It’s a New Year. And it has apparently been a new year for quite a while. Three months, I see. I should stay in more. That way I would have more time to blog about the things I haven’t been getting up to. Instead, I have been getting up to things.

“Oh”, you ask, “what sort of things? Interesting things? Exciting things? Things I might want to read about?”

Well, I have just gotten back from Melbourne, the city I love and want to move to. And before that I was in Sydney. And before that I was in Buenos Aires (which I hated more than microwaved steak). And before that I was in Ushuaia (which is just lovely) and before that I believe I was on Antarctica.

Antarctica? Yep. Sure was. Snow, ice and stinking penguins. Are you aware of how bad those lil’ fuckers smell? Because they smell horrid, terrible, revolting, disgusting and putrid. Damn cute, though.

So, why was I on Antarctica? Well, I was the +1 on an adventure cruise my mmmMother booked. And whilst the average age of the cruise goer was about a million, and the only people my age were a married couple who argued a lot and a New Yorker, I did manage to make friends and enjoy the social aspect of things. But the real fun was had on Zodiacs and on the Antarctic continent itself. Oh, and it helped that the people running the thing were fun, interesting and in more than once case, very, very cute.

But, I will leave Antarctica alone for the moment as there are diary entries to be read and reviewed and turned into something worthy of writing down, and this update is not that place.

This update is the place where I tell you about Faith No More. If you were alive in 1993 and not a moron, you may be aware that they were the single greatest rock band of their era. Yes, I know, they ushered in the age of the rap/nu-metal rape of civilisation, but whilst those that followed them were crass, unimaginative and horrid, Faith No More were amazing. Great, thumping bass lines, fantastic drumming, wonderfully out-of-place keyboards and screeching guitar* riffs**, all topped off with the single greatest voice to ever grace rock music. Ever. I dare you to even suggest someone in modern rock who can approach how great Mike Patton is. And that’s even before you tackle his range, his songwriting skills and how much he likes to take his cock out at shows.

Anyway, back when I was a Young Man, half a life time ago (sadly, true) I really liked Faith No More. King for a Day… Fool for a Lifetime was one of my two favourite albums. I completely loved the fuck out of it. And when they put out Album of the Year and toured it around Australia, I just had to go and see them.

And I did. And it was great. Even getting some girl’s steel-capped Doc in my temple and falling to the ground unable to breath (for a few moments) was worth it.

And then they broke up. Which was sad. Because as much as I love Mr Bungle and Fantômas and Imperial Teen and Tomahawk and Peeping Tom nothing came quite as close to perfection as Faith No More did. Nothing.

So I pushed them to the back of my mind for a few years, until I got out King for a Day… Fool for a Lifetime from my CD rack*** one day and started listening to it again. It got the point that I would carry the entire Nine Inch Nails back catalogue around with me, and King for a Day… Fool for a Lifetime. I once wrote a short story that only used lyrics from Faith No More songs as dialogue. They may not have been still around, but they were still having an impact on me and those poor saps who had to read my poor fiction.

Then, one day, they announced they were reforming. And I was happy. And then they announced they were only playing festival dates in Europe. And I was disappointed. And then my friend said she was going to the UK and Europe to see them AND Nine Inch Nails play. And I wanted to murder her quietly in her sleep.

And then, they announced they were playing the Soundwave Festival here in Australia. I went to Soundwave 09 because Nine Inch Nails were playing, and lets just say that as great as the music was, the festival itself had a lot of shortcomings, all of which I was later told was the result of the venue, Eastern Creek Raceway in Sydney. I had intended to see the Melbourne shows too, but for reasons that are too pathetic, I didn’t.

But, FAITH NO MORE! So I bought tickets to both the Sydney and Melbourne festivals. And I was happy. Then when I was in New Zealand, the band announced sideshows, so I had to ask the friend (who I thankfully hadn’t murdered in her sleep) to get me tickets to those. And she did. Because she is pretty awesome and is no longer in any real danger of being murdered by me.

Those shows all took place in the past week, so I have been totally and utterly fucking tired from lacking in sleep and still trying to go to work each day. But, I did get to see Faith No More four times, Neil Hamburger once, and Eagles of Death Metal three times. All such very good things. And I now can say that Soundwave is great, Eastern Creek is shit. The Melbourne Showgrounds were amazingly well sorted out, and the venue really makes a mockery of how crap the Eastern Creeks facilities were.

Now, are you familiar with Chatroulette? No? Really? Should I explain it or are you familiar with Google? Because I think you should Google it if you don’t know what it is. I’ll be here when you get back.

Back?

Good.

Right, well at the Melbourne Soundwave show, Faith No More had Chatroulette setup on stage so they could broadcast/stream their show to randoms. And so they did.

Here is some footage I took of it:

The crowd goes nuts at one point because there was a guy in just a penis pump making perfect penis pump circles with his gyrating penis. Tops!

In summary, FAITH NO MORE!

* Proto-hipser-glasses wearing guitarist who was famously fired via fax.
** Current shredder.
*** The flat surface that surrounds my TV, and it only contains CDs and DVDs, no cases.

1. Game journalists with no sense of gaming history.
2. People who bitch, moan and complain about the price of iPhone apps.
3. “Good Samaritan” drivers who cause traffic jams by letting someone without right of way cross/pass/in.
4. Being given advice on a subject by someone who hasn’t taken five minutes to gather my knowledge on it first.
5. Waitresses who really, really don’t get sarcasm.
6. Getting older.
7. People who just have to include a song reference into a blog title, post or Top Ten list.
8. Eight, eight, I forget what eight was for.
9. The globalised world refusing to do business with me on a retail level.
10. “Aussie Pride” or Southern Cross stickers on VS/VR Holden Commodores, being driven by inbreed little cunts with white sunglasses on.

* This list may, or may not, be restricted to ten entries. I may rant on here a little, too.

I live in Australia’s least liked Capital City. Sydney hates us because it wants to be the Capital, Melbourne hates us because The Daily Rag says so (maybe, I don’t read the papers, but Crikey doesn’t seem to mind us that much). One of the things that strikes me as odd about Canberra is the way the City has retracted over the years.

Retracted socially, that is.

In the 1970s and 1980s there were clubs, bars and nightspots all over the place. Not just in Civic (or Canberra City, or whatever it is officially designated this year). Today, if you want to go and hang with your real-life friends, you have to drive/bus it into Town. Yes, there are a few bars in Belconnen and Woden (and I am aware of the infamous “taverns” in Tuggeranong) but they fill up rather quickly, are full of locals and, frankly, fail at being anything other than suburban bars and/or clubs.

So it strikes me as odd that Canberra Social Networkers, the self-congratulatory wankers who dominate any search results for “Canberra” or “Windbag” on Twitter, attempt to be social and network here, in Canberra. Where do they go? What do they do? Well, I reckon nowhere. They stay digital, etheral.

I get the feeling that most of them have found a small audience of people with nowhere else to be either, and so they preach to the converted (I at least only preach to the perverted, using a comination of Twitter, Tumblr and some glow sticks). I also have a sneaky suspicion that some of the better known and “Internationally” recognised fellows and felloweses are sad loners taking full advantage of any time in the sun they can have. I could be “Internationally” recognised too, it’s not difficult; all you need is a van, a backyard big enough to put some tents up and a collection of women you can scare into submission.

Doesn’t mean it’s good, though.

* Because, the only thing Social Networkers have is an opinion. And this is only mine, and it will invariable mutate as I become more or less interested in what people are saying about me. Also, if you start following me, you better prove that you are not a spammer or if you are a spammer, you better be a hot one.

As a modern day male with a full time job, I am no longer able to spend every waking moment playing GTA or Half-Life 2 or Sensible World of Soccer. I would very much like to be able to, but I can’t. I can’t carry my Xbox 360 and Wii around with me either, so my gaming is “on the move”. This used to mean I carried a Nintendo DS around with me, but I was too ashamed to use it in public, which means the lion’s share of my game time is spent on the iPhone.

Which means I have bought many (too many, in fact) iPhone games. And a bunch of them have been total shit.

Some, however, have been great. They are:

Flight Control – Draw lines to make planes not crash.
Real Racing – Drive fast cars on a race track, fast.
Wolf3d – Force yourself to remember how small a window you had to play this in when it came out, then realise the iPhone screen is about the same size. Wonder, out loud, how far we have come.
Grunts – Cannon. Fucking. Fodder (minus the theme song).
Pinball Dreams – Hey, I had an Amiga. It was rad on there, it’s rad on here.
(I was going to put up links to the iTunes Store, but Apple can go suck a fuck right now, but if they stop being dickholes soon, I will re-consider).

Of the others, well, read my review of the re-re-release of Monkey Island to understand how I feel. Go on, do it. It’s below. Or click here.

But I am too busy to give a fat flying fuckstain about how I am being unfair to Monkey Island, I feel that with a mobile platform like the iPhone (and the cheap prices of the games), if a game doesn’t get it’s hooks into me early, or has an off-putting control scheme, I will just ditch it.

So, first off, Space Invaders Infinite Gene – Ignore anything you know about the great-granddaddy of shooters and just buy this game. Do it. It has this amazing vector look, sounds great and controls well. And it changes how you think about Space Invaders.

So, second off, Civilisation Revolution. I downloaded the Lite version. Then I deleted it. Helpful hint, if it takes 3 fucking second for an “OK” button to register a press, don’t expect the rest of the game to move at all. This thing looks great, sounds brilliant, plays like underwater squash. Ignore. Ignore.

Or just wait till they come out with an update that works.

So, LucasArts have revamped, re-animated, re-scored and voiced a new version of the classic The Secret of Monkey Island. And you can get it for Xbox 360, Windows or the iPhone.

I went with the iPhone path, because, hell, a point’n'click adventure makes more sense with a touch-screen than a gamepad, right?

Alas, whilst the game looks and sounds amazing, the controls are totally, utterly and horribly fucked. The developers have kept the mouse cursor part of the original game design, and whilst they have tarted up the UI*, the cursor doesn’t follow your finger on screen. It has a lag that increases the more you move. So you have to move finger, stop, lift finger, touch cursor (which is nowhere near where you want it to be) and drag again. Pity yourself if you need to click near the edge of the screen, because your finger will slide off the touch-sensitive area and the frustration will end with you boiling your iPhone in a Pryex jug in the office microwave oven.

So, my advice? Don’t buy it… yet. Hopefully LucasArts will fix the controls and push out a 1.1 version hat makes it work better on the iPhone. Until then, just play Flight Control.

P.S. Unrelated, kinda, but I found the coolest paint program ever. It’s called Grafx2 and it mimics the Amiga application Deluxe Paint. Why bring this up? Well, back in the dark old past of the late 1980s, LucasArts converted Deluxe Paint from the Amiga to the PC. And they used it for all of their adventure games. In fact, it is how Guybrush got his name, as Deluxe Paint would append “.brush” to the name of a file, and the LucasArts artists just happened to name one “guy”. So, “guy.brush” become Guybrush.

But as I got older, I found myself spending less time roasting marshmallows over a red-hot CRT/PowerBook and more time with actual, real people. People who did want to go outside. People who would spend money to strap sticks of wood to their feet. Sticks of wood that, over the years, have got wider and wider until they joined together to become one piece – the snowboard.

And yesterday, I did the same. I took a trip from my base to the snowy delights of the Perisher Valley. I bought an expensive jacket, some in-expensive waterproof pants, and then hired a really cheap (yet brand-new and apparently good quality) snowboard, and threw myself down a hill.

Over and over. Again and again.

And I loved it.

So, now I am looking at going again, really soon. Whilst I will likely continue to rent boards this season, I did have a quick look at obtaining either a cheap new board and bindings, or a second-hand/ex-demo setup. In looking around multiple places I found out about Burton’s “Love” range.

Now I want one of these:

So, VNV Nation. Futurepop Industrial dance band and all round nice guys (I’ve managed to chat to them both a couple of times, well, by chat I have walked up to them post-shows and talked at them about how great they are) and a band I happen to think are pretty great.

So, VNV Nation. They have a new album out, its called Of Faith, Power and Glory and, hell, it’s pretty great.

Great. Pretty.

I was, don’t you know? So, the question is this, should I spend the money to advertise that fact? Or keep that little bit of knowledge to myself? Ja oder nein?

And I am so completely happy with it. I have a nice fast little 50mm lens which means I can take some of the sorts of pictures I like quite reliably (the only thing that lets me down is me). But she is quite a big camera to lug around – even without the lenses.

So, maybe I need something like the Olympus E-P1. Not only does it have the most wonderful retro look I have seen on an affordable camera, it seems to tick all the other boxes I originally wanted in a camera.

Check out this DP Review preview if you want to make yourself lust after one as well.

The Stereo Holga is for those times when one crappy retro lens is just not enough. Now you can perfect that crappy retro 3D look you so desire. Highly lusted after here at Shallow Bay Towers.

Ye Olde Ikea Catalogues because there is nothing more hip, here and modern than old furniture right now, so why not look at how cheap much of the original stuff was?

How long is your snail? This one is 39 inches long! And you thought I was being rude, didn’t you?

I once bought a Nokia 770 tablet, and I liked it, but it was far too slow. These days I hang with an iPhone and it does everything I want it to, but does it do it for you? If not, maybe a stupidly affordable Nokia N810 tablet would fit the bill?

Speaking of stupidly affordable, how does free sound? How does a Mario Kart-like socially networked game sound? How about I show you something that combines both of those things? OK, go look at Hoverkart.

I like photography and I like pretty girls. I would like to take more pictures of pretty girls, but they don’t always want me to. I bet if I was a very talented photographer, and quite pretty at the same time, I would not have any issues. Here is one such photographer/pretty girl.

I have a previously diagnosed shoe fetish and I find myself unable to consider continuing to live without having at least two pairs of shoes for every occasion. I would like to have an occasion to own these Oakely Assault boots and these adidas GSG-9.2s.

* Things I find interesting may not be interesting to you. Consult your medical practitioner if symptoms persist.