Music in the news

"Metal listeners might not be stupid after all", says the Telegraph. About two months ago, now that I look at it - I'd been meaning to comment on this article for absolutely ages and never got around to it. It seems to me that metal is experiencing something of a revival in British youth (if you'll allow me to use that frankly frightening term) now, and it's always nice to see mainstream media giving this underrepresented genre a chance.

But reading that article through, some problems begin to emerge. "Participants said they appreciated the complex and sometimes political themes of heavy metal music more than perhaps the average pop song" is pretty fantastic, and I could just about understand the section about using music "to help them deal with the stresses and strains of being gifted social outsiders". I can't say that that was my thinking behind the music at that age, but it might just about work.

I just feel that it's being portrayed as a good thing for the wrong reasons. I don't listen to music to work off anger or remind me how troubled and alienated I am. If you want that, you might as well give up and listen to Fall Out Boy. Presenting it that way in the article does still gives it a negative image - instead, I think metal has a huge amount of power and energy behind it that can be very positive and uplifting. Something that makes you want to sing out loud while feeling like you're being thrown across the room backwards. (Ignore the way that that last video was edited by a 10-year-old with Windows Movie Maker.) I know that sometimes you just need a bit of this, but it's not representative of the genre as a whole. Neither is anything, really.

Where the article cocks up completely is the example list of bands, "including System of a Down, Slipknot, Tool, Dragon Force" - No! I know you don't want me to go on about this, but "true" metal is something that's held as virtually sacred to a lot of fans, and System of a Down and Slipknot are definitely not it. And as far as I'm concerned, Tool's only contribution to the music world is to convince a group of people to label themselves accurately as such via the band's T-shirts. Before the accusations of elitism come flooding in, I should mention that I actually quite like some of System of a Down - Serj Tankian (or Սերժ Թանգյան if you want to show off) actually has a pretty good voice in between all the screaming and bizarre squawking noises that punctuate their music. I'm not even sure what I would call them - they're listed on my iPod as "Unclassifiable".

It also makes me finally realize why I don't like Dragonforce. Musically they're all right, if a little repetitive and a bit too much about WAAAARGH WE CAN PLAY THE GUITAR REALLY FAST rather than actual melody or coherence, but I thought for a while that I simply didn't like them because they were popular (which is stupid). Instead, it's because in a genre that should be imageless, I don't like their angry image - and the way it causes them to get lumped into lists like this. They almost seem to be this generation's version of Iron Maiden, something to annoy your parents with before you leave for university. And I, as much as I wish I wasn't, am a bit over the hill. Colon, open bracket.

Crystal Towers 2 - Rise from your Grave

You thought you'd never see this journal again, didn't you? But I've been working away on it after a considerable amount of time shaping up the bug tracker for the project. (I've temporarily chopped a bit out so that you can view the issue list here without needing an account, to show what's happening with it so far.) As you can see, my current testers aren't confirming the fixed issues too fast (grr), so if you want to be given an account and be given access to the game as it's built, comment here!

So, to the new pictures. After doing a tutorial and working on fixing the various bugs in the main game (it looks pretty presentable now), I've been working on a new level that's provisionally called Dust Hill, after that abandoned Sonic 2 stage. Knowing me, it'll probably be called Dust Hill in the final game, too.



As you can see from that health bar, I've also added an "überificate" option for testing.



Most of those graphics will be neatened up a bit eventually. I rather like the movement of the worm-like things, though - they throw themselves forward in bursts, making them pretty difficult to land on accurately. And it's even more difficult to hit them with magic, as I discovered while testing it. I'll make that one of the missions.

Dinner, bachelor style

I really shouldn't be posting this. If I kept it quiet, no one would ever know and the whole thing would just go away. But in the interest of finally writing a decent entry , letting the Internet share the story and not worrying about my reputation, this is an account of dinner this evening.

The plan was simple. Home-made pizza. It's not the most amazingly complex of meals, but still respectable enough to be impressive for someone who doesn't normally cook for himself. The last time Whitney and I tried it, it all got stuck to the baking pan and could only be removed by chiselling at it with a fork for hours, and I was determined to do it right this time.

Again, in a none too complicated fashion, I went for chicken and pepperoni as my toppings. I've always found chicken a terribly frightening thing to cook because it'll obviously kill you instantly if you so much as touch it when it's raw, so I always end up frying it for about four hours and it's as dry as a sheet of paper by the time it comes out. Not this time, though - in fact, I'd like to think I got a rather perfectly done chicken thigh.

Rolling the dough isn't a difficult task either, even though the stuff I was using seemed pretty resistant to my efforts to actually spread it out. Nevertheless, I guessed that that was just because it had been in the freezer for a while. After battering it a bit with the rolling pin, I got it into something resembling a circle, oiled a biscuit sheet, slapped it on and threw it in the oven.

About ten minutes later I came back to see that it had formed a huge mountain in the middle. (I was later told by Whitney that you're meant to puncture dough before you put it in the oven to stop it from doing that. Who knew?) Still, this was easily solved by battering it down a bit with a spatula. After that, it doesn't take Gordon Ramsay to know that you slather it in tomato-based sauce and put cheese on top along with your choice of topping - cubed chicken and sliced pepperoni. What could be simpler?

So after about another ten minutes, I went back to check it. It seemed ready enough, so I got it out, tipped it on to a plate and, after a painstaking half hour or so avoiding any kitchen-related disasters, sat down for dinner.

( That was when I realized that I'd used piecrust instead of pizza dough. )