Leaving

And now for an impromptu visit to Newbury... I live a weird life.

Dick Justice - Cocaine

Found this rather fantastic song last night. If you like Rob Dougan's stuff (Clubbed To Death, Furious Angels, etc) then you'll like this. You can get it (and tonnes of other good free music) from CCMixter ... direct link to the song is below.

Dick Justice - Cocaine, by John Holowach

Also while I'm on the topic of free music, My Reality Is Changing by Teru is also rather fantastic:

My Reality is changing, by Teru

Oh and Clockwerk Girl by sHORT fACED bEAR is also worth a listen:

Clockwerk Girl, by sHORT fACED bEAR

I plan on remixing some stuff from there at some point, which should be good fun. I've just recently installed Beast which is a Linux-based audio environment. It seems very powerful and everything, but the interface is less than intuitive. Still that's often the case with audio applications regardless of platform. At least it seems stable.

I'd like to try doing something a bit different musically soon, something more angry sounding. I've tried it in the past but everything I do that is dark just ends up sounding lifeless or ends up sounding happy. I've got loads of new samples to mash up which I'll have a faff with soon. Only problem is I feel like I'm somehow cheating using existing samples. Ah well. It's all the same to the listener I guess.

Just As I Expected

2005 is turning out to be the worst year of my life. We're 5 months in and the only way I can imagine it getting worse is if someone close to me were to die. Yes I'm probably tempting fate with that sentence, if such a thing is possible. It's probably not but then everything else that I imagined could possibly fuck up this year has done.

Bah. Roll on 2006. Roll on happy times.

Tell Me Why, I Don't Like Mondays...

...or Tuesdays,

...or Wednesdays,

...or Thursdays, Fridays, Saturdays or Sundays...

Ellen DeGeneres

Sounds about right, except she forgot to mention that half the reason for going to work is to pay off the 3-4 years of education we take part in so that we can get the job in the first place so that we don't spend our entire lives in debt.

Except we shall spend our entire lives in debt.

National Masturbation Month

It's national masturbation month in America, according to goodvibes.com and May the 28th will see the annual Masturbate-a-thon

It seems really daring and strange at first but really masturbation is a natural act that animals partake of that has, for some reason, a huge social stigma attached to it. Well personally I say good luck to them, but I wouldn't want to go knocking on people's doors to ask them if they would sponsor me for every minute that I wank. Especially not in god-fearing America.

Sarcasm

I read somewhere that the rest of the world struggles with the British sense of humour and our love for sarcasm and irony. As a result I conciously try to avoid using sarcasm when I'm talking to people whose first language is not English. I just cooked a pizza and carried it up the stairs to my room where I bumped into my Italian flat-mate who laughed and said "Wow, that's the biggest pizza I've ever seen!"

I looked at him blankly and said "what're you on about?!"

"I was being ironic" was his reply. It suddenly occurred to me at that moment that I just wasn't expecting sarcasm from an Italian. If one of my British flat-mates had said the same thing I'd have realised straight away that they were being sarcastic, but because he is Italian I simply was not expecting a sarcastic comment for him.

Or maybe it's just the lack of sleep...

The Birds

It's like a scene from Alred Hitchcock's The Birds outside my bedroom at the moment. It would seem most students only empty their bins when there's an inspection and so the rubbish bins outside our house are piled high with bin bags. As a result there are hundreds of seagulls on top of them ripping them open.

Oh and Labour won. *unshocker* At least Ceredigion got a good council out of it.

I'm currently testing my "soccerbot" which is proving agonising. The game runs like treacle and they're all bloody stupid. They keep driving into each other and getting stuck. Mine makes an effort to move itself if it gets stuck but the ones that come with the game are less intelligent it would seem, and I have to test mine against theirs.

Ceredigion Votes Lib-Dem

Ceredigion will be getting a new council, a Liberal Democrat council. Good choice, in my opinion, even though I didn't vote for them. They'd have been my second choice if there hadn't been a Green representative. Greens got a whopping 2.4% vote in Ceredigion :( Ah well, there's always the 2008 vote.

Newbury Votes Conservative

Ugh, Conservative. How dreadful. Hopefully in 4 years time there will be a Green representative in Newbury. Still, it might not be that bad. Rushcliffe, which is where my parents live, is a Conservative area and they have the best county council of anywhere I've ever been.

Overall it looks like we're going to be stuck with another Labour government for another 4 years.

Momentus Occasion

Today marks the dawn of a new age. An age where it is no longer necessary for me to pull all-nighters. Yes, tonight will be my last all-nighter. It's uninterrupted sleep from now on.

Draining Complete

I've been running around like a headless chicken today. I had to leap out of bed when the room inspectors arrived. I was just pulling my trousers on when they started letting themselves in, even though I'd yelled "just a second!" The curtains were drawn so they couldn't see that the window is clinging to its frame for dear life. They took one look and left saying the room was fine. Unfortunately the rest of the house didn't fare so well. It was all stuff that I'd had nothing to do with mind: The cooker wasn't very clean (a bit harsh that, in my opinion. People still have to cook, we can't not eat just because there's an inspection on...) and the fridge was grim (fair play, it really was) and the bathroom downstairs (which I don't use because it is grim) was grim. But they were fair, they gave us an hour and a half to clean the place up.

So after an hour of frantic cleaning I went to vote. Only problem was that I had no idea where the polling station was. I wandered around until eventually I found it. They had one sign outside of it... You'd have thought they could have put one or two further down the road. After voting I went to the COOP to get some odds and ends and got stuck in a queue behind the frailest living person I've ever seen. Seriously, this woman must have been about 200 years old. It took her about 10 minutes to walk from the checkout to a seat about 2 metres away.

When I got home I then had to head back out for badminton. I wanted to give blood, but I also wanted to play badminton and I knew there was no way I'd be able to play afterwards, so I decided to go to badminton first and then give blood. I got completely thrashed at badminton and then came home and went to give blood.

For some reason when I got there I had it in my head that I might have had a blood transfusion as a baby, but then when I spoke to my mum (they wouldn't let me give blood without checking - even though I've given blood before) she said I've never had a transfusion so it was all okay.

This time it bloody hurt when they took the sample from my finger. Last time it didn't hurt at all. Weird. Hopefully I won't spend the next 2 days feeling half dead like I did last time.

Now I must go drink lots of fluids.