scottyboy

G-Police was pretty tough, but I completed it umpteen times and kept coming back to it until I finally ditched my PS2 at the end of uni. I also had the sequel, which held my best-game-evah title for a bit, but as I replayed them I realised the original was the much better game. MediEvil was the other great, underrated PlayStation (one) game for me.

ICO Toejam & Earl G-Police Baldur's Gate Mutant League Football Pretty sure is mine.

Sounds like clipping to me, just compressed; even if it's technically not, what Joda Serk said - the distortion sounds bad.

Don't really keep up with actual Aberdeen music much, but Oxbow Lake Band, Lockah, Kitchen Cynics and Fat-Hand are pretty cool. A lot of the bands people rave about on here, I wouldn't say are "worst" or even bad, but I don't think much of, really. Dunno about worst, probably to be found among the young, generic metal/indie/pop bands that are presumably perennial. In the interests of not being boring and naming someone, I saw the Marionettes once when they first started and they were pretty mince; wouldn't be at all surprised if they've managed to improve over several years though...

I'm boycotting it, I'll likely boycott the world cups, and I tend to boycott voting too.

If someone were doing the donkey work on a music blog, and needed occassional contributors, I'd be tempted. /bandwagon.

Only went once. The music was interesting but I didn't think much of it. Must've been an awesome place if one is seriously into dance, electronica and clubbing beyond its cheesiest incarnations; but I'm not, really. It's more sadly reflective of the (always, but now apparently increasingly so) difficulty of doing anything at all musically niche in Aberdeen. (Lockah should have a huge, reflective, angry post about this. Where is he when you need him? Oh, yes, Brighton...).

Bump - nearly 3 months no posts? The Aristocrats at the Garage. On record their stuff hasn't really blown me away (especially as the guitarist is a favourite of mine) but it was a whole other level live. There was one bluesy, Hendrix-y piece improv in particular which was probably a whole other level of chops and taste than anyone (alive) I've heard. And a side of his playing that the youtube ninjas haven't replicated with depressing accuracy. Also, at one point he was playing with one hand while doing "vocals" with a squeeky pig toy, in chorus with the bassist doing the same thing with a rubber chicken. And another point where pints were bought on-stage, and the audience started yelling in Father Jack voices - "drink! feck!" - and proceeded to heckle the guitarist as he described cracking his head open after a fall ("arse!"), yet still finishing the demo ("demo!") on which he was working. Awesome.

I'm playing in the lowest, I imagine, matchmaking levels in both games. I played LoL with a friend and ended up matched with opponents about a dozen XP points higher and survived pretty well; I think there's a lot of leveling features in LoL that make it hard to really get ahead without a well coordinated team at least. Prefer Dota tbh, and there seems to be less cuntery among its players.

...aaand League of Legends.

See, they don't fail, they just move to Brighton.

I'm not even convinced Aberdeen produces any less famous/commercially successful (whatever it is "culturally significant" or "breaking out" means) relative to other places of similar population.

I'm playing Dota 2 am becoming hooked, playing online in the entry-level matchmaking isn't as intimidating as I thought it would be.

*and Bigsby puts away the poisoned umbrella yet again* edit - That's supposed to quote the Post, not Bigsby, of course.

Pretty cool, think the accuracy is a bit dubious though.

As above, it should be taken as part of the wider culture of anti-gay hatred ("you're not scared; you're an asshole" etc.) in Russia, with the law preventing anything which might redress that. "Propoganda" would include the Canadian video at the top of the video; the term doesn't have to refer to extremist distortion. Add to that the corruption which has clearly been going on that the same time. I think the IOC (and indeed, these days, FIFA) is a frankly vile organisation, getting into bed with these kind of regimes, with horrible political and human consequences, then holding up their hands and saying "hey, political neutrality". Fuck the IOC, tbh.

Mainly enjoying the shadenfreude over the yet again farcical results of the collision between international sport and corruption. And the journalists being shocked, shocked, on being asked to put toilet paper in the bin. Welcome to the world... I did get the gist of a Dispatches doc over facebook last night, didn't seem so amusing.

Not sure that means every band will be influenced by them, just as likely to be the White Stripes, or Mogwai, or the Smashing Pumpkins (cough) or loads of other big rock bands. Jan above plays in a rock band, which I think it's fair to assume is not influenced by the RHCP. Ditto with Kiss, just as likely, if not more likely, to have been Van Halen, Deep Purple, Led Zep and so on which influenced Extreme, Poison, MrBig, G'n'R, The Darkness, or whoever we might be talking about.

I share Jan's opinion of By the Way, but I own (and wore out) Mother's Milk and BloodSugarSexMagic and as I said, Fruscianti was a big (and probably permanent) influence on my playing. Weirdly enough, I was getting into Tool, Satch and Vai, and probably loads of other muso stuff at the same time. A year or two earlier my very mainstream first-year uni flatmates were enthusiastically into the aforementioned abortion (and maybe the greatest hits) which prejudiced me against the band, but reading about Frusciante constantly in Total Guitar I went back and checked out his heyday. RHCP are a bit like Limp Bizkit for me: genuinely creative, credible musicians inexplicably fronted (and critically emasculated) by a dumb-as-bricks clown. IMO: Frusciante's Vai-and-Hendrix-disciple playing rammed into a funky cock-rock (or cocky funk-rock?) band on Mother's Milk was awesome, and Pretty Little Ditty I think is one of the nicest and most interesting additions to the Hendrix-tribute subgenre of instrumental rock. Biggest influence on me though was probably the ramped-up strat tone: I was beginning to like the single-coil sound, but was also into shred and heaviness, and this made both seem possible in the same set-up. This album, as well as Guthrie Govan's live work with a Suhr Classic, made me buy a strat, moving away from my Gibson copy and EVH-style Peavey. Regards BloodSugarSexMagic, the more "serious" lyrics are nevertheless completely naff, and whatever else, but even if the funk is not the most legit (which I'm not sure is necessarily true, and the "white-boy funk" derision which sometimes accompanies such criticism is particularly dubious), the chord work is easily transferable to other funk or rock contexts in either direction (particularly since in actual funk the guitar player doesn't have all that much to do). A lot of the funky chord rhythms and voices I prefer, as well as the angular middle-string riffs I come up with, I can probably trace back to this album. The electric finger-picking thing (which can also be heard on such classics as, er, Maroon 5's "She Will Be Loved") were helpful, to the extent that I use it. /cool long story

I've done about 5 minutes research and know next to nothing about Woody Allen, but I've read prosecutors felt they had enough to feasibly charge him but chose not to, in order to spare the alleged victim ordeal of a trial. So, if she, in adulthood, felt that he should have been taken to task, I feel she should have that right (though, writing to the New York Times seems about the worst way to go about it; surely there are other ways of getting it looked into). Regards the co-incidence, it seems the plot of the award winning movie bears a strong resemblance to some of the real life dramas with Mia Farrow, which might have set her off one way or another. There also seems to have been disagreement between some of the specialist investigators, with one not ruling out that she could have been abused. That said, I'm skeptical as far as my opinion/knowledge goes, again mainly because he was cleared before and that (most of) the investigators thought Mia Farrow was behind the claim.

More bitcoin commentary: http://www.foreignaffairs.com/articles/140702/yuri-takhteyev-and-mariana-mota-prado/bitcoin-goes-boom?cid=soc-facebook-in-snapshots-bitcoin_goes_boom-020214

Tofu tastes of nothing and has the texture of nothing. What it is good for, though, is sitting in soup and stews and absorbing all the flavour.

Tough one.. only one I'm pretty sure about would be Satch's Surfing with the Alien. Guthrie Govan's Erotic Cakes in more recent years. And for stuff I jammed earlier on, which is probably still with me, RHCP's Mother's Milk or BloodSugar..., or RATM's self-titled. I've never played along to whole albums much, I could do a much more representative listing for say, 10 songs. Maybe another thread.

The Economist did a feature on Bitcoin recently: http://www.economist.com/printedition/2013-11-30 [Digital money: The bitcoin bubble]. Basically what Gladstone said, too late.

I've had another listen (or 3) to American Irony; when I first heard it I wrote it off as generic indie, but it's more endearing after giving it a chance. On the one hand, it is reaaaaaaallllllllyyyyyyyyyyy rough: there's a searing clip on the guitars and Nefarious Barney Plough (forgot who's singing on this one) sounds like he's simultaneously gargling whisky at a few points. But the sunny harmonies give it a pleasant incongruousness and catchy-ness that set it apart. The ooh-oohs are particularly nice, reminds me strongly of another track I used to like but cant recall (think it's Jesse Malin's The Heat, not sure...) right now.