eurovision

It was Eurovision this weekend.

As per usual it took me somewhat by surprise.  For some reason I have it in my head that it is held later in the year.  I think this might be because the Eurovision's I mainly remember watching were either as a kid or as a Student and in both my memories are largely of it being warm and late light (the student ones often involved drinking).  Therefore in my head Eurovision is associated with summer.

Anyway, this year was okay.  It was held in Sweden and was much more "traditional" in the sense that they hadn't gone mega bonkers with the whole thing.  A lot of the Russian satellite states (who had quite a string of wins when they all joined and only voted for each other) seemed to get into a bit of a staging war, with ever bigger productions.

Sweden just put it on in a reasonably-sized hall with a single presenter on a fairly basic stage with a basic presentation.  Really it's about the songs, after all.

The songs were genuinely of an okay standard this year.  There were only a couple that stood out with Eurovision-weirdness, and this was mainly in the staging, rather than the songs themselves.

I thought the winner was okay.  I got a bit mixed up with what was meant to be the favourite, but I think a perfectly okay pop song won in the end.  Although I would have liked something like Greece to have won, as there's was more fun and definitely more memorable.

The UK did poorly, as has become the norm in recent years.  There is obviously the Balkan effect nowadays, but to be totally frank it was another largely forgettable and uninteresting song.

Just recently they seem to have decided the best tactic is to have a 'star' name sing the song, but a star name from the ancient past.  Last year it was Bacharach and this year Bonnie Tyler.  I'm puzzled by this approach - isn't it mostly youngsters (or at least families) that watch Eurovision?  So what youngster knows Bonnie Tyler from Adam?

ripping good time

The other day I was ordering a was browsing Amazon for a couple of CDs (yes, I still buy CDs! How very old school of me!) when it occurred to me I hadn't mentioned the completing of a grand project.

A lot of this time this blog is all about how rubbish I am at completing or doing stuff. I'm supposed to be an anime fan, but I can't be bothered watching all my anime DVDs. I'm supposed to be buying the anime mags so I can scan them, but can't be arsed. I'm supposed to enjoy reading, but instead of reading the books I buy, I read manga instead. I'm supposed to be a gamer, but fixate on 1 game and play that to the exclusion of all others. And all the other stuff.

Well, the project in question was also a bit of a victim of this effect to. The project in question was the ripping of all of my CD collection to MP3.

I used to be really into music, but when after Uni I kinda rediscovered anime and manga and what gave way was my interest in music. Plus, at the time the bands I was most into had all either broken up or had started releasing crap.

What I'm saying is that my music collection used to be huge, given the amount of time I'd been building it, but since Uni I've hardly bought anything, so I guess now it's just big.

Anyway, the idea was that given the MP3 player I got for my thirtieth I should start ripping my CDs. I started on this and got a long way, but then I hit a problem.

The ripping program I was using has a database that looks up the album and track titles and it covered 95% of my CDs. Admittedly it wasn't perfect - some of the album names especially are a bit wonky - but it was good enough.

But then I found that some of my CDs weren't in there. And I also found that tying the stuff in was horribly tortuous. So I put these to the side and did the rest. There weren't many, but enough that once I'd completed the others I kept making excuse to not do them.

Well recently I made the time and ripped them plus the few newer CDs I'd bought since putting the project on hold. Now, interestingly and technically, I also found about half a dozen disks that had some sort of copy protection on them, so I've not ripped them, but I'm pretty happy to say that I've completed the project.

It's kinda a good feeling to really finish something.

lookit

Look, I actually updated my website - http://www.trismugistus.com/

There's a new review on there. Well, I say new. It's new in the sense that it's new to the website. It's actually a very old review - let's put it this way: the review in question covers four volumes of the manga Rosario+Vampire. I recently finished volume 7 of that manga, and they don't exactly release them every month.

Still, it's good to have an update on the site. I even did a bit of work on some more updates. Unfortunately, the appalling tediousness of processing images for the reviews meant I didn't get as far as I'd have liked. I always forget just how long it takes to do them.

The downside is that I've still nothing really to update on the walling side - indeed, I've little in the ways of genuine motivation to even feel particularly guilty about that. What it odes mean is for the foreseeable future, my updates are going to be entirely review based.

Something else I managed to do while working on the updates was listen to the new Green Day album.

I gave it a couple of listens and I have to say that so far, while I like it, it's not one of their best. The main problem I'm having is that it sounds very familiar - they seem to have pinched (or pinched and tweaked) a lot of riffs from other songs.

Saying that, I've noticed it before with Green Day and I don't fundamentally have a problem with it, because they normally add a big fat Green Day stamp to the songs too. But here, it feels more like they didn't bother so much with the big fat stamp and used a small one instead.

It's difficult to explain and as I say, I don't dislike the album, but still, it feels like it could have been more.

It also doesn't help that the production seems a bit off - it's hard to tell what the lyrics are in a lot of places, which is never normally the case with Green Day. Also, because I can't tell what he's singing half the time, it means the album doesn't quite seem to have a cohesive theme. I mean, it's presented like a concept album, but I can't really tell what the concept was - not like American Idiot or Warning anyway.

So a little disappointing on that front.

I was also disappointed that I didn't get more done over the weekend. It wasn't a particularly busy one, but I dunno, the time seemed to slip away from me a bit. For example, I didn't do anything e-bay wise.

Also, even though I watched quite a bit of recorded telly, I've still a massive list of stuff on my PVR.

Partly that's because of my obsessive BSG watching, of course, but also the BBC decided to do one of those 5-parts-in-5-days things with the 3rd season of Torchwood.

It gets on my tits when they do stuff like that. I can understand it in some ways, but for me it's a totally impractical thing - I'd need weeks of advance notice to keep up with that as a schedule thing.

Still, it's one of the big advantage of PVRs - you can record all of the stuff in great quality and watch it back when you have the time. You can of course record stuff with normal VCRs, but the quality is poorer and you'd end up with several tapes kicking about for ages, which is far less practical.

Megadeth

I've been listening to a lot of Megadeth recently.

This has kinda been brought about by a "grand project" I've been attempting (more on that later), the upshot of which has meant I've had all my Megadeth CD on my MP3 player, and hence can listen at work.

I used to be really into music, back when I was in A-level and at University. Interestingly it's another demonstration of how I'm slightly obsessive. I'd buy lots of CDs from new bands and obscure bands and stuff.

My main music of choice was heavy metal - specifically thrash or speed metal, by bands like Metallica and Slayer. My favourite was always Megadeth, though. I still think Countdown to Extinction is the greatest album ever made.

The reason I kinda stopped was a triple whammy.

Firstly, once I graduated Uni my interest just generally faded. My peers were less into music than I was, so there were fewer people to talk about it with.

Second, I got back into anime and manga in a big way, so a heck of a lot of my time was spent watching and reading that. Plus of course, my money went on buying then, rather than CD.

But the other key part was that Megadeth ceased to be. My favourite band was no more, and my interest kinda evaporated with them.

The reason they stopped was that Dave Mustaine (Megadeth has always been his band) had a severe arm injury and the prognosis was that he would never play again.

However, unknown to me, as I wasn't really paying attention any more was that Dave got better and eventually several years later he released a new Megadeth album.

Now, whilst I wouldn't say I was really back into music as such I have been rediscovering Megadeth, as well as familiarising myself with their newer albums, and I've really been enjoying it.

stuck in my brain

Don't you just hate when you get a song stuck in your head?

It just keeps looping around and round and you find yourself singing the words under your breath. Sometimes it's okay if it's a song you kinda like, but even then it can get a bit tedious after a while.

The worst is when it's so lodged in there you can't sleep cos you mind won't relax enough to stop it from looping the song endlessly over and over.

Maybe it's worse for me. I'm fairly sure I'm a bit OCD (Obessive Cumpulsive Disorder). I don't say that in an emo pity me sort of way, I just used to be really quite obsessive about things and occasionally still find myself utterly fixated.

I guess the best way to explain my particular thing was that it was to do with patterns.

Draw a small square with the tip of your finger on the palm of your hand. Right, now where did you start? It was probably at one of the corners, right? And you kept your finger constantly on the palm, rather than lifting it off to draw each side, right? What direction did you go in? Clockwise of anti-clockwise?

Well that's all perfectly normal. My problem was that, having drawn the square once starting at one corner, I would then have to redraw it starting at the other four corners. Sometimes I'd also have to redraw it four times starting at the different corners going in the opposite direction too.

If I didn't do this I would feel... odd. If I did do it, it would be, I dunno, pleasurable, I guess. Like finishing a good book or something - a pleasure in a sense of achievement.

Also, it wouldn't generally involve actually drawing the shape, just mentally picturing the action of drawing it. And the shapes were more complicated than squares, but not so complicated as to prevent their easy repetition.

It's not something I still do (nowadays I obsess over things like Civ3 for short periods - you may have noticed in previous blog entries) and it was probably not OCD, I was just reminded of it with this bloody song going round and round in my head like the patterns I used to draw.