I’m going to a party tonight and I agreed that I would sort out some playlists for it. Here are some of the highlights:
Ghost – Ganagmang
Comus – Song To Comus
Espers – Dead Queen
Hawkwind – Magnu
Camel – Lady Fantasy
I have this horrible feeling I’ll never be allowed to make playlists for parties ever again…
I don’t really have a strong opinion about Valentine’s Day, either one way or the other.
I do sort of agree on the one hand that it seems a little pointless, as if you are truly in love with someone then you don’t need a set day to make a declaration of that love.
But then again the tradition is kind of nice, and it’s harmless enough, so I can’t really begrudge anyone who decides to celebrate it.
Maybe it’s because I’m a historian, but I find the history behind it much more fascinating. Like many other holidays, if you go right back, before the day was re-appropriated to be the day of Saint Valentine, this period in February was already being celebrated by the Romans in a festival called Lupercalia. Look it up on Wikipedia. Like all of the best bits of History it is replete with gory details. Here’s the best:
“The festival began with the sacrifice by the Luperci [a particular sect of priests in ancient Rome] (or the flamen dialis) of two male goats and a dog. Next two young patrician Luperci were led to the altar, to be anointed on their foreheads with the sacrificial blood, which was wiped off the bloody knife with wool soaked in milk, after which they were expected to smile and laugh.” (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lupercalia)
Ever since I found that out, whenever people mention Valentine’s Day I always immediately associate it with blood sacrifice. I find there is a certain amount of dark humour to be found in this, given that it is a celebration of love. I’m sure such sacrificial overtones will be appreciated by anybody who has ever experienced love go bad. After the blood has been wiped on your face, what else can you do but laugh?
Activison has laid to rest the Guitar Hero franchise.
I was a little shocked by the announcement at first, since it was only a few years ago that it was impossible to escape from the Guitar Hero phenomenon. I was certainly addicted to it for a time.
On further reflection, however, I don’t think it should be too surprising. I think the business model of Guitar Hero was pretty much doomed to failure anyway. In the beginning it was a great new novelty and a lot of fun because we had never experienced a game like it before. Sure, there had been musical rhythm games in the past, but none of them preyed upon the air guitarist hidden inside all of us. Don’t lie – we’ve all done it, and Guitar Hero basically said “it’s okay, so have we, so why not have some fun with it?”. And it was, for a time.
The problem was that each successive release of the game was… well, it was essentially the same thing all over again. The graphics would be slightly improved, the mechanics tweaked and refined and the shape of the controller changed. But that was never what we really cared about with these games. Nobody ever said “hey, check out the hammer-on/pull-off mechanics on the latest Guitar Hero!”. No, it was all about the songs. In the end it ultimately boiled down to this; £40 for a new list of songs. A list of songs in which there would be, maybe, 10 you really wanted to play. The rest would be inconvenient hoops you would have to jump through before getting to the real rocking-out.
I think an even greater emphasis should have been placed upon downloadable content when the series hit the current generation of consoles, sticking to one release of the game and offering customisable song packs, and not releasing more and more versions of what was basically the same game. I also feel that the addition of the ‘band’ element was the beginning of the end and by the end it felt as if the game had become or a jack of all trades and a master of none.
It is a shame, though. There is still Rock Band, but I always preferred the feel of the earlier Guitar Hero games. They were straight-up, no-nonsense, in your face shredding nirvana. I guess I’ll have to just keep rocking it with my copy of Guitar Hero III.
I’ve recently come back to the Linux fold, after being away from it for two years.
For a time I used to run Ubuntu as my sole OS, eventually moving back to Windows due to becoming increasingly more frustrated with getting games to behave themselves under WINE and because of a problem with my old laptop whereby the CPU was constantly overheating. The only thing I could do to stop it from reaching critical temperature and powering down was to run it at half speed whenever I was doing anything particularly intensive, which was generally pretty frustrating as “intensive” in this case seemed to include watching videos on YouTube.
Recently, though, I decided that my current machine was long over due for a clean-up, so I decided that in the process I had may as well see what had changed in in the world of Ubuntu. I decided to set up a dual-boot system, since my need for Windows is still really only for gaming purposes, and have Ubuntu for my day-to-day stuff.
After playing around with Ubuntu 10.10 for a few days, I am seriously impressed by the progress that has been made in the past two years. Some of the highlights for me so far have been:
All in all I have been extremely pleased to see the progress which has been made, and has even made me feel slightly guilty about abandoning it in frustration when I did. I understand that there is debate within the Linux community over Canonical, but I feel that ultimately the Ubuntu community should be congratulated for what it has managed to do for the desktop Linux experience.
I’m now roughly halfway through a History MA. I say ‘roughly’ because I have finished what, for want of a better term, I have come to regards as the ‘easy’ stage. The real challenge still lies ahead. I am currently staring down the gauntlet, at the wrong end of 20,000 words and I have realised one thing; the entire experience has been markedly different from anything I could have expected or prepared myself for.
The first real shock when you begin postgraduate study is the increased volume of work.It is something which you try to mentally prepare for, but it still takes you by surprise and by the end of the first week if you don’t feel like you have had the stuffing knocked clean out of you, then you are either superhuman or lying. Or perhaps possibly both. The reading lists alone tend to be longer than a first year undergraduate core text. These are, of course, merely lists of ‘suggested’ reading and, if in the course of my academic life thus far, I have learnt anything at all, it is that the term ‘suggested reading’ in more or less analogous to ‘light bedtime reading’.
Hyperbole aside, you will certainly find a step up in pace such as you have never met before. No, it is not like changing from college/6th form to university. It is much more intense. The best thing you can do by the end of the first week is to laugh. If you can laugh, then you have a good chance of surviving. You will definitely need that sense of humour later on. I won’t lie; it won’t stop you from occasionally feel as if you are going insane, but you’ll at least believe that you’re having fun whilst you slowly lose your mind.
You do eventually adjust. The trick is finding new ways to cope with, and to stay on top of, the vastly increased workload. I refuse to believe that even the most seasoned of academics can steel themselves to pour through dusty tomes every waking moment of every day. No matter how strong your passion is, sooner or later something else will become more appealing. The trick is to find ways to keep yourself engaged with what you are doing when your mind does begin to wander. I have now begun to understand why so many historians like to pepper their work with anecdotes which on first glance may seem to have little relation to the main thrust of their argument. It’s because we need such diversions account of a runaway horse one morning on the streets of later eighteenth century Norwich (C.B. Jewson, The Jacobin City: A Portrait of Norwich 1788-1802). Day-to-day life is full of such irreverence, and it does us well as historians to remember this fact.
The past 4 months have been tough and exhilarating at the same time, but it is in beginning to prepare myself for the hefty task of researching a Masters dissertation that the real fun is starting to begin. I can already feel the lure of the archives calling.
