End of the year show.

A few loose ends to clear up before we move into the new year. Mostly overlooked commercial stuff from Boxing Days uber review and a few reminiscences for you as well.

Our Award for best commercial house goes to a three way split, god knows how we managed to miss out on this last time, but step forward Disclosure for White Noise with Alunageorge, Duke Damont  and his Inner Cityish Need U 100%  and Breach Jack though not actually good enough to properly jack in my mind.

A brief apology to Smiley Virus as thanks to Mail ballyhoo I caught her song Adore You and its a really nice slow jam.  The video isn't bad and has a brief shot of her putting her hand in her panties (not masturbation) which brings up the whole pornification of pop all over again.  Its just a pity her skin is covered in rubbish porn tats, (see also Cara "monobrow" Delevigne whos underboob tats are so bad they look like she is going in for a pre op breast augmentation rather than body art) maybe you dig tattoos but to me they are just fucking shit.  To be honest you can see plenty of cam models / Amateur porn models (with or without tats) wank off online so the whole thing just relies a stunt, to sell, what is lets face it a track that could easily stand on its own without her "fingering" herself for the video not matter how brief.

They tried to get Ding Dong the Witch is Dead for when Thatch died, though to be honest I played that twice when Hugo Chavez popped his clogs back in January.

Finally Bastille Of the Night is an extremely weak pop cover of Rhythm of the night / Snaps rhythm is a dancer that is much more serious than cancer, and is so bad its actually more like contracting AIDS via your speaker.

Boxing Day review.

Here is part two of our holidays special.  Incidentally why do Americans say that, its only Christmas really and Hanukkah if your Jewish the rest of the religions really don't bother with this time of year at all.  No one really cares about Kwanzaa and Eid was ages ago I know we have a big Muslim population here and its taken seriously.  Enough moaning here is my pick of the year music and book wise first up

BOOKS.

I've read a few good stuff this year and its not all non fiction.  IUCNs book on threatened creatures is a damn good read though, check out the web version to see what is endangered.

Most of the time I've been reading Lee Childs excellent Jack Reacher novels in which the peripatetic ex redcap rocks up in town to solve a crime and bust heads, I've started on 61 hours and looks like its going to be ace.  There is a film of One Shot where Scientology Midget Tom Cruise makes a good fist of being Reacher despite him being knee high to a grasshopper.

MUSIC

Listen to a lot of music and such so here goes, good stuff first as always, and a hearty kick to the bollocks for all our losers.  First up Commercial music.

Award for Best song never sung by Fred Ventura goes to

Daft Punk Get Lucky. Featuring Nile Rodgers and Pharrell Williams and whenever I hear it I hear it sung by Fred Ventura with his thick Italian accent.

Best neosoul sung by a wife beater.  Fine China Chris Brown.

Forgot all about this but its a rather nice song sung by an utter cunt.  Lovely break down  that reminds me of the eighties and there have been a lot of tracks that have tried to take me back there.

Best song in need of something extra. Drake Hold On we're going home.

He has an ace voice and this is a good song that for me is just getting going.  I've tried tabbing off in youtube and bringing up old synth demos but so far nothing really matches the sound in my head when I hear this.  Even worse there isn't really a clean acapella so I can add the massive synth breakdown it requires.

Best song to come from New Zealand Lordes Royals.

We just wanna be Roy L. Gay Goose shagging in the back seat. We drive cadilac in our dreams. Ha ha ha.

Best rap about charity Shops. Macklemore Thrift Shop.

Not only does it remind me of where I get half of my music nowadays it also reminds me that this along with Lordes has a great message that it isn't bankrupting yourself for the weekend trying to get wrecked and waking up with god knows who on a sunday morning.  -1000 goes to Macklemore himself explaining that his name is pronounced Mack Le More as it makes him sound like a massive bellend.

LOSERS

Wrecking Ball sMiley Virus Cyrus

Is this a thing now I don't care about her twerking at MTV and I don't care about this song. However I do care enough to put up a picture of a bootleg towel of her.

Its the face on this that creeps me out.

Robin Thicke Blurred Lines

Don't care about the controversy of the video having some naked chicks in it Mirwais did it first. Don't really care that its much of a dull song, no its that Thicke comes across as the biggest bellend ever. #FUCK OFF.

Michael Buble Christmas Album.

Mr Insincerity himself manages to ruin Jingle Bells, which admittedly takes some doing, but he and the Puppini Sisters manage it with some aplomb.

Avici Hey Brother.
For the heinous act of marrying bland trance with Country music, two genres that should never cross.

Jason the Rolo Trumpets.
Just vile, but has one redeeming feature in that it reminds me of this old nonsense.

MY UNDERGROUND Winners for this year are.

Paranoid London. Paris Dub 2. You'll want the original demo of this as its an acid monster.
Altern8 Activ8. Unsuccessful Christmas Number One this year which was a shame. The mixes were largely lame as well except for one nice acid remix that was the boss.  There was the Obligitory dubstep mix as well which was total bollocks.
D'Marc Cantu. Tanzakuro. But mainly for the 150bpm monster acid track speedfreak that sounds like mid west style tracks by Woody McBride.
The Orb, Solid Steel mix, The Orb FACT mix with Lee Scratch Perry.  Both mixes are absolute genius and are liberally filled with the Orbs lovely plunderdelic style of dub house (Louis Armstrong, The Cranberries and quite a bit of Scratch I can here).  They're both available for free either on Soundcloud or from FACTs site and well just check em they're awesome.

Finally ASMR stuff. Not sure what it stands for but it largely relaxes and gives me the weirdest boner at the same time.  Its largely hot women whispering in your ear for about 30 minutes, in some sort of  non sexual role play role, I.E crystal healer or heavy breather, their aim is of course total relaxation.  We like Heather Feather and Queen of Serene both should be listened to with headphones in for maximum effect and in some place quite, though I have listened to both whilst working to chill me out.

Merry Christmas.

No really this is my favourite time of year and to start off here is a small review of stuff that'll probably carry over to tomorrow.
I've been reading through last years collection and stuff and mainly chuckling at posthumous nonce which is a great name for a metal band or indeed Lostprophets now Ian Watkins is in jail for fiddling.  We had a poor year this year which saw our local cactus society branch close, Youtube go full retard and both Maggie Thatcher and Nelson Nutella die.  I'll do all the music bits tomorrow so for today you'll get various awards and that.

Starting with.

Best Show on Television Award: An adventure in time and space.

Recreating William Hartnoll era Dr Who for the 50th anniversary is an unalloyed treat. This showed the struggles that Verity Lambert had bringing the show to the screen.  A few things I didn't know about that was that they had an Indian Producer, rather forward thinking for the early 60's.

Tennis. Andy Murray won thus breaking the sixth seal and unleashing the prophecy that the world will end when a Briton wins Wimbledon.  Didn't watch obvs as tennis is boring.

Best Youtube poop.
There's been a few in contention, mainly Michael Rosen stuff as he's the gift that keeps on giving.

I think you know what I mean.

If I had to nail one down its Chicken Pika's Michael Rosen's Adulterous Dad
as the sentence mixing on that is really nice.

Latest fad on YTP. Rog
He goes by many names but if you've ever seen PC virus total or some of the other shit he sells Rog is now a new favourite for YTPers. Also he also doesn't mind the whole YTP thing as well.

Miranda Awards 2013.

There are a few things I've seen which are largely odd or unwatchable.  I don't tend to watch the mainstream stuff like Strictly or X Factor and not even Steve Davis in the Jungle can make me watch I'm a celeb, so my picks aren't that mainstream at all.

Room 9.

This was billed as a South African version of the X files a mash up of two of my favourite things.  Sadly the execution on this was horrible and came across like the BBC doing one of its interminable dramas on a Tuesday night.  Its not that it was cheap but was total bollocks that did it for me.

Numb3rs.

Imagine there is maths guys that can crunch maths problems to solve crimes.  Imagine that unlike say Alan Turing or Stephen Hawkings they are Hollywood ugly (i.e not that) and American so maths gets corrupted into math.  Personally I can't stand that and the final nail is that it was several degrees worse than the most far fetched CSI Miami episode which to say is very bad indeed.

Other stuff that warrants a mention but no explanation.

Fox cancelling Touch after 2 seasons.
Syfy cancelling Warehouse 13 after 5 seasons, (its best to go out on a high I suppose).
BBC Christmas Robin idents.  Unoriginal but endearing nonetheless.
Manding Ngor.  South Sudan correspondent with an excellent name.
The axis of horror that fuses CBBC trailer with autotune.
D Love and his futile attempt to sell Digital Radio to the apathetic British public.
Discogs cancelling their reviews. So sad.
An ITV bumper involving ducks on a village green, that I've never seen since.

and finally. UK Gold showing The Two Ronnies Spectacle thus showing up the rest of you sad clowns just what comedy is.  Oh and plenty of behind the scenes stuff too including the Two Ronnies Down Under.

Round up time of year.

Its that time of year when I break out the best of list for music and the Mirandas for television that has pissed me off, so this Sunday's little post is a small round up before we tuck into our Christmas meat.

Nigella Lawson.
This was big in the UK,thanks to the recent fraud case involving her aides and revelations about her taking cocaine as well as the break up of  her marriage to Charles Saatchi.  Do I care about any of that, no, its largely a throwaway comment in the Mail on Sunday about her being on Desert Island Disks.

The full line up is here at the beebs own page and makes for interesting reading.  Apparently she is a big fan of  Mory Kantes Ye Ke Ye Ke (Hardfloor mix) labelling it as a personal favourite, something I would never pegged her as a dance music fan especially a big storming acid rework of the original but there you go.

Bubble Bobble. Lost cave.
Didn't know this was up to version 1.2, but if you want to play a good hack of the original Bubble Bobble arcade game then this is available here.  I said it needed balancing to iron out the difficulty spikes and that is exactly what has been done. We would also recommend getting mameuifx as your main mame as it plays bootleg and rom hacks without much hassle.

More Christmas tat.

Went to Woolwich to drop off some donations to charity and had a look round didn't see many manic street preachers at first but that all changed as I reached the Mind shop.  They had a load of folk out from the New Wine church (now the Ebenezer Goode cathederal of god), they had the usual leaflets about jesus and some dude dressed up as Father Christmas behind a Yamaha Tyros2 keyboard of all things.  Its the first time I've ever seen a black santa, and this one had glasses as well.  In fact the Christmas stuff didn't end there as they had a mastiff with a tinsel collar at the bus stop near Primark, it looked rather ace actually as those dogs aren't really cute.  Coming back they had all came out of the wood work and there were millions of the buggers preaching outside smiths.  There is a letter in the Greenwich time moaning about the Chuggers and Preachers so can't be the only one to get pissed off by it.

People Who Annoy Us

So I've spent the best part of half an hour dicking about trying to find a way of logging in to post this, as Google in their infinite wisdom decides I need a Google+ account even though my existing G+ account is never ever used.  Oh it gets stuff posted to it and if I'm surfing in Chrome I can even put comments on videos "lucky me" but if I use Firefox and who wouldn't I can't even do that as Google Plus is SHITE.
I've sort of fixed it now as I have added a X (its not an app we're not apples) to Chrome which means I should be able to sign in and post through that.

Normally I use Chrome for select things (I.E porn) as Firefox gets all my regular day to day traffic, Chrome also hosts a few out and out classic games such as Miniclip pool and Spelunky, and of course Spelunky Porn.

Nonce Sense.
Incidentally here is another one of my bugbears, NSPCC ads. They've got a new ad out for Christmas reusing the same child actors who by my reckoning must at least be grown up with their own kids by now, but with some added bits of onscreen gunk and a fey version of a Christmas hit.  Is this a thing now get some dopey bird to sing a light version of hit songs, you know what I mean Gabrielle Aplin's version of The Power Of Love for John Lewis last year or Lily Allen with the bear nonsense for this year.

At least they didn't include the clip of the little boy playing Tony Hawks Skating, but I wouldn't put it past them. Incidentally one of the most excellent and by excellent, I mean messed up things I saw, was one of the original ads with a laugh track added.  Its gone from YT now as is my inspired copy (i.e. massive cash in) largely for using Orbital The Box as a backing track. I'll add it to Mediafire in anyone wants it but like everything I've made it is awful and everyone thought I was taking the piss out of abuse rather than the ad itself. The perils of Autism.

Christmas Junk

Forgive me if I treat this as some random update but have been busy with Christmas shopping and stuff.  Mostly getting stuff for parents and looking out for cards and presents so have been preoccupied and that.
Maybe next week I'll have something better but for now here are some unfocused stuff I've come across.

*Some hideous bear hats in Poundworld that are supposed to be endearing but come across as body horror.

*Finding someone had put some breath spray packs on the tampon rack in Wilkinsons, and if you got a dirty mind like me that is quite a bad stretch.  At least it wasn't Listerine.

*The only endearing thing I've seen is some Starlings singing down at Aldis at Thamesmead. They were all around the cars and on the handles of the trollies near Morrisons. A mix of youngsters and older birds in their winter plumage it was nice to see.

*Oh and Blockbusters is officially fucked.  The store there is officially closing today and they are flogging off all manner of gear at 90% off and various store fixtures as well.  They had Alien breed compilation for PC and a bargain basement bin full of PS2 football games.  Either Pro Evo or Fifa 03 they had Tiger Woods for PSP and Go Sudoku as well but to be honest I bought nothing at all as they had nothing that appealed to me.

Losing Neverland

We didn't realise until it was posted up on Siliconera but the company Neverland is going into liquidation.
Though mainly known for the Rune Factory series of games they also did the Lufia series for the SNES and later other systems, which I've never played but have been really well received (IIRC Superplay gave it 79%).  So with heavy heart its time to give the first 3 Rune Factories a good raking over.

Rune Factory.

The original but not the first Harvest Moon Spin off, and if you've played Harvest Moon you would be at home here.  Basically its Harvest Moon with combat and a few bits and pieces to add to it.  You can marry and have children just like Harvest moon and they will not do anything much here though later series will expand on this.

It still starts the same you turn up in some no mark village with amnesia and have to take over a plot of land to turn it around.  You'll gain tools by talking to people and have a small cave to explore at the end of your land.  Where it differs is  that there are generators in there that spawn monsters and your farm tools will deal damage as well as dropping items that can be used to craft more weapons and armour.  There are a few ladies to court and settle down with, theres no gender selection here though until  I think 4 and beating the first dungeon (Clemens cave) will give you a chance to take on other caves dotted around.

I haven't played this in ages and had IIRC Sickly Felicity from the store as my partner, though I could have had the girl who ran the bath house.  (Pro Tip: exploit the bath house you'll get back all your energy and it only costs 10 gold, you'll make that back easily selling random weeds).  I remember the vicar was a miserable cunt called Wesley, and that the fisherwoman Sabrina was a total lush, sadly not dateable they have a thing against milfs.  The kid in this Cecillia becomes a date option in Rune Factory 2 predictably she is a maid character.  

At a glance what is new here.
Many caves to defeat, though this would be reduced to 4 seasonal caves in later games.
Combat with recruitable creatures that could be sent to work on your farm.
Thats it

Rune Factory 2

This is a continuation of the story set in Alvarna, you still have amnesia and for some reason you are in a different part of the country.  Your dungeons have been reduced down to 4 and worse part until you settle down with a nice young lady, knock her up and more crucially build a school you won't actually be able to explore any of the dungeons fully (and only then as your offspring).  Incidentally you'll do the ultimate dead beat dad thing and bugger off a full two days after all those things are implemented (though those townsfolk saps still hold you in high esteem).  So with school built and lessons to go to your child can learn recipes for making things and due to some pretty harsh unlocks it'll take ages to level up and make the best weapons and food.  Our bride here was Yue a travelling merchant and cutie in a kimono, although we could of had wannabe teacher Mana or Cecillia one of the only recurring characters from the original Rune Factory.  I still haven't beaten this as the bosses are tough and it takes ages to do stuff, plus time really drags here and your day takes what seems like a week to pass.  This is the weakest in series definitely.

At a glance whats new here.
Reduced caves to fight in.
Generational story that lets your kids fight your battles for you.
Days that drag on for weeks.
Takes ages to actually cobble together anything for making.

Rune Factory 3

This is a more modern version and isn't really inspired by anything that went before.  You still have amnesia and you still get a plot of land  to cultivate, however this time you get the upgrades from the later Harvest Moon games.  This boils down to you can throw items without them disappearing and seeds only fill one plot of land rather than a 3x3 square.  You can also grow seeds that will grow into monsters that will help you out, we have a floating lillypad to help us get around and something that becomes a sword.  On the downside everyone without exception of the ginger bird on the box is a mental or shapeshifter of some description, (Spoiler as are you as it turns out, you can turn into a yellow sheep for no apparent reason, maybe its set in Wales.)

Your choices are limited to.
Ginger bird (Shara), reasonably normal has a little sister called Monica who is a brat.
Narcoleptic shop keepers daughter, wants to go to the big city but is too lazy to do anything.
Raven. Near mute weapons dealer.
Pia. Squid loving mermaid runs the bath.
Sakura. Reasonably normal girl that runs the junk shop.
Sophia. Opposite speaking daughter of fat bastard mayor Jasper.
Collette. Perpetually hungry daugher of the innkeeper.
Daria. Flaky artist who lives outside town. Really loves rainbows.
Marion. Runs the clinic and is basically Joseph Mengele in a fucking dress, always experimenting on Collete.
Carlos the fishermans daughter, a tomboy.
Finally they've spawned a village in desert that holds a village of monsters you can date their leader even though she has a horn. I've yet to pick a bride but will probably plump for the narcoleptic shopkeepers daughter out of consistency.
Edit we've married the narcoleptic shopkeepers daughter who promptly gets herself kidnapped.

Combat is much better here and they've tightened up the time issue from before now the clock ticks down even when you are in buildings.  You also learn stuff by eating recipe bread that the innkeeper bakes, which makes no sense but is a nice touch.

At a glance whats new.

Systems imported from later Harvest Moons, i.e. Throwing stuff, limited seed placement.
Your house is basically a great big tree.
Most of the women you can date are borderline psycho or shapeshifters.

FF7 NES

Well I'm starting to warm to the new logins google have set up, for those blogger users who want to know were everything is, it can be found under Dashboard and then blogs weirdly enough, you just have to login.  I still hate broken old Google+ though and they're right cunts google for forcing it on us, as its broken and horrible, I'd rather use the old fashioned way of engaging (or not) with my subscribers via comments rather than the broken system they have now.

Anyway this isn't another google rant but rather a nice announcement instead. Lugia 2009 finally released his epic rework of  Final Fantasy 7 for the NES.  Lindblum (and a few others) did the original translation and hack of the Chinese original but left many of the maps and sprite artwork untouched.  This is a massive revamp along with new sprite work and scenes as well as some difficulty rebalancing as well. 

Much more information here complete with link to patches but no ROMS. 

The original game was a homebrew remake of the original game for the NES by the company Shenzhen Nanjing.  Its pretty strange as both its cart and board are unique running on Mapper 162 from one rom bank.  Wikipedia has a pretty good write up here if want more. I had a look on Bootleg Wikia but they've just used what was already on Wiki already.

Old geeks.

This is getting beyond a joke, I've spent most of an afternoon working in getting the Bearorbust youtube page into some sort of working order and failing at most steps.  God damn omniaccount my arse this is seriously shite I didn't want a google plus account and I certainly don't one foisted me just because Google can't give them away.

Anyway what I wanted to talk about this week is the end of Eltham branch, our cactus society.  I've posted before about our Christmas party (one of our first posts fact fans) when we still had the late Chris Moore as our treasurer shortly before he passed away.  It all started from a few things such as the terrible snows at the beginning of the year and a switch over of treasurers, meaning that our numbers dropped to an unsustainable level and continued to remain that way for the rest of the year, so much so that this christmas party is more like a wake than a celebration.  The only silver lining is that we will be joining Bromley branch in the new year over at Keston not that it is any easier to get to. 

So for our last ever slide show we were treated to a trip to Madagascar the massive island off of the coast of South Africa, home to lemurs, Chamaeleons but mainly succulents.  The guy doing the talk was a pretty awesome photographer and he was running a small slide show off of some of his spare images as the talk was done via laptop.  Madagascar itself was a revelation, a mix of crashing poverty and habitat destruciton combined with some startling endemic species.  He had a few shots of the aforementioned Lemurs and Chamaeleons creatures along with Baobab and Giraffe Weevils the beetle equivalent of a construction crane. What we came for were the succulents, and Madagascar doesn't disappoint.  They have a few species of Baobab, thick of trunk like some redwood sized bottle replete with stick nest branches and cannonball fruit, Alluaudia with its spiny trunk and  its graftable onto various species of cacti as its a distant relative.  There were also various euphorbias and Pachypodiums as the countryside changed from the (depleted) rainforests of the north to the dry arid areas of the south, via the mountain lands in the middle. Most odd of all there is a solitary species of cactus, a Rhipsalis that is the only endemic cactus to be outside the new world.  Its unknown how it reached there but Phil Maxwell thinks it could be a hold out from Cretaceous times from when Madagascar was part of the super continent Gondwana.

Its a fitting end to Eltham in that we held out so long but are now (soon to be) extinct.

Fred Flintstone PH fucking D.

Looks like caveman thinking is catching, the long hated renovation of Youtube (goodbye most of my subs videos) and  its forced adoptance of  Google Plus has come to pass, pissing off everyone I know and consolidating everything into one confusing mess.  You can't comment without it and even if you do it returns errors, Google plus is of course the Red headed stepchild of social networks.  Incidentally thats where I found my log in now as part of manage your blogs rather than going to your homepage (I did want to bugger off to Wordpress or even Tumblr before looking through this so if anyone else is in a similar situation check to see if it hasn't been borged into your Gmail log in).  Even worse I had a trip down to my aunts as she wanted to pick up a new car and I wanted to do some computer stuff (basically run virus and Malware scans and update everything) but it didn't turn out like that.

I wanted to shift across some home videos she has of my family onto DVD via a Videograbber that didn't really work at home.  She has an old dell PC that I've used in the past and I generally boot it up to play stuff via FBA and a few other emulators.  However this time when I booted it up I was met with an error message upon start up that a System32 file was corrupt and pressing r to repair it (can't remember it offhand).  She had long moved on to a small laptop with horrible track pad for email and Internet surfing so it wasn't a problem for her but I wanted to get to the root of it for old times sake.  I decided if windows wouldn't boot I would try Linux and download Mint to see if it would boot via CD. Short answer yes but wouldn't accept cinnamon at all, prefering to go into Fallback mode minus any log out options.  I decided to download Ubuntu and try that as well and it worked a little better but with various crashes, both times it refused to mount the main drive and gave back error messages to check it in windows. 

Finally I Decided to run some benchmarking tools including Dells own set of start up recovery stuff. Ubuntus own drive benchmarking and Seagate tools (for we found it was an old Maxtor drive) DOS start up disc.
The upshot is the drive was knackered and the only thing for it was to take it out and replace it.  Luckily it was never used for much I lost a song I was working on in Aodix and a few replaceable roms, All the photos on there I migrated across to a cd ages ago so nothing much was lost thank dog. 

Caveman days

Its finally come to this that Google have fucked around with the blogger template so that I can no longer log into this blog via Firefox and have to use Internet Explorer instead (I can't update this blog when I use my aunts PC so its nothing new).  To me it's akin owning a car and instead of filling up with petrol ripping out the engine and adding a coal boiler instead just because steam worked so well in the 19th century.  Truly prehistoric. 

Incidentally this is just what this post is largely about, cavemen thinking and outdated ideas being posed as some sort of brilliant new idea or solution, but to show them up for what it is prehistoric nonsense.

I've moaned about the gap between the age of consent and being able to star in porno before and didn't realize that there was a similar gap between smoking and being able to by tobacco products.
I don't smoke so don't really care much for it but when I was younger it was also something you could also do at 16 if you really wanted to die young of cancer. It wasn't until a young guy who works on our team asked if I could get some fags for him (we're English so it isn't what you were thinking) that I found out there was a big difference in the ages you are able to legally smoke and being able to buy your own fags.   

Then I found out that a few of the many filehosts have been blocked on certain ISPs here, Rapidlibrary for starters and Filecrop for hosting copyright material in a futile attempt to stop theft.  I suspect a VPN or tor would get round this but for now one of my favourite waste of time games has been taken down.

I call it the Rapidlibrary game. For this you will need to pick a word off of the top of  your head and enter it into the search box.

Next hit enter and check the last 10 search enquiries on you left and see which is the sickest porn you can see on that list.  You get no points at all just for doing this and never ever download anything you'll find on that list (most of its highly illegal).  Its just a fun diversion and also proves that most of the people searching on there are massive perverts.

Finally, M and M games have a new home in Croydon, moving out of their previously tiny place in the little arcade and into a much larger and nicer premesis out by Cash Converters. I was massively impressed by the amount of retro game stuff there including a shedload of Super Famicom carts (I clocked a Star Ocean and a few Romancing Sa.Gas loose as well as a few famicom games for good measure).  Makes me sad that my SNES went to its great graveyard in the sky ages ago, not that my Nihongo is any good.
Just proves that some old stuff is still good.

Prickly Pear and Mint Ramblings

This is a bit of a split post the first half is all about Linux Mint and the internet and the back half is all about Prickly Pears. Without further ado we'll begin.

Linux Mint and online.

In the week I decided to test something out, I've noted already here that I created a dual boot system with linux mint so you either have a choice of Windows XP or Mint, but so far its been a closed system gated off from the Internet and intermittently receiving product updates by USB stick.  What we wanted to do was link it up downstairs where our internet connection is and let it run wild online.  Noting that it was a bastard to do with either XP and Vista (my system is old so you'll excuse us that we don't have windows bastard 8 running) we were just going to test to see if it would actually recognise there was a system there.

Remarkably it did first time, so we decided to run the service centre and update linux as well as bother about with firefox which I've used for years.  Your default page is Linux mint which also gives you a janky search to go with it.  We also added adblock because the internet is hell without it, and decided to also see if you could download stuff and add it, turns out you can if you use terminal and know what distro you are running but if you are unsure just look for it in the service center.  If I ever get a new computer I'll be sure to run mint to see if I can at least find out how to get online as i'll know it works.

In other news It looks like the latest updates to  NI. Reaktor, Skanner and Drive seem to be win 7 or higher only. I put this here as a Vista user it seems that 5.8 is the last version for us.

Prickly Pear.

This summer has seen some weird things flower in  the conservatory.  For starters we had a good year a lot of Echinopsis flowered for the first time in ages, helped along with the long hot summer we had.  I also had this flower too.

Bud back in June

When we came back off of holiday  there was this bud waiting for us and we thought that would be the end of it.  It would remain that size and not do much, how wrong could you be.

Three inches in all.

As the summer wore on this is what it eventually turned into a big tomato red flower with its trademark sensitive stamens.  This is quite the result as opuntias don't really flower in the UK as they require massive amounts of space and time (and I guess light as well)* to do well.  Some are slow growing but most rocket up throwing out pads replete with vicious glochids that will snag anything that will come into reach, so you can see why they are neglected. 
*Apart from that they are easy to grow and are remarkably cold hardy, we grow without winter heat and have never lost an Opuntia to cold. 

Anyway a few months later after the flower (it lasted one afternoon) had died and a green fruit was left behind I ventured back into the conservatory to see that it had coloured up and was now a deep purple.

The sad chumbero (size 1 inch).

After some deliberation I decided to take it off as it wouldn't get any bigger and stuff it into the kitchen first removing any stubborn glochids and other junk.  It stood there for about a week before I had the heart to eat it. 

All prepared.

The actual pulp and seeds itself was quite odd, it tasted a lot like a plum slightly sour and with a massive amount of juice.  The seeds themselves were bullet hard and are now back in the conservatory on a paper towel but I have to say it was quite pleasant.  The juice itself reminds me of beetroot and with all the attendant caveats about beetroot juice (it stains).  I wonder if it could be used as a dye my fingers are still purplish from cutting up the fruit, maybe someone with access to a lot of prickly pears and doesn't mind fingers like a pincushion could try it out.  I'll wait till the spring to sow the remaining seeds and see what I get (they will need chitting and preparing before sowing as like I say they're bullet hard).

Food and drink.

So its happened Google has morphed my entire blog, Youtube channel and unwanted child of a Google Plus page into one hideous shambolic whole.  Its not as if I wasn't warned but now I have one log in to rule them all and be damned if you want differently.  Also Youtuber channel owners look in your channel for the subscribers sidebar and click get Email notification for all you sub to as the new way is only frequent fliers will be updated meaning you'll miss out on all of you updates.  Its a horrible way of working I know but at least this way you'll get an Email notification when someone updates.

Food and Drink.

We don't really cook up stuff, I can make breakfast at a pinch so this will be a few recipies for soft drinks  with an occasional plea for making products that do not exist. 

Drinks.

Due to an ambivalence toward Alcohol this is strictly drinks for teetotallers and non diabetics due to frightening amounts of sugar.  We picked up a few cans of coconut juice at the weekend and a thoroughly vile sugarcane juice from an unofficial poundshop.  Really mixed up it looked like grey water from the bath and it really didn't help adding 7UP as a mixer.  Hopefully the coconut version of this will be much better, when mixed as we still have a few 500ml bottles left.

My favourite version of this is just plain coconut juice and cream soda which is heavenly.  There really isn't a straight version of coconut soda although such a thing must exist somewhere maybe this dude has some.
(hint yes he does.)

The pound shop also had cans of drink as well including the lovely pokka melon milk and a few other concentrate stuff like an orange drink version (don't care for orange) and a mango one which is nice.
Also I've had Korean drinks in small cans including a nice grape juice drink with added grapes and occasionally Sujeonggwa. See below.

Made with Persimmons

Finally because I'm obviously some sort of manchild we have Frosties for breakfast (Frosted Flakes for non UK citizens) it offers basic nutrition with the added hit of sugar.  I had the crazy idea of adding raisins or even currants to the flakes and as an afterthought reaching the bottom of the current box decided to bulk it up with Fruit and fibre.  Not too sure about the peanuts but it actually works with the added raisins to it.

Sky Plus Lego

We have a second hand Sky Box and its rather better than what we previously have, this is due to the fact its a Sky plus box rather than a normal sky box.  We picked it up a few weeks back and it required a bit doing to it where a bit stands for adding cables and a remote.  The cables are easy we just switch it over from the regular Sky box we have and it'll work no problem, card is more problematic as it seems to deny us the right to view Sky Movies and Sports (not that I care about movies and sports), but regular stuff and the odd sky channel its ok.  You know I can't remember the last time I cared about Sky one (oh yeah Touch and they cancelled that) unlike when I was young and showed stuff worth a lick.  The remote we picked up at the Meridian bootsale for the princely sum of £10 as opposed to the £25 or so they wanted in store, it sort of works (no subs no sky EPG) so I'm proud of that, all I have to do is deal with Sky and get recording added.

On other news I found my old Lego in a sweet jar in the cupboard, ominously titled stick insects on the lid (we did have them, they were a gift from a neighbour and they fed on Privet).  Tipping it out we found these things.

A mass of weird blocky trees.
A collection of dismembered lego men not including several firemen mostly missing hands, heads and legs.
A chef excellence who's main body was replaced with a set of wheels.
Various ladders (from the fire station set)
Various space thrustery bits (from the lunar landscape set)

Oh and these two characters.

Percy Pig is on your right.

Percy Pig comes with his own wheelbarrow which I still have, the other guy well I don't know who he is only that its the only thing left from my duplo set as a kid.  I love his cheeky grin and porkpie hat and seems to be part of a tugboat toy (thus making him a sailor.)

Android Days.

This I swear, will be the final bit on virtualbox for a while, and I believe I mentioned Android (or phone linux as its never known as) last time. So here goes, I had about 3 different ISO.s of this before I finally found a copy that worked.  My first got stuck in some sort of command line hell even after rebooting, the second installed fine but when it came to boot proper it got stuck at the loading screen (Ironies I'm emulating a bricked tablet) the final version I found works well and I've come to if not like Android then on a level abide it. 

You'll need to disable the mouse to actually do anything with it, and I've browsed the Google play store and even watched some porn online (even though flash doesn't work with it so watching any video is pointless). Also as its basically running in a box you could essentially click on all those ads on the side and not suffer any consequences doing so, (We've not installed adblock so the screen area looks massively cluttered and untidy.)  On the plus side I get the joy of playing android games except what I've installed so far requires an update or my virtual box is not considered a proper phone for downloading through google play.

So far I have Disgaea Netherworld  (either not supported or not let us download) and PPSSPP which doesn't run for me either on android or computer.

NEO GEO Gold SNK step in.

Didn't expect to find this via Dr. A's twitter feed. SNK have publically disowned TOMMO distributors of the NEO GEO gold X handheld console, which we translated the specs of way back when.  The console itself wasn't that great and was basically a system on a chip running a version of FBA so maybe its for the best.

Linux Mint and more boxes.

This is yet more notes on Virtualbox, and to be honest I still haven't gotten anything much to work in it though to be honest.  We got a newer version of Linux (Mint as the more observant of you have seen) and tested Android instead of AROS.  Theres a great guide to putting Android on Virtualbox here but all the machines I used are either junk or not worth it, except for Linux Mint and that was basically running it from a live CD. More later. 

First of all a diversion into junk tour territory, I had the chance to go to a bootsale for the first time in ages, down in SE12 (Well hall / Eltham boundaries).  It was billed as busy and large which actually meant having 6 stalls with a few people loitering about.  To say its disappointing was an understatement and coming home with M.A.W mixes of Hardrive Deep Inside was about the only consolation of a poor day out.

To make up for the fact we decided to mess around with Linux Mint which we previously had as a virtual machine but decided to make a full on Live install.  You can do this in windows from the Live CD and create a dual boot setup, my old XP workhorse now comes with linux power and looks 10 times better.  Everything intergrated well hardware wise and there were no errors.  I haven't had to touch the notorious terminal yet, but if you are a windows native I would say give this a go.  Bits still remind me of Workbench (I think its the dual icons on screen) and sometimes it reminds me of Mac stuff especially the windows and that.

I have even briefly scanned some stuff with it via simple Scanner (not sure its real name but would love a windows version) a small program that scans an image and saves it to desktop or disc.  I had a brief poke around gimp (horrible as always) and Libre Office (use this on PC rather than word).  Looking to poke through some old hard disks if I can get them to recognise them Mint (drew a blank in windows they don't have drive numbers it seems as they don't show up) but so far I'm well impressed with mint has to offer.

This is a box a Virtualbox.

Wrapped up and ready to go. Hello readers this is a short musing on virtualbox and Linux in general, its possibly not that helpful but its been keeping me interested for the past few days. 

We've been wanting to explore some old hard disks and as part of a recent Maplins binge have got ourselves a Hard disk / card reader all in one job.  Most of what I have isn't really readable and as I found out dead.  What I did find out reading around that booting some form of Linux could make those drives with missing letters readable.  To be honest I still haven't gotten them read as you will see but so far I'm not all that struck with virtualbox.

If you want to do what I did you'll need the following:

A USB flash drive (mine was 8GB we wanted to put PS2 isos onto it of course that never came to fruition)
A linux live USB creation program.
Some sort of Linus image see top.
Some sort of Linux Image.

And follow the straightforward instructions on the Linux live USB creator.

For our test program and first foray into Linux we trialled 2 tiny linuxes as our target Machine, an old XP beast liberated from work years back would struggle with current popular builds such as Fedora and Ubuntu (incidentally could some distro guys actually come up with Linus Linux or Ubunton with the face of Emma Bunton as desktop wallpaper just to satisfy my stupid sense of humour). 

First up as everthing seemed to be going well we had our download verified (we used Puppy Linux and DSL) and installed.  Our key was created and loaded, we found out we had a portable version of Virtualbox
and our Linux ran from this environment.  So far so good, we decide to boot up our virtual Puppy and see how it goes, except we get to a start up screen that goes nowhere and does nothing.  I'm no good at programming and command line stuff yeah I know Linux is all that even with its windows veneer over it, its still command line at heart.  So we try another distro Damn Small which is smaller than Puppy and thankfully has none of the issues either as we successfully boot it into its GUI and then discover Virtualboxes other dickish thing getting a mouse pointer to work.  If you've ever used WinUAE emulator its a bit like that there is a hotkey to trigger mouse capture (or in WinUAEs case to switch screens) except it captures fuck all and does nothing.  We decide to do the decent thing and burn it to a CD via IMGburn and switch priority at the bootscreen to see it in action.

Our main thoughts on DamnSmall is that it reminds me of Workbench 3.5 not the old school 4 colour Amiga OS, but something from 1998 with all the hacks added to make it 32 colours or so.  PC owners of an age may recall Windows 98 instead (only a lot greyer).  Its rather nice and the mouse works in the live CD just like a boss, I still didn't get my drives to work or be read so will have to read up on that via on line with my current PC.

They had a lot of stuff to look at including Firefox and a few file manager stuffs as well as a cute version of Tetris that looked like it was an exile from Workbench or Win95 and wasn't half bad.  After some tinkering and that we decided to close down and remove the CD. 

We may download Virtualbox proper and try out something more modern like Mint  or obscure such as AROS (which I remember from Amiga Format way back in 98).

More Old TV discoveries.

I know some of you are waiting for this, but I had a good day yesterday marred by the fact that google wouldn't let us login or update.  So I've prepared a short statement beforehand and copypasted it so you all know the score.


Because Google is being cunty as usual I'm having to pre write this in Notepad
but let me assure you we have made a few major discoveries regarding a few
lost things.  Its not hen a pippa but it does involve old eastern bloc cartoons and
old cable memories.

Pomysłowy Dobromir

This was something I'd long forgotten aboutand involved a small ginger kid who dreamt up
stuff with his grandpa. A small ball would bounce on his head and he would sketch
up something to bail him out of a problem.  Now watching it I remember the little
green bird as well, in fact this is real cute I used to beg my mum to tell me
stories about that guy and his chickens.  Episode here.

Nickelodeon Pinwheel.

Like some horrible racial memory, this I think there was a badly made snail called
Silas. Indeed Wikipedia agrees and throws up the Admiral bird as well as a few other
characters (oh and this is probably where I remember Simon in the Land of Chalk Drawings from). 
We never formally had a Nickelodeon channel till about 1993 and even then
it was shunted off in favour of the Family Channel.  This could have been part of
TCC's (now trouble) daytime line up.  In fact as soon as the theme tune played I knew
exactly what this was, something long buried and filled with janky puppets.

Finally our google fu managed to rustle up a name for an old hardcore record
I had that masqueraded as an Altern 8 white label.  Its Reel II reels MDA EP, and
was the dogs as usual. 

Konami Round Up.

This is a round up of all things Konami. There may be some other stuff in here mainly about the end of WOS (main site up but forums now closed for those interested) and Jim Nick Nick Davidson but damn there is a lot of Konami stuff here to deal with.

First up there are a few translations to deal with, mainly Suikoden Spin offs, so if you have a hankering for Suikogaiden 1 and 2 on the PS1 then your prayers have been answered. 

These are side stories from the original PS1 Suikoden games and play out like a visual novel rather than the RPGs you would be familiar with.  A much better description and a download can be found here.

Next is a translation of Suikoden Card stories a GBA version of a physical card game from Konami (its not just Yugioh stuff they do).  They say its not as polished as the two visual novels above but still good enough to get a release.

Finally there is a translation out for Konamis "Ladyius" shooting game Otomedius, Gradius in skirts if you will, for the arcade.  The site there is good for both general information on all of Konamis Gradius games and the patch itself.  Incidentally this was the first in a week of Konami Kracks and what set the idea off originally.  I really didn't know what sort of hardware it ran on, but it seems that its some sort of PC equivalent like Taitos Type X hardware.   If you get it working the forums there have a massive compatibility thread, to help you along.

Jim Davidson Still Unfunny.

In other news Jim Nick Nick Davidson moans that Ade Edmonson is smug and his wife (Jennifer Saunders) is funnier than him after winning Masterchef.

Put it this way what would you rather have Bottom, Filthy Rich and Catflap and The Young Ones all proper laugh out loud funny shows with Ade Edmonson in.

Or Jim Davidson doing his bloody Chalky White impression on Big Break.

I rest my case.

ZX People.

Well this is awkward. I am going to bite the bullet and be brave about myself and write what I have long suspected... that I'm autistic or have some sort of disordered Spectrum (face it you have to be to own a Speccy).  It only really dawns on you  that you aren't like other folk when you see other folk.  They know how to speak and how to do stuff that isn't awkward.  They aren't narrowly focused, obsessive and inward looking plus they have it all.  Me, well I have my family and... thats it.

I guess it started when I was little, I don't quite know how or when, but my primary school referred me to a patient group at the Maudsely Hospital at Denmark Hill, I remember going I think I still have some of the stuff they used to give out (a Postman Pat pencil sharpener of all things) and my mum made friends with the mum of a kid in my group.  He was called John and was much further down the spectrum than me, what we call Autism proper, I remember he read Lord Of The Rings and swore like a bastard.  His little brother was cool and we shared a love of snooker, both of us having tables to play on, but as for John well he wasn't like me and I wasn't like him, so didn't pay much attention.

I don't know if this intervention helped or not all I knew is that I was like no one else, few friends, odd hobbies and mostly alone.  I always though of myself as shy rather than an autist, not talking much helped and thanking my lucky stars that I could read and write and do base maths so wasn't quite a spacker like a lot of folk possibly think I am.  Then about 30 years later I read a book (actually this book) I loved cats having many over the years and it spelled it out in no uncertain terms.  I'm a cat (an autist). 

I knew what I was and where John was in the scheme of things, I was high functioning and he was somewhere below me (but thats OK, he's a fellow robot and us robots stick together). 

I still don't really fit in to the whole autism thing though, I hate sudden loud noises and loss of routine (ever wondered why this is updated on a Sunday and Sunday only), and get distracted easily, mostly though I have about 16 different things on the go at once, and while I may have laser like focus (to such an extent that I block out most things) I can lose focus easily unlike you more typical autist.  I actually wondered why other people didn't zone out like I could and wonder if its like altered states or deep meditation done by yoga practitioners or alternative therapy students / psychedelic drug users.

Finally its taken a long time to even find a name for what I am, I really hate the term aspie, its weak and stupid and reeks of weasel worded leftist PC speak.  Whereas Sperg, or spurge just makes me think of Euphorbias. It wasn't until Facebook and a post to a group (I've forgotten where they are Autistic artists if it helps) calling themselves Autists that the name clicked.  So yeah this is me autist and proud(ish).
   

Islington Junk Tour.

We decided, as it was an absolutely vile day, to take a trip to Walthamstow and go on to somewhere else as a spur of the moment thing rather than plan anything at all.

After doing well we decided on the way back to look round Islington and Highbury as A. it was on the Victoria line and didn't have to change trains or even lines and B. It was somewhere I had never been before. 

Most of my Charity shop haul had at that point come from Oxfam in Walthamstow, some ace singles there including The Beloved Your love takes me Higher and Ongaku 3 (Pink Elln and Atom Heart) which are ace.
So we decided to exit the tube and see what delights Islington has in store. 

Short answer not much.

Longer answer as follows.

If you are remotely leftwing or a ponce that gets off on the whole organic, wholefood, sustainable wankery that is wrong with modern society then Islington is quite probably heaven to you but for me its kind of a living hell.  There are only so many bearded lefties one can take before you positively have to kill everyone in the room, and this was my tipping point.  As you come out of the station you will find a Marie Curie cancer research shop, not only is it massive but its the only charity shop you'll find for miles around.  They didn't have a bad selection at all, with a massive array of both CDs and records, we managed to find some old Guerilla records stuff including D.O.P. so was reasonably happy. 

We decided to trek down the high street and found out a few troubling things about Islington, their sole supermarkets are either Waitrose or Budgens (I had to google where my nearest Budgens was, because up until that point I'd never actually seen one in the flesh.)  After a trek past the 7th identical ethnic cafe, (although with no actual ethnic people there, I don't think I saw a black face once) we came to a token working class cafe called Workers Cafe, a name so weirdly marxist you may just stick up a sign saying, Here be Proles. 

On the plus side I did see Schram and Scheddle from the Michael Rosen poem of the same name, though it was on the other side of the street so didn't go in.  We went past a McDonalds and ended up in Angel which had a Cancer Research shop complete with a well stocked vinyl selection.  We got a Funkstorung album and I love Sourcelab 3 with Jean Jacques Perry and some early Black Strobe (I'm a sucker for electro and weirdness), before getting the tube back home.

Bubble Symphony Proto

Before we get onto the main moan of the week, I'd like to spend a bit of time discussing this which turned up in a box of old jamma boards. It as the title suggests is a proto version of Bubble symphony, which I first got to play on Taitos Arcade legends for PC, (PS2 not having this for somne reason).   Even though I much prefer the follow up Bubble Memories, this version actually looks the bomb being much closer to Bubble Bobble than the world spanning rework we eventually got.

Incidentally that was the high point of my day, mostly I've been wrestling with something ordered online, first up an Icydock Harddrive dock that spontaneously combusted for no good reason, yeah we got our money back on it as well, and a Video tape snaffler from Honestech.

Most of the time its been driving me nuts due to a combination of video and problems with the software, largely it not recording anything and when it accepts a stream its largely static.  Now I'm pretty sure there are other ways of using the hardware so it doesn't go through honestechs software, which on expert is remarkably informative, but so far have drawn a blank, we have another vcr to test and if push comes to shove I've already installed the software on my old PC to see if thats the problem.  If you do make it though, I have tapes worth of Porn memories to be loaded up onto youtube. 

Looking through I have a few animes Kishin Heidan and Gunbuster (few episodes missing).  A load of Pokemon lifted from Sky back in the 90's and a few It'll be alright on the nights as well as some junk kung fu and a something tedious from Hokushin.

Top something or other missing or long forgotten products.

A following list of obscure products either long dead or just failed in the UK.

If you are wondering why this came about then this should be all you need to know, I was looking at the cans in the 99p store and it struck me that we don't see Lilt around no more.  There are numerous tropical drinks now but Lilt along with Five alive were the original pineapple based drinks but now sold almost nowhere (they're both owned by Coca cola so are probably safe but damn they weren't half bad).  Here are some more stuff that 

Burtons Puffs.

Can barely remember these, they were cheap crisps that were sold from our schools tuck shop, (no we werent posh our school did have a tuck shop).  They cost 10p and you got loads of them in a packet, nice potato crisps.  There is a thread that has some info. Burtons makes biscuits only now it seems and there is no room for crisps and stuff.

Tab.

Actually this one isn't so lost as it being a total failure here.  Americans gating in here will say oh yeah Tabs still available in the states but I will say this.  The UK version was a flop, I remember this coming out in the last year of school and of one corner shop selling it, after a while it just disappeared and Coke pulled the plug along with Vanilla coke although that is thankfully back.

I don't even remember it being any good just the advert on TV which was sort of Xfiles SciFi pastiche with the tag line now everything becomes clear.  See also mountain dew and snapple for other American brands that have died on their arses in the UK.

54321. 

A chocolate bar I only really remember from the song and Advert. I never actually got to taste this one.

Hubba Bubba Gum.

This I think you can still get, it was bubble gum and I fucking loved bubble gum back then, would take this over chocolate back then.  It came in about a billion flavours such as, Cream soda and a variety of fruit flavours. Now I don't see them around along with the other novelty gums especially the one that was just an eyeball (Horror gum I don't know) maybe health and safety got them.

Marathon, Opal Fruits, Oil of Ulay, Jif liquid.

Basically renamed to oblivion often for the worse and often under the auspices of "homogenizing" the brand.

Mr Dog, Meow mix, Brekkies.

A rather pet centric mix of stuff that either does not exist anymore or has been renamed.

Meow mix you may remember from the advert that goes Miaow miaow Miaow and was basically cat food.
Brekkies were biscuits, that I think were either subsumed into Go cat or some other terrible product.
Mr Dog, is now better off known as Cesar for reasons that are never made clear at all.  Incidentally I also saw a DVD line in Ibiza in a record shop a long time ago but they specialized in "Welsh vices" rather than
Dog food.

Atlus, Mitchell and More

Hello its been quite a while since I've added a round up of stuff but there is so much to talk about that its unreal (bro). 

Cousins on facebook.

You may have heard me talk about my cousins here and that, often in exalted tones, that we share a lot in common and they're gifted, but that really is just the girls.  In reality my cousins had 4 kids each and the majority of them are sons.  I'm not saying that they are all unpromising dullards or junior thugs, if I'm going by facebook posts (and really you shouldn't go by facebook posts) then damn I thought we were smarter than this. 

It all stemmed from monday going through my pictures and finding some comments I'd missed by my cousins eldest.  He wasn't a mate so we did the honourable thing and sent a request, only for him to reply who are you are you gay?.  The rest descended into cavespeak / textspeak which I'm pretty sure is untranslatable.
So we gave him the heads up in words he could understand, i.e. your mum was my cousin, and your nan was my mums sister.   I got a request but with the words I still don't know who you are.   Thick cunt.

Freecorder.

For sheer completeness we have a video review now up on youtube, Short version for those with tiny attention spans, if you have an offline PC (say an old XP box you don't use) its still probably not worth the hassle of downloading.
You can watch it here in all its silent glory.

Double Wings.

Thanks to haze this bizarre little Raidenesque shmup is now (more) playable in MAME.  Why does this get a mention here, because it was one of the first things I ever played in a pub.  I was 17 and along with several 6th form mates we used to go out on a saturday night to the Director General pub.  After a few, we had some cash to play the few cabs they had there, including this with its toucan in a flying helmet  a gambling version of tetris and an Addams family pinball (the greatest pin of all time).  I'd long forgotten about it untill I saw it up on there in all its emulated glory.

Oh and finally in this highly schizophrenic post how about a list of all? the mobile phone game spin offs of the series.

Heroes In a halfshell.

Been staying with my aunt for a bit as my cousins daughter is down from Scotland so excuse me if I come across all loved up like a wuss. I've talked about her before here and is about the closest thing I have to a soul mate / daughter never had, with a staggering amount of things in common we share.   Anyway we got talking over the laptop and she showed me the Turtles Wikia page via as she likes the new TMNT series, and I talked about my love of the old show and how the Turtles arcade game was a big draw before the Streetfighter boom.   I may have done how Sky did it back then but along with the Lensman and Robotech these were the really greatest shows on their long forgotten Premiere movie channel, they were bought by the BBC and they became the Teenage Mutant Hero Turtles. Every now and then they fish out a massive terrapin thats been terrorising the lake fauna at some backwater pond and its blamed on the Ninja Turtle craze.

We got round to favourites, she liked Usagi Yojimbo, the samurai rabbit, I had a thing for Baxter Stockman the hideously mutated fly guy and she showed me what he is now, and its not good.  I loved the campy old designs there was just something about Baxter a foreveralone with a bugs head, now hes young, Cybernetic and... black.   We had a short discussion on the rest of the shows she really didn't like Gennosuke Usagis friend and I said he looked like Bebop the Rhino from the old shows. 

Most of my time I've been showing her some stuff, she drew the line at Dr Rabbit is a Racist the classic Waxinator poop and also disdained Protomans theme from Megaman 3 (we watched the cartoon in English for the first time as previously I'd only seen a German dub).  I also spent an enjoyable saturday laughing at silly names on Animal Planet with her, my favourite: Randy Farmer, worked for the Houston SPCA turned out to be an actual farmer for bonus lols.  Oh and winding her up about puppies vs zombies (babies) a really lazily put together show with tat from youtube.

Teenage feline Turtle Watchers.

Finally we'll leave you with a bonus snap from holiday as its sort of Turtle related. Some adorable strays looking over the animals (and wondering if theres room to make a meal of one)

Nonce Sense = no sense.

One of the most soul destroying things about reading the Daily Mail, isn't reading about Kate Middletons pregnancy or any other aspect of her overprivileged life but the campaign bits that sometimes arise. 

Be it to stop various things like the EU or plastic bags, but mainly its to get rid of pornography and put all pornoviewers into some sort of death camp where they cannot taint the regular populace (subs please check), oh and to stop "children" from watching porn online. 

Looking over the campaign from the beginning its morphed from getting David Cameron to offer in an opt out clause on all ISPs, to getting Google (and they really have it in for Google) to banish Paedophilia from the net and drive it onto some god forsaken TOR portal where it can be cut loose from normal viewing (which of course it already is).

Reading the comments there is an eye opener, as most do not want a block on Porn (even one that has been conflated up to Child Porn which by default is banned in most countries worldwide) and equate it with a short step to censorship.  Even the Daily Mail, where this shit started, is basically telling him to keep his own house in order before sorting this out and that its an unworkable prospect.  

I've wanted to do a piece on this for a long while and thanks to some high profile cases in the media, that say that if you watch bent ref media online or offline you'll go out and commit an noncecrime nows my chance.  I don't know if its true or not, I'd love to know what kind of research was done on this because what I'm hearing sounds like the old one about "Grandfather smoking 20 a day and living to his 80's and not got cancer" style anectdote rather than some peer researched paper on a control group of paedophiles living in the community. 

I don't know about other paedo stuff having no knowledge of that world but I will say this a lot of people are technically buntymen now (myself included) and its all due to the tabloids. 

Cue Linsey Dawn McKenzies Sunday Sport Debut.
"As McKenzie approached her 16th birthday, the Sunday Sport tabloid newspaper expressed an interest in turning her topless debut into a media event. Throughout June and July 1994, it published provocative pictures of McKenzie, touting her 34GG bra size and counting down the days until it could legally show her topless."

Or would you prefer Sam Fox
 "In 1983, at the age of 16, she began her modelling career on Page Three of The Sun".

Yeah back in the 80's and 90's you could quite legally see what we would call *child porn in the red tops and there was not a peep from anyone.  In fact that is banned by law now, just goes to show how attitiudes change.

Hornchurch Junk Tour.

For the first time in ages I got to do a junk tour.  We normally head toward Romford or Walthamstow both places that have proven lucky in the past, this time though we decided to go off the beaten track. 

First of all though I've been to Hornchurch before its not really to look around and mainly for a nature walk around Elm Park which lovely though it is is in the totally opposite direction.  What I did notice from these ramblings of mine was a load of charity shops in the main town.  This is where we started.

I'm not kidding either there are something like 6 - 7 shops for such a small town, including a Sue Ryder and a St Francis Hospice.  Oh and for some reason when I went they decided it would me music day, so not only was there a pub with a live PA and a shouting clown, they had  a few bands out side the shops including an old man singing I've got a lovely bunch of coconuts for that extra surreal sensation. 

Transport links.
Hornchurch tube station is about a quarter mile outside town so beware of that if you are not used to walking or a just fat and lazy.  Thanks to planned engineering works I had to catch a train at West Ham instead of the tube and change at Barking to catch the tube onward.  Although in hindsight getting off at Upminster would have been better.  Fun fact:  Upminster is a place I was fascinated with as a child as well as Central Line stop Theydon Bois, sadly I've never been to either. Anyway back to the finds.

I managed to snag a few good books here too. We got Superfreakonomics and a Gary Larson anthology both highly recommeded especially if you have a fetish for cows in 60's glasses or odd economics (why is a $2 brass like Father Christmas*).  We also spied some non armada Hardy Boys Detective stories which I would have had if I didn't already have them.

But most strange of all we got a few games, they had a lot of PS1 titles and were pretty sure its where PS1 games go to die.  Along with the inevitable stack of  *FIFAs they had Pro Pinball the Fantastic Journey for just a pound, haven't tested it in EPSXE yet but shouldn't cause too many problems.  Finally we decided to have a nose around Romford and was overjoyed that nearly every bus went there.

Oxfam in Romford is a great place to buy CDs and we got the excellent Global Communication 76:14 and the not so excellent Sharon Stoned Sample & Hold album (despite it looking like it was all electronic its just a nancy boy Indie pop record). Plus some old Soma releases (Percy X) and that was the makings of a grand day out.

The back end of nothingness

By the time you read this I'll be dead..... of boredom.  Its Wimboredom final and by the time this is up then Andy Murray will either be the greatest ever living Briton or Scotlands answer to Jimmy White.  Not that I'll be sitting watching at all.

Oh and serious note now I've mentioned snooker our thoughts go out to Ali Carter who's currently undergoing treatment for testicular cancer.  Best of luck and hope that they caught it early enough to be treatable.

TV the End.

This is the final bit from holiday TV and is really just a small thing about Orbyt.tv which had a channel but through googling turned out to be an Android Spambox for games and viewing and I suppose Media.

Spanish Speakers / Hablamos Espanol Aqui Para Informacion.

I also found out the real name for a clip from a mystery kids show I've had on my YT channel for ages.  Its from M.I.C a sort of catalan version of Morph, though this came from  a shop that had toys for sale as well as DVDs.  Maybe one of these days I'll come across some Stories without words stuff.

Bugging and Lawrence.

I can't really care anymore about what our clouseauesque cops got up to in the 1990s, regarding phone taps and surveillance of suspects, however Doreen Lawrence has gone up in my estimation as its emerged that she banned the ANL and Trotskyists from marching after Stephens death.  Oh and for more background information Anorak has some more nice info here regarding the case.

Opuntia

Better news now as this came out over the weekend. It lasted for all of Friday afternoon before fading.

Flower

Bud

This was one of my neighbours plants that I inherited when he died.  Opuntias are known for being tricky to flower in the UK as they require room to mature and bulk up in size before they are mature enough to bloom.  Coupled with the fact that they are vicious bastards with easily detachable spines and joint stems, you'll see why this is an event and a big one at that.

I first noticed the bud coming back after holiday and while excited didn't really expect it to do much.  However this weekends scorching temperatures must have been enough to get it to flower.

I'll see if there will be any fruit formed from this but to be honest I'm not hoping for much.

Finally clearing out a cupboard we found this which we brought back from our first trip to Mallorca back in 1993.  Going to see what I can find out about this.

Complete with copier adverts.

Holiday part 2 The Televisioning

So there was quite a bit of stuff going on whilst I was away and that, its a little stale in my mind right now and after detailing all the trips out I made last time it only seems fair that I give you a run down on what else was happening.

We stayed at the Golden Hotel Taurus Park in Pineda De Mar, an excellent complex dealing in fine food and drink (seriously I put on about 2 pounds having pancakes for breakfast alone) and entertainment.  My room was pokey but did at least have a flat screen TV and had a niceish view of some satellite dishes and the main road.  They had a small zoo in the grounds comprising mainly of Pheasants and a lairy Peacock that predictibly we called Captain.  They also had ducks and as I love ducks this made them go up about 25% in my estimation.

These are royal ducks in spanish.

Going out of resort, Pineda de mar itself seems to have a lot of ducks as well including various places bedecked with china ducks.  The main resort was dominated by the train line running paralell to the beach providing a regular service to Blanes and in the other direction Barcelona Hospital.  The beach itself wasn't that much, dominated by coarse sand that is the near equivalent of top dressing and a sharply shelving seashore means swimming was not on the menu.

However the real meat of course is that big flat screen TV and thanks to a bastard bout of insomnia you'll get a load of stuff on channels and content. 

First up the English.  BBC1, ITVs 1-4 but not 3 and CiTV, BBC World service (possibly the worst news in the world) and the obscurites that make life living.

Fashion TV dedicated to catwalk models and modelling clothes, lots of women who could do with a good meal and the associated benders and fag hags that make up the fashion scene. 

God channels 3ABN and Sonshine TV a Filipino based outfit pumping out Jesus 24/7 run by plastinated freaks. 

ITV remains horrible but for Harry Hill doing You've been Frames and Ben Shepard gameshow Tipping point coming on like a real life version of Coindozer.

French TV is boring as fuck. Seemingly endless talk shows that blur into one and homegrown cartoons.  We did see a modern version of Garfield in french but thanks to it voice acting it just made him sound manic depressive.

Germany.
RTL is something I'd heard of from satellite days (I always wanted to see Raumschiff enterprise untill I found out its just Star Trek in German). They had a few variants including SuperRTL (in fact we saw Spirited Away and its still ace even if you can't understand it) and its largely good you can't really go wrong with German stuff.  Also if you ever see Warehouse 13 in German whoever voices Artie has him spot on.

Belgium. BVM is the sole Dutch channel and what I saw of it seemed to be OK. 

Russia. We hit the motherlode with mother Russia.  With a variety of channels and our only other home for Christ in all his works, Russia soon became our favourite for weirdness.

TVRUS. (russian language)
This we readily corrupted to say TViRUS, thanks to Resident Evil.  It was home to a few oddments including a weird morning program with a funny looking old lady.  I deeply regret the one where she was looking over cucumbers and gherkins (I kid you not), if you ever saw Harry Enfields character Jurgen the German she was a dead ringer for him.

Nasch TV (Permanently borked)
This is the other goldmine. It housed some of my favourite things, an old Stories Without Words style cartoon about a Ginger cat in the sea that sank boats, heres a short clip.
Also there was an intensly strange morning television show kind hosted by two women that was deeply erotic though as I don't speak a lick of Russian probably wasn't.  Heres another short clip.
What you didn't see and Sadly I didn't catch was  them feeding each other fruit before hand.

Other stuff included an Armenian station a Macedonian station and a few God spots.  Including Soyuz TV which was Orthodox complete with priests with big bushy paedophile beards.

Finally the greatest variety, Spanish TV.  I can speak a bit of Spanish but the rate its spoken on TV is rapid so basically if you want local news be prepared to read like a bastard.  It was also home to late night porn channels detailed below.

NEOX had Viewtiful Joe anime dubbed into spanish, which I never knew existed. There was shedloads of Doraemon mainly on Kids TV Boing its never ever been translated (along with Captain Tsubasa) but remains entertaining nonetheless.   I saw Big Brother at like 3am and even then it still didn't put me to sleep. 
They have MTV in Spain and even dubbed its a waste of fucking time. They had Welsh fuckwit show The Valleys dubbed and its still cock awful. They also had a spanish original based on Alaska (of Raskayu fame) she / he seems to have been to the same school as Pete Burns as I couldn't make out what sex he / she was.

Finally I promised you teh pron, so here are all the channels that have some adult content as far as I could tell.
BOM / 8TV. Catalan language SFW.
These were largely the same deal some stripping plus onscreen text chat. We have it in the UK but it seems largely for a Gay audience and there is no stripping. 

Martv Catalan Public Access.

Largely stripping in the wee small hours, some women a bit ropey but there were a few stunners there. Seems to be between 12.30 till 5.30, Rest of the time is public access television with parochial ads and at the moment some dumb stage play.

10000 and 1 Views.

Well that was amazing we've just come back from a nice holiday in Pineda De Mar (Nice Informative Spanish Link here) and was quite amazed that we've reached the 10000 views mark. Congratulations to all that have visited and heres to ten thousand more.

On sadder note it seems that the Casino Leisure arcade on Goodge street has finished its remodelling into a slot arcade, theres fuck all to recommend here its all slots and its now called crystal casino.  Truly sad and feels like the end of an era.

Holiday.

This is a round up of a few trips out on holiday and a few bits and pieces of interest.  First up is the garden tour in Blanes and nearby Lloret De Mar.

This is a lot better signposted than the Botanicactus trip I undertook last year and there will be no samaritans this time.  Taking advantage of excellent train links (theres a RENFE line running right by the beach) we could take the train in style to Blanes and catch a connecting bus to either Lloret de mar or Blanes.  First up is the Marimurtra gardens in Blanes. 

Marimurtra

This is situated on a steep climb at the top of the cliffs overlooking the harbour, if you can walk it then its worth it but less fitter people can take the Garden bus up (we did this in Lloret). Once at the top though the views are excellent, taking in the harbour and various gulls nesting on the flat rooves, well worth a slow walk up.  The gardens are 6 euro to get in and you get an extra 2 for 1 tickets for other gardens at  Lloret once you are up there though its worth it.  Cactus fans will be overjoyed, there is an extensive macronesian flora as well as shorter sections on South Africa and the Americas.  Stuff was well grown and was at least correctly named. They had other stuff including a small cafe and a cracking Magnolia in flower that drew all the bees.  Overall 7/10

Marimurtra Map

Tuberose at Marimurtra

 Lloret De Mar.

This was at a later date and we took full advantage of the garden bus this time.  Its about a mile outside Lloret the two gardens we were visiting and if you make you way down to the harbour the stop you want is just outside the tourist office / museum.  It'll cost you 10 euro for this trip as this is both a joint day pass bus ticket / garden pass giving you free entry to one garden and half price to another.  Oh and antother thing get there early or be prepared to make a day of it as the bus takes an obligitary siesta at 1pm and doesn't resume till 4pm.  We walked back and can appreciate how far this is of the beaten track (you'll never find them without the bus even though they are well signposted) but for now here are the two gardens.

Jardin de Santa Clotilde

In a cactaceous departure this is a much more traditional garden complete with cypresses and formal planting.  We thought it was either the grounds to a religious order or a large manor house / Hacienda, but it turns out the gardens are a memorial to the wife of the owner.  They had largely formal planting and edging, complete with some stunning views framed by mature trees it was remarkably cool and clear.  Much more italiante in style like something from Piedmont or Tuscany.  It costs 5 euros to get in, but you normally get this one free from the bus / garden ticket combo.
Overall 6/10

Look down to the Sea.

Pinya de Rosa

This was the final stop on the tour and was the cheapest to enter at 4 Euros which we got in half price.
This was the most oddest and a polar opposite to Santa Clotilde, a pure cactus garden complete with hand printed leaflet and blazing sunshine.  I felt it was on its last legs or at least in terminal decline, and if you ever went to the cactus garden on Tenerife outside Los Christianos,  then it feels like that.  What they had was quite lovely though and its largely stands of Cereus, Cleistocactus and other tall columnar types as well as majoring in tall cacti  they had much more to see including a lot of Opuntias in flower.  Warning a lot of the names are outdated or just switched around, however its a slight niggle and there are many opportunities for great photos.  They have an area with peacocks and at the very bottom a large pond, shaded and with fish and dragonflies. 
Overall 7/10

This was nice.

Opuntias at Pinya de Rosa