DarkscapE has been cancelled. General dwindling of numbers at Ret and a general apathy in the local scene principally to blame. My thanks to ChrisT, Doug and Neal for including me in this ride, I had some great times...

I've not given up on the idea of a Industrial/Goth night in Leicester, but I can't see how things can proceed now. After all if some of the best local DJs are fed up with the scene then how can you get the rest of them moving?

Well I'm not defeated yet, but it does look like going out to a decent night may need a farther trip afield now :-(

Apparently it's Retributions Birthday this Saturday and there may be cannibals and grass skirts or something. Also there shall be a chance to see an inebriated riak try to remember how the decks work after a long absence!

I have been recruiting patrons by a painstaking process of word of mouth and have over a dozen promises of attendance based on that alone. All I need now is for YOU (Yes YOU) to attend as well ;-)

Goth, Industrial, EBM and other dark tunes (not menthol ones)

39 degrees celsius at the moment and apparently it will get hotter at the weekend. (It was 45C a couple of weeks ago.)
We have martian soil outside our apartment. I bought a few cans of Lager for equivalent of 35p each, a bottle of wine for 1.00ukp and a bottle of Amaretto for 3.30ukp :-)
Still haven't found a good resteraunt near our apartment though :-(

By this time tomorrow I shall be in Crete. Been too busy to really get excited, and I'm going to miss darkscape_club. Oh well hope to see you in August!

In other news I am highly irritated after reading a anti-hoodie magazine article that contained the phrase (from memory) "some say that wearing hoods is a natural reaction to the increasing amount of CCTV in our society, I say oh dear where you caught stealing car stereos, poor thing"

Or to paraphrase "only the guilty have anything to hide". Can't decide which is more annoying, the authors naivity or realising that I should support the right to wear hoodies despite hating them?

From http://www.whitehouse.org/news/2007/07/independence-day-07.asp

"On Independence Day we remember. We remember a great war. A war fought by a rag-tag band of scrappy insurgents, fighting against the occupying army of the most powerful Empire in the world. An Empire so arrogant and selfish, it thought it could lay claim to every corner of the earth, and snatch all the world’s resources for itself. An Empire so in love with itself, it thought is was God’s favourite, and believed itself duty-bound to jam its style of government and way of life down the throats of anyone who disagreed with it. Many said that the scrappy insurgents could never win, that the Empire would crush them like puny ants. But the rebels fought on, and their numbers grew, as citizen-soldiers dropped pitchforks and took up crude weapons to fight for their liberty and independence. These brave and determined fighters dispensed with the rules of warfare. They hid in the shadows, launching devastating attacks on the soft underbelly of their fearsome enemy. The Empire called them cowards and terrorists. But in the end, the Empire lost. Lost because of their undeserved entitlement. Lost because of their greed and laziness. Lost because their so-called divine leader – a dude named King George – was a stubborn warmonger who couldn’t accept that his ass had been whooped. Which wasn’t a big surprise really, since dumb old George only got to be in charge on account of he was related to some older, smarter guy with the same name."

Ok so it started with an ill considered move on my part. I read "the Sun" editorial. I'm not proud of it but I was bored and it was the only thing to read while I was waiting for my food.

Apparently the S(c)u(m)n wants to call on our new PM* to "tear up the hated Bill of Human Rights" because all it does is "prevent our security forces from protecting us effectively."

Can we suspend it just for him? Just long enough to have him arrested with no cause, held with no charge or right to appeal and then force him to watch "V for Vendetta" twenty times without allowing him to sleep.



Wouldn't it be funny if we became a God-fearing totalitarian state because of fear of terrorists that want us to become a God-fearing totalitarian state? (**)

* Because the best way to defy terrorism is to get an unelected leader to change our fundamental rights and protections.

** Assuming the "terrorists", (aka incompetent idiots***), were actually Muslim extremists which I'm not sure has even been confirmed yet.

*** So nice to see the British media turning a botched job into successful terrorism!

A concerning bit of news this morning considering thebuffymonster is going to London next week, not to mention for my friends who live and work in the capital. According to MSN a bomb was found and diffused in the Haymarket street in central London.

http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/19495826/

I hope they actually meant "defused"...

Glenmorangie Single Malt port wood finish = Good!

Zonealarm when installing a software suite = Bad!

It's like having your own little conspiracy theorist sat on your system tray.

ALERT! SUSPISCIOUS BEHAVIOUR!
A program is attempting to use resources on your computer! You should pull the plug now! They can't hack you, virus you or install adware if you leave it off and put it in the corner of the room!

Hope to see many of you there. It is the first anniversary of thebuffymonster and I getting together (well almost). So come and give us hugs and stuff!

Have just bought "Nine Inch Nails - Year Zero" and was slightly confused when I thought the CD came out of the drive a different colour! As I encoded the CD today to listen to on my mp3 player I ran a search for the lyrics to add to the tags and accidentally came across this article http://www.ninwiki.com/Year_Zero I am now trying to avoid becoming absorbed by the various faux websites and background to this concept album as I have way too much to do at the moment!

Very conscious of that Bill Hicks reference this morning while getting a fresh jar of coffee from the local co-op. They have playing "convenience store radio" which is just like any other British radio channel, in that it plays nothing but pop/R&B, but the ads are targeted to the shops customers.

So I was slightly disturbed by the ad that has a woman listing all the magazines available, faster and faster until she fakes an orgasm and then delivers the last line with what sounds like post-coital breathlessness.

Not that I have anything against the female orgasm, or being there when it happens, it just seems a little much for daytime listening in a shop less than 200m from a school.

yoinked from imagnocean

Crush this person!
Get your own ThisCrush.com CrushTag!

Though the only likely crush is my ego ;-D

Todays personality problem is: curious

Thanks to Voodoo's Sale!

My aging (i.e. over two years old) mp3 player (Creative Zen) is getting a bit gittery (probably all the times I've tried to juggle it). Still I'm so glad that I don't have to use s*i**tunes to update it as itunes has taken great glee in erasing all the music on my phone and now cannot synchronise with it anymore for no discernible reason. With the old firmware I could update it with creatives own mediaplayer OR a pseudo-explorer interface. Because it had started to freeze up occasionally I updated the firmware and now...
> I can sync it with most common media players or...
> I can just drag and drop files with explorer!

I shall mostly be doing the latter, as I don't need some ****ing media player to **** about with my content.

(It is also freezing a lot less now, though I've only just realised that there IS a reset button! :-/ )

Was surprised to find I had two hands this morning after a vivid dream of slicing it off & going to hospital to have a surgical hair tie hold the skin over my wrist, which subsequently slipped off when I brushed it against something leaving me to bleed a lot.

But that's not what I am incredulous about.

Nor is it the snow.

It's the fact that as my first job this morning I traced the fault in a computer to the fact that one of our pupils has stolen the fuse from the plug!