Rock Off!

What a great night! Here's to many more rock offs to come!



















Heaps more great photos of the night can be found here. You shouldn't need a Facebook account to see these, but if you're having trouble, let me know. It's so much easier to upload photos to facebook than this blog, so from now on I'll probably just put most of my photos up on my Facebook profile. So you should all get accounts chop chop!

P.S. George, check your facebook. It's your turn in our scrabble game.

It's on, Donkey Kong!

I know you're all as excited as I am about the impending Rock Off. Here is the final line up of songs:

Chris:
Surrender - Medium
Less Talk More Rokk - Medium

Andrew:
War Pigs - Hard
Killing in the Name Of - Hard

...and of course Free Bird on medium to finish it all off and make sure we develop juvenile arthritis. Game on!

Mixed Bizniss

I've been cooped up in my room like the timid introvert I am recently, and it's the fault of two fascinating diversions. I've created a 2007 edition of the famous Andrew Roff Best Songs Ever compilation, and it's pure listening ambrosia. (aside: I tried to export the tracklist, but iTunes will only spit it out as a poorly formatted .txt file or a poorly formatted .xml file. I need a stylesheet to get it on to a web page).

The other demand on my time is a new mod I downloaded for Civilization IV. It's called the 'Realism mod' and it's meant to give players a more accurate simulation of combat, diplomacy and technology advancement.

So far it's been fun if a little anachronistic - in 400BC, playing as the Chinese, I used my generals Adolf Hitler and Saddam Hussein to invade Japan. That's realism for you in this post-modern world, I guess.

In other news, I got the reading list for my elective uni topic 'Law and Literature' yesterday. It seems we'll be spending a couple of lessons discussing Isaac Asimov's I, Robot stories. That is so wicked. We're studying a lot of other cool stuff too, and other law students have said the topic's basically run like a book club. I already know what I'm going to do my assignment on: Arthur Miller's play The Crucible.

Guitar Hero News
Seems I got some dates mixed up in the rules I posted a while back. Song selections have to be in by Sunday 15 July, and the contest will be on Saturday 28 July (I'd said Saturday 29 July, which is just wrong). I've made the appropriate changes to the rules.

I was feeling confident about my chances, but my Playstation's broken and I won't get it back until next Monday at the earliest. So Chris has a golden opportunity to get a headstart on me. Song selections should be interesting...

Here's a thing

I've talked about the idea of nerdatious synergy before, but this really takes it to a whole new level. I like guitar hero, and in my weaker moments I like the Power Rangers, but would I ever let these worlds collide thus?



I'd like to think not.

Okay, but seriously, the Government's fucked.

I apologise for the coarse language. I try not to use the word 'government' too often on this blog, especially in the title of a post. Another thing I aspire to do is to try and be a little more objective in my analysis of Australian politics - a little less biased. Failing this, I'd at least endeavour to make a reasoned, well thought out argument before dispensing any snap conclusions.

But really, though. This time they've lost the plot, taken the cake, and... and... performed various other actions which, taken together, point to a serious mental illness.

Behold, courtesy of Margaret Simons at Crikey:

"The Government plans to pass legislation in the autumn session aimed at regulating all content – including text and still images – using the film classification system as the standard.

Crikey understands that publishers would have to submit for classification all material to be delivered electronically – including book and magazine content. Any content that gained an MA or R classification would have be subject to an approved age restricted access system. [emphases added]"

I mean... wow. They've been trying to drag us back to the 1950's for years, but this bill is in a league of its own. It has a huge potential to impact bloggers - along with basically everyone else who publishes anything online. The next time George goes on a rant about female genitalia, will we have to shut the blog down until the OFLC can review it? Will we be forced to implement an age verification system to stop children reading about Kate's trip to Port Vincent? It's unfeasible, unenforceable, and a stupid idea to boot. Aw, what the hell, let's use some conservative terminology. It's un-Australian!


On a very distantly related note...
So last night I rediscovered the joy of a computer game called Bookworm Adventures. I've enthused about it to some of you before - it's a delicious synthesis of unadulterated nerdiness, combining the nerdiness of computer roleplaying games with the nerdiness of spelling things correctly. Verily, it is a computer roleplaying game wherein enemies are dispatched by spelling words correctly.




Anyway, I was reflecting that the game represented admirably the noble concept of edutainment - that learning and having fun are not mutually exclusive. Don't make me draw you a Venn diagram, muthafuckas.

I reflected on the warm feeling I get inside when I look at my in-game stats:




I thought that I should try and spread the Good News. I pondered on who could most use an expansion of their vocabulary, and the answer was obvious. Perhaps if George knew more words, he wouldn't feel compelled to write posts with a profanity content hovering around 70%.

This would be a good thing.

But then I thought about it a bit more. I tried to envisage George actually playing the game. Now, I don't think I'll show it to him.

Musical events that I'm excited about

I'm glad that I waited 'till after lunch to write about the Blues and Roots Festival (5-9 April), because in the mean time they've released the second round of artist anouncements! Among others, I am excited about seeing Paul Kelly live for the first time. Paul is the slightly less famous uncle of Dan. Other people I'm hanging out to see are Ben Kweller, Rodrigo y Grabriella (again!!), Gomez, John Butler Trio, Eric Burden and the Animals, etc etc.

I have a five day ticket, so if other people want to come up for five days, or three days, or some other number of days, you should organise it soon. Apparently 5 and 3 day tickets are almost sold out. Get it sorted, people! If youse guys are interested, we can probably sort some accomodation out in Byron itself, so we can walk to Red Devil Park. Those with me last year may recall driving back to Lismore through floods, bone tired and jangly from all the speed balls, shouting at each other about Aboriginal cave drawings. Not as fun as it sounds.

I'd also like to mention that I'll almost certainly be in Sydney on June 20th. Why? Well, it may not be everyone's cup o' tea, but the PLAY! concert (sic annoying capitalisation) will be at the Sydney Opera House on that night. Yep, orchestrated video game music. This kind of thing very rarely comes to Australia, so I don't want to miss it. Scoff if you must, but if you seek understanding one could do worse than reading this article (nice web design skillz, too).

If anyone has thoughts, or wants to journey with me to these events, let me know.

PS: I've posted, Alice has posted, Julian's posted. Congrats! What about Kate, George and Jono? Pop that cherry!