I am 138

[1743]

The pleasantries are gone.

I'm stripped of all I was.

[1750]

Killing tomorrow...

[1822]

I picked up Rock Band at the weekend. I've been waiting for this to come out over here since it was released in America.

It's far more fun to play than either Guitar Hero 2 or 3.

I spent most of the weekend playing the extra At The Gates and Metallica songs I downloaded. Definitely time well spent. Playing the songs with 3 others is hilarious. I enjoyed playing Blackened so much that i hit up eBay looking for ...And Justice For All on vinyl.

Kind of on that topic, I'm stoked on a new band that is in the works. Hopefully it's going to be a lot of fun.

I went to see the new Indiana Jones the other day. It was pretty great, although it did lose the plot a bit towards the end. The fight between the greasers and the college jocks was great.

Tonight a bunch of us are going to hit up Tim Burton's Batman in Cineworld. I'm really glad that the cinema is showing old movies on the big screen. Next month is going to be Blade Runner. I actually can't wait for that.

I wish I had seen Turmoil playing in 2000.

That's all for for now.

[1856]

Die Young...

[1417]

YOUR FUNERAL

Cursed broke up the other day. This upsets me. I'm glad that I saw them when I had the chance.

[1423]

On new songs and apparel...

[2041]

Cornered practice was last night. We recorded instrumental demo versions of our three latest tracks. Jon wasn't at practice because he was studying for his exams, which are in full flight. I'm pretty happy with how it turned out. I uploaded one of them, with the provisional title of Barricade, onto our MySpace. People seem to think it's pretty good, so I'm happy about that.

I'm stoked with how much interest there is from people in hearing the rest of our new stuff. We've put a lot of love into it, so I hope it goes down well when it eventually sees the light of day.

I sorted out the Another Day In Hell shirts yesterday. We're going to be getting a limited run of them done, and there won't be a reprint. They should be ready for our second last show, with Crowd Control, on the 28^th of June.

It'll look like something along the lines of what's on the right (click for a biggun [edit: even bigger now, just for Gav)...

They'll be printed on white Fruit Of The Loom heavyweight classics in a bunch of sizes. If you can't make it to the show and want one, hit up the Another Day In Hell MySpace, or email halfshellrecords [at] gmail [dot] com, and we'll see what we can hook up.

There won't be a reprinting of these and once they're gone, they're gone for good.

It's payday tomorrow, so I'm thinking about buying a new PC to celebrate. I didn't really want to buy another PC, because I'd much prefer to have a Mac, but I want to have a solid development machine that I can use from home. I've not really been a complete technology nerd for some time, and I guess I'm ashamed to say that I found some perverse pleasure in reading through technical specification, looking for what I want but not paying too much for it. It's not going to be for gaming rig or anything even close, and the only real stipulation I had was that the motherboard have a HDMI connection so I can plug it into that ridiculous TV I have.

As for size, it'll be a small form factor one, but with a pretty decent AMD X2 and 4 GB RAM. I think the modular power supply is a good idea, partly because it increases airflow and all the benefits that brings along with it, but mostly because I hate trying to get cables in and out of the way. The one I picked out also has 4 native SATA power connectors. I Also went with an SATA hard disk and DVD drive.

I also spent a little while looking for a cheap Mad Catz HDMI adapter for first generation XBox 360s allowing them to output signals in 1080p.

I eventually managed to hook one up from GameStop. Hopefully it'll arrive soon. It'll also free up the component input port on the TV for my Wii. 480p MarioKart, here I come... *ahem*

Finally, Rock Band is out tomorrow. Hell yeah. Sorry Rachel, but you're never going to see me again.

Now I'm done.

---

Bands I'm listening to that you should also be the one that's listening to:

• Spat On
• Piece By Piece

[2139]

True evil never dies...

[1648]

On Wednesday, I saw a trailer for a new zombie movie called Outpost. The twist is that the zombies are the result of a Nazi experiment to make invincible super soldiers, like in Universal Soldier. I'm so excited by the potential for blood and hilarity in this film.

In other movie news involving Nazis, I hear that the new Indiana Jones is less than spectacular. I'll be very disappointed if that's the case. :(

It's been 4 days since I got out of hospital, and I'm still not 100%. It hasn't been the best week. I have an outpatients appointment with urology in about 5 weeks, just to make sure everything is alright, but I think that if it's not all alright by that time, then I'll definitely have noticed.

Band news. Another Day In Hell are coming to an end. This has bummed me out more than I can say, but that's how life goes, unfortunately. We have two final shows coming up, one with Crowd Control, and some unannounced others, on June 28^th before they go on tour, and the other at Demented Fest on July 20^th. There are no posters or fliers or anything for either of these yet, but soon.

edit: Still no poster for the June 28^th show, but here's the one for demented fest.

We will have some shirts available at both of these shows. I think they're going to be limited to 50 altogether. The design is by super tight homeboy, Simon Erl. I love that dude.

In other news, Jonathan Boyce (that's his handsome visage on the right), drummer for Another Day In Hell and Forging Friendships, has taken up vocal duties with my other band, Cornered.

I've been playing with Cornered for about 4 years, and it's mostly been long periods of quiet, with brief spells of intense activity. I was the original vocalist for the band for a long time, but we'd decided that we needed to find a dedicated vocalist because I couldn't do it and play guitar at the same time and give both my fullest effort.

We've not played a live show in nearly 18 months, partly because we were writing new material, and it was taking a long time to come together, but mostly because we weren't able to find someone who we wanted to play with us. Jonathan fits the bill, and he's the best dude ever, to top it off.

I've not been doing much with regards to Half Shell right now, for various reasons, none of which are really good enough. I'm going to be running some shows this summer with Demented Promotions and Red Ranger Promotions. I'm not quite sure what the future holds otherwise.

I've been seeing a young lady, Rachel, for the past while too. She doesn't really get enough of a mention, but she lights my fire. That's us on the right when we went down to visit my sister, her husband and their new baby, Roisín.

I've got no pictures of the cute little tyke, but rest assured that she enjoyed vomiting all over my nice shirt.

The baby, I mean.

That's all for now. Time for chinese food and zombies of the SS.

---

Bands I'm listening to that you should also be the one that's listening to:

• Necro
• Crowd Control
• Real Talk!

[1732]

Like a stone, like a stone...

[2330]

I've been in hospital for the last week. Woke up on Tuesday in unbelievable agony. It took between then and Thursday night for them to figure out I had a renal stone.

It wasn't a very pleasant experience, so I'm not really into recounting it. Instead, here follows what I did when I wasn't curled up in a ball, fucked up on painkillers, going for scans and not eating for 3 ¹/₂ days.

I finally finished Broken Sword. That was class. Nico is a horrible bitch and isn't very aesthetically pleasing.

I played heaps of Starcraft, which is something I missed out on before. It's still pretty deep as far as strategy games goes.

I watched a couple of documentary movies. The Corporation, Enron: The Smartest Guys In The Room, Global Dimming and An Inconvenient Truth.

I watched Lords Of Dogtown. I really enjoyed Dogtown and the Z-Boys when I saw it a couple of years ago, and this is was a thoroughly enjoyable movie. Emile Hirsch is great in it. I hope he hasn't destroyed his career with that Speed Racer shit.

It please me greatly that I was visited by my mom everyday, and by heaps of other good dudes and dudettes. Every visit was really appreciated.

I was back in work today, the day after I got out. It wasn't a fun day in work. I guess it'll be a little while before I'm back in fighting form. Then everyone is dead.

You should too.

---

Albums I'm listening to that you should also be the one that's listening to:

• Cursed - One
• Slayer - Reign In Blood

[0108]

Five times in the mirror...

[1715]

This blog is about my most recent excursion to see bands playing. In this case, CURSED.

So last Saturday, I got up at about 6am, got my shit together and headed out towards the airport for an 0845 flight with Aer Arann to Wales. After a quick check in, I got onboard the plane. It's been a while since I'd flown on a turboprop plane before, and I forgot how noisy they are. The flight was just over an hour long, and by 10 I was in Wales, waiting for the bus to Cardiff Central.

I was staying with Glenn, and he came down to meet me at the bus station. We went back to his place and had some laughs, most especially at the National Geographic straight edge documentary. Before I watched it, I would never have suspected that I was in a gang.

We went in to town to kill some time before our train to Newport, so we hit up the cinema to see Forgetting Sarah Marshall. I'd already seen it a couple of days before, but I really enjoyed it, so had no problem going to see it again. It was actually funnier the second time around.

By the time the movie was finished it was almost time to go, so we headed to the train station. On the way we saw two dudes outside a pub, one holding the other up. The holdee started throwing up, a lot, and got some on the shoes of the holder, at which point he was let go, and when he hit the ground he vomited all over himself. I couldn't stop laughing. This was at about 6 in the evening.

After a 15 minute train ride to Newport and a brief walk, we got to Le Pub. There were plenty of people there but the doors weren't open yet. The show ended up starting late.

Le Pub itself is really nicely laid out, and has a really good sound. The venue is upstairs, and the upstairs is split level, with a bar on the right hand side, and the stage, which is about 2 ¹/₂ feet high, is down a small flight of steps. The area in front of the stage is about 25' wide and about 10' back to where the steps are.

The first band up were The Good Wife. I'd like to be able to say that I like this band. They sounded a bit like These Arms Are Snakes, but without any of the competency. The vocals were strained, the guitars were out of tune, and none of the members seemed that interested in what they were actually playing.

Up next were Gramercy Riffs, who'd been added to the bill in place of Tortuga. I'd heard these about a month before, and was really excited when I found out they'd been added. They play the kind of punk hardcore that I'm really into right now, and, appropriately, the songs are all full of big fat riffs. I picked up their 3 track demo, which has also been released on cassette. They're coming to play in Ireland in late summer, so I'm really looking forward to seeing them again.

Just after they finished playing I turned around and saw my kiwi friend Holly, who was supposed to be in Sweden, at the merch table. Her and another friend, Fingers ( who rules and tattooed my shin for me), were doing the merch for Cursed on the tour. Random. :)

Wales' own Wraith, were up next. They've recently been signed to Reflection Records and have their first 7" out. They play fast and interesting metal tinged hardcore. They're seriously good, especially the drummer, and I recommend getting their 7".

The next band were some ridiculous metal band called Carrion of Vigrid. I watched a couple of songs, but the only thing of note was one of the guitarist hilarious array of hats.

Cursed (myspace) were eventually ready to play at about 2320. I seriously love this band and have done since they released their first record. Soundwise, they have my favourite tone of any band that I listen to, and from the enormous guitar and bass setups that they have, I'm not surprised. I've been to a lot of shows over the last few years, and this was definitely the loudest.

They kicked off and wasted no time in smashing through both new and old songs, including Nineteen Seventy Four, Night Terrors, Head Of The Baptist, Magic Fingers and, the first Cursed song I heard and still my favourite, Bloody Mary. During the set, the singer, Chris, went up to the bar and got a knife, which he used to cut his underwear off. He then taped them back together and stuck them over the face of Thai lady boy on a poster advertising the same.

The guitarist switched to second bass as they finished off the set with Friends In The Music Business. After this blew my head off, it was time to leave, with a giant smile on face and a copy of the latest record under my arm.

It was nearly 2 by the time we got back to Glenns place, and I pretty much passed out straight away. I'm reliably informed that I slept without making any unusual noises.

I was flying back at about 2000 on the sunday, so we had a bit of time to kill. Cue another trip to the cinema. This time we went to see Street Kings, and while it wasn't entirely terrible, it was completely overacted by Keanu Reeves. We ended up leaving before the end, so I could get the bus to the airport.

I landed back in Dublin at around 2200.

It's worth noting that my ears were still ringing on Tuesday.

Thanks Glenn for hooking me up with the place to stay and all.

---

Bands I'm listening to that you should also be the one that's listening to:

• Cursed
• Ed Gein
• Ceremony

[1802]