I really wish I could go to this gig Madness are doing to promote their new album, The Liberty of Norton Folgate. Unfortunately it wouldn't be very practical because it's in London mid-week - I would have to take a couple of days off work to get to it.
I love the style of the advert, although it could have done with a bit more proof-reading and they have scaled it down too much for the web. "[The Liberty of Norton Folgate] Danced skanked and boggled for the cause of man and woman's need to be." Check out the video too. How many movies do you recognise?
Calling fans of Filk, Portal, and Jonathan Coulton
JoCo has pointed out on his blog that a group of trolls have been giving a fan a hard time in the comments to a YouTube video of her singing Still Alive, the end-credits song from the Portal video game. Give it a listen, and please consider leaving her a supportive comment. There's cake in it for you if you do! Feel free to pass this on.
I've got Monorail Santa onto the tree and sorted out some extra support wires to stop the track tilting wildly under the weight of the carriages. Here's a video of it in operation. Apparently you can still buy them, but they cost quite a lot more than I paid for my broken (but repairable) one.
I couldn't find the lyrics posted elsewhere on the web so I've transcribed them myself (using my CD copy of the Astoria sound desk recording because the audio on the Youtube video is a bit ambiguous in places): ( Read more... )
So, my second Madness gig. I drove down to Liverpool Aintree Pavilion last night to catch them on their Transport From London tour. It was another brilliant show; Madness are still playing on top form. They performed a few brand new songs from their forthcoming album, including the catchy Forever Young.
Stranger Things is a new low-budget SF series that's being distributed as a free video podcast. I've just watched the first episode and it wasn't bad - it has a similar style to The Outer Limits.
The Secret Life of Machines with Tim Hunkin and Rex Garrod was one of my favourite TV programmes as a child. They're a series of documentaries that explain how many everyday objects work in a fun and easy to understand way. Unfortunately they haven't been repeated for many years, they've never been released on DVD, and they're virtually impossible to get hold of on VHS. It seems that somebody has decided to do something about this by posting the full series on Google Video!
I was a bit concerned about the possible copyright violation, so I checked Tim Hunkin's web site to see if he had anything to say about it and if he had any news about an official DVD release yet. From what he says on there, it appears that he endorses the provision of free copies of the programmes on the net. Brilliant news! If you know any inquisitive kids of any age who like to take things apart and figure out how they work, point them at these programmes immediately and they'll love you forever (or at least until they've watched them all and decide to try dismantling the family car).
The Internets are very quiet this morning, so here for your amusement I bring you the Morris Minor subplot from Bad Taste:
I've cut out all the gory bits and swearing so it should be safe to show to your visiting grandkids or whatever. The background music is rather disjoint because I've had to cut out big sections between the scenes, but it still makes up a surprisingly coherent little story.
In case you haven't heard of it before (though I suspect most people reading my LJ probably already own a copy), Bad Taste is a great comedy-horror-scifi movie, and the first creation of Peter Jackson who is now rightly famous as the director of the Lord of the Rings trilogy. If you like comedy horror with plenty of blood and guts thrown in, I can highly recommend you track down the full movie (it was released on DVD a few years ago - try Amazon). It was filmed on a shoestring budget in New Zealand in the mid-eighties. Apparently the Moggy belonged to a friend's wife, and they'd accidentally torn the bumper off while trying to tow a too-heavy trailer, hence why it came off so easily when the alien grabbed it.
I just saw this video from the 2005 JOGLE (John O'Groats to Land's End in a Moggy in less than 24 hours), and it's got me thinking seriously about doing next year's run in Fenchurch.
One slight problem: I would have to find a co-driver, as the rules require two qualified and insured drivers per car for safety reasons. It doesn't take place until next June so I've got plenty of time to think about it. I'm sure I'll be posting on the subject again if I do decide I want to do it.
Note that the full trip is actually twice as far as the JOGLE itself because you have to drive up to John O'Groats first and then back from Land's End afterwards.
Edit: and I've already had my first volunteer co-driver: RogerRust from the Morris Minor Owner's Club forum. Don't let that stop you volunteering though; maybe I can run some kind of contest to choose the best candidate ;). Roger has the benefit of experience in that he's already done a previous JOGLE in 22 hours.
Some quick back of the envelope calculations suggest I'm likely to use about £160 worth of petrol over the whole run (at today's prices) if Fenchurch is as economical as I think she will be.
As seen on UKNOT, Less Than Three is an irritatingly catchy techno song/animation with a geeky theme. Yes, it did take me a couple of minutes to work out what the title means :)
Another con, another con report. This is going to be a very long post, so apologies in advance to those who get this via aggregators where the body of the post doesn't get hidden behind a cut.
I've moved Fenchurch over to the garage below my office where I'll be doing the respray and various other bits and pieces, and I've set up a CCTV camera so I can keep an eye on her. As well as acting as a webcam and a motion sensitive security camera, it's also recording a 24x7 timelapse video of my work at 250x realtime. Here's what I've been up to today:
(If you get "This video is no longer available" try again later - YouTube seems to be acting up a bit.)
When I removed the wing it revealed yet more evidence of the dreaded steel-worm. It's going to need a bit of patching where the back of the wing bolts to the body (looks like there's a natural mud trap there).
Here's the live webcam (click on the image for the big version): If you watch it long enough you're bound to spot me picking my nose or setting fire to something with the welder.
Bond: Live action reenactment of a level from the Goldeneye N64 game
I've never played the Goldeneye N64 game, but I've played a few other first person shoot-em-ups. I was a huge fan of the Duke Nukem franchise - I once bought an N64 just so I could play Duke Nukem 64. So I found this video pretty funny. The dull, repetitive background music, the stupid enemy AI (particularly the soldier who tries to run off a balcony), the clumsy movements, the player who repeatedly bumps into a garage door instead of ducking under it, the soldiers who fire dozens of shots from close range but somehow manage to miss, the slight delay between hitting an enemy and the enemy reacting to it, the corpses that mysteriously vanish, the stream of identical bad guys...
