and ex-wife. It's all somewhat complicated and twisted, but it's a good setup for a potent climax to the story. The first book just explains what's happened to the Land in the intervening time, and introduces all the main characters.

The book is no disappointment, although it will be hard to really judge it until the series is complete. It does seem obvious that he set it all up in the previous series, although he cleverly made it seem like there were no loose ends at the end of the second chronicles. Lord Foul's primary weapon has always been despair, and evoking despair has always been one of Donaldson's strengths as a writer. For the first six books, it almost always seemed like the heroes were truly fucked, and there was no way they could ever win. A real achievement when you know it's an epic fantasy story and the good guys have to win in the end anyway. In the first series he did this by making Covenant a real fucked up mess of a man, and when he sorted himself out at the end of the first series introduced Linden Avery, a real fucked up mess of a woman. Now both Covenant and Avery have saved the Land in the past, and defeated their personal demons in the process. They're confidant that they can do so again. As a result, The Runes of the Earth is vastly more upbeat than the previous books. I'm not sure if this is a mis-step on the authors part, a deliberate change of direction, or if he's deliberately lulling us into a false sense of comfort before really fucking things up. Based on the surprising twist at the end of the book, and the various ominous hints dropped along the way, I'd bet on the latter.

A note on titles, 'The Runes of the Earth' - mysterious and evocative, in a numinous sort of way. Not all that menacing. The next book is 'Fatal Revenant'. Sounds brutal. I'm looking forward to it!

They Were Right About You

aMotion - A Perfect Circle

It took me a while to track this one down, as for some reason they weren't selling it in the boring mall CD stores, but it turned out to be well worth the wait. For some reason I thought this was a live concert DVD, but it turns out it's actually a music video collection. This is excellent news because I rate APCs videos right up there with Tools.

So the DVDs got all of their videos, including a few that I'd never seen before. There are commentary tracks by Maynard for most of them, and a few commentaries from Billy too. And of course there are a whole bunch of random special features, such as the obligatory photo gallery (which includes a tactless but amusing upskirt shot of James Iha dressed as Dorothy from the Wizard of OZ). The best feature is undoubtedly Maynards commentaries, in which he talks plainly about the meaning behind the songs and the ideas behind the videos. They're very interesting, and it's just a pity that there isn't one for Imagine. The second best feature is the video clips, which are mostly just random weird home video footage of the band backstage, but it's funnier and cooler than you'd think.

The videos themselves are pretty cool too of course. Three Libras and Imagine are quite easily two of my favorite music videos ever made. Judith and Weak and Powerless are pretty awesome too. The unedited version of The Outsider is quite good too. It's still ridiculous and stupid, but that's kind of the point. Like The Outsider, Thinking About You is another Bikini Bandits video, only even dirtier and more obscene. Aside from that, it's also not as professionally done, and doesn't really make a good video. It's not really any surprise that I havn't seen it shown on tv before. Another one I hadn't seen before was Blue. They had a competition for fan-submitted videos, and this one won. (I guess it's a cheap way to get a video done). It's actually pretty good. And of course, there's Counting Bodies Like Sheep. I still don't like this one that much, it's just way too obvious and shrill. (Or maybe it's just that this is the only APC video with no hot chicks in it.) Lastly, there's a live concert version of The Noose. The video's a bit wanky (all dark with weird effects over the band), but it's a cool version of the song.

It also comes with a audio CD of remixes which I don't rate very much. I think they would all work a lot better with Maynards voice taken out since it never seems to match with the radically reshaped songs. The best tracks are James Iha's remixes, which leave the structure of the songs unchanged and merely change the instruments, and the two versions of The Hollow at the end, done by Paz and Troy (the two who left the band before Thirteenth Step).

Seasons Greetings

Well tomorrow I'm off to the Tron for a week or so (assuming my flight isn't overbooked!) to see the progenitors for christmas, and for the remainder of the holidays I'm planning on being inebriated. For these reasons, expect little to no blogging for a while.

He Clenched His Necessity

The guy who wrote Band of Brothers is writing a movie adaptation of the first Thomas Covenant novel.

The first two Thomas Covenant trilogy were my favorite books ever the last time I read them, which was about five years ago. The author, Stephen Donaldson, has released the first book in the third and final trilogy this year, over twenty years since the last Thomas Covenant book (and I'm in the middle of reading it right now).

I'm not too happy about the news of the movies. These books delve deep into the psyche of the protagonist, and I think it would be very hard to do justice to them on the big screen. While a really good writer and director could make an excellent series, I can see it easily turning into a ginormous shit fest in the wrong hands.

Well, the movie probably won't even happen, but if it does, and it turns out good, I'll be very very happy. If it turns out to star Tom Hanks as Thomas Covenant (a leper and a rapist by the way) and Catherine Zeta Jones as Linden Avery, I will be very very angry.

The Appointed Time Comes

The Axe Attack - New Zealand Metal Volume 1

I bought this compilation because it contains a single Cripple Mr Onion song, but I was hoping I'd find a few good tracks from bands I'd never heard of as well.

Barefoot Over Nails is the new Cripple song, and while the album version seems to lack a bit of the brutality compared to the way they play it live, it's still pretty cool. You can appreciate the more subtle aspects better when you're not being buffeted around in a moshpit.

As for the album as a whole, it was almost worth it for Barefoot alone. There are good tracks from Subtract and Chuganaut as well, but I already knew I liked those bands. There are a few others that seem interesting (New.Way.Home seem kinda cool), but unfortunately I'd have to say that 3/4 of the CD is competant but average, and one or two tracks are just rubbish (including Malevolence, (but unfortunately there's no Meatyard or Hatred)). Still, it's good to own this album in case I ever need an hour of noisy obnoxious death metal.

My Goodness! Gordon Freeman!

Half-life 2 - Valve

So it's the most anticipated PC game of the year and, as reported, it's pretty cool. It continues right on from the end of the last game (literally, I wonder how many days has Gordon gone without sleep now?) although you are immediately transported some years into the future. The Earth has been taken over by a bunch of nasty aliens called the Combine, and it's up to Gordon Freeman to kick their arses.

The gameplay is much the same as the original, which is a very good thing. The only real changes are the vehicles (a boat and a buggy, nothing super exciting, but fun to use all the same), and the realistic physics engine. The physics engine works pretty well, you very rarely see it fuck up, and it makes the game a lot more realistic and immersive.

Overall I thoroughly enjoyed it. There's some excellent level design, and a lot of work has been put into the atmosphere of the game. There's only one complaint I have. The story, she is no good.

Spoilers follow....

That's not to say the story is rubbish, I was pretty interested in finding out what the Combine were, and what they were up to. The problem is that it just ends without explaining anything. Apparently there is to be a third game which will finish off the story, and that's fine, but for those few of us who actually like a reasonable narrative in our games it would be nice to be rewarded with a bit of plot advancement after battling your way through the entire game. Game designers often skimp on the story like this, cackling away but promising to reveal all in the next game. And then of course the series gets cancelled (see Gabriel Knight) or new designers decide they don't like the old story and change everything to suit themselves, resulting in an incomprehensable mess. And then they get cancelled anyway (see Command and Conquer/Red Alert).

Another thing that pisses me off is the lame climax. After fighting your way through 10 levels, the final confrontation happens because... you get captured. Well gee, maybe I should have just surrendered right at the start (OK, right after I got the gravity gun) and saved myself some time. It pisses me off in books and movies when the results of the climax depend in no way on whatever it is the characters have done along the way, and it's even worse in a game, when you've done all this stuff yourself. It's really a deus ex machina, but it's still a big fucking cop out.

One thing that did impress me with the story is pointed out on Game Matters (in the comments). The gameplay actually reflects the theme of the story. Throughout the game your character is referred to as 'The One Free Man', yet the gameplay is completely linear! You have almost no choices at all! I would have just laughed this off as a bit of unintentional irony, except for the comments of the man in the suit in the closing scene, "Rather than offer you the illusion of free choice..." (referring to the stupid choice you had to make at the end of the first game). So it would appear that despite what all the other characters think, Gordon Freeman the character truly does have as little freedom as the player. It makes me wonder what the third game will do with this, will the climax actually let you make real choices? Maybe the guy in the suit will set you up on the side of the Combine... anyway, I guess we'll find out in another five years, assuming Valve doesn't go bankrupt or get bought out by morons.

A Land Untouched By Modern Dentistry

Molvania - a Jetlag Travel Guide.

A pisstake travel guide to a made up eastern European country. In Molvania the countryside is littered with minefields, the local delicacies are things like maggot infested cheese and horsemeat, and the natives are dour, unpleasant alcoholics. Of course, the travel guide is obliged to put the best possible spin on everything, leading to statements like "Gone are the days when it was necessary for visitors to come equipped with personal first aid kits and their own blood-supplies (although it still wouldn't hurt)".

I couldn't say how accurate this books satire of real travel guides is, although I suspect that the character of Phillipe, a travel writer who thinks you've only had an authentic travel experience if you get mugged at least once and sleep in a stable, is based on someone real.

It's a pretty funny book, but tends to just repeat the same sorts of jokes over and over, so it's best sampled a bit at a time.

Movies

So I've seen a bunch of movies recently.

Rock Star: Based on the real life story of the guy who replaced Rob Halford in Judas Priest. I knew it would be crap, but I watched it anyway because there just aren't that many mainstream movies about heavy metal. Well the music was a little too 80s to really interest me, and Jennifer Aniston makes the worst rock chick ever.

Team America: World Police: Very funny, but not as good as the South Park movie. Probably suffers a bit from being overly political, although they do skewer both liberals and conservatives pretty solidly. The best scenes are the ones where they take the piss out of Bruckheimer-style action blockbusters. And the one where they mock the UN.

Bad Santa: Absolutely classic. The main character is an alcoholic criminal who works as a mall santa as a cover to burgle the mall on Christmas Eve. What starts out as a bitter anti-Christmas movie eventually works its way around to a somewhat happy ending, but without any schmaltz and without compromising its initial cynicism. The perfect Christmas movie for a mean spirited old cynic like me.

Sean of the Dead: The funniest movie I've seen all year. While at it's core it's a pretty standard zombie movie, wedded to a pretty standard romantic comedy, it's so well written that it had the whole theatre laughing hysterically in a way that I haven't seen since I was 8 and watching Daffy Duck get hit on the head with a hammer. It starts to take itself a bit too seriously toward the end, but it goes out with a few very funny scenes, and the first hour or so is absolutely hilarious.

The Random Crap Just Keeps Coming

(From Boingboing): Some idiot in Aussie makes an electric pump driven beer bong, and rips a hole through his stomach.

You know those silly horoscopes that they have on the Onion? Well mine (Leo) actually came true this week. (I guess it means that the writers of the Onion read the same blogs I do.)

And something I forgot to mention from the weekend, Trent Reznor plans to bring NIN to Australia 'a few different times' the next time they tour. Hopefully that includes NZ too, even though the tour is probably not happening until 2016...

Random Crap Day 2

Over at Uncertain Principles they're talking about the idea of the perfect three minute pop song. Which has resulted in everyone going through their iTunes playlists, listing all the songs that are exactly 3:00 and discussing how well they deserve the label of perfect pop song.

I arrived a bit late to the discussion to post mine over there, but my results were somewhat amusing, so I'll put it here.

I have four 3 minute songs in my collection:

'In the Flesh' - Pink Floyd (this is the live version off of Is There Anybody Out There?)
Pink Floyd doing a sarcastically bombastic rock song. While it may seem like a pop-rock song at first, I'd say that it's not pop, since it doesn't have a standard rock structure, and it doesn't really make much sense out of the context of The Wall.

'Bili Rubin' - Einsturzende Neubauten
About as pop as Neubauten ever get, which is to say, not very.

'Garofandi Allo Spiedo' - Mike Patton
Off one of Mike Patton's neo-classical solo albums. Fucked up and bizzare, even for Patton. Not pop.

'Reclamation' - Skinny Puppy
Are you kidding? Not pop. (But a fucking awesome album closer.)


The odds of four songs which so represent everything which pop is not coming up randomly like that is pretty unusual, even in my collection.

From the Department of People With Nothing to Do

It's random crap day here at the Wildebeest Asylum:

Shihad admit that their last album sucked, and explain why.

Scribe's posse beat the crap out of some dude from bFM. Cue dozens of unfunky middle aged white DJs (Scribe's most vocal fan base) flipping out because he's behaving like a real rapper, and not a tame top 40 pop-tron. On the other hand, it's pretty fucking stupid for a top 40 musician to get on the bad side of the music press.

Random forum discussion about old Lois Lane comics from the 60s and 70s. Believe it or not it was one of the most popular comic series of the day. Every issue can be dropped into one of several categories, (and you can tell which based just by what's on the cover): 'Lois leaves Superman for someone else because he won't marry her', 'Lois turns evil and tries to kill superman (possibly because he refuses to marry her)', 'Lois and Superman get married but it turns out that one of them is a robot', and 'Superman tries to kill Lois because he's sick of her bugging him to marry her'. No, I am not making that last one up. You can really see the progressive 60s attitude of female empowerment coming through there...

Hmm, Smells Like... Chloroform!

A few weeks ago I was talking to someone about the old Tintin comics, and how Tintin seemed to be knocked out with chloroform at least once in every book. Lo and behold, a report has been published in a medical journal concerning Tintin's regular "significant loss of conciousness" (not just restricted to chloroform but involving concussion from explosions, blows to the head and so on). The researcher suggests that a disorder of the pituitary gland resulting from the repeated head trauma may have caused his never aging youthfulness over the 50 or so years that the series ran.

Classic quote:

"We identified the cause of the trauma, the length of loss of consciousness (calculated by the number of cartoon frames before Tintin returns to normal activity) and the apparent severity of the trauma (indicated by the number of objects e.g., stars, candles revolving above Tintin's head)," he said.

I bet something similar was going on with Tintin's dog Snowy, who not only had more than a few run ins with the old chloroform, but also seemed to end up getting blind drunk fairly often.

Big Day Out Final Announcement

They've made the final announcement for the big day out next year. Unlike my last two posts, I won't say something about each act because half of them I know nothing about and most of the other half are hip hop and dance groups I care nothing about. But as for the rest...

Crusty Demons: The obligatory bike stunt group.

Kid Koala: I think he's some kind of scratchy DJ guy. I might go and see him, since he was on the Lovage album with Mike Patton.

Evermore: A nice Coldplay-esque kiwi band. Their big single is alright, (if a little twee and girly) so I might go along to this one too.

8 Foot Sativa: [stupid munter bogan voice] 8 FOOT!!!! YEAH!!!!!!! DUHHHH!!!!!

Deja Voodoo: They were fucking awesome last year, in an unbelievably shit way, and I expect they will be the same this year.

The Have, Pitch Black, Chuganaut: All good kiwi bands that should be worth seeing too.

48 May: Must miss!