Happy Birthday to me…

OK, so it was my birthday two days ago but meh. Not much occured, really. I’m not celebrating it til the weekend. Being here at Uni, there’s not much to do aside from have a few drinks with a few friends, which I did. Watched Boogie Nights, which I love. Chest Brockwell… what a name! This weekend I’m going home. Going to get my presents off friends/family and go out on Saturday to celebrate, so I’ll probably update this after then, hopefully with some pictures. Aside from that, we’ve just been playing a bit of Rock Band really. Completed drum campaign on Hard (Suck on that, ‘Run To The Hills’) and I’m a fair bit through expert.

I need a hair cut.

Happy New Year

OK, so I’m a bit late in updating my blog. But I’ve been home over Christmas and New Year and I’ve never really got round to doing it. I guess I’ll start where I last left off.

I bought an American brand new Elite 360 off eBay. It was perfect. Already in the country, brand new, American and only £200. That’s cheaper than a Premium over here; I guess nobody wanted it because it’s American an it doesn’t come with a UK power cable (I already have one). Better yet, he only lived 20 miles away so we went to pick it up. That gave us a whole night of Rock Band before we broke up for the holidays. It was worth the wait, and it is fucking fantastic. I think I’ve picked up the drums fairly well. I jumped straight into a hard career mode and I’m now half way through expert, having never played the drums in my life.

Anyway, Christmas was fun. It was probably the first year where I was looking forward to spending time with my friends and family, doing the usual stuff like eating fantastic food and getting fat more than I was looking forward to presents and shit. I’m getting to the age where I’d happily accept a pair of socks as a gift. Still, it was pretty good present wise. I got an iPod touch. I always though if I’d get an MP3 player it wouldn’t be an iPod because you’re buying a brand, not a top class MP3 player. Capability, quality and price wise they’re not the best. The iPod touch is a completely different market though. I bought it because it looks fantastic, does fantastic things and is so much more than an MP3 player. It’s the iPhone essentially, without the phone (I don’t need a phone - I have one without a ridiculous contract) but thinner and a lot cheaper. Almost everyone I know has fallen in love with it and wants one. Including my parents, who are scared of technology love it because it’s so simple. No buttons… just press what you want. And who isn’t impressed at zooming in on a picture by pinching the screen. I’ve also jailbroke it and installed some pretty cool applications such as a last.fm scrobbler, a SNES emulator, SCUMMVM so I can player Broken Sword and a few other cool games and such. The internet works perfectly on it, and it’s cool lying in bed watching YouTube videos. All in all, I’ve probably only spent about 30% of my time on it actually listening to music.

So Christmas was cool. New Years was pretty good. Couldn’t be arsed to go out so I had a few friends round. I’m sure you can imagine what happened; we got drunk. I’m sure Lauren or Dee has some photos I’ll try and get to put up here. I’m back at Uni now. Been playing a lot of Rock Band with my housemates in our band ‘Crab Enamel’. Not been up to much else. Hanging around, drinking a bit. Went out last night for ‘one or two pints’ which turned into 6 or 7. Now I’m listening to ‘In Rainbows’ as loud as I possibly can. Best album of 2007 bar none. I’m sure I had something else to say, but I can’t remember what. Oh well…

G’bye.

Rock Banned

So, between my last post and this one you’d expect something miraculous to have happened. Nope… same old, same old. We haven’t really even went out much recently. Last Thursday was quite fun. To make up for the fact that I hadn’t been out in a while, I got a wee bit drunk. We ended up soaking the kitchen floor and skidding across it. Then sliding down the stairs. Let’s just say it wasn’t the hangover that hurt the following morning…

Aside from that, the one glimmer of light was Rock Band. Rock Band itself is worth hyping up and getting excited over, but when you live in a house with 3 other gamers all of whom love Guitar Hero and such… well, we really wanted it. Unfortunately the UK release date isn’t even announced yet, labelled only as ‘Q1 2008′. My guess is March or April but I wouldn’t be surprised if it got delayed due to hardware issues. Anyway, we all contributed money to import it, assuming it was region free as 90% of the 360 games I’ve bought are. If not, I had a plan to borrow my brothers modded 360 to play it.

So we paid and waited. I must have refreshed at least 10 times a day on the tracking page to watch it get closer to our house. Finally, 10 days later, it arrived. But there was no delivery. One phone call to the delivery depot later, “You have customs charges. You can come and pick the item up and pay them”. Off to the depot we went. Handed over the tracking number, “There is no such item here”. Bugger. Wrong depot. I was at Royal Mail and it was being handled by Parcel Force. After a silly journey based on Royal Mail man’s terrible directions to the other depot, we arrived. Paid the ridiculous customs charges (£38… over $80) and brought the game home.

It was like christmas day. We set it all up and put the game in one of our 4 360’s. “This game is not the correct region. Go to xbox.com for more information.” Well, that’s a bit shit, I thought. Not to worry though, I have my brothers not so legal console. In goes the disk… “This game is not the correct region. Go to xbox.com for more information.”

Our faces dropped. An hour or so of research later, we found out that not a single firmware flash or mod chip can bypass region locking. This thought hadn’t even entered our mind… I thought the main reason for modding your console was to play imports. Surely after 2 years, somebody had figured it out. Shit. Fuck. Bollocks. So, Rock Band sits set up in our sitting room. A statue of what could have been. Were we stupid for blindly importing? Probably. But the awesomeness of the game made us do it.

Now we’re left with 3 options. Wait until the UK release and buy the standalone disk (The hardware is region free and working… for now). This would destroy the point of importing, and create another agonising wait. We could re-sell it on eBay. That way we’d have to agonisingly wait, but we’d have our money back in the mean time. And thirdly import an American console.

Me being the silly bugger that I am, I’m looking for an import. The cheapest NTSC console I can find. I don’t need an HDD or Wires or pads. And I won’t be buying this just for Rock Band. I’ll use it as an import console, getting games cheaper and quicker. But I really can’t afford it…

But I shall!

For the gods of rock…

:S

Ágætis byrjun

Hello one and all. Probably just one. What have I been up to this week? Well, I wish I had a grand adventure to discuss, but I don’t. I haven’t really been out this week. I had a few drinks in the house a few days ago. Well, actually more than a few. But nothing exciting happened. I just played on Halo 3 with my housemates til the early hours. Some American redneck asked me what the bitches were like in England, to which I replied “Probably the same as the bitches over there” and he said “I heard they have multiple men” to which I replied “Not from my experience” and he said “You must just be ugly” to which I replied “I look like your dad”. Thinking about it now in a more sober state of mind, what he said didn’t even make sense. In my experience, women don’t have multiple men, thus anybody I’ve been with has been with me only. Surely not a concept which would make one think I’m ugly. Unless of course you’re an ignorant, American imbecile. Either way, I had the last laugh. I then went on to play the Antiques Roadshow theme down my microphone. A theme which greatly translates to being a soundtrack to a battle.

Went to Dee’s house yesterday. Everybody was drinking, but I was feeling a bit weak/dizzy and I got a headache so I, for once, stuck to water. Nothing to note happened. Watched a bit of ‘Children In Need’. I decided that if Ross Kemp had a brother, his name should be Ted. Ted Kemp. lol. Made a few songs today. Bit bored really. Especially for a Saturday. Oh well. I spontaneously bought Rock Band on eBay yesterday but I’m regretting it now because I don’t have £150 to waste, but I really don’t want to wait til the UK release date (Probably around Feb/March. Maybe later) but I rang Gav today and he said he might pay for half of it, which is fair as the whole house would be playing it a lot. Who takes it home is a different matter, but I might just fully buy it off him when the time comes. Either way, it’s going to be put to use in the student house for the next 2 years.

And that is that. The name of this blog post by the by is a Sigur Ros album I’m listening to. I want their new DVD. And the limited edition ‘The Beatles - Help’ DVD boxset. It’s rather good. It features a deleted scene with Wendy Richard (Pauline Fowler) who, according to IMDb, has a rather extensive ornamental frog collection.

One

Well, I’ll class this as my first proper new blog post since re-beginning my blog. I haven’t done much. I went home on the weekend, but my family went away to my aunties in Yorkshire for my cousins birthday so I had the house to myself. I wasn’t planning on going out on Saturday, but Dee convinced me. My new student bank account is finally open, so I have some money to tie me over til the stupid Student Loan Company sorts my maintenance grant out. Also meant I could pay Gav back the money he has so kindly borrowed me to survive til said grant/bank account gets sorted.

Anyway, I drank half a bottle of cheap scotch whisky at Dee’s, and then her mam re-filled half of it with some Bell’s Whisky she had. Usually a good thing, however almost a bottle of whisky before going out to a club is never a good idea. Anyway, it was an ok night out, but nothing special. Krash just doesn’t do much for me anymore. It’s predictable both in it’s music and company but I still hardly recognised anybody there, so I assume most of the old crowd have moved on. Maybe it was just a bad week. It also feels weird, as Dee pointed out, going out with just 3 people (Dee, Lauren and James in this case) having gotten used to going out with a large crowd of peeps from the student houses. And it’s still ridiculously expensive (£3 a pint fuckingsadface.gif). I want to go to Skates, as that is always brilliant (and cheap) but it’s on an awkward day (Tuesday).

Aside from that, I have done little else. I came back to Uni. Went to the cinema with everybody today to see 30 Days of Night. It was ok. Pretty much as I expected. I didn’t expect a masterpiece, and I didn’t get one. I’d have liked it to be a little scarier though. Not that I get scared by many movies anyway, but still… when you’re laughing, it says a lot. Near Dark is my favourite Vampire movie.

I bought Call of Duty 4 today too. Haven’t played much of it yet. Played a few rounds of Team Deathmatch and it was really fun, but I knew what to expect having played the multiplayer beta. Still, something else to play online aside from Halo 3. Wanting Mass Effect and Assassins Creed this month too.

And that, for the moment, is that.

Blog 2.0

OK, so I’m going to kick start my blog back into action. I now officially class my last attempt at starting a proper blog as a failure. I didn’t post consistently, and thus it’s use was pretty much non-existent i.e it was useless. As you can see, my last ‘Catch Up’ post detailed my moving into my Uni house last year. Well, I’m in a new house now with new housemates (Still with Gav, plus new guys Shiv and Tim). So this is a fresh start. I’m not promising anything, but I’m going to try my best to post as often as a can. Hopefully at least once a week. Preferably more. I might throw in some views on new movies/albums/artists/games from time to time to. Since this is my first post in such a while, I’ll leave it at that and make my next blog post an actual blog post when I actually have something to blog about.

à revoir

Catch Up

So today I have finally decided to write about what I have been up to in the last few month. It wasn’t quite as soon as I earlier predicted, but nevertheless I have got round to it. Now that I have… I really don’t know where to start. I guess it had better be with Uni, as to be honest I can’t really remember anything happening before that up until my last blog entry before Uni. That is the very reason I want to be consistent with my blog so I don’t forgot such marvellous memories… (I assume… I can’t remember). Anyway, I started Uni in September. Moved into my new house. I have 3 housemates (In alphabetical order) Adam, Damon and Gav. To be quite honest, the first 2 weeks were just constant drinking.

In the first week we collected 4 or 5 traffic cones and 2 safety fence things. We also received two or three letters of complaint about noise in the first fortnight and the police walked into our house during a party, though that was mostly because somebody stupidly left the front door open and not because we weren’t law abiding (Which we certainly are). Strangely enough, the police didn’t say anything about the bright orange fence on our mantle piece. Don’t think we’re inconsiderate, typical, cliché student types. I think we deserve to have a welcome party in the first week. It just so happened we have snobbish neighbours who complained because we made a bit of noise on one night. They didn’t even attempt to tell us to turn it down, else we would have.

Anyway, my room is downstairs at the front of the house. I like it. I think it is the best sized room of the house. Not too big, and not too small. The only downside is that because I’m at the front of the house I have to constantly have my curtains closed so people don’t look into my room and decide they want to steal everything.

Since then, nothing much has changed. We’re still rather bizarre and we’re still not Danish. We have a book called ‘The Thoughts and Writings of 107′ (Our house number) which is kind of a diary of the house. Every time somebody says/does something random/stupid/funny it goes into the book. I’m glad it was started, because I can guarantee we would not have remembered 90% of the stuff in it. Most of the book is filled with stupid, but brilliant, drunken games we play such as ‘Replace part of the hip-hop artist with ‘Jew” which results in classics such as ‘Jew-Pac’, ‘Jew-Z’, ‘Jew Unit’ and my personal favourite ‘The Jew Tang Clan’.

And I guess that is all there is to say for now. I do not have time, nor can I remember and fill in everything that has happened so I shall leave what we can remember in our book and continue forward via this blog. I will mention that my housemate Adam kicked his fireplace resulting in years of soot falling out all over his bedroom, including the carcass of a small dead bird child.

Lol.

Smell My Cheese You Knobber

Right, so here I am. A bit drunk. Fuck all to do. What have I got to say? Not much really. I’m not going to explain the last few months because to be Frank, and I am Frank, I can’t be arsed. I’ve just paid for my Alan Partridge “Smell My Cheese You Knobber” T-Shirt. Jurassic Park! I’ve just been to Gav’s bedroom. He said he was going to bed 10 minutes ago. He lied. He was playing with Winamp. We ordered two 1/2 lb Cheese Burgers earlier, with Onion Rings. I’ve been burping up onion rings for the last hour. I feel that my life has turned into one big onion ring burpathon.

No I don’t.

But it is quite frustrating. I want some new flavours. Fruits of the forest maybe…

I’ve just heard Gav lock his door. That means business. He really IS going to sleep now. I shall drink alone

Gav is my housemate by the by. More about all of that in my next blog outing. At the moment I am waiting for the new Lost episode to freakin’ show up on MiniNova. Frickin’ 12 weeks I’ve been waiting for this. I am genuinely rather excited… for a TV show anyway. I shouldn’t be so sure about Gav… I have just been to fetch a drink and Gav’s bedroom light is on. He never sleeps with his light on and he only shuts his door when he is sleeping or on the phone. Hmm. I shall investigate…

Well that was rather worthless. I have really hurt my leg running up the stairs thinking there was an extra step. I hate it when that happens. His door was locked. He never locks his door. He did claim he was going to, after I ran in the other night with a glow in the dark Frisbee when he was in bed. Anyway, I confronted Gav and he said “I am just getting ready for bed”. His music was off, so I assume he is. Anyway, I think that is enough blabber for now… tomorrow the blog revolution shall start. Well… not really, but I might write more. It’s actually quite fun. Gav’s light is still on. I shall go have a shot of Tequila and blue stuff (forgot what it’s called).

Edit: The blue stuff is called ‘Blue…’ … I forgot. One second.

Edit 2: Blue nothing… it’s called ‘Sidekick’. Y’see… I could have edited all of that out, and make it seem like I got the name right off. But I didn’t, and this is my blog and I shall be honest. While I went in to re-check the name I had another shot.

The roof of my mouth has went numb.

Oops

Well, I guess I didn’t live up to my promise of blogging all of the time. It isn’t because I have got bored of the blog, I’ve just been quite busy. After my last entry, I went to Leeds festival. I planned on writing about that but I had to get sorted for Uni. I told myself that once I’d moved into my Uni house and everything was set, I’d make an entry detailing everything but I guess I just forgot. And there is a distinct lack of time now too.

Now that everybody is settled in, and we’re not drinking every night, I’ve time to sit in front of the computer for some geek-all-nighters. This is where this entry came from, and where tomorrows will too. I’ve only just remembered about my blog now, and it is 4:14am so I haven’t the time to make a full report now, so I shall tomorrow. Promise.

The Weekend, The Weather.

So I guess this is my first official blog post. The weekend was pretty uneventful other than Krash (Locl rock club) on Saturday night. On Friday we typically came to my house. We decided earlier on that we were going to go to a Maize Maze. We didn’t know where it was, or if it even existed… we’d just heard about it via Dee’s mother I believe, and an article in a newspaper. Anyway, after some searching we found that it was situated at Broom House, Durham but it wasn’t going to be created for 2006. Instead they have created a 10 acre forest adventure trail but it didn’t open until Saturday so we decided to go next (this) week. More on that later if it occurs.

Instead we went to Newcastle. I didn’t buy anything, other than food, as I don’t have much money. I got a Subway ‘2 meals for £5.99’ deal. I got a 6″ Tuna with lettuce, cucumber and ranch dressing and a 6″ steak with lettuce, cucumber and a dressing that I can’t remember. I gave the second drink and cookie to James. I am on a sort of diet… not anything specific, I’m just eating healthy things more often than not. It’s going good so far. I’ve been eating healthily for about a month and so far the only bad thing I’ve had is one Chinese, an Indian and a BBQ and even then I chose the healthiest things I could find (Apart from the BBQ…). I thought I’d find it harder, but I’m actually having no trouble just eating healthy stuff. I only want to lose about 2 stone then I’ll start eating what I want again but I’ll keep it a bit more under control. I’ve already lost 3¼’s of a stone

On Saturday we spent about 4 hours deciding what to do. Either go to Krash, which we couldn’t really afford, or go to Dee’s house and sit in her garden which I was fine with, but I think everybody wanted to go out. In the end we decided that we’d go to Krash if the weather turned bad. It started raining and thus our mind was made up. I’ll be honest… I wasn’t looking forward to Krash because I couldn’t get drunk (Medication - I’m allowed 10 units of alcohol). I’ve never been out and stayed sober before, and doing so didn’t really appeal to me. I don’t like drunk people when I’m sober. Dee picked me and Alan up to go to Morrison’s to get some alcohol to drink before going out. I got two 2-litre bottles of woodpecker for £4 coming to a total of 14 units. That was already 4 units over what I was allowed with my medication so I couldn’t even drink all 4 litres. We went back to Dee’s and I was sitting arguing with myself in my head… “I suppose its only one night a week…” “No, you can’t drink. You’ll bugger up your liver. It’s not worth taking the chance”. In the end we looked through Sharon’s (Dee’s mam) 2 nursing books. The first one said “Avoid Alcohol”. The second one didn’t mention anything, although to be honest it didn’t say ‘Avoid _____’ at all anywhere in the book for any drug.

I got drunk.

I had my 10 units in Dee’s house. I drank one of the 2 litre bottles, totalling 7 units. One can of Woodpecker, another 2 units and 1 shot of some white chocolate vodka stuff, which was 1 unit. At Krash I had 3 bottles of Magners, which didn’t state the amount of units but I’m going to guess about 3.5 each. It was quite fun at Dee’s. Not much happened really. We sat in her sitting room for a bit while her little cousin Christopher and her not so little neighbour Kieran played on Worms 3D. I put a bottle cap on her uncle’s dog, Ebony (lolz). I tried to take a picture but it ran away and it fell off. It looked like it was wearing a fez. Dee ate a daddy long legs. It was originally going to be me, but I decided against it. Dee decided to do it after she was promised £10 to do so. She did, and she got. After this, we moved out into Dee’s front garden. Everybody lay on the grass apart from me and James who danced like pricks to Dirty Pretty Things. We danced around the people lying on the grass in a circle and they didn’t seem to notice so I poked Dee with a stick. Then we spotted a hedgehog. I think Hebburn Village is turning into some sort of nature reserve, as I spotted a Fox there last week. The fox ran off when I stealthily snuck up on it, but the hedgehog froze for a picture. Or out of fear. One of the two. I personally think it was posing.

As you can see, it disappointingly looks absolutely nothing like Sonic. I was tempted to test how sharp it was, before Dee’s aunty informed me that it would be covered in fleas. Nothing new… it is Hebburn after all. Nothing much more worth noting occurred at Dee’s house. James felt sick and decided to not come to Krash. We left for Krash. James stayed, waiting for his mother to pick him up. I think he just wanted to play on Worms 3D with Kieran really.

Krash was quite good. Nothing particularly memorable happened. It was really full. I’ve never seen it that full in ages other than the last night before it re-opened and New Year. I danced like a right gimp to Master of Puppets with Ray. That is about as much as I can remember. I always try to take pictures at Krash, and they always end up stupidly out of focus. Half because I’m drunk, and half because I think its fine to take a picture while dancing. The end result is always a feast for the eyes.

I think Dee got some quite good pictures, which I’ll upload once I’ve stole them off her. One of them I believe had Hobbsie with a bollock out. Unsurprisingly. After Krash we walked in search of food. I got a song from the 80’s stuck in everybody’s head despite the fact that nobody knew all of the lyrics. You know the one… “We close our eyes… de de de de de de… Imagination de de de de de de de” hmm… I can’t really do the tune in text form. Either way, it’s ‘Go West - We Close Our Eyes’ so download it because it is the most astonishing, pragmatic, benevolent and omnipotent song you’ll ever hear. Maybe. We found a Subway but it smelled like burning plastic, then the power cut off and it went dark. We left and found another one but they closed the door just as we got there so we went to the chip shop which sells dildos and ‘herbal’ drugs. Then taxi and home.

Sunday was pretty uneventful. I sat and talked to my uncle, who was down from Scotland for a wedding, and my dad in the back yard for a few hours. Watched TV and started my blog on blogger.com before realising that wordpress is 10 times better and I moved it here on Monday. Today has also been pretty uneventful. It’s only 3:30pm but all I’ve done so far is watched Mythbusters (Woo, a one I hadn’t seen before) and wrote this. The weather has been weird though. We’ve had the hottest summer ever, but for the past few days it has looked like it is wanting to rain. The sky is pining to leak, but it has just been spitting for 20 minutes then going away and it is still really warm. Then today as I was watching Mythbusters it just started pouring down. And I mean pouring. Yes that’s right… italics! I’ve never seen rain that heavy since the massive thunderstorm last year. Then as quickly as it started, it stopped. And I don’t mean it gradually faded… I was looking outside, shocked at how heavy it was and then in literally a second there was nothing. And that was my day’s excitement. Tomorrow should be a bit better. I believe Kris and James are coming over and I’ll ask Dan and other people if they so wish. Oh, and Justin Timberlake’s new song SexyBack owns you.

That is all for now!