"Nothing but the rain"
I’ve a few things to say about Bullet For My Valentine, but thinking about it I probably wrote some stuff here and here. This album was the first by Bullet that I had listened to. I think I would say that it is largely ok but nothing special. It doesn’t really hit the spot for me. The heavy bits are good but the rest is ok.
It’s ok.
This was the view as the sun set over the Isle Of Sheppey, viewed from Whitstable.
It is time for us to accept that our mind exists entirely within ourselves. The construct that is Duality is false.
For far too long humans have talked about our “mind” almost as a separate part of our existence. We long to avoid death and we would like to believe that we aren’t just the product of cells, chemicals and electricity. We talk about consciousness as though it’s some magical, other worldly, thing that produces us. There’s this idea that we have “free will” and we are able to make choices and react to things outside of our experiences. The worst possible interpretation of this is that our mind is our soul and it will be preserved when our body dies. This kind of thought leads to myths and stories of eternal life, these things are dangerous to mankind.
The evidence is quite clear though. We exist within our bodies. Our thoughts are contained within our skulls. There is no single place within our brains where our “soul” or consciousness reside. What we consider to be our thoughts and free will are simply electrical and chemical signals developed within our brain, across the entirety of it. If parts of our brains are damaged our personality may change. Other parts of the brain can learn how to counteract the damaged parts. We are the sum of our experiences mixed with some pretty basic instincts.
Just because I dismiss the human psychological construction of duality doesn’t mean I don’t find everything fascinating. It is simply quite stunning how we have developed over time to become these thinking beings, able to discover the rules of the world around them, able to manipulate the environment to produce more humans. Very slowly we are coming to a collective recognition that we are failing the planet, that we need to stop carrying on, but that requires political will and that is desperately lacking.
Our emotions are chemicals and reactions developed and evolved over millennia. This doesn’t make it any less magical. It makes it more magical. The mystery isn’t removed when we accept what is plainly true, it allows us to wonder at what we now know. Just because we know the truth it doesn’t stop feelings being real.
On the matter of free will I should explain why we have none. We have the ability to make decisions and we constantly do that based on the available information. As our decisions are part of a chemical and electrical brain it is clear to me that if we were placed in exactly the same situation again with the same stimulae we would make the same decision. There is no way we would have done something different. Our language has developed so that we talk about “changing the course of history”. What a bullshit phrase that is. The things that have been can’t be changed. The course of our futures is unknown. We don’t change the future. The future just happens. We can’t change the decisions we have already made and we most definitely won’t choose a different path in the future. We are the product of our chemistry.
Does this mean that we can predict our future choices? No. Our brains are quite brilliantly complicated and simple at the same time. There is no way we can really model a brain at the moment. We can’t take a snap shot of our brains and then run those processes forward. Even if we could as soon as the external influences were different the two minds would diverge with increasing speed.
I am constantly amazed at how we humans have developed our understanding of the universe while at the same time deluding ourselves about reality.
Well, I’m not sure where to start with this album. There’s a lot to say and this will end up as a ramble through my history. There’s probably not a lot new there given some of the communications on this site.
I bought this album on the back of previously purchasing Music For A Gilted Generation. This new purchase BLEW ME AWAY. It is heavy and nasty and yet brilliant and perfectly produced.
I used to play quite a bit of Doom and back in ’97 or so and this album was placed in the CD tray to keep a nice background track to me blowing shit up. Fat Of The Land is perfectly moody for this task.
If you don’t own this album then you suck. Go get it. Download it. Play it. Make your ears bleed.
There isn’t a bad song on this album.
I saw this band a long time ago in Wembley Arena. I have a feeling they supported Bon Jovi, but I could be wrong. I bought this album on vinyl shortly after and then obviously I bought the CD to update my collection many years later.
This is very melodic rock/metal. In fact I think metal is NOT what it is. The whole album is very musical with tight long harmonies in the vocals. I like it but you have to be in the correct mood otherwise you’ll hate it.
This is also a very “summer” album. It’s a bit jangly. Quite possibly this is an acquired taste. I know that Andy would hate it.
“Fine Art Of Friendship” is a good song.
This is, as far as I know, the first album by Seattle giants Alice In Chains. It opens with “We Die Young”, quite simply a brilliant song that introduces the whole Alice experience. The guitars are generally heavy and slow while the vocals haunt me.
Alice In Chains formed part of the Seattle sound, a mixture of grunge and anger, but I think they stood out from the rest. On the occasions I have seen them they blew me away.
This is a brilliant album. My favourites are the opening track and “It Ain’t Like That”.
Other Alice in Chains communications are here.
Here is a picture of my Indiana Jones Minecraft character. The Cylon version is staying at home to look over my lounge. Indiana is based in my work room. He looks great, I am happy to have him.
It’s a Cylon Minecraft character made from cardboard and painted. I didn’t make this, it was made for me and I feel proud to be the owner of a Minecraft Cylon. It matches the Cylon in my dining room.
For those of you unsure of what a Cylon is, then you should go here. For those of you unsure of what Minecraft is, go here.
Also, for those of you who haven’t seen the BSG series you might want to know that “Nothing but the rain” is a quotation from that series.
“What can you hear, Starbuck?”, asks Adama.
“Nothing but the rain.”, she replies.
If this is your type of rock then it is a good album. I had a slight Extreme revival about a year ago where I got their albums. I listened to them quite a bit in my late teens. This was their first album. You should get Pornograffitti instead.
So, I went to see this film last night. As ever I rated this film on IMDB, you should read this communication before moaning about my rating system.
I rated Avengers: Age of Ultron (2015) 6/10 #IMDb http://t.co/X91ogrVXTl
— Ian Parish (@iparish) April 24, 2015
Overall I enjoyed this film. I don’t think it was as good as the first film. The action sequences were perfectly fine although nothing really stood out for me. The buddy aspect of the film was ok but the best parts of that were dealt with in the first film.
Look, this is a solid superhero film and works very well. It is probably better than most of the standalone films that have been released, it just wasn’t as good as the first film. Sorry.
I am annoyed.
The BBC are arseholes. The headline and photo ALL imply that plucking makes hair grow in humans. Here’s the first few paragraphs. With my emphasis.
Plucking hairs in a precise pattern can make even more pop up in their place, a US study suggests. Playing with the density of hair removed altered how serious an injury the body recognised and in turn how much hair regrew. The team managed to regenerate 1,300 hairs by plucking 200, in the study using mice reported in Cell journal. Experts said it was “really nice science” but were uncertain if it could lead to a cure for human baldness. Half of men have male-pattern baldness by the age of 50. The team at the University of Southern California were investigating how hair follicles communicate with each other to decide on the scale of repair job needed.
So, with only a single reference to the fact that the study was in MICE and lots of human type text and a picture this article screams that plucking in humans will cause hair growth.
Ok, so it happens in mice. So fucking what. When they can show it works in humans I may interested in knowing about it. Not for myself although I am mostly bald, I’d rather have less hair.
This is extremely poor reporting. There is no need for this article. It is a waste of time.
So people. What I thought of Thunderbirds Are Go:
Oh my! @ThunderbirdsHQ was so awesome. I loved it and I loved watching it with my kids. Brilliant!
— Ian Parish (@iparish) April 4, 2015
Quite simple really. I loved it.
The show looked brilliant. The mix of miniatures and CGI was perfect. For a great example of where this works well you could see Moon. For examples of where just CGI doesn’t work see Star Wars Episodes 1-3. The whole look was organic, more natural than pure CGI.
I have no idea of which Tracy brother is which. I just can’t do similar faces and names. I will probably end up knowing them by colour. Quite clearly Kayo, Lady Penelope Creighton-Ward and Parker were obvious. The others? No idea. My facial recognition fails me completely.
The vehicles looked and sounded brilliant. I had two “moments”. The first was when TB2 took off from Tracy Island and there were a couple of “boom” sounds that made me shiver. Then, and this is just brilliant, when TB1 flew there were condensation clouds behind shock waves that made my hairs stand on end. Yes, I am that much of a nerd.
Who cares if the story was over the top, that’s just what we want. Overall, this was a great piece of television. It is something I am really looking forward to sharing with my children The wait for something like this has been too long!
Nerd Stuff:
The animators have been very clever. They have given the humans a slightly shiny face in homage to the plastic models of the original series AND at the same time they have avoided falling into the UNCANNY VALLEY. Well done. Any more realistic and people would have felt an urge to throw up and turn off. Also, creating a smooth surface with certain reflective properties saves a ton of rendering time.
If you aren’t sure then think about why in Toy Story ALL the characters have plastic faces [rendering time] and then think about Monsters Inc, only one character has hair, why? Rendering time and computer power. I saw a documentary about Pixar where they essentially said that if they tried to re-create Cars using the computer power available when they made Toy Story the rendering would have taken around 2000 years. Computers are awesome.
[I had watched the Reggie Yates documentary called No Strings Attached, but I got bored. It was a modern documentary with reviews and reminders bracketing every advert break and that ruined it. Not worth watching.]
So, here’re some photos from the Disaster Area gig on the 20 March. Our set list, although small, was perfectly formed.
The quality of these photos is terrible, mainly because they’ve come from the Disaster Area Facebook page. If you really want to see more head over to that stuff. As I’ve explained before: I don’t do Facebook.