As part of this summer I went to the Imperial War Museum in Duxford. It’s a great place and I’ve been there loads in the past. This time was to talk bollocks with an old friend AB. We wandered around and shared stories along with catching up with what’s been going on for the last two years. In the American hangar we saw a B25 Mitchell which had apparently once been the gate guardian at a US Base in Germany. This meant some soldiers would sign the plane by scratching their name into the skin of the aircraft.
Elvish History
If you look carefully you can see that the name in the middle is Elvis. This is plausible as he spent time in the US Army and was in Germany. The fact that he spelt his last name wrong shouldn’t get in the way of a good story.
Maybe Not
You might have to look at the original pictures, click on them, to be able to see the details!
This is number 1905 and so continuing a recent feature I give you some things that happened in that year [common era]:
A boiler explosion in the Grover Shoe Factory kills 58.
Einstein submits his photoelectric effect paper.
The French pass a law concerning the separation of church and state.
This album, this debut album is shocking. It’s a collection of noises from the collective called Throbbing Gristle. This album was so influential with artists producing electronic music along with the rest of their back catalogue. When you listen this album you become hypnotised by the noise and curiosity of what is going to happen. The track listing is as follows:
Industrial Introduction
Slug Bait
Slug Bait
Slug Bait
Maggot Death
Maggot Death
Maggot Death
There’s an utter fascination that draws over me whenever I listen to this band. I think a part of it is the horror of the sounds. Then there’s the wondering what’s going to come next and finally there’s the intrigue of who and what created these sounds. When you listen to Throbbing Gristle you might not enjoy it [I do] but you end up knowing you have experienced. If you can, it’s worth the listen, but be warned.
This is number 1904 and so here’re a few things that happened in the year 1904 when the year 1 is what some people consider to be when JC was born but it wasn’t and that kinda messes everything up:
Roger Casement publishes an account of Belgian atrocities in the Congo.
Earlier today I had a lovely walk around the creeks of Faversham. The walk started in the centre of Faversham near the Guildhall building and then followed the Saxon Shore way around Ham Marshes. It’s a lovely part of the countryside and nice and quiet, just the wind whistling through the masts of the boats.
Faversham Creeks
The tide was quite low and there was little water in the creeks. The first part of the walk was along Faversham Creek and then the return was along Oare Creek. There were a lot of newer houses along the shore way and I’m concerned that in fifty years or so they’ll be under water. I’m not convinced at all that humans are going to solve the climate change crisis. I think we are already within the realms of a positive feedback loop.
Faversham Creeks
When I first published this communication I completely forgot about the new “this year in communication number” feature I had been doing and so this is to correct that:
In the year 1903 ACE the following happened:
A fire on the Paris metro at Couronnes kills 84.
The Iroquois Theatre fire kills 600.
Henry Ford founds the Ford motor Company. Henry Ford is a raging anti-Semite.
I have tried with Muse. I have tried to listen to it and feel good things about the music. But I have failed every time. I can’t stand it. I think it’s the singer voice. I’m not really sure. It just leaves me cold.
So, this is communication 1902. So, what happened in that year of the common era?
A snowstorm in Japan kills 199 during a military training exercise.
A stampede at the Shiloh Baptist Church in Birmingham Alabama, kills 115.
After a long day of building stuff I had booked to go to the cinema to make sure that I had a definite end in sight. I didn’t want to be working into the evening always trying to do “one more thing”. As it is the progress is good and I got to where I wanted to be. Still plenty to do though. The only film I could be bothered to go and watch was Old by Michael Night Shyamalan. I’ve looked at what’s on later today and can’t see anything other than a Purge film – which I couldn’t care about – although maybe I should check out a different cinema and see what they’ve got. Watch this space to see if I write another review.
The tide was low this time as I approached the car park. I could see the edge of the mud banks so I’m not sure how much lower it can get, it’s been quite a while since I regularly went this way. When I saw F9 plenty of people were wearing masks but this time there were a lot who were not. It’s very clear that the government [BJ] wants to shed the responsibility and pass it on to individuals [a classic right wing manoeuvre] but in the broadest sense people are stupid. We rules and laws in place to ensure that people don’t make their own choices on many things. If we didn’t have speed limits there would be many many more deaths on the roads than we face now. After the film I thought about what rating to give it and they are explained here.
What did I think of the film? I hated some of the acting and I hated some of the cinemaphotography. I guess M K was heading for a style but it is one I didn’t enjoy. Overall the film was kinda OK but really I just hung around as I wanted to know what the resolution was going to be. I’m not going to give that away here as that wouldn’t be fair but I was hoping for an explanation of why the beach existed rather than what use it has been put to. I guess I can’t have everything.
Oh, there were too many codas. I don’t think any were needed. It could have ended at the point where the people are swimming in fish. That would have been enough for me. It would have meant there were loads of questions that were unanswered but I think it would have made a better film overall. Please remember that I am not a film maker and so I know nothing about these things.
This is communication 1901 and so in line with recent practice I mention below some aspects of the year 1901 – and yes, I am aware that for a lot of people this isn’t even the correct calendar to use but it’s the most common.
The UK and Germany agree on how to carve up some of Africa.
Boer concentration camps run by the UK are reported to be cruel and have a high mortality rate.
Alabama requires voters to have passed a literacy test – and yet modern day republicans are outlawing critical race theory.
This distance is 40,000km. I think that’s why it was chosen by Polyphony to be the last achievement for distance in Gran Turismo Sport. I completed this yesterday after competing in some online races around Interlagos and then twatting the 787B around Special Stage X for four laps which was remarkably boring. I guess I should try and get the other achievements completed but I can’t be bothered to take that many photographs within the game or create that many liveries, I’ll look later and see how many that entails, if it’s one hundred then I guess I could manage it but any more will be met with a resounding “fuck that shit”.
Final [not online] GT Sport Achievement
It’s fitting that this is communication 1900 and it’s about Gran Turismo, a game I have played since its initial release back in the last millennium. It is a game I have enjoyed and still do. I am, however, concerned that the next level of controller will be produced by Fanatec and having looked at their equipment I am shocked at how expensive it is!!
Here’re some of the vaguely interesting things that happened in the year 1900:
Miners in Austria go on strike looking for better working conditions [amazing we still have issues with working conditions].
The legal workday in France is limited to just 11 hours – for women and children.
The Italian King is assassinated.
Max Planck discovers the law of black-body radiation.
I went to the cinema. I went to the Cineworld cinema in Rochester. I went to the cinema to see Fast & Furious 9 [fucking 9 of them! Can you believe that?]. While driving the approach to the cinema I noticed that the tide was high, the water was lapping around the base of the grasses on the mudbank so it was almost as high as can be. I wrote about why I was seeing this film in this communication. After watching this film I considered how to rate it using my rating system discussed here. Then I tweeted the result because that is what I do.
I guess I ought to explain my rating of 2/10. The system means that this rating is used when I walk out of a film or gave up watching or just hated it. I’m not sure I hated it and I didn’t walk out but I didn’t want to give this film a massive 4 stars as that would’ve been over-rating it so my excuse for the two stars is that I fell asleep and so this film was so terrible that it couldn’t keep me awake. Not that missing a few minutes in the middle of this film mattered really, there wasn’t any sensible plot as far as I could tell.
This film is what you expect it to be. Plenty of fighting with hands, guns and vehicles. Ridiculous stunts. Over the top sequences and general bollocks. It’s a Fast and Furious film. It’s going to be terrible. I could explain everything that was wrong with this film from the plot to the physics but there are two reasons I don’t want to:
a) there was so much wrong I don’t have the time or inclination to do it. b) this film doesn’t deserve those words to be written about it.
My experience was one of being too warm, a short period of sleep, feeling cold, losing my facemask, general horror at the physics in the film and laughter at how pathetic some of the scenes were. Does Tbilisi have that much space or canyons close to it?
This is communication number 1899 and so here’s some information about what happened in that time period:
I bought this because a big part of me wants to really like Faith No More. But, it doesn’t quite do it for me. I’m not sure why. This is a solid album but not one I would play too often. I’m not even sure if I’ve played past the first two songs, I’m writing this review on reputation alone!
As this is the 1898 communication here’s a few things that happened in 1898:
Henry Lindfield is the world’s first automobile fatality on a public highway in Purley.
I’ve booked a ticket to go and see the latest Fast and Furious film. This could be a massive mistake because when I went to the last one I walked out it was shockingly bad. This time I go knowing that it will definitely be utter shit. There are a few reasons I am going to spend a couple of hours in the dark:
I like going to the cinema.
This film is in screen 8 which is the comfy one.
I’m going to listen to God Awful Movies after I’ve watched this.
The point of going to watch this film isn’t the actual film experience it’s the experience of listening to a podcast that rips it to shit afterwards. I have listened to every episode of God Awful Movies and I even send them money using Patreon. I pay the God Awful guys because they entertain me each week and I am happy to reward them for that. Noah, Heath and Eli make me laugh and have helped get me through some iffy times in my life. It’s a couple of hours each week where I can concentrate on something so shitty that these guys have made over 300 episodes where they explain, and take the piss out of, terrible religious films. F9 is a Patreon bonus episode. So, I’m going to see the film. So that I can understand what they are talking about. My time in the cinema will be rewarded when I listen to the podcast after.
I’ve also been watching Boondock Saints II because the GAM guys are reviewing it in a standard episode. I’ve watched Boondock Saints as a lot of the music I like references it and uses quotations from the movie. It is not a good movie.
What follows is something I tried doing before but didn’t follow it through. This is communication 1897 and so here are a few things that happened in 1897, quite likely the ones I find curious rather than the best ones:
Some fraternities were founded in the USA – by the way, fuck fraternities, fucking awful things.
Dracula first published.
The Lattimer massacre.
The Korean Empire is founded.
The Wissenschaftlich-humanitäres Komitee is founded, the first LGBT campaigning organisation.
Got pinged to isolate. I had to leave work. I went home. I organise some aspects of my life. I had to do my first online order for groceries in around eighteen years, I’d been running the house to empty ready for a shop at the weekend. Fortunately I still have a number of goods left over from my stock of Brexit rations. This communication is part diary, part thoughts, part descent into madness. I had plans for the next few days, I was going to go to the cinema, go shopping and sort out a few things around the house. I guess I can still sort those things out. Let’s see what happens. I think the verb tenses used in the following will mess with your head. Some is future tense, because I wrote things in the morning and some is past tense because I said what I did!
Day 1 – last day of work. I’ve organised all the things I can and I wait for the start of the summer holiday. On this day I ended up doing some exercise, an hour on the rower, watched Guns Akimbo and finished two TV series which I will write about separately. I also did some Minecraft but somewhat aimlessly.
Day 2 – first day of the summer holiday. Current plans are to exercise. Watch TV and play some games, maybe a new one. I played X-Plane, Minecraft and Life Is Strange. The food delivery came a few hours early so that was good. I weedkilled some weeds and thought about home improvement works I am planning. I read up on the book I am reading to figure out wtf is going on and the wikipedia page helped a lot.
Day 3 – Some exercise and chilling are planned. Looking back I’m not entirely sure what I did. I watched Page Eight on Netflix. I ordered some stuff from Amazon. Had a BBQ and I’m not really a fan of eating outdoors so ate indoors. I got fed up with the book I was reading and so finished a chapter and moved on to Red Shirts by Scalzi.
Day 4 – I rowed a little bit. I read a little bit. I did some thinking about the bedroom project [not a sex thing] and upgraded aspects of a laptop.
Day 5 – Rowing. Minecraft. Storm watching. Localised floods. Reading. Cleaned the U-Bends in the kitchen. Responded to a local planning survey. Watched Blue Origin launch and land.
Day 6 – Cheat for food and exercise. Started watching The Right Stuff. Started watching Salting the Battlefield. Played Minecraft with the aim of getting a wither skull or something so I can spawn the wither and then kill it and get a beacon. Got a wither skull but died a few times doing it. Lost some decent netherite tools but overall, quite pleased. Had the boiler fixed – maybe, let’s see how that goes.
Day 7 – Exercised. Tidied bedroom. Finished watching Salting The Battlefield. Watched some Olympic softball. Read some of my book. Played Minecraft.
Day 8 – Played Gran Turismo, Minecraft. Emptied a bedroom ready for customisation project. Started watching Star Trek Enterprise, got bored. Started watching Manifest, got bored. Bought what I thought was Boondock Saints II on Amazon, paid £5 but it was just a ten minute interview – cheeky bastards – got a refund from Amazon for that. Downloaded Saints II and started watching it. Customised the Magic Mirror to have an animated rainfall map.
Current Magic Mirror Configuration
And that is isolation completed. I am now free to leave the house and head out to the big wide world. But, I don’t really trust anyone else so I will be wearing a mask when I’m inside. I will avoid crowded places and I will stay away from other people. I’ve got plenty of my summer holiday left to get things done, although if I’m honest there won’t be much different from the stuff listed in here.
Blow Up Your Video came along as my awareness of AC/DC grew and I really liked the album. I seem to remember being in Jersey and having it on tape although I mostly bought records, music cassettes were a popular portable method for listening to music. The Razor’s Edge was the second album released by AC/DC after my consciousness was raised. It’s an excellent album and has a number of great songs.
Thunderstruck – everyone knows this song. It’s a great song. The video is excellent. A great opener and worth the hype.
Fire You Guns – another high speed brilliant song.
Moneytalks – It does doesn’t it, but also another single and a great song.
The Razor’s Edge – brilliant, well crafted.
Mistress For Christmas – a fucking terrible song made for the xmas market but it’s kinda cheeky also and makes me laugh. I suppose you have to be good at song writing to be able to write this stuff.
Rock You heart Out – proper high speed rock.
Are You Ready – a live classic and classic AC/DC. I’m running out of superlatives.
Got You By The Balls – not the best AC/DC song with balls in the title but still a great song.
Shot Of Love – not sure about this one.
Let’s Make It – AC/DC songs are pretty much all about sex. All of them.
Goodbye and Good Riddance to Bad Luck – it’s ok.
If You Dare – fantastic riff work.
There’s an awful lot of good on this album and not a lot of shit. It’s well worth owning and playing. Everyone sings along with AC/DC right?
I’ve decided to withdraw from the news and views of what’s happening around the world. I see nothing but conniving ignorant cunts from the UK government and it distresses me a fair bit. You know what it’s like: you’ve got ten minutes here or there and so you have a little look through some Twitter Feeds, get reasonably annoyed at what you see and vow to leave it alone for a while. Yesterday I watched the BBC news at 1300 for a little while and the sheer arse-about-faceness of the tory minister brought on to defend the PM was incredible. He didn’t answer the question, which I guess is why he’s a minister and I’m not. It would be nice if this bunch of tory pricks could actually be honest and show sympathy. But we know that tories are literally that because they can’t empathise.
Today I’ll be trying to avoid the news, Twitter and Reddit. I’ve uninstalled Reddit from my phone, again. I had loaded it as a little summertime time waster but the politics is just annoying. I quite like seeing the cool stuff but I’ll survive without it. I think it’s time to create some proper goals in Minecraft and start working towards them. Today’s job is to find a mob spawner to XP up my mending enchanted tools. I also want to learn about potions for when I go to the End. Fuck this world and it’s short-sighted politicians. Time to enter to the world of games.
As part of my round the world trip in X-Plane I landed at Omboue Hospital in Gabon. It’s such a quiet airfield that X-Plane has nothing there. Not sure where my next stop will be, I’m considering flying over the top of the DRC as, you know, it’s the DRC and not a healthy place.
Mr O bought this for me and it’s very different but also very excellent. Radio sounds and news items and speeches set to wonderfully gentle music. Very different from what I would normally listen and quite fantastic.
666. An obscure reference from the drug induced writings of a crazy man and two thousand years later we have people concerned about a number causing bad shit. I know the religious have issues with reality but it makes me laugh just how much they think writing a particular thing or saying a thing can affect the physical world. It’s a bit like them believing that wishing really hard actually does anything.
I’ve had this album since I first got into metal all those years ago. I didn’t get it when it came out, my development occurred a few years after that but by 1988 I was a fully fledged member of the Maiden fandom and totally loved everything they did. This album with Clive Burr on drums is still amazing and something that stands up to time. I know I’m going to be slightly controversial when I say there isn’t a duff song on here as I know there are friends of mine who feel quite strongly about some of them:
Invaders – As an opener I’ve always liked this song. I sort of consider it a follow up to Invasion. Close friends of mine disagree with its greatness.
Children Of The Damned – is a fucking masterpiece and I recently played it to get the guitar solos out of my head as they were ear-worming. Bloody marvellous.
The Prisoner – this song made me seek out the TV show and both are great. Personally I’ve always been slightly irritated that the start-stop gives way to full-blown rampage a bit too quick.
22 Acacia Avenue – the follow up to Charlotte The Harlot and possibly my least favourite song on the album. I don’t know why.
The Number Of The Beast – a song about the beast. Brilliant. I guess it worked into the Satanic Panic of the later 1980s.
Run To The Hills – a social commentary on the genocide of the native Americans if a bit gimicky.
Gangland – I really live this. I like the speed and the beat.
Hallowed Be Thy Name – shiver down my spine. Simple.
This is my current base in this latest world. I’ve written about things recently but this is a whole new era of my Minecraft skills. I have a simple base at the moment, I have a villager breeding area as I try to get the mending enchantment and I have a kelp XP farm. Things are going OK at the moment. The island in the bottom is mostly reclaimed and so I’ll be calling it New Holland.
I’ve got railways joining these places over the sea. This land is in a new chunk since the caves and cliffs update part one and therefore there are geodes and glowing squid all over the place. I’m not sure how to make a proper base yet, but part of me wants to build up a massive volcano and go completely Bond-villain.
My current flight sim plans are wandering around the Earth from airport to airport and just enjoying the views. I’m currently heading down the west coast of Africa and have recently started recording my journey on Twitter. I don’t use Twitter a huge amount at the moment because ultimately no-one cares what I think and I have friends whom I can moan to about things.
Having just clicked on the hashtag I can see that there are many people using the same hashtag but in reality. They are travelling around the world. Well, given the current pandemic, I am not. Also, I don’t have the money and I have other responsibilities at the moment so I don’t think I can. My next trip is to Scotland in February.
X-Plane Control Panel – iOS
This is a screen capture of the X-Plane Control Panel on my iPhone. It looks at the information in X-Plane on the PC and gives me information about my flight. The bottom display is my glideslope approach to an airport, the middle display is a kind of map with weather display and the top is my PFD. I’m quite impressed with the extra information I get and I’ve been using the glideslope when my approach is through clouds. None of those landings have been successful though and I generally fly those routes again or it seems like I’m cheating. One thing that does happen though is once the iPhone is connected it changes the weather from real-world to whatever the settings are on the phone and that’s a frustration, I will look into this to see if I can correct it.
I bought this album either before or just after I saw this person at the Underworld. This man is the DJ person who appears with Slipknot but this album is not Slipknot. I quite like it as something different but it’s not my usual style.
This is the system I use to play on the flight simulator. I really enjoy my time flying around the world virtually and trying to split the journey up into twenty minute flights.
X-Plane Set Up
The stuff I have here is a HOTAS system from Logitech, two PC screens, keyboard and mouse from Razer along with two external displays. The Samsung tablet runs some software giving me a PFD and the information involved there. My phone runs some software which is similar to the tablet PFD but also includes glideslope information and forward terrain. In the picture below you can see my chair, which I absolutely love. It’s a lovely chair.
My Favourite Chair
It was quite hard to get the camera to take a reasonable photograph of the system because I have a polarising filter on the lens and as the displays are also polarised, but in different directions, it means that I couldn’t really get the best direction of the polarisation. But I did ok. Here is what it looks like at its worst.
![Final [not online] GT Sport Achievement](http://fooyah.net/wordpress/wp-content/uploads/2021/07/E7FgeSZXIAoPXYd.jpg)
