Stripey

The best story I ever heard was from a guy who went to the chip shop after a late, long night on the town. He and his mate sat down at a table and this random stranger joined them. They had chips and the random drunk guy had a 'half chicken' (common to get in a Dutch chippers').

After a while the guy jumped up and shouted out 'bollocks! I said I did NOT want mayonnaise with the chicken!"...

....Turned out it was an abscess......

thats an urban myth with a few variations, one being the chicken burger in mcdonalds...

That's quite interesting - I always feel I'm not doing enough, though this is usually based around what I read about huge amounts of compression being a fairly routine part of modern music making, as opposed to compression making the music sound better. My mastering process (if that's what it is) basically consisted of sprinkling a few compressors around the mix and hoping for the best, though these are issues I am acutely aware of and generally seeking to rectify.

IMO compression is pretty widely misunderstood and overused. It's only necessary if there is a problem with the mix which needs to be corrected, i.e maybe you've put your drums through a tape emulator to get some character into them, but that's flattened the dynamics so you would use a compressor to bring the attack/decay, the snap and punch, back into them. Then again you could achieve the same result by mixing back in some of the dry drums...

If you put heaps of compression on the elements of the tune all you're doing is actually increasing the peaks in the waveform and pushing down the volume of the track. People do this and it sounds punchy and it pumps, but once it's rendered it sounds quiet compared to other tunes, so they will then go and stick a brickwall limiter over the whole mix and chop off those peaks they've just created in order to bring the volume up, making the mix a bland wall of noise that's incredibly fatiguing to listen to.

It's much nicer and more natural to hear the dynamics of the sounds themselves, rather than dynamics imposed on the whole mix by sidechaining compression.

the lead synth sound that runs through the whole piece is kind of too dry and uninteresting to sustain interest, tbh I thought "oh no" as soon as I heard the first few bars. The rest of the synth sounds were pretty dry too, there's not really anything there that excites or holds interest and the same goes for the drums really. Mixwise, there's not really any bassline coming through and you're really overdoing it with the compression! There is like a fine line between a bit of subtle pumping and full on sea-sickness inducing compression hell.

the snail was probably the healthiest ingredient in the whole thing.

vaios are overpriced, they used to be good value and I've bought three altogether, but now they are really just far too expensive for the spec. I guess it's no coincidence the price went up and the styling went OTT since some judicious product placement in films over the last few years.

Toshiba offer good value for money at the moment, but tbh with a budget of 500 quid there are loads of good deals around regardless of brand, especially if you're just looking for something to use for general internet shit and ms office. 300 quid these days will get you a perfectly acceptable laptop.

I still have a toshiba laptop I bought in 1997 when I was at uni and it works perfectly, whereas the p4 2.4ghz vaio I bought roughly 4 or 5 years ago I've had to remove the lcd panel from because it failed and the battery doesn't last over 15 minutes. It's basically not any use as anything beyond a NAS and shell machine. Also it weighs a ton, something to watch out for with these "desktop-replacement" laptops with ridiculously huge screens.

I second avoiding fujitsu siemens btw, the build quality is poor and I've seen a couple with cracked cases and also suffering from overheating problems.

I think I would be physically sick if I took a bite of a ginsters "chicken and mushroom slice", snail or not.

i've not given it a great deal of thought

oh really?

Do you think it is actually a photo of him, or even his name?

yeah that's him. Can you honestly imagine kode9 hatching some plan with norman cook to release an album under a pseudonym in order to con the whole dubstep scene. I mean can you honestly imagine norman cook writing those tracks. l o l.

How can you possibly know what the core agenda and motivation are of a whole raft of people?

What do you think they stand for?

Who the fuck is this Burial chap?

Sounds like shite to me, i can't wait to moan about how terrible he is if he wins the Mercury Music prize instead of my own crap favorite band.

Not that the Mercury Music prize means anything nowadays anyway.

Bring back the 90s.

i heard it's a mobo he's nominated for actually, but dont get me started on that

sing in a wierd accent, maybe it will distract people from the fact that your lyrics are fucking banal and your band is utterly pointless except in it's role as a vehicle for your own ego. It worked for the arctic monkeys afterall.

Hasn't every generation had these people though? The writer talks about punks and how every previous generation strived to revolutionise, but did they really? Aside from a handful of visonaries the majority of punks were just the hipsters of the day, slavishly following the trend to appear cool. Much like their beatnik and hippy parents and the mods and rockers before them and the generation x/grunge/britrock/whatever youth movement of choice came after them.

This isn't an interesting article, it's just one guy whinging about kids today.

I don't think that's really the case, obviously all these "movements" over the decades had their mindless easily influenced followers, but at the core of each of them was some genuine agenda, some genuine action, and some genuine belief that things had to change. What's the core agenda and motivation of these kids? Fuck all other than rampant consumerism, narcisissim and self indulgence.

Haha, someone still lives in their mum and dads loft

I'm a homeowner actually, but thanks for your interest. Anyway back on topic.

Some of my "ethnic" instruments

Basket of random percussion and whistles

Rarely used and consequentially rather dusty didgeridoo

I'm sorry for putting on weight

The most interesting thing I've read all week:

Hipster: The Dead End of Western Civilization | Adbusters Culturejammer Headquarters

I take a look at one of the girls wearing a bright pink keffiyah and carrying a Polaroid camera and think, If only we carried rocks instead of cameras, wed look like revolutionaries. But instead we ignore the weapons that lie at our feet oblivious to our own impending demise.

We are a lost generation, desperately clinging to anything that feels real, but too afraid to become it ourselves.

rise of the idiots indeed.

Last time I checked the appreciation of a specific artist, be it in music or any other art form, is entirely subjective.

In which case the mainstream music industry is in the business not of promoting good music, or letting people make their minds up amongst themselves, but in the business of telling people what is good music, and that music just happens to be the stuff they own the rights to.

the drivers are working fine, it's just a misconfiguration of the WPA settings

Terminally Incoherent Blog Archive Linksys WPC54G ver. 1.2 with WPA on Hardy may help

wpa

incidentally, how the hell do you install drivers in linux?

they're either compiled into the kernel or compiled seperately and loaded as kernel modules using modprobe / insmod

google wpa_supplicant

I've not set up wpa myself with linux before.

are you using wep or wpa

Yeah that's what I'm doing.

did you have any luck taking down eth0 and then ifconfig wlan0 up and adding the new default route?

This just in: graduates with no experience = liability. People in other disciplines are happy to work 6 months WITHOUT PAY just to gain experience.

GetDarker.com :: [Article] Burial reveals himself!

i feel bad about posting this because the whole thing is about as absurd as banksys facelessness act, but here you go anyway.

don't wear an iron maiden tshirt to the interview either

Sorry i couldn't resist. It was just set up so nicely. I'm glad you enjoy the music you listen to

Well it's nice to able to listen to music in a mix without knowing or caring who made it, and deciding for yourself wether you like it or not purely on its own merit. I don't see what's funny about that. I enjoy talking to people to try and suss what that amazing tune is on that mix from the other day, it gets people communicating and gets people excited about the music.

Then again I suppose some people just enjoy waiting for the latest press release from radiohead while suggesting that anyone who does any different is pretentious...fair enough.

You're a man in the know! Most of the tracks i listened to in the last two months are so obscure that the people that wrote them didn't even know they'd written them. They are THAT ahead of the times

I'm only being honest, no need to take the piss.