Eyeing Little Girls With Bad Intent

Jethro Tull – Aqualung

As a wise man once told me, “Jethro Tull isn't the kind of thing you want to listen to a lot, but when you do feel like it you'll be really glad you have it.” When people say these kinds of things to me I usually just nod and smile.

Jethro Tull's album Aqualung fits right in with a bunch of other famous British albums from the late 60s and early 70s such as Pink Floyd's Dark Side of the Moon, The Beatles' White Album and a whole bunch of Led Zeppelin's stuff, made at a time when rock music was just starting to expand musically and thematically, but before it became arrogant and pretentious.

Like a lot of those albums Aqualung is an ambitious concept album, using the tale of a lonely old hobo in order to criticise Christianity. In contrast to the weighty concept the music has a pleasant 60s folksiness. It seems very simple when measured against all the Opeth I've been listening to recently, but the more 'complicated' music you listen to the more appreciative you become of simplicity. Even with simple arrangements and a straightforward approach there's some nice, evocative stuff on this album.

Jethro Tull's only gimmick is leadman Ian Anderson's flute playing, which actually works very well in the context of this kind of music, and it's a bit of a surprise that other bands haven't tried it. Like all good classic rock albums there's plenty of flashy guitar virtuosity which always goes down well, and they have some pretty cool dual solos between the flute and the guitar.

By today's standards the concept is pretty mundane stuff, even if it might have seemed terribly transgressive at the time, so I wasn't very engaged by the lyrics or the theme, but the music is very solid and it's quite an agreeable album. I don't think I'll listen to it a lot but, uh, I'm glad I have it...

In The Distance, I Hear Them Devouring

Opeth – Ghost Reveries

I hate to disabuse my readers of their perception of me as a savvy, literate intellectual with my finger on the pulse of the underground, but I'm actually just a lazy fuck in front of the computer and as such I tend to miss out on a few things. Number one on that list at the moment are Tool tickets to the concert in January, but besides that one of my major musical regrets of the last couple of years is overlooking Opeth for too long.

After having more than a few people rave to me about this band I gave them a perfunctory listen before deeming them uninteresting and categorising them in the 'more dopey metal shit that I don't get' folder. Of course now that I've realised my folly and given them a decent chance, everyone else seems to have moved on. Saying you're getting into Opeth is very 2004.

Opeth fit comfortably within the death metal genre, and although some might argue with that statement, saying that they incorporate different styles such as jazz and folk and contrast melodic passages with heavy, aggressive ones, I would reply that this is merely a distinction between 'good metal' and 'boring metal'.

Ghost Reveries was a critical success but as you might expect most metal hipsters are dismissive of it in comparison to Opeth's older stuff, as they are starting to move vaguely in the direction of not being obscure any more. However they may have a point as besides a few excellent tracks, a majority of the album does feel slightly uninspired, but even a subpar Opeth album is a great album in general.

There is a loose concept to Ghost Reveries, dealing with death and the occult. Like almost all metal ever written the lyrics are fairly overblown and probably a little ridiculous taken out of context, but Mikael Akerfeldt (singer, lead guitarist and songwriter) manages to bring a fresh breath of literacy to the standard subject matter of satanic rituals on foggy moors, and after all, that is all that I really ask for from song lyrics. No matter how cheesy it is to hear about ritual murder in frozen forests, I can't deny that I get a real kick out of it when it's done right.

What really sets these guys apart is the complexity of the music (which is especially unique in light of how almost all the rock music popular today is influenced by the simplicity of punk). Most of their songs are ten minute epics with interlocking, recurring themes, and the parts themselves are a joy to learn as a musician, because there's always so much going on both rhythmically and melodically. The members of the band are all stellar musicians themselves, of particular note is the drumming and Akerfeldt's vocals, which are impressive not only because he alternates effortlessly between clean and growly singing, but also because he has some of the best tone in his death metal voice that I've ever heard. Sure some other guys are deeper and more guttural, but Akerfeldt is able to add a really nice crunch to his voice without overdoing it, so that it still conveys emotion (and sometimes you can even understand what he's saying).

So back to Ghost Reveries in particular. Even the naysayers won't deny that the opener, 'Ghost of Perdition' is a classic, even by Opeth's standards; ten minutes of truly epic heaviness punctuated by beautifully sad acoustic pieces, made only more melancholy by the fact that the song is about some dude murdering his own mother because the devil told him to. The next two tracks, 'The Baying of the Hounds' and 'Beneath the Mire', initially suffer in comparison to their predecessor but after a few listens they grew on me a lot. They both have intense moody breakdowns in the middle and 'Hounds' in particular has some inspired passages.

Unfortunately the remainder of the album doesn't quite live up to the start, 'Harlequin Forest' and 'The Grand Conjuration' are both decent songs with some great riffs but they don't hold together overall as well as the earlier tracks. They are integrated with a few acoustic(ish) tracks, 'Atonement', 'Hours of Wealth' and 'Isolation Years', which are all great but rather short and are really designed as interludes to the heavier tracks.

Of course, that's still six great tracks out of eight so it's not like I don't recommend it, it's just that there are other Opeth albums that are better.

You Go Ahead! I'll Cover You!

Half Life 2: Episode 1

Valve's Half-Life games are arguably some of the best video games ever made, and nothing about them is particularly innovative or original, but both entries in the series simply have the slickest, glossiest production ever seen in games. From beginning to end the gameplay, graphics and sound are flawless down to the smallest details making the games truly immersive, almost cinematic experiences. Half-Life 2 even took things a step further, introducing actual subtext into the story that was actually enhanced by the interactive nature of the game.

Valve have chosen to continue the series in episodic format, although seeing as how their idea of episodic is one episode every six months to a year I wouldn't look to them as the best example of this new business model (hopefully the upcoming Sam And Max games will be the first real contender for that title), and the first instalment in the Half-Life Episodes series is a satisfying taste of that Half-Lifey goodness, although it's too brief to attain the epic heights of its predecessor. That's not to say it was too short though, the game was actually much longer than I expected, and I was quite satisfied that I got my $30 worth. Plot wise not much happens, once again we start out exactly where the last game leaves off and your goal is to safely escape City 17, as the alien fortress that you infiltrated in the last game is about to blow up and take a good chunk of the countryside with it. Along the way you are accosted by the remnants of the alien invasion that you took down in Half Life 2. A few more plot elements are introduced, ranging from the obvious and stupid (“Whatever is in this mysterious data capsule must be incredibly important to the aliens!”) to the potentially interesting (your egghead scientist ally from Half-Life 2 taking charge of the human survivors and his ardent hatred of the posthumans), but we'll have to wait for later instalments to see how they pan out.

Valve have obviously listened to what their fans wanted more of, and it appears that what they wanted more of was clearly the gravity gun! I am fairly sure you could do the whole game (excepting maybe the boss battles) using only the gravity gun as a weapon as almost every part of the game requires it in some way, and with your well armed sidekick Alyx backing you up for most of the game it's very rarely even worth swapping it out for a different weapon. You'd think that picking stuff up and throwing it around would get boring, but the designers once again show their talent and produce a large variety of interesting new scenarios to chuck stuff around in. Introducing Alyx (a major character from the first game) as a permanent partner is nicely done. Her AI is generally pretty good and her comments on your actions (like for example gushing with admiration after you take down a boss enemy) makes the game feel a little more immersive.

Mostly however it's just more of the same that we got in the previous games. The boss battles are recycled from Half-Life 2, and you'll recognise many of the locations you visit from that game too. This is by no means a bad thing of course, just like the first two games this episode is a joy to play simply because of the simple attention to detail and imaginative level design brought to it by the developers. Yes, many of the scenarios are variations on those found in earlier games but these guys seem to have some clever knack to making them fresh and fun each time you encounter them.

Hey! Girls Name!

So over at Uncertain Principles Chad Orzel has a post listing songs on his ipod named after women. Since I had nothing better to do I did the same myself, and I found that I only have thirty (out of about 3600 songs). Fewer than what I expected, and it seems that I probably have more with men's names.

Anyway, I figured we'd make a little game out of it. See if between all six of my readers, you can name the artists who perform these songs. A couple of them are obscure, but I'm fairly confident that even between Barnes and Joel alone you could get most of them. And just to make it interesting, if you don't collectively get over %50 by midnight on Saturday, I'll murder all of your families!

1) Aisha

2) Ruby

3) Alice

4) Judith

5) Deanna

6) Xtal (This one probably shouldn't count, but hey.)

7) Sabrina

8) Grace

9) Magdalena

10) Lucy

11) Minerva

12) Jezabel

13) Rose

14) Madeline

15) Katrien

16) Vera

17) Pauline

18) Lydia

19) Tracy

20) Polly

21) Sophie

22) Jessamin

23) Maria

24) Elizabeth

25) Sylvia

26) Brena

27) Candy Jones

28) Lily

29) Lilith

30) Anna

Forty Signs of Rain

by Kim Stanley Robinson

One of the easiest ways to irritate me is to start an argument about global warming. The issue is one of the most obnoxious and aggravating examples of the general public's scientific illiteracy, and it's incredibly frustrating to watch dishonest politicians and big business take advantage of this to further their own agenda. The nadir (or at least what I hope will be the nadir) of their efforts was the release a few years back of Michael Crichton's State of Fear, a science fiction novel (easy on the science) which suggested that global warming was thought up by a bunch of scaremongering environmentalists (not 'conservationists' of course!) who needed a new boogyman in order to keep the millions of dollars of income they were receiving in the lucrative business of being hippie activists.

Fortunately as an antidote to such drivel Kim Stanley Robinson has written Forty Signs of Rain. Unlike the other novels of his that I've read it's very low key and character focused. It seems he is deliberately trying to avoid the image of the hysterical, zealous environmentalist by calmly and rationally stating the facts. The book is set at some point 'in the not too distant future' (OK he's a little fuzzy on some of the facts) and the effects of climate change have become noticeable, but there are no giant icestorms, tsunamis or plagues of locusts. The changes are enough to impact peoples lives, but not so much to wreck civilisation. I have a vague recollection that this is the first book in a series, so maybe we'll have a few more dramatic scenes of national monuments being destroyed, just like in that stupid movie, but for now he keeps his doomsday predictions rather conservative.

As much as I approved of the message, the book itself was a bit of a drag, as he keeps things perhaps a bit too low key. The principle characters are a group of scientists doing work loosely related to climate change, and as much of the narrative is spent on describing their family lives (or lack thereof) as on the science or the gradually encroaching catastrophe. A part of me hopes that this is to make it all the more heartbreaking when the protagonists' annoying kids buy it under a rogue iceberg in future books, but I'll probably be disappointed. Nevertheless I do appreciate his effort to keep a human focus in a story that is primarily about political issues, I just think it wasn't executed as well as it could have been.

The biggest problem for me with the book is Robinson's pollyanna solution to the lack of attention given to climate change by the worlds governments, a mix of Buddhist philosophy and an exhortation for all the scientists in the world to join hands and WISH REALLY HARD!!!!! that they can suddenly stop being politically impotent. It's a nice sentiment but my view is that if you want to win this fight you have to realise that it's all about money. If I were a climate scientist what I would do is put an emphasis on the cost of catastrophic climate change in actual dollars. Any and all of us, whether individuals, corporations or states, have a lot to lose, not just personally but financially if these predictions come to pass. Nobody is going to be making much money when the Sydney CBD is underwater, so it makes financial sense for any business which genuinely has a long term view of its interests to co-operate with plans to avoid this scenario.

Of course, that's more than a little pollyanna-ish too. It doesn't do much good for a small business to spend their entire profits to convert to clean energy when the USA, China and India sit under three huge columns of CO2 flying up into the air, but I believe that an emphasis on the financial cost of climate change in the future, as compared to the cost of making moves to avoid it now, would be a good way to get the attention of the greedy and short sighted in businesses and governments around the world and present the issue to them in terms that they cannot ignore.

A Bit Of The Old Ultraviolence

During my long period of unemployment I got to catch up on two movies that I'd been meaning to watch for some time: The Devil's Rejects and Oldboy.

The Devil's Rejects surprised me a little bit by just how disturbing it was. I still haven't seen its prequel (House of 1000 Corpses) and I was expecting something a lot goofier, more in tune with director Rob Zombie's cheesy industrial metal band. However the titular group of psychopaths engage in some pretty nasty behaviour, and in particular the extended torture and kidnapping scene in the middle of the movie was pretty twisted.

Zombie's movie is very ambitious, but in the end it left me unsatisfied. The story is a nice and elegant allegory to current world affairs, but it lacks depth and insight, and the violence, while some of the nastiest I've ever seen on the screen, only offends in the shallowest manner, especially when compared to Oldboy.

The violence in Oldboy is very infrequent, especially when compared to The Devil's Rejects' non-stop gore-o-rama, but the two or three mutilation scenes are so gutwrenchingly disturbing that even I, he who likes to spring viewings of Mr. Hands onto unsuspecting visitors to my house, found them difficult to stomach. I'll express the reason behind the difference in my response to the movies by way of an analogy to black metal. Opeth have been the best musical discovery I've made so far this year and while they can loosely be described as a black metal band the growly, thrashy parts of their songs are balanced out by plenty of acoustic, melodic, moody or otherwise restrained passages. This means that when they launch into a heavy part it feels a whole lot more heavy than the music of say Cryptopsy, who undermine the incredibly brutal assault of their music by kicking every song off at maximum power and never dialling it down for even a second. In the same way, The Devil's Rejects' non-stop gore is unaffecting because we've (or at least I've) been exposed to so many gory movies that meaningless violence is no big deal no matter how disgusting it is. On the other hand Oldboy's few moments of genuine violence are disturbing because they occur in a much more realistic setting, and because it takes place in a much more meaningful narrative.

SPOILER WARNING: I'm going to ruin the end of Oldboy for you now, so if you haven't seen it, go away and watch it right now and then come back.

Oldboy is a very clever movie. For most of it's length it is a mostly straightforward revenge flick, as our protagonist (played by Min-sik Choi) tries to track down the man who imprisoned him for fifteen years (and also tries to learn the reason why he did so), looking (in what must have been a deliberate decision) more or less exactly like a Korean Charles Bronson. However by the end the genre conventions are completely reversed, it is the antagonist who ultimately gets his revenge on Choi, and once having achieved it, promptly kills himself, as there is nothing left for him to live for. Choi's character, robbed of his own revenge, must live with the horrible things that he has done and that have been done to him, but he still gets to live. And in the final scene he seems to have found, in a very twisted way, some kind of peace.

The climax of the movie, in which the protagonist is begging his nemesis for mercy and has been completely broken to the point of cutting out his own tongue, is an incredibly good example of how to use violence effectively in a movie. It's shocking, unexpected and blunt nature is grotesque enough, but the real reason it works is because of the story and characters that have caused it to come about. It's one of the most powerful scenes I've seen in a movie for a long time and it will stay with me for far longer than the rapes and eviscerations in The Devil's Rejects.

Hipster Antagonism Day

Every couple of years a terrible doom descends upon the offices of the tastemakers at Pitchfork Media, and to a lesser extent those of their second rate counterparts at the Onion AV Club. For every now and again, when the conditions are just right, a new Radiohead album is released. (For the purposes of this discussion, we're going to treat Thom Yorke's solo record as if it were a Radiohead album.)

You see, when such an album is released the hippest of the hip find themselves in a seemingly inescapable quandary. On one hand Radiohead are one of those most repugnant and vile beasts - a popular band, but on the other hand they achieved this popularity while deliberately moving to a less commercial sound. And it must also be considered that they have a more or less unassailable status down on the 'hipster street'. Caught between these opposing forces, the beleaguered music writers must figure out how to write a review (and write a review they must, for they have a reputation to maintain and ignoring such an important release would not go uncommented) without being seen to either non-ironically enjoy popular music or to appear as if they 'don't get' an unconventional band. So what can they do? The answer is obvious once it is presented: write a few snide paragraphs mocking both the Radiohead faithful who would spend good money to hear Thom Yorke read the phone book and mainstream audiences who can't handle the quirky direction Radiohead has gone in over the last few years, while conveniently forgetting to offer an opinion of their own on whether it's any good or not.

And lest I be found guilty of what I'm condemning: Yes, Thom Yorke's album is great. It somehow manages to take moody glitchy electronica accompanied by his trademark wailing and turn it into agreeable listening.

The hipster elite save their real venom for other bands, in particular Muse. For a long time I couldn't figure out where all the Muse Hate was coming from, after all, I consider them the closest thing to indie amongst my music collection. However after listening to their new album Black Holes and Revelations it finally clicked: Muse are the new Pink Floyd, and as such they shall forever be the Moby Dick to hipsterisms Captain Ahab.

In order to understand the reasons behind this we need to go on a little historical digression. Many years ago Sid Vicious famously called Pink Floyd a bunch of dinosaurs and used them as an example of the kind of music that punk came about in order to destroy (members of the Sex Pistols later admitted that they were actually OK with Pink Floyd, but they were a convenient target with which to refer to 70s stadium rock as a whole). Too effete to like real punk music, hipsters nevertheless revere it as the forerunner to their beloved 80s new wave, and every throw away statement by a real punk is therefore a holy statute to be followed without question. Since the real Pink Floyd are sadly retired, the hatred is transferred to Muse.

*** Wildebeest Asylum Handy Hint ***

If you're planning on going to a party or a bar where you may encounter hipsters, bring along a copy of Pink Floyd's The Wall in order to protect yourself from unwanted attention by these scourges of the music scene. If one approaches you, simply brandish the album with all the strength of your spiritual convictions, and this unparalleled icon of classic rock indulgence (Led Zeppelin may work in a pinch too) will cause the hipster to retreat into its cardigan, leaving you to either make your escape or to beat it to death with a blunt object, as you see fit.

*****

It is therefore with great sadness that I must concede a lone victory to Pitchfork Media and the hipster community as a whole. You are correct. The new Muse album sucks arse. It is an overwrought parody of the greatness of Origin of Symmetry, Hullabaloo and Absolution, all of which by the way, you are still completely wrong about.

Yes It's Actually Called The Chumby

It's some kind of ipod-esque gizmo for super geeks.

The Bonehunters

by Steven Erikson

Erikson has thus far managed to overcome the problems that most epic fantasy writers suffer from and keep his series of six hundred page door stop novels from getting bogged down in detail or overwhelmed by the huge number of subplots and secondary characters. Unfortunately in The Bonehunters (the sixth in what will eventually be a ten book series) signs start to appear of such a deterioration.

To be fair he hasn't become Robert Jordan just yet, a lot happens in this book but while the earlier entries worked as standalone novels as well as part of the series, The Bonehunters consists of individual scenes and setpieces unrelated to one another that feel just like events and plot points that Erikson has to check off before we can get to the good stuff at the end of the story. And in true epic fantasy style the characters take their damn time moving from plot point to plot point, I was sick and tired of 'trekking through the desert' scenes by the end. At least when the characters arrive where they're going the action scenes still contain everything that fans of the series love, which is to say lots of shit getting fucked up by absurdly bad assed heroes and villains.

As a whole the book was still fun to read, but didn't meet the standards set by the series so far. However most long fantasy series' suffer from 'middle book syndrome' and I remain hopeful that later episodes will continue to satisfy as the overall story arc begins to descend towards what should be a fucking intense climax.

Erikson keeps the real world subtext coming again in this book. The last book, Midnight Tides, made its primary villain an aggressively capitalist, expansionist empire that had more than a few similarities with the USA. This book reveals more about the plans of the series' ultimate villain, the Crippled God, whose promises of redemption after death in exchange for suffering on Earth are clearly meant to be uncharitable interpretations of Christian beliefs (or those of Abrahamic religions in general). This commentary is supported by more than a few soliloquies by primary characters regarding the ultimately harmful nature of any brand of religion. Even in a world where gods are provably and unavoidably real, promising devotion to an all powerful being who sits by and lets mortals suffer in this fallen existence is not only irrational but morally suspect. Jesus and Mohammad may not literally stalk the desert themselves deliberately spreading war and disease as the gods in this book do, but the analogy is pretty much spot on.

For the Role Players

700 things Mr. Welch can no longer do during an RPG (via Lore Sjöberg)

"388. Pursue means chase after, not just make called shots to the knees.
389. My samurai is not required to commit seppuku if he fails to hit the monster.
390. My character's background must be more indepth than a montage of Queen lyrics.
391. A starting paladin has no conceivable use for industrial lubricant."

Catch Up

Okay look lively you lot. We've gotten way behind and there's a whole lot to catch up on. Here's a quick summary of everything I've read, seen and listened to in the last few months.

Howls Moving Castle

Generally very well done (and as with all Miyazaki films the animation is spectacular) but the story was kind of dull.

Layer Cake

Pretty fucking good. Not as funny as Snatch or Lock, Stock and Two Smoking Barrels but a cool, entertaining movie nonetheless.

Midnight's Children (Salman Rushdie)

I know this won the Booker Award for 'Best Book of the 20^th Century' but I found it quite boring, although I did appreciate some of the clever things he did with how the story was framed.

Everything and More (David Foster Wallace)

A non-fiction popular maths book by the guy who wrote the behemoth novel Infinite Jest. Fascinating stuff, if you like maths. Some day I'll have to write a post about just how much maths freaks me out...

Spawn (Todd McFarlane)

The first trade collection. Cool concept but a cheesy execution. The animated TV series was far better.

Napoleon Dynamite

I left off seeing this one for a while because movies with a cult geek following like this one often don't live up to their reputations. This one's an exception though. Absolutely hilarious, and with a moral that I found quite touching: It doesn't matter how much of a loser you are, find something you love and do it well.

Dark Horse

A really random Dutch film. Suffers a little from pretentious European Art Cinema syndrome, but is generally entertaining for most of it's length.

The Brown Bunny

What a pile of shit. Yes the twist ending was clever in how it put the rest of the film into focus, but the rest of the film is a total bore-fest, and the climactic blowjob scene makes a joke out of the whole thing.

Palindrome

Not a chore to watch but it doesn't have much to recommend it beyond the clever gimmick of having the lead character played by completely different actresses throughout the film.

Nothing

From the writers of Cube (one of my favourite sci-fi movies) comes a stupid comedy with a similar plot hook. Unfortunately these guys are far better at making up interesting concepts than at writing comedy. It had it's moments but was pretty lame a lot of the time.

The Proposition

An Australian movie written by Nick Cave. It's a great, moody outback western for the first three quarters of its running time, but the ending completely lacks any emotional punch.

Jazz

A kind of counterpart to the Blues book I read earlier this year. This one is not as snarky, and the writers are (as you might expect) far more reverent to the material (with typical Jazz fiend snobbery), but it makes up for that with an abundance of photos and quotes and interviews from those who lived through the Jazz era. (The Blues book lacked these things, as bluesmen tended to die young or just wander off and disappear.)

Dante's Equation (Jane Jenson)

A trashy sci-fi novel from the writer of the brilliant Gabriel Knight series of adventure games. It's generally a pretty fun read, but I could have been spared some serious forehead slapping if they had had it proof read by a scientifically inclined editor. Just a paraphrased example:

“Oh my God! This is like no sine wave I've ever seen before!” says the brilliant scientist. They both looked at the screen. This is what they saw:

[picture of a square wave].

Sun Ra: Space is the Place

A fun B-movie, if you're not too bothered by the (heavy) reverse racism. Plot summary: Sun-Ra returns to Earth in order to take all the black people to up to his paradise planet where they can live unmolested by whitey. The devil tries to stop him.

Stardust (Neil Gaiman)

An actual, no irony allowed fairy tale, sticking to all the conventions of the genre but still making a damn fine novel. More than makes up for the disappointing Anansi Boys.

Pattern Recognition (William Gibson)

Now this book just made me angry. It starts out with incredible mood, full of post-modern malaise and seems poised to delve into the conflict between art and money, and how discerning what is genuine is being made harder by the trends in today's advertising, but in the end it just goes nowhere. Fuck you William Gibson! Now I'm going to forever wonder just what would have happened in the book you started writing.

Peeping Tom

On his newest album Mike Patton goes in an upbeat, hip hop direction. It's good and I'd recommend it, but it's far from his best work. The single 'Mojo' is easily the best track on the disc.

Dear Wendy

Seriously, what the fuck? I have no idea how to describe this movie, in fact, I have no idea if I even liked it or not...

Faster Pussy Cat, Kill Kill!

This legendary B-movie certainly fulfilled its title's promise of PG13 T&A, but while it may have been provocative when it was released, by my standards it was not terribly interesting.

Valley of the Dolls

Another, not quite so legendary B-movie (it will always be overshadowed by it's sequel). Worth watching for some great 70s cheese and some entertainingly hysterical overacting, but only if you have nothing better to do. It's quite lengthy and the plot is very dull.

Ichi the Killer

A moderately disturbing anime. Again pretty tame by my standards, but I'm told that the live action movie it was based on was better.

Damnation

An acoustic album by Swedish death metal band Opeth. A few songs are absolutely brilliant, most of the rest are quite good but others fall a bit flat. It's an admirable change of pace for them but they should probably keep concentrating on rocking out.

--

That'll do for now. There's a bunch more stuff I want to write about, but they're all things that demand more than a paragraph each.

Is This Thing On?

The editorial staff of the Wildebeest Asylum are proud to officially announce the new look, massively overhauled, Windows Vista(TM) ready Wildebeest Asylum 2.0. From our brand new offices in central Sydney our dedicated team of writers are spending every available minute drinking rum, hanging out in divey metal bars and chasing Aussie pussy in order to bring you the unique brand of state-of-the-art, next generation content that our fans have come to love so dearly!

Sign up to our members only area and for just $40 a month you get access to exclusive content including:

• A limited edition Wildebeest Asylum rainbow enema.

• Special behind the scenes footage of the writer's creative process: See Jon play air guitar while listening to Opeth! See Jon masturbating to old episodes of Buffy!

• The right to obey, and the right to kill.

...all of which is my way of saying that I now have a computer and internet access again, and actual honest to god content will resume shortly.

The AOL Search Data

See here if you don't know what I'm on about.

The things you see when using the random user search are at first frightening, then amusing and finally depressing when you see how bad the average internet user's spelling is (not to mention their lack of understanding of the difference between the search bar and the address bar).

Johari

Since all the cool kids are doing it, I made a Johari page too.

An Oldie But A Goodie

An amusing article about Anime in Japan. The bit about tentacle porn is very good.

A Sydney Moment

#1 in what will (hopefully) be a continuing series:

Dirty dancing with a hot girl to Coal Chambers' "Big Truck".

Hot Girl: I hope you won't be turned off if I start singing along in the death metal voice.
Jon (aloud): Oh no I don't mind.
Jon (silently to himself): Allll-riiiight

"Be always drunken. Nothing else matters: that is the only question. If you would not feel the horrible burden of Time weighing on your shoulders and crushing you to the earth, be drunken continually.
Drunken with what? With wine, with poetry, or with virtue as you will. But be drunken.
And if sometimes, on the stairs of a palace, or on the green side of a ditch, or in the dreary solitude of your own room, you should awaken and the drunkenness be half or wholly slipped away from you, ask of of the wind, or of the wave , or of the star, or of the bird, or of the clock, of whatever flies, sighs, or rocks, or sings, or speaks, ask what hour it is; and the wind, wave, star, bird, clock, will answer you: "It is the hour to be drunken! Be drunken, if you would not be martyred slaves of Time; be drunken continually! With wine, with poetry, or with virtue, as you will."

--Baudelaire

Mogwai Live

Mogwai Fear Satan:


Tracy:

Yes, We Are A Long Way From Home:



It was good.

Best Web Page Ever

NSFW

Please Stand By...

There will be a temporary outage while The Wildebeest Asylum relocates to new offices in Sydney. Normal service will resume shortly, and we sincerely apologise for any inconvenience.

While we are looking forward to expanding our business overseas, the editorial staff of The Wildebeest Asylum would like to emphasise that the move will not diminish our commitment to 'Kiwi' values*, nor does it reflect a lack of interest in the 'Kiwi' market. It's just because of the Damn Socialists not giving us any tax cuts!

* Including but not limited to: a friendly and easygoing nature, a quarter acre block for every family, an excessive drinking habit and an antiquated and emotionally stunted ideal of masculinity.