The peculiar USian shopping tradition of Black Friday (most famous in the UK for resulting in some poor Wal-Mart peon being trampled a few years back) has been leeching out into the wider world of digital distribution this year, and as a result I’ve acquired dirt-cheap copies of Aliens vs. Predator, Altitude, DogFight, Flotilla, Gratuitous Space Battles, Plain Sight, Galactic Civilizations I Ultimate, Machinarium, Doc Clock: The Toasted Sandwich of Time, Eufloria, Iron Grip: Warlord, VVVVVV, World of Goo (already owned; part of a bundle), Beat Hazard (already owned on 360), Audiosurf (a-o), Rhythm Zone, The Polynomial, Gish, Jolly Rover, Puzzle Agent, Recettear: An Item Shop’s Tale, And Yet It Moves, Batman: Arkham Asylum: GOTY, Deus Ex: Invisible War (already owned and sold on Xbox, but for £1 why not), Alpha Protocol, Sam & Max Season 3 complete, BRAINPIPE, GalCon Fusion, Gridrunner Revolution, ProtoGalaxy, and Quantz.
Astute readers will note that the majority of these are indie games, so yes, you can expect a bunch of indie reviews to appear as I dabble in them. I’m already enjoying GalCon Fusion (the best way to spend two minutes aside from a cup of Chai tea) and Recettear (the only time you will hear me utter the phrase Capitalism, Ho!).
(At some point I’ll join the rest of the internet in showing off my rubbish MineCraft constructions, too.)
Damn I love games, you guys. And I love digital distribution even more. All of the above probably cost about £30-40 all told, and there’s no annoying packaging or install discs at all. Just the costs of server hosting for the distributor/retailer, bandwidth for the both of us, and a little download and install time for me. The future is rad.
This won’t be a glorious retrospective or even an excoriating rant about British pop music in the 1990s. I moved to Essex in about 1993, and my enduring memories of the Brit music for the ensuant 7 years are BritPop (which I never really took to bar Suede and Blur’s mid-to-late work), the shudderingly awful ladrock of Oasis, awful meat market dance tunes – this was Essex, after all – and of course the cancerous polyp upon the anus of humanity that was UK Garage, and subsequently Craig David’s stupid chinstrap. I wasn’t much of a fan of what I heard at the time. But hey, your mileage may vary. I once read that the guys who pioneered UK Garage were working underground with little recognition for many years, so at least they were genuine at the same time as being terrible.
But the point of this post isn’t too reminisce about times past. It’s actually to make cheap fun of the elements of British pop culture that just don’t seem to be able to move on. Let’s start with the slightly tragic: recently ’90s two-hit wonder Republica (you know them, your mum probably likes ‘Ready To Go’) reformed for a tax write-off reunion show. Loserville was in attendance and reviewed what was, by all accounts, the most significant musical event of 2010.
I’m trying something a bit different here – a live stream of Montreal punk band the Sainte Catherines playing at The Fest in Gainesville. Hopefully the embed code will work, and thanks to Erica of Yowie.com for alerting me to this.
This post goes live at 8pm and the set will begin at 9pm GMT. If my embed doesn’t work, then the source page is here.
I don’t have any reviews queued for this week as I spent my spare time last weekend making a website for my band.
It’s WordPress-based since that’s all I know, but I think it’s come out pretty well. Credit where it’s due: I’m using a modified version of this theme.
Minor detail for the techgeeks: at the moment the domain name is just forwarding to a subdirectory on nostalgiaforinfinity.com, with the content framed so the domain name always displays in the address bar. At some point I’m going to try and figure out if it’s possible to have the domain properly route to the subdirectory and still look as though the site is properly hosted, i.e. links appear as wrecktheplacefantastic.co.uk/about/ and not nostalgiaforinfinity.com/wreckthis/about/. If only they’d taught this in A-level IT instead of some twattery about business studies.
For your listening pleasure, head to Banner Pilot’s bandcamp page to listen to a stream of their wholly re-mastered 2008 album Resignation Day. It’s totally awesome; previously I felt that it didn’t hold a candle to 2009′s Collapser but with some canny production work it’s every bit as good. Not to be missed if you dig melodic punk rock as much as I do.
You might also want to check out this PunkNews stream of Pacer’s (ex-The Steal) debut 10″. I’ve not listened to it yet but I caught them live a few weeks ago and they kicked a few asses with their driving hardcore punk.
I’ve also been listening to Gallops today and Holy Roar are streaming all 5 tracks from their excellent self-titled dance / rock EP. (Holy Roar stream a lot of stuff which is very cool indeed.)
I heard that some elderly apologist for paedophilia is here in the UK at the moment. Well, we’re all annoyed about that but remember he’s involved in even worse things. Easy to lose sight of that. Fucking papacy.
Okay yes yes I am working on some REAL posts and reviews and things. Work is hard at the moment! Which means I gotta get my relax on, rather than slaving over a hot keyboard for y’all. xx
Here are two videos, via the New Left Project, that relate to Israel/Palestine and are worth watching.
First up is a short 3-minute piece that restates some of the simple facts about the siege of the Gaza Strip and the recent assault on the aid flotilla.
