- logging coolness from 127.0.0.1, daily.
Feeling a little restless today, so started poking around some old videogame messageboard haunts - ones where the signal-to-noise ratio is tolerable and people know their stuff. Suggestions for the reader: The Fanitsu Project Import Board and The Fanitsu Project Features Board are super-obscure Japanese-videogame messageboards with great info. Also, the neo-geo.com boards are pretty good if you want to know what's going on in SNK-land (mm, cartridges!) And for fans of shoot-em-ups of the 2D, 3D, vertical, horizontal, and uvavu flavors, the Shmups boards are always well-informed and excellent. Any other suggestions?
Ohboy - this plain rocks. For all those geeky scratch DJs out there, New York's Turntable Lab has the VERY unofficial 'Videogame Breaks' 12" (scroll down!). Here's the Realaudio links for samples of Side A and Side B of the vinyl, which includes start-up jingles for the PSX, Sega games, and entire tune and SFX sequences from "Mario", "Crazy Taxi", "Tetris", and more, which you can scratch and manipulate on your decks all you like. I'm pretty tempted to get the record, and I don't even have turntables anymore :) Oh, and the whole Turntable Lab store is great for the latest ragga, hiphop, breaks, scratch, and more, especially since they have Realaudio samples of everything.
No actual update yesterday, since I wandered up to San Francisco to check out the Warp records night featuring Prefuse73, Plaid, and a DJ set from Andy Weatherall. It was kinda fun discovering that the cable cars can actually be handy for getting across town to the gig at Bimbo's 365 Club, and the gig itself was pretty decent - especially the set from Prefuse73, whose new album, 'One Word Extinguisher', sounds like it's going to rock - seriously lush live instruments + vocal cutups. Now.. tired.. lazy Sunday time. :) Oh, and newsflash: Xbox Linux without needing a modchip. Wow, need to sort that out.
Considering I now have a half-decent web presence, it's a crying shame (*snigger*) that there's no info on the person behind it. Until now, that is. Resisting the temptation to regurgitate the Dr.Evil speech for my personal details, and considering that most of the people who read this probably know me anyhow, I've nonetheless added a bio page. And yes, I am available for parties and bar mitzvahs. Hope everyone has a nice weekend - oh, and anyone know where I can find Steinski's 'Nothing To Fear' mix online? The motorcade speeds on..
Added a couple of new reviews (for out-of-copyright ebooks by Agatha Christie and Maxwell 'The Shadow' Grant) to the evam section of the site - had actually read them some time ago, but finally got round to writing them up. I know a lot of people still have issues with reading ebooks, and I can only say that I swear by the RCA REB1100 Ebook, which was based off the original Nuvomedia Ebook from Gemstar. It's specifically designed for reading books and only books, so the screen and text are a perfect size, the backlighting and adjustable contrast is excellent, and thanks to sites like Blackmask, there's 11,000-ish free titles to download for it. I particularly like a lot of late 19th and early 20th century fiction, so perhaps it makes more sense for me than many in terms of good, free, out-of-copyright downloads, but still, I think the REB1100 is a hint of things to come in terms of usability and comfort. And prices are starting to go back up for REBs on Ebay, a sign they may become prized in the future - I noticed similar with the Gameboy camera and Gameboy printer after the flood of discontinued copies abated.
Managed to wander out to the shops to pick up 'Amplitude', the new PS2 music game from the makers of the equally yummy 'Frequency'. Seems like a pretty kickass sequel, especially for those like me addicted to Bemani-style beat games where you press buttons in time to rhythms. The rather handy fan-site freq.com seems to have good gossip/info, plus posts from some of the creators in the forums. The song list is a little more geared towards the rock mainstream, but there's still plenty of good electronica/breaks/etc, including a great scratch-DJ remix of 'Rockit' by Herbie Hancock, Mekon with Roxanne Shante, and most bizarrely of all, Game Boyz, who are, uhh, the ex-members of Scottish power popsters Danny Wilson. Riight. Oh, and the ever-synthtastic Freezepop, who may get on the disc because their svengali works at the developers, but reliably _KICK ASS_, this time with 'Supersp0de', the only fan tribute song ever to pronounce Target as 'Tar-j'ai'? :)
Those of you who follow the soundtracks we put out on Monotonik know that I'm a fan of music that projects stillness, floating, calm - the halcyon. Nobody does it better than Harold Budd, the American-born neo-classical ambient artist, who is a little reclusive, a lot under-rated, and just plain gorgeous to listen to, all treated piano and transcendental spaces. He has a wonderful catalog dating back 20 or 30 years, and i'm especially enamoured with the 'Serpent In Quicksilver/Abandoned Cities' CD re-issuing his early '80s material, evocative of haze-drenched Californian deserts. Here's a good feature focusing on his catalog, philosophies and methods, also mentioning his many collaborators, of which the divine Fila Brazillia are now the newest..
Oh, and one other Nintendo-related thing: since I picked up 'Kirby's Pinball Land' for Gameboy and am getting all Kirby-lovin' again, found a _hilarious_ example of over-serious fandom on this Kirby fanpage - to be exact: 'Some hard core Kirby fans are even upset by the fact the names of Lololo and Lalala from the games were changed to Fololo and Falala in the show. Unfortunately, we all have our ideas and opinions to just how the show should be, and some people feel that Kirby may become a sell out if he strays too far from his roots.' Sir, you may have a wonderful fanpage devoted to even the more forgotten Kirby titles like 'Kirby's Dream Course' for SNES - yep, minigolf _and_ Kirby all at once, but.. well, dammit, I guess you have a right to get upset, just like certain ear-biting boxers or spoon-bending King of Pop friends might have done over inconsequential videogame character naming shenanigans. I mean, Lalala, Falala? Sacrilicious.
Looking forward to the US release of 'Made In Wario', aka 'Wario Ware Inc.', for the Gameboy Advance, since it caters perfectly for my blipvert-length attention span - a series of 5-second-long minigames play in quick succession. Oh, and the already-posted FAQ has some interesting 'evil twin' trivia about Waluigi, the recently-invented 'evil Luigi' nemesis-type character. They claim that, whilst Wario is 'evil Mario' because an upside-down M is a W, Waluigi should really be called Waruigi, 'cos an upside-down L looks like an 'r', and the Japanese have a lot of problems differentiating between their Ls and Rs at the best of times. Hmm.. actually, I wasn't convinced, but then I looked closely at Waluigi's cap logo and also found a Nintendorks posting (scroll down) saying: 'Warui (Pronounced Wah-Roo-Eee) means Dark or Evil. Mario, flip the M to get Wario, which is a lot like Warui. For Luigi, it's WaLuigi. In Japanese ALL Ls and Rs are pronounced virtually the same.' Aha, so they ARE right. Of course, Waluigi isn't _IN_ the new Wario game. But that doesn't stop the FAQ-makers and now me getting all het up about it :)
Some discoveries I've made recently (or not-so-recently) of sites and blogs I.. dig include: loonyblog, from Jason 'loonyboi' Bergman, contributor to Shacknews and late of the excellent loonygames videogame theory/exposition site. Also Die Puny Humans, courtesy of Warren Ellis, one of the few comic-book writers actually doing something _different_, and a bizarre mix of fetching camgirls, mutated artwork, and war news right now. Also try Walk The Planck from former Monotonik contributor and New Zealander, Aquaboogie, or Kieron Gillen's Bath-based Future Publishing kwak, or Bookslut blog about, y'know, those paper-y things, or Toastyfrog for ever-reliable witty gamingkwakola, or Keith Bee, aka Vim!'s new blog (he gave up on the one I made him here), in which I handily find out he's finished his mix for the Monotonik mix-cd. YAY!
If you're the obsessive type who tends to check referrer logs a lot, there's always something interesting or bizarre which someone _seems_ to think they can find at your site. But by far the most disturbing search referrer to ffwd recently is anthrax + netflix. Uhm.. that's a pretty bizarre search - I'm hoping they were after a DVD by the thrash-metal group and aren't talking about some bizarre new terrorist conspiracy theory, uhoh. Other search topics finding ffwd which made me chuckle - retro + nudity, nes nudity ROM, and, of course, ululation (yep, only 26 people on the entire Internet have used the word, and I'm one of them. I think I need to get out more.)
On wandering aimlessly around my local software store yesterday, whilst the wife was otherwise occupied in Old Navy, came across a copy of 'Pocket Music' for the Gameboy Color in the second-hand section. Whilst there are other VERY cool and more powerful unofficial Gameboy music creation packages such as 'Little Sound DJ' and 'Nanoloop', 'Pocket Music' (courtesy of Jester Interactive, the folks behind 'MTV Music Generator' for PS2), seems to be the only commercially released Gameboy Color music title, unless you count the mini-games in the Gameboy camera. And you may get further confused by the fact that there's a different Gameboy Advance version of 'Pocket Music', which came out later, and apparently uses all samples - much less beepy and interesting for bleep freaks. Either way, still trying to work out if either of the "Pocket Music" titles was released in the US, so not quite sure how this copy ended up in San Jose - it's got a European product code on it. But try to hunt this (locked-out from playing on GBA!) GBC version down, especially from UK sources, since it's fun+easy to compose and has got great demotunes by Tim 'Cold Storage' Wright.
Thanks to those (gd, nullsleep!) who pointed out that I've referenced Fatboy Slim for the previous two posts in a row. Woops, unintentional but amusing - it always concerns me that his US profile is negative enough that he got branded Fratboy Slim, so maybe I'm trying to subconsciously rehabilitate him through pun-tastic weblog titles? God help us all, if so. In other entirely random news - got to hear some sekrit preview tracks for Tim Follin's 'Starsky And Hutch' videogame soundtrack, and it confirms my suspicions that Mr. Follin is the new Huggy Bear - ridiculously good cod-funk :) And to finish an entirely disconnected update, something that's been in my 'must post' bookmarks file for a while - the hidden-in-code ramblings of a super-grouchy Amiga games programmer - love it!
After promising it for about a year, finally got to making the skeleton of the .mod soul brother webpage. This is intended to be a good central place to download the _best_ open-source music .MODs from the Amiga/PC demoscenes, especially for those who don't know much about the .MOD scene, or are overwhelmed, mp3.com-stylee, by too much choice and too many confusing/boring/uninteresting artists who've released cheesy .MODs. The first artist I ended up featuring was the marvellous Mortimer Twang, and I'll continue adding artists and mentioning them on here over the next few weeks. I admit that my choices of musician are somewhat subjective and Amiga-centric - but as long as Ukulele/Banal Projects and Stargazer/Sonik Clique don't have good web representation, I'm there :P
Was _delighted_ to note that the wonderful Palm Pictures, who are the guys who put out the amazing 'Scratch' hiphop DJ documentary, and also produce the best music-video site on the Net, Sputnik7, have announced music-video collections for pretty much the holy trinity of revolutionary music-vid directors - Spike Jonze, Michel Gondry, and Chris Cunningham. They're all due out in August, with more directors to follow - YAY! Could probably ramble on incoherently for many paragraphs about how much I love these guys' work, but just go check out their sites to save yourself my painful proselytizing. Oh, and Palm already have a Hype Williams music-video DVD out, though I didn't get round to picking that up - wot no Missy on the DVD? Boy, he's directed a lot of videos, tho :P
For those who like Japanese videogame music, I noticed on vorc.org that there was a new .PDF magazine about that whole genre, called 'Spirit Of Gamer'. And I downloaded it, and it was good - very good, actually, and the broadband version, whilst pretty large at 21mb, is well worth getting for some great reviews and liner note translations of recent Japanese soundtracks like 'Dark Cloud 2' and older soundtracks like 'Sega Arcade '80s Vol.1'. Interestingly, I notice the parent website, Slightly Dark, is dedicated to 'out-of-print' game soundtracks, and has a number of intriguing ones for download. Sadly, it's not strictly legit, but it's worth temporarily sampling great stuff like the Famitsu-freebie 'Super Smash Bros DX Orchestra CD', given away on the front of a magazine in Japan, and featuring all your favorite Nintendo soundtracks played live by a full symphony orchestra..
Some highlights for the weekend include - working out how to burn Karaoke discs, and then discovering how much fun caterwauling Oasis songs like 'Songbird' are when enriched by Bay Area-based tipsy friends, thus no-one else having the faintest idea how the song goes. Also enjoyed discovering an active newsgroup improbably called 3do.bad-attitude, which seems to contain completely unrelated contents. Oh, and to round up the random 'to-be-posted' links, the pulp/Victorian-encyclopaedic Jess Nevins (never knew he had a Livejournal!) has his companion book to Alan Moore's 'League Of Extraordinary Gentlemen' (yes, yes, the GOOD, comic-book version :P) coming out later this summer - look at the gorgeous cover-art from John Picacio, complete with glowing quote from Moore himself.
The world of celebrity photography, especially photos of music celebs, has only a miniscule amount of pioneers and standouts. One that comes to mind is David LaChapelle, whose work you might know from a certain homoerotic picture of Eminem. But someone who is both amazing AND under-rated is the UK-based Perou @ Perou Inc., whose recent work with bands like Sparks and Autechre look stunning. Wish the pictures on his portfolio site were bigger, but as you can see, he's not afraid to use special effects or interesting props to create evocative results. And there's an excellent archive index on his site, where you can look at his wonderful take on music and celebrity portraits - I first saw his work in UK music magazine NME.
I'm pretty much a sucker for anything Jackie Chan does, and I loved his smart, easygoing partnership with Owen Wilson in 'Shanghai Noon'. So, of course, I was drooling when the sequel, 'Shanghai Knights' decided to change the genre-pastiche from Westerns to English Victoriana, referencing Sherlock Holmes, Jack The Ripper, and much more along the way. Now I note that Ebay has a bunch of the props from that movie up for sale, including one of the stunt imperial seals and, most brilliantly of all, Owen Wilson's character's pulp novel 'Roy O'Bannon Vs. The Mummy'. There's some other sneaky Sherlock Holmes-referencing props that I'd adore to get hold of, but I'm not going to link to those, in case one of the 3 people who reads this daily outbids me on it at the last minute :P Haw.
There's some really neat stuff hidden away in them thar retro gaming hills, it seems. Just noticed the Zektor Vector Generator add-on card for the PC, which is.. a vector graphics display adaptor for your home computer. It even comes with the (presumably 'unofficial') ZVGEmu for playing 'Asteroids', 'Tempest' and all the other great titles. It's a great way to get all the old classics that were discussed on Vectorlist working via your PC, though you still need to dig up an X/Y monitor from somewhere. For a little more background, it's also worth checking this first part of this article on 'The Rise And Fall Of Vectors' - if we all wish hard enough, will vectors rise again? :P
For some reason, HG Wells' all-time classic book 'War Of The Worlds' keeps reverberating on my radar. Firstly, the excellent, and now deleted-for-copyright-reasons, ~aD - 'Pharis Wheel' mix on our net.label Monotonik, which featured the famous Orson Welles-intoned radio broadcast. Then, the divine Alan Moore uses the Martians from the book as part of the amazing 2nd series of his graphic novel 'League Of Extraordinary Gentlemen'. And finally, I stumble upon a wonderful site showing how illustrations for the book of 'War Of The Worlds' have changed over the past century or so - wonderful stuff, even from artists as unexpected as Edward Gorey.
Just spent my lunchtime releasing the latest EP on our net.label, Monotonik, this time from Grandma, aka Khonnor, aka a bunch of other stuff. It's called 'For Your Broken Heart EP', and his music still continues to astound me, especially for someone who's just 15. I know geektronica (the currently preferred name of choice for what we release :P) is a niche, but some people have the capability to escape that niche, and he's one of them. Particularly, I find his spoken word section on 'Are We Dead Yet?' really affecting in the strangest ways - talk of 'anti-aliased halos' and the 'screensaver of the holy cross'? Wow. It just.. works.
The idea with ffwd is that I move all my other personal pages in under the ffwd 'umbrella'. Or parasol, if you prefer. So I've finally got round to redesigning my out-of-copyright ebooks review page, evam (which stands for 'electronic vintage ascii messiah', incidentally, doh), and you can find it in the menu at the top left of the screen. No new entries recently, but I've read a couple of books that I haven't written up, including some good pulp fiction starring 'The Shadow', so I'll try to update soon-ish. And the other pages (mainly photo pages for digicam/gameboycam/watchcam) should be converted soon. Suggestions on how to design it so the internal links on the top left are clear and separate from external links would.. rock.
Catapulting its startlingly literate hiphop lyrics out of seemingly nowhere, Tim Simenon's Bomb The Bass project had one of the best electronic-hiphop releases of the '90s with 'Bug Powder Dust', featuring the bizarre, maybe even over-eclectic Justin Warfield rapping about everything from 'Naked Lunch' and Led Zeppelin through The Great Space Coaster to.. Men At Work?! Fortunately, a nice Finnish person has deciphered the lyrics, so if you were confused about who Mr.Mojo Risin' was or where to get vegemite sandwiches - be confused no more. Oh, and for La Funk Mob remix action, if you haven't heard the track in question, try the Evil Puppet Head.
Hmm.. sometimes I get a little concerned that my constant obsession with ephemera and the wackier side of pop culture is a little unhealthy. But then I figure - it's only a spare-time thing, and I've got this far (lack of crushing debt, attractive website in the suburbs, adorably re-addicted to 'The Sims' on PS2 wife), so.. y'know, it can't be ALL bad. But I do resolve to think a little harder about more serious issues and goals (doing great at grad school, becoming a software archiving and/or public library maven), and... maybe even post about them. In the meantime: been trying out RSS aggregation to get all my favorite sites or blogs in one big, easily-checkable chunk. Windows users should check out Syndirella, which is freeware and seems to do the job pretty good, after an annoying 20mb download from M$. Also, if you like The Smoking Gun as much as I do, I recommend reading this excellent article on them from the now sadly defunct Shift magazine.
As a follow-up to the item about 'Manic Miner' and 'Jet Set Willy', poking around has revealed all manner of homebrew, adapted, and modified slants on those classic ZX Spectrum games. I particularly enjoy the Java-based 'Platform 1', since you just need to load the webpage to play it - put your highscores in comments?, if you dare, i'm No.17 currently :P And there's even a 'Jet Set Willy' hack with all-new level design devoted to The Beatles and The KLF (scroll down for info). And as a final aside, this Matthew Smith-related story is amazing - it's like you're Indiana Jones finding the Holy Grail, only the Holy Grail is.. 'Attack Of The Mutant Zombie Flesh-Eating Chickens From Mars - Starring Zappo The Dog'?!? And there's a vicious twist.
I've been a massive fan of the Japanese game developers NanaOn-Sha for their quirky, amazing music-based games ever since they made 'Parappa The Rapper' and followed it up with myriad amazing sequels and the super-stylised, vector-line-drawn 'Vib Ribbon'. Recently their titles, save the 'Parappa' sequel, have been much more difficult to track down, with 'Rhyme Rider Kerorican' for the Wonderswan Color tragically never released in the West. So I was delighted to see another mention of the Playstation 2 'Vib Ribbon' pseudo-sequel, 'Mojibribbon', in this Gamehotel presentation held in Paris by the Ars Electronica Electrolobby organisers last month. Still no sign of the game's release, though.. and will it be unplayable by non-Japanese speakers? Grr, I need more musicgameweirdness. And whilst you're about it, release the Parappa The Rapper animated series outside Japan, too, 'powers that be' :P
As part of the Copyright Office's discussion on the Digital Millenium Copyright Act in the US, public comments on the anti-circumvention clause (1201) are allowed, which are then posted on the copyright.gov site. Since I've been researching and working on ideas for software archiving, myself and Brewster Kahle at the Internet Archive posted a reply comment (PDF file) dealing with the preservation of obsolete software that has hardware dongles. The full document explains it better than I can in a short amount of space or time, but there's a concern that, over a long period of time, obsolete dongle-based software won't be allowed to be archived properly, so when its copyright does finally lapse, there won't be a working copy left.
