Dark Liquid

The podcast may be gone but the ‘rock conference’ lives on! I kinda expected it to happen, but hearing it confirmed was awesome. Now I just need to find something to do all the time in the year between LUGRadio Lives!

LRL08UK was awesome. The social aspect was even better than last year. Shoutouts to Bytey and Andrea, two awesome people we hung out with as well as Matt, the guys and cool Scot/American Andrew. See you guys next year!

It was one expensive weekend. I spent about £700 since I paid for everything more or less. Lost had the bad luck to have his bank fuck him over during the weekend, so he couldn’t get at any of his cash. I also bought Dru a ASUS eee 900, which doubled up the expenditures to the £700.

I did my best to put my camera to good use and took about 80 odd photos (of which only about 50 were usable) and bumped them up on flickr. Got some good shots and a lot of mundane ones.

All in all, an awesome weekend. Looking forwards to next year.

Hmm, haven’t posted in a while. Here’s a quick summary of the last few weeks.

• Well, the wedding is still progressing nicely. It’s an arse trying to get anything sorted with honeymoons though due to all the legal gumph with name-changing and visas, etc.
• Work is still busy as hell.
• Heading up to the last (sniff, sniff) LUGRadioLive today
• I am loving jQuery more and more
• Sweatmistress (don’t ask, it’s my weird sense of humour at work again)
• I’ve been trying to write more, joined a cool site called Protagonize
• New drums and a digital camera!
• Forbidden Kingdom is awesome, Jackie Chan looks great in dreds
• Dr. Horrible is also awesome. “The hammer is my penis.”

Well, the wedding is creeping up on us, only 2 months to go or so now, eep! We’ve still yet to sort thing out like honeymoon, etc. Things are just so complicate and expensive. It looks like we might be going to Seattle for our honeymoon now rather than Iceland. Iceland is an arse to get to for any reasonable cost, which is a shame. We were looking at Switzerland or Norway, which both seemed quite nice, but the dates we wanted didn’t seem to work out very well for getting reasonable costs/tours/etc.

I’ve been knackered most of the last week. Extremely large amounts of overtime are to blame for the most part. Note to self: 32 hours of solid coding at work is not conducive to good health. However, the end result was very worth it and we got a kick-ass site out the door.

Yesterday we were buying books (yes, more books) one of which was a funny anecdotal kind of tale about D&D consuming the freetime of teenage boys and the sales clerk happened to mention he thought it looked funny and that he played D&D himself. Awesome, we remarked and we promptly exchanged details, so we might have a new recruit in out little cabal of roleplayers. He’s played mostly AD&D and the 1st ed basic set, while most our my group plays D&D 3.x and are moving to 4. I mentioned we play a lot of systems, storyteller (White Wolf stuff) and what not and he seemed interested. I might get him to come along to my Wushu game, which I must remember to write up stuff for, as well as make my proposal to my brother for him to comicify it or something.

I direct you to go and check out Severed Fifth a new project by Jono Bacon of LUGRadio and Seraphidian fame.

What’s exciting about it is that it’s a project to test out the viability of something we’ve all been arguing in favour of - free music, free culture, free distribution. Can a band really make it without the backing of the record industry? Can a musical project survive purely on it’s own merit and the actions of the community it builds up around itself? Can that project actually make any money?

What’s cool is that this is a project aimed primarily at consumers, people listening to music because they like it. It isn’t targeted at the free culture advocate who listens and promotes ‘just because its a free culture project’. Can real fans (which may or may not be aware and/or advocates of free culture) make a project successful? Will they even exist without the mass marketing machine working to make them aware of it?

Who knows? No-one does, but with Severed Fifth it’s going to be interesting finding out.

Hmm, well I played my first couple of games using D&D 4th Edition yesterday and I have to say for the most part, I’m impressed.

The rules are generally similar and everything tends progress more quickly and more streamlined. There were a couple of bumps but mostly those were down to not remembering some parts of the rules. Usually, everything you needed was in one place, unlike the chore of having to hunt through about 10 different tables spread across 2 to 3 different books I remember in 3/3.5.

I played a Dragonborn Warlock, Shiv Banedrake, a white-dragon styled guy that had taken on the mantle of Warlocks as an exercise in learning the skills of his old racial enemy, the Tiefling. Not that he harbours any magnanimity towards them now, but still, best be prepared. Remember the fallen!

We all had a pretty bad run of rolls on both adventures. My average dice score was below ten for both games. That made things harder, but playing smart and cursing everything I could see from a distance, then following up with lots of Eldritch blasts worked out nicely, with the occasional melee foray when I needed to rescue our Cleric who got knocked out. Of course, the GM fudging the dice probably helped too

All in all, I think 4th Ed has the makings of a great system. I need to find a third-party character sheet though. The ones we printed off suck and are mostly just confusing rather than helpful.

I just watched the most awesome movie ever last night. That is, the most awesome film ever if you find extremely over-the-top, clichéd Japanese slasher flicks awesome.

Completely ridiculous plots, character interactions and reactions and events are rife in this film, but they all make the film that much more fun. The gore and violence is extremely funny, as is the dialogue. I’ve only heard the English dubbed dialogue, so I can’t say if it’s an accurate translation or not, but damn, its funny.

Some choice moments include

• finding out about the main characters parents
• the main character getting her arm battered and fried
• someone being sliced into chunks by shurikans
• someone having their skin blasted off by machine gun fire
• chainsaw feet
• the drill bra

The entire film is hilarious and the are so many things in it I’ve seen in various animes. Sort of staple scenes and scenery that seems mandatory in anything from Japan, such as ’school kids walking over bridge’ which is in at least half a dozen animes I’ve seen.

This film actually surpasses Brain Dead as my all-time favourite humour/gore-fest film. Well done Japan, well done.

Yesterday I baked a Banana Loaf! I didn’t have any eggs or cherries though, so it was just bananas, flour, margarine, sugar and I added some honey for binding.

I almost doubled the amount of banana in the recipe too and I think the cake turned out great, if a little sweet mostly on account of the honey. It was a little too sweet for Dru’s taste but it caters to my own sweet tooth just fine

Well, my suit is coming along. I now have the jacket, I’m awaiting the shirt and trousers (they needed altering) and I have my shoes, by which I mean lace-less Doc Martin boots. It all looks rather smart.

I can’t believe it’s only 3 and a half months away. 3 and a half months until I’m a married man at 24 years of age. Cripes!

In truth though, it’s not scary or daunting at all. It just feels right. There isn’t any doubt in my mind that Dru is who I want to spend the rest of my life with and the only way I could be happier about the whole prospect is for it to come into being on the day.

I love you Dru.

I must say, I’m really pleased with Ubuntu 8.04 Hardy Heron. I installed it on my macbook yesterday and it works like a charm. Wireless didn’t work out of the box but by following the Ubuntu Macbook Howto things went pretty smoothly. My wireless works perfectly on the madwifi driver with NetworkManager, compiz works nicely and I have a nice, fancy desktop, sound works, the touchpad works with two-finger scrolling and multi-finger tapping for clicking. It’s generally a really solid build and I’m very impressed. The only issue I had was booting it up for the first time. rEFIt just wouldn’t boot the partition. It would show the penguin logo but just hang. After updating it from version 0.9 to version 0.11 though, everything worked fine.

I’m really enjoying Firefox 3. The new features make it so much easier to use and things I was using plugins for are now either built in or have better equivalents integrated into the main app. The only downside is that Google Browser Sync doesn’t work with Firefox 3, which is a real shame. However, since I use the del.icio.us plugin for my bookmarks, it’s not a complete show stopper.

I’m also posting this directly from my desktop, deciding to give a desktop blogging client a go. I’m using the gnome panel applet gnome-blog 0.9.1 so we’ll see how it goes.

All in all, Hardy Heron in a phenomenal piece of work and I’m blown away by it. Once the new free-as-in-freedom madwifi drivers support the wireless, I see no reason why most of the macbook hacks and stuff can’t be enabled by default or at least be wrapped into a script so you can go into the admin and enable ‘Macbook compatibility mode’ with a warning about possible non-free things being installed/enabled/etc. Being able to just install linux on a macbook and be ready to go would be awesome.

In other news, I’ve been reading the rulebook for Promethean: The Created and I’ve fallen in love with the setting and the general theme of it all. I’ve come up with a character concept based around a promiscuous female Muse of Aurum, who roves from college to college, university to university trying to understand the human condition by immersing herself in student culture and sex.

Speaking of the new World of Darkness, it looks like we’ll be playing a Werewolf: The Forsaken game. I was homing for a Changeling: The Lost game, but we were out-voted by the other players. Our GM is good at what he does, so I’m sure he can reach a good balance of roleplaying for Dru and I and hack-and-slashing for the others.

It looks like I will be starting either one of my own roleplays this coming Wednesday. After pestering people with Facebook I eventually created an event and invited people to it. I’ve had just enough responses to make running a game worthwhile. I’m hoping to run both games alternately, but we’ll see what the players go for. You’ll be able to keep up with the games’ progressions on my Obsidian Portal page.

Now, I’ve never been that enamoured with Steeleye Span. Most of their work I’ve heard has come from their album recordings and it’s never really done anything for me. However, seeing them live at The Pavilion last night completely blew me out of the water. They were excellent and, to me, had a totally different sound to what I’ve heard before.

The only thing I could have asked for would have been more use of the electric violin. I love the sounds of that instrument so much and they used it to full advantage for one song. If only there could have been more!

It was amusing, my age bracket were somewhat the minority at the concert, the average age of listeners being somewhat older. Then again, when you’ve been going as long as Steeleye Span, I guess you’re going to have a lot of fans in the older age brackets.

We were amazed by the excellent seats we had. We’d got seats right at the very front, in the middle so we could only have got closer to the band if we had climbed up on stage.

All in all, it was a really enjoyable evening.