Nothin' but Trouble...

My first pilgrimage of the year last Monday. A trip down to the holy city of Wolverhampton to see the legendary Trouble at the Civic Hall. Well, the Civic Hall bar actually. Curse all you trend pandering, false metal felating bastards that would let such an iconic band be forced to resort to changing down venue from the Wulfrun Hall to the bloody bar of the big venue next door. Grrr. Anyways, said venue wasn't all that small, actually, being sized halfway between, say, the ABC 1 and the ABC 2 in Glasgow. Not exactly packed out, either, but then again Doom metal never was big box office (apart from, well, you know who). You're into it for the love of the damn thing.

None of that matters anyway. The band themselves were simply magnificent. Tighter than a constipated gadfly, heavier than four dozen buffalo stampeding on your cranium, louder than the coming apocalypse, yada yada yada. Have I really been waiting nearly twenty years to see them live? Brrrrrr. They ran the full gamut of their material, all the way back to the oldest, slowest, most funereal stuff right through the Jimi / Zep styled era of the mid nineties and then on to some new material which sounded super heavy in the old fashion - not that anyone will be buying it, sadly. I had heard that they will be on the same bill as Heaven and Hell on at least one festival line-up in Europe this summer. Probably in a land where the mullet is the official national tonsorial style - just a shame I can't afford the requisite hair weave.

Have to say that I really like Wolves the town. The lovely folk from the Midlands are generally pretty damn cool IME and you always get a nice bit of conversation with them, especially when they find they are talking to a Scot. Funnily enough, the town centre, to me, actually looks a lot like, erm, Hamilton... without the omnipresent shell suited, semi-human garbage polluting the shared psychic head space, obviously. Lots of great buildings with some beautiful architecture, especially the art gallery and St Peters church. Just, y'know, old-fashioned nice. I like old-fashioned nice. Defo worth a visit, I'd say.

Paradise Deferred (Redux)

Bah, this game programming lark is a royal pain in the cojones. I've been trying to motivate myself to finish that godawful sideways scrolling shoot 'em up that I've been rattling on about for, oh, months now but I have been seriously struggling... sadly, the "can't be arsed" factor is hideously enormous, exacerbated by the huge number of fiddly little bastard details that always need to be attended to before making real progress. I've actually somehow got a fair old bit of the infrastructure well in place but there always seems to be something else that needs properly designed, and it's always something that hadn't been previously accounted for... and, frankly, after spending most of my 9-5 workday ploughing through acres of ill-considered, back-of-the-fag-packet designed shit intricately planned, well-architectured, high quality code, I'm not always in the best frame of mind to spend the evenings or weekends peeing away my precious drinking time doing similar into the wee small hours. Not when there's a third series of Deadwood to be watched...

Aha, I hear you cry, the big sh**bag is making his excuses and baling out already - what a complete Colin Hunt. Well, naw, that ain't the case... not at all. The sideways scrolling job will get finished at some point, maybe even this summer... but my new years resolution was really based around just getting a game written in Python with a view to subsequently getting it running on Linux as well as Windows... and then going on and seeing about getting it running in an OLPC development environment. Well, that project is still very much on, only I've retrospectively decided to walk before running (er, actually after trying to run in the first place but bollocks to pedantry) and have started converting my old "classic" Columns rip-off to Python / PyGame from the original Delphi / DirectX version. A much less technically onerous endeavour as well as a pretty damn fun way to really get into the guts of the new language without fighting it quite so much at every bleedin' step (e.g. cursing stupid things like the lack of basic, multi-dimensional arrays in the standard Python library the other day - WTF ?!?). In fact, it's going to be a cool wee proggy to hang any graphical and musical doodlings from in the way that I'd originally intended the Delphi version to become. Well, I've started so I'll finish as old Magnus used to say. This thing will definitely get done. I've said so in public. So there :-P

In the meantime, here's a picture of one of the models for a putative end of level baddie from that wannabe R-Type / Gradius clone to keep y'all satisfied. It was going to be a picture of another (partially) furry German but the big man thought better of violating the old Blogger terms of service. Ho-hum.


Made with the help of -

The Byrds "Sweetheart of the Rodeo" - Oh, how old Uncle Mex loves the sound of some steel guitar on a Sunday morning. Glorious. Gram Parsons R.I.P.

A good Rogering...

Nipped down to London at the weekend to see Roger Waters at the Floydian spiritual home of Earls Court. What a fantastic concert venue, much better than any of the faceless, plastic, 10,000+ seat sized arenas that I've visited over the years... I'd forgotten just how splendid it was after seeing the other three amigos there back in '94 when I was a mere slip of a lad. What a super posh, ultra-exclusive area of the city as well, very pleasant indeed. Unlike the drunken crowd of scouse gits that inevitably sat in front of the big man during the show, singing along loudly at the most inappropriate moments, getting up every five minutes to get their beers in or go and take a piss, usual boorish nonsense from ignorant fuckwits - IME, there has always been that thin strata of the Floyd audience coming from the chav demographic... something to do with the drugs methinks. Anyway, they didn't quite manage to ruin the gig for the old fella - jolly(!) Roger saved the day by playing wall to wall (tee hee, see what I did there?) old stuff all the way for a good three hours (with a twenty minute break in the middle), including the whole of Dark Side in the second half, in order, from start to finish with old Nick Mason on the drum stool. Marvellous. Must give props to the twin guitars of Dave Kilminster and Snowy White channelling Gilmour with much aplomb. Good work fellas. Yes, a lovely night all round.

Now that's what I call commitment (vol. 4)

Stumbled across this picture (right) of the sainted wee Ron fronting the Sabs Heaven and Hell a few weeks back. Uncle Mex here could not help but notice that the leather lunged, pocket sized titan has invested himself in the blessed cause of fronting the greatest metal band in the known universe to such a heroically committed extent that his very DNA itself is transforming, as highlighted below in the close-up through the appearance of stigmata in the shape of the sacred Sabbath cross on the back of his hand (apparently that whole cross thing is also a traditional religious symbol of some significance as well - go figure!).


Anyhoo, I know damn well that the cheap "Volume 4" crack in the subject line would have worked better if the Oz was the current front man but the pun would not be denied - bollocks to the lot of you :-P