"Nothing but the rain"
So, it has been written within these communications that I have seen Combichrist a few times. , here, here and here. In fact it would be easier just to search Fooyah.net here.
So, out of those four gigs I reckon that the best set was the Old School Set they performed at Electrowerkz. I have now created a playlist on my iPhone and Sonos system that reflects what I think this concert was. I don’t have an exact list but this is close enough and a bloody good list of songs it is too!
So, the xmas break, which requires food and alcohol, along with a significant drop in exercise has resulted in what I would call a considerable gain of mass. I have written about mass loss before and I wrote more here also. To lose mass you have to burn more energy than you consume. It’s that simple [and no, you don’t have a gland problem!]. Not a lot else to it, it’s the psychology of it all that will fuck you over. I like eating and I comfort eat. It’s the self discipline that hurts. I know that when I am a healthy mass and exercise I can maintain that mass and still have blow-outs now and then.
So, before I get to my numbers, here are some facts about fat and exercise.
So, my ideal mass would be <80Kg. However, I’ve not been that for a long time and I would be happy with <82.5Kg which comes in at 13 stone in old money. I am currently hovering around +90Kg. This upsets me greatly, but it is my own fault. Now is the time for action. Let’s just assume I want to lose 10Kg just to make the numbers easy. It’s worth knowing how long this will take and what effort I will face. I think many people are unrealistic about mass loss.
Some maths:
10Kg is approximately 22 pounds of fat to be lost.
22 pounds of fat is roughly 77 000 kcalories extra that needs to be burnt.
If I reduce my daily intake by 500 kcalories then this would take 22 weeks, as I would lose one pound per week. This is nearly half a year, which is a depressing amount of time to be on a restricted calorie diet.
If I maintain 2500 kcalories per day and run to burn the excess I will need to run 770 kilometres. Given that my average run is probably around 10km this means 77 runs. If I manage to run twice a week, on average, then this is over 35 weeks which is again an intolerable amount of time.
What I need to do is reduce my calorific intake while at the same time exercising to produce the desired results in a shorter (but sensible) length of time. I aim to be a healthy mass again by the end of March. This gives me three months or twelve weeks. I need to lose around 2 pounds per week. I can do it. I am determined to do it as some of the health issues that I have mentioned previously are back.
My progress isn’t going to be public. I am not going to start tweeting about this all the time. I probably won’t even mention it if I do or do not get down to the target mass.
I am fully aware that I am going to come across as an asshole in this piece but this sort of thing really annoys me. This is a special allowance given to a group of people who “sincerely believe” that they must fast during a particular time of the year. Now, it’s not just Islam that is catered for. Christianity gets Easter breaks for schools moved around every year just because they “sincerely believe” that something special happened two thousand years ago not on that date.
Here’s my thought process.
Clearly god does not exist. If god did exist then how come all the books written for him by messengers are different and contain different messages. This is not my only argument against god but it is clearly a human invention. Show me your proof and I promise I will believe, I’m happy to wait.
As god does not exist all religions are bullshit. They are just codified ways of treating each other (or hating women, foreigners, gays, the disabled etc if you have really read them).
Therefore all “sincerely held beliefs” are bullshit. No state should tolerate them being used as excuses for special treatment.
Now that seems extreme but in reality it means everyone gets treated the same. The same rules apply to one and all. I utterly fail to understand how you can tell what a “sincerely held belief” is. How do you know someone has that? If I want every Wednesday off work because the Church of the Flying Spaghetti monster deems that necessary everyone would laugh at me.
That’s not a real religion.
They would say.
How the fuck can you tell?
Would be my response.
It’s a bit like Donald Trump claiming he’ll stop all muslims entering the USA. How the fuck can you tell who is a muslim? Do you ask them? How do you know they aren’t lying. What do you have to do to be a true muslim? How can you prove you are a true jew? How do you tell someone that you are a devoted christian? This is the “no true scotsman” fallacy. You can’t tell this stuff.
Let’s stop asking for changes for groups of people because of “special pleading” or “sincerely held beliefs”. I don’t like the idea that once one group gets special treatment then all the others should get it too. Let’s just treat everyone the same and call this treatment out for what it truly is: bullshit.
On the 2nd January 2016 I went to a Not New Year’s Eve party at Electrowerkz venue in Angel. Sally and I had been before to this event and really enjoyed it, details here.
Quality night out with @trusmoov Electrowerkz.
— Ian Parish (@iparish) January 3, 2016
We left home around 21:45 after spending a while getting ready in our outfits. There exist pictures from our previous outing but there are none of this visit. I had black nail varnish again and silver stripes over my bald head. We arrived near Electrowerkz about an hour later after driving in to Angel and parking on someone’s drive using the website Just Park. It’s not even a five minute walk to the venue. It was brilliant to be there again, it’s a really nice atmosphere, plenty of costumes, plenty of not-costumes and much good natured chatter and dancing.
There was quite a lot on and I was looking forward to seeing Shiv-r. I had downloaded two albums by them about a month before and I liked it. I also wanted to see the suspension performance piece in the courtyard.
Here’s what went on that night.
I was mostly interested in the Theatre of Sin shows. They were pretty good. The two bands were good. Pretty Addicted were great and had a punky sound with a female vocalist. Shiv-r were a slight let down live, the frontman wasn’t as good as the singer from Pretty Addicted even though the music was more my style. I missed Mynxie Monroe as Sally and I were probably exploring the main areas of Electrowerkz. There are quite a few rooms and each has a bar attached.
The courtyard has a bar shaped like a tube train and the exit to the smoking area along with a staircase up the back of the building which gets to the cloakroom right at the top. There’s a room downstairs where Purefuckingindustrial was hosted, it was good music, very much my new stuff, see this communication.
If you move up the stairs, past the area where they were showing Game Of Thrones episodes on a large screen, you see phrases painted on the wall. These are from the film Aliens and I think it’s a great touch to give the place some atmosphere.
Turn right from the landing and you enter an Alien themed bar and through that you get to the Hellfire room. Good stuff in here a DJ playing a good mix of music.
Keep going through the Hellfire room and head up a small flight of stairs to end up in the “aircraft” bar. I think this is modelled on an airplane but it’s hard to tell really. There are aircraft windows up on the wall and (not very) engine looking lights suspended from the ceiling. But, it’s a bar and we managed to be given an extra beer in here by mistake. Once through some more doors you end up in what I would call the main venue. It’s a small hall with a stage at one end. This is the top floor or the Theatre of Sin for the purposes of ClubAC.
Although Shiv-r hadn’t finished their set Sally and I went to the courtyard to see the dying mermaid from Cynth Icorn. There are videos available on the interwebs if you search, the one I found was on Vimeo. It was very curious to watch. A girl was suspended from the ceiling using two hooks through the skin by her shoulder blades. I think I understand now that skin is pretty tough stuff. I’m guessing it hurt quite a bit and towards the end of the performance you could see it was very tiring working against the pain. I was going to put a picture in here but you are intelligent enough to know whether you want to see it or not and can use the internet yourself.
Once it got to about 0400 we decided to head home. We both got goodie bags on the way out although mine was just an envelope and Sally’s was an envelope in a bag so I guess hers was a proper goodie bag. We got home around 0500 and went to sleep. It was a great night. Good people, brilliant outfits, reasonably cheap drink and excellent shows. Can’t wait to go again.
Oh, the title of this communication. The first visit to ClubAC was easy to title as Sally muttered fucking stairs a lot over the evening. This time there weren’t any major complaints, she had mentioned her trousers slipping down a couple of times, hence the title of this communication.
I recently went to see The Danish Girl at Cineworld in Rochester. We were in screen 8 which means comfy seats and a nice auditorium. Sally hadn’t been in there before and was somewhat shocked at the tables between the seats downstairs and the size of the chairs upstairs. The rail in front of the front row upstairs was slightly too high to allow proper slouching in the seat.
As ever I rated this film on IMDB and you should read my page explaining ratings here.
I rated The Danish Girl (2015) 6/10 #IMDb https://t.co/TzYIfvjkaS
— Ian Parish (@iparish) January 2, 2016
So, this was a good film. It was very enjoyable and it is surprising how good and effeminate Eddie Redmayne is. This is a film about tolerance and understanding, it has lessons that much of the world could use to understand their population. All these countries with non-liberal views should just fuck off this planet.
So, the film. It’s worth watching. What I would definitely recommend is that you then read the Wikipedia pages about Lili Elbe and Gerda Wegener. The real story is far more interesting than the film and more fascinating. You should also check out this page of Gerda’s art.
So, before I start you should be aware that there are going to be SPOILERS in this page. Please go away if you don’t want to read anything about the plot or what I thought about the film.
You have been warned.
As normal I rated this film on IMDB and tweeted my result. You should read this communication about my rating system as it explains quite a bit.
I rated Star Wars: The Force Awakens (2015) 10/10 #IMDb https://t.co/lyMeSV6VNN
— Ian Parish (@iparish) December 27, 2015
So, I rated this a 10. You MUST be made aware that according to my rating system a film which I will definitely buy or pay money to see again gets a 10. I am going to buy this film on Blu-Ray and I will watch it with my sons. By default this film gets a 10. Not because I thought it was great but because I am going to buy it. Damn.
I went to see this film on Boxing Day [2015] in Milton Keynes. Sally and I went to the 4DX screening, mainly because it would make it more enjoyable for her. 4DX is a cinema system with moving seats, jets of air and water, scents, fog and rattles in parts of the seat.
You can trust me that the experience isn’t really like the promotional picture. It’s quite good fun, it doesn’t add anything to films really. If it’s a good film you won’t really notice the effects and if it’s a shit film then it will still be shit. We first saw Jurassic World in this screen.
If I had to honestly rate this film then I can easily and categorically say it is better than episodes 1,2 and 3. After that I would probably say it is worse than any of the originals, 4,5 or 6.
The film itself looks lovely. It would have been so good if it was the very first film. There wasn’t a great deal of prior knowledge required. I suppose a vague understanding of the family trees would have been helpful but mostly it could stand alone. All of the effects looked organic and the whole feel of the film was one of pleasure for the eyes. Thank god that they didn’t use all the CGI backgrounds, if they did the technology has come on leaps and bounds. The film looked lovely.
Now, here’s the tricky bit. The story itself was bollocks. Yes, it was a Star Wars story and it was always going to make a fuckton of money. But it was a shit story. The further I get away from seeing the film to more annoyed I get at them wasting the opportunity to really add to the Star Wars universe. Let’s just take some of the plot bit by bit, just indulge me, or if your indulgence is not forthcoming then go ahead and read a random communication within this website.
Orphan (?) girl lives alone on a sandy planet making her living in the desert [episode 4].
Cute robot, who everyone understands, befriends girl [episode 4]. Now this is OK, the whole point of the original was that the film was about the robots.
Droid holds secret plans/map to find something important [episode 4].
Bad man in a mask [episode 4,5,6].
Bigger bad man appearing via hologram [episode 5].
Good girl gets interrogated but manages to resist and not give away secret family history to interrogator who is a very close relation [episode 4].
Pimped up light sabre [episode 1].
Giant spacecraft to destroy large things [episode 4].
Shield of giant spacecraft needs to be destroyed and this can only be done from within enemy system [episode 6].
Girl has to be rescued from big bad spaceship [episode 4].
Girl who has the force looks in a basement and experiences the dark side of the force and foreboding [Luke in the cave episode 5].
Big bad spaceship has to be destroyed by a single X-Wing fighter flying through a trench to get to the centre [episode 4 and 6].
Angry teenage boy is annoyed at his parents [episode 4].
Big bad space ship blows up and rebels celebrate [episode 4,6].
Last Jedi who failed in his training of young Jedi disappears off to far flung planet to live alone [episode 4,5].
Bad man who might be dead but probably got away [episode 4 (kinda)].
So, overall the film is just a rehash of the good films from before. It looks beautiful. The story is terrible. I have more moans and groans and things that annoyed me. I will probably keep getting these over the next few weeks so you might find that I add to this page quite a bit.
Kylo Ren is a spoilt child who needs a slap and his allowance should be removed. What an utterly terrible character. He desperately wants to be like the grandfather he never knew. What a twat. I apologise to the actor who played him but he looked really annoying once he removed the mask. He also looked nothing like his parents. NOT SCARY. He could have at least been seriously disfigured in a childhood accident, there could have at least been some form of credible back story to him.
Rey [which I first heard as Ray and thought “oh, that’s a little odd”], grows up on a sandy planet and then escapes with a droid with a secret map. She then discovers she has the force and learns really quickly to use it to her advantage. I am pretty convinced she is going to be the twin sister of Kylo, she wasn’t aware of who her parents were. Boring. It’s been done before. [Jase has just text to say he thinks Rea will end up being Luke’s daughter which does make more sense than my theory].
I did almost audibly cheer when the Millennium Falcon appeared in the film. But WHY oh WHY did they have to include reference to the terrible and incorrect line about making the Kessel run in under 12 parsecs. Everyone knows that a parsec is a unit of distance. Arrrrrgh. I have just looked at Wookieepedia and they use some awesome apologetics (perhaps as good a biblical twats who try to explain why the incorrect stuff in the bible is true) to justify the use of wrong units in the films. I’m not impressed, it’s a clever argument but it’s made after the fact to justify bullshit (again, like the bible and ALL other holy books). Also the Wookieepedia page claims that you have to use distance because of the problems with relativistic time, well, I’m sorry but if you are going to include a correct reference to relativity then all the Star Wars films have massive time dilation issues. It’s classic apologetics, creating an explanation post hoc and then ignoring other factors.
Why was Luke’s light sabre in a trunk in the basement of a bar on a forest planet? How? What?! Also, Rey found it so the entire Star Wars universe is pure coincidence.
I thought the battle scenes looked very good, however, I am somewhat concerned at the g-forces experienced by the pilots of X-Wings and TIE Fighters. They seem to overcome these without any major tech to help them.
When the star is consumed by the new Mega-Death Star shouldn’t everything pretty much freeze straight away? There wouldn’t be any external source of light energy.
Why did R2 suddenly wake before Luke had returned? He seemed to come to life at a random time. Perhaps I missed it but I’m sure that BB-8 had already been near R2.
C3PO has a red arm. What? The rebel alliance are so tight fisted that they have no replacement arms for a historically important droid who was hand made by Anakin?
The military control base for the attack at the end seemed to look a lot like the base at Hoth. I guess we are to assume that technology hasn’t moved on and that it is the best possible organisation of systems.
Finally, for my initial communication about this film I wish to bother you about the communication system the rebels have with the Mega-Death Star. They seem to have a link to the Empire’s secret base and understand its operational procedure because at the end of the film the countdown to firing and status of the weapon is known by the rebel HQ. How do they get this information in real time? At least in episode 4 the count down was provided by line of sight and Yavin being in the way. It was irritating.
So, here’s the thing. It’s a Star Wars film and it’s better than 1,2 and 3. I enjoyed it. It looked good. It just doesn’t make a great deal of sense and has a stupid plot. I would rate this film a 6/10 if I hadn’t already defined my rating system.
One of a pair of Christmas presents, a pretty cool 4×4.
This is the second of a pair of Christmas models. It’s a good looking beast!
I’m going to try and explain my position on data mining and data collection and profiling. The government wants to collect lots of data on all of us to help fight terrorism. This won’t work. The amount of data they want to collect is immense. They want to find terrorists using sophisticated computer programs and mining this data for connections.
Problem 1
If I was a terrorist I wouldn’t use social media for communication. I would use face to face meetings, dead letter drops and PAYG mobiles using them for a week and then dumping them. I would never directly contact anyone in charge and all organisation would be off the internet. It’s no use searching these data for patterns. Terrorists don’t use communication methods we can tap into.
Problem 2
The laws of probability. Let us suppose that the software can recognise a terrorist, by using their behaviour traits, 99% of the time and it incorrectly states an innocent person is a terrorist 1% of the time. Let’s suppose we are monitoring a million people and that there are 100 terrorists in that population. This would extrapolate to around 7000 terrorists in the UK. It would seem likely/reasonable that there are that many people within our borders willing to cause damage to the state.
The Sums
Of the 100 terrorists the software finds 99% of them so 99 terrorists are taken into custody. 1 terrorist remains at large.
The software also falsely accuses 1% of the population as it is only correct 99% of the time. This means that 9999 honest members of the public are wrongly accused of being terrorists.
So we have taken 10098 people into custody. The chances of you being accused but innocent is 9999/10098 which is about 99%.
The chance of you being guilty if taken into custody is 99/10098 or about 1%
This is a bad situation.
Data mining isn’t going to work. Neither is profiling or algorithms about people’s behaviour. The numbers don’t make sense. This measure won’t work.
To give you an idea of the scope of this problem I will now expand this to those people who enter this country each year. Let’s assume that the domestic population of the UK is perfectly happy with the State and not partaking in naughty behaviour (a false assumption). According to this BBC report there are 200 million people who enter and leave the country each year. So that means 100 million coming into the country each year. This profiling method assumes we have access to all of the data about every person who enters the country. Let’s look at the numbers and just for niceness let’s increase our software detection accuracy to 99.9%.
99.9% at selecting a terrorist correctly.
0.1% at selecting an innocent person.
Let’s also increase the number of terrorists to 10,000 (although this seems remarkably high to me).
9990 terrorists will be correctly detained. This means that 10 will go free.
99990 innocent people will be detained.
The probability of a detained person being guilty is: 9%. This is slightly better but not a system I want to be a part of.
Enjoy your winter break.
I took the plunge. I went to see Spectre at the cinema. The adverts had finally worked and I felt that it was something I ought to do. Before you read further you should ensure you have read this communication concerning my IMDB rating system. Here’s my tweet concerning my rating:
I rated Spectre (2015) 4/10 #IMDb https://t.co/05syF4gPd6
— Ian Parish (@iparish) December 14, 2015
I will admit that this looks a low rating, especially when you see what else I have rated higher and I am sure that some people will be disappointed with my score. Let me explain.
I really liked Casino Royale with Daniel Craig, I thought they had put some energy into the Bond franchise. I wrote about it here on an old website although I haven’t re-read it to see what I thought about it. Quantum of Shit Solace was terrible, I hated it. I would have thought that I reviewed it within this website but a quick search proved fruitless, have a look and see if you can find it here. I just didn’t understand Quantum of Solace, it irritated me immensely and I was very close to letting go of bond, hence it’s taken me a long time to get around to seeing this one.
The opening in Mexico City was pretty good but also pointless. The endless running and shooting and fights. I think I’m just tired of the whole thing. There wasn’t anything that I hadn’t seen before. Except for the helicopter. The helicopter was awesome. The stunt flying was bloody fantastic. Very impressive. The fight in the helicopter was bollocks.
After this we had Bond being told to stand down. This happened before with Timothy Dalton as Bond, in Licence to Kill I think. It didn’t bother me. Why are MI6 people using mobile phones for communication when they know that the new service wants to monitor all information. Arrrrrrrrrgh. It’s annoying. I would also like to point you to a future post discussing why data mining is bollocks.
So, Bond then travelled somewhere after stealing a car and got from London to Rome, driving within 24 hours, which is fine I guess and then he attends a meeting where the head bloke psychically knows he is there. It was utter shite. The idea that criminals are manipulating politics and markets for their own gain is no more credulous than the illuminati doing it for their own purposes. Bullshit.
SO, the clue leads to some woman who Bond beds, obviously. She wanted him after knowing him for minutes. Then he heads of somewhere to find someone who left the group of badies. He kills himself after telling his arch enemy where his daughter is. Why should he do that. His daughter was safe before he told Bond. Off to somewhere in the states where people can pay a fortune to feel better about themselves and Q turns up with an MI6 laptop and is accessing all the data via a wireless network. Bullshit.
A fight on a train, in the dining cart, where everyone seems to have disappeared once the fight starts. A shoot out on a train (the best in Africa) and yet it continues on to its destination. Without stopping or arrests. Arrrrrrrrgh.
There’s so much to moan about in terms of plot and things I want to stop. It was nice to see Blofeld. It’s a shame they didn’t kill him but at least he can escape prison and then become part of future movies.
This whole film was a plot mess and terrible. I will admit that I will go back and watch another Bond movie from the 70s to see if they are just as bad. I disliked this film a lot. I just hope that when I finally get around to seeing the new Star Wars film that I won’t be feeling this bad.