Another year, another remixed Beatles album is released. Last year it was the White Album, this year it’s the 50th aniversary of Abbey Road.
As I said in the last post like this, while I am a compelete Beatles fanatic, I’m not a fan of their later albums from Sergant Pepper onwards.
But my feelings for Abbey Road are a little different because of three compositions. Come Together, Something and Here Comes the Sun. Three great songs, and thankfully Apple Music have released an amazing video to coincide with the new remixed album.
And Jesus H Fucking Christ on a fucking bike, Here Comes the Sun sounds out of this world, sounds so fresh and betrays none of it’s fifty year age. I was blown away.
Roll on the 60th aniversary remixes of Hard Days’ Night, Help, Revolver and Rubber Soul 🙂
So the Beatles White Album has been remixed… suppose you have to do something for the 50th aniversary. Not my favourite album in the world, anything after Revolver pails into comparison and while I can agree that it’s progression in their music and songwriting, it’s just not as exciting to listen to.
The White Album just appears to be a lot of knock off songs from India thrown together into a double album although it does have some highlights like Dear Prudence, While My Guitar Gently Weeps and I’m So Tired.
So it’s very meh to me, but there is a new video…. oooooo. Yeah exactly. So here’s a remix of Glass Onion, sounding a little less like filler music to my ears, but hey, we all have our favourites.
Back in the Summer of 1983, I was a child you would recognise from the wreck I’ve made of childhood.
I was an extrovert, I was never in the house, I was out with a massive group of friends any chance I could get.
Then December comes. As any other kid, I looked in my mum and dad’s wardrobe’s looking to see what presents I would be getting for Christmas. Nothing. A little weird, so I took a risk and looked in my oldest brother’s room and there in the back of his wardrobe was a Woolworth’s bag with black box, about a foot long, half a foot deep and wide. On the front was a black machine with what looked like blue keys.
What the fuck is that? Guess it’s for my middle brother or something, so I presumed my present hadn’t been bought yet.
Come Christmas Day, I wake up excitedly and rush downstairs with my brothers and we start unwrapping presents. I’m given this box and I unwrap it and it’s the same box I saw before.
Aaaaah… look at that beauty
Same question, what the fuck is it? Sinclair ZX Spectrum Personal Computer. What is a computer? What is a Spectrum?
So my brother’s set it up for me (they’ve obviously used it before!), plugged into a colour TV, cassette player and a few WH Smith’s tapes. The fuckers didn’t even bother buying games for it but pirated them from someone in their work, along with a list of games I could buy for ÂŁ2.50 or something. A tradition I’ve carried on every since ha.
So they put in a tape and we wait, and wait and wait and then I’m presented with this screen. The first computer game I’ve played.
Let’s remember, this is 1983, and computers by modern standards were crap as you’d expect, so it’s hard to imagine the impact this made at the time, or as I prefer to see it now, what a complete fucking disaster this made of my life.
For the next six to nine months, I hammered that fucking rubber keyboard and Kempston joystick as I refused to let some fucking sprites on a screen beat me. Jetpac, Manic Miner, Jet Set Willy, Pssst and Football Manager was hammered morning, noon and night.
The number of hours I wasted on this game. FML.
But then the boredom set in. No more “yay let’s play Atic Atac”, more “oh god, do I have to play these shitty games again”, but that god for the manual, which gave very, very basic instructions on how to “program” it and this was the point my future life went to shit as I typed in those long program listings from Sinclair User that never fucking worked first time around, that took longer to debug than to type in the first place, but at least it gave me a skill I have to this day of finding problems very quickly and fixing them.
I can still remember me and my brothers writing a game called Miners Strike, which was basically Space Invaders but instead you fired policeman at miners. Well it was topical at the time, and the hell of doing graphics as binary characters with the help of pen and paper.
So this is how my future life was decided. My mass of friends drifted away, going outside was rare, I was kicked out of the school football team and basically I turned into what kids of today are like: glued to their xbox’s and playstation’s, never going out, anti-social.
Over the next year or so, I learnt Z80 code but then moved to the Commodore 64, and it was the same story… I got bored of the games and started coding on it instead as it was much more entertaining to me.
Then I joined the 16 bit generation in July 1987, and what was left of my personality soon disappeared as I joined “the scene”, writing tech demos in what was bascially a European wide pissing contest to see who could do the best effect better than anyone else.
Ah it was fun.
Now it’s my job, I’m a developer for a living, sat in front of two monitors for eight hours a day, writing crappy code and fixing issues before I go home and spend another five hours at my home computer before going to bed and the whole sorry cycle starts over again.
As much as I hate to laugh at people who can’t speak English, and I do find broken English incredibly adorable when I’m speaking to my European friends, I have to admit to moments where I’ve had to stop what I am doing because I’m laughing to hard.
I don’t mean having to learn north, south, east, west, left, right, front, behind in Romanian and Ukrainian because my friends get very confused (re drunk) playing an online game.
From experience I find the Romanians to be the most hilarious, and they pick up words from films and television and then write the words out phonetically, for example, ‘health’ will be typed as ‘healph’ , ‘heapf’ or ‘helfph.’
For extra lulz, ask them to pronouce a word that end in ‘th.’ That sound isn’t in the Romanian language so asking one to say ‘teeth’ leads to much amusement on my part as their tongue does gymnastics to get that sound and leads to a conversion of shouting ‘teeth’ being repeated a lot.
So rewind a few weeks, and I was talking to my friends on TeamSpeak while playing Armored Warfare with Romanian friends. We somehow got onto the subject of tattoos, as one of their girlfriends wanted to get one of a ‘dan-dill-lee-on.’ There was a short pause as I tried to make sense of this mangled word. ‘A what?’  ‘A dan-dill-lee-on. You know the… er… plant you blow on (cue a ear shattering sound as he blows into the microphone) and er… floating things.’ Oh you mean a dandelion. ‘Yes dan-dill-lee-on.’ I had to walk away because I was laughing so much, right in the middle of a game.
‘Sorry I disconnect. Fuck-king Were-les.’Â No, it is ‘why-er-less.’
‘Wee-Fee’ when he means ‘why-fi.’
Just stop speaking English until you can speak it properly you daft twat 🙂
I have a list of annoyances in life with people that really tip me over the edge. Things that turn me from happy to furious in the blink of an eye.
Lying
They say honesty is the best policy, well apparently not when you are dealing with fucking idiots on the internet. It’s why I log everything I say on the internet, just on the off chance that some fucker decides six months down the line, that I said something which I know I didn’t. My memory is shot to pieces about many things, but I do remember what I’ve said and not said in my head, and thankfully I have gigabytes of text files going back to my days on IRC in the 1990’s to prove it.
Yeah, I should have a clear out one day.
On time
If I can take the trouble of being on time for something, then why can’t anyone else? If people are five minutes late, I’ll either fuck off home or go elsewhere.
The art of conversation
The internet is killing the art and etiquette of conversation.
Imagine you are in a bar. You see a friend and you start a conversation. You are in the middle of saying something and then this friend just fucks off with no warning. You wouldn’t do it would you? So why the fuck do people do it on instant messaging. What happened to saying “I’ll be back in a moment” or “I have to go”? I just had an example of someone asking me why deleted a message from yesterday. I said it was crap and asked how they were. Oh they’ve fucked off. Great.
Maybe it’s because I was brought up properly by my parents, but these things really boil my piss and I’m getting more and more intolerant of people.
I’ve dropped friends I’ve known for decades if they’ve fucked me off enough, so I have absolutely no guilt about telling someone I’ve known for a few months to fuck off.
You have a Velociraptor bashing (no pun intended) at the door, you need to lock the doors quick as it’s only Sam Neill holding the nasty little fucks back.
So what method do you think the brains behind Jurassic Park decided would be the best way to secure a big fucking metal door.
A fucking lock on the door?
A switch next to the door to lock it?
A fucking archaic Unix graphic file browser where you have a 3D representation of the file structure, and you have to find the program to lock the doors?
Of course, it’s number three. For fuck’s sake.
Just interested in where the fire alarm is, the parent folder?
It is actually a real piece of software called FSN, or Fusion by Silicon Graphics.
