More Jello plus Ministry. Although it started to sound dated even within a few years of its release, this is not a bad album. The usual lefty paranoia from Jello with lots of forced lyrics and such and yet another album-closing audio endurance test.
Here’s a brief movie I made for my Daughter using xtra normal’s text-to-movie web app. (xtranormal.com/watch/5839651) if you are having trouble seeing the video).
UPDATE: Xtranormal is no more. Links are dead.
Jello Biafra and Ministry. The first song is great but the rest of the record is an endurance test.
The series chugs along. Number three is still the best movie of the series, but this one performs as expected. The kids in secondary roles are all growing up to be weird looking young adults who have yet to master their craft.
I was disappointed when I came to the realization that this was more of a collection of short stories rather than a full novel. The tales aren’t bad, but I would have preferred a much more grandiose story arc to end of the Hornblower series.
Starts out nicely with Hornblower sent off to deal with a mutinous crew and keeps up the pace for about half of the book. Things begin to slow down near the end when the war with the end of the Napoleonic wars. Although, the return of some old friends from previous books is a welcome turn. So far, the initial trilogy of Hornblower novels are looking like the high point in the series.
A disappointing follow-up to the last Hornblower novel. This one has Hornblower in Russia helping out during the siege of Riga. Maybe a little too much politics for my taste.
This weekend, I actually left the house to see live music that wasn’t Nonagon. Thanks to John H., I got offered to see The Jesus Lizard at Metro. The Jesus Lizard is one of those bands that, during the nineties, I saw at least half-a-dozen times. Their music basically became the blueprint for much of the stuff we wrote in Der Lugomen. The band has reunited with its original line-up (technically, its second line-up since they had a drum machine on the first EP) and been playing shows since this summer. It was a pretty good show despite the fact that Yow had injured himself the night before and had to sing from a bar stool for most of the evening. His normal position is horizontally, thrashing about and body surfing over the audience. The crowd was typically wild. I managed to avoid the fray by just pinning myself against the stage barrier for most of the show. The opening band, Triclops, was awful. Truly, truly awful. Derivative, overly long and indistinguishable music fronted by a douche-bag singer who relied on an effects rack in lieu of any real talent. The comparisons to Jars of Clay were very much in order.
There’s my head in the foreground. This picture was stolen from some stranger’s Flickr site. They must have been standing behind me the whole night.
This weekend I played through No One Lives Forever again to see if it still holds up. I have long considered this to be one of the best games I have ever played. The graphics haven’t aged very well—they are comparable to what you would see in a Nintendo DS game these days—however, the story, game play, music and humor all are as fresh today as they were back when the game was released, and, despite the their simplicity, the visuals still have their moments such as the Bond-style credit sequence complete with a dancing Cate Archer. Plus, I will never get tired of the incredibly catchy soundtrack music. I would love to see a NOLF 3 one of these days. I may even be up for buying one of those nerdy “who the hell buys these things” collectors’ editions.
A fairly good sci-fi novel about a pair of telepathic twins separated when one goes off to survey new worlds in a near-light speed starship. Although somewhat dated in it’s writing style, the book does a good job describing how near-light speed travel would affect the aging of the twin in space compared with the one on earth.
