»25th April 2005

Update of the Apocalypse



You'd think that it being 11:50 on a Monday morning I wouldn't have much to moan about. It's surely too early for me to have tried to get Steam to work. To be truthful, it's fair to say that I wouldn't even normally be awake at this time. You'd also think that being a monday morning, I wouldn't have had much contact with annoying students at uni, it being the beginning of the week and before any scheduled time with said retards. Well you'd be right on that also. In fact, I really don't have anything to moan about. Not that I can think of anyway, I mean if I gave it a little more thought there'd surely be something ticking me off.
So, if I'm not unhappy about anything particularly new then what the hell is going to go in this blog? Well, the astute amongst you (which can be counted on one hand (not the astute amongst you, just how many of 'you' there are)) will know that in lieu of something to moan about there's a good chance the pages of the blog will be opened up to conjecture and speculation, the two most powerful tools at a historian's disposal excluding fabricating the past.
I woke up with what can only be described as a hangover. Which was strange as to my knowledge I didn't drink any alcohol last night. The conclusion I have come to is that the mysterious 'Third Force' in the apocalyptic struggle taking place in and around Leeds University, of whom I am an unwilling agent, secreted me off in the middle of the night so as to carry out a few upgrades and update my firmware version. Whilst I don't feel particularly different, headache having gone after consuming the favoured morning beverage of coffee and cocaine (read: Lidl's take on Coffee Mate), I have noticed that I am now able to run around very fast whilst making virtually no noise. Which is kinda handy I suppose.



In hindsight, the Man in Black cover really seems to have gone wrong. The small choir of clones of the same drunken mumbler really are quite disturbing. The eagle-eared (if that isn't a figure of speech I decree now that it always was, such are my historical time bending powers) amongst you might have picked up the falsetto part, if I didn't tell you about it already. Well that's if the MP3 encoding picked it up. The falsetto part was dodgy to the extreme. What sort of worked in a 1:30 punk cover does not work in an accoustic country cover it seems. On the subject of MP3s, I live in hope that some day people will realise how shit MP3s sound below about 160kbps at the very least. What music are people listening to where it doesn't matter that guitars blur into cymbals which blur into that annoying grey mush that constitutes anything except vocals on low quality MP3s? That was a rhetorical question, if it was a proper question the answer would not be "Nine Inch Nails, you loser". Low quality MP3s are justified sometimes, I will concede that much. Instances where low-quality MP3s are justified are as follows:

1. Where file size is critical. Such as on this site where I have about 25mb or however much NTL are willing to let me use.
2. On flashes where sound quality is not usually that important.
3. When sending files over instant-messanging programmes such as MSN.
4. When used for ambient sounds or effects on Half Life levels where people don't like hanging around waiting for a sound to download.

There may be other instances where shitty sound quality is justified, but I can't think of them right now and I'm not giving this thing a greater share of my attention than it deserves.
Low sound quality MP3s are thus not tolerated when:

1. You have a 120gb hard-drive.
2. You actually like listening to music.
3. Where file size it not an issue, which isn't very often when you think about it.
4. Well, wherever possible really.

Notepad must have some powers of extracting grievances because it really hadn't occurred to me upon starting this update that I harbored a deep dislike for low quality MP3s. If people really don't give a fuck about sound quality maybe we should all move back to the 80s and start watching VHSs and listening to cassettes.



This update is actually not all that bad (#nothing like a little self congratulation huh?), in future I think I'll try and do more morning, post-coffee updates. Well it's not actually morning anymore. God damn, it's 12:28, I've been typing this thing for 40 minutes? What the hell!? Hmmm, looks like the internal clock is a bit dodgy on my new BIOS.


Extar, over, out.

Keeping in step? Keeping in line? Chin held high? Feel just fine? Do what you're told? You're probably in a marching band.