We’re a bit partial to good ol’ British tea over here at the Compound/Clearinghouse/Deprogramming Center, but these days we use a bit of Asian ingenuity to get our hot water with the perpetual boiler. However this BBC Photo Instruction Page is telling us how to really make a trad cuppa. I’m not too sure I agree with the “milk first” rule, especially because 1) I use tea bags and 2) I’m a bad judge of the future milk/tea ratio. Still, if you’re curious, here’s how you really should do it.
Author: tedmills
We’re Going to Hack the Chalice!
Many fans of the Atari 2600 console from the ’80s consider Adventure the finest game that company created. Minimal sound effects, moebius mazes, dragons that looked like ducks (and kinda like microscopes when you killed them), a sword that was a big arrow, and mostly…just…silence, made this a mesmerizing winner.
I guess it would have happened sooner or later, but not only are Atari nostalgia geeks making their own games in their own cartridges but some guy has gone and hacked Adventure so it now has more levels, more mazes, more everything. Crazy, man, crazy.
Lastly, some group called Naked Intruder has made a mini-album of industrial metal-type music all from Atari 2600 sounds. (We’d prefer somebody to have a go at something ambient.)
All found at Atari Age
Master Directory Block Rockin’ Beats
Phew. After much futzing with the intricacies of Data Rescue X, I was able to pull everything off the damaged drive I needed. I think the corruption of the MDB occurred because of some event back in August 2001, as I had a lot of mysterious ghost files from that time popping up in duplicate or triplicate (my first attempt at rescuing data garnered me 6.6 GB of files from a 3.1GB HD that was only 1.3GB full). I then used Disk Format in OSX, which allowed me to erase the volume and install a OS9 driver. That done, I used a trial version of Prosoft’s Data Backup to shift all the rescued files over.
I punched my fist in the air like a monkey in a too-tight flightsuit when I booted up off the new disk and the happy Mac face came up, then loaded, then Entourage loaded up where I had left off. Nice. A few minor things don’t work–I lost registration codes for some third party software, and some of my aliases don’t go to where they should–but it’s as if nothing happened. Of course, I just lost a day of work, so time did pass. On the other hand, I didn’t have to take it to the shop to get it fixed. Phew.
Sorted!
You are now looking at my CD collection. With a day spent restoring my crashed drive (see the main page for that story), I spent the down time doing something I’ve been meaning to do since 1996: sort my CD collection into a manageable alphabetical order. I was stuck in the house anyway. I always used to keep my collection in order, but the bigger it got, the lazier I became. Since coming to the Mills Compound in December, this has been on my to-do list. I knew it would take some time, and it did.
Most of my CDs have had their cases tossed and replaced with thin poly bags that hold both booklet and J-card. (You can get them at Bags Unlimited.) So what you are looking at is a fraction of what it could be.
I sorted ’em into alphabetical piles on the floor and took this picture. You can see the piles for B, C, and F are the largest, the reason being my obsession past and present for The Beatles, David Bowie, Beck, Elvis Costello, and The Fall. The P pile should be bigger as an extra three feet of Pizzicato Five CDs were already sorted and on the shelf. The “Various Artists” pilie was big enough to divide into two, and next to that there is the Soundtracks pile, the Jazz pile, the Classical pile, and below that Video Game Soundtracks, and VCD (mostly porn, apparently. Where did that come from?) And do you really care about this?
Anyway, it’s all sorted now and shelved away. At last I know where everything is.
Flags – Breathless
IMME Records IMME-1001
1996.08.01
Second only to Pizzicato Five, Flags was my favorite Shibuya-kei band back in the rosy days of ’96-’97. Produced by Tetsutaro Sakurai, they were his side project to Cosa Nostra, and featured five girls of different looks and personalities that he used to sing his Todd Rundgren- and Laura Nyro- inspired pop. There was Harry, the spooky, arty one; Aki, the girly one; Maria, the one who sounded like Kahimi Karie; Emiko, the earthy, fun one; and Rio, the slightly older, glamorous one. Or that’s how they seemed to me.
After buying all four of their releases and all six of their singles, I had given up on even finding their rare CD-ROM mini-album combo from 1996, let alone being able to afford it (Japanese collector prices being astronomical). Imagine how I almost choked on my Raisin Bran when I saw this at Tokyo Recohan for something like $7. It was a no-brainer.
I was slightly disappointed to find out that the six songs here are not new, despite the titles I’ve never heard of. They are actually all remixed versions of the songs found on their second album MOR from a month before, with English lyrics instead of Japanese. Some sound like demos–all the sounds I know are in place, but they don’t fit together as well. “Wonderland,” the English version of their best song “Nowhereland” (a song I so loved that I ripped off the title for my movie), is awkward and blocky, one take short of being brilliant (it’s interesting to compare and contrast, of course). It’s like those albums you discover only in your dreams–it sounds like them, but something’s quite off.
The QuickTime movies that accompany the songs are the usual bland Japanese promo variety, with usually one or two set-ups and no imagination of what to do for the entire 5 minutes. Only “Wonderland” gets any sort of treatment, with the band vogue-ing and being subjected to several digital effects. The dancing doesn’t suit the music, though. Mostly the videos prove what I always thought, based on the very few publicity photos I have seen of them: Emiko (left) is the cutie (she also has the best voice). After their 1997 album Cream they vanished into the ether.
Outlook Not So Good
After about five fortunes from a “Magic 8-Ball,” I usually begin to wonder instead what makes the thing work. Wouldn’t you love to take one apart? Sure you have. The Inscrutable 8-Ball Revealed
After about five fortunes from
After about five fortunes from a “Magic 8-Ball,” I usually begin to wonder instead what makes the thing work. Wouldn’t you love to take one apart? Sure you have. The Inscrutable 8-Ball Revealed
La Fidélité
Dir. Andrzej Zulawski, 2000
Inspired after listening to the audio commentary on the Possession DVD, I felt the urge to watch Zulawski’s most recent film, which has been sitting on my shelf since I bought it in Taiwan last year (and still not available in the States). Of course, I didn’t expect it to match the bugout weirdness of Possession, but it had something going on, one being a discussion about tabloid culture and capitalism. The plot has Sophie Marceau (a respected young photographer) marrying an upper-class man she respects more than loves, and fighting off the urge to sleep with a much younger working-class paparazzi photographer. The two central words of the film are “Fidélité” (of course) and “Verité”, both of which are explored in the personal and in the realms of commerce, and how the latter undermines the former. Marceau’s character’s life is intruded upon numerous times, her most private moments made public, but she too is guilty of this, working for the same tabloid press as the young photographer (and for the Murdoch-like goon that may or may not be her true father). How media, and the mediaization of our personal lives, destroys us is one thing the film explores; how to escape is another matter. The film is apparently based on a novel by Madam de la Fayette, but I didn’t know this going in. Zulawski also uses a lot of quotes from Auden throughout, and a brief glimpse of the John B. Root film “Principe de plaisir” on a TV. It bears watching again, as it was complex in its characters and plotting–a second viewing would reveal more of its structure, I believe.
Is This Thing Recording?
When I was a kid, one of my most valuable possessions was a Sears mono cassette recorder, on which friends and myself made hours and hours of ridiculous skits and other shenanigans. I thought the thrill of hearing your own voice would have been lost to the camcorder generation, but apparently PC owners with MusicMatch Jukebox software have something called “Mic in Track,” the ability to hook a mike up and record straight to mp3. Possibly these people don’t know that their efforts are also downloadable from Kazaa if they save everything in their shared folder. Ah-ha….
Check out the audio verite at Stark Effect – mic in track.
Discovered at Boing Boing
An Ode to Mupesa Solomon
Ever got one of those spams supposedly from some poor resident of an African dictatorship promising you a 10% cut of millions of dollars if you help them squirrel some money out of the country? Sure, we all have. You ever wonder who these people are? An intrepid Scot and his buddies abroad set out to scam the scammers. This is absolutely brilliant stuff, and worth the long reading time. Thanks to my friend Chris for passing this on.