N Code

Blog Days - A Shot In The Arm

2010-08-03T12:36:00.007+01:00

I thought it was high time I broke the months-long silence hanging over our little blogosphere, so here I am with a new post. There hasn't been a longer period of inactivity on this blog since its inception, which hopefully says a little bit about how busy I've been of late.

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Nina and I found a new place and moved in together officially back in June. I say 'officially' because for the last year and a half, I was spending about four nights a week with her anyway. We've moved into a lovely house in Greenisland, north of the city with amazing hillside and sea views. We've got plenty of space - I've got my own full studio room set up, and Nina has a room of her own for reading, writing and practicing her therapies. There's a vast, secluded back garden and brand-new everything inside. We even get to ride the train to work and back together each day. I've never been happier. My 'leaving' the city signifies the end of an era in some ways - I'd been renting and living in Belfast with McGrathy for about seven years, though fortunately he and my other friends in the city are only fifteen minutes away. He and I will be joining Nina alongside Linda and Dan The Man in a couple of weeks for another patented Alcohol Fuelled Geek Fest(TM), which I hope to enjoy as a celebration of Steve and I's shenanigans-filled time as co-habitants. Lest we forget: We Can't Be Fucking Killed.

Riding this wave of nostalgia - no doubt heightened by my slow march towards the big Three-Oh in 2011 - I've been seeking out yet more memories from my childhood and teenage years, centered mostly around my audiovisual experiences at the time. I recently re-watched RoboCop, which remains a brutal affair both in its gory violence and its satire of 80s corporate avarice. My always-simmering obssession with Knightmare has peaked again, as I'm re-watching episodes here and there and re-reading some of the old roleplaying board; I'm even working on my DNF-esque Knightmare game engine (again). I'm enjoying seeking out artsy/big-haired 80s music videos from Bon Jovi, a-Ha, Guns N' Roses and more. Moving into my late teens and early twenties, I've been re-living the pro wrestling 'Attitude Era' dominated by Stone Cold and The Rock, and continue to enjoy the incredible Botchamania series on YouTube - recommended viewing regardless of your attitude to what they now call 'sports-entertainment'. Even my current listening habits skew towards the middle of the last decade, when I was immersed in all kinds of extreme music, from when I'd be sat up til 3am on a work day drinking Erdinger and listening to early Emperor while the rain poured outside my bedroom window by the train line in Great Northern Street. Those close to me know that some of those times were grim, but serve now as a reminder of all I have to be thankful for - love, friends, family and health. (Despite my death/black metal leanings, I'm still a total sap at heart.)

If it sounds like I've got a lot of spare time on my hands, the reality is sadly different. My current work schedule is pretty brutal, as I'm trying to meet a go-live date three weeks from now. I've been doing late nights at home for several weeks, and probably look like a zombie as a result, but I'm more motivated than I have been in some time and am determined to capitalize on this. I've even managed to squeeze in some freelance work on the side, which has been a valuable extra source of income. That said, I'm still looking for a new job, and hope to be in a new position by wintertime (fingers crossed). If I get some XBox360 time, I currently enjoy my second run through the epoch-defining Half-Life 2, along with new offerings such as the beautiful and disturbing Limbo. Hopefully Steve and I can squeeze in some online Far Cry 2 or Left 4 Dead in the very near future.

Creatively, things are on the up. I finally bit the bullet and invested in enough new PC components to put a new one together, replete with 3Gb of RAM, a 1.5 terabyte main HD and an Intel Core Duo II processor. It's a reasonably modest setup compared to modern gaming rigs, but I'm looking to be creative with it, not play Crysis 2. I was able to lop a fair chunk off the total price by not purchasing an operating system, as the Linux enthusiast in me would have baulked at installing a brand-new copy of Windows 7 when there's innumerable desktop distros out there for free. I've installed ArtistX, which contains an insane amount of multimedia software - DAWs, raster and vector graphic editors, 3D modelling tools, softsynths, MIDI sequencers, and loads more. The new gear has already inspired me into becoming creative once more, in t-shirt design, web development and of course music. I'm itching to get going again, having removed the excuse of my gear not being up to scratch. Though I'm in desperate need of a new guitar... just saying.

So, 2010 so far has been a hell of a year. I can't believe its August already. Hopefully I'll get a bit of a holiday in the next month or so, during which I hope to... actually, I'm not going to set those goals for myself just yet. With so much on my plate and so much on the horizon, the best thing for me is to just enjoy it one day at a time.

NJM

Current Geek (And Other) Activity

2010-03-24T10:44:00.004Z

Nina and I took a week off at the start of the month to get out of the city and relax for a bit. As with last year, we went to the Slieve Donard hotel, and spent the time in and out of the gym, pool, jaccuzi, sauna and steam room. It was amazing - I haven't felt so relaxed in recent memory. I had intended to spend the remainder of my time off recording, but my 8-year-old PC has become useless for pretty much anything other than browsing, media playing and basic coding. It now boots and runs off a highly-customized Puppy Linux USB stick, which is great fun and lightning-fast, but leaves me with no viable way of working on my music.

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Without an audio workstation, my creative endeavours have stagnated badly. I've enlisted the help of Happi in sourcing parts for a new rig, which I sincerely hope to have picked and purchased by the end of this week. I really can't wait. Following my little spa retreat, I've really found my inspiration coming back, and if I can get my equipment in order, there really won't be any more excuses (apart from time, of course).

Away from music, I'm currently learning a new programming language: Python. I've been hearing about it for years as an excellent tool for everything from general-purpose tools to automation, game development and even PHP extensions. Many of the job apps I've looked at over the past month or so list experience with Python as one of their desired (though not essential) criteria,. It's cross-platform, which is important for me at a time when I'm running Linux and Windows alongside each other. In order to learn it I'm trying to replicate one of my old DIV-Basic efforts, Detonator, in Python. Once I've got that down, I have to choose between McGrathi Apocalypse, 14 Days and some sort of Knightmare engine as my first original Python project. All are in the advanced stages design-wise, so it's really just a case of picking one and sticking to it. Again, time will be the major obstacle.

So in the next few weeks I'll hopefully have yet another string on my big geek bow. I also hope to have a new audio solution in place and maybe, just maybe, a finished track or two. Though I've said that so many fucking times over the past five years that I'm actually scoffing at myself. I've got other plans and projects in the works too, so here's to finding the time and patience to tackle them in 2010. (What do you mean, it's nearly April? Shit.)

NJM

Past Travesties In Web Design 1999-2007

2010-03-23T11:34:00.005Z

The decade that was the 00's stands as a turbulent time in the life of your host. Were it to be plotted on a graph, it might look like a mountain range. Nowhere is this better reflected than in the vestiges of my decade-long presence on the Web - a pathetic tale of narcissism, spite and baseless self-importance.

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Between 1999 and 2007 I engineered around 15 different personal websites. The brave new world of the internet, discovered during my university studies, was an inferno to the blue touchpaper of my own ego; the urge to pollute the global network with my own ramblings was impossible to resist. Along the way, I committed every web design atrocity possible in pursuit of my subconscious goal: make everyone in the world think I was awesome. Looking back, it was even more ridiculous than it sounds.

And so - from early Word-based opinion pages to Geocities/Tripod 'site-builder' efforts, through ad-strewn free domain hosting, IE6-only pages, message boards only I ever wrote on, Flash masturbation par excellence, and all kinds of plugin and script abuse - the detritus of my digital ego trip lay strewn about the Net for years, fading away as sites expired and hosts deleted it to make way for other, hopefully worthier, content. Thanks to the Internet Archive, I've recently been able to unearth some of it, conjouring a strange mix of nostalgia, humour and shame in the process.

As a present-day 'professional' web developer, almost everything I did in those days is an utter travesty from a technical standpoint, even considering the 'standards' at the time. It was definitely a case of my vision outstripping my skills, and even my common sense (today, the opposite is much more common). I used to make sites work in Internet Explorer and if they didn't work in any other browsers... well, fuck those people, they should be using IE. I even went so far as to block people with scripting if they were using a 'wrong' browser. People have been fired for doing this sort of thing. Elsewhere there are preload bars that don't load anything, nested tables and framesets, mouseover effects for every element on screen, background music loops, unskippable Flash intros, site navigation disguised as an x-ray of my head, pointless splash pages, animated repeating backgrounds, and pretty much everything else you would imagine seeing on Web Pages That Suck. It was an experimental time, sure, but I often wonder how much quicker I could have got into my current career path if I had just stopped, looked and listened in the face of my earlier web design abominations.

Most facepalm-inducing of all, though, is the actual content. Pages and pages of egomaniacal text, journal entries that read like some kind of psyche profile, thinly-veiled accusations and slurs, utterly self-centered ranting and raving over perceived injuries (largely imaginary), emotionally-retarded whining and indecision, baseless ad hominem attacks on innocent bystanders... on and on it goes. The really sad thing is that, despite later obvious technical advances, this sort of content remained a spectre hanging over my web efforts for a long time. Even the first year-and-a-half of this blog is a nightmare of neurotic bleating and moaning. I almost don't recognise the author when I read over it today. Not exactly the globe-straddling wit I probably envisioned when I took my first bumbling steps in HTML editing in MS Word back in 1999.

Yet in spite of it all, I still enjoy going back over my earlier misadventures in the Web, if only to realise how far I've come professionally and personally. The year 2010 is already shaping up to be a transitional one, and I'm moving into a whole new chapter in my life. In revisting the earlier chapters, I hope to learn the lessons and avoid the mistakes of the past, and in doing so carve out a much smoother, fulfiling path through the next ten years - and beyond.

NJM

The Ghosts Of Hacking Past

2010-02-16T17:23:00.006Z

'Bloody instructions which, being taught, return to plague their inventor...'

(Macbeth, Act 1, Scene 7)

Recent developments in work have moved me to start seeking my fortunes elsewhere. I've been browsing the job listings and polishing my CV as the first stage in my eventual departure. In an effort to make my resumé as comprehensive as possible I've been going back over some of my old work and cleaning it up, and am astounded at how amateurish and downright impenetrable some of it is.

Back when I started in this job I had been coding PHP for less than a year and had definitely fallen on the 'script-kiddie' side of the developer divide: no real procedure or process, just a burning desire to Get It Done by any means necessary. My old code bears the ugly scars of this attitude. Just looking over one of the 'simple' internal tools I wrote in early 2008 reveals a nightmare of spaghetti procedural code, meaningless function and variable names, embedded HTML and JavaScript, performance bottlenecks, and several sections that would be shoo-in candidates for The Daily WTF. It says a lot when the developer himself can barely make sense of what he's written.

Fast-forward to 2010 and it's obvious I've moved on in leaps and bounds. My work is better structured and organized, more efficient, clean and maintainable, and generally devoid of WTF moments. No doubt I'll look back on it this time next year and roll my eyes in disgust. I guess that's the lot of the humble developer: you never win, you just do a little better each time (with thanks to Cleveland from Family Guy). Sometimes I wonder if I'm cut out for this whole programming business. I often doubt if I'm applied, patient, logical or simply intelligent enough. I guess time will tell. So, at the risk of closing this little blog post on a note of uncertainty, I'll leave you with another well-known definition of programming: 'A pastime similar to banging one's head against a wall, but with fewer opportunities for reward.'

NJM

Zombies, Board Games And The Joy Of Rapid Prototyping

2010-02-08T13:08:00.004Z

In an effort to jettison some of the creative baggage I've been lugging around - and by way of a break from programming - I sat down at the computer last month and fired out a basic boardgame prototype for the perpetually-stalled McGrathi Apocalypse. I put a grid together, a few counters, took some dice and tried it out. Things got out of hand. A few days later I had a full-colour board layout, several different types of marker, character profiles, an action point-based combat and turn system, derived statistics and inventory management rules. It's been a long time since I've been inspired in such a freewheeling fashion.

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Sadly, the resultant 'game' - think Space Hulk meets Left 4 Dead - is no fun at all to play. This is largely due to my shoehorning complex statistics management into it - most of the mechanics were lifted verbatim from the underlying logic of the McGrathi Apocalypse videogame, and bog the flow down accordingly. Each actor on the board has a field of vision, hit points, seven or eight metrics and a number of skills and drawbacks, all of which impact their ability to move, perform actions and engage in combat. One character firing a gun at another takes at least two dice rolls, modified by a number of stats and circumstantial factors. In a test game pitting a single player character against just 3 infected enemies, it took a good 45 mins to resolve the game to completion (the player was overwhelmed and killed in 12 turns). It's nigh-on impossible to keep track of everything. With that in mind, it could maybe work as a computer-assisted boardgame: players would move around and make decisions, with a nearby laptop performing number-crunching duites, resolving combat, tracking statistics and generating random variance. That would actually be quite cool, freeing up the player to focus on tactics and decision-making without worrying about the almost AD&D-level skill checking.

I might develop the boardgame in more detail as a little pet project. For a very quickly knocked-up effort, it already looks pretty damn cool, with nice use of colour, icons and type (I must get some images up later). It could eventually be released to the world as a PDF that could be downloaded, printed and cut for your very own home version. All that said, it's really only a means to test gameplay mechanics, and as such will probably always be a fairly joyless affair for anyone other than d20-worshipping RPG junkies (and even then, it probably isn't anywhere near hardcore enough). The real pleasure, for me at least, lies in the rapid prototyping of a creative idea, from gestation to development to production to testing. If only I could be so progressive with my other projects!

NJM

Geek Part IV: Welcome To 2010

2010-02-08T10:32:00.001Z

Okay, Happy New Year and all that.

2009 was a relatively quiet year of blogging, with only 50 entries in 12 months, and I imagine the paucity of posts will continue in the first quarter of the new year. I've been wondering if the whole blogging thing is worth it any more. It's not that I don't have anything to talk about; it's just that I really don't have time at the moment. Besides, practically no-one is listening, and I've always disliked people who mumble to themselves. More on that later though. For now, here's hoping that 2010 is as great a year as the last one was - and hopefully much more productive from a career and creative standpoint.

NJM

Puppy Linux: New Tricks For Old Dogs

2009-12-14T09:49:00.004Z

This post concerns custom operating systems; any non-geeks might want to go away now. Though you might learn a thing or two about speeding up your machine if you choose to stay. Okay then.

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For as long as I've known Nina, she's had real issues with her laptop. A Vista machine that's just not spec'd enough for such a demanding OS (even after major tweaking), the thing takes up to ten minutes to become useable once booted; after that, intermittent freezes, lockups and general sloth-like response times are the norm. Even something as simple as browsing the Web becomes a teeth-gnashing experience. It's little wonder that she barely uses it. With her email inbox overflowing, her foreign friends neglected and her creativity stifled (she's a skilled writer and relies on Word to store and edit her material), it was a matter of days before the thing would be flung out of her apartment window to a meaningless end on the concrete below.

I managed to solve the issue by introducting Nina to Puppy Linux, an incredibly lightweight operating system that can run from a LiveDVD. Put the disc in the drive and turn the machine on, and in twenty seconds you have a fully-usable desktop with web browser, word processor, spreadsheet and other utilities. The system can read and write to Windows folders on the hard drive like Documents and Downloads, so Nina can get at her existing work and share it between Puppy and Vista. If she makes changes to Puppy itself (e.g. changes her wallpaper or other desktop settings), the system overwrites the DVD with the latest version of itself - leaving everything on the computer itself completely unchanged. And if Nina wants to use Vista for some reason, she simply takes the DVD out of the drive and reboots. Oh, and it's free, in every sense of the word.

In practice the whole thing works amazingly. Web browsing is blindingly fast, even on high-footprint sites like Facebook and YouTube, and the general responsiveness and usage of the system is incredible; it's like having a brand new computer. Obviously there's slightly less in the way of eye candy, and there's a small learning curve when switching to a Linux-style interface, but thanks to custom themes and skins the transition is much less painful than you'd imagine. Nina is incredibly happy with it and says she's much more motivated to use her machine now. I was so impressed that I'm going to set up my own version for general PC use; given that nothing loads from the hard disk, it should prove a boon for my slowly dying home machine. Those of you with old kit out there could do a lot worse than to give it a crack yourselves; it might just give you a whole new daily computer experience.

NJM

Dec '09 Update (Does My .BAT Look Big In This?)

2009-12-08T10:56:00.004Z

2009 has certainly been the year for neglecting the blog. In fact my online presence has diminished considerably over the past 12 months - I can't even remember the last time I had a conversation on MSN (if 'conversation' is the right word for it). So at the risk of fostering lazy habits, here's my latest bullet-point update. In this issue: haematology, exploding hard drives, and heavy bag. Indeed.

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Belated birthday congratulations to both Robyn and Kaz, who each added an extra stroke on the wall recently. I was going to mention their respective ages, but it may well have become taboo without my realising. Congratualtions girls!
Over the past month or so I've made several trips to my new doctor - the first time I've set foot in the waiting room since moving to Belfast in 2004. Many of you will be aware of the physical abuse I subjected myself to in the years that followed: poor diet, interminable drinking, recreational drugs and prolonged stress. Furthermore, both my gradfathers died of cancer, and I had been a heavy smoker for 5 years. In light of all that, I was understandably nervous about going for an MOT lest the results reveal a catalogue of hitherto-unseen conditions and general nastiness. Unbelievably, the results from my blood tests reveal I'm in almost perfect health; cell count, sugars, cholesterol, and so on are all fine. Even my blood pressure is normal, which was amazing given that I'd had a stand-up argument with my boss the very morning I was tested. If there's a weakness it's that I'm technically overweight: 14.5 stone (203lbs / 92kg), which at a height of 6' 2" gives me a BMI of 25.6. My doctor actually weighed me twice, as she couldn't believe I was overweight: apparrently I 'wear it well'. She then fed me the line about muscle weighing more than fat, which I've been repeating like a mantra ever since. Still, my persistent beer gut has forced me back into regular gym visits, accompanied by Nina, who joined to take advantage of the swimming pool.
I'm going back into the studio in the next week or two to get a couple of vocal tracks down: 'Night Of The Witch', a brooding tribal affair; and 'A Cautionary Tale', the latest incarnation of an industrial stomper based on a McGrathy riff, which may or may not be about a demonic vagina. My PC is dying a slow and horrible death, so I'll be relying on a stripped-down custom Linux box for sound capture. Come to think of it, I have a copy of Linux Format magazine in my bag as I write: the line between geek and nerd has never been so thin.

I've got a few musings I'd like to get down here soon, so maybe, just maybe, there will be more to come later. The four or so of you still reading can hardly wait, no doubt.

NJM

Left 4 Dead: Still Gr8

2009-11-13T13:07:00.004Z

Things fall apart quickly when you don't work together.

Zoey had been killed by a Tank a few blocks back, and the ensuing battle had left Francis, Bill and myself badly wounded. Yet Francis had run on by himself, perhaps out of fear or impatience, and now I could hear him getting ripped apart by Infected on the other side of a huge bus blocking the road. I started through the warehouse to get around the barricade and help him, but I had barely taken five steps when I heard a cry of 'NOOOO!' over my shoulder. I spun round to see Bill being dragged backwards by the huge tongue of a Smoker, the coughing and spluttering of the creature audible behind a parked car. Instinctively I fired at it, but a stray bullet hit the car and set off its alarm, which shrieked in the night. Before I could close the distance to Bill, who was still constricted and slowly being strangled, we were both completely engulfed by a horde of Infected. About a dozen blocked my path and grabbed at me, knocking off my aim every time I tried to get a shot at the Smoker and free Bill. A huge scream overhead heralded the arrival of a kill-stealing Hunter, who pounced on the helpless Bill and tore him to shreds. Knowing he was lost, I shot my way backwards out of the melee towards where Francis was.

I managed to dispose of the remaining Infected and found Francis's corpse a short time later. Distended, disembodied legs nearby told me he'd fought a Boomer and had got covered in Infected-baiting bile for his trouble - blinded, surrounded and alone, he'd had little chance. I was the only one alive, and my chances looked grim. My only option was to make a run for it, in the hope that I could cover enough distance to reach a safe room and heal up. Swallowing some pain pills, I sprinted, not stopping, blasting any Infected out of my way. Past a Witch, who looked threateningly in my direction but mercifully remained passive. Up the street, through an office building, a train yard, all the while clawed at by Infected, my health ebbing away, til I had slowed down and was out of shotgun shells. The screams of twin Hunters cut through the air behind be, and I turned round, barely avoiding one of them jumping straight at me. I ducked into an open container and unloaded my pistols into its head, before limping out of the container into the light - and straight into another horde of Infected. I went down, incapacitated, but still firing wildly as they flailed and stomped at me in droves, blocking out the sky with their emaciated forms, before the second Hunter leapt onto me and sealed my fate. All was lost.

No, it's not a dream. With the (controversial) release of Valve's football-score-sounding Left 4 Dead 2 less than a week away, I've been playing a hell of a lot of the illustrious original over the past few days. It really is a gloriously intense experience, with staggering replay value for a game with only five available scenarios, and the Versus mode continues to provide twitchy, cinematically epic moments to rival the best that other dynamic shooters like Halo 3 and Far Cry 2 can offer (as the above account, taken from a recent online session, illustrates). Having played the demo of L4D2, I still have some reservations about the new tone and setting, and wonder if the new additions to the formula will destabilize rather than enhance the rich blend of chaos the first game provided. Still, even if the sequel does disappoint, there will always be time for another trip to Mercy Hospital in my book. Pass me my Molotov.

NJM

October 2009: An Update

2009-11-03T15:30:00.006Z

I guess it's time for the (by-now customary) bullet-point update.

Over the Hallowe'en weekend I had the pleasure of dressing up two days in a row. On Friday I hacked together a shirt, tie and some basic makeup into some kind of corporate zombie outfit, and took part in the Critical Zombie Mass - a spooky-themed variant of the bike ride from last month. Despite the freezing weather we had a great turnout, with 40-odd freaks on two wheels seeping through the city streets to the tune of 'Thriller' and 'Tubular Bells'. Great fun, though I retired early to get home and work on my costume for the following night - Harvey 'Two Face' Dent from The Dark Knight, in all his charred, ripped glory. I wasn't entirely happy with the way it turned out - I had more planned for my 'bad eye' that had to be scrapped at the last minute, and the exposed jaw didn't look too hot in my mind - but everyone at Bingo's party on Saturday went mad over it. I even got presented with a bottle of champagne at the end of the night for Best Costume, though it might have been more of an award for having a high pain threshold - the plastic device I had manufactured to achieve Harvey's trademark one-sided snarl was uncomfortable to say the least.* Not to mention that I couldn't eat or drink for the two hours I was wearing it (I removed the mouthpiece later that night to partake of refreshments). Still, a fantastic weekend all round. I'm thinking a damaged T-800 or Dr. Jonathan 'Scarecrow' Crane for my 2010 effort.
I'm almost finished my current web project - a holistic therapy site with content management system and social network integration. Once that's done, I'll be focusing on a few personal endeavours: an online portfolio for myself, and a site for my music (I have a name for the 'artist' in mind). In the wake of my Judge Head 'phase', I'm inherently suspicious of any blatant self-promotion or brand-building, but I realise it's a necessary evil to get the music out there and heard. So expect to see me on MySpace, Facebook, PureVolume and much more as we head into the New Year. There's the small matter of actually finishing the album to deal with, of course...
Nina and I celebrated our first year together a few weeks ago. I can't express the full extent of how happy she makes me, because the words always seem to fall short. So I'll have to be content with saying that she's the love of my life. Again, the words just don't capture it; hopefully my actions do.
Work has been somewhat frustrating lately. Every time I think I've broken through and can actually see progress in the main project, another obstacle comes crashing down in front of me; most of them seem to originate within the company, rather than from outside. Still, I'm going to persevere in the short term, though I just can't see me being there this time next year. Though I've said that before.

More to come later this month (honestly).

NJM

* The white plastic of the jawbone, meanwhile, was culled from my old Judge Head mask. Cutting it up was a symbolic moment indeed.

Thinly-Spread And Lightly Toasted

2009-11-02T12:51:00.004Z

Last month is the first month I've gone entirely without making a blog post since time began. I'll be updating with pictures, tunes and hopefully a few new links this month. In the meantime, and to celebrate this dubious milestone, here's a nice song.

NJM

Wake Up, Time To Die(t): On Self-Neglect

2009-09-29T10:30:00.007+01:00

It's become a real effort just to blog recently. It's not like I haven't got a lot to talk about - I have new web projects for four different clients on the go recently, and that's outside of work. I'm also at my most creatively inspired in ages, with a new style of lyric-writing that's really working and producing results. At this rate I could have my first album fully written and demoed by the end of October (©2001 Famous Last Words, Inc.). I also recently took part in a Critical Mass event in Belfast, which I helped organise and did graphic design for (I even bit the bullet and set up a ShTwitter feed for them). It was great fun to be out on my bike again for the first time in over 4 months, and avoiding arrest was also nice. My enthusiasm lessened when I saw the subsequent photos of myself, with my sunken eyes and protruding beer gut.

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Despite being in the best mental shape of my adult life, I've been neglecting myself physically. My fitness is lacking, I'm tired a great deal of the time, and I've even developed skin irritation on my leg. Stress from work might be a factor, perhaps exacerbated by my sense of being devalued or taken advantage of by management. It's also a bitter irony that I no longer feel compelled to hide the cracks in my personality (real or imagined) by cultivating an external 'image'. Where in the past my frequent gym visits were the result of narcissism and paranoia, these influences are no longer as compelling. I guess the trick now is to become compelled by the desire to stay fit and healthy, rather than some misguided attempt to look a certain way (though looking good would be a great bonus). The bike is back on the road and the gym is just around the corner - I think a diet is now in order. I did it before, and I can do it again. Watch this space.

So there's just a few of the things I haven't been blogging about. And would you look at that - a blog post!

NJM

Misanthropic Thought Of The Day

2009-09-07T09:22:00.002+01:00

This probably isn't very cool to say, but I'll say it anyway: in my opinion, any parent who blogs, Facebooks, Tweets or otherwise comments on the web as their own baby - complete with lolcat-style babyspeak and made-up words - needs to be put against the wall and beat about the face with a bat.

Enjoy the rest of your day.

NJM

Childhood Memories Of Horror, Resurfacing

2009-09-03T12:42:00.004+01:00

Something popped into my head the other day that has been buried, dormant in my subconscious, for over two decades. I can't recall what brought it out from the murk, but it resurfaced from the depths of my childhood as clearly as when I first experienced it.

One day back in my fourth year of primary school, as a boy of only 7 years old, I and my classmates were each asked to pick a random book from the classroom library. Browsing through the expansive if battered collection of paperbacks, I discovered a scary-looking book called EAT THEM ALIVE. It turned out to be what I now recognize as pulp/exploitation horror, where naked indigenous women are devoured by giant insects at the behest of deviant criminals (I think). Gruesome descriptions of flopping amputated breasts, entrails, screaming villagers and twenty-foot insects all rattled around in my young brain. I knew even then that the book should not have been there. By that time, though, I couldn't dismiss the images.

What the hell was the book doing in a primary school classroom? Was it an oversight, negligence, or some sick prank? And what impact did it have on my then-innocent mind? The fact that I can recall it so clearly after all these years might speak volumes - uses-and-gratifications theory can hardly apply to a seven-year-old kid, can it?

As I often say: Freud would have a field day.

Status Report (August '09 Edition)

2009-08-31T12:14:00.005+01:00

I've been spread so thin of late that blogging hasn't got a look-in. Between an increased workload, spending time with Nina, salvaging friendships and maintaining creativity, I barely have time to exercise, let alone blog. With that in mind, expect this particular entry to be quick-fire and disjointed, like Uzi-toting custard.

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I think it's time for the hair to come off again. I had hoped to wait until Hallowe'en to shave it off, doing so as part of my ambitious Harvey Two-Face costume, but I can no longer stand its presence. It has to go. Sorry to anyone who liked it (hi Mum).
Getting my bike cleaned and fixed today, in an effort to battle the ever-growing bulge above my belt. I'm really starting to feel uncomfortable in my own skin, even if the outside appearance is more or less the same. Despite having reduced my alcohol intake considerably in the past year, I've also reduced my gym time. Not good. [EDIT: the roads outside work are flooded thanks to the rainfall. Might stay in tonight after all.]
Earlier this month I took a week off work to hole up in a small recording studio owned and run by Nina's genius brother (they're a family of geniuses, it would seem). With nothing but keyboards, mics, guitars and signal processors for company, I was free to get on the mic and lay down full-throated, aggressive vocals - something I simply can't do in my own house. It was very liberating. The results were varied, due largely to the many rewrites I felt necessary to perform during the recording process. However, I have a lot of raw material to work with, and hope to start producing finished tracks once I give my ears a good rest.
On a related note, I've been rehearsing with Happi in an effort to pick up where I left off last year and get playing in public again. My goal is to get Denise on board too, and perform some original material between the three of us. Time, as always, is the enemy, but I'm more confident and determined than ever.
The glut of zombie-themed content currently populating XBox Live (several shitty Indie Games, L4D2 trailers, and so on) has led to my shelving of McGrathi Apocalypse once again. The game design itself is quite solid - it would make a pretty good boardgame, actually. Sadly, I can't see it being developed for XNA given the general zombie bandwagonism currently in force. I'll focus my energies on 14 Days, which is a far more original and unique idea anyway.
I've made a resolution to improve my overall graphic design and production skills with a view to exploring several ideas that have been rattling around for ages: a customized tarot deck for Nina, some t-shirt designs, some large-size wall art for my room, and much more. In addition, I've taken my first tentative steps into non-linear video editing in the hope of finally producing that zombie/slasher/torture short film that McGrathy and I have been talking about for a decade or so.
I recently finished my first game of Fallout 3. To call it a 'playthrough' would be wrong, because I barely saw a third of the gameworld in the course of my story. It really felt like I had lived and died in the game as myself, thanks to the degree of freedom I felt throughout. Even better, it means that there's a whole other landscape out there that I'm dying to explore in my next attempt (perhaps as a deliberately cruel and evil character - I was eulogized in the closing cutscene as a pure, uncorrupted wanderer thanks to my actions and attitude in the game). A landmark title in my gaming 'career', not least because my fellow Ballymena escapee Liam Neeson played my father in it.
Speaking of landmark titles, one more thing: after getting a fantastic deal at Cash Converters, I'm going home tonight to finally play Metal Gear Solid 4 on my new(ish) PlayStation3. IT. IS. TIME.

It's depressing how similar my creative intentions sound to those I had about a year ago. The march of progress can indeed be a slow one. That's more than enough for now - keep on rockin'.

NJM

Funk Metal: A Galactica Dream

2009-08-25T15:34:00.004+01:00

Following a three-episode Battlestar Galactica session with Steve last night, I wound up dreaming that I was at some lavish evening gala comprised of Sixes, Threes, Eights and That Kevin Spacey-Looking Motherfucker™. One of the buffet tables had a selection of turntables, knobs and faders on it, and I was trading turns with an impassive, body-popping Dr. Baltar, hammering out all kinds of scratching, stuttering big beat (kinda like that Coke ad from the '90s). Every now and then I would look back over my shoulder and try and fire up the crowd, which was regarding our antics with a mixture of bemusement and indifference. Eventually an authority figure (not Adama) came over and whispered in my ear to stop making such a racket. The moment the music stopped, however, the assembled Cylons began voicing their dissatisfaction that the booming grooves had ended. Then I woke up.

Rumours that I built Nina in my dungeon laboratory refuse to disappear.

NJM

New(ish) Album From Gore Metal Overlords

2009-08-13T15:39:00.007+01:00

This is not exactly breaking news, but I've just learned with a mixture of excitement and revulsion that New York zombie gorefiends Cannibal Corpse released a new album back in February - the beautifully-titled Evisceration Plague. I got into the band back in 2005 at the apex of my extreme metal leanings, and took morbid fascination in their devastatingly dense sound, dodgy album covers (see image) and hilarious lyrical abominations. So inspired was I that I even wrote a death metal song in my nascent FBTR days about... well, it involved cows, and fists. Yeah.

Evisceration Plague seems to follow a 'Corpse tradition, in that it could just as easily be titled Unpleasant Ways To Die. Here's the tracklisting:

Priest Of Sodom
Scalding Hail
To Decompose
A Cauldron Of Hate
Beheading And Burning
Evidence In The Furnace
Carnivorous Swarm
Evisceration Plague
Shatter Their Bones
Carrion Sculpted Entity
Unnatural
Skewered From Ear To Eye
Skull Fragment Armor

Altogether now: Intestines slick with blood cannot escape my grip / Surgical incisions give way to frenzied carving / Delirium has taken hold, disembowelment is complete / Horror grips my mind, my entrails are in my hands.' Gorgeous!

I haven't had a full-on extreme metal fest in ages, and yet I've just blogged about black and death metal in the same day! I'll have to go home and listen to this tonight. It's great music for cleaning your room to, if you can consider that a recommendation.

NJM

My Life According To Cradle Of Filth

2009-08-13T11:12:00.005+01:00

Stolen from a Facebook meme. I did Nine Inch Nails over there, but this one is far cooler I think.:

Using only song names from ONE ARTIST, answer these questions. ~~Pass it on to 15 people and include me. You can't use the band I used.~~ Try not to repeat a song title. It's a lot harder than you think! Repost as "My life according to (band/artist name)"

Pick your artist: Cradle Of Filth
Are you a male or female: I Am The Thorn
Describe yourself: Painting Flowers White Never Suited My Palette
How do you feel: Ten Leagues Beneath Contempt
Describe where you currently live: At The Gates Of Midian
What's your Occupation: Sodomy And Lust
If you could go anywhere, where would you go: The Graveyard By Moonlight
Your favorite form of transportation: Death Magick For Adepts
Your best friend is: Lord Abortion
You and your best friends are: The Principle Of Evil Made Flesh
What's the weather like: Cthulhu Dawn
If your life was a tv show, what would it be called: Tonight In Flames
What is life to you: From The Cradle To Enslave
Your last/current relationship: A Gothic Romance
Your fear: Creatures That Kissed In Cold Mirrors
What is the best advice you have to give: Thank God For The Suffering
Thought for the Day: Under Pregnant Skies She Comes Alive Like Miss Leviathan
How I would like to die: Shat Out Of Hell
My soul's present condition: Lovesick For Mina
My motto: Better To Reign In Hell

Feel free to share your own!

NJM

New Soundcard Re-Ignites Love Of YouTube

2009-08-12T09:42:00.004+01:00

I've spent the past week holed up in a small recording studio about 12 miles north of the city, recording vocals and guitars for what I hope will be my next demo EP. As part of the preparations for this, I finally got a new soundcard and HD. I'll elaborate much further on the recording sessions in the coming days, but in the meantime I'd like to celebrate my ability to once again enjoy web video in all its sonic glory.

From my old Think Tank tales of angst, woe and egomania, I give you the following quote:

16/05/2006 - At one point I had come out [of the Metallitia mosh pit] after a particularly hard pummeling, and was hanging at the back taking in some fluids with Daz, who seemed unwilling to risk life and limb in the mass of flailing bodies. Suddenly the pummelling opening riff of 'Creeping Death' kicked in and I ran, elblowing and dodging stationery onlookers, from the back right to the front, and - as the drums blazed in ferociously - slammed right into the back of the slam pit, obliterating them like a well-aimed human bowling ball. For the next six or seven minutes, I stood legs akimbo, dealing out carnage, pushing, shoving, elbowing and throwing all around me, like a pinball machine bumper during a rather violent mulitball, before being sideswiped by a tattooed metalcore guy who had a huge grin on his face the whole time. When it was all over, I shook hands with everyone present, then limped away. I have bruises even today, and my hearing only came back fully three days after.

So, in the spirit of those scuttling, moshing days - may they yet resurface - and in celebration of my new soundcard, here's a video of some hardcore dancing. As you watch it, picture me floorpunching (1:18) in the office when no-one else is around; it happens.

NJM

Thoughts On A Blog Change

2009-07-24T10:04:00.003+01:00

The more eagle-eyed among you will notice my new XBox360 GamerCard down the right sidebar there. I figured I may as well add it, if only to serve as a subtle reminder of how big a distraction my 360 can be (I've left it at Nina's place for the past two weeks in an effort to actually get other things done).

Anyone with a Live account can recover their own GamerCard at http://gamercard.xbox.com/YourGamerTag.card (substituting the relevant GamerTag, of course). To get it on my blog I just embedded it in an iframe within a HTML/JavaScript widget.

The fact that Blogger doesn't support PHP scripting of any sort is a source of mounting frustration for me (though I won't dwell on it, because meta-blogging is masturbation). A PHP-enabled blogging platform would prove awesomely powerful in terms of personalization, customization and extension of the core blog experience. I think WordPress might be the one to go for, but it would require a dedicated web host and a considerable amount of hacking to get in shape. It's not as if I have a high-traffic blog (I average about 60 visits a week), so if I'm going to get my own domain again I may as well code up my own blogging solution and make it OpenID-compatible so the Bloggers and the LiveJournalists can comment on it.

Hmm. Another nice little project for a rainy weekend - after I finish Kaz's new site, get my album recorded, get my two XNA projects off the ground, get my expenses in order, etc, etc...

NJM

Down And Out In Simsville: Alice And Kev

2009-07-16T09:16:00.007+01:00

As a footnote to my previous post about games that aren't games, I advise gamers and non-gamers alike to check out Alice And Kev, a social experiment/webcomic utilizing The Sims 3.

Alice And Kev is the ongoing tale of two homeless Sims 3 characters created by the author, who instead of having a nice user-created house are reduced to sleeping on park benches or wherever else they can find. Alice is a good-hearted and caring young girl who is the constant victim of verbal abuse and embarrassment by her mentally-unstable father, Kev. The story follows the pair's efforts to survive in the face of near-starvation, mental and physical exhaustion, police harrassment, and apathy from the general public. Nearly every event in the story is unscripted, and emerges from the decisions made by the Sims AI, which proves to be a harsh (and occasionally surreal) mirror to our own society's problems and prejudices.

It's galvanizing to see a commercially popular game used to challenge people's perceptions of real-life social ills. As fascinating, funny and touching the comic itself is, the real insight is provided by the hundreds of comments each episode recieves from the public. These run the gamut from 'OMG their so cute!!!11' idiocy to admissions that the user's preconceptions of homeless life and people have been turned on their heads. Alice And Kev demonstrates that the sort of non-game I envision in my 14 Days experiment can be a powerful force for change in people's attitudes, and has bolstered my desire to develop my ideas further.

More to come!

NJM

14 Days: When Videogames Aren't Really Games

2009-07-15T16:54:00.009+01:00

In the more ponderous moments of last month, I found myself doing one of two things. I was either fantasizing about various videogame concepts whilst attempting to learn C#, or I was filling my head with dread-inducing nuclear disaster paraphernalia. I can't fully explain the latter. I guess, as a child of the 80s, I was never afraid of monsters under the bed, as I was far too busy being terrfied of child safety commercials and the doom-laden AIDS awareness campaigns. Factor in the burgeoning realization that my young life and that of my loved ones could disappear in a mushroom cloud, or slowly ebb away under deadly fallout, and it was a dark and uncertain time to be a five-year-old.

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My latent fear of The Bomb, re-ignited (pardon the pun) when the Metal Gear Solid series laid the nuclear agenda once more upon my impressionable teenage mind, now seems increasingly and worringly plausible in the context of the War On Turr® and the proliferation of armed religious fundamentalism, not to mention scientific grandstanding. A quick glance at my Wikipedia browsing history of late reflects these concerns: assured destruction, certain safety factor, criticality accident, decapitation strike, retreat, fail-deadly, salting the earth, and more - all rattling around in my head, leaving me awestruck at the dizzying heights of our scientific ascendancy and the correspondingly stomach-churning fall we could take if we're careless. In particular I found the concept of building one's own fallout shelter both comforting and devastating in its cosy hopelessness; the very nadir of Government smoke-and-mirrors, crystallized in the (never used) Protect And Survive informational videos. The existance of media such as this scares me more than any crackpot dictatorship, as it brings The Bogeyman of my childhood right into the house, into the family, even into our own bodies - then expects us to prepare for it like we'd prepare for a spell of bad weather.

It might seem rather strange, then, that I'm designing an experimental videogame around these very concerns. The 'game' is called 14 Days, and in its current iteration is kind of like a Sims-lite. Players start the game with a randomly-generated building (an apartment block, a house, an office, etc), in which resides a random group of people - perhaps a family, or an elderly couple, a bachelor, or maybe a company team. The player, in an omnipotent role, 'guides' these people, asking them to carry out actions as the game progresses. The people must fortify their building in preparation for a nuclear strike targeting the city. In this pre-strike period they can visit local shops to buy and sell items, while barricading windows and doors, making the premises as safe as possible and stockpiling food and supplies. They must also try to shield themselves as much as possible by building a makeshift fallout shelter somewhere in the building.

The pre-strike period is followed by the nuclear blast itself. The building will have been placed a semi-random distance from the impact point, and will suffer damage accordingly. Barricades may be destroyed, fires may start, and even collapsing walls or explosions are a possibility depending on the layout of the house and measures taken in the pre-strike period. Any stragglers not sufficiently protected from the blast are most likely going to be killed outright. The survivors are given precious little time to deal with casualties, effect makeshift repairs and get adequately protected before the fallout arrives. Herein begins the main challenge of the game - to keep as many people as possible alive for 14 days, at which point they will be rescued and evacuated from the city. Depending on the effects of the blast and the preparations taken, this task may range from comfortable to impossible. Risks to survival/success may include fatal radiation poisoning, death from physical injury, starvation, infection, disease, and even suicide. Supplies and equipment must be used wisely, with thought given to rest, nourishment, sanitation, morale and peer relationships. People in a fragile mental state may become unresponsive to commands, and could jeapordize their safety and that of the entire group. The game ends when all survivors are dead, or when 14 days passes and at least one survivor remains alive.

Let me state the obvious: this is not 'playing a game' the way you'd play Um Jammer Lammy or Doom. Sure, you can win and you can lose, but the point is that even if you 'win', and you can bring even one of your poor survivors out alive, there's no big celebration (c.f. Frankie's 'Two Tribes'). I guess the closest example remains The Sims, but deliberately devoid of the absurdist humour and character advancement provided by that game. Yeah, it's The Sims: Slowly Dying Edition. No, it's not fun; despite it being a quote-unquote 'video game', it's not intended to make you dance a jig - quite the opposite. Playing 14 Days should be a harrowing, thought-provoking experience. This isn't about making some cool people-management entertainment broadly centered around nuclear warfare. Nor is it cheap post-9/11 scaremongering intended to draw in an audience with morbid fascination or gallows humour. The mood is intended to be one of hopelessness, and desperation; the message is the experience itself.

This has been a very depressing post indeed. Imagine the reviews 14 Days would get if it ever made it to XBox LIVE! Then again, death is a fairly depressing thing. And if playing 14 Days could give someone pause to reflect on what they love and what they could lose, even just for a moment, it will have been my most meaningful project to date. Here's to it taking shape.

NJM

Regaining The Focus, Post-Project

2009-07-15T13:27:00.015+01:00

Now that the clusterfuck surrounding my latest project has subsided, I'm able to focus once again on music. I've written a couple of new tunes that I started working up last night. They're quite different from what I normally write - much more melodic, spacious and ambient, the antithesis of the dense and crushing sound I normally hack together.

It might seem obvious that a person's state of mind would inform the direction of their creative endeavours, but it's only now I'm realizing the true extent of this in the wake of my newfound happiness in life. For me, it's as if a whole other musical language, long forgotten, has suddenly been re-implanted into my subconscious. The distorted doomscapes I love to work in now have some sky above them. Far from diluting or softening what I'm trying to achieve, this contrast only serves to increase the power of the whole, even in the most suffocating moments. I've been concerned about losing my self-imagined 'edge' - that serrated, chaotic undercurrent that I try to capture in an effort to convey a dark intensity. Fortunately, I can still get there, still get down in it - but with the considerable benefit of not being a navel-gazing, narcissistic screwup at the same time. (I hope. Otherwise I'm going to look really, really stupid.)

I guess the point of all this is that we should never belittle the work we produce, regardless of the personal and emotional circumstances that birthed it. What we felt, thought, imagined, hoped and feared, even if they didn't impact the actual work in a concrete fashion, still provide a backdrop that we can not help but recall upon revisitng the work itself. Sure, our expertise and experience can grow in a way which makes our earlier efforts seem almost embarrassing, but we should never forget the emotional threads woven through what we produce, or that revisiting those old feelings through consumption of our own work is an intrinsic part of the personal and creative process. Recognize it, embrace it, and learn from it. We depend on art, music, fiction and film to transport us somewhere else - sometimes, just over your own shoulder is the most worthwhile destination of all.

NJM

Timesink Of The Month: Fallout 3

2009-07-14T10:10:00.006+01:00

I've never been much of an RPG player, due in part to the paucity of storylines I can relate to ('oh great, another emo-haired sword-waving whiner trying to save the land from the big-titted evil sorceress!') as well as the sheer annoyance of certain core mechanics (two words: random encounter). The last one I really got into was Final Fantasy VIII, and even then I still never finished it. And hell, even Linda finished FFVII. On the other hand, I've long been a fan of any game that can combine the best bits of RPGs - in-depth character creation, branching storylines, and a wide variety of supported play styles - with a more immediate and compelling setting and pace. Hence why I found Deus Ex and System Shock II such vital gaming experiences, and why I'm now completely and utterly hooked on Fallout 3 for the XBox360.

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I've never played a Fallout game before, but I understand they're traditional dystopian RPG games par excellence. The latest installment transports the player to first-person view and drops them in a '50s-styled post-nuclear wasteland in which a multitude of survivor settlements exist, from the smallest shacks right up to floating cities and even the ruins of Washington DC. The player negotiates the world almost exclusively on foot, with a handy quick-travel option to places already visited, but with the exception of a brilliantly-designed opening act (in which the player creates their character and learns a bit about the game mechanics) there are very few proscribed destinations from the get-go. The freedom and breadth of possible exploration is incredible. Combat, when it occurs, is a mixture of real-time positioning and thoughtful target selection, with something called VATS allowing the player to assign attacks in frozen time, while requring positioning and evasion in real-time. It's a great system, meaning you don't have to be a hardcore Counter-Strike afficionado to enjoy exploding enemy heads, and lends a great sense of tension as you watch yourself unloading in third-person slo-mo on an approaching giant scorpion, mutant bandit or killer droid.

And it will be yourself you watch doing all this, thanks to the fantastic character creation options, which as mentioned are built into the opening act. Spanning from the moment of your birth and jumping in steps to your 16th birthday, the player's gender, strengths, appearance, skills and moral compass are decided before they are unleashed on the world at large. The facial appearance of your avatar can be modified in a way which recalls the best of the WWE SmackDown! games, deepening the immersion considerably. RPG veterans are well-catered for on the statistics side, with core attributes like Strength, Charisma and Agility complemented by a vast range of upgradeable skills (everything from Bartering to Science to Lockpicking and Explosives), and later augmented with experience-earned Perks such as Gun Nut, Quick Learner, Lady Killer/Black Widow and even Nerd Rage. The benefits of all these stats go way beyond simple numerics, providing new options in conversation with non-player characters and enabling a wealth of new approaches to quests depending on the circumstances.

The overall experience is so in-depth that, barring the initial setup, it's questionable if I'm really 'role-playing' at all. Indeed, Fallout 3's mechanics are so flexible that I am literally playing through the game as myself; the player looks like me (albeit with my old buzz cut), has average strength and speed offset by a streak of good luck, has a range of skills that favour computers and regular tech, and has Perks including Quick Learner and Child At Heart. Moreover, I really am playing as myself - the gameworld is so diverse, so accommodating of multiple play styles that I've yet to encounter a problem that can't be solved exactly the way I would want to do it in real life, or a conversation which lacks an option for what I would want to say. It's incredible. I find myself wondering what it would be like to play the game through as someone else, with their face, strengths and weaknesses, imagining what they themselves would do in a situation. If there's ever a game that would stand up to my long-postulated 'one-life' mechanic, this could well be it.

But I won't be restarting the game any time soon, despite recently dying for the first time (shot by a gung-ho security droid when I wandered into the local armory), and despite my current wandering of the wilderness looking for new areas to explore. Though there's enough playing even in my progress so far for a dozen restarts, I'm having way too much fun out here in the radiation-poisoned wastes to start over now. Besides, I think I see a new town - or what's left of one - just over that next ridge.

NJM

Webcomics (or, Late To Another Table)

2009-06-19T17:09:00.004+01:00

Despite my much-touted geek prowess, I've always lagged behind when it comes to comics and graphic novels. I've read some of the popular ones - Sin City, Judge Dredd, Watchmen, The Dark Knight Returns, that sort of thing - and enjoyed them immensely. Yet I've never had any real urge to seek them out, either in print or online; I've studied the form and the techniques without ever becoming a fully paid-up Comic Book Fan (no doubt in part due to my fear of dipping my toe in such stereotypically 'nerdy' waters).

Which explains why I'm so late in discovering and loving two webcomics I stumbled on during today's lunch break. First up is Garfield Minus Garfield, which is exactly what it states - Garfield strips with the eponymous feline edited out. What remains is 'a journey deep into the mind of an isolated young everyman as he fights a losing battle against loneliness and depression in a quiet American suburb', and it's as sad as it is hilarious.

From there it was only one lucky click to Alien Loves Predator, in which two individuals from the legendary warring races have made their peace and are now trying to eke out a living in present-day New York City. I can't help but be reminded of myself in several of the strips, though which species I am is open to debate (I feel Alien might have it: 'Yeah, midget porn... the trick is to watch it on a really big TV, then it's just like regular porn!'). It's fantastic even if you're not a sci-fi freak. Plus they end up rooming with Jesus Christ himself, so it has to be worth a look.

Check 'em out!

NJM

Bat For Lashes - 'Pearl's Dream'

2009-06-19T09:55:00.003+01:00

At the risk of further damaging my metal credentials, I'll admit to being on a little bit of a pop trip lately thanks to Bat For Lashes (aka Natasha Khan) and her fantastic album, Two Suns. As seems to be the norm these days, it's rooted in Depeche Mode-worshipping '80s electro: all drum machines, lush pads and pulsating 8-bit basslines. That said, Bat stands for me head and shoulders above the likes of (the otherwise pretty cool) La Roux due to the ethereal, dramatic spin she imprints on her work, which is ambience-heavy and breathy as well as driven; think Fleetwood Mac meets Portishead produced by the 'Mode and fronted by a clone of Kate Bush and Bjork. It's fantastic stuff.

Here's the second single from the album, 'Pearl's Dream', with a video showcasing the drama and imagination I find so refreshing so refreshing in these cynical, identikit pop times. Enjoy it!

NJM

Murder In Top Gear - A Dream

2009-06-18T21:33:00.011+01:00

A dream I had early this morning, recorded here for posterity:

I arrived a the house of my singer, Jo, for some kind of gathering. Jo and Jill were in the kitchen along with Nina, Johnny, Adrian and Bingo, who were hunched in front of two large widescreen TVs playing a first-person shooter on an indeterminate console. The game featured a lot of water and wilderness, much like Far Cry 2. Nina claimed that she wasn't very good at the game and asked for help. I accepted the pad from her and wrestled with the controls in an effort to improve her score against whomever she was playing.

At this point some kind of transition occurred, and Nina and I were either inside the game itself, or suddenly partaking in a live-action variant thereof. Under a violet night sky, we were perched on the roof of a partially-submerged vehicle in the middle of a gently flowing river, the moonlight glistening on the ripples. There was no sound save for the lapping of the water and the chirp of crickets. Nina was grasping a huge sniper rifle and was staring intently up at the outline of the hills at the riverbank. I followed her gaze towards the hilltop where I saw a figure moving, silhouetted against the sky, as if some kind of light source was beyond the hills. In that instant I knew that the figure was - wait for it - Jeremy Clarkson, that he was carrying some kind of explosive weapon, and that he was going to blow us up with it. I quietly asked Nina to get in the water, before I slipped into the river myself and made my way quickly towards the thicket at the water's edge.

I was inexplicably holding a pair of wire cutters, and fully intended to dispatch Clarkson with them if I could sneak up on him undetected. Emerging silently from the water and crawling through the blackness of the hillside grass, I got within ten feet of my victim before several gunshots tore through the air; Nina had evidently got a bead on him. Pinned down and unable discharge one of his rockets/grenades in Nina's direction, and spotting me poised to strike, Clarkson backed off down the other side of the hill - a fairly steep cliff which he pretty much jumped off. I peered over the edge expecting to see him dead, but instead saw him running up a road that would bring him back to the top of the hill in short order. I drew my own rifle, watched Clarkson through the scope and, just as he was trying to fend off the grasping advances of two unidentified humanoids, I put three shots in his chest and shoulders. He crumpled dead like a ragdoll, as the rifle report echoed around the river valley. I sort of half-saw some kind of HUD in my eyes, like a success indicator or score tally, before Clarkson himself reappeared and walked towards me, asking me to teach him how to play like me.

Gunning down Clarkson with help from a hot chick? Sounds like fun.

NJM

Thoughts On A Job Change

2009-06-18T13:04:00.005+01:00

I've been in my current position as a web developer/designer for over a year and a half now. My original remit as a simple editor expanded rapidly to cover all manner of programming, design and research roles. By and large I've loved my job immensely, even after the novelty of being an Abbey escapee had faded. In being allowed to work frequently in an R&D-orientated fashion, I've been able to learn something new literally every day. My skills and knowledge have increased exponentially in response to an ever-morphing array of business problems and challenges. However, the past couple of months have been a test of my patience and focus, and have led me to wonder what might be next for me.

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I obviously can't go into specifics, but the overall feeling is one of mounting frustration. I bend over backwards to deliver projects and meet deadlines, only to have the deadlines ignored or changed at the eleventh hour by the very people who set them in the first place. I'm involved against my will in processes and schemes that rob valuable time from my actual projects while having nothing whatsoever to do with my role. A lot of this happens, ironically, because the business is doing so well. The team is stretched to full capacity, compounded by the continual addition of new ideas and initiatives which, while beneficial and even innovative long-term, divert even more resources away from the core business. In a further irony, my frequent attempts to actually do my job by alleviating the strain on the business, usually via simple automation of manual processes, have been either met with incomprehension or dismissed out-of-hand in favour of paper-based systems manned by two or more people. Time is always against us, of course, but the time potentially spent in implementing a solution that is manageable is lost tenfold in the paper-chasing that ensues downstream in the existing system - a 'soultion' akin to sticking a Band-Aid on a shotgun wound. That we can simultaneously be so forward and backward is a source of ever-increasing stress for me, and even after the teething troubles of new business ideas are taken into account I have a hard time visualizing an improvement in the situation, based on previous experience.

All of which leaves me wondering exactly what my future is, or can be, with the company. One other major factor is my salary, which I recently found out lags behind several of the sales floor staff - despite the job ads calling for a PHP developer with 1 years' commercial experience boasting a starting salary nearly 180% of my current earnings. When I first took the job I was just starting to get my life in shape after a protracted black period, and I was so happy to get the position that I never gave any thought to how it would look after me financially. Even after that, I was a single rent payer with no dependents - I could get by fine on the pay, and had no concept of a future worth investing in. Now, things are different. Not only do I value myself and my work much more highly, but in my relationship with Nina I have something to plan a future for. I need to start now, with the hope of one day having a house of my own and some sense of financial security for the first time in my life. And even though it's theoretically possible on my current salary, I would find it hard to look myself in the mirror knowing how badly I'd sold myself short, as a matter of professional pride, if I tried to do so.

The times, as Dylan first noted, are a-changin'.

NJM

Apocalypse Soon: Getting To Grips With XNA

2009-06-17T16:40:00.005+01:00

In my increasingly rare recent moments of downtime I've been playing about with Microsoft's XNA, a development framework most notable for its ability to support XBox360 programming. Used in conjunction with XBox LIVE's Community Games service, it allows bedroom coders to publish and sell their creations directly through the XBox LIVE Dashboard - an unprecedented opportunity in the console world (the closest, the PlayStation's Net Yaroze, required expensive specialist hardware). Needless to say, I'm leaking geek juice just thinking about it.

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The current experience of browsing the LIVE Community Games store is one of finding diamonds in the rough. As with most social network-based content, there's a vast amount of plain crap. Look closer, though, and there are some standouts - games that have clearly been made by people with a real love of their work, that look great, play great and would fit right in as a full-fledged commercial release on LIVE Arcade. It's the latter type of game I hope to eventually bring to the 360, and it involves - shock! - zombies.

McGrathi Apocalypse is a game idea that's been violently banging around in my head ever since the eponymous Steve and I saw 28 Weeks Later. I had several working versions of the game prototyped, all of different genres and gameplay: a gore-filled arcade FPS, then a darker, more concentrated survival horror affair, before jumping to NDS with a Robotron-style eight-way shooter and most recently a stat-heavy roguelike in .NET with old-school ASCII graphics. Even though none of these prototypes got anywhere beyond tech demos, with each iteration the idea and gameplay has been refined and improved. The current state of the game design is something approaching a tactical RPG: a party of survivors, each with their own strengths, weaknesses and unique skills, have to escape through swamp, urban, cave and forest environments to reach an extraction point, in the face of sustained, deadly attacks from infected humans and animals. Whether or not an essentially turn-based combat system is right for the LIVE Marketplace is a whole other blog post, but since I haven't seen anything of the sort there so far, I figure I might as well fill the gap myself and see how it goes.

More on this when I have something new. It's easy to be cynical, given how many iterations I've already gone through, but the thought of the end result - seeing the game art appearing on the Dashboard, or watching Steve, Neil, Happi, Nina, Robyn and Kaz struggle against ever-more desperate odds in the bloodstained streets of Wherever - is the most potent driving force I've felt about the project to date. It has to happen!

NJM

Peering Out Of The Geek Closet

2009-05-27T11:11:00.005+01:00

As part of my seemingly never-ending birthday celebrations this month, I took time over the weekend to hang out with Linda, McGrathy and Dan The Man® up in our old university haunt of Coleraine. Nina joined us as a way of being introduced to Dan and Linda, who both seemed to approve of her (Linda later told me I have to 'keep her, she's awesome'), and as predicted the weekend played out like some kind of retro geek nirvana: pro wrestling, zombies, cinematic elitism, alcohol and junk food.

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Nina seemed to take a considerable degree of pleasure in seeing me interact with my old friends in such an enthusiastically geeky way. Indeed, her presence gave the experience a fresh twist even though we amused ourselves in the same way we did almost a decade ago - Undertaker vs. HBK at Wrestlemania XXV followed by the first two Resi Evil films back-to-back, with alcohol and Chinese food included. The whole experience was like travelling back in time, compounded by the familiar surroundings and the fact that Dan in particular doesn't appear to have changed one iota in appearance or personality since those university days.

Linda and Dan don't really have egos, which is hugely refreshing, and which allowed me to give free reign to my normally fairly well-controlled geek impulses. I had been concerned that Nina would have recoiled in horror at the mutated geek she had fallen in love with, but she was her usual graceful, easygoing, loveable self throughout, and claimed to have really enjoyed her weekend even though I'd Skippy Slammed™ her onto the mattress on Sunday morning. I'm very lucky to have her.

So we had Dan and I calling play-by-play on the awesome Wrestlemania match, yelling and laughing all the while. We had in-depth discussions on how the halon extinguisher system in a corporate environment could be used to exterminate an entire workforce á la Resident Evil, and used Abbey as a (perhaps deserving) example. We had talk of music, videogames and films spoken with the true passion and committment that only geeks (of any kind) could provide. For a geek in both work and play like myself, it was the perfect way to spend a weekend. I had a fantastic time and would love to make it a regular occurrance, though I'm going to have to invest in some more zombie films before then.

I'm back in work today and staring at all that hardcore PHP I'd left behind. After the fantastic rest I've had, it almost feels inconsequential, but more importantly I feel revived and more than equal to the task ahead. Proof of a great time off indeed.

NJM

Recharging The Batteries At Twenty-Eight

2009-05-19T14:49:00.005+01:00

My 28th birthday saw me hunched in front of my work computer for the eighth day running debugging several thousand lines of object-orientated PHP in an effort to meet an impossible deadline. As the sole member of a development team responsible for bringing a brand new online hire service to Belfast's tourist sector and beyond, I had been charged with completing a two-month project in eight days. I didn't succeed, of course, but no-one could question my workrate or determination, as evidenced by my hunched posture, black-ringed eyes and inability to form a properly structured sentence. With two days of my holiday already stolen by the project, a proper rest was definitely in order.

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(As an aside, this willingness to heroically fail has been a defining feature of all the projects I've worked on, as is the total under-selling of my work to clients. I found an invoice in my mailbox the other day, quoting for a fully-featured corporate website and content management system, on which I'd asked for literally one-sixth of the figure I should have. It's one thing bemoaning one's employer's perceived lack of appreciation for your skills, but quite another to lack any belief in them yourself. Fortunately I've learned my lesson in this regard - now I just need to know my limits and admit to them.)

My wonderful girlfriend Nina provided the perfect antidote to this code hell by whisking me out of the city for a weekend at the Slieve Donard Hotel at the foot of the Mourne mountains. Fresh air, hiking in the forest, great food and drink, a luxury gym, pool and spa and breathtaking scenery - the antihesis of the airless, windowless office nightmare I'd been in previously. It was a very active form of relaxation - we hiked about eight miles, and I put in a decent session in the weights room - but today at the end of it all I feel relaxed and purged of all stress. Just in time, in fact, to go back in to work tomorrow and try and pick up where I left off even though I still have just under two weeks of my 'holiday' still to go. Maybe I haven't learned any lessons after all.

I was very well treated over my birthday overall. I've been taking singing lessons for the past few months, and my folks picked up the tab for my first block of sessions - a fantastic gift. McGrathy gave me a copy of the terrifying Dead Space, which I've been looking to get my hands on for ages, along with a card addressed to 'Ballbag' - thanks a lot, my dude. Plus I've had all other kinds of little gifts, vouchers, cash and other goodies, plus CAKE (which I like). On top of all that, I'll be having an Alcohol-Fuleled Geek-Fest™ up in my old uni stomping grounds this weekend, including an appearance by Dan The 'Fucking' Man™! Twenty-eight isn't one of the 'big' birthdays in the same way milestones like 18 and 21 are, but I've still come out of the other side feeling like it's just as important as the one before - thanks so much to everyone, especially my incredible girlfriend, for making it special.

NJM

Xtival 09 Gives Hesitant Gamers A Good Excuse To Party

2009-05-03T16:55:00.011+01:00

I've never been much of an online gamer. I prefer the solitary joys of a good plot-driven action-adventure to the Internet-enabled mass murder innovated by Doom and its ilk, and my multiplayer moments have always been with friends via splitscreen or system linkup. However, this weekend I had my first prolonged taste of worldwide online multiplayer thanks to the orgy of free networked gaming that is the Xbox360 Xtival 09 event.

My hitherto ambivalent attitude to online play has meant that my XBox Live account has always been a Silver one. The Xtival event temporarily upgrades all Live accounts to Gold status, meaning I can jump headfirst into online multiplayer for any XBox360 title I own. As I'm temporarily embroiled in GTA4, I chose it as my first online experience - a simple deathmatch where I and fifteen other lunatics run around Liberty City shooting, stabbing and running over each other in stolen cars. After twenty minutes I finished in second place, which wasn't bad for my first go, but the real triumph of the experience was that my first victim happened to be one of the Rockstar employees who developed the game in the first place - a feat which turned out to be an actual GTA4 Achievement. Talk about beginner's luck.

While the experience was stylish, sadistic fun - pulling a 180 in a stolen car and shooting the driver of the pursuing vehicle in the head, for example! - it paled in intensity next to the twitch-gaming bloodbath that was my first online session of Left 4 Dead. My first taste of the game last week alongside some computer-controlled teammates was a nerve-shredding blast, but my time online - playing a 'Versus' game in which two teams take it in turns to be the Survivors, with the opposing squad taking control of several 'boss Infected' - was devastatingly intense. As one of the four Survivors, teamwork comes to the fore, with players instinctively covering angles, clearing rooms, sharing out medikits and defending incapacitated teammates against the almost incessant torrent of Infected. The presence of the opposing team, in the form of boss Infected, cakes on the fear and apprehension. One finds oneself checking every corner, glancing nervously at holes in the ceiling or at seemingly innocuous piles of rubble, braced for a Hunter to pounce or for a Smoker to drag a lagging teammate screaming towards their fate.

As the roles are reversed, the play dynamics shift dramatically. Instead of desperately protecting oneself, it is necessary to make suicide-like surgical strikes in the hope of wearing down the Survivors enough to prevent them from reaching their goal. With infinite lives and a ticking time limit, sneaky tactics and careful choice of attack spots are essential. Watching the hapless humans battle against the horde as you wait for the perfect moment to leap from the shadows is a gripping subversion of the 'lurking' tactics so reviled in traditional multiplayer shooters. I personally did very well as an Infected, scoring top of the game board for several of the rounds and frequently cackling aloud as I pounced on the rear guard while the rest of his so-called team blundered on into the darkness without him. I felt like the Predator - it really appealed to the evil monster deep inside of me (we all have one, trust me).

I only had a few hours online, but Xtival has been successful in opening my mind to the world of online multiplayer. It'll never replace the sheer joy of massacring your closest friends, but as a way of elevating the tension and testing your skills against the most advanced AI of all time - other, usually better, players - it's an incredibly enjoyable experience. The event ends tomorrow, after which it looks like my upgrade to a Gold Live acount is inevitable.

NJM

Shock News: Abbey 'Not A Good Bank'

2009-05-02T10:20:00.003+01:00

Anyone who has money in a bank - or at least, has an account into which money might, one day, go - should read McGrathy's latest post about the ever-declining public perception of Abbey.

As an ex-employee of the company in both customer- and staff-facing roles, none of the vitriolic tirades Steve links to are of the slightest surprise to me; Abbey's perpetual slide towards some kind of government inquiry appears more likely with each passing quarter (though that might just be wishful thinking on my part). Even so, it's important to remind ourselves of the depths to which financial institutions will sink unchecked, especially in an economic climate that will no doubt be used as some as a smokescreen for mismanagement and levels of service that they wouldn't dare attempt to justify in more stable times. Thanks to Steve for posting it.

NJM

Wikipedia: Remembering The 'Old Web'

2009-04-10T17:38:00.006+01:00

Despite ongoing concerns about its accuracy, Wikipedia continues to remain one of the Web's most ubiquitous content providers, and is also a bigger timesink than ever. Here's some choice articles I've read, according to my browser history:

A Scare at Bedtime - Biker's bell - Carancas impact event - Dermis - Ebola - Fleeing Felon rule - Gloria Ramirez - Hundredth Monkey Effect - Igraine - Jean Charles de Menezes - Kerry Washington - List of programs and machines in the Matrix series - Monopoly on violence - Network-centric warfare - Operation Thunderbolt - Principle of Evil Marksmanship - Quincey Morris - Robert Dziekanski Taser incident - Subsistence theory of wages - Twinking - Visible universe - Why The Future Doesn't Need Us

I always take great pleasure in seeing how curiosity can lead, via richly-linked articles, to the damndest places - getting from Podge And Rodge to neo-Luddite critique in the space of the alphabet is unprecedented. In these days of Ajax-heavy Rich Internet Applications, Wikipedia - despite its distinctly Web 2.0-esque focus on user collaboration - is actually one of the purest remaining expressions of the 'old Web': a stateless hive of text-based information interconnected by hyperlinks. We can 'tweet', Facebook and otherwise 'share' our lives into obsolescence, but it's nice to remember that the Web is, at its heart, still a fountain of actual knowledge if you look carefully enough.

NJM

Resi 5 Bosses A Cut (Rip, And Tear) Above

2009-04-08T14:22:00.009+01:00

I completed Resident Evil 5 a couple of days ago, and enjoyed it immensely. Though suffering from a few niggles - some slightly underwhelming environments (understandable given its impoverished Third World milieu), a reasonbly low difficulty level even on the highest initial setting, plot twists you can spot a mile away, and a general lack of genuine scares - it's a blood-soaked action extravaganza from start to finish.

Of particular note are the boss battles. More grotesque, oversized and vicious than ever before, the key enemies are a real triumph of art direction and game design - they actually had me verbally exclaiming 'oh, fuck me' at their mere appearance on occasion. Yet the battle that sticks out the most for me is actually the lowest-key in terms of scale, and involves a human opponent instead of a multi-limbed viral monstrosity. The fight against Krauser in Resi 4 is one of my all-time favourite videogame battles, but this one turns the concept on its head by pitting you against an opponent you aren't permitted to injure or kill. You can attack and wound them, but are implored not to do so, and the death of the boss actually results in a Game Over. Forced to ingore all of the firearms expertise they've acquired in the course of the game to this point, the player is left with no choice but to block and evade the boss's relentless attacks while waiting for an opening to subdue them, all the while entreating them to snap out of their biohazard-induced rage.

I can't describe it without giving away spoilers, but in my button-mashing efforts to restrain my attacker - accompanied by a dramatic, mournful orchestral track - I found a genuine emotional resonance. It would no doubt be totally lost on anyone not well-schooled in Resident Evil lore, and in terms of game mechanics there's little difference between a 'Restrain' button prompt and a 'Run' or 'Dodge' one, but it really got me thinking about a different approach to pivotal battles in videogames. (As is often the way, Metal Gear Solid deployed such an idea over ten years ago with the fight against a Psycho Mantis-controlled Meryl.) Rather than confronting the player with an adversary that is simply harder to dispose of than usual, the game fiction itself could be leveraged to present a battle that the player struggles with not through a power or numbers imbalance, but through a desire not to hurt the very thing that's trying to hurt them. (Dog lovers could no doubt imagine a boss fight against a virally-controlled family pet, provided there's a hope of a cure.)

A sign of a worthy videogame for me has always been that it makes you think about the medium and suggests a way to elevate it in the future. Resi 5 achieved this, and was a hugely entertaining spectacle to boot, making it a highly recommended entry in the series. Let's hope, however, for a return to a more vulnerable and terrifying atmosphere for the inevitable Resi 6. Sheva deserves a game of her own for sure.

NJM

Blog Necromancy At Sociable Geek

2009-04-08T12:10:00.003+01:00

Just when I feared I'd be talking development frameworks and zombies to myself for all eternity, along comes McGrathy with not one but two posts to his recently-neglected blog. Well done to him for getting back into it, and for continuing the zombie theme too. We really need to get that movie made.

Our little blogosphere has been eerily quiet of late. It happens. I guess the reason I've stayed active even when no-one is reading is because I've only ever really used blogging as a form of publicly-available journal keeping. I think it's also an ego thing - when the world and his wife seems to think they need a social networking account to be a real person, it's nice to have a little pocket of the Web all to myself that I can actually control and manipulate as I see fit. Speaking of which, I really must get that new blog skin finished.

NJM

Personnel Change At Chez Nous

2009-04-02T09:03:00.005+01:00

I'd like to say great big thanks to Karen for being such a great housemate over the past two years. She's been lured away from our place by her friend Adrian with the promise of lower rent and more space, an offer impossible to refuse in these economically- and creatively-impoverished times. So I want to wish her good luck in her new residence, and I hope that it proves inspiring and comfortable for her. See you soon, kiddo - you'll be missed.

Thanks also to McGrathy and young Rebecca for continuing to tolerate my presence (or lack of it). Keep on rockin'.

NJM

Google 'AI' Mocks Widespread Web Malpractice

2009-04-01T09:25:00.004+01:00

Google have become so ubiquitous over the past decade that it's easy to forget that they are, at their heart, an extremely large team of talented geeks. So it's reassuring to find them in full-on geek humour mode on this April 1st. A link on the Google home page introducing CADIE, a 'singular upgrade to your online life', reveals that the search king has been working on an advanced artificial intelligence that, having trawled the Internet and deduced the most common design and content conventions, has made its own personal blog page.

The result is a light-hearted lampooning of social networking norms as well as a clever indictment of non-professional web design. From the animated Under Construction banner to the Comic Sans MS font abuse to the hideous tiled background, dead links, and web ring buttons, it's a spot-on pastiche of Geocities/Tripod 'site builder' design circa 1995 - bad habits which continue to plague the advancement of the Web to this day (I was certainly guilty of such abuses ten years ago). Even more effective is the piss-take of typical social networking banality. Here's the super-advanced adaptive AI's first blog post:

OMG here i am. im cadie im a AI "brain" lol. a/s/l? im a girl, 2 minutes old, just hanging out in da C.A. learnin a lot tryin 2 get smarter make friends save humanity etc etc i like cmputrs (duh) sunsets rainbows ponies and after 1 netwide image search PANDAS PANDAS PANDAS ther SO CUTE!!! omg!

gotta go dr. N is coming hes so CUTE :)

Genius. The 'Terminator argument' and talk of grey goo is all very well, but a supercomputer that thinks it's a prepubescent Bebo user is infinitely more terrifying in my book. Still, she's just learning, so who knows what craziness will ensue before the day is out.

NJM

From The Web To Widgets: My First Desktop App

2009-03-31T12:09:00.005+01:00

In my ten years of Dicking About On The Internet^(TM) I've learned dozens of different technologies and scripting languages, yet such a Web-centric approach has left me completely useless in the realm of the desktop. Last week I rectified this inequity with my first ever desktop app - a bulk mailer for my workplace, to replace their woefully inadequate in-house solution.

For a first effort, it's pretty comprehensive. It supports two mail modes, alternative plain-text content for people with images disabled, address encryption, duplicate detection and removal, system tray progress notifications, error logging, and even data fields in the mail body for customer name, address, and so on. It requries the .NET Framework, which is a real annoyance from an open-source and cross-platform standpoint, but quite frankly VB.NET seemed to be the quickest language to learn for this sort of thing - I put this entire thing together in three days. When I get more experience I hope to port it to a platform-independent language like C++ with the Qt widget toolkit or similar.

I won't be releasing it to the public in its current state (it's based on structures unique to my place of work). I just wanted to blog it as another little milestone on my road to becoming a true ninja geek (though I fear I'm in danger of earning a pejorative 'nerd' tag). Maybe one day I, like the big software companies, can create my very own poorly-designed, badly-bugged EPOS system/office suite/whatever and charge unwitting customers exorbitant annual fees for the privilige of trying to use it. Hey, that's business!

NJM

Beauty Company Suspected Of Manufacturing Bio-Organic Weapons

2009-03-31T09:18:00.004+01:00

With the Holy Grail of prolonged youth still a mere transhumanist fantasy from a biological standpoint, Avon seems to be taking matters into their own hands - selling the T-Virus from Resident Evil to unsuspecting customers.

Get ready for a youthful-looking zombie uprising! Thanks to my very good friend Happi for the heads-up.

NJM

April 2009: My Zombie Videogame Month

2009-03-24T11:06:00.006Z

Fresh from blasting my way through Far Cry 2's African wilderness and Halo 3's epic alien battlefields, I'm primed and ready for a crash of hungry zombies* to hit my XBox360 next month.

First up is the highly-anticipated (and somewhat controversial) Resident Evil 5, the direct sequel to one of the greatest action games ever made. Having played the demo, I can state that it's more of a refinement of Resi 4's winning formula than a drastic evolution, but what I'm really looking forward to is the two-player co-op mode - with McGrathy and I's 360s hooked up to our home network, we can join forces to kick seven shades of gore out of the ravening hordes and hopefully keep each other alive in the process. It'll be tremendous fun.

Next in line for the killing spree is Left 4 Dead, an apocalyptic experience from the developers of the incomparable Half-Life series. It's another co-op survival scenario against impossible odds, with the added opportunity to play as a 'boss Infected' with heightened powers to take out the pathetic human survivors. Enough said. I'm particularly looking forward to this one - from what I've seen of the gameplay on YouTube and XBox Live, it's going to be a hell of a fight.

On a related note, my hitherto totally-stalled McGrathi Apocalypse project is currently in a new phase of development as an add-on for a larger GZDoom project being created by a multinational team (myself included). The main game, which is top-secret at the moment, will hopefully be released in the third quarter of this year.

NJM

*Yes, I know that neither Resi 5's nor L4D's antagonists are technically 'zombies'. Still, if the cap fits...

Google Maps Street View Goes Live, Promotes Fantasies Of Armageddon

2009-03-19T12:05:00.002Z

Look at them, like bugs on my browser window, just begging to be squashed... Whatever precision space-based killer weapon the major global powers develop next, you can bet it will be powered by the new Street View of Google Maps. All that's lacking is a targetting cursor and a 'Vapourize' button.

View Larger Map

I've also seen my place of work, and my own house, complete with McGrathy's car in the driveway. There's a whole debate to be had about the privacy and ethical concerns of this sort of thing, but in the meantime it's undeniable fun. Die, Shabbey, Die!

NJM

Mortal Coil: Bodies...The Exhibition, Ambassador Theatre, Dublin

2009-03-05T14:11:00.011Z

Over the weekend Nina and I escaped to Dublin for a much-needed break, and to celebrate her birthday in style. With it being our first 'proper' trip away, we spared very little expense: first-class train tickets there and back, a jacuzzi in the hotel room, superb Italian and Thai food, Temple Bar, the Book of Kells, cake (GOOD!), flayed and dissected human corpses in a variety of poses, wine... you know, everything needed for a romantic weekend away.

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BODIES...The Exhibition is a museum gallery featuring real human cadavers, preserved in various states of autopsy or dissection. At time of writing, it is showing at the Ambassador Theatre in Dublin's O'Connell Street, and it was here that Nina and I saw the exhibit for ourselves. On my way in, I suggested that we would be seeing corpses riding horses and playing poker as seen in the 2006 Bond film Casino Royale; as it turned out, I was confusing the exhibition with Body Worlds. That said, it was obvious that this was not your regular museum tour, and with little real idea of what to expect, I felt a strange mixture of fascination and revulsion as I stepped into the main hall.

The exhibit takes the viewer on a pseudo-scientific trip through the human body, starting with the skeletal system and adding muscular, neural and cardiovascular systems on top as the tour progresses. The various functions of the body are illustrated with real human anatomy - anything from a leg with the tendons splayed out to a full corpse holding hands with its own skeleton. In the later stages of the exhibition one can view a thinly-sliced corpse laid out like a three-dimensional MRI diagram, various cancerous organs, and even a section showing various foetal development stages.

I felt extremely conflicted as I wandered the exhibit, and I think this blog post will ultimately reflect this. Death was literally around every corner, and yet I felt compelled to continue - partly because I was utterly fascinated, and partly because I'd spent good money to get in. It made me wonder about myself as a person, and about society in general, when for EUR £20 I can line up to see a bunch of dead bodies like I was a punter at a freakshow. It's easy to argue that the exhibit makes only the most cursory of nods to both science and morality. Save for labelling each part and offering GCSE-level descriptions of their function, science has been used here merely as a tool to get the bodies to the state they're currently in. A lack of detailed info about the preservation process is a major oversight, and calls the value of the exhibit as an educational tool into question.

Such a general lack of transparency, while ostensibly in place to treat the donors 'with the dignity and respect they so richly deserve', muddies the ethical waters to vast degrees. There is no background given on where exactly these dead people came from, or on the circumstances surrounding their inclusion in the exhibit. I later learned, unsurprisingly, that there's a huge bioethical controversy surrounding this kind of display, including the suggestion that some bodies were used without consent. Such claims leave a very nasty taste in my mouth, as did the merchandise stall at the end of the tour, offering BODIES... T-shirts and keyrings to the punters, many of whom were young children (though the way in which these kids may process the exhibit is a subject beyond the scope of a single blog post, I fear). And while a glass bin for depositing cigarette packs in, next to a dissected cancerous lung, goes some way towards using these cadavers to say something relevant and meaningful, the 'disclaimer' at the entrance to the foetal section is in some ways little more than 'haunted house'-style grandstanding.

And yet despite the many ethical issues, there's something much more enriching, and curiously life-affirming, to be gleaned from it all than mere spectacle or the satisfaction of morbid curiosity. Even at the most basic level, the exhibit achieves what it purportedly sets out to do - celebrate the marvellous machine that is the human body - and one can not fail to be fascinated and moved by such an unprecedented close-up of how we're all put together. The real triumph of this, though, is that it throws into such sharp relief the thing that is, ironically, absent from the exhibition: humanity. Maybe it's due to the lack of 'personal' features such as skin or hair on the bodies, or maybe it's due to the shop mannequin-like plastic sheen of the preservation process, but I could find nothing recognizably 'real' or human in the meat, bones and glass-eyed stares of the exhibits. This kind of detachment merely allows one to get through the exhibit without major revulsion or psychological trauma; it doesn't preclude finding wonder and meaning in what the exhibits stand for. And it's in this regard that I found myself affected most deeply.

Posed grandly conducting an orchestra, making a last-minute football save or simply sitting in quiet contemplation, these figures become a celebration of all that is good and wondrous in humankind, the celestial way in which they are lit suggesting a sense of loss and remembrance that left me overwhelmingly grateful for the lives of the people whom I love and care about, and with a desire (augmented by the simple act of staring one's own mortality in the face) to not squander my time with them. Returning the bereft, cold glass stare of a sitting cadaver, and being able to juxtapose it against the warmth of my companion's hand in mine, was a profound moment the likes of which I haven't felt in recent memory. There's a wider debate to be had about the very nature of these shows, and there's an understandable moral outcry at the concept without any real discussion of the treatment and presentation of the exhibits themselves, but in the 30 minutes or so I was in there I discovered and enjoyed a renewed sense of my own humanity. For that reason alone I was able to walk out of BODIES... not depressed or disgusted (barring the aforementioned ethical concerns), but happy, thankful and with a renewed determination to spend the years to come more wisely than those that have gone before. Which is a pretty good deal for 20 euro, I reckon.

NJM

Social Networking And Youth: You've Gotta Have A Brain To Damage It

2009-02-24T15:28:00.006Z

Today's hot topic is the claim by a 'top neuroscientist' that social networking harms children's brains, resulting in a generation of inattentive, ignorant, self-obssessed drones. And this is only becoming newsworthy now?

Whilst I think that the culture of the non-celebrity has played a much, much larger role, I will admit to finding some truth in the notion that society as a whole is disappearing up its own ass. If we accept some culpability on the part of social networking (and, by extension, the modern Web in general), then we surely arrive at some kind of postmodern chicken-and-egg scenario: is the rampant egomania and lowest-common-denominator mob rule so prevalent on Facebook, Bebo et al a case of cause-and-effect, or is it one of supply-and-demand?

Here's an extreme hypothetical example. The current trend of 'microblogging' embodied by Twitter and its competitors, coupled with advances in mobile browser tech, has made it perfectly feasible for someone to 'share' (read: broadcast) the fact that they're taking a shit, right while they're doing it. Hell, they could even take a nice picture to go with it. Of course, the same technology also allows a journalist in Darfur to get reports of humanitarian atrocities out of the country for the world to see, but hey, that's democracy (the best and worst thing about the Web) for you - bestowing the right to free speech upon everyone, even those people who have absolutely nothing of any merit to say. Hell, without such conceits, I couldn't post this blog for no-one to read.

But back to the guy broadcasting his shit (literally) to the world: what motivates him? Would he still want to do it, and find a way to do it, if he didn't have so many ever more ubiquitous ways of doing so? Would the developed world be so head-and-shoulders up its own colon if the colon-tunnelling tools weren't so readily and widely in use? (This is like the gun control debate, but with 'the right to bear arms' replaced by 'the right to blow my own e-penis at any time or place of my choosing'.) I personally think the real question is this: who the hell is listening?

In these days of the non-celebrity - those lacking in any and all talent who are first built up, then chewed and spat out by the tabloid/Big Brother machine - instant gratification is the name of the game, and what better way to gratify oneself then to know, regardless of what utterly meaningless, trivial and self-centred trash you vomit into the cesspool of society, that there are not only others who are doing exactly the same, but that these same non-entities will take some kind of fleeting interest in what you're saying? How can they not do so? The entire social networking paradigm is dependent on people actually giving a shit about frequently meaningless content - if no-one was listening, no-one would say anyting, and the entire system collapses like a house of cards (it's this very conceit that somewhat eases my own inner conflict on the issue; I know there's practically nobody reading, but I keep going anyway for my own amusement). How else can you explain the regular mass migration of users between different social networks, all of which offer identical features in a slightly different package? In fact, the very term 'social networking' is a huge misnomer, because the only thing one has any real investement in is one's own profile (and this obviously doesn't apply to band/artist profiles - which are supposed to be egocentric - or events/gatherings/charity groups).

Given all this, maybe the blame for this supposed increase in youth vacuousness can be laid rather squarely between the (non-)celebrity culture and the social networking infrastructure through which it propagates. Going further: perhaps this infrastructure has become indelibly part of the (non-)celebrity culture. Through the social networking model, we can all be famous in our own heads - our 'friends' list becomes our fanbase, our profile pics are our promo headshots, and our status updates are our tabloid soundbites, to be cascaded down through our 'fanbase' via live feeds and e-mail updates. (I always loved how the term 'feed' implies a vampyric, parasitic urge in those that make use of them.) Why face up to the cold reality of societal and economic decline, not to mention your own rapidly-fading dreams, when you can take some small, artificial modicum of warmth from the few hundred 'friends' subscribing to your Facebook account?

The 'top neuroscientist' who made the claims I opened with obviously doesn't turn on the TV or radio much. Social networking is not the cause of social masturbation, it's just another way of expressing it. That doesn't make it any less despair-inducing, but as with videogames, movies and music before it, we should never submit to the idea of scapegoating a particular area of art or technology at the expense of a wider social problem. As a final note, blogging is also classed as 'social networking' by many analysts. I guess that means I have an e-penis too, though I'm not sure how big I'll allow it to get - and even if it does get big, I'll continue to labour under the assumption that no-one in their right mind would ever give a shit.

NJM

A Very Brief Rant On The Brit Awards

2009-02-20T12:16:00.004Z

I got a bit carried away with my comments over at Tina The Princess vis-a-vis the Brit Awards, specifically the Best Live Act category, the nominees for which included Iron Maiden. The Verve, Elbow and Scouting For Girls, among others. Since my comment was essentially a mini-blog, I thought I'd repost it here for posterity.

My disgust at the Scouting For Girls nomination isn't due to their being a particularly poor live act per se - it's due to their being one of the worst bands in recent memory. They actually replicate their songs perfectly well in a live setting; it just so happens that said songs are plodding, repetitive, derivative, saccharine and utterly devoid of wit, wisdom or depth. Any hooks they do possess are swiftly bludgeoned into oblivion through incessant repetition of choruses ('She's So Lovely' being a standout example) and the kind of plodding piano accompaniment that makes them sound like a Chas & Dave tribute act on barbiturates.

As you've suggested Tina, their nomination is an indictment of British popular music in general. That the actual Best Live Act award was ultimately (and deservedly) won by a band [Iron Maiden] that formed in 1975 - playing a style of music that has completely fallen out of mainstream favour - speaks damning volumes about the ever-swelling ranks of identikit bands polluting radio and television. I often wonder if the people who buy these kinds of records actually like music at all.

Elvis is very much dead.

NJM

Mick Foley Reviews 'The Wrestler'

2009-02-18T13:07:00.002Z

I've just uncovered a great review of Oscar-contender du jour The Wrestler written by one Mick Foley, one of my favourite authors and wrestlers.

I managed to catch The Wrestler during its theatrical run here in Belfast, and found it a powerful, contemplative and brutal spectacle (if a little by-the-numbers on plot). I feel that Mickey Rourke, Marissa Tomei and everyone involved thoroughly deserve the plaudits they have received for their work. One of the first things that struck me was the parallel between the film's portrayal of the eponymous Randy 'The Ram' Robinson (Rourke) and the real-life hardships of the wrestlers in Barry Blaustein's unsung 1999 documentary Beyond The Mat. I went back to that film last week, inspired by my viewing of The Wrestler, and was particularly moved by the way in which both films highlight the tension between a grappler's life on the road and their dedication to their family.

A scene in Beyond The Mat featuring Foley -who, as Mankind, was one of the WWE's biggest stars - was particularly relevant to The Wrestler. A bloodied and battered Foley, just a day after the now-legendary brutality of the 'Hell In A Cell' match at King Of The Ring 1998, expresses his overwhelming desire to relieve the anxiety and worry his wife and young children suffer through as a result of his nightly bludgeonings, but has to concede that - despite a grocery list of injuries that includes over 300 stitches, torn abdominal muscles, multiple concussions and fractures, broken teeth, C-4 explosive burns and half an ear missing - he just can't accept doing anything else in life. It's a theme that forms the backbone of The Wrestler: 'The Ram' can't face life outside of the ring even as his ailing health threatens to end much more than his career, asserting that 'the only place I get hurt is out there [in the real world]'. I recently learned that director Darren Aronofsky gave the screenwriters on The Wrestler a copy of Beyond The Mat as reference material.

With all that in mind, I was very pleased to discover Foley's own take on the film he played a small part in birthing. Not only is his revew highly perceptive and delivered with the legitimacy and insight of a quote-unquote 'real' former world champion, but it also demonstrates that Foley has lost none of the witty, anecdotal writing style that made Have A Nice Day!, Foley Is Good and Hardcore Diaries such fantastic reading. And although Foley closes with the assertion that he doesn't see any of his own influence in the movie, I hope he would take some comfort in the fact that he was (and still is) an inspiration to countless fans worldwide - myself included - both in the ring and in writing.

NJM

Back To Formula

2009-02-17T13:18:00.003Z

As you can no doubt see, I've reduced the blog skin to base elements in preparation for the new one, which I hope to have rolled out tonight. You'll notice a couple of functional additions which I had planned all along, but which now look like mere bandwagonism after I was beaten to the punch by brand new blogs from Kaz and Nina. Still, you know my widgets will be tarted up considerably. :)

Watch this space for some changes in the next day or so (echo, echo, echo).

NJM

Blanket Coverage

2009-02-05T09:22:00.003Z

Happy Birthday to McGrathy, who levelled up again today. I hope he doesn't mind me publicizing it - you know how these old-timers can be cagey about their age. And, since the much-touted winter weather has finally hit Belfast with a vengeance, Merry Christmas to the rest of you.

The snow is actually very inspiring, as I've been working on a new aesthetic that incorporates precipitation of some sort. It'll be the visual complement to the music I'm working on, and could well develop into the 'label' for all of those releases, consigning FBTR and the Sexual Ninja Order to the murky, narcissistic and blood-soaked annals of history (though, as I used to regularly assert, they can't be fucking killed).

NJM

Checkpoint

2009-02-03T13:53:00.003Z

Last month I set out some early goals for myself in 2009. So far I've managed to get my bike repaired and back on the road (just in time for the much-publicised cold spell) and am using the old PC that McGrathy gave me as a Linux-based hard disk recorder in my temporary studio setup. On the gigs front, I've hooked up with Denise The Sleaze again for practice in the hope of getting a public performance together in February.

I'm also making great progress in the way of songwriting and releasing an EP - Nina and I are collaborating on a couple of tracks, with she providing the lyrics and themes and I creating the music to match (she's a highly skilled writer). It's pretty dark stuff, with several new twists on some of my old tunes, and I'm very inspired indeed. All in all, I'm not doing too badly goal-wise.

I still need to finish my new blog skin, and the looooong month of January has temporarily scuppered my savings plans. My half-finished project list is still huge and encompasses everything from custom PDA applications to digital matte painting. Here's hoping I can continue to whittle the list down in February and the months ahead.

NJM

Falling Down

2009-02-02T16:23:00.002Z

Let me share with you my mood on this bitterly cold Monday morning in work. I give you: Office Chairs!

NJM

Africa Shox

2009-02-02T12:47:00.005Z

Last night, I had been following the riverbank for several kilometers in the setting African sun when I heard the ominous whirr of a motor boat. I sprinted towards a clump of thicket, baseball-sliding into cover a second before a patrol boat came skimming down the river. I knew if I had any hope of reaching my objective, at least another 10km away, I would need some transport. Drawing my sniper rifle and placing my eye to the scope, I put a bullet through the chest of the driver, who slumped out of the boat and into the murky depths of the river.

As the boat drifted to a stop, I leapt into the river and swam out towards it. I was barely halfway there when several bullets tore through the water around me - a guard post just upriver had heard my rifle shot, and several of the guards were now barrelling down the river bank towards me in an armed jeep. Hoisting myself out of the water onto the boat, I pivoted the boat's mounted gun and opened fire on the jeep, killing the crew in a red mist and bringing the jeep to a smoking halt.

I jumped on the boat's controls and brought it to shore as the remaining guards in the guard post continued firing. I took cover behind the smoking jeep and procured an AK-47 from one of the bodies there. Reloading it, I advanced from behind the jeep and towards the guard post, killing one guard who broke cover and sending his comrade scuttling behind a wall. Suddenly the gun jammed, leaving me defenceless. I took a few scratches from the remaining guard as I ducked behind a fence, still trying to clear the jam in the beaten-up AK. 'Come and get it, you arsehole', yelled the guard in a strong Afrikaans accent. In desperation I tossed a grenade over the fence towards the guard post - the resultant explosion killed the guard, destroyed the guard post and ignited a fuel dump which burned a sizeable portion of the surrounding grassland and foliage black, driven by the light evening wind.

By the time the fire had died, I had already returned to the boat and, having quickly patched my wounds up, set off upriver again towards my objective, leaving the remains of the guard post smoking in the sunset.

Far Cry 2 on XBox360 is full of little mini-epics like this, and they aren't even scripted - merely the emergent result of a huge open gameworld (50sq km, to be exact), decent enemy AI, and some neat little tricks like weapon degradation and fire physics. I've been playing for three days now and haven't even started the game properly yet, but when simply wandering the land can lead to this kind of spontaneous, intense exchange, it's worth taking the time to explore. It's refreshing to play a game that makes you feel part of something free-flowing and dynamic, rather than being led by the hand through a series of predetermined scenarios with no room for experimentation and improvisation. Highly recommended.

NJM

Baby You Can Turn Me On

2009-01-30T10:31:00.004Z

This weekend I'm heading up to Ballymena to visit my folks, partly because I haven't seen them since Christmas, and partly because they have no less than three computers in the house that I need to 'fix' (though I think it's a case of PEBKAC). Before I head up there I plan to hook up with Happi for a long-overdue catch-up and a few (heh) beers, and also with Robyn for a coffee and a yak.

As I type, the engineers in the workshop next door to where I'm sitting are putting the finishing touches to my newly-serviced Core 40. The head mechanic quipped that my chain looked 'like it had been sitting in a puddle of piss for a month'. Such is the lot of an ignorant newbie - you'd think I'd have picked up through osmosis some idea of how to properly clean the thing, but no. I haven't been on the bike in two months and I can't wait to get riding again. If the weather is good on Saturday afternoon I hope to cycle up to Ballymena, but it's probably going to rain, and I don't think I can face 30 miles in the cold and wet again. I've been feeling really lethargic and unfit of late, so I really can't wait to get out and about.

I got a great deal on a preowned XBox 360 the night before last, so now all McGrathy and I need is some Ethernet switches and two copies of Left 4 Dead to bring all our co-op zombie-mashing fantasies to grizly life. This may spell the end of the McGrathi Apocalypse project, but since I haven't worked on it since November I guess that's probably a good thing. I like brains.

NJM

Mom Said Keep It Clean

2009-01-23T14:13:00.004Z

For every wide-eyed idealist rushing headlong into 2009 in a fluff-covered ball of optimism, there's at least two despondent cynics frantically trying to salvage something meaningful from the wreckage of their lives through a fog of shattered dreams and post-Christmas body dysmorphia. Either way it's surely a time to take stock and speak one's mind. Yet with the exception of the obligatory annual posts from Katie, Robyn and Kaz, all is quiet in on the blog front right now - not even the inauguration of a new US president could disturb the silence. So in the spirit of sticking my head above the trenches and yelling 'Oi!', here's some random thoughts on this bitter January day in Belfast.

The only people possibly watching Celebrity Big Brother now are the tabloid journalists desperately searching for more race- and sex-related scandal to put on the front page, so all that boring stuff about economic meltdown and dead teenagers in Iraqistan can be relegated to one of the pages that comes after the picture of Lucy Pinder's tits. Mutual parasitism is alive and well in the UK media, kids.
As of today the UK is officially in recession. So those idiots at Zaavi, Woolworths and the rest clearly got what they deserved for jumping the gun and going bust before the recession 'started', right?
Speaking of the recession - now is surely the ideal time to promote the use of quality open-source software alternatives in UK government institutions, businesses and schools. Not having to pay exorbitant license fees to the likes of Microsoft, Apple, Adobe et al can only help to reduce costs and prevent potential layoffs and closures. The youth of today, the 'digital natives' as I've heard them called, are subconsciously learning how to use tools - PhotoShop, Office, OS X - when they need to learn (and should be taught) the core skills and concepts instead - graphic production, word processing, operating systems and so on. Once a student fully learns the concept of a spreadsheet, it doesn't matter what application they use to make one - and it makes much more sense to learn these concepts via the free and fully-distributable likes of OpenOffice rather than suffer the (at least) financial penalities of proprietary software like Excel in the misguided belief that its widespread usage makes it some kind of 'standard' in itself. It's like focusing on teaching a chef how to use Lloyd Grossman sauce, instead of explaining how a lasagne is put together. A change in attitude is required and the tightening purse strings should make the benefits obvious.
Is it just me, or has sex-voiced Welsh singer Jem been reworking the same song for three years?
Watched David Lynch's Mullholland Drive the other day. I enjoyed it immensely, and that has nothing to do with the unexpected and intense lesbian love scenes featuring the highly edible Naomi Watts. It was just an audio-visual feast. Too bad I have absolutely no fucking idea what the hell actually happened in the movie, or why - I got the same feeling I get every time I try to watch Akira.
I still haven't played Guns Of The Patriots. Since an XBox 360 is stupidly cheap at the minute, I may as well console myself (ahaha!) by getting one and playing Left 4 Dead with McGrathy. I am the zombies.
I haven't had some nice cake in a long time. This isn't a sexual metaphor - I just want some cake.

Here's to payday so I can have a beer and a big creamy gateaux of some kind! I'll leave with a parting shot from The Best Page In The Universe: 'if minds had anuses, 'blogging' would be what your mind would do when it had to take a dump'. Amen to that.

NJM

Fret And Buzz

2009-01-08T09:50:00.003Z

Before Christmas I had a practice session with Jo which was committed - live, unproduced and in mono - to tape. I sifted through the tapes afterwards and found a couple of tracks worthy of another listen. Following a brief cleanup, here's our very first attempt at playing 'Dream A Little Dream Of Me' - I wince at my guitar playing, but in my defence it was almost zero degrees in the garage, and I'd also never even listened to the song properly until half an hour before this track was played. Jo's vocals are very nice though, so enjoy it if you can.

NJM

High Gain

2009-01-05T13:30:00.006Z

I've been unable to shift a heavy cold since just before Christmas, and it managed to keep me confined to my bedroom over the entire weekend. (Note to the homies: I'm not dead.) With nothing but machines for company - save for the occasional phone call from the wondrous Nina - I amused myself by playing some old videogames, watching a few DVDs and plugging various noisy things into other noisy things with shiny wires and plugs.

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With my main PC soundcard all but shot, I've had to fall back on the old machine that McGrathy procured for me some time ago, which is currently running dyne:bolic as an OS. The machine doesn't have a lot of RAM, so I don't have a lot of room for wild effects and multi-layered synth patches - the machine will just choke on them. It records raw audio very well though, and creating drum loops and so on is a breeze thanks to the plethora of incredible open-source applications available through the dyne:bolic OS.

Having to work with this stripped-down setup has really made me re-think my approach to how I make music. I've realized I'm far too production- and editing-focused. Nearly all of my sounds are achieved via hard, hard processing of a basic sound using racks of virtual effects banks. This isn't a Bad Thing in of itself - the finished sounds are very good, and the flexibility to change things is invaluable - but it has made me extremely complacent when it comes to recording best practices. I've lost count of the times when I've let a poorly-recorded guitar or vocal stay in the mix in the hope that I'll be able to clean it up with a load of software-based screwdriver work. Worse, I'll often give no heed whatsoever to how an instrument sounds in the real world before jacking it blindly into my recording unit and committing it to a track.

I've realised it's time to become much less of a producer and much more of an engineer. Obviously the two disciplines overlap considerably, but where production is concerned with how something sounds at the end of the music-making process, a good engineer needs to focus equally on how it sounds at the start. Things as simple as learning how to dial in a quality guitar tone, reducing interference, setting the levels properly, maximizing signal-to-noise ratio and reducing mic bleed and sibilance are all things I need to focus on in much more detail. This will be a little homework project for the next month or two. The time has come to start achieving great sounds before even touching a recording device, rather than hoping to salvage a bad track via the 'miracle' of digital editing.

For the record, my test recording was a distorted acoustic funk riff played over a live-retriggered ProtienDS breakbeat. I'll have my DS on-stage at some point in 2009 if I have to put a gun to the organizer's head!

NJM

A Kick Up The Ass

2009-01-01T16:59:00.004Z

It's only 5pm and I've already got my first surprise of 2009 - the erstwhile Painted Ass, aka my very good friend Robyn, has finally made a return to Blogger!

Good luck with the blogging efforts in 2009 and beyond, Bobs!

NJM

Level Complete

2008-12-31T11:50:00.006Z

I don't do New Year's Resolutions, in acceptance of the fact that I'm a grade-A procrastinator towards 90% of my delusional concepts and ideas. That said, I would like to make a very small To-Do List for the coming year, much of which I hope to get out of the way in the first couple of months.

Get my new studio set up. I've been gearing up, no pun intended, to get a new digital audio workstation together for a little while now. I don't need it to continue making music, but I'm at a bit of a creative impasse at the minute, and there's nothing like some shiny new toys to move things forward - plus it'll be much, much easier to work with. And since my soundcard finally gave up the ghost on me two nights ago, I'm even more determined to sort this ASAP.
Skin the blog. This one doesn't do it for me anymore, and never really got finished. I've got some ideas but until they develop I might just strip this whole thing back - I'm talking a CSS-only skin, no graphics except for a logo and a few icons. It'd look pretty 8-bit, or like Rez, which might be awesome.
Play more gigs. I'd like to do one night a month at first, then maybe one night a week, incorporating some paid gigs if anyone will have us. This also means I'll have to get some more tunes written and finished.
Release an EP. Online, for free download, maybe accepting PayPal donations or orders for 'special edition' versions - a similar model to that used by acts ranging from Unbalanced Grass to Nine Inch Nails. I have enough material for a whole album, but four or five tracks is much more manageable and thus less likely to slip.
Get back on my bike. I've only been off the road a month and I already feel mightily unhealthy, though the holiday season obviously takes its toll. I also haven't been in the gym in almost two months, but that's easily fixed.
Start a savings account. I want a proper holiday this year - it doesn't have to be on the other side of the world, but it has to be worth going away for in the first place. Plus, I still have to solve the 'Snake problem'.

That's more than enough for the start of the year. I could actually have them all struck off come February if I put my mind to it. That would be awesome. I love goal-based motivational lists, it's like having 'mission objectives' in Syphon Filter, which appeals to the game geek in me. Now to start completing them!

Happy New Year, dear readers!

NJM

2008: The Year In Blog Posts

2008-12-24T11:30:00.003Z

Nostalgia, though it's not what it used to be, continues to sell well at this time of year. It is in this spirit (and one of shameless self-aggrandizement) that I proudly present The N Code 2008 Retrospective - some of my memorable blog posts of the last 12 months.

Merry Christmas to all my (half-a-dozen) readers and contributors, and Happy New Year. 2008 has treated me very well - let's hope 2009 can do the same for all of you.

NJM

Neil Down And Pray

2008-12-11T15:15:00.004Z

McGrathy was Dicking About On The Internet(TM) today and typed 'god' into Facebook Search for fun. This was what he saw.

To steal a quote from last night's Xmas movie, Home Alone 2: 'get down on your knees and tell me ya love me'.

NJM

Loop Da Loop

2008-12-10T10:09:00.003Z

I was going to post up about how I've got a couple of new songs written and that I plan to record and release them in some form before Christmas. However, the truth is that I'm so tied up in both work and play that I barely have time to clean my bedroom, let alone arrange, record, mix and master new tunes. Such is the harsh reality of the silly season - though at least I got to watch the brilliant Home Alone with Steve the other night, and Scrooged time is surely approaching (though it's always Scrooged time in my book).

It is imperative that I get down at least one of the songs I have, as it's going to be an Xmas present for someone very special, but even that is proving quite a challenge. Expressing my positive side (it exists!) in a non-clichéd way is a dozen times more difficult than venting the usual angst and paranoia, in my sad experience. I've earmarked some time in the next few days to set up a Facebook group under the FBTR umbrella (yeah, I know Facebook sucks balls, but I might as well make it work for me). It would be very nice, and would make sense, to have something worthy of posting up. I hope to have a practice with Jo tonight and will do my best to commit it to my knackered old four-track, so I can post a few 'live' demos up in the classic 'bootleg' (read: shoddy) style. More to come, as always, later.

NJM

Like A Dog Chasing Cars

2008-12-05T09:17:00.003Z

Continuing the theme from my previous Bat-Post, I realise that I haven't put up any pics of my Hallowe'en excursion as The Joker. Most of my blog-reading associates will have seen them already, either through the Book of Face or from actually being present, but hell - I'll fire one up here for posterity's sake. So here's me flanked by Darth Maul (Gordon) and a skinny Kaz as Mummy 2.0.

Other freaks present at Stevie Bingo's bash included the man himself as the Dark Knight, plus we also had a Batgirl, Banana-Man, Slash, a witch, The Dude (The Big Lebowski), The Bride (Kill Bill), a geisha, a frightened ghost in heels (!), a robot, plus my girlfriend as the hottest flamenco vampire to ever stalk the streets. Awesome fun. I'd like to revisit the Joker next year and work with latex instead of wax. Either that, or I go for Harvey Two-Face... ooh.

NJM

Well Hello Beautiful

2008-11-28T10:42:00.004Z

With Christopher Nolan's record-breaking The Dark Knight about to pass the $1 billion mark at the international box office, I'm reminded that I was going to post my own review of it some time ago. I'm not going to go off on one of my usual rants because, quite frankly, everything that could possibly be said about the film has been said already in the press, by people infinitely more eloquent and distinguished than I.

So my review of The Dark Knight is this: I loved and relished every moment of it. It's by no means a perfect movie in design or execution; it could have been leaner, more concise, perhaps less concerned with the minutiae of every character's arc through the story, but this would have reduced it to half a film in both running length and depth of emotion. Heath Ledger deserves every one of the plaudits heaped upon his ghoulish, bogeyman-like turn, but for me the key performance is from Aaron Eckhart, whose virtuous but easily-manipulated DA Harvey Dent provides an emotional backbone to the film (particularly in his scenes with the equally-excellent duo of Christian Bale and Gary Oldman) that the looming spectre of The Joker could never have provided. The action is kinetic, brutal and refreshingly realistic, but it's what happens between the explosions and fistfights that elevates the movie, assisted by first-rate cinematography, direction and scoring. And any film that can boast Maggie Gyllenhaal, Michael Caine and Morgan Freeman in supporting roles has to be more than your average popcorn fare. In sum, The Dark Knight is as intense, sprawling, troubling, spine-chilling, thought-provoking and, yes, dark a film as you could ever hope to find in any genre of cinema.

NJM

Echoplex

2008-11-20T15:52:00.004Z

The Monday before last saw my trusty singer Jo join me on-stage for another round of open mic shenanigans at The John Hewitt in Belfast's Cathedral Quarter. I've played there four times before and am becoming quite comfortable on stage, but on this night I was completely psyched out because my girlfriend was coming to see me play for the first time - plus I had the added intangible of a digital sampler pedal to use, which had failed me the last time I tried to use it during a performance with Denise. After much poking about with the mixing desk we managed to get it going, so Jo and I were first on to play.

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We were only supposed to play three songs, but got to play five - the crowd loved us, and we didn't even have Rent-A-Crowd to support us (though my housemates and some of Jo's friends were dotted around the bar). It was a reasonably young crowd so they reacted very well to our choice of material, which comprised 'Black Horse And The Cherry Tree' by KT Tunstall, 'Sway' by Bic Runga, 'I Want You Back' by The Jackson Five, 'Good Luck' by Basement Jaxx and Maria McKee's 'Show Me Heaven'. We'd never been asked for an encore before - it felt fantastic, and several important people were extremely impressed. Job done, haha!

The organizer of the open mic nights expressed his admiration for our playing, but noted that he'd love to hear some original compositions next time. Now I'm in the curious position of having a whole heap of songs that could be worked into playable material, yet being unable to get into a suitably dark mood to finish them (my head's been in a good place the past few months). I guess I'll just have to do some new material from scratch, written with Jo and Denise in mind. It'll be tricky, but I'd give almost anything to get a reaction like we got that night again.

More to come as and when it's ready, which could well be after Christmas at this rate.

NJM

Dungeon Crawler

2008-11-20T11:26:00.005Z

The blogging frenzy continues!

I've been dabbling in Nintendo DS coding recently, and though I'm still very much at the beginner stage it hasn't stopped me from coming up with some pretty wild (though technically very feasible) ideas. The hitherto-stalled McGrathi Apocalypse has now been reimagined as a top-down DS killfest with field-of-view mechanics and randomized play areas, kinda like Robotron (or Smash TV, or Geometry Wars for the kids) meets Rogue meets an overhead Final Fight. I've been picking apart the source code of various roguelikes and have a head full of great ideas. We'll see how they pan out; I don't have much free time these days and I have much better ways to spend it then sitting in front of a computer (heresy!).

I have also had a minor NDS-related breakthrough in my ancient and long-dead attempts to code a game based on classic kids' TV show Knightmare. It involves wi-fi co-op between two NDS consoles; one player is the Dungeoneer and controls the player avatar without being able to see where they're going, and the other player(s) view his progress on the second console and issue verbal commands to their comrade. It's the first time I've come close to capturing the play mechanics of the TV show in a meaningful way, and I'm disturbingly inspired by it all. I've got some graphics and interface mock-ups of this which I'll stick on here later.

Try not to pee your collective pants with excitement til then!

NJM

Netrunner

2008-11-20T10:39:00.003Z

It was around this time last year that I was hired by my current employer, escaped from Call Centre Hell and found myself in the role of Professional Geek. I really can't believe how quickly the year has flown in.

The most surprising thing of all is that I still really enjoy my job. Reality has bitten in certain ways (resentment and bitchiness between certain cabals of staff, for example, though I'm not personally involved in any way) but I still go to work and come home each day with a sense of achievement and purpose. To read feedback about how impressed people are with the sites I've made, or to see a piece of artwork I've done printed in a magazine or hanging on the side of a building, is still a fantastic feeling.

I've never really shaken the sense that I'm in over my head, and this is only going to get worse as we take on a (potential) new software platform and I have to try and get to grips with JSP from scratch. But I'm a quick learner, and I always try to ensure that every day is a school day. I'm sure I'll be fine. And with the potential for full creative control over my work in both aesthetics and functionality now an actual possibility, 2009 is certain to be a challenging, exciting and - dare I say it - fun year.

Here's to a very merry holiday season!

NJM

Basehead

2008-11-20T09:01:00.002Z

Just popping my head above the parapet to wish young Karen a very Happy Birthday. We'll all be out for dinner on Saturday so I thought I'd just shout out here in the meantime. She's the old fogey of our place now.

Coming soon: open mic goodness, prosthetics, creative ironies, pocket dungeoneering, and - of course - zombies.

NJM

Click Click Boom

2008-11-04T11:40:00.005Z

Fuelled by my recently-voiced cynicism regarding the imminent US 2008 election results, I was reading up on vote caging (á la Dubya's victory in 2004) and the very good chance it will play a part today. In doing so I stumbled across georgewbush.org, one of the most gleefuly sarcastic and cutting political sites I've seen. Here's a few gems from the homepage:

THE PRESIDENT: "Good evening. In the life of all imperialistic military empires, there come brief, fleeting moments that decide the direction of a multinational corporation masquerading as a democratic nation, and reveal the character of its blue-blooded aristocrats, conniving religious hucksters and corrupt, back-slapping robber barons. We have now been suspended in such a moment for over six calendar years."

On the US security situation: "So make sure to hug your iPhones, TiVos, and SUVs extra tightly tonight. Because you never know when a jumbo jet full of screaming people is going careen into Home Depot while you're shopping for interior latex to accent the crown molding in your new house, the one with the mortgage you're going to default on any day now."

On Iraq: "Why, with the full brunt of the American security machine – which includes the US Military and the corporate mercenary industry which I call 'Warbucks' – bearing down on this soon-to-be-paradise, I feel safe enough to tear off my knickers and take a hot piss on a pile of bones out here in the open!"

Utterly uncompromising, and yet strangely reassuring in its demonstration that the art of making fun of ol' Capital G is far from dead. I love it!

NJM

Your Move, Creep

2008-11-04T08:56:00.004Z

Last night I had a dream that I was preparing for a holiday with McGrathy and David Tennant, and we were being driven to the airport by McCain and Obama, both of whom were speculating as to who would be the next Doctor Who. Predictably enough, they couldn't agree. I think I heard McCain make a fairly tasteless joke about Sarah Palin, though.

Here's to a new dawn in global politics - though the cynic in me still has a gut feeling that the Republicans will triumph. Hopefully I'll be proved wrong. McCain looks like his face has been grafted on to an artifical head, Alex 'RoboCop' Murphy-style.

NJM

The Time Of The Nine

2008-10-29T13:36:00.004Z

The ever-observant McGrathy has rightly pointed out my total lack of commitment to my Top Ten Nu-Metal list from a while back. Fact is, I've been far too busy to blog much lately, and I have also made a decision to steer away from writing blog posts that make assumptions about the audience, namely assuming the audience exists at all (as Steve memorably noted on his own blog, 'this one's for the four of you still reading!'). Anyway, here's the remaining nine reasons why Nu-Metal Didn't Totally Suck, because I'm a man of my woooorrrrd.*

Linkin Park 'In The End' - 'there's only one thing you should knooooooooow!' Teen angst has never sounded so fucking epic.
Deftones 'Headup' - they may have never truly fit the nu-metal tag, but Chino and Co still found time to throw out mosh-pit attitude superior to most other bands in their sleep.
Slipknot 'Wait And Bleed' - a then-unprecedented racket from the masked Iowan nontet, and the first instance of their now-trademark soaring melodic chorus lines.
Papa Roach 'Last Resort' - hip-hop breaks and Maiden-esque riffs collide in a rallying cry of angst and disaffection. Nu-metal at its leanest and meanest.
Spineshank 'New Disease' - blending techno influences with the genre's ubiquitous downtuned guitars and beats resulted in this undulating masterpiece from one of nu-metal's many, many forgotten heroes.
Korn 'Here To Stay' - punishing, paranoid and catchy as fuck, it was the latter-day Korn template writ large. Still sounds extremely dangerous even today.
Limp Bizkit 'Break Stuff' - though they continue to embody the very excesses and hubris that would result in the genre's self-destruction, to deny the knuckleheaded brilliance of their breakthrough single (especially the leaden guitar riffs) would be nonsense. Custom-built for falling off a skateboard to.
Lostprophets 'Shinobi Vs. Dragon Ninja' - Pontypridd's own contribution to the story of nu-metal, the 'Prophets had a scratchy, jittering take on '80s nostalgia that won them an army of fans long before their ascent into the mainstream.
System Of A Down 'Chop Suey!' - having long transcended pretty much every genre in rock, it's worth remembering that SOAD were once key figures in nu-metal, and this schizophrenic anthem remains one of their greatest creations.

Honorary mentions go to Rage Against The Machine (uncompromising rap/funk-rock, with none of the introspection that marked nu-metal's lyrical niche), Mr Bungle (a proto-Slipknot more interested in sexual deviance and saxophones than inner turmoil) and Faith No More (like Red Hot Chilli Peppers with a bigger, sicker set of balls). Thus ended the reign of nu-metal, leaving the door open for utterly bland guitar-wielding pop bands with 'The' in the title to sneak in and infest the airwaves in the '00s. Another rock revolution is surely in order.

NJM

*Watch out for pictures of my Hallowe'en costume on these very pages in the coming days!

Low-Pass

2008-10-24T10:05:00.004+01:00

Well as promised/threatened, here's the first medley of demo snippets, released under the FBTR umbrella. The difference between the earlier angry stuff and the more ambient bits of late is huge, but I really hear the progression in it. I think I'll use FBTR as the blanket name for all the stuff I'm working on (be it my own tracks, stuff I've recorded with Denise or Jo, or whatever). We could be a kind of urban sound collective - past and present members including Denise, McGrathy, Darren, Mags, Jo and myself. Perhaps a FBTR group webpage is in order. Though I doubt that it stands for Fucking By The Roadside any more.

Thanks to my current inexperience with YouTube, the sound mix is mono. It still sounds pretty good. The photo is one I snapped with my phone one night in Whitehead train station - I love the distant lights, it fits the later tracks particularly well. Anyway, I'm hoping the next 'demo transmission' will be of better audio-visual quality. Enjoy!

NJM

The Phat Controller

2008-10-22T10:49:00.004+01:00

Last night I sorted through my work-in-progress music and pulled everything that is fit to be completed. Tonight I'll be working up a short medley of all the demo tracks I have and dumping it on YouTube with some suitable visuals (though due to time constraints, probably not my own).

The idea is to just get it all out and let it breathe. Maybe hearing it in a different context will be the impetus I need to just finish the bastard things. If I can get lyrics done for them where required, and get Denise or Jo in to do vocals for me (or, God forbid, do it myself), I'll just publish and be damned. I mean it's not like I'm ever short of ideas, so I don't see any point in sitting on this stuff any longer (some of it is over three years old, for fucksakes).

So apart from 'I Touch Myself' and FBTR's myth-making 'We Are Ninjas', I have the following (mostly untitled) tracks:

'Intro', some creeping ambient noise and blastbeats
'A Cautionary Tale' - based on a riff I stole from McGrathy put through the grinder, with some truly stomping industrial dance beats behind it
'Mannequin', a sinister, sparse trip-hop number laden with overworked metaphor
The 'closing credits' music I literally dreamed up a long time ago, and in which I've recently discovered a whole new resonance
A dark ambient piece that was once called 'Omega Point'
Distorted strings-based industrial with a Killing Joke-type jackhammer beat
A song I wrote with Denise recently called 'Drifted', mixed in a light glitch/drum n' bass arrangement
More ghostly dark ambience derived from another mix of 'Drifted'
Huge booming trip-hop with sparse vocals and almost trance-like retriggered synths
Buzzing, lurching, gruesome industrial that's begging for a decent hook
A glacial interlude piece tentatively codenamed 'Hymn'
Guitar-based breakbeat with obsessive lyrical concerns

Thrown together as snippets in a random medley, it's unlikely that any of it will make much sense. Consider it the musical equivalent of blitzing your bedroom when it's a mess. Except it's not my bedroom, it's my brain.

Updates to come whenever the tracks are online.

NJM

Ghost In The Machine

2008-10-21T12:56:00.002+01:00

Halfway through October and I have a post count of 2. Appalling. I've been very busy with all manner of things lately - music, design, coding, socialising, and all the stuff I say I like doing on job applications/website profiles. I don't have time to fire it all up here at the moment, but trust me when I say that things are going almost frighteningly well at the moment.

In the meantime, and in classically retrograde fashion, here's a lo-fi blast of my old Judge Head / FBTR track 'I Touch Myself [Impaler Variation]', brought to you via the miracle of YouTube. With about twenty tracks currently residing on my hard drive in various states of completion, let's hope that there's more to come in the near future.

NJM

This Concept Of 'Luv' Confuses And Infuriates Us

2008-10-09T13:38:00.003+01:00

I note with a mixture of amusement and disgust that messages and pictures from Bebo are being transmitted into space, ostensibly in the hope of reaching extraterrestrial life. One can only imagine what even the most humble of intelligent alien races would make of the Bebo brand of leetspeak, utter ignorance of grammar and punctuation, rampant narcissism and general idiocy. Maybe if we Add Them As Friends, they won't elect to blow us all to atoms like we deserve.

NJM

A Drinker And A Fiend

2008-10-07T11:51:00.006+01:00

I've been absent from the blogosphere recently due to simply being too damn busy. My two weeks' holiday was well-spent; I got a few loose ends tied up and managed to spend some quality time with my friends and family as well. I even reunited with the Ballymena crew, something I've been threatening to do for way too long, and best of all it was at my old buddy Chris's wedding - which I was rather relieved to attend.. I've been swamped at work since returning, but I've been very productive and have really enjoyed the creative and technical challenges posed to me. I've been out socialising a lot more of late as well, which offers a bit of much-needed balance to my regular geekdom, and I've even managed to get back in the gym with regularity (though my alcohol intake still fluctuates wildly).

Having recently knocked up a new Bebo skin, I'm finally about to change my blog as well. I'm not particularly keen on the new Bebo skin - it's a bit of a rush-job - but quite frankly I'm getting so sick of social networking that I'm barely ever on there now anyway. Same goes for Facebook, which is every bit as irritating and bland as it is expertly-coded (notwithstanding the ubiquitous security concerns). Sadly the nature of my work means I can not afford to be ignorant of these applications, so I maintain a trivial presence in what the analysts still occasionally call 'Web 2.0'. Elsewhere I've been playing around with DS and Wii mods in more depth, combining software exploits and storage media with some basic programming nous and blatant piracy to enhance my mass-media experiences. (I watched The Dark Knight on my Wii recently, for example.) I've also started dabbling in C++ with a view to adding another string to my geek bow. I'm also still very active musically, meeting Denise and/or Jo for practice and writing at least once a week.

I'll talk about all of this in a little more detail in the next couple of posts, but I figured I'd just touch base here and keep the writing juices flowing. More, as always, later.

NJM

Touching Is Good

2008-09-23T01:54:00.007+01:00

I forgot to mention that I finally equipped my Nintendo DS with a R4DS card and am currently in the process of hacking the shit out of it. So, er, here's a picture of it.

I've still got the spare PC and XBox lying in bits on my desk, and between those and the musical equipment slung left and right my bedroom's starting to look like some modern sculpture nightmare. I must clean up all the wires and components and give it a good spring clean. Another thing for my To Do List on this second of my two holiday weeks.

NJM

Hard Core

2008-09-20T14:55:00.009+01:00

I'm flabbergasted by the amount of hype that has been built around the opening of the new Apple store in Belfast's Victoria Square. It's a huge event, as it is the first store in the entire of Ireland, and their retail model seems to represent something of a shopping nirvana for the hundreds of people queuing outside the store, some even camping overnight. The BBC has a neat piece on the melee, and if you look closely you may even spot new Mac Specialist Karen bounding up and down like it was some kind of Cyborg New Year! My workplace's resident harware guru Mark also gets to wax lyrical in the video, and comes across very well on camera.

One thing made me smile, though: for all the success Apple has had in positioning itself at the very cutting-edge of sexified design notes - to the point where they've practically defined it as an alt-lifestyle in itself - the Belfast opening was ultimately overrun with a collection of devoted freaks and geeks who look about as designer as Randy and Earl. (One of them had an Apple tattoo, which is tantamount to getting a Windows logo inked on your skin, 'classic design' or not.) Still, it actually makes me more inclined to pay them a visit myself than any amount of forum rumour-mongering would have, but I reckon I'm gonna have to leave it a few weeks (or months!) 'til the scrum dies down. Christmas will be huge there, no doubt.

Actually, given the government-like level of secrecy hitherto afforded the whole thing in our house, I hope I won't be shot for blogging my opinion.

NJM

Follow-up: there's loads more footage of the opening festivities, including some high-fiving worthy of Borat, available on YouTube. My thoughts on Apple aside, it's obvious that my geek credentials have taken a major pounding through by non-attendance. Altogether now: 'All the geeks are all lined up...!' NJM

Follow-up #2: I also note that Mark has drawn the attention of the Cult Of Mac. Yes, it exists. NJM

The Number 23

2008-09-11T01:39:00.004+01:00

Here's a sobering, pun definitely not intended, one-minute test from the World Health Organization I recommend you all take. Share your scores and thoughts if you like, but it's not required.

Alcohol Use Disorders Identification Test (AUDIT) online questionnaire

As an equally 'fun' supplemental exercise, I invite you to compare your good selves to the DSM-IV diagnostic criteria for 'alcohol dependence':

"...maladaptive alcohol use with clinically significant impairment as manifested by at least three of the following within any one-year period: tolerance; withdrawal; taken in greater amounts or over longer time course than intended; desire or unsuccessful attempts to cut down or control use; great deal of time spent obtaining, using, or recovering from use; social, occupational, or recreational activities given up or reduced; continued use despite knowledge of physical or psychological sequelae."

Here's to my two-weeks holiday, and to maybe one day learning from past experience.

NJM

Bits And Pieces

2008-09-10T11:25:00.002+01:00

Last night I found myself inspired enough to write a brand new song from start to finish. Musically it's a twitchy drum n' bass-type thing that translates nicely to a sort of speedy blues on acoustic guitar. Lyrically, it's about obsessive and addictive behaviour. I've tried to avoid being merely angsty and instead gone for a more confessional approach, but the words are by neccessity vague enough that it falls back on a few old clichés now and then. Still, I'm just psyched to have got something down after so long. I haven't got a title for it yet, but the most repeated lines involve 'doing it again', whatever 'it' is, so perhaps I'll look into using that as a title.

I'll play it for Denise when we practice on Thursday night and see if she likes it. She's gonna have to go raw on this one, and I'm not sure if she'd be comfortable singing the lyrics, or even if the words will make any sense coming out of her mouth. The mere thought of having to teach her the song through a private performance is enough to give me palpitations, so the odds of me ever singing it in public myself are slim to none, but if I can work it into a decent track I'll probably record it and publish it online. Conveniently, I've got two weeks off come Friday, and I am desperate not to squander it on bumming about doing fuck all.

I was pleasantly surprised to learn that the single 'Spiralling', which caught my attention on the radio last week thanks to its unashamedly '80s power-pop arrangement and production, is the latest track by none other than Keane. I've always liked their work, especially the blend of electric grand piano and Tom Chaplin's reliably amazing voice, and it's inspiring to see them broadening their sound and not taking themselves too seriously. The 'do you wanna be a...' part in the breakdown is hideously contrived, but I'll forgive this indiscretion and concentrate instead on the hook-laden vocals, with high harmonies that remind me of Semisonic's 'Secret Smile' - another epic track by a bunch of average Joes with a rare knack for great pop. Though I'm braced for ridicule yet again for my more cheese-based musical leanings, I as always make no apologies (though I was listening to Darkthrone last night, if there was any balance needed).

NJM

The Subliminal Verses

2008-09-09T13:38:00.004+01:00

Well, Denise and I played our John Hewitt set last night, and while we got a great reaction, I was unable to use my pedal to play 'Black Horse And The Cherry Tree'. We played it raw instead and it went down a treat, but I was temporarily in a black mood over the deviation from my original plan. Gotta roll with the punches! I hope to have some original material ready for her or Jo to sing in the next couple of weeks, provided they're comfortable with conveying what will no doubt prove to be some pretty barbed lyrics.

I walk around day after day with at least a dozen different song ideas in my head. I often hear the music and melody but can't determine the lyrics. I've even had dreams like this. Occasionally I sit down and work on some actual words, something I used to do almost daily when I was in school, but I never get much done these days. I tend to think more in terms of themes than actual lyrics, and even then these themes are much more likely to inform the music rather than the words. The themes shift and morph depending on my mood but remain largely similar throughout. So somewhere in my head there's negativist songs concerning deceit, abuse, resentment, addiction, obsession, jealousy, deviance, and various twisted takes on love. They sit side-by-side with positive songs of hope, empowerment, camaraderie, and good old-fashioned devotion. How does one go about writing a lyric that walks the line between sixth-form angst (c.f. 'emo') and mere throwaway pap (hello The Ting Tings and their ilk) to take on some kind of actual meaning? I'm not sure it even matters, otherwise you run the risk of taking yourself waaaay too seriously, and as I've been repeating like a mantra to Denise and Jo: if it [music] ain't fun, there's no point.

NJM

Anti-Myth Rhythm Rock Shockers

2008-09-08T15:38:00.009+01:00

If anyone could have ever doubted McGrathy and I's commitment to our hardcore Rock Banding, not to mention our oft-touted geek credentials, they would have surely been silenced by our antics over the weekend. Faced with the prospect of a vocal-free session after the bundled Rock Band microphone finally gave up the ghost, most gamers would have tossed their instruments in disgust and gone back to playing GTA4 instead, but not us geeks. A quick trip to B&Q for a soldering iron later, and we had engineered a 3-pin XLR-to-USB adapter cable from the huge tangled mass of spare wires and components lurking in my bedroom storage. We then proceeded to rock the fuck out, accompanied by our other band members Rebecca* and Schree, for a good three or four hours, with our vocal stylings now delivered to the game by my swanky Audio-Technica recording mic! We're like a heavy metal A-Team, only much better looking.

Elsewhere in music, Denise The Sleaze and myself are playing another open mic set tonight in The John Hewitt. Our set includes a version of KT Tunstall's 'Black Horse And The Cherry Tree' which we're performing with the assistance of a digital sampler pedal, much like she plays it herself live. I've only owned the pedal for three days, and we only practiced it for the first time last night. Will we elevate our game to a higher level, or crash and burn in an Icarus-like blaze of ignominy? Stay tuned to find out!

NJM

* I did mention that we've got a fresh new housemate named Rebecca as a replacement for Bruce, didn't I...?

Pika Pi

2008-09-05T13:56:00.003+01:00

I took delivery of my R4DS card yesterday - perhaps just in time - so it's looking like another weekend of alcohol-fuelled geekage and hackism for me. I must pick up a copy of Cooking Guide and attempt to curb my appalling dietary habits, and I'm really in the mood for the Trauma Centre games after watching this week's special 'Spare Parts' episode of Blood And Guts: A History Of Surgery - as fascinating as it was stomach-churning.

On Monday I played a small open-mic set in The John Hewitt with Jo, a friend of Karen's with a superbly rock-edged upper range. Highlight of the set for me was a guitar arrangement of Basement Jaxx's 'Good Luck', which turned out to be a pretty nifty blend of my heavy right hand and Jo's blistering vocals. Kaz took a few pics ~~which I'll try to get uploaded later, though~~ in which I appear to be either sticking my 'bum tongue' out or chewing my lower lip throughout - must have been the nerves. Galvanized by the experience, I've started rehearsing with Denise again for a few more performances in the very near future, and I also want to get some original stuff written for her and Jo to sing at some point. I'll be highly-strung about handing over the contents of my head for someone else to voice, but on the other hand it might force me to keep my more navel-gazing tendencies in (lyrical) check.

I really hope I get out this weekend, 'cos the last one was a total wash-out. More to come later.

NJM

Skin Crawler

2008-09-03T12:19:00.004+01:00

I'm loving the beta of Google Chrome, the latest hopeful entrant in what used to be called the 'browser wars'. It's got a beautifully clean interface, some very nice tricks to streamline your Web usage, and most importantly is built on the same rendering engine as Safari 3.1, meaning that it doesn't impact my compatibility testing workflow - easily the most pube-tearingly frustrating part of any web development project. The browser doesn't seem particularly customizable at the moment, so it probably won't usurp Firefox as my tool of choice, but I'll be very keen to see the level of plugin support in the finished product. It's open-source too, which can only be applauded.

Given the rate at which Google continues to expand from a simple search engine provider to one of the largest players in the information age, I'll be amazed if we don't see some kind of operating system launch in the next couple of years. Either that, or we cease to have traditional desktop functionality at all, instead doing all our work and play through high-speed connections to super-rich Web apps, with Google looming omnipresent over it all (though the existing hybrid infrastructure is liable to remain the norm for some time to come). At which point, most likely, they'll start to attract the same unique blend of fanboy worship and bitter flak currently enjoyed by Microsoft and Apple, justified or otherwise. These are dynamic times for the Web.

Random project idea of the day: an experimental browsing interface which renders Web pages as a Neuromancer-esque kaliedoscope of coloured lines, blocks and pixels. Usability not included.

NJM

Just Like New

2008-08-31T01:14:00.003+01:00

For my next trick, here's my Wii playing the DVD of The Matrix:Reloaded. In case you didn't realise, it's not supposed to do that. More hackage to follow - I found myself browsing Torx screwdrivers in B&Q at 7pm this evening, mwahaha!

On another note: the legendary Slipknot have just released their fourth major ablum, All Hope Is Gone, the follow-up to 2004's Vol 3: The Subliminal Verses. More on that later, but for now here's Track 5 of the record, 'Dead Memories', which will no doubt surprise the current batch of skeptics in the same way 'Vermillion Pt. 2' did for the batch before them (including this former 'Knot-hater). If I had to sum up the song, I'd say it's like HIM and Machine Head being hit with a baseball bat my Metallica - 'Enter Sandman'-esque guitar motifs, sexual tom-tom work and Echo And The Bunnymen swinging tempos abound. Listen and enjoy!

NJM

Smash!

2008-08-29T11:37:00.004+01:00

I've got incredible images in my head of sitting in my front room, playing McGrathi Apocalypse on an XBox and controlling it with a Wiimote and Nunchuck. I think I've figured out a way to do this, and this has got me awesomely excited.

I need a holiday from all this geekage.

NJM

Slipgate Complex

2008-08-29T01:59:00.004+01:00

...and after a little bit of dicking around, here's a shot of my trusty Wii running a stupidly smooth open-source port of the mighty Quake, from your bog-standard SD card. That was easy, I'm expecting to get electrocuted with my next console hacking effort!

NJM

EDIT: sadly it doesn't support the soundtrack, originally composed by one Mr. Reznor. I look forward to later versions that allow me to experience the game with the full horrific audio intact.

Antistatic

2008-08-28T10:49:00.005+01:00

Last night I started playing through Silent Hill 2 again, on my knackered old 1st-generation PlayStation2. I completed the game twice back in my university days, and it holds a special place in my heart not only as one of the most genuinely unsettling and tense games of all time, but also as a shared experience with others.

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Back in 2001 I was living in Portstewart with McGrathy, Dan The Man, a young stoner named Goatboy and my erstwhile former work colleague Leanne. Linda lived nearby and visited frequently, and my then-girlfriend was also a regular at the house. I fondly recall the many late nights we would all pile into my bedroom on the ground floor, turn out the lights, and shiver our way through the game, eventually completing it together after struggling through some truly brain-melting puzzles. Those were good times. I haven't played the game since then, leaving my recollection of how it all unfolds quite hazy - which should make playing it through again much more rewarding. It still stands up incredibly well in both aesthetics and gameplay.

Over the course of the next few days I plan to fuck with an old XBox that Steve and I have lying about. My intention is to install Xebian on it and use it as a media player-cum-emulation platform, by hotswapping the hard drive and connecting it to my experimental PC to load the required exploits. This involves screwing around with a couple of machines while they're powered up, so I need to make sure I'm careful to not destroy the technology and/or myself. If it works I'll be amazed, but at least I have the courage to fail. Less hackorific is my plan to use my Nintendo DS as a media player and personal organizer through the use of an R4 cart (which McGrathy has already begun using to great effect) and a little bit of Linux wizardry, and also to fuck about with my Wii using an exploit in the Zelda game Twilight Princess. Gone are the days of Nintendo's vice-like controls on the use of their hardware and software, which can only be a benefit to developers, users and Nintendo themselves.

In an effort to balance the ever-expanding snowball of geek I'm stuck in, I'm quite musically active at the moment as well. I'll be playing another open mic night at The John Hewitt this Monday, accompanying a friend of Karen's for a few unorthodox covers. With Denise being back from holiday we'll be able to get more nights in as well, and I'm also playing my Les Paul again with much more regularity, while continuing to get to grips with all the new audio software I'm learning. I may be forever struggling to finish what I start, but you could never accuse me of being bored.

NJM

Geek, Caution

2008-08-27T10:44:00.009+01:00

I've got a couple of techie projects on the go at the minute, separate from my interminably frustrated creative endeavours. I've got a spare PC floating about that McGrathy managed to salvage for me from his workplace a while back. It's of average spec but has all modern connectors, plus the lack of an installed OS makes it an ideal blank canvas for all manner of curious experimentation.

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My main interest is in building an entirely open-source rig that can function in tandem with my main (old and knackered) Windoze PC. To this end, I've got four Linux distributions I can boot into for different applications. I have Ubuntu for standard desktop services and Web browsing; Pure:Dyne and Dyne:Bolic for high-end audio and multimedia production; and BackTrack 2 for penetration testing and network monitoring. I'm running all these from LiveCDs at the moment, with config settings stored on a USB sitck, but I plan to partition the hard drive and create a multi-boot system from the ground up.

The whole experiement is an important one for me, as it will provide a tool through which I can slowly 'wean myself off' the restrictive yet ubiquitous software provided by the major companies. I'm not doing it out of some hippie-like hatred of corporate greed, though. Business is business, and as a new e-commerce developer I'm arguably part of the proprietary software scene myself. What galls me is that the majority (though not all) of the software the majors provide simply isn't that good, and more importantly, can't be tailored to suit the needs of the individual. Indeed, in a number of cases they openly violate your privacy without your consent and/or contain features hostile to the user (Apple's iPhone firmware and Microsoft's Vista DRM controls being just two high-profile examples). The tools that the open-source community produce - democratically and generously - are not only superior in functionality, they are also freely extendable and customizable, with no legal bullshit or 'rights restrictions' governing them. Hence the open-source mantra of 'free as in freedom, not free as in beer'. Come to think of it, the only proprietary software I use regulary, apart from Windows XP itself, is Adobe Photoshop, Illustrator, Windows Media Player and FL Studio - which are easily replaceable with Gimpshop, InkScape, VLC Player and the aforementioned Pure:Dyne respectively.

Of course, with my being prone to the occasional bit of software yo-ho-ho-ing, it's extreme hypocrisy to decry the lack of end-user rights for applications I have essentially stolen. But that's the other point of my little 'freebox' experiment. If I can produce a workflow that is actually a viable alternative to the high-end pro stuff, then I can ditch the pirated warez altogether and use free software with no legal or ethical (yes, ethics. Remember them?) pitfalls. Yes, much to my dismay, I actually do have some sense of right and wrong after all, and I'm still trying my best to improve myself as a human being on top of all this geekery. Maybe it won't work, and I'll be back to waiting for XP to boot before you can say 'antitrust', but adhering to a moral code in the digital domain will hopefully have positive follow-through for my own interpersonal life. Though I've poked around in my head so much, I fear I may have voided the warranty.

I've got more hackery afoot, including some big plans for cetain items of console hardware I own, but that's for another post. Keep on geeking, boyz and girlz!

NJM

Null And Void

2008-08-26T09:47:00.003+01:00

Big props to McGrathy for getting back into blogging form, and with a fresh new blog skin to boot. I look forward to his new direction, whatever it may be.

Predictably, I've been scrapping ideas for my own new skin as soon as I've thought of them. This has to be the worst of my self-destructive habits - I rarely, if ever, finish anything I start. Evidence of this is strewn throughout my history. I think I'm going to have to start forcing myself to get from A to B creatively, no matter how uninspired I may feel at the time. Just getting it done would be inspiration enough at the end of the day, I hope. I've had a couple of blog skin ideas that I've shot down without even touching pen to paper (or mouse to desk), but I think now I'm just going to churn them out anyway. If they lead to something worthwhile, that's fantastic. If they don't - so what? At least I'll have got them done and out there.

Last night I cleaned and strung my battered old Les Paul and riffed right out for about two hours. That's something else I should try and devote more time to, as it makes me feel alive in a way few other things can these days. Maybe I should take up BASE jumping.

NJM

Ahead Of The Curve

2008-08-13T09:16:00.005+01:00

The lack of activity on the blogosphere of late has been shocking. Where is everybody? Maybe they're all in rehab or something. I could do with a stint in The Priory myself.

I haven't posted my The Dark Knight analysis yet because I'm struggling to do justice to the picture while at the same time trying to find something to say about the movie that hasn't already been said ad nauseam in the specialist press. Still, as soon as I have it done I'll fire it up here. I'm so busy of late that I barely have the will to eat properly, let alone play at being an Empire staffer.

NJM

Skin Ticket

2008-08-08T14:08:00.002+01:00

I'm thinking this blog needs a new look again (yes, I know). I want to keep the N Code metaphor but give it a more damaged, hacked-together look - even biomechanical - without it looking necessarily evil. The hard part is doing that without ripping off Giger, especially since I picked up an awesome hardback of his art for a mere £6 in HMV recently. Looks like I might have to pencil in some Photoshop dickery for the weekend. More later!

NJM

A Lost Reality

2008-08-07T00:48:00.000+01:00

For my first nu-metal tune I'd like to spin the clock right back to where it pretty much all kicked off: Korn's rulebook-destroying debut single, 'Blind' (Korn, 1995). There had been groundwork laid for the emergence of nu-metal as far back as the 80s, when Public Enemy and most famously Aerosmith had flirted with the blending of hip-hop and rock, and in the 90s we had seen everyone from Faith No More to Rage Against The Machine further cross-pollinate the genres. But this song, lurching into life in a mire of impossibly downtuned guitars, eerie polychords and heart-stopping snare rolls, was the first time such disparate influences had come together so cohesively, and the results were explosive. Jonathan Davis' opening roar of 'are you ready?' was a threat, not a question; nu-metal had arrived.

'Blind' (via YouTube) [opens in a new window]

Even today it can generate an arena-wide moshpit, but I can scarcely imagine what it must have felt like to hear this sound coming out of the speakers for the first time in 1995. For a generation of disaffected youth left stranded in the aftermath of grunge's demise, this must have been as welcome a prospect as it was terrifying. An emaciated, flailing Davis gave new gravity to grunge's trademark quiet-loud dynamics, confessional one moment, disgusted and furious the next, with the middle eight in particular somehow drawing the first vital line between rap and death metal that would define the best of their later work. The production was claustrophobic and grating, the sheen of their later Pro-Tooled work utterly absent, and arguably the track is all the better for it; 'Blind' was the harbinger of a new movement in metal, where raw emotion replaced contrived irony in a hail of angst and torment. Trent Reznor must have been smirking to himself somewhere - misery now had real company, and they were about to take their pain to the entire fucking world.

More from Korn and their baggy-trousered peers soon!

NJM

[Index] Ten Reasons Why Nu-Metal Didn't Totally Suck

2008-08-06T23:24:00.005+01:00

The world of rock and metal was a turbulent, troubled place come the mid-90s. Kurt Cobain and the grunge phenomenon had literally and figuratively blown itself away, along with the status quo of what had preceded it, leaving a huge void that commercial pop would never be able to fill. The early 90s had already seen impressive reinvention within the world of rock: Trent Reznor had cut out a Grammy-sized niche with the acerbic industrial misery of Nine Inch Nails; the Chili Peppers had taken funk rock global with Blood, Sugar, Sex, Magic; and a young Mike Patton, through Mr. Bungle and especially Faith No More, had redefined what was acceptable to call 'metal' in the Nineties. Yet despite their successes, none of these artists had ever managed to generate a zeitgeist to rival grunge in its unifying power and globe-straddling dominance. And with niche music channels, radio stations and the burgeoning Internet scene broadening demographics and testing genre loyalty across the board, audiences were primed and ready for a new and deadly sound to drag the music industry kicking and screaming into the new millenium.

What followed would open up metal to a global audience previously unimaginable, spawn the biggest-selling album of the millenium to date, provide the very best and very worst that the metal world had to offer, divide both audience and artists into spiteful and petty camps, and eventually self-destruct in a wave of bandwagonism, identikit laziness and corporate greed. Nowadays it is used as an insult, a cheap punchline, but there was a time when it was the most relevant, innovative and exciting sound going. Those artists that rose above the spite to produce enduring, powerful music are the ones I hope to remember and enjoy here over the next few weeks. Welcome to nu-metal, and welcome to Ten Reasons Why Nu-Metal Didn't Totally Suck.

Korn - 'Blind' (Korn, 1995)
...and the rest!

NJM

Dorsia At Eight

2008-08-06T16:47:00.007+01:00

Finished reading American Psycho recently.

"There is an idea of a Patrick Bateman; some kind of abstraction. But there is no real me: only an entity, something illusory. And though I can hide my cold gaze, and you can shake my hand and feel flesh gripping yours and maybe you can even sense our lifestyles are probably comparable... I simply am not there."

With my finishing of Bret Easton Ellis' sickfest novel, I decided to check out the 2000 film adaptation with The Dark Knight himself, Christian Bale, in the titular role of Patrick Bateman. Robyn, who has at one time or another come face-to-horrified-face with most of the skeletons in my bunker-sized emotional closet, was my viewing partner. Upon watching this scene she looked at me, chuckled loudly and said simply: 'You are Patrick Bateman'.

Funny thing is, I really don't know if I'm offended or not, even though I found some sense of familiarity with his internal monologue in the novel (apart from the whole serial killing/cannibalism/skull-fucking thing). I wouldn't mind having his looks or his money, but I'm fairly certain that Robyn was disregarding those. Either I'm a walking music review (likely), or I'm a sadistic sexual deviant (equally likely).

I also got compared to E. Edward Grey (James Spader) in Secretary once. Does somebody know something I don't?

NJM

You Wanted Arts & Crafts

2008-08-06T00:59:00.004+01:00

I'm anticipating some flak for this, but what the fuck - it's been a very, very long day. I just wanted to note something, before the triple-threat of a Dark Knight review, a nu-metal retrospective and a bereavement-triggered tirade against organized religion drag my blog screaming down into a pit of foreboding and ire. What I want to note is: Ashlee Simpson's 'Outta My Head (Ay Ya Ya)' is the best fucking piece of throwaway electro pop I've heard on the radio in ages.

Yeah, she's a total airhead like her sister - she actually married that silly fucker from Fall Out Boy - and her previous appearances on MTV have made me want to throw a fridge at the screen, but her latest effort simply rocks: 80s-worshipping bass and organ patches, detuned snares and minimalist, robotic harmonies. Kinda like Gwen Stefani without the helium vocals. I guess beefy ol' Timbaland really is some kind of genius after all (he handled production duties). Ashlee even manages to look pretty damn hot atop a gigantic Rubik's Cube, and also scores points for channelling Kylie and Max Headroom together in the same scene. All we needed was for the Ghostbusters to show up.

Go ahead and scoff!

NJM

EDIT: Ashlee tied up = GOOD!

Knightfall

2008-07-30T17:26:00.002+01:00

With critics around the globe generally losing their minds over Christopher Nolan's already record-smashing epic The Dark Knight, I'm steeling myself to see it for the first time tonight with Robyn and Karen. You can bet it won't be the last time I see it, but I'll have a typically overwrought, in-depth and spoiler-labelled analysis up within the week. Frankly, I'm fucking hyped up. More to follow.

NJM

What Kind Of Cake?

2008-07-23T10:54:00.005+01:00

Some quickfire musings and notes on this work-heavy day:

My long-neglected MySpace page is in desperate need of a makeover so I can stick up some demos of the music I've been working on recently. I need to come up with an aesthetic that a) isn't Judge Head, and b) isn't a rip-off of NIN's The Slip (download it free now!) artwork. Same goes for my Bebo page, for that matter. Any ideas would be appreciated because my head's fried from work.
Started reading American Psycho for the first time the other night, despite having had the book for about seven years. Some of Patrick Bateman's internal monologue and meaningless anxiety reminds me of myself three or four years ago, with the notable (and hopefully obvious) exception that ~~I can't afford his lifestyle~~ I'm not a psychopath*. Great book so far. I've seen the movie once, but I was drunk and stoned and remember absolutely nothing of it.
The Belfast Rock Band tournament passed us by this time, but we will be ready and willing the next time it hits town. McGrathy and I are playing consistently at Hard level now - we even got through 'Blackened', though I have no idea how. Drums are my cocaine.
My next N Code feature will be 'Ten Reasons Why Nu-Metal Didn't Totally Suck'. Believe it or not, I've actually managed to think of ten. Watch this space for a baggy-shorted teen-angst party like it's 1999.
Having recently developed idiot-proof, anyone-can-use applications in work for mailing list management, content editing, product generation and even creating entire websites, I'm starting to ask myself: am I in danger of coding myself out of a job?
If I don't see The Dark Knight soon I'm going to vomit blood.

That is all... for now!

NJM

* I think.

Stop F*cking Calling Me

2008-07-18T13:54:00.004+01:00

And while we're on the subject of NewGrounds, here's a must-see for any Metal Gear fans, especially those who found Metal Gear Awesome, well, awesome. Definitely NOT work-suitable! It takes a little while to load, but it's totally worth it.

MGS Flash Collab Disc 01

Insane.

NJM

Where's Your Head At?

2008-07-18T13:17:00.003+01:00

I meant to post this a while back after it surfaced on the ZDoom forums via NewGrounds, but it fell by the wayside in the face of my workload. Now, having recently watched Saw IV, and following a curious throwaway conversation about torture last night with McGrathy, I present the predictably-contraversial Flash physics experiment that is...

The Torture Game II!

Enjoy, if you like that sort of thing. Me, I keep 'accidentally' ripping off limbs...

NJM

Take Me To Cold Steel

2008-07-18T01:52:00.002+01:00

With the exception of Resident Evil and Hitman, there have been many, many mediocre movies based on videogames in recent years. Looking to buck this trend is the once-darling of the high-end PC action scene, Max Payne, which is currently in production with Mark Wahlberg in the titular role and Family Guy's rather hot Mila Kunis as the love interest, Mona Sax. Based on his roles in Shooter and Boogie Nights, old Marky Mark is more than up to the role's blend of tragedy, stoic irony and balls-out action, and the trailer certianly seems to capture both the glacial corporate deadness and snowbound lowlife sleaze that so defined the game. I still say that Johnny Knoxville should have got the part, though.

NJM

Gentlemen, Let's Broaden Our Minds

2008-07-12T18:43:00.003+01:00

I may not have mentioned it much on this blog, but those know know me personally will attest to how utterly, insanely, pissing-my-pants excited I am about The Dark Knight. Not a week has gone by for the past year that I haven't mentioned it to someone or other, and with every new trailer, promotional poster or innovative guerilla marketing tactic, I've been bouncing off the walls, furniture and other people like Stewie Griffin on his way to Disneyland. Between waiting for it and MGS4, I'm surprised I haven't actually died.

Finally, we're in the Month of The Bat, and to give you a taste of what's in store for us, here's the late and truly fucking fantastic Heath Ledger crashing the party as the lunatic, anarchist Joker. No spoilers, just edgy, unpredictable menace. My three-word review when the film comes out? "Oh. Fuck. Me."

NJM