tommo

Last night, I watched an American basketball game (NBA) on free-to-air telvision.

This is the first time I've seen NBA on FTA Australian TV since ... *thinks* ... probably 1998?

IT'S ABOUT FUCKING TIME.

It was on the Ten SD2 channel (simulcast with HD I assume), and I've read that when they launch their 24 hour sports channel in a couple of days (which, it appears, will replace SD2), they'll also have 3 live games per week screening there. Bickety - as they say - bam.

I've been wanting to watch NBA games on TV for so long. Throughout my school years they used to screen 1-2 games per week as well as recap/highlight shows, and I've missed them so very, very much.

Oh, and last night's game? Miami Heat vs Detroit Pistons, with a superhuman performance by Dwyane Wade (rapidly becoming a new favourite player) pushing the Heat over the line for a last minute 5 point victory. Great stuff.

Now, if they can get the NBL back on the telly I'll be set.

Last night I played my first game of indoor beach volleyball, with ataxi, dafwarg and dunq. I haven't played volleyball of any kind since high-school phys-ed, and had never played it on sand. It was really great fun! I'm already looking forward to next week's game.

I was decent at it in high school, and found that it all came back to me quite quickly, so I generally managed pretty well. And we won, which is always nice :)

I just want more SwanCon people to pick a book/show/film/comic/game they're a big fan of, think about an aspect of it they find interesting, shape that aspect into a question to give it a strong topical direction, and then run a panel on it.

It sounds obvious, but it doesn't happen enough.

Just a quick post to say I really liked it. A few dot points follow, cut for some light spoilers:

( Read more... )

I need to re-read the book. Over the years my information retention from reading has improved from "fucking terrible" to "kinda bad but not too bad", and I last read it about 5 or 6 years ago, so other than major plot points I couldn't actually remember much. It did make watching the movie kind of interesting, though, having vague recollections reignited every 10 minutes or so.

Something I've been thinking about recently...

I'm getting tired of comic book movies (and I suppose sf-action in general) where there's no key villain for the first 90% of the film, so they create one at the end using the following formula:

1) There's a kinda morally corrupt (if not just plain evil) character who's been lingering throughout the film so far. The film may have made a poor attempt at making him look like a good guy so that the writers can go "Ooh, twisty!" when...
2) ...he attempts to use the same technology that is responsible for the hero's power.
3) It goes horribly wrong, he becomes PURE EVIL.
4) He and the hero have a rushed, climactic fight, because the writers didn't know how to end the movie without having the hero punch something big for ten minutes.

With the questionable exception of setting up a main villain for the sequel (in which case the climactic fight scene isn't really necessary) it strikes me as a really boring and unimaginative way to end a film. And it's resulted in a couple of films I otherwise really liked having kinda underwhelming finales.

What do YOU think?

Hey conradin, you should check out Jaga Jazzist if you haven't already. Really good electronic/jazz that's similar in places to Amon Tobin. The album I've heard is called A Livingroom Hush. I reckon you'd really like it.

The final five! Thanks to everyone who's been reading this list :)

---#5---

Ringo Shiina - Shoso Strip
(Japanese pop/rock)



Before she went on to form the awesome jazz-funk group Tokyo Jihen, Ringo Shiina carved out a very respectable career as a solo artist. Her debut, Shoso Strip, is everything a great pop/rock album should be - exciting, exuberant, creative and very, very catchy. Ringo Shiina's powerful, emotionally-charged vocals are a wonder to behold, and the little experimental tweaks in the instrumentation keep things vibrant and interesting throughout, making these 13 tracks pass a lot faster than you'd expect from the album's near hour-long runtime. The surging finale is a major highlight, but nothing can compare to "ギブス" (aka "Gips"), whose chorus is so uplifting it should lift the roof off your house.

---#4---

Comets on Fire - Comets on Fire
(psychedelic-rock, garage-rock, noise-rock)



Comets on Fire's self-titled debut album is a riotous storm of psychedelic garage-rock, layered with huge, fuzzed-out riffs that are played hard and heavy, effects pedals left, right and centre, and vocals so raw and rocking they'll shred your speakers apart. When it comes to pure, floor shakin', foot stompin', air guitarin', jumping-around-like-a-madman hard-rock bliss, there's few albums that deliver on such a high level. It's the sort of music that inspires you to want to play it in your car with your windows down and the volume up, despite the knowledge that people who do this look a bit silly. It's not exactly a complicated album, but believe me when I say it's a hell of a lot of fun.

---#3---

Deltron 3030 - Deltron 3030
(hip-hop)



Futuristic geek-hop that constantly delivers the goods, thanks to Dan the Automator's kick-ass production, Del tha Funkee Homosapien's stoned-out delivery, Kid Koala's expert turntablism, a series of A+ guest appearances and the huge number of SF/tech/geek references littered throughout the album (Microsoft, William Gibson and mecha all get mentions, to name just a few). Most of the songs establish various overarching details of the album's futuristic setting, however there is a loose story running throughout - Del plays a freedom fighter battling the galaxy-wide regimes of a dystopian future while participating in a series of intergalactic rap battles. This plotline is tied together nicely via a sequence of entertaining snippets and interludes, which drive the narrative forward and infuse the album with a feeling of real cohesion. It's absolutely one of the decade's best albums, and sets the bar impossibly high for its oft-delayed sequel.

---#2---

Jackie-O Motherfucker - Fig. 5
(free-folk, americana, improv)



On Fig 5, Jackie-O Motherfucker take an overtly exploratory approach to the soulful twang of Southern folk and Americana, in which their improvvy, jam-band stylings are driven along by multiple guitars, touches of banjo, varying percussion, harmonica, free-jazz and even some sparse sampling. Their takes on traditional classics "Amazing Grace" and "Go Down, Old Hannah" are filled with real warmth and beauty, while "Your Cells are in Motion", with its propulsive rhythm and looping guitar lines, is a personal favourite. It's refreshingly unique and utterly captivating stuff - a strikingly original album which is by far one of the best I've heard this decade.

---#1---

The Microphones - It Was Hot We Stayed in the Water
(lo-fi, experimental, psychedelic-pop, folk, noise-rock)



Warm, lo-fi instrumentation, intimate vocals, incredibly creative songwriting, some delightful guest-appearances by Mirah (who featured earlier on this list) and downright exceptional analogue production wizardry by head-Microphone Phil Elverum all come together flawlessly to make this aquatically-themed effort the best Microphones/Mt Eerie album (yes, I think it's better than The Glow, Pt 2), the best album of the year 2000, and, at time of list-making, a top-5 contender for my favourite album of the decade. It stands as an ecclectic tapestry of sonic concepts that constantly evades easy categorisation no matter how much you try to pigeonhole it, and is utterly emotionally gripping to boot. There are no fewer than five tracks here that I'd put on a "Best Songs of the Decade" shortlist, and "The Glow" - the album's utterly magical centrepiece - is one of about three songs I'd consider for the #1 spot. It Was Hot We Stayed in the Water is simply a marvel, an album that's hugely appealing not only as an inviting work of deeply human art, but also an awe-inspiring network of musical ideas to deconstruct and examine. On either one of those levels, very few albums can match it.

---#15---

Radiohead - Kid A
(experimental-rock, electronic)



Everyone seems to disagree on which Radiohead album is the best, but I reckon Kid A has to take that crown. Borrowing heavily from Brian Eno, Can and Aphex Twin, Thom Yorke, Johnny profuGreenwood and co crafted a concise and hugely enjoyable album of unsettled ambiance and electronic rock. Admittedly, I've come to realise that it's not quite the earth-shattering, 5-star masterwork that I once considered it, but it's still a damn fine album, easily one of 2000's best.

---#14---

Jackie-O Motherfucker - The Majick Fire Music
(experimental-rock, improv, free-folk)



The Majick Fire Music is a more sparse and controlled, less jammy work for JOMF, although it still ranks amongst their very best work (I'd say it's second only to Fig 5). The opening trio of "Extension", "Bonesaw" and "The Cage" are great, moody, longform tracks which show plenty of discipline and patience in the manner in which they're played, while the closer "Black Squirrels" (one of the album's few looser tracks) is a genuine contender for the single best song in the band's catalogue.

---#13---

The Mountain Goats - The Coroner's Gambit
(singer/songwriter, lo-fi)



One of John Darnielle's last true lo-fi recordings, The Coroner's Gambit tends to trade places with a couple of his other albums as my favourite Mountain Goats release. Prior to this, Darnielle had always been a very capable wordsmith, with a staggering volume and frequency of output, but his songwriting was simply sharper at this point than ever before. It's hard to miss that there's a real tension and urgency in his delivery, even moreso than usual, and when he bellows "You can arm me to the teeth - you can't make me go to war!" on "Family Happiness", it makes for one of the most intense moments in the entire (enormous) Mountain Goats discography. There's plenty of similar moments littered throughout the album, making this one of his most satisfying, emotionally-gripping releases.

---#12---

Broadcast - The Noise Made by People
(dream-pop, electronic)



The Noise Made by People is a fantastic work of tranquilized clockwork electronics drifting through hazy production, which come together to create a sound that's consistently dreamy and vivid, kind of an alternate-future version of the Velvet Underground. This foundation is built upon by Trish Keenan's flattened vocals, which give the album a lovely "sleepwalker" vibe and place it as the perfect soundtrack to being lost in the city at 3am.

---#11---

The White Stripes - De Stijl
(garage-rock, blues-rock)



This is definitely my favourite White Stripes album. It's catchier, more consistent, more economical and has more highlight moments than any of their other releases. While they'd venture into more ambitious and experimental grounds with their subsequent releases, De Stijl (along with their debut) proves for me that Jack and Meg are most in their element when they keep things simple and focus on writing kick-ass garage rockers.

I just submitted a couple of panel ideas to the SwanCon site. Thought I'd post 'em here to promote awareness and perhaps get some feedback.



Changing the Heroes

Across their personal storyarcs, many of the characters of Heroes tend to be morally fluid - with heroes falling from grace to become villains, villains facing moral crises that lead to self-doubt, characters making decisions which lead them down uncertain pathways, and some simply never shifting away from moral ambiguity. Are these character transitions plausible and elegant, and what do we, the viewers, think of the methods the writers are using to enact them?

Lost

TV series Lost is scheduled to conclude after two "mini seasons" of 17 episodes each (the first of which recently commenced in the US). In recent times, the show has arguably gained a newfound sense of direction, and this definite time limit suggests that The Survivors and Others are finally headed towards some sort of climactic endgame. This panel will encourage open discussion on the current and previous seasons, as well as speculation on future events.



I don't think we've had panels specifically about either of these shows at a previous SwanCon, although I could be mistaken. I suck at panel titles, so any suggestions of better titles are welcome.

Like several of my friends, I've been trying to lose a bit of weight lately. My method has been to eat a relatively normal quantity of healthy food each day (pretty much the same sort of food I was eating before), but instead of having it as breakfast, lunch, dinner and snacks, I'm having breakfast and then basically "grazing" throughout the remainder of the day. I like this way of eating, as I feel satisfied all through the day, rather than getting really hungry right before meal times, and I also get to eat a wider variety of foods. Combined with a reasonable amount of swimming recently, it's been working well and I've lost some weight.

My current aim is to get under 90kg, at which point I'll decide if I want to lose some more. I started out in early-January, and my weight had typically fluctuated between 95 and 102kg for a few years before that. Anyway, I'm down to 92kg at the moment, which just happens to be the magic number that puts me back into the healthy weight bracket of the bmi. Woo!

Anyway, just thought I'd share that little milestone.