Regeneration

OK, so I'm getting over my chronic head cold and as a result I'm less bored and so my blogs will inevitably become less interesting and more unfocussed and rambling. Today's entry is a sort of list of stuff which I've come to realise or have found interesting recently.

.Music

I finally bought and subsequently listened to the seminal Radiohead album OK Computer about 12 years after everyone else (including my own mother and presumably hermits who dwell in the rings of Saturn). And it's good. Not quite as good as everyone has been saying, but excessive hype always renders the superlative underwhelming. Previously I had lumped Radiohead with all those whiny, depressive bands I used to hear clogging up the airwaves on the Burger King radio while I pushed those frozen patties onto the grease-stained conveyor belt and through the hellish gates of that infernal broiler, bands like Snow Patrol and Coldplay, awful, awful wank. Now I know the truth; Snow Patrol and Coldplay are to Radiohead, what Chlamydia is to sex. An unpleasant derivative of the actual act itself. A smelly, painful discharge. I think further listening is probably in order to properly appreciate the album, but so far it's all good.

Additionally, Absence by the drone/shoegaze/hip hop group Dälek may be the best album of last decade. So get it. NOW.

.Emulators

Since fashion, politics and the economy are all hell-bent on emulating the eighties, I figured why not do the same with video games? I recently torrented MAME an arcade game emulation engine. It's ace, pressing 5 inserts 'coins' and although I'm only a short walk from Brighton Pier, it's brilliant to be able to congeal slowly in my own filth, while my room grows around me, blazing my way through arcade classics. I've also discovered perhaps the best game on the planet. Alien vs. Predator the arcade game, unlike the watered down PG-13 movies, this is balls to the wall horror and action, pure geek pandering. You can play as one of two different Predators- modelled after the original classic look and the pointier looking monster from the terrible Predator 2 (you know, the one where Danny Glover looks "too talented for this shit")- or Predator protagonist Dutch (who now inexplicably sports a MASSIVE GIANT ROBOT GUN ARM). The whole game is utter fan wankery.. you can pick up and use the famed M41A Pulse Rifle from Aliens and the Predator's throwing disc, there's even a boss fight against the Power Loader... I was doing OK until I came up against the sentry machine gun turrets from the (far superior) director's cut of Aliens at which point my head actually exploded from an overdose of illicit geek love like that man's in Scanners.

I've just realised that I've used the word 'wank' an inordinate amount of times in this blog, which is pretty telling. After all I haven't left my room for about 4 days..

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