I had another session of No Man’s Sky. I’m still in the Survival game and, after a few side tracks (including another death), I managed to get the Hyperdrive I needed for my space ship. I got out of that crappy solar system quick smart and landed in a much better one, this time with a Tropical planet and no aggressive Sentinels. It was a fun adventure. I think I’ll explore this Tropical planet for a bit and maybe set up a base. It looks pretty nice. Even though the oceans look deep red from space, they’re pretty normal looking from the surface. What will I call it, this planet?
Lum
Played some more No Man’s Sky. I don’t really need to call this Tropical Planet anything, because its designated name is fine. It’s called Lami Tau. Nice name. The only thing I changed was the Lami – made it Lamu, after you-know-who. So I’m exploring Lamu Tau at the moment. And I’ve named my ship Moroboshi!
I played some more No Man’s Sky. I have been taking possession of various ships I’ve found and, rather than modding them up, I’ve been selling them as scrap for money. I’ve built up over sixteen million credits so far. I was doing this again with another ship when it sparked off a mission that sent me to a derelict freighter in space. Some pirates cornered me there, and without a properly functioning ship, I got killed. That seemed to break something in me, and I got fed up. I’d had enough. I put the game away. Playing this is the very definition of Futility. I have better things to do. Mind you, I have done this kind of thing before. And I still like hanging out at my hideaway on Calypso. If I bust the game out again it’ll only be to go back there and chill.
Finished reading the second volume of the Your Name manga. I’m so glad I watched the film the other day, because it really informs my reading here. This one goes well into the back story of Mitsuha’s father Toshiki, a folklore anthropologist, and his courtship of her mother, Futaba. There’s also lots of stuff about the origins of the legend of the comet, which Toshiki discovers was thought to be a dragon. It continues through Futaba’s death and Toshiki’s becoming Mayor right up to the end of the timeline when Mitsuha orchestrates the emergency when the comet falls. Toshiki at first doesn’t believe her, but by the story’s end he remembers the link between the comet and the dragon and becomes a believer. It’s a fascinating insight into elements that circled around the film but were not included in it.
Had a listen to The Hollies’ What Goes Around album, the one I redid and added that b-side to recently. It’s a fairly average album for them, which is disappointing as it’s the one that saw the return of Graham Nash (hence the title). The opener, Casualty, couldn’t sound more Eighties, with its synth drum fills and keyboard bass. I like its boldness, such a statement of intent – this is the Hollies in the Eighties. If the Lights Go Out is a nice power pop number about how we might cope with the Apocalypse. Their cover of Stop In the Name of Love was the single, and a pretty successful one, too (at least in England). They really make it their own. I like the update of their old hit Just One Look too. It’s keyboard based and the melody is different in the chorus, giving it a fresh new sound. Then there is, what for me, is the best song on the album: the ballad Someone Else’s Eyes. It’s just melodic pop perfection. The b-side song I grabbed recently and put on this album, called Musical Pictures, is also a ballad. I’m guessing it got the b-side treatment because the band knew Someone Else’s Eyes was superior.
I borrowed another book from the library, this time it was 501 Essential Albums of the 90s, edited by Gary Graff. I’ll say off the bat, it’s very US-centric. Almost all the contributors seem to be based in Detroit Michigan, which doesn’t help. There’s a slew of Australian artists and albums not represented here, which should be. Even the Brit presence is pretty scant. There’s no Manic Street Preachers or The Sundays or even All Saints. The only Australian artists I detected were Midnight Oil (Blue Sky Mining), Savage Garden and INXS. Pretty shitty, but it’s a great selection of the best of American. I counted how many albums I actually own, and it came to 60. There’s quite a few I probably should own. It’s a good reference for that kind of thing. So, not to be taken too seriously, but they do get some things right. The REM albums are Out of Time, Automatic For the People and New Adventures In HiFi. Monster and Up are left out, as they should be.
Listened to Massive Attack’s first album Blue Lines in the car. It was one of the albums mentioned in that Best 1990s albums book and made me want to return to it. Have to say, it’s a pretty average album IMO. There’s definitely a cool vibe going throughout all of it, which may be why it gets such kudos, but by my count there were only four good songs. That would be the opener, Safe From Harm, the cover Be Thankful (along with memories of the MV with the stripper doing her routine!), the classic Unfinished Sympathy, and the last track, the magnificent Hymn of the Great Wheel. The rest were pretty meh, with Tricky putting in some average raps. It’s just as well they got rid of him after this album. I like the vibe, just not all the songs.
I finished that book on Best Albums of the 1990s. It was an interesting journey, going from 1990 to 1999, seeing the way the music progressed through that decade. The basic trajectory was Grunge, Britpop, Nu Metal, Alt Rock, boy groups and girl groups, and electronica.
I made a playlist of old Eric Clapton material the other day. It was mainly from his Seventies period, including a lot of stuff from 461 Ocean Boulevard, which is a killer album. I’m not sure what prompted it; maybe it just seemed like a good idea for a playlist. Anyway, I’m really enjoying listening to it in the car. I love the way he used the female backing vocals. Just finished the There’s One In Every Crowd album (what a great version of Singin’ the Blues!) and I’m now up to the live EC Was Here material. I may extend this vibe into a JJ Cale playlist next. Then maybe next stop ZZ Top.
I’ve also been listening to my Apink album, Re Volution, that I bought on my recent foray into Melbourne. It’s good boppy stuff. One song in particular has really jumped out at me. It’s the second last track, called Catch Me, and man it’s catchy. I was hoping this would happen. Every album should have at least one song that really gets under your skin in a good way.
I borrowed a dvd of Brian Wilson: Long Promised Road. This is a doco about the head Beach Boy reflecting on his life and music. He’s not always the most reliable narrator about his own life, is old Brian, but I’m sure he’ll be entertaining.
I watched the Brian Wilson Long Promised Road doco tonight. Rolling Stone editor Jason Fine drives Brian around the streets of LA informally interviewing him whilst taking him to key destinations in his life. They go to Paradise Cove, site of the first Beach Boys album cover, which has a plaque of the event. Then on to the Wilson’s home town of Hawthorne where the family block is now just a frontage sporting a sculptured wall featuring the Boys. Then it’s Brian’s home in Laurel Way, where he wrote Pet Sounds and Good Vibrations whilst camped in a sandbox, then the Hollywood Bowl, and beyond. Brian’s a hard man to get to talk, but Fine persists, and Brian responds, but you wonder how much is the truth. Bruce Springsteen, Elton John and others fill out the doco with glowing accounts of Brian’s genius, including some nice vintage footage of the Boys in action. Producer Don Was gets all tingly as he listens in the studio to a playback of the end section of God Only Knows that’s just the vocals. I wonder if he knows that one of those three voices belongs to new member at the time, Bruce Johnston. A backstage interview in 1964 reveals Dennis as a lothario, flirting with the female interviewer. A crucial moment happens when Brian is told by Jason about the death of his old manager, Jack Rieley. It had happened a few years previously, but Brian hadn’t heard about it. He’s shocked and on the verge of tears. Even more shocking is when we find out Brian had never listened to brother Dennis’s classic Pacific Ocean Blue solo album. Jason fixes that problem by playing it to him. Brian seems to like it. It’s a nice revisit of Brian’s legacy, but not too deep. One for the fans. It makes me want to go back and listen to his version of Smile though.
The latest edition of Librarything includes a nice list from the Green Dragon group about ‘Favorite Book Dragons’. Some pretty cool dragons mentioned, including Smaug, the dragons of Pern and Le Gun’s amazing dragons. I think I’d like to nominate the one I read about recently in that Zen Cho story, If At First You Don’t Succeed, the one that was an Imugi aspiring to dragon-hood. That was one plucky dragon!
I took possession of my new Stereolab album today. It’s called Instant Holograms On Metal Film. A typically impressionistic title for the Lab. Some of the song titles are equally evocative: Mystical Plosives, Melodie Is a Wound, Vermona F Transistor, Electrified Teenybop, and Transmuted Matter. Most of the original lineup is still intact, including Laetitia, Tim and Andy. Can’t wait to give it a listen.
Aaand speaking of transmuted matter, I finished the Greg Egan book, Quarantine. It was tough going in the end, with the quantum jargon coming thick and fast. I ended up skimming large chunks of the latter part of the book. I got to this particular passage, an account of efforts to control quantum fluctuations (I think!), and it did my head in: ‘Both Von Neumann and Hypernova have facilities for true random number generation – as opposed to the deterministic pseudo random sequences produced by purely algorithmic means. They employ groups of neurons especially tailored for the purpose, balanced on a fractal knife-edge between firing and not firing, stuttering chaotically in the sway of nothing but intracellular chemical fluctuations and, ultimately, thermal noise.’ (p157). Phew! It feels like reading pure Maths. There’s only so much of that abstract stuff I can take before my head explodes. In the end the story became something of a ‘stop the madman letting the world-ending virus loose’ plot, with the virus being a world that is in perpetual quantum flux. Egan writes impressively about what a world like that might look like – it ain’t pretty! It was good cyberpunk ala William Gibson stuff, but it asked for a lot of patience and concentration from the reader. Don’t know if I was up to it. It hasn’t soured me on Egan – I’ll definitely check out some more of his stuff. But I will be wary.
I bought an anime bluray at JB today while working in Knox. It was Akiba Maid Wars, a great little title I first read about in an issue of Neo magazine. The idea is they’re like Yukuza constantly warring with other maid service factions – all whilst performing their cutesy maid services. I took it home and watched the first five episodes. It was better and funnier than I expected it would be, following the trials of Nagomi, a newbie maid navigating her way through this unexpectedly violent world. Great soundtrack too. As a side note, I got a $100 parking fine yesterday, and so today I decided I would double down on that figure by buying something at JB, which is what this was. Coz IDGAF.
