Adventures in breakcore

Hello again. I've decided to re-relaunch this blog after deciding that I like talking about things, but can't get anyone to listen to me. Nor can I get them to listen to any music I like, which means that you, lucky reader, can discover new music with me.

So, having listened to a range of different genres of dance music over the years I have settled (as the title may suggest) on something dubbed breakcore. If you've never heard of it, you are in the company of many. Imagine your run of the mill drum and bass, speed it up a little, chop the beat up into tiny pieces and then liberally sprinkle it, well, everywhere.

Key artists in the early breakcore era included aphex twin and Venetian snares, and the genre was gaining a toehold in the clubbing world (this despite the fact that the time signatures vary so much it takes practice to dance to). Until dubstep came along and all the ravers got too mashed on ketamine to deal with the intensity.

So I was left alone with my headphones, bopping to tunes no-one liked, and that DJs had lost the will to spin. So it has remained until very recently, and in the majority of that time my knowledge of the genre has been rooted in free online mixes, with limited tracklistings.

Recently though I decided to try and learn a little more about breakcore, not quite with the fervour of a teenager that's just been told rock music would piss off his parents, but an effort nonetheless. I have since been prowling youtube, soundcloud, bandcamp* and a number of forums to try and get myself up to date.

All this effort though, and still those I know look at me like a bewildered child any time I try and share this knowledge with them. So I return to my blog with this 'adventures in breakcore' series knowing I can at least inform one small dark corner of the net.

I was planning to review Gizm0de's 'snack on this' as part of this article, but frankly I've wittered on so long already you wouldn't know there was a review here! I'll post it separately soon.

*I really cannot recommend bandcamp highly enough. I'm on the consumer side so cannot comment on selling, but the full length previews and ability to buy direct from the artist make it a must IMO.

M&M World - A world of M&Ms

I was walking around London today when I saw this...
 

It's on the corner of Leicester Square and Wardour St. just opposite the KFC and the McDonalds. On spotting it I sighed, as clearly here was just one more notch for rampant consumerism at a time when it's getting harder for the average man to put bread on the table. 'But that's the way of the world these days' I thought. In these straightened times it's nigh on impossible to build anything, particulalrly in the high rent areas around Soho, without big buisness backing.


So I decided to go in, I mean this is a prime retail/leisure location, what had the M&Ms brand put their name to in order to entice passing tourists? It might be a cinema, what with the red and yellow M&Ms now presenting those silly adverts in theatres nationwide. Or maybe some kind of games arcade, with an M&M store inside when you need a chocalatey break. Indeed, I just got the feeling while standing outside that there would be 4 distinct levels, each with their own fun activity...

Oh yes Ladies and Gents, I got that impression because that's what I was promised. So what was inside?


It was a shop. A giant bloody shop selling loads of M&M merchandise. Only a small corner of one of the floors was even devoted to the selling of the snack itself. There were M&M lunchboxes, M&M t-shirts, M&M hats, M&M bibs and much more besides.
Who on earth concocted this idea? What blithering loon thought that there was enough demand for clothing and accessories with a coloured circle with an 'M' in the middle that they would build a giant shrine to the things? I'll tell you one thing, I had no fun at all. I walked round, gagged at the thought of the depths Westminster's planning committee had sunk to, and left, past lots of joyous people all getting their photo taken with a statue of the 'yellow one'.

Re-launch

Ok. So I've decided I'm going to do this again.

Hello and welcome back for those of you that have missed me in the almost a year I've not posted (where does the time go?). The plan is to try and post a couple of missives a week in order to get me back in front of the computer and writing again. Because I have this terrible habit of thinking I don't have anything important to blog about, I'm not going to limit my writings to things that actually matter. Instead, I plan to just sit down and force myself to write about whatever comes into my head.

This SEO defying approach may well lead to a distinct lack of intrest, but I guess the point is that I should be doing these sorts of things for me. Improve my writing skill, whether it be politics, football, life or any other nonsense. What won't happen on here from now on is any post about video games, as I'll reserve those for Common Ground Games.

Just occurred to me that the last post on here was in reference to the recent AV debacle. Well what a clusterfuck that was. It does seem that if the reformists can't design a coherent plan for themselves, what chance have they got of convincing others? It all got a little bit Judean People's Front for me. Depressing.

Right, that'll do for now. Like I say, hello again, hope you are well. See you all soon.

AV campaign poster

Over at Lib Dem voice there is currently a competition running to source a poster to promote the Alternative Vote campaign, for next years referendum. 

Here is my offering:

If you came here via the comments page on LDV, please take your time, have a look around the blog, and if you are feeling really adventurous, maybe leave a comment or two. Cheers.

looking for work

I'm not sure any semi-regular experience comes close in the horrible stakes to job-hunting. It's so ridiculously soul destroying and demoralising that it leaves you unconvinced as to your ability to do any job at all. And I say this as someone who has only received one rejection letter to date.

Let me start from the top:
I found out last week that the company I work for is in severe dire straits. This was confirmed for me on Wednesday when it was suggested that instead of my usual work, it may be best to prepare a CV.
This was duly completed and the job hunt began, if not hastily, earnestly. The problem was (and indeed remains) that not only am I not particularly clear what I want to do, but my career to date has not really been targeted enough to give me a proper fall back.
The obvious contender for a holding role is to do some design work, admittedly that's far from obvious looking at this blog, but it has been the key thread through my career to date. Thing is, these days everyone wants to see a portfolio. I'm not organised enough to keep a portfolio. I had trouble enough remembering where the my work was on the server. Finding work I did 3 or more years and 2 computers ago is like looking for a needle in a haystack. When someone forgot to provide the needle.

I can do other things of course. I mean I can write, or at least I hope I can. If you've made it this far then at least I can write a bit anyway. But once again employers want to see a strong portfolio of work. That tends not to mean a hideously untargetted blog and the occasional note on rwdmag.com. Besides, the few jobs I have seen that do exist have balls and all to do with what i know.
'Do you have a passion for luxury hubcaps?' Does anyone?

To save repeating myself down the list of skills that I have in some measure, it's essentially the same story. I can do the job but either don't have a portfolio handy, or haven't been doing it professionally for anything like long enough.

Luckily I do have a way of amusing myself even in these irritating times. On seeing one job that I considered I had a chance for, I replied, 'are you looking for the ultimate all-rounder? Well look no further!'

Yes I know what you're thinking, that's either breathtakingly arrogant, mind numbingly stupid, or both. Frankly I'm not sure I care, after another day in our rotting corpse of an office, I needed some entertainment, I was tired of typing up the same empty platitudes and maybe, just maybe someone arrogant and stupid is just what they were looking for.

More re-hashing: Raoul Moat and Facebook

Posted on a forum of which I am a member, about the RIP Moat facebook pages. In reply to a call for them to be banned.

As far as I can tell the page that was removed was done so because it breached the T&Cs of facebook (I believe there were comments inciting violence). The problem with banning this sort of group as you seem to suggest, is that you won't actually be stopping people from thinking these things. You just won't be able to search for them. I actually think it's quite a good thing these pages exist, because then you know who the nutters are!
The far more pertinent question is surely what drives people to want to join this sort of group? If you take the group away, those people that are publically sympathising with Moat will instead do so in private. What makes tham sympathise? A few of the crazies that joined his group may be dangerous, they will continue to be so regardless of whether they can announce it on facebook.
I still blame it on the media. I think the prolonged coverage made him an obvious 'anti-hero'. People want to be famous, and if they can't sing / act / kick a ball then suddenly this new route to stardom has emerged. Terrifying really.
While I don't agree with the banning of internet pages of this ilk, I have no problem with what Cameron seems to have said (not heard his words directly). This is a case of someone with influence offering an opinion, I'd rather the PM (of any party, except the obvious) use this influence than the papers that try and do it on a daily basis*.

*This bit refers to something that the PM said in PMQ's expressing his distaste for the facebook groups.

Guitar hero: On tour review

It has (once again) been quite a while since I blogged. So to remind myself what it's like to use the blogger software and to help achieve my goal aiding potential employers by having all of my writings in one place; here is a review I wrote for the TVUSU magazine about 2 years ago. Enjoy.

 You know something is awry with guitar hero – on tour almost as soon as you first switch on the power. A rather colourful warning is displayed espousing the necessity of regular rests, followed by a further warning suggesting how best to hold your DS while playing. If you hadn’t already worked it out, Activision are letting you know that for all that the guitar hero franchise is, one thing it isn’t is ergonomic!

To put it in plain text, the ingenious attachment that Red Octane have devised for use with their portable incarnation of a multi million selling game is supremely uncomfortable. This isn’t out of bad design either, the strap around your hand has to sit so tightly so save you smashing £100 worth of DS lite all over the train platform and the buttons sit almost as well as could be expected (though to make the angle between the buttons and the users fingers a little less than right would have been pleasant). The problem is quite simply that the format does not transfer as well to a handheld format as one might expect.

Of course, the tardy and dedicated reviewer that I am, I persevered on through the RSI (which in the days of the Wii is little more than an occupational hazard anyway) to find out how valid an addition to the series ‘on tour’ is.
Due to the limited amount of space on a DS cartridge, the career song list is limited to 5 venues which between them house 25 songs spread over the 4 difficulties now familiar to guitar hero veterans. This in itself is no bad thing and completely excusable. What however (to me at least) was completely inexcusable was recycling songs from guitar hero 3, especially as (despite the missing button) the charts for the songs felt so similar. This would all be well and good if only newcomers to the series were expected to play, the problem with this approach is that isolates those fans of the series that don’t want to be playing the same songs again.

The game play itself should be very familiar fare, even to many who don’t themselves own a video games console. Notes move along the screen in time with the music and as the notes reach a marker, the player ‘strums’ (using a special plectrum shaped stylus) while holding the button whose colour corresponds with that of the note.
    Guitar Hero-On Tour offers three single player modes; I will spend little time discussing the obligatory career and quick play settings, as they are fairly simple and indeed quite self explanatory. What does deserve some column inches though, is the new battle mode. Not quite a new thing in itself (Guitar Hero 3 had three ‘boss’ battles against guitar legends and… Satan) what is different here is the fact that you can play any unlocked song against a CPU controlled adversary. In this you can gain the upper hand by launching power-ups at your opponent to temporarily disadvantage them. Unfortunately, like every other good idea in this game, it just doesn’t work well enough. To activate the power ups, or in some cases to recover from those that your enemy has hindered you with, you need to perform actions on the touch screen, while the song continues running on the other side! This makes using or recovering from power-ups nigh on impossible. While disappointing, it’s hard to see exactly what Red Octane could have done better.

So, to conclude, I wouldn’t really recommend this game to fans of the series, as it’s just not in depth enough to really offer value for money. That said I wouldn’t recommend it do newcomers either. The awkward design of the controller may well put you off learning and the track-list just isn’t inspiring enough to draw you through the game. A shame as nothing has really been done badly, it just probably would have been better off not being done at all.

4/10