JR Merlin’s Oddcast

Here it is, the latest episode of the show, coming at you with an international selection of free punk. Gummow, this one’s for you!

Trick Seventeen - Those Flowers - by-cc-nd
P.O.Box - Bully - by-nd
Nosebone Inc. - La Courde au Cou - by-nc-sa
Curly’s Revenge - Better Days - Licence Art Libre 1.3 (LAL 1.3)
Autonomadic - King of Beers - by-nc-sa
THE NEXT LEVeL - The Anthem - by-nc-nd
Distemper - Утро - by-nc-sa

All the tracks today can be found, for free, on the Jamendo website.

 

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Ahahaha, yes. You read that right, there is a new JRMO for your aural orrifaces. Go grab it!

Music today was all from Jamendo, recently voted the best site for music on the entire Internet.

Tracks were:

Time Kills by White-X-Blues Band
Crazy World by Wild Dawn
Mairie by Bruce Machine
The Believer by Holy Pain

 

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Tattoos are everywhere these days. At least, it seems that they are everywhere, perhaps it’s just because I work in a bar and spend three days a week at college. Maybe it’s because I have several myself, that makes me more aware of them.

Tattoos are unusual things. Each one should be something personal to the person who wears it. I say should, because, if you’ve every been in to a tattoo parlor, you’ll have noticed that they have lots of designs that you can just walk in a choose from. If you choose a tattoo like this, then frankly, you deserve to bump in to somebody who has done exactly the same thing as you and picked the same design as you.

To those of us that have crafted their own designs, or had them made especially for you, you have a special bond with those tattoos. No doubt, when you look at them or think of them, you’ll be flooded of memories of where and when, what was going on in your life at the time. And if you truly have something special, then you’ll remember what it meant to you when you had it done.

The meanings of some tattoos are obvious: my soon-to-be-former brother-in-law has Britannia and his blood type on his arm. No prizes for guessing that he’s ex-army. If somebody has a Swastika on their forehead, chances are that, at the time they had it done, they aren’t a nice person.

Other tattoos are harder to work out. Perhaps you’d never work them out, and you need to be told what they’re all about.

I’m currently sat across from a young lady who has a tattoo on the inside of her wrist, it appears to the shadow of eight paths coming together, a bit like the crosses of St Piran and St Andrew, except, not the lines of the cross, but the areas between them. I have no idea what that’s all about. I’ll never know, as chances are, I’ll never see her again. I just hope that she doesn’t regret her choice when she’s older.

Will I regret my tattoos when I’m older? Honestly, I don’t know. Best case scenario, no because I’ll be of the same mindset then that I am now, or because they’ll all bring back memories of when I had them done. Worst case scenario is that I suffer a paradigm shift and suddenly I find myself as being somebody that is completely different then who I am now.

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I actually have space to bust out the MacBook Pro today, so no dropped key presses! Huzzah!

These days, it seems, not a week goes by without somebody releasing a cover into the charts, or a film is remade using new effects and technology. Even the fledgling video games industry is starting to see games being remade to take advantage of improved hardware.

So I ask, why are books not receiving the same treatment? Now, I understand that some authors will tackle the same topics or events, especially those writing fiction based around true events, and that just recently Pride & Prejudice & Zombies was released. This is hardly the same as rewriting The Hobbit or Animal Farm (minds out of the gutters, you sick puppies!).

Imagine, if you please, 1984 as written by J.C. Hutchins, or Return of the King - The Chris Lester edition. Better still Scott Sigler’s War of the Worlds. How about Tee Morris and Philippa Ballantine teaming up to take on the Chronicles of Narnia?

Now, the strange thing is, that as a film director, you can take any novel and rework it anyway you see fit: World of the Worlds (the one staring Tom Cruise) or Baz Luhrmann’s Romeo and Juliet. Neither of those are 100% accurate to the original text. (I suppose the same is true of Peter Jackson’s Lord of the Rings (side note: in RotK, whenever a new character appeared on screen I shouted out “It’s Tom Bombadil!” partly in futile hope, partly to piss off my mates and those people around me).) In order to produce a film, you must* have a script, which means somebody has to take the original manuscript and edit it in to something that the producer wants.

Yet it seems that screenwriters rush in where novelists fear to tread.

Perhaps it is just that authors are too hell bent on blazing their own trail. Perhaps they don’t want to become the Westlife of the written word.

Maybe it’s just that me thinks about these things.

*Yes, yes, I know there are improve films out there, but really, how common and successful are they?

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I’m going airsofting tomorrow. For those of you that don’t know what that is, it’s a combat simulation sport - think paintball with added realism.
I enjoy it, obviously, otherwise I wouldn’t drive ridiculous amounts of miles every month to go.
The problem with me airsofting is that it filters through to my every day life: the jacket that I’m currently wearing, the conversations that I have, but perhaps worst of all, the way I look at places and try to work out if they’d be a good place to skirmish.
It’s something I remember doing as a child, except then it wasn’t airsoft, it was Quazer. The difference is that I’m an adult now, I should know better.
Still, I know this and I continue to play.
What’s more, I’m really looking forward to tomorrow!

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I must start making notes on what to blog about. Last night I had a couple of good topics to write about, but this morning, they’ve all fled from me. This will never do.
My mum came home yesterday. She’s back for 3 weeks to smooth out some problems that have arisen. We (mum, my sister Vic, Lindsy and I) were sat around after having take away, just chatting about nothing much, when mum asks: “what’s this website that all the celebrities are on, and you can chat with them, (at this point, I had no idea what she was on about) and one of them posted a photo of his wife’s bottom? (The penny dropped at this point, but I keep quiet.) They were talking about it in the paper at the weekend.” (No idea if she was talking about a Maltese paper, or an imported UK one.) “You’re talking about Ashton Kutcher and Demi Moore on Twitter.” And so the conversation went from there.
It’s bad enough that my mum has a Failbook (what have they done to the Chat, FFS!) account, but when she starts talking about Twitter, then it’s time to raise the alert level. I refuse to set her up with an account, as I’ll guarantee that she just won’t get it, which will lead to me being asked a host of questions, which I’ll do my best to explain in plain English, only for her to continue to not understand.
Twitter used to be our village, somewhere for the bleeding edge of the technoratti and geekdom to express frustrations and communicate with one another. The likes of Ashton, Britney and Barack have made big media turn their lenses towards us, in an effort to see how it works and what they can use it for. Of course, there are people in the companies that know what it’s all about, they probably run their own account, plus one for their company, but those in charge, those in power of old media, just don’t get it. They look at it and see pictures of the Hudson plane crash circulating before they’ve even finished their cup of coffee. Then they see Oprah tweeting about nothing, and they can’t see how both things can co-exist in the same space.
The truth is, they don’t. Those that (and brace yourself for a few more sweeping generalisations) follow celebrities are not those that care about how the Mars Rover is doing. Much like the Internet as a whole, Twitter is many things to many people, and it’s able to do so quite easily. What I think would prove this would be a “neighbourhood map” of the entirety of Twitter: an “image” that links followers and followees. I think they’ll be several distinct camps of people. Yes there will be those that cross between the camps, but I believe them to be in a minority.
What’s my basis for these thoughts? My own thinking. I have no proof to back up or disprove the theory.
Don’t forget to follow me on Twitter!

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Another trip to college, another Blog from the Bus.
Popular culture would have us believe that the first rule of being a librarian is to never judge a book by its cover. Often, people use this notion to say that we should look beyond the first impression that people send out.
Sharing this journey with me are the follow*:
A geek
A nerd
A swat
A goth
A party guy
A guitarist
A glamour girl
To list but a few. While I daren’t say that everybody on this bus has the freedom to where want the choose, I think it’s probably safe to say that most of them do. So, is then fair to make the above list, based on how they have chosen to portray themselves? They’ve put their outfit together an created a certain look, which has almost certainly been inspired by whichever cultures and subcultures they belong to or associate with.
Take me as an example: I’m wearing a pair of faded olive drab cargo trousers, a blue Animal hoody and a genuine issue German Flecktarn parka. What image does this put across of me? Somebody that’s into military “things”? Probably. Is it true? My extensive airsoft armoury and hundreds of pounds spent skirmishing probably atest to it being true.
So I’ll put it to you like this: don’t judge a book by its cover, as it didn’t have a say in how it was clothed.
*By my definition, not necessarily theres.

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Just a quick update to let you know about a few projects that I am involved with at the moment:

Firstly, go check out Weather Child, a podcast novel by Philippa Ballantine. I’m the voice of John Louden, father to one of the main characters.
Secondly, I’ve been approached to be in a film, not too much information about that yet, but it should be pretty cool. Don’t expect to see me on the silver screen mind, I have a feeling that this may end up like the last film I was involved with.
Thirdly, I’ve been offered a part in another podcast novel that’s going to be recorded this year. That’s all the information I’m probably allowed to talk about right now.

Keep your eyes and ears open for me!

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I may have stated that I’m a Web Technology student. That means I’m learning to build reliable websites that function across all browsers and things like that.

As you may imagine, there’s a fair bit of research needed, wheter it’s the correct syntax for a MySQL query, or the history of DDoS attacks. We’re forever needing to look things up.

Currently, at college, they’re doing some work outside of our building. They seem to have struck the fibre optick cable that connects our building to the rest of the campus. This, in effect, killed the independent net connection that we required (we need a separate one from the rest of the college so we can play round with ports and the like).

So, until about 2:30 yesterday afternoon, we had no net access. Some of us tried going to the library, only to find the books there are 8 years old, and don’t contain the necessary information for our course. All of the library computers (which are connected via the college’s regular network) were occupied.

2:30 yesterday rolls around, and we’re switched over to using the regular network with all the other users in the college, and all the restrictions that that incurrs.

Gods only know what I’ll find when I get in today.

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Yesterday I was going to talk about procrastination, but decided it could wait till today.

When it comes to doing things, I like to prioritise: those which are urgent get done first. Sadly, I seem to have a screwed up definition of urgency: this morning, it was answering an email and tweeting were urgent, which pushed things like getting ready for college and breakfast down the list (thus far, breakfast has consisted of a single Werther’s Original), until such a point that running for the bus became more urgent than tweeting.

I think that’s why I like this bus blogging thing: I can’t really do anything else whilst stuck here, so it gives me a chance to get to something that would otherwise be way down the list.

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