Streatham Junk Tour

We did a visit to Streatham, South London, on Saturday. Unlike previous posts, which have some familial connection, Streatham, despite being South London where my dad's side of my family come from, has precious little of all to do with us.

Its uncharted territory and is ripe for a good junk tour. We didn't know what to expect, only that the high street is long and has a few charity shops including a few book and music dedicated Oxfams.

We got off to a really good start as we got a Venetian Snares single in Balham and a few mix CD's including Kevin Saunderson mix on Defective. 

The bus to Streatham is right outside the tube station, which is convenient, (it's also the only bus that goes from that stop so you can't miss it) and after a while we got to where we wanted to go.

They had quite a load of shops and we ended up taking a punt on A Certain Ratio Graveyard and Ballroom CD as Discogs app was being cunty. Its really good new wave rock / dance and for one makes which I didn't hate guitar stuff with a passion.

Also picked up a few promo CDs which ranged from The Orb with Lee Scratch Perry (good) Eyeballs  Invisible Castle(drone) and French For Cartridge (bleurgh Indie Kids.)

Final pick up was a solo release of Xaviera Gold's Mucho Man a nice slice of dark house from 1989 and one of those that never got played out nor got any attention back in the day. Its really good and seems criminally overlooked.

Having enough of that we decided to get the bus back to Balham and go home. Pro tip the stop you want is behind the station, and there is a choice of buses too. One goes to Stockwell and the other Balham. Easy to pick up the northern line to reach across the river or reach central London for other places.

So in hindsight Streatham is the Walthmastow of the south.

Hounslow Junk Tour

Decided to go on another junk tour and this is one that I've wanted to do for some years now.

In a similar vein to my trip to Peckham this is another trip back to my childhood but this time its on my mum's side of the family as my granddad lived there for most his life. 

I can remember getting the train down with mum and dad and getting off  and going down piggy alley (probably not its real name) and head toward Cromwell Road. They built a massive hindu temple there in the mid 90's about the same time my granddad passed on.

Anyway this didn't actually turn out to be a trip to Hounslow itself to begin with. I wanted to go to Ealing but seeing as I had a choice of Richmond or waiting for the Ealing train, decided I'd visit there and have a look around. Their charity shop choices are limited and coming out to rain and seeing a bus for Hounslow decided I have fuck all to lose by getting on board and heading off there.

They still have a few places I remember as I came in. The bus station and the Treaty Centre which I remember opening as we got balloons, to take home. There is also a Blenheim Centre too which houses an Asda, a Bum (B+M) and a Barnardos. I could have gotten a CD dedicated to Gurbani Fonts which I guess is to do with Sikhism. Pity there wasn't 9 other CD's I wanted for a £1 as I'd have whacked it up on Archive.org for everyone.

Still raining as I came out and found my way to the main drag. Found the Cex where my cousin's kid worked. They have some communist little cunt out by the main entrance to the centre with a sign saying how wonderful Cuba is as a socialist paradise (It's not.) And came across the worlds grimmest game shop with an entire top row of DS games dedicated to 42 board games and brain training.

Working down we bought a ton of techno in the Princess Alice to make up for it and decided to call it a day and seemingly took the longest route back home which sucked.

10th Anniversary.

At the beginning of December it shall be 10 years since I started writing this blog. 

I set it up to basically have an output, online and act as an archive to things that I would have forgotten about over the years. Stuff like British Cable TV, Polish cartoons, Hardy Boys detective novels.  A love for the PSP and PS Vita consoles, and some Rom hacks that I've played and liked.

I have at times written reaction pieces to bad reporting on cacti and have received at least 1 comment that wasn't spam over the years. 

Looking at my earliest posts I really wanted it to be called Lobster Egg, in part derived from Roger Irrelavent in the Viz and essentially Davey Jones strips which speaks to my level of stupid. But it turned out that the name was taken by a food blog, which was a bummer.

I still don't know 100% where Tibbet, as in my name for a cat, came from. Pretty sure its Mrs. Kitten from the classic Smoke and Fluff but of course intensely corrupted. See also Mrs Nibble / Mrs Cobble from Blackberry Farm tales for the rabbit equivalent. 

It also seemed that I was a bit haphazard in my posting, putting pages up rather than every Sunday, like I do now.  

I was a proper hammer on feminism then, which would take Darkness Savior on Tumblr of all places to turn me on to the whole MRA / Skeptic community. I still like the news critic stuff like Tim Pool, Short Fat Otaku, Vee, The Britisher and even Sargon and Thunderf00t when they're not too cringy.

I added a twatter profile some two years ago and its brought me daily dogs, cats, game knowledge and left wing cunts galore to laugh at. 

Its bittersweet to look back at how the time has gone and that, and for once decided to do what every other cunt does when it advances in years. Adds a shitty retrospective post.

 

Houses on cliffs again.

Been working hard on this for the past few days. A new David Attenborough on TV, is the impetus what made me bust a gut and get it finally done.

I've made a version for the UK, which most certainly would not have been released here in under the Armada imprint. Also I think I've caught all the Americanisms that were in the revised text.

And I've added a fresh PDF of the original text. So far I've got about 9 more to buy to add in which should, dog willing take me through 2020.

Also we're coming up to this blogs tenth anniversary which is nice, though we have fuck all planned for this home coming celebration.

Anyway here is both the original text and the UK rewrite that would have been put out back then,

Uptown trip.

Not a bad trip uptown to be honest, just a lot more convoluted than it should be, due to rail improvements on the DLR and parts of the District line being closed.

In fact we saw quite a few people out, whinging about a second brexit vote. Overhelmingly middle class, middle aged home counties types with their E.U. flags and pithy worded plackards. They even had a cute doggo that was called Euro dog there on the tube. And you never see dogs on the tube as a rule.

Euro doggo seems to be some sort of howl (spaniel) / poodle crossbreed, a cockermutt*, if you will. Would love to have gotten a photo but train was packed and they would have gotten the manager. (Yes they were those sorts of people.)

The other doggo on the tube, (yes, there was two,) was much more easier to pin down, a nice medium sized husky. He had to be carried down the escalator as is customary, and while on the train was befriended by a small girl.

Had a look around Notting hill and did the usual record shops taking advantage of the bargain bin to pick up some overlooked house for the channel.  Walked down to Kensington and was gouged £2.49 for a can of U.S soda. Rather good too, ranking behind Jone's soda for a good American soda taste and sugar free too, which is a miracle as only Bepis do sugar free right. Kind of reminds me of Sargon brewing up a batch of liberalism for the kiddies there.

Had to go to Sloane Square because of the shut down for repairs and that and was reminded that getting the regular train is also bastard expensive and that £3.10 to London Bridge and their nicely renovated station from Woolwich Arsenal. As they say a total rip off. No wonder that climate cunt was pissed off at Canning town.

We also grabbed a leaflet stuck in the tube from anal rebellion. No doubt they are light on resources as it seemed to be stuck on with the worlds smallest amount of masking tape.  Can imagine doing a bad photo shop of this in paint.  If I get the time.

*edit, as its citation has gone awry, imagine if you would the dog in the link but with the traditional brown Springer Spaniel colouring.

Mini PC continued

This is just a short version update, on the mini PC. So far I've had no luck in removing the bios password. Oh, there's guides but they mainly involve taking it apart and either shorting out the battery (yeah right like I'm gonna cause a house fire) or dismantelling it to remove the saturn battery in it (the big button cell type, I know it as the battery back up from Sega's Saturn console.) so it goes to BIOS.

Apart from that have a new game. Resonance Of Fate for PS3. It doesn't explain itself well and there are a few things a good faq will sort out, but it seems to be quite good so far. Can see echoes in the town scape of Valkyrie Profile: Silmeria another Tri Ace game. Too ages to work out how to save a game while the mini PC ran through diagnostics.

Cambodia PC

We finally found a really small netbook PC thrown out. It's one of the small Acer Aspire series of netbooks from I guess 2010 - 2012.  It runs a starter edition of Windows 7 and is quite nifty in a way.

It's not the fastest as it packs an Intel Atom processor, and I've upgraded it to 2GB of ram from the 1Gb stick it did have.  It does the internet, but really slowly and I've finally added the printer to it.

The downsides are the BIOS is password protected and will need to be unlocked before I can switch boot order and see if a Linux will run. It has no CD so maybe a puppy linux live  usb with the HD removed, as it can run in ram,  will do the trick.

So the original owner was on some sort of scholarship to Cambodia as part of a gap year / sixth form work.  They had dropbox and a few other storage solutions there as well as an expired Graham Norton antivirus.

Mostly videos of a few places, but largely mates and dorm rooms and such. Pretty normie stuff, and a typical bird behaviour. If you like no landscape shots and plenty of mates posing in front of things, including a few clips of them round the pool, then this your thing. No pron and the owner is pretty homely looking to boot.

I've been adding programs to it, to get it into shape including looking for a non adobe PDF reader as my go to favourite, fails to install.  Will I use it for much? god knows, its small enough to not have any CD drive built in so will need an external drive to take advantage of anything. Definitely do have the drives to take advantage though. So there is that.

All in all, its not bad but hardly essential. Hopefully it will linux ok.