Slides Done

Couldn't find the plane stuff so here's a BEA shuttle bus.

Finally done with scanning in all the slides and films, that my grandad and other relatives filmed over the years.  Found a fresh biscuit tins worth in the back room and these were the last of them.  A few bits from Kew and Syon Park, some shots of London and some of the lights on Oxford Street from 1963, oh and me as a toddler from 1978 (am old). I've added a few bits and pieces to Archive.org but I see no reason in not sharing them here.

Enjoy coke with a guinness and skol.

That's the movie and not the welsh wonder himself.

You can see the main problem I have with the scanner I own.  Namely it'll give out this insane light bloom in the corner which you can see in some of these shots. The original scans of these were mostly unusable due to this.  I had to quickly scan one at a time and then save and exit line up another slide and scan it like that.  I'll add some plane stuff for those that like that sort of shit, my grandad lived near Heathrow so you'll see a few planes and that.

Is that some hideous Yogi bear with Popeye.

Wow, you are big pervert.

We got one of those emails, you know the type, someone playing at hacker claiming to have commandeered your webcam when you visit teh pron site and they want cash or they will have release pics / clips to all your address list contacts / friends / family / your dog.

I knew that it was bollocks straight away, not only because the Mail ran an article about the scam but because we have our cam taped up with black tape since we got it, that and it ended up in our spam folder with a big warning saying  this is a scam dude.  You are not seeing anything unless I stand in front of it and even then why would I take the tape of the cam.

It was sort of scary for a minute as it starts with a partial of an old password of mine (from Myspace and KVR and barely used for anything else), but then scrolling down and reading through it and that it required money to be paid in mickey mouse cash (bitcoin) or it will go to close relatives and people on my address book. So in all its going to fuck all people then.

Sadly though the worlds greatest "hacker" didn't have any badly mangled euphemisms for masturbation, just the line wow you are big pervert along with some broken English.  Which still made me laugh even though its true.

I can see how someone would get suckered in, it did seem genuinely scary until I realised how old the login info it was and that gmail recognised the scam straight away.  We ran a few scans to see if there was malware and virus on my system but it turned up fuck all.  In short if someone says that they have that they're bluffing especially if  your cam is gaffer taped over.

Round up of sorts.

Sorry if everything is getting messed up now but we're having central heating put into our house so I have to rehome a lot of stuff luckily my room only needs a few bits and pieces moved but it means a good chunk of the CD collection and all my albums will need to me moved further in.  Also it means I get to purge a bunch of old magazines from way back.

Mostly EGM and Edge magazine but also throwing in some MAD magazines and a bunch of junk too that is ages old that I never really tackled before.  I suppose there is all that space/

TERRA BATTLE.

On halloween, Mistwalker nixed their entire European server killing off my entire 3 year progress on this. Its still available for US and Japan at present but after going to all the trouble of downloading an American APK. file and registering again, I found that my file didn't carry over.  This is also a pretty good reason for backing up everything and not trusting something that is always online to always be there.  We switched to Granblue Fantasy with its built in English option.
Though if you are going that route, Mobage is a bastard to connect to. even more if you don't speak Japanese.

Weedle Guide.

This harks back to the first blog post I ever submitted here.  I explained what a Tibbet was (and you can see what a Tibbet is from our header) but not what a Weedle was or rather Wheedle as it was back then.

A W(h)eedle is basically a black and white cat with a white tip to its tail, its colouration should be medium neither too white or too black. He was my pet cat growing up and was called Whisky as we wanted a gender neutral name (or more accurately not saddle him with a girls/ boys name if he was the opposite gender).

Better photos when I get round to scanning our old albums there's lots of this guy.

To help you with this I've appropriated a guide from Wiki to help you understand what the various shades of Weedle are.
Incidentally that maybe catloaf stance Whisk is adopting there but we called that stance a meat pie when growing up.

If a Weedle has a black nose it is called a Kitler.

Hackney Trip

Took a trip out to that great progressive land of the East end, or as you may know it Hackney. An upmarket hipster paradise that also has its fair share of hideous stabbings and is of course a left wing hell hole, its also a great place to go searching.  Like every progressive shopping area there are no real shops that ordinary people go in such as Poundland or WH Smiths but plenty of boutique shit with inflated prices and such.

There are a few good charity shops even if they are few and far between, I always seem to pick up stuff from the Salvation's Barmy and this is no different.  We had a Disney T Shirt, a noise comp CD and an original Hardy Boys detective novel (the original version of The Secret Of The Old Mill) in hard back.  Have a complete armada run of the UK titles so will have to read them to see what differences there are from revised to Original.

No the most important thing is that there is a pretty good cactus shop just down from the Toy Museum at Bethnal Green.  Its called Plant Warehouse and is almost opposite the pricey flower warehouse, I first took notice whilst walking down the street and they had some large plants in the window that looked decidedly succulent.  A Cyphostemma no less so with that I had to take a further look.  There were a lot of massive plants in the window including a Cleistocactus with dried flower remains for £1200 and a few of the bigger Euphorbias including a Tirucalli type and Ingens.  They had smaller Mammilarias for £10 in pretty nice clay pots and a few Hoya leaves in pots for £5.

Worst of all were some strange bowl garden selections including 3 columnar types a few  Mammilaria's  a Titanopsis and a Faucaria.  Also they had Ganoderma mushrooms for sale in  a small wooden arrangement, they are the ones with the dubious health claims and such.  Also our Pilea Peperomioides* is worth £20, which is pretty cool.  All in all the stuff they had there was massively pricey, if you have deep pockets and the heat to keep some of this stuff then good luck, me I'll stick to our club shows and stuff.

Didn't come out properly but £20

*this fucking site. really. I got my original Pilea from an old lady who came to the club who called it the Oriental Jade Plant.  Its a massive progenitor of offspring which means that unless you send them out to people you will be stuck with ever more piles of Pilea.  Like all nettle family its flowers are insignificant green string although perversely would love to see a macro shot of the bloom itself.

See nothing to write home about.

Club History Part 2.

This is the final part of this BBC4, 3 part series looking into the birth of dance and its continued degeneracy at the hands of American club culture.  I signed off last time with the words fuck my life, or something similar.  Yeah that was pretty prophetic to say the least.

It starts off OK with a look at DJing with DJ Greg Credit to the Edit Wilson explaining the basics of beatmatching and a classic clip of him doing the same on the tube.  Works up through hip hop exploring the whole two turntables mixer style and lands firmly in Ibiza some time in the mid 80's.

Alfredo playing various tracks from the broadest beats around to a mega diverse crowd, something to get the crowd moving no matter who they are.  Its a leftfield choice but also quite a good pick,  I would have gone with Ron Hardy at the Muzic box here, but its how house and acid was seen outside the states.  Later on its Danny Rampling transporting these sounds back to Shoom and dear old Oakie at Spectrum and later mixing the Happy Mondays album Pills, Thrills and Bellyaches, bringing in the rock kids to the clubs, See also Stone Roses Fools Gold.

Its still bearable at this point, it talks to Normal Cook aka Pizzaman  Fatboy Slim, about DJing and such and the crowds, and Tiesto's "single handed" creation of trance as a gay form of techno. But mainly its about crowd adulation, playing the same style for 8 hours, making cash before burning out and coming back with a more varied sound.   TBH this is still the best thing he ever did.

From then on its down hill all the way with the rise of the mega club and the mega DJ and the whole EDM Degeneracy.  You get a bit of David Guetta, with some Kelly Rowland crossover that finally got the Yanks to play dance on the radio opening the doors for Black eyed Peas and all the other stuff that makes me weep.

Worse we have Steve Aoki a dude that's taken to DJing while prancing about like a little twat. No actual mixing here just poncing about and lobbing cake at the audience when he plays specific tones in his pre mixed sets.  The audience lap it up like Pavlov's Dicks that they are, and I couldn't shift the whole Brasseye  Drugs episode they must have something wrong with their Shatners Bassoons.

It then calmed the fuck down with a few bits and pieces from underground DJs the Black Madonna and Midland (me neither). I have just googled Mike Read's Stalker and her and have been pissing myself laughing as its an uncanny resemblance.

In retrospect if you can ignore the last 30 minutes of this its all you  need to know about DJing plus all the real heroes here are limited to a few sound bites such as Jeff Mills and Nina Kraviz which is a shame as her and Helena Hauff are probably the vanguard of what I call real DJing and welcome female perspective to boot.

BBC Club history.

BBC 4's Can You Feel it is a sort of gun to the head of dance music, you know kinda like a cucked version of what Sky Arts did a back last year but on the BBC instead. I can definitely say this though, it  benefits from the BBC's cash input, as rather than a UK centric outlook, you have full access to all the American DJs this time.

I'm currently two thirds of the way through, with the final bit on DJs recorded to watch this coming Friday, but I feel qualified to put in my two pennorth in, just like the old official games mags did from 10 minutes of playing so here goes.

The first part is actually pretty good giving a lowdown of the origins of the 4/4 beat with a healthy focus on pioneers of house.  Never knew Ron Hardy was bi though his whopping smack addiction was skated over but its always good to see them credit a true master (there's a bit of archive stuff of Frankie Knuckles too).  We get the Belleville 3 on racism and forging Techno from the whole cloth of European synth pop and funk via the Electrifying Mofo / Mojo.  Finally we have its all gone Pete Tong  and his single handed introduction of House to the British public via his house sound of comps.

There's a token poke at the North with 808 State (well A Guy Called Gerald and a weirdly uncredited Graham Massey and some other guy who could be Martin Price). Mostly though its the BBC dollar reigning large here as you have talking head shots from Vince Lawrence, Screaming Rachael, Craig Loftis, Steve Silk Hurley, and Joe Smooth talking about house in the old days and such.

First part here.

The second part is where it all goes wrong for me, it big's up the the whole mega club era and EDM bollocks whilst overlooking the whole warehouse rave aspect.

Its still good mind you. From the Loft to Studio 54 and the Paradise Garage complete with Larry Levan at the controls, to the early days of rave in the UK via the second summer of love. 

Its good to know that:

In the old days that you could run stuff from lamp post electricity to power your illegal rave.

Amnesia was just an after hours club in Streatham.

Danny Rampling's Shoom was located in a basement warehouse out of Southwark

That the Factory in Manchester closed due to massive gangster infiltration (sadly also there from the start).

It goes off the rails at the end speaking to Moby about EDM trash in Vegas and that its more of a fairground experience with showpiece bollocks and actors. Also weirdly glosses over the whole criminal justice bill era of raving, though its nice to see Creamfields get a look in.

Second part here.

Like I say, I've not seen part 3 yet though this does not bode well and I quote.

"With in-depth interviews with David Guetta, Steve Aoki, Tiesto, Paul Van Dyk, Black Madonna, Moby and Midland"
and as an afterthought at the bottom.

" Other contributors include Pete Tong, Jeff Mills, Terry Farley, Fabio, Nina Kraviz"
Fuck. My Life.