Pirates of the Caribbean – On Stranger Tides

I had low hopes for this movie. I mean, my few memories of the last one were of my friend moaning that she wanted her money back. There were threats to walk out. It was bloody awful. This one, though?

#musicmonday: H3llb3nt – Forget You

H3llb3nt – Haloblack’s Bryan Black, Chemlab’s Jared Louche, 16 Volt’s Eric Powell, and anyone else they could rope in at the time – released the album Hardcore Vanilla back in 2001. It was mostly ignored, which is a shame, because it was at least attempting to do something that didn’t sound exactly like everything else at the time.

Morrowind: A love letter

I wish I had a time machine so that I could go back and play Morrowind for the first time again. That was one of the first thoughts I had this morning. I could vividly hear in my mind the musique concrète of its soundtrack – the ambient noises that give it such an unearthly, magical atmosphere – and wanted to hear them again for the first time. It’s not something I could accomplish, I thought sadly, though I fired it up for probably the thousandth time. It looks old, which it should, after nearly a decade. For me, it looks like this

- better than the game-as-shipped but not as flashy as some have it. For me, I don’t see the point. You could spend hours or days with mods getting it to look like this

7 Everyday Household Killers (Orphan, and other movie maniacs)

I just watched Orphan – the psycho-in-the-family schlock horror starring Vera Farmiga, Peter Sarsgaard and Isabelle Fuhrman. It’s produced by Joel Silver and Leo DiCaprio, and is reasonably well-made and entertaining with a genuinely surprising plot twist. I’d recommend it in a “watch it if it’s on TV” sort of way.

The internet has been won

Since nothing else can possibly top this, I think we can all just give up and go home.

And So I Watch You From Afar

Writer’s block. I’ll therefore serenade you with And So I Watch You From Afar, another band from the recent Great Escape festival that I bloody well missed. They are, apparently, extremely good live. ASIWYFA are a four-piece instrumental post-rock band from Belfast, Northern Ireland, who last year won XFM’s Album of the Year. The band consists of Rory Friers and Tony Wright on guitars, Johnny Adger on bass and Chris Wee on drums. Hurhurhurhur. You said “wee”.

Laser Bread’s Photostream

Now, this is something to be excited about! Laser Bread – AKA Brock Davis – is an artist and musician who works in a variety of media. He works as a group creative director and art director for an ad agency in Minneapolis. His Flickr photostream is a collection of cute, funny, whimsical and often thought-provoking images that range from beautifully-sketched pencil drawings to food sculptures and photographs.

Cults – Cults

Over at Collapse Board, 10 reviews of the new album by Cults have been published. There’s a good one, mine, a really bad one (Wallace Wylie’s, which I think is splendid), a poetic one, a pictorial one, etc. It’s an interesting experiment – highlighting how even at the same publication opinions can be wildly different. You can draw your own conclusions about “assholes” at this point.

30 day song challenge: day 02 – your least favourite song

So these 30 days are not going to be consecutive: that much should be apparent. Day 2 is a tricky one, though, because on what basis do I choose my least favourite?

I once was sent along to review a death metal band, and that wasn’t really fair because I don’t even like death metal, but this band … well, they couldn’t sing, couldn’t play, there were no discernible rhythms or hooks or anything whatsoever to like or even admire about them. Even though I wasn’t into grindcore, I could hear the support act and think “they’re really good at what they do” – I could admire the ferocious tightness of their ear-splitting groove – but this lot? Wow. It was the musical equivalent of Battlefield Earth: so bad, it’s not even funny. The band broke up after I wrote the review. I got death threats. The editor got death threats. I got fired.

Things That Are Tiny

I stumbled on Things That Are Tiny the other day, and every time I think of it, I fall into fits of giggles. It’s possibly the cutest blog in the world.