- logging coolness from 127.0.0.1, daily.
Thanks to the ever-vigilant Keith 'Vim!' Baylis, got hold of the BBC Radio 1 Essential Mix from the _genius_ DJ Yoda And Greenpeace, promoting their amusingly named "Unthugged" mix-album with 2 hours of UK cut-up turntablism of the highest order, messing up the Batman TV series theme, Jay-Z over slowed-down jungle ('Super Sharp Shooter'!) , the Meow Mix commercial with Cassetteboy's Jamie Oliver piss-take (which Holly appreciated greatly), and a veritable cornucopia of other goodness... hey, and I just noticed the mix is still up on the Radio 1 page right now [UPDATE - no it's not any more, doh!], and here's the tracklisting. Clever, _and_ funky? Damn them.
In other news, people were poking me mightily about not updating the modsoulbrother site, which is my contribution to .MOD (music from the demo/hacking scene) history, and an attempt to bring a little perspective and explanation to what is not a well-described or documented scene. So I actually took some time out and put another entry online, for Martin 'Nuke' Iveson, who started out doing .MOD music, and is more famous nowadays as one of the musicians at Tomb Raider developers Core Design, and as a top-class jazz-house artist. So.. go check it out if you're into that type of thing - tunes will play in WinAmp, tho it's better with an extra plug-in.
It's so freakin' hot in California tonight that it's gone past ridiculous and back round again. Whatever that means. It hit 100 today, anyhow, and I was glad I didn't have to work outside anywhere. But I do need to get a laptop so I can work in the room that has decent air-conditioning.
So we finally, finally, gloriously got a TiVo, and I'm already drooling at all the good stuff it's got recording for us. I'm also now tempted to subscribe to Showtime, cos they seem to have a 'get 50 bucks if you subscribe for 3 months' offer, and 3 months worth is less than 50 bucks - so seems like a deal. Although just about everything on Showtime itself is either movies we can Netflix or rubbishy, save Penn And Teller: Bullshit!, the jewel in the crown of the Showtime deal seems to be The Sundance Channel, which you can only get with Showtime and has some very good-looking documentaries and independent movies - stuff like Gods And Monsters, Wilde, The Spanish Prisoner, and many many others I haven't seen. If I get it, I'll tell you if it's worth it.
Finally, thanks to TiVo and the skippability factor, you will be getting regular New Tom Green Show updates from me until I bore of it, or he gets cancelled - all bets are off regarding which one will come first. Last night's episode had, well, Glenn Humplik turning up with his arm in a cast 'cos Andy Dick broke Glenn's thumb wrestling on the show the previous night (!), Tom showing a whole bunch of laidback charisma but not a whole bunch of interviewing skills, Jamie Kennedy being vaguely amusing, a good filmed segment where Tom found Tom Green County and harassed all the residents, Fred Durst showing that he can only ever sip a mug of water twice (he's obsessive-compulsive about it, apparently), and.. this one swung back to watchable for me, but I'm still, admittedly, a fan to start with. We'll see how the ratings work out.. the New York Post loved it, but I think the review is a bit too effusive, frankly.
Aren't I meant to talk about videogames sometime, too? I still love Dead Or Alive: Xtreme Beach Volleyball, which is well worth buying at the $30 Target has it for, and my next two GoVoJo rentals are Midtown Madness 3 and Wario World, so I'll bust out the (lack of ) knowledge about those when they arrive. Yay?
Being a Simon myself, thought it was cool that Holly found the Simon charity auction on eBay, with, yes, famous people called Simon signing the classic electronic toy Simon and then selling it for charity. Seems like there's a lot more demand for Duran Duran than American Idol, though, judging by bid prices.. weird.
Oh, and of course, after I raved about The New Tom Green Show, the second night was an unmitigated disaster. Marilyn Manson and his girlfriend sat around looking bored while Tom halfheartedly egged them on, then Andy Dick came out and looked very confused and somewhat chemically enhanced, then things pretty much deteriorated from there. Apparently, if Tom can get the right guests on, all is good, but.. ugh, tonight - trainwreck. At least the filmed clips were good (particularly Tom going into the Louisiana backwoods, and doing car revving noises and dog barks with a crazed toothless local for no particular reason.)
As previously discussed, I was quivering with barely suppressed potency at the concept of The New Tom Green Show, the great surreal Canadian one's adventure into the world of the late night talk show. And the premiere tonight was, well, rather special, I thought. It's really a lot less of the gross-out insanity of his previous MTV shows, and more of the off-kilter chat show with just enough weirdness to make you grin. Tonight's guests were Ludacris, the guys from American Movie (which Tom says is his favorite movie ever), and Seth Green.
So.. Ludacris fired Bill O'Reilly books from a homemade catapult in the parking lot, Tom put cardboard bits on the cameras to make the show feel more important, the filmed inserts included the start of Tom and Glenn's hitchike across America (where-in they begged money from Sally Jessie Raphael and Tom threw up on-camera after getting completely trashed in Washington DC), then the American Movie guys turned up plugging their new homemade horror movie, which looked absolutely crazed, and Mike (the sweet acid casualty) sang a song about someone hacking his hand off. Then Tom walked across the road and tucked Seth Green into a bunkbed at some random house across the street from the studio cos Seth was tired, then the show finished off with a choir singing a beautiful hymn.
I think I see a touch of Reeves And Mortimer in Tom, or.. it's just that touch of guile-less style which makes him terribly watchable for me. Anyhow, guests for the rest of the week include Tony Hawk, Marilyn Manson, and Gene Simmons, so at least they're getting intriguing guests in for the first few days. If you're in the States, then watch it, dammit - weeknights at midnight on MTV.
Further to yesterday's entry, finished up Book 5 of Harry Potter. Again, this is a no spoiler zone, and I really, really enjoyed it. There's a lot of action, a lot of culmination, a lot of disintegration, and a lot of Harry growing up into a young man rather than a boy. Although it's a long, long way off, can't wait to see it as a movie.
On a completely unrelated note, the excellent Lassi Nikko, aka Brothomstates, who's an old .MOD-scene legend, sorta vaguely released some .MODs on Monotonik once, and released an album on Warp, and who already had his idm bleep tracks used on a Sprite commercial in the UK, apparently has his music ('Viimo') in the new Pantene Pro-V commerical, according to Luminfire. Shame it wasn't Alberto Balsam, really (Aphex Twin joke! Aphex Twin joke!)
So I wandered out at about 3pm today, and decided to try Tower Records, which is just across the street from our apartment, for the new Harry Potter. Of course, having no actual gumption, I hadn't reserved it. But fortunately, people don't think to look in Tower Records for, uhh, books, and there were about 5 copies left. So I'm about 150 pages in (speed reading is a curse as well as a blessing, frankly), and so far.. I like it a great deal. I like the way that JK Rowling has a certain, unshakeable sense of where she's going in the books. As I was saying to Holly, the Bridget Jones sequel, although pretty good, felt like Helen Fielding was, well, reaching a little for places to take Bridget. And Hannibal was a darn strange direction to go in for Thomas Harris. But the Harry Potter books always feel they're going in the right direction, getting ever murkier, ever darker and more epic as the series progresses. I'll try to post again when I'm actually done - still no spoilers, mind you.
So we decided to try a new distribution method at our net.music.label Monotonik, and it's the wonderful focused P2P utility BitTorrent. Thanks to the equally wonderful Reed @ Gametab, we've set up a Monotonik BitTorrent download page with over 1.3gb of our freely distributable MP3s to download - everything we've done since the beginning of 1999, actually. So.. please tell your friends, go leech all the releases (which are now named with catalog numbers for the geek collectors amongst us :P), and generally... have fun with it?
A current obsession of one of the IRC channels I hang out in seems to be the messed-up, dream-based furry web comic, Boston and Shaun. Basically, it's about a dragon called Boston who has someone called Shaun tucked into her pouch (!) in a vaguely disturbing manner and then Shaun turns into a dragon sometimes and then they inflate and there's bad grammar and nonsensical plotlines and and and.. anyhow, bizarre is not the word, read a few and see what I mean. And this is intended to be deadly serious, and _not_ a spoof comic, as far as anyone can work out. But as an added bonus, someone (Tumult?) has mixed up a little Boston And Shaun tribute in Flash, with all that memorable dialog coming out of, well, other people's mouths. OK, so ffwd promises not to turn into Fark, but dammit, this is classic re-appropriation :)
It's a balmy day in the Bay Area today, and it's nice to spend it in the shade, sipping a pint glass of water, and listening to Super Furry Animals. Continuing my habit of putting single songs on repeat, 'Presidential Suite' from the Rings Around The World album is currently going round and round. There's never been a more beautiful song about Monica Lewinsky, that's for sure, and its animated video for the wonderful Rings Around The World DVD works even better, all Yellow Submarine-ish psychedelic cut-ups.
Anyway, that happens to be the random bit of pop culture tickling my fancy today. Otherwise, dear reader, all seems to be going good. Updates on ffwd have slowed significantly, mainly since I'm pushing 50 posts a week on my 'work blog', Slashdot Games, which has been getting good hits (well into the 7 figures-worth, so far) and some nice feedback from Wired editors and Shacknews loonies alike. I'm determined to make it the most interesting games site out there, if not the most comprehensive. And I'm just setting up an interesting BitTorrent experiment with the Monotonik catalog, and desperately trying to get time to write some other things, make progress on the archaic software work at the Internet Archive, update modsoulbrother, and practically an infinite amount of other things. But, y'know.. all is full of love.
So it turns out that one of my favorite goofy hiphop 'stars' of all time, the saintly Ugly Duckling, have a new album, 'Taste The Secret', out next week on Emperor Norton Records. It's a, get this, concept album about a store that sells meat milkshakes, and their showdown with the evil vegetarians, and it's actually very reminiscent of Parappa The Rapper 2 and the noodle shenanigans there-in (!). The corporate entity behind this milkshake revolution, Meat Shake, even has its own site - neeto. The Emperor Norton info page on the band has a bunch of audio clips, and I highly recommend checking out the album when it comes out, plus the other two _brilliant_ albums from them, Fresh Mode and Journey To Anywhere. Unfortunately, the band seems to have got bounced around labels a lot, in the UK, they've been on Wall Of Sound offshoot Bad Magic, and then on home of The Prodigy + Badly Drawn Boy, XL Recordings, and in the US, they were on 1500 Recordings, also home of Roni Size, who got shut down after being bought by a dot.com (Riffage.com) who went bust, of all things. Oh, and the new Village Voice has a very positive review of the new album, yay.
Finally got round to watching the (recorded, so could skip tedious bits!) MTV Movie Awards last night. Now, despite the fact that MTV hype it endlessly and even have shows all about the 'wacky stuff' that happened at previous awards, *sigh*, it's often got some interesting people and stunts on it. This time, all the geeks are talking about the Gollum acceptance speech, which was indeed genius - wonder if Andy Serkis wrote the dialog or whether Peter Jackson planned his own berating? Otherwise, the Yoda appearance was, sadly, borderline tedious, there were some fun little comedy cameos (particularly Andy Richter), and me and Holly were disappointed David and Victoria Beckham didn't present, darnit :P But the most exciting thing, for me, and I suspect nobody else, were the trailers for The New Tom Green Show, which is apparently some kind of pseudo-talk show with filmed bits in it, and Glenn Humplik as a real sofa-sitting sidekick. As for why I'm excited, I still think the man is one of the most watchable people on TV - I even liked Freddy Got Fingered. Go figure. I think it's the Beavis And Butthead approach to humor - 'I saw the top of the mountain, and it was good'.
In an extremely bizarre turn of events, there's a new website promoting the Dumb and Dumber prequel movie, and it's called.. Slashdumb. This amazing new site's slogan appears to be 'News For Dummies - Just Stuff', the posts on it are from lloyd and HarryOne (the main movie characters), and the domain name is registered to New Line Cinema - I checked. The Borg version of Gollum is a particularly nice touch, I think. It's definitely weird when you're working for enough of a cultural icon that movie studios start parodying it. Or rather, nerd web site designers who work for movie studios, and who probably read Slashdot all the time anyhow, I guess :P
So, my first piece of work in a _long_ time for Gamasutra (the online part of Game Developer magazine) is up, and it's an interview with game design maverick Chris Crawford. Sadly, you may need to register (for free) to check it out, so if you're too lazy, here's a completely different interview I did with him back in 1997. Apparently, I'm stalking him. Nah, but seriously, he's one of the few shrewd people looking at game and interactive design with a critical eye, plus he's opinionated and funny, which helps a lot. Hopefully his new deals for a revamped "Balance Of Power" will work out, too.
So me and Holly are _finally_ getting to go back to the UK next month - it's been 18 months without visiting for me, though I saw a lot of my family when they came over for wedding-related stuff. I've postponed the trip umpteen times due to a myriad of problems, and even had to cancel a non-refundable plane ticket once due to visa problems. But.. it's all good now! Even better, we're going to go on a holiday-within-a-holiday with my parents and visit Portmeirion in Wales, a beautifully bizarre village you might know from "The Prisoner", that classic late '60s TV series of paranoia and mistrust. If I know you from UK days, mail me.. I'll be seeing you :P
So, scampered off to the cinema yesterday with Holly-ester to see "The Italian Job", which, obviously, I was concerned would be a Tinseltown remake disaster on the scale of Michael Caine's other horribly-revisioned '60s classic, "Get Carter." However, it just wasn't. It was a really rather fun heist movie, with some smart casting choices - Jason Statham putting on the charm, Mos Def goofing off, and the ever-reliable Seth Green in the Benny Hill role. Actually, let me repeat that, because it's the only time you're ever going to hear it. 'This movie starred Seth Green in the Benny Hill role.' Excellent. And the scriptwriters made some intelligent choices, not trying to Xerox the original, rather cleverly weaving in some of the original locations (Italy, the Alps) and characters. Not enough Mini chasing went on, mind you, but I think I can forgive them.