Month: November 2021

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Not Quite Caves And Cliffs

I’ve been busy over the last while playing Minecraft now and then. This video is long overdue as it’s a walk through of the latest base area, which I think was finished a few months ago but I just hadn’t got around to recording the walk-around. Things have been quite busy. This last weekend gave me the opportunity to spend some time setting up the recording software again [it hadn’t been used really since the new screen was purchased]. It took a while to figure out how to create new scenes and get widescreen recording to work nicely. However, this Minecraft video is in standard 16:9. Why? Because I don’t think Minecraft looks good in ultra-widescreen. I’d rather put a decent product onto YouTube than one where I think I’ve compromised in video quality. I’ll be uploading some flight sim stuff soon and that will be in lovely widescreen.

Comms#1993, here are some things from that year.

  • A 21st birthday party ends in hilarity.
  • A bomb in a van under the WTC explodes killing 6.
  • Waco siege, Texas. 76 die.
  • Jurassic Park is released [first DTS film].
  • Marine dumping of radioactive waste is banned.
  • Doom is released.
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Ghostbusters: Afterlife

There wasn’t much choice at the cinema when I looked to book a ticket. Eternals was on along with some films I had already seen but I am not going to bother with Eternals. I don’t like superhero films and if I want to watch them I’ll do it on a streaming service. Ghostbusters: Afterlife was all that was left, but that doesn’t mean it was a poor choice, I wanted to see this. It was dark and stormy so I couldn’t see where the river water was for a tide report, but there were some reflections of lights high up the mud bank and, more telling, there were sea birds just resting all over the place, floating around, and I think they were taking shelter from the storm.

After seeing this film I rated it on the IMBD website and there is a guide to the rating system within this communication. I flip-flopped between a six and an eight because as much as I enjoyed this film and it gave me the “feels” I wasn’t sure I was going to see it again. But, let’s face it, for a film to make me happy and smile thirty five years since I watched the first version, it deserves a decent score. I then tweeted my score.

I really enjoyed this film. It felt like it was paced quite slow to start with but I think that’s because modern films are paced too fast in case the audience decide they hate the film. Making people wait for the “action” is perfectly good. There doesn’t have to be loads and loads of action all the way through the film. We don’t need films to keep racing to the lowest denominator of the public. There should be room for improving society and not just destroying it all the time.

I smiled at many points in this film and laughed [inwardly – I’m not a freak] in the right places and sometimes in this wrong places. The person three seats along my row seemed to laugh too loud and too much, but you know what? Each to their own. It’s better than the narcolepsy person I was near for one of the Matrix fims. I’m going to try and give little away about the film but that also means I can’t really talk about the ending. I will say that I loved the effects of the big-baddie, I thought they looked really good. The voice was interesting and in the credits it mentioned that Shohreh Aghdashloo had been the voice and that didn’t surprise me. She has such a unique voice and accent it really works in this situation.

The touches of music that plinked away in the background were perfect and hinted at the original film enough that I’m considering getting the soundtrack in digital form. The Ghostbusters OST was the first album I ever bought with my own money. I can remember my mum asking me to make sure I wanted it as it was quite a bit of money. Clearly I wanted it. If I want something then I always want it. I think.

I enjoyed this film a lot. It is nostalgic. It is lovely. It is worth seeing.

Comms#1992 and we get closer to the millennium each week. I wonder what number 2000 will contain? I’m not going to plan this, I’m just going to let it happen. Now, I’m one of those who can count correctly and so in terms of years I recognise 2001 as the start of the third millennium because that is very clearly when it starts. Here are some things from the year 1992 C.E.

  • The Maastricht Treaty is signed.
  • 263 die in a coal mine disaster in Turkey.
  • The LA riots following white cops being acquitted of beating a black man when a video clearly showed them doing so.
  • The Balkans are going to shit.
  • The first text message was sent.
  • The Fulham Five first lived together.
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Up From The Ashes – Don Dokken

I really do just like some classic cock-rock. And this I think is classic cock-rock. I don’t know anything about the history of Dokken and Don Dokken, it’s mid to late 80s stuff and all information about rock bands came from magazines in those days. I didn’t really care for that stuff. Does it matter who leaves what band and who fought whom? I guess it’s a bit like a soap opera if you are really into that stuff but I don’t think I was really bothered by it. When Izzy left G ‘n’ R it was more a understanding of “yes that makes sense” than OMG G ‘n’R are breaking up. Bruce left Iron Maiden and I wasn’t fussed and so on.

Sometimes I wonder why people give up on a thing that clearly makes them plenty of money. If I had an acting job that meant loads of money but it was shit TV then part of me would want to keep doing that job. However, the motivation of money is much higher in my personal priorities having grown up with not much of it and as an adult choosing a career where the financial rewards aren’t great [even diminished under the tories]. Ah, now I see my motivation – I chose a career path that I find fascinating and fun and the lack of money is just a side product which I cope with – hence other people choosing to leave their success and seek fulfilment. Good on them.

I don’t think Dokken were ever megastars with the ability to retire whenever they want. One of their songs was used for a film soundtrack and that’s about the limit of their fame and fortune. Their favourite album of mine was recorded in Japan and as a previous headteacher of mine said to me once regarding his own music success in Japan – they buy any old shit over there. So as I write this the songs are playing and they are broadly speaking very well constructed rock songs with reasonable riffs and verses that are a little too ballad for my tastes now. I don’t really like songs which slow down. The verse should be upbeat and then the chorus should be even more so. It’s an 80s thing to have ballad shit in songs and keep repeating it. I don’t think I’ve ever really liked it.

Some song highlights are:

  • When Some Nights – I like the guitar and bass combo in this one. It’s the fist song with some life in the album.
  • Give It Up – good bass sound. Good quality sing along song.
  • Down In Flames – interesting opening with mechanical voice.
  • The Hunger – opening drums – amazing, riff – amazing. Balled verse – shit.

Comms #1991, so here are some things from that year:

  • I was working at Raytheon/Cossors and almost considered joining the air force if the Gulf War became “bad” whatever that means.
  • I started university and met some great people.
  • Dissolution of the Soviet Union.
  • The Moby Prince sinks killing 140 people.
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Windows and Window

It feels like it’s been a busy month and also such a struggle to keep up with everything that has needed to happen. Basically I think I’m saying it’s been too busy and I want it to stop. This weekend I have been mostly fixing a laptop that kept moaning about files missing and therefore it was unable to perform some windows updates. Obviously it would only tell you this after it had spent about two hours looking promising with the update. It didn’t feel overly safe turning off windows updates so I tried to fix it.

I made it worse. I managed to mess it up so it would even boot to the windows login screen. I had been doing some DISM work within windows trying to get the windows image to fix itself so it would run the update. Oh well. After quite a bit of attempting to boot to safe mode I finally got the laptop to boot to command prompt and from there I was able to browse the various drives within DOS. I found a setup.exe file on a bootable USB stick and just thought I’d see if it runs. It did. It proceeded to reinstall a fresh copy of windows and slowly over the next twelve hours I got all the previous software and files reinstalled. Small items are still being loaded as I write this but mostly, the machine is back and running quite well.

No major files were lost because I have a very clear – save it in the cloud as well policy. Useful things are only saved in a OneDrive type situation so that things aren’t lost in exactly this kind of situation. Even my NAS Drive is triply redundant, although two of those are physically in my house, so if it burns, I lose those. I don’t know who else thinks like that but I do. There have been many times I’ve come home hoping that my house hasn’t caught fire and burnt down the entire row. No, I don’t leave naked lights on or anything like that, it’s just a thing.

I also resealed some of the outside rubber things on a window. I had removed it a while back with the aim of buying some more and then replacing it. I think it’s the source of a leak I have with rainwater appearing on the window cill. The old stuff looked “dried out” and cracked. I think it just being a south facing window did that with direct sunlight all the time. I ordered a variety pack because there are approximately thirty different types of window gasket and then I chose the one that fitted best. I don’t think it’s an exact match for what I removed but it did seem to fit snugly. Yesterday I spent an hour fitting less than a metre of this stuff to the window. The issue now is that the corners of the gasket don’t fit super tight so I have some duck tape there at the moment. I need a rain storm to hit so I can judge the effectiveness of this stuff.

The oven heating element blew again about a week ago. I know I’ve changed it in the past and when I searched this site for some information it turns out that was in 2016. I suppose five years for an oven element is OK? I’d prefer it if I didn’t have to change it but at least it’s something I can do with relative ease. I’ve pencilled that in for next weekend along with a busy Saturday. Once again I find myself wanting everything to just stop for a month or so.

This is communication number 1990. Here are some things that happened that year along with me becoming of legal voting age and taking my A-Levels.

  • The Pale Blue Dot photograph is taken and sent back to Earth.
  • The NZ Navy stops daily rum rations.
  • A fire in an illegal club in New York kills 87.
  • Germany merges economies.
  • Berlin Wall destruction begins.
  • Iraq invades Kuwait.
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United Abominations – Megadeth

Here’s the thing with Megadeth; since they gave up drugs and became all christian they’ve kinda gone a bit shit. I understand the reasons for coming off drugs, that makes loads of sense, I’m not sure I understand the christian part because doesn’t that mean that god made them an addict in the first place and he’s a fucking asshole? I do know that twelve step programmes might not work that well and one of the steps is to surrender yourself to a higher power. Fuck that shit. In Scandinavia they have a programme that doesn’t depend on abstinence and that works better I suspect. Anyway, it’s a complicated picture and not one that I’m going to do justice to in this here little blog.

This album is not on my iPhone. I think that says it all really. While it’s in my collection and on the NAS drive in the house I won’t listen to it anywhere else. To be perfectly honest if I want some Megadeth in the house I wouldn’t even put this album on. I think there’s only so much twiddly thrash metal you can have in your head at one time before all the songs start to sound the same [I will admit that typing that just made me sick]. The Megadeth albums on my phone are:

  • Killing is my business . . . And business is good.
  • Peace sells . . . But Who’s Buying.
  • So Far So Good . . . So What.
  • Rust In Peace.
  • That One Night – Live In Buenos Aires.

So, there. You now know what I think of this album.

This is communication number 1989 and as has become a recent tradition these are some things, curated by me, that happened in that year.

  • 47 died in the Kegworth air disaster.
  • Union Carbide agree to pay the Indian government 470million for causing the deaths of 3,700 in the Bhopal disaster of 1984. [$127,000 per human life in case you wondered].
  • 97 people die in the Hillsborough disaster.
  • 51 people die in the Marchioness disaster.
  • 11 die in bomb attack at Deal Barracks, Kent.
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Unholy Terror – W.A.S.P.

I had this album playing while I was flying X-Plane yesterday. I had thought that I might recognise some of the songs, but I did not. It could be that yesterday was the first time I actually played this album. W.A.S.P. are a comically larger than life band who sought out the controversy and I’m hoping to see them soon. But this album left me unfazed. Just go listen to Live . . . In The Raw.

This is communication number 1988 and it’s quite exciting writing and finding these little happenings each year as we enter a period of time when I was quite aware of the world and the goings on therein. I was sixteen in this year. ATC summer camp was at RAF Coningsby, I took my GCSEs, it was the very first year of those examinations.

  • 3 members of the IRA are shot dead by SAS in Gibraltar.
  • 167 die in the Piper Alpha oil platform explosion.
  • 75 people are killed in an airshow accident at Ramstein.
  • Total one million dead as Iran Iraq war ends.
  • F-117 acknowledged as existing and first B-2 is revealed.
  • Pan Am flight 103 is blown up over Scotland, the debris lands on town of Lockerbie.
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Undaunted – Mordecai

I saw this band live at Download 2013. They were in a smaller tent and Smith and I just went there out of curiosity. They were not terrible. It was perfectly good rock/metal music. So, I bought their album.

I’m not sure there’s anything special about the album. There’s not really anything that stands out enough to say that this band should be massive. But, that might be the crux. The whole album is crafted really well. There aren’t any shit songs and it all works pretty well. It’s a pretty good choice when I want to listen to rock but nothing superstar.

This is communication number 1987 and as with recent traditions I have been adding a few things that happened in that particular year in the current calendar system. Having typed this I’ve remembered I didn’t do it for my previous communication so I’ll head back that way and adjust it shortly.

  • The Archbishop of Canterbury had sent an envoy to the middle east to try and help but Terry Waite was kidnapped and not released until 1991.
  • 193 people die in the Herald Of Free Enterprise ferry disaster at Zeebrugge.
  • 16 people are killed in a massacre in Hungerford, UK.
  • Mathias Rust lands a small light plane in Red Square Moscow.
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November Happenings

Sometimes it’s hard to keep finding “content” to fill these gorgeous pages. Often this site requires me to go to the cinema or at least go somewhere so I can then write about the terrible/great experience. Recently it feels that I’ve not done much. I mean I have but it’s just the boring same old.

Last Sunday I helped supervise some of the cadets who are entering a national competition in a couple of weeks, nothing exciting there. This past week I had two days off work ill and actually slept for the entire day for the first one. Then yesterday I ran a weapon training session and range for some of our new recruits. Oh, today I’m heading into town this morning to take part in the Remembrance Parade which I guess is something important but not always something I’ll take photographs at or write about each year.

This week just gone I’ve either been too tired or ill to cope with opening up the editing software and writing stuff here. I’ve actually just reminded myself that I started the album reviews for this exact problem, if I don’t have anything to write about then I can write an album review and publish it easily. So, this week I’ll probably publish a few of those. It also means I get to listen to those albums to remind myself of the specifics.

I do know that I’ve felt ill since the return to work in September. My lungs don’t feel correct and if I go for a run in the cold it really knackers those air bags. Not sure what’s going on, it’s not SARS-Cov-2 as I’ve repeatedly tested with both LFT and PCR. There are big issues with the LFT but it’s the best thing we’ve got at the moment I guess. I don’t think the government should be pushing them so much but they are blinded with their “success” of just under 150,000 deaths so far. Fucking twats. I honestly will not understand why anyone would still vote for the tory party after everything that has happened. They are in over their heads and horrible. Some people I talk to seem to think that voting labour endorses complete socialism or communism and they can’t bring themselves to do it. Happy to trudge along with the stupid cunts we have now in charge instead of wanting to help people. Let’s be clear, the government response to this pandemic has been disgraceful.

I’ve been playing Minecraft a little recently and am trying to give myself little projects in that as time goes on. I’ve just built a bubble elevator for one of the kids so they can build a sky base and we’ve worked on somewhere to attempt to kill the Wither. We’ll see how that goes. The last time we tried it I had to reload the world from a back up as our entire base got destroyed. My next job is to build an underground area in a few chunks a long way away for us to attempt to kill that bastard. We want a beacon. I think we’d also like some elytra but we are working on that. I don’t think we’ve found an end portal yet.

I keep being tempted with buying a PS5 but I will only play one game on it and so I don’t think it’s worth getting for just that. Especially when that game is available on the PS4. I haven’t pre-ordered my copy yet but I will. It comes out around the time of my completion of half a century of rotations around the sun. I’m currently having a go on Assetto Corsa on the PC and it’s ok but I possibly need to connect the steering wheel to the PC and that means moving it from the front room which seems like effort at the moment. Using a PS4 controller works reasonably well given my extensive experience in racing sims.

There’s nothing currently on at the cinema which I can be arsed to see. The only film I could possibly go to is Eternals but I dislike superhero movies so much that I reckon it’s just not worth going. My biggest issue is that the resolution to these films is always who fights better and never a negotiation or discussion. It’s never a cerebral conclusion it’s always fists and I fucking hate that.

I guess it’s time to start doing things to get ready to parade through Maidstone. Maybe later I’ll complete some more album reviews. I know that the Use Your Illusions are coming up and it’ll be fun to see what I think of those albums thirty years later.

This is communication number 1986 and so here are some things that happened in that year of our lord:

  • Chernobyl disaster.
  • M25 motorway is opened.
  • 2000 people die in a limnic eruption in Cameroon.
  • Top Gun is released.
  • Consensual sex between men is legalised from the age of 16 in NZ.
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Such An Inflating Day Trip

I went to meet a bunch of people in London. The congregation was meant to be part of a stag do. I mean, it was a stag celebration but I didn’t really attend most of it. The plan was brunch, a rugby match and then whatever followed. I knew that the brunch was going to be either outside or in a well distanced restaurant and so I was happy with that but as the time approached to attend a rugby match travelling via crowded trains and being in a stadium I felt unsure about the covid-ness of it all. Now, I had been to a gig where you had to show your vaccinated status to get in and there were quite a lot of people but it felt mostly safe. I didn’t want to be in an England crowd at Twickenham.

Belfast, London
Belfast, London

Another things that’s been bothering me recently is the pay rises the government has paid teachers over the last ten years. I find this really interesting, partly as I’m a teacher and partly because I can’t believe teachers are not as angry as they really should be. Over the last ten years the government has deliberately followed a policy of austerity. This was their political choice. We now know it wasn’t necessary as when the covid pandemic hit they decided to spend a fuck-ton squared and even then the controls were so poor that BILLIONS was lost. Here’s a graph showing teacher pay over the last ten years compared to where it would be if we had JUST received pay rises in line with inflation.

Teacher Pay Rises Versus RPI
Teacher Pay Rises Versus RPI

Back to the stag. We met at a place near Waterloo station but I walked in from London Bridge station which was about a twenty five minute walk along the South Bank. It was a really nice walk and I started on the river close to HMS Belfast and then walked past the City Of London, the Golden Hind, and a lot of eateries. Fortunately I didn’t have to walk past too many of those “people who stand still for money” as they annoy me intensely. The brunch was nice and the restaurant staff were very tolerant of the pranks played on the stag.

Cityscape, London
Cityscape, London

Here are some numbers for you wrt the pay. The pay rise over the last ten years amounts to around 13.2% total pay rise since 2010. Inflation in that time has caused an increased in prices of around 37%. For comparison the CPI, and clearly you are going to use whichever inflation measure works best for your argument, has increased 25% in that time period. I used the Office for National Statistics to get my data. If my pay had increased by the CPI it would be around 46,000 now which is still clearly above what I am actually paid. In essence I have had a real terms pay cut every year for the last [over] ten years.

MP Salary
MP Salary

There’s nothing like mixing up all your graph types when you are trying to make a point but I was curious how much MPs have awarded themselves over the same time period. They’ve had a pay rise of around 25% meaning that they are inline with the lower of the inflation measures. So, the people voting to not pay public servants according to the lower rate of inflation have awarded themselves that exact rate. We all know that’s not even the best of it. Over that time MPs have given themselves plenty of expenses to be able to pay for things that they would say are required as part of the job, and I would mostly agree, but I would also argue that many MPs play the system to enrich themselves. This pay doesn’t take into account any other jobs and directorships that MPs take on.

I think the problem is that too many of us do our job because we like being a teacher. We feel a “calling” or feel we should do the things that are considered normal of us. I personally don’t think that. I don’t feel the calling and I don’t feel this job is a vocation. This job is one that is bloody hard work and no one will be there to thank you at the end of it. That’s not how all this works. You don’t get a special seat in heaven. You just stop doing this shit one day and it leaves your life. Salaried jobs are bollocks. We should be paid for what we do and in a specific time frame otherwise the organisation is stealing from you.

Comms#1985 and so here are some things that happened in that year:

  • “Neighbours” starts on Australian television.
  • First mobile phone network in UK.
  • South Africa ends its ban on interracial marriage.
  • 56 die in the Bradford City football ground fire.
  • 39 fans die in the Heysel Stadium disaster.
  • Windows 1.0 is released.
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Last Night In Soho

So, I used my last night of freedom in this mini-break we have from work to go to the cinema to watch Last Night In Soho. It was directed by Edgar Wright who also directed Baby Driver which I reviewed here. Driving along the south run towards the cinema I noticed that the tide was very low, I couldn’t see the mudbanks because it was dark but I could see the white of the seagulls standing on top of the mud all the way to the centre channel of the Medway. I don’t recall checking what was going on with the river levels when I left I was puzzling out what I thought about this film.

After watching the film I rated it on IMDB, there’s a whole thing about the rating system and that’s covered in this communication. Then, eventually, I tweet the result to my fans but not from my phone as I’ve had Twitter removed from my phone for a long time now. The only “scoial media” type app I have installed is Reddit and that’s only for times when I need distraction from the happenings around me because I’ll get too annoyed if I actually pay attention to anything.

I’ll try not to give too much away about this film but for the first 75% of the film it was heading for an EIGHT out of ten. I really enjoyed it and thought I might watch it again to see all the subtleties between each decade of happenings. Essentially a girl moves to London and experiences visions from the 1960s. I thought this premise worked really well and I liked the whole [first 75%] of the film. The music was great, the look and feel of London in the 60s was fantastic and the experiences of a Cornish girl heading to London were reasonably accurate but I’m not sure the “big city” is that much of a “thing to worry about”. Maybe I’m wrong because I grew up near London and regularly went there in my teens, I guess I also have to factor in that I am a male and places feel different to us depending on what sex we look like.

When people talk about the swinging sixties I tend to remember what my mum once said and that was “it was still a bit shit everywhere”. While there might have been an amazing scene in some cities most of the world was still a bit shit. The image of Carnaby Street and the Kings Road garnered feelings of freedom and liberation and I suppose while that’s true the men in charge were still assholes. I did like the fact that many of the male characters in this film were creepy as fuck. I guess that is what the world is like even now and the experiences of women were shown to be generally quite awful.

My problem with this film started in the last 25% of the run time. I had positively enjoyed the film until then, wondering whether the main character was crazy or experiencing some weird time displacement. I was hoping this would turn out to be a film where the mental health of the main character grew to be known and helped to be minimised with care and compassion. But, no. This turned into a plain horror film. I don’t care for horror films because they are clearly bullshit and the tricks they play on you are trope-like and mostly boring. Every now and then a film will come along that will be surprisingly different but then that spawns a load of shit.

Terence Stamp and Diana Rigg were fantastic in this film. The two lead characters managed to keep their eyes open in terror suitably long enough. This was a well made film but the crappy ending dropped the scoring down from an easy 8 to just a six and so this film gets lumped in with all the other sixes and there’s a lot of them.

I’d be curious to know just how good an Redruth accent the lead female had, @cornishpom?

This is comms#1984. Here are some things that happened in that year of our lord:

  • The USA and the Vatican restore full diplomatic relations.
  • The start of the Satanic Panic.
  • An explosion at a waterworks in Lancashire kills 16.
  • Liechtenstein finally grants women the right to vote.
  • Threads airs on BBC two and gives me nightmares.
  • Joe Kittinger becomes the first person to cross the Atlantic, solo, in a hot air balloon.
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