Round up 2o2o the everything else.

 I spoke too soon when I said there was no bad music in 2020. I forgot non binary retard, Sam Smith did his own version of I Feel Love by Donna Summer. A totally unnecessary edit and a complete train wreck.

Oh and if you're just joining us here, this is the bit were I shoe horn in all the bits I've forgotten over the last few days, and add sundry other bits and pieces like books and Youtube

First up is forgotten stuff and also ran bits.

Travels to To Oishii Tokyo. 

A sort of food unwrapped with a scandinavian bird in place of Kate Quilton. Its on NHK world and the one we saw concerned Konjac root. How it is and what its used for (mostly Oden stew and choking people, it's banned here.)

I'll add 4 seasons in Japan as well, just for focusing on so much obscure wild life. A big brown sea slug in a bay and several crabs in a lagoon were just one of the highlights of lockddown for me. but there are loads of episodes just like this.

Youtube.

Been deep in the comicsgate hole for most of 2020, so if you want action and adventure and no one talks about orange man bad or pronouns in  your comics, look into some of those guys. 

In fact I have a few good series for you to check. 

Theramintrees for one of the best demolishings of Christianity ever.

Looking into the work boy and getting it to run via the original software hosed out from the gigaleaks.

And speaking of gigaleaks. The out of the blue leaking of a whole load of Nintendo roms and info, has to be the best thing this entire year. Includes smug link from Links Awakening. Proto art, beta roms for a load of gameboy and Snes games along with some tools and a bit from Yoshi's Island where he bombs a village in helicopter mode.

Finally got round to looking at the His Dark Materials trilogy and its doesn't disappoint. The show is good, but has taken a few woke pokes including Mrs Coulter of all things that aren't in the book but I'm not going to argue against casting here. Its spot on, all leads are good, and we get Moriarty as Stanislaus Grumann.. Which is cool.

Review of 2020 continues.

 Yesterday I put up our annual review of the year. 2020 which of course sucked. So you'll be wanting a lot of television to take away your pain and... well that was knacked as well.

SARS2 did in a lot of live stuff and on a positive note killed off Eastenders for a while before coming back, much as it was. 

If you want our Miranda awards they're at the bottom of the page under the good TV.

Good TV

Perry Mason. Sky Atlantic

I sincerely hope that this is getting a regular season or at least an update to this. As, fucking hell, it's good. It details his transition from a two bit private eye, to unorthodox public defender via depression era America. So think old cars, segregation, police corruption and revival churches. This centers on a child abduction and murder, kinda like the Charles Lindbergh case. One to catch on DVD. HBO, SKY Atlantic.

Hubble. BBC2

A humble documentary about the troubled star scope. Its just an excuse to see a billion good things that had been discovered by the venerable telescope. Includes galaxies and star clusters. Proving that the BBC can put out a good show if it has to.

White House Farm ITV.

A similar form to Perry Mason. This focuses on the Jeremy Bamber murder case back in the 1980's in which he killed members of his extended family and his subsequent police case and capture. It has that authentic 80's jank that only those that were there will understand. Hangovers of 70's fashion and design with kitsch and earlier heirlooms. Well worth watching.

Tutankhamun in Colour

Final BBC entry here. This is a monumental colorizing job on old photos and film from the Howard Carter / Lord Caernavon expedition to Egypt, where they rediscovered king Tuts tomb. It brings it all to life with some excellent photo editing work. Also Carter was a bit of a hero, giving full props to his native workers and that, when most back then wouldn't.

The Miranda Awards for televisual ineptitude. Worst of 2020.

Twilight Zone. Reboot.

The worst of the worst. A woke reworking of the classic Ron Serling show. Do you want all cops kill minorities no matter what you do story. Of course you don't. Want a meteor storm that turns all men into rapey monsters. Apart from a few low T soy boys and a queer kid. Its depressing and woke, worse of all its fuck all fun. 

Eastenders.

For once they managed to kill it off thanks to SARS2. They ran out of episodes and had to air the glory years such as Dirty Den and Angie and Arfur Fowler stealing the xmas club money. Apart from that, though it sucked. A Marchioness disaster rip off in which Denny dies (yay) and that whole episode from the perspective of mental Ben. Which, apart from sounding like Merzbow in places due to him being deaf, is ruined by it being depressing as usual. 

The final bit is the whole Ian Beale getting assassinated and no one, ever calling it Kill |Beale. Which is a missed opportunity.

Review of the year 2020

 So, we can take it as read that this year has sucked balls. Big time. A train wreck of massive proportions all thanks to SARS 2 electric boogaloo. So you'll be wanting a round up of the year, where I didn't get to go to many record shops and just downloaded stuff from Youtube and Bandcamp at random.

The good.

Clone 20 years of Creme or

A free download. You know what you're getting here. Smudged up electro, New oldskool house and acid tracks and a few wavy gems. Myriadd, Perseus Traxx and Lake Haze are the stand out tracks here but there is no duff one here. One to put away for special occasions.

A Jazz reworking of Walking in the Air.

Do you want it to sound like cinematic orchestra or something from Ninja Tunes back catalogue some 20 years ago. Well this is my treat to you from the Kristoffer lo and some university jazz ensemble. Magic stuff.

WAP Traxman mixxx.

Despite Cardi B being utter trash, this has been this years monster hit and best appreciated in its original form as fucked up ghetto shit. I can think of no better person to juke this up than Traxman himself.  

Delroy Edwards. Slap Happy.

A cool mix of old school house with a freestyle edge to it. If I have to single out anything that I really love its going to be Rock This Place. Also look out for Wagon Wheels EP if you want more of the same. Both on L.I.E.S. Records.

Benedek Mr Goods.

Fuck it might as well add this on L.I.E.S. as well. In a similar vein but with a more go-go edge to some of these tracks. Driving music is the boss. Also with a boiler room live set so you can appreciate it more. 

Uf0.Viewpoint of Cala Llonga.

Finally this for shoe in of acid track of the year. Only heard this a few days ago and really loved it.

Worst tracks of the year.

Crucially not much. SARS2 kept us out of the office for ages so I wasn't subjected to Kiss FM (a blessing.)  So the only thing I heard was an Irish guy doing grime which was fecking horrible. And Becky Hill murdering Forever Young for Macky D's. Rather subject myself to Ronald Mc Donald's 600 mile long salty French Fry than listen to slow Interactive covers.

anyway back tomorrow for Boxing Day TV Hell.

Zoomer.

So its about that time where I set up the best and worst music, TV and stuff of the year. The Miranda Awards for telelvisual awfulness as I call them. I decided to compile a notepad file of what sucked and rocked this year. Though it's more good than absolutely awful seeing the year we had. 

Currently we are in Tier 4, which is complete social isolation and you are not out allowed. Ever.

Cactus club is not relegated to Zoom meetings, which is fine if you like putting your face on screen, but I hate this. I have my web cam taped over for a reason, I just don't like showing my face. If they could do some sort of animal avatar with text to speech voice (Microsoft Sam) option, that would be fine. I could even mic spam the old aha ha ha and soi soi soi memes for their benefit (but won't).

Best of all would be using Zoom without a webcam,  just listening in and no participation. Maybe speaking a bit, but that's not fun for me.

Edit. Just this but mandatory.

 

Phone stuff.

Found a phone at work during the week. Someone was clearing out a load of old stuff and I got this along with a DSi which works perfectly and contained literally a million pictures of kids goofing around before I formatted it for hacking.

The phone however was locked. and, looking at its specs, is considerably worse than anything I've actually used, including the touch screen only work issue Blackbastard I had circa 2013. Which fact fans, was my first ever Mobile. 

I never got anything android to sync up right either. Old Apple, while being an utter cunt to do at least lets you look at digital photos, and digital only, Android, doesn't. Thought I'd have a look at the internal storage, seeing as SD and chip was removed. Then thought about removing the password lock, to let me at least let me nose about the file system.

Which brings me to my main rant. All phone unlocking software is borderline unusable for a freeloading perspective. 

Most software will do nothing unless you pay for it, it will not unlock or remove anything and expect you to pony up money in advance to do stuff. Like I say, its borderline unusable.

What we need is some sort of FOSS android explorer, akin to testdisk is for Hardrives. Something that will when you sync up your phone immediately bring up a menu that lets you explore the file system, browse files and copy things across to PC/Mac Linux Amiga, like iTunes but not shit and more hackery.

If I could program, I'd totally do this (that or a PVR HD dumper, face it, this is going to be the future front for preservation.) probably add in a unlocker too, to make it a swiss army toolkit.

Finally had a look at a crack for this before remembering that all cracks are malware shit, without exception. Downloaded one and Antivir caught it immediately.

Melted Coins research.

 No, this doesn't mean a new book is ready for release, I've still work to do typesetting and editing. I just want to draw your attention to something interesting I've found.

One of the things you'll learn about when reading the Hardy Boys books is that 38 of the original stories were rewritten in the 1960's to remove outdated references (no more automats and roadsters) and the nixing of stereotypes (mostly people talking in accents). 

A few things got rewritten entirely and a few got, what I would call the directors cut, which is, a brief trim to cut out most flavour text and expressions. Previous example would be in the Hooded Hawk mystery is the culling of the Krait encounter in the woods near Chet's farm.

 The UK editions also got a few bits and pieces removed, mainly Americanisms, spellings and more importantly book order, which is radically different here than back in the states. There's a page here outlining what editions we received and when. 

In all there are five books which keep their original text here at the expense of their revised cousins. They are:

The mystery of the melted coins

The flickering torch mystery

The secret of pirate's hill

The clue in the embers

The mystery at Devils Paw.

What I found out and have seen nowhere is that these texts were also edited and condensed. So you lose bits and pieces to keep it to 160 pages overall. Having pdfs of the originals and all the UK editions to hand, help out immensely. I wouldn't have known that they had done this if I hadn't been typesetting the books and looking through the original text. You lose some Americanisms here such as all US coins, and a few bits and pieces of continuity are altered. In all its not bad.

And for good measure seeing as the remake has bugger all about Chet being conned by a shady summer camp and a lot more about Seneca Indians. I don't see why it wasn't released here.  Unless of course the story of the worlds dumbest counterfeiters are of interest to you.