Event

Misery

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Misery

1. A state or feeling of great physical or mental distress or discomfort.
‘a man who had brought her nothing but misery’
‘the misery of the miner’s existence’

2. A 1987 psychological horror thriller novel by Stephen King.
The novel was nominated for the World Fantasy Award for Best Novel in 1988.

3. A 1990 Hollywood film starring James Cann and Kathy Bates.

4. A stage play that premiered in London, 1992.

5. A Court Theatre production from August 2018.

It’s a grim horror story with occasional  laughs. Not exactly entertaining, but if you are a horror junkie it should work for you….

Backstage Review

 Theatreview Review

Cityscape

The Press

 

Music

Welcome Pluto

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Welcome to the World
by Still Pluto
This comer from ‘Southern City’s Lab’, a Russian publisher for various forms of independent rock, electronic and avant-garde music.

This is in the classic ‘Heavy Rock’ genre. Grungy guitars, lots of riffs and a powerful rhythm section. Play it loud !!

 

Movies

MI-Fallout

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Mission: Impossible – Fallout is a 2018 American action spy film written, produced and directed by Christopher McQuarrie. It is the sixth installment in the Mission: Impossible film series, and the second film to be directed by McQuarrie, after Rogue Nation (2015), making him the first person to direct more than one film in the franchise.

The cast includes Tom Cruise, Ving Rhames, Simon Pegg, Rebecca Ferguson, Sean Harris, Michelle Monaghan and Alec Baldwin, all of whom reprise their roles from previous films, along with Henry Cavill and Angela Bassett, who join the franchise. In the film, Ethan Hunt (Cruise) and his team must track down stolen plutonium while being monitored by a CIA agent (Cavill) after a mission goes awry.

One of the better action films. A good collection of stunts, running, stunts and a great final action sequence involving helicopters  filmed in New Zealand.

The main down side was a slow middle section involving characters standing around telling the story. Ten minutes could easily be removed, making a better movie.

 

Music, Writings

Genre Delem-nia

 

After several years of music on a server, it is necessary to create genres and create playlists after some variations, I eventually settled on the following:

 

Genre Description
1 Ambient Textured/low dynamics
2 BerlinSchool Electronic Orchestral
3 Chamber Small # Instruments, Mainly Acoustic
4 Space Tranquil, Hypnotic
5 Chill Upbeat, light electronic
6 Synthwave Heavy electronic with reverb
7 Trip-Hop Dynamic electronic
8 Psybient Psychedelic + Electronic
9 Downbeat Relaxed Chill
10 Prog Rock Polyrhythmic Rock
11 Rock Blues based
12 Space Rock Long Form Prog Rock Jams
13 Disco Bass heavy dance
14 Post Rock Textured Guitars
15 Jazz Soloing /Lead Instruments
16 Vocal Focus on vocals
17 Orchestral Sympnonies, Concertos
18 Metal Heavily Distorted Guitars
19 Symphonic Metal Metal + Choir, Soprana

 

Then when I seriously started storing mp3’s on my smartphone, it became apparent that 19 types were too many. This was reduced to just six……..

 

1 Ambient Soft & Relaxing with low dynamics
2 Electronic Keyboard/Computer created (not in an other category)
3 Rock Bass/Drums/Guitar based
4 Vocal Focus on vocals
5 Orchestral Symphonies, Concertos
6 Metal Heavily Distorted Guitars

 

 

 

Writings

BC No Go

Following purchasse of a Chromecast Audio, I am trying to make all my collected music available from my smartphone either via streaming or a saved file. This will mean I can listen from work on headphones or at home on speakers.

Music over the years has been purchased on LP, CD and digital download. This has included a number of online shops, including CDBaby, iTunes, 7Digital and Google Play. All these files have been kept in archives on CD, DVD and hard drives.

The most extensive recent purchasing has been from bandcamp. It is clear that there will not be enough space on my 128gig SD card to hold this music. After extensive testing and looking for approprate software I have not been able to get Bandcamp music to stream successfully to Chromecast Audio.

There was an Android app that would stream a URL. This works OK, but there was no way to get the next track to play. Fortunately there are a lot of artists also on Spotify. I can you through all these artists and get Spotify links.

There are requests for Bandcamp to include this feature, but until they do streaming has to be restricted to Spotify.

Due to these limits, the final music model will be:

1. For any music previously purchased and available on Spotify, provide a link on my page.

2. Everything else gets saved on the smartphone SD card.

3. Apply the De-Clutter Ex Test to all MP3s.

The remaining problem is successfully synchronizing music on my PM under jRiver to the smartphone. I tried lots of methods. jRiver can sync, but it is slow and not always successful.

I tried Wi-Fi methods, none that good and the one I did get to work was just too slow and put files on the wrong place. Most of these work OK synching to the main memory but have problems connecting to the SD card. I managed to get Total Commander to link to the SD card, but it’s sync feature would not work with the SD card.

Most of the problems relate to the MTP drive used in modern Smartphones. My older Samsung S3 would open as the next available drive letter. This made syncing easy, this new method has disadvantages.

Eventually I found a solution in FreeFileSync.

 

 

 

 

Music

Music Link Test

Spotify Limit

Initially I thought it would be possible to save album links for all the CDs I owned within Spotify. Unfortunately Spotify has a 10,000 saved song limit. This appears to include any albums or artist links you save. And I have already reached that limit. As an alternative, this is a test of a web page that will hold the link to each artist:

A Model Kit Bandcamp
A.e.r.o. Spotify
ABBA Bandcamp
Absurdcus Bandcamp
Adaptive, The Bandcamp
Aesma Daeva Spotify
Afformance Spotify
Afformance Bandcamp
After Crying Spotify
After Forever Spotify
Agents Of Mercy (Stolt) Spotify
Alan Parsons Project Spotify
Alba Ecstasy Bandcamp
Alice Deejay Spotify
All India Radio Bandcamp
Alpha Wave Movement Spotify
Amon Duul II Spotify
Amos, Tori Spotify
Anderson Bruford Wakeman Howe Spotify
Anderson, Jon Spotify
Anderson, Laurie Spotify
Android Lust Spotify
Aphotic Apathy Bandcamp
April Rain Spotify
Ariaphonics Spotify
Arise From Thorns Spotify
Armatrading, Joan Spotify
Armstrong, Craig Spotify
Art of Noise Spotify
Artemis Bandcamp
Ascendant Bandcamp
Ashlyn C Bandcamp
Ashra Spotify
Asia Spotify
Asleep At The Wheel Spotify
Astropilot Bandcamp
At War with Self Spotify
Atlas, Natacha Spotify

Books

Prime Love


Prime Time Love
(Abigail Love #1)
by David Blake (2017)
 

Can a girl fall for a guy if his name sounds like a mechanically operated sex toy?

Abigail Love and her new cameraman, Will, were in the same class at school. Ten years later they find themselves working for the same company, but at first, neither can remember who the other one is. As they start to date, what happens when they find out, especially when Will realises that it was Abigail who’d teased him into early therapy?

This takes place in the same universe as Detective Capstan & Sergeant Dewbush and occurs immediately after the Sergeant falls into a coma. He will awake hundreds of years later for the Space Police books.

The two protagonists, Abigail and Will each have secrets and are thrown together in a work place surrounded by a cast of crazy characters. As it does not have Science Fiction tropes and isn’t really a crime story I wasn’t sure if it would work. It does, largely due to the smooth prose and crazy plot.

This makes me think of a memory of reading Tom Sharpe almost 22 years ago. A very urban and funny read.

 

Music

Eyes Closed

Audio

‘Close Your Eyes’ from the album ‘My Brain is a Receiver‘ by Troika is not the only song with this name.

My favorite version is from Oxygene8 in the ‘Freak of Chance’ album:

 

Another good version is by ‘Grey Eyes Glances’:

Then there is the Bic Runga version…..

 

 

Writings

CD Death


Death of the CD
 

After using Chromecast, I decided to eliminate all the CD’s on my PC that were available from Spotify. When this was done, the MP3 copies of the CDs dropped by 90%. Remarkable.

What I found during this process was that there were a lot of albums (mainly from well known artists) that have been re-issued. Some have been remastered, some have additional tracks and sometimes new cover artwork. It’s also a good way to discover new albums by old bands.

It looks like the CD is dissapearing in favour of online digital distribution, as this graph shows.

Other articles on the same subject:

Rolling Stone

Guardian

Tech Insider