Month: April 2019

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Master Of Puppets – Metallica

It’s hard to write about an album which affected me so much. There are a few that have had that effect and the first three Metallica albums definitely gave me something new from music. This was a new style for me, I expect I listened to this in the late 80s after getting into Iron Maiden and AC/DC. The sounds of this album and the thematic experience were beyond my then understanding of what heavy metal was.

I used to think that Metallica took the “chug” sound and made it into a note. They took melody and turned that into rhythm. It felt like a whole new way of writing music and it shook me [but not all night long].

For music to be where it is today you have to have all the bands who now bore me. You have to have the big four. Without them music would be different. Although someone else would have got there, I’m not obsessive enough to think that the creativity of humans is so poor that only a few people are capable of changing the world. If not Metallica then another band. If not Picasso then another artist. That seems quite logical to me.

Every song on this album is an artwork. It is a classic. This is an album that should be owned and played by all. It’s stunning. Yet, now, it bores me. My music has moved on and while I can appreciate this album for the genius that it is I rarely play it and consider it almost a part of history. I would rarely seek this album out. I still play AC/DC and some other bands so I’m not sure what it is about this that does that.

If you asked me to list the top ten metal albums I don’t think this one would make it for me. I’d rather have the first Metallica album. I understand that is a controversial choice and I also understand why but the first album is raw. This album is somewhat polished and I’m not so keen on that sound. Which is ironic given my current propensity for electronic industrial music!

Go listen to this. It’s a classic. It’s just history now.

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Pet Sematary

I’m having a cup of Earl Grey tea as I write this because for some reason I want Earl Grey tea. I’m not sure why but I had to go and buy a box of tea bags just to satisfy this craving.

This afternoon I went to the cinema at Rochester, the Cineworld one, the one I always go to, and I watched another horror film. I’ve a number of things I want to talk about here but first there are some formalities to get through. The tide was quite low and I did’t take a photograph this time but I did look at the lovely murky water as it journeyed past to the Thames Estuary.

I also rated this film on IMDB. I then used the app feature to share my opinion with the world because I know the world wants to know what I think.

So, the things I want to say are in broadly two themes. The first is what I thought of the film the other is why I think I dislike horror movies.

I haven’t read the book and I haven’t seen any other film version. So, this film was a bit shit. But that might because of what I write in the next paragraph. My issues are the following:

  • IT HAS NOTHING TO DO WITH A PET CEMETERY. A cat nearly gets buried there. That’s it. All the rest of the action happens upon a special fucking hill which people only go and visit when it’s night time because otherwise they’d see it’s just a hill. WITH STEPS. This place you aren’t meant to go has STEPS.
  • This is surely a love story? The ending seemed perfect for a sort of “let’s get together” type of film. I’m not sure I was meant to empathise with  anyone, I didn’t really. I did like John Lithgow though, it’s hard not to.
  • A cat being evil isn’t a surprise. We all know they can be evil fuckers. It didn’t really seem that evil in the end. It just scratched someone.
  • They did kill a kid and well done to the film makers.
  • Trees aren’t scary.

While I was watching this film I was trying to work out why I don’t enjoy horror movies. It’s not like when I was a young teenager and I saw loads of classics and each one affected me quite a bit back then:

  • The Omen (all parts)
  • Poltergeist
  • Amityville
  • And probably a few others

I think I struggle with these themes now because I don’t believe in any form of soul or afterlife. I don’t believe in anything after death. There’s no evidence and all religions which offer the afterlife are cons.

I am subject to jumps and foreboding but I think in horror films it’s not done subtly enough for me. It’s obvious when there’s going to be a pop-scare. The music seems too leading, I guess these slasher flicks seem to grate rather than entertain. I mean, if you lived in this sort of universe you’d fix up all lights and basement rooms during the day time and make sure everything worked well in the house. Who’d walk around a house in the dark when they hear the noises of the undead?

Do you know what I watched last night that was better than the last two films I saw at the cinema:

UNDER SIEGE

It was amazing. I enjoyed every minute of it and I have every time I’ve watched it since seeing it at the cinema in 1992. There might be too many bullets in each magazine but as films go it is great fun. Well done to those who made it. It still works well twenty seven years later [it hurt writing those numbers]. Except Steven Seagal is clearly a nutter now.

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Soulless

I went for a walk through Maidstone yesterday and happened to have a cup of tea at the cafe in the House Of Fraser store at one end of the Fremlin Walk shopping experience. The following photograph was taken through a window while sitting and drinking.

Fremlin Walk
Fremlin Walk

Upon initial inspection the place seems nice and pretty but when you gaze for longer you can see how horrible and soulless the design is. All the buildings are the same, the colours are all pastel shades meant to compliment each other and the trees are evenly spaced. The place has no soul. It has no organic-randomness. It’s a designed space and I think it looks horrible.

Towns are organic growing places where new buildings should have purpose and style along with individuality. We shouldn’t have everything looking the same, it should be interesting and varied. Too much order is a bad thing, although you could argue it is very efficient but at the same time it lacks a certain quality.

Places like this don’t looked lived-in. They look forced. I shall go and find some contrasting pictures over the next week to continue my thesis. I’ve got some ideas of where to go.

Sky
Sky

This view was quite nice [note the lack of buildings though] although I missed getting the best symmetry. Maybe I should return to try again?

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Master Of Confusion – Gamma Ray

In reality this is a Helloween album. I think it’s Kai Hansen playing guitars and then the sound is more “Helloween”.

So, I’ve just been over to Wikipedia and I’m not sure what’s going on. This album is named for Gamma Ray on my music collection but it isn’t in the list of titles by Gamma Ray on their Wikipedia page. This means it might really be by Helloween [which is almost the same thing].

Fuck. It’s not on the Helloween Wikipedia page either. That’s me a bit bollocksed there then. Now the next thing is to search for the title rather than the band name. Perhaps I’ll try Kai Hansen.

Now I’m lost. It’s not on his page either.

The album is playing as I write this and bugger me if they haven’t covered “Death Or Glory” by a NWOBHM band which I’ve heard many times on a album collated by Lars Ulrich. However, the search isn’t going well to figure out this album because now I’ve search for “Death Or Glory” and all I’m getting is a song by The Clash and it’s NOT THAT ONE.

The next song has started and it’s a ballad bullshit thing. It’s called Lost Angels and sounds like it too.

Right, I’ve solved the Death Or Glory problem, it#s by a band called Holocaust, of course it is.

Back to searching for the album artist that I’m listening to at the moment. This review is causing pain and effort. Originally I was just going to write:

It’s typical Helloween and I haven’t listened to it much.

Jesus! That took some time. But now I’ve found it. The album is actually an EP with only a couple of new songs and some live versions of other songs. Here’s the Wikipedia page. Oh, it has three sides to the EP. Because, of course it does.

My next challenge is to try and find the NWOBHM compilation that Lars Ulrich put together as there’s a load of great songs on it.

MasterOfConfusioCover.jpg
By Source, Fair use, Link

On my previous communication I forgot to mention that I have finally completed the L section of the reviews and now I’m on the M bit, I mean I know it’s obvious but it feels like an achievement.

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Maiden England ’88 – Iron Maiden

Honestly, I bought this a few years back because it’s a recording of the first concert I went to. Except it isn’t. I saw Maiden on 10th December 1988 at Wembley Arena and it was spectacular. This recording is them at the NEC in Birmingham. I think I’ve played it once.

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Lego 66 – Magazine Kits

Here’s another couple of Lego models for me to catalogue. These came attached to one of those magazines that cost around GBP5. But I think the models look quite cool.

Dwarf Spider Droid micro edition
Dwarf Spider Droid micro edition
U-Wing micro edition
U-Wing micro edition

It’s probable that the U-Wing is part of the rebellion against the established government of the galaxy. If we use a neo-con view of the world then we would probably think they are rebel scum, all those terrible people fighting for the rights of everyone. Could it be that they are the bad side?

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Lovesexy – Prince

Wow, two albums in the “L” section of this as I trawl through my stuff alphabetically. The main this I remember about this album is that it was recorded on a tape which had Bon Jovi and then went straight into this. I’m not sure they go together but that tape was a product of its time, around 1990 in my lifescale.

There are two songs which strike me as best on this album and they would be: Alphabet St and Lovesexy. I don’t listen to this album often, it is however most definitely a summer sound. It’s worth a listen.

As I had a taped copy of this originally from SR I didn’t know the format of the album and when I got the CD version I was annoyed that the whole album is listed as a single track. I spent quite a while finding software to break the album into individual tracks but I go there in the end. I now have this as a digital copy on the NAS. It’s there forever. Unless there’s an EMP, in which case we are all fucked.

I can remember this tape playing as I drove cadets to a band competition in the late 1990s. I had this playing in the minibus and we were all singing along to Bon Jovi and then Prince started playing. I quite liked the contrast but it was not universal!

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Loveless – My Bloody Valentine

I got this after a friend recommended it as a highly rated album. I knew it wasn’t metal but I wasn’t sure what it was. I can tell you that I would describe it as haunting blurry music with distortion. I can’t decide if it’s actually any good. It sounds like it comes from the early 90s and they are a band trying to make a name for themselves as being different and not the usual Manchester lot.

I guess that first paragraph is rather vague but I have listened to this quite a bit and it might possibly be summer music but it’s not one I rush to. I also haven’t looked up anything on Wikipedia [which I will do after publishing this] so I can’t be held accountable for anything I’ve said which accidentally is true.

It’s worth a listen but probably best while high?

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Not A Neo Con

I found an advert which, I think, lies! I was looking through the newspaper that my parents read and I found the advert below. Now, let me first explain that I do not agree with the “news”paper that my parents read and given my personal politics it stresses me that they still get this heap of shit delivered to their door. I have offered to pay for a different paper but they have refused. I’m not sure why they still read the Express but it is a vile piece of work.

What A Con
What A Con

This advert is along the lines of what started me into this skeptical hole in the first place. Originally my father gave me a magnet that surround the fuel line in a car and then magically makes the car engine more efficient. I’ve written about it here. At first glance it seems reasonable that something might increase the fuel efficiency of an engine, but if it’s that simple don’t you think the manufacturers would do it anyway?

I wrote about a fuel chip I saw advertised in a motorcycle magazine here. It seems that this device is making very similar claims. Notice that if you want, you can get your money back if you aren’t happy with the results. This is a classic scam because no-one cares enough to ask for their money back.

Having looked at the website in this advert and the one for tank chip they both are in association with the same company.

Hamilton Direct

This company is based in Paignton in Devon. They seem to peddle a lot of bullshit. Don’t buy anything from them.

The bike insurance people Bennetts did a proper testing regime on the tank chip and they found it makes no difference. You can see their results here: Bennetts.

If the product seems to good to be true then the chances are that it is.

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An Avatar

I’ll probably mess around and update this one soon, but this is my current Gran Turismo driver:

Kertz
Kertz

I think you can just see two decals for this website as advertising. Pretty poor placement by me and perhaps I should change the colour.

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Mutability

A few summers ago my project was to build an ADS-B receiver and use the data collected to upload to an aircraft tracking website. If you want to see what I see then go to:

360 Radar

I don’t remember the details about how I found this but the project was good fun and I got the Raspberry Pi in the loft with a decent aerial, filter and pre-amp, and it was all working fine. I was using a lovely piece of software called Virtual Radar Server and was able to use this as a web server and people could see the aircraft on web pages served by the Pi.

360 Radar is good because it using multi-lateration to detect the positions on military aircraft. This is pretty handy for spotters like me and it also works well when I take cadets to RAF Wittering for some Air Experience Flying, I can see where my cadets are in the air.

Over the last few months I’d been receiving outage warnings from the 360 guys. It would appear that my Pi had stopped sending them data and while I live in a flight-busy area of the country and there’s plenty of contributors here every little helps. I had the occasional outage and this seemed to be when the router reset and the Pi wouldn’t re-find the existing wi-fi network. I just had to power cycle the Pi and everything worked fine. The outages seemed to be occurring more over the last while with the Pi stopping feeding every few days.

At first I thought it was a wi-fi issue so I bought some new ethernet-over-power adapters and linked the system into the route via a wired connection. This also meant I could ssh in to the Pi even if wifi was the original problem. I tried to work out how to turn the wifi connection off entirely but just ended up changing the SSID the Pi looked for as a simle way of ensuring the wired connection took preference.

After a week of testing I was still getting outages and my initial thought was that the VRS software was making the Pi work too much. I’m not sure why I thought that but I looked up ways to remove VRS. This was not the easiest as I had installed it years ago and couldn’t remember how it ran within the OS. I eventually managed to remove the Mono service and this stopped VRS running.

It was at this point I worked out how to use the log file of the MLAT client and I could see that all the software seemed to be working fine it was the Dump1090 program that didn’t seem to be sending data internally. I figured that Dump1090 had somehow stopped receiving the signal from the aerial. It all worked fine after a reboot and so I decided to replace the USB dongle that was decoding the ADS-B signals. I ordered a FlightAware USB stick and at the same time decided I would rebuild the Pi OS from scratch to have a “clean” build.

Once the new USB stick arrived I turned off all the systems and followed the excellent instructions from the 360 Radar guys to rebuild the OS of the Pi and just run a lite version of what I had been doing before. This took a while as I mistakenly thought the Pi wasn’t uploading to 360 because I was looking at the wrong server details. After an email to the support chaps it turned out I was contributing and a couple of hours of troubleshooting by me hadn’t been worth it!

So, the Pi sits in the loft, chugging away supplying data to 360 Radar, in return for which I get free access to their excellent tracking site. I’m running dump1090-mutability along with the MLAT-Client from 360. I’d really like to be able to allow you all to see the output of this but Mutability doesn’t have an external feed and I am not opening up my 80 port for the world.

Output of dump1090-mutability
Output of dump1090-mutability
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Love Symbol – Prince

I don’t thin that as a metal head it’s wrong to really like Prince. This album comes after Diamond and Pearls and was when he changed his named to a squiggle.

There is a level of funk in this album which is delightful. I don’t listen to this album as much as Diamonds and I think that’s because the latter has more of a personal connection, I did see Prince on tour at Earls Court.

Turn the bass up and play this loud on a sunny day and it can’t do anything but brighten your life.

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Look What The Cat Dragged In – Poison

I can remember a poster of the singer of Poison on the wall in our sixth form centre at school and I couldn’t tell if he was a he or a she. It’s good that these things matter less these days and most people don’t really care, be what you want to be. I haven’t seen Poison and that may be a good thing, I dread to think what the audience would be like.

This is classic terrible 80s rock and it’s brilliant. This is an horrific look at the culture of cock-rock and what it does to a generation. I love this stuff but at the same time I can inform you that it is terrible [sorry Pom].

This album has some classic songs on it and everyone would be singing along.

My problem now is trying to imagine four chaps in their sixties with balding heads running around in drag-queen make up singing these songs. It was and is a product of its time and is a bloody good examples of that time.

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Lodestar – Lodestar

This band was a spin-off from Senser. The singer and a couple of others created this album and toured for a while in 1996 or so. I can’t remember when I bought this album. The wiki page for them seems to indicate they are a prog-rock band but it’s not as boring as prog rock and quite upbeat. I enjoy it and some of the songs run through my head now and then, the sign of a good album. It’s worth a listen.

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Us

Yesterday I drove to the western half of Kent to see the film Us. I had to cross the Medway, much like the Romans about two thousand years ago but without the battle and invasion part. The cinema I went to is the Cineworld at Rochester. I picked the film Us because it was lowest on the list of films I’d least like to see that were being shown.

M2 Eastbound Medway Bridge
M2 Eastbound Medway Bridge

If you look carefully at the picture of the bridge you can see the work done to strengthen it. It has been reduced from four lanes to three due to the increased sizes of lorries allowed on UK roads by previous governments leading to a drop in rail freight and an increase in traffic. You can see the tide was middling.

As is custom I rated the film on IMDB and tweeted the result, this communication deals with the rating system:

I rarely go to see horror films because most of the time they are stupid. Once you accept that supernatural stuff is just that – outside of natural and therefore doesn’t exist – you find ghost stories quite terrible. I’m still working through what I thought about certain aspects of this film, I guess it has got me thinking.

This film crossed many genres and I was surprised by that. But overall I found it a little boring and tired. Maybe I’ve seen too many of these types. Maybe I haven’t seen anything new for a long time. The reason I went to see this was I had heard it was meant to be pretty good. Shortly I am going to read some proper reviews to see what they say, to gain some insight into why other people thought the film really good. I can’t write too much here without spoilers.

There was a bible passage mentioned a few times throughout this film, it was Jeremiah 11:11. This is what it says:

Therefore this is what the Lord says: ‘I will bring on them a disaster they cannot escape. Although they cry out to me, I will not listen to them.

Not sure what it’s about but it does seem that the Lord is being a bit of a malicious prick.

I suspect this film is full of metaphor and I’m just missing the point.

 

I have just been and read the review of this film written in The Guardian. I don’t think there’s a great deal of insight in the review. It got 4 stars and I’m not really sure why.

UPDATE: I found someone who’s better at metaphor than me so if you want please read Eli Bosnik’s blog post.

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Lving Proof – Live In Chicago – Wishbone Ash

I bought this album because I heard somewhere that the lead singer of Iron Maiden said that this band were one of his influences.  I have listened to it and quite enjoyed it, but it is generally slow and not metal. It’s good for having on in the background on a summer’s evening while sitting outside.

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