Jamming session

2094

Dirk has just informed me through an email (which I couldn’t really read) that they’ve written about the previous jamming party they did on his birthday. I went there and to my delight I also saw that they uploaded two vids from me playing with fire.

Excellent! Finally a recent vid with a good capture. I especially liked the jamming behind me. It is something that makes dancing with fire even better.

2091

Hypocritical D?

I was watching music videos of Tenacious D songs on [tag]YouTube[/tag], when my eye fell upon this one:

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Now, this striked me as quite strange for two reasons. First of all I thought Jack Black was much cooler than this. Almost until the end of it, I honestly expected him to support piracy in some funny way. Needless to say, I was quite disappointed to see that he was actually serious on condemning it.

I wouldn’t be so annoyed by that per-se, as piracy, in the original sense of the word (cheap movies sold on the street etc) rewarded the wrong people, but in this vid, he seems to be against file sharing in general which is just wrong. There is just so much arguments to support piracy that I don’t even care to divulge on the point here. Let’s just say that if it was not for piracy, I would never support [tag]Tenacious D[/tag] and/or even know who the fuck they were.

Second, isn’t Jack an avid weed smoker? Isn’t it just a tad hypocritical to talk about right and wrong when he himself breaks the law without remorse? It is not that I am against drug use (far from it) but this shows that Jack Black realizes that the law is not always correct, and thus he chooses to ignore and break it. No, if millions of people who decide that file-sharing should not be illegal are “Douches” (especially since the facts are in their favor) then what does that make Jack, hmmm?

My initial opinion would be, unfortunately, that he has become a Sellout. Pity because my respect for him and his work just dropped considerably.

Can he not realize that it is file-sharing and word-of-mouth that empowered him to such a degree? If it wasn’t for thousands of people sending each other “that funny song” (Fuck her gently) and “that funny video” (Tribute) does he think that he would be as known as he is?
Would Tenacious D become famous in Corporate America, with this combination of music and lyrics and humor that they use? If you think that, then I have a bridge in Brooklyn to sell you…

Deactivating lasers with my dick!

Yesterday I saw Tenacious D in the Pick of Destiny and I loved every minute of it. You may not appreciate it that much if you are not a Tenacious D fan but I loved it.

The soundtracks are amazing and the epic song in the end is all the money. The movie is a general comedy with a lot a explicit language (which I don’t mind at all) and it follows the supposed meeting of Tenacious D until the writing of the song “Tribute”.

I will let the first videos speak for themselves.

[youtube]hvvjiE4AdUI[/youtube]

[youtube]TCd7_pp0xnY[/youtube]

Download Go and see it!

Now!

Wacken's 300

A member of our Wacken trip, seems to have a quite a good skill at making videos, he has mixed up his takes from Wacken and created a little trailer, as a taste of what happened. It was created with a little 300 theme in mind.

You can see it below, or if you’d rather have a more lite version (it is 40MB), you can head over to Youtube where he has uploaded it as well.

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Ελευθερία του Λιακοπούλειου λόγου

Ωχ παιδιά δεν μπορώ, δεν ασχολήθηκα με τον Λιακόπουλο παραπάνω απ’οτι είχα διαβάσει για την υπόθεση Τσιπρόπουλου αλλά έτυχε να πέσει στα μάτια μου το παρακάτω άθλιο βιντεάκι αυτού του ανθρώπου.

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Liako
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Ρε σείς, τι λέει το άτομο; Έλεος, έλεος ας είναι και σπορέλαιος! Είναι ξεκάθαρο οτι μιλάει φυσικά για το funel και προσπαθεί να περάσει το μήνυμα οτι ο τύπος που το έγραφε, τα έπαιρνε κανονικά για να θάβει τον Λιακόπουλο. Όχι οτι ο τύπος είναι ρόμπα ξεκούμπωτη και σηκώνει μεγάλο δούλεμα…

Ακούστε ατάκες…

Αυτούς όλους που κάνουν περίεργα πράγματα πρέπει να τους εντοπίσουμε και να τους βγάλουμε στην άκρη…

Μάλιστα. Με το “περίεργα πράγματα” φυσικά, εννοεί ότι πάει αντίθετα με αυτά που θέλει να περάσει ή με ότι κριτικάρει της μπούρδες που ξεστομίζει.

Η κυβέρνηση έχει βάλει τα τσιράκια της…-… που, “αναγκασμένο” πλέον, το κράτος θα πει, ααα, όλοι πρέπει να είναι φανεροί.

Μα ναι, όλα είναι μια συνομοσία ενάντια στον Λιακόπουλο και στον ελέυθερο λόγο απο την Νέα Τάξη Πραγμάτων. “Μέσα σε μια νύχτα” θα κλειδώσουν το Ιντερνέτ συνεχίζει να λέει, άσχετο πόσο αδύνατον είναι αυτό και πόσο πολύ δείχνει την άγνοια του για το πως λειτουργούν τα πράγματα.

Το πιο χαρακτηριστικό απο αυτά που λέει

Εαν δεν περιχαρακώσουμε την ελευθερία του λόγου…

Α ρε “ελληνορθόδοξε” κρυπτοφασίστα Λιακόπουλε, ξεχάστηκες για λίγο και έδειξες το πραγματικό πρόσωπο σου ε; Αυτή είναι λοιπόν η πρόταση του; Να μειώσουμε την ελευθερία του λόγου ώστε να μπορεί να επιζήσει η “ελευθερία του λόγου”…που θα συμφέρει τον Λιακόπουλο, και κάθε Λιακόπουλο.

Είναι απίστευτο πόσο υποκριτικό είναι να βλέπεις το άτομο, το οποίο ξεδιάντροπα επιτέθηκε στην ίδια ελευθερία που υπερασπίζεται, με αποτέλεσμα ένα εντελώς αθώο άτομο να περάσει τον Γολγοθα, να φτιάχνει βιντεάκι με τίτλο “SOS ELEFTHERIA STO INTERNET“…πραγματικά αηδιαστικό.

Θέλετε κι’αλλη υποκρισία. Έχει βάλει και τα σχόλια του βίντεο σε moderation ώστε να μην φαίνεται τίποτα άσχημο απο κάτω (Σοβαρά, δείτε το, ούτε ένα κακό λόγο δεν έχει και από τα 6000 views υπάρχουν μόνο 6 σχόλια). Σιγά μην αφήσει το δικό μου σχόλιο να περάσει δηλαδή…

Αυτό είναι φυσικά το καλό με τα blogs, μπορώ να τον σχολιάσω όσο του αξίζει και δεν μπορεί να με φιμώσει όσο και να προσπαθεί.

Α ναι, ένα άλλο ενδιαφέρον πράγμα με αυτό το βιντεάκι (εκτώς απο τις απίστευτα άκυρες συνομοσιολογικές θεωρίες) είναι το γεγονός οτι λέει το ίδιο πράγμα 3 φορές. Απλά ξεχνιέται που και που και αρχίζει να μιλάει για κάτι εντελός άσχετο και μετά όταν επανέρχεται, έχοντας ξεχάσει τι είπε 20 δευτερόλεπτα πιο πρίν, το ξαναλέει.

Ρόμπα Λιακόπουλε, νομίζεις οτί το “Ιντερνέτ” είναι το ίδιο πράγμα με την τηλεόραση, στην οποία μπορείς να αγνοείς τον αντίλογο; Ετοιμάσου για μεγάλο μπουγέλο όταν αποφασίσεις να γίνεσαι τακτικός στα μέρη μας. Ξέχνα αυτά που ήξερες…

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Liako2
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Manowar Resurgence

So, yesterday me, Arnoc and Alisa had arranged to head over to the Magic Circle Festival in order to see some bands that each of us liked. Vadim wanted to see Stormwarrior, Alisa Majesty and me mostly for Gamma Ray but since I had the chance, [tag]Manowar[/tag] for the first time. In the past I’ve always avoided Manowar concerts because of the overwhelming feeling of suck most people informed me of. Read more “Manowar Resurgence”

Just one more distro change

Every time that I change a GNU/Linux distro I claim that I’m going to keep it for a while but for some reason as soon as some thing start to break down things always start to look brighter on the other side. So this is how I ended up looking toward Ubuntu once more.

For those that do not follow my distro jumping story (and I blame you not), last thing I was trying out was Sabayon Linux, after getting totally pissed off with my Ubuntu 6.10 installation where the system was hanging all the time without reason. Sabayon’s initial install seemed more stable and I thought to install it. (never mind the fact that the true culprit was Nvidia crappy drivers)

Unfortunately for me, Sabayon was much less stable than it seemed initially. I blame it on the absolute bloatware format of the distro. It just includes so many applications for the same purpose, along with 4 different desktop environment and generally every conceivable package that you could think of that it seems inevitable that something will break as soon as you start upgrading things. If only they had an install option to install a more minimal system…

At some point I had gotten fed up with my CD drives disappearing, Kopete crashing (I eventually used Pidgin which is very very nice), randomly failing HDD (OK that still happens) and having to use legacy nvidia drivers in order to have beryl without system halts, I found myself buying a new external HDD (about time and I thought to myself,

Why not buy a cheap VGA to see if that will stop the system halting with newer Nvidia drivers? If nothing else, you can keep your old one to finally setup the extra server you wanted.

And so I did. I grabbed a Geforce 8500 for 90€ who I mistakenly assumed would be better than my 2.5 year old Geforce 6600 GT AGP. When I reached my place, it occurred to me that if I’m going to go to all the trouble of setting up a new VGA, I might as well go all the way and install Kubuntu Feisty 7.04 which will give me a chance to check out the new Compiz-Beryl Fusion as well. Who knows, maybe the new, “Better and more Stable” version would not overheat my Geforce 6600.

S’yeah, right. The first installation failed because I wanted to keep Sabayon as a second OS but the damn Kubuntu installer did not have support for LVM and insisted on formatting my old boot partition if I were to use it. I couldn’t be bothered at that point to play with Grub so I installed the system in my old 80Gb HDD after freeing up my old 25gb “Storage Space” (Hah!) but no luck. Since the primary HDD is the SATA one, installing it on the ATA drive did not make the system boot the new boot loader as the MBR kubuntu wrote on resided in the inactive drive.
So I bit the bullet and after backing up crucial files (Porn), critical settings (Porn playlists) and other stuff I did not want to lose (Porn links) from the home directory I deleted the Sabayon LVM and installed Kubuntu on the freed partition while formatting the boot sector and keeping my home directory intact. I assumed that K[tag]ubunt[/tag]u would just use my old KDE/Firefox settings and I was mostly right. Unfortunately there were quite a lot of setting that did not work “just right” so I ended up resetting the KDE settings (read: rename the .kde dir) and pasting the app setting I wanted to keep in it afterwards.

The initial problem was that I could not install the propriertary nvidia drivers as in the official documentation as Kubuntu does not include the necessary restricted-manager script. No problem, I fired up the package manager and requested the installation. As it was not installed on the menu, I had to use it from the console but no biggie.
I then installed [tag]compiz[/tag]-fusion and used my gf6000 to see how it went. As expected, it halted the system just as I finished setting it up. No problem then, I opened the box, installed the new VGA and tried to use it. Well I was quite surprised when the restricted-manager told me that I do not have a restricted card, the system recognized it as VESA and no matter what I did, Kubuntu just refused to acknowledge that I had a damn nvidia card inside. Checking on the compatibility list, I discovered that my card was not supported by Ubuntu. *Groan*. Now I had to find out another way to install the driver. I did not want to use Envy as it was supposedly not compatible with the official way, but in the end I gave up and used it because nothing else seemed to work.

Fortunately that helped and my new card started using acceleration. Woe to me when I discovered that it was actually much worse, performance-wise, than my old card 🙁
It was at this point that I swore and decided to just buy a good card. Shallow? Quite. But at least I had

an excuse to get myself a present for my good job performance and after all it might allow me to play a newer game. So, I returned the card, became 200€ poorer and got me a Geforce 8800 GTS who I knew was supported this time.

I took me a while to install it because I did not realize it required extra power but I happened to see the appropriate holes as I was getting “hammer and saw” thoughts.

new vgaOne envy run later (no restricted-manager still said I did not have a restricted card) I got my acceleration going. I set it up and playtested it for a while. Fortunately it did not hang the system anymore.

Now there are a few more details to iron out (like the system not booting up at 1280×1024 even though I put it in the X.org) or allowing me finally to change languages with double-shift (which does not work, again) and stuff like that but from initial experience I believe that, other than a strange slowness issue, Kubuntu is much much more stable than his predecessors and surely more stable than Sabayon 3.3. Time will tell if this will continue. For now I am contect to play around with my new accelerated desktop.

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Compiz-Fusion Rulz
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I’m thinking of making a nice video with the new version but I need an editing software that is not too hard to use. i tried Cinerella but it seems to like to crash so I don’t know how much I can use it. If anyone can propose a good screen capture setup (so that it doesn’t start to flicker when too many 3d stuff are drawn) and video editing for [tag]linux[/tag], I’d love to hear it.

Beltane

So [tag]Arnoc [/tag] piqued my interest about the yearly gathering he is having with his friends which he likes to name it after the Gaelic holiday, Beltane. As far as excuses to have a barbecue with your friends go, this is not half bad, although it doesn’t mind to remember that this is also the Labour day as well.

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We didn’t have any maypoles or flowers but we did have quite a lot of Mead however, and I even brought a little mead_sm.jpgbottle of Jaegemeister that a friend of Arnoc’s almost drank by himself 🙁

We also had quite a lot of BBQ but unfortunately, due to the fact that the ECB restaurant had an all-you-can-eat day I was pretty stuffed already and I couldn’t enjoy the fine souvlakia that were around, or the horrible cucumber salad 😛
Time passed and people were starting to ask for a fire show. I was itching to test my new [tag]firestaff[/tag] so I gladly obliged them. There was just the perfect place in the back garden for such a thing.

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We continued during the night with drinks and discussion and even some dancing around the fire on Pagan Dancethe music of Ensiferum if my memory does not fail me. Generally it was a good time and we finished at about 12:30.

It was around that point that I discovered the most ugly bird sitting on the tree and hooting. It was the owner of the place who snuck in and climbed on while no one was looking. Fortunately that ugly bird drove us home so we were spared having to wait for the last train in the cold.

Took five vids (but no pics) that you can find in the gallery now.

Good times

Underground gigs

I’m starting to like the Metal scene in Frankfurt more and more. Yesterday I met with Maubi to go to a little gig of a few underground bands at Die Halle that was organised by FFM-Rock. Initially we though the price must have been 6-8 €, judging from previous experience. I even though that for 5 bands it might go as high as 10.

I did not expect it to be just 5 FUCKING EUROS! Five!! That is, 1€ per band. And the beers were at 2€ each! Two!! I don’t have enough exclamation marks for this shit!!!
The bastards at the Harley bar in Thessaloni charged us 15€ for 2 bands and the beer was something like 4€ or 5€! Bastards!

Moving on

Smiling MaubiInitially we met with [tag]Maubi[/tag] at the underground station at 20:15 where he informed me that two others would join us. I do not remember their names now bur needless to say, they were familiar faces from the Final Destination.

We got on the train where they proceeded to speak mostly in German. To pay them back I started filming them 😛 I even managed to finally get a pic of Maubi for my called ID.

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We arrived at the concert hall, (die halle heh) at about 2:15 and as I expected, they knew everyone around.

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The place was a regular bar and there must have been about three dozen customers. As you could probably listen in the previous video they were doing the sound check when we entered.

ChiabolaThe First band that was playing were Chiabola. I did not think to take a video of the band at that point so you’ll have to be happy with this picture only 🙂

What surpised me about them was that only one member of the band had long hair, something usually common in Nu metal bands. Their music however was quite good, reminding me a bit of Paradise Lost in their newer albums. They only played 3 or 4 songs if I remember correctly.

Force Trankill in action

The next band, Force Trankill, was the one that had Maubi’s two guitarists from his other band, Everfest. They were playing progressive rock, and without wanting to sound biased I must admit that they were the ones I like the most. Of course, this is not to say that the other bands were not good, Force Trankillquite the contrary. I was amazed at the quality of the bands I saw for just 5 euros!

The singer was probably one of the reasons why this band sounded so goo. This is the same singer that I saw in a previous [tag]gig[/tag] I went to. Maubi told me that band was his other project at which point I started wondering if everyone around here two pet bands as a pastime.

Another FriendI believe I have to also mention that the whole environment was really cool. Although I hand’t really spoken to many people by that point, everybody seemed friendly and a girl regular even promised to help me get a flyer of the gig.

The area in front of the stage was not packet and I had enough space to move around and take photographs and videos. That is not to say that people where not head banging and stuff.

Crystal Crow SingerNext on the stage were Crystal Crow, of which the singer I had noticed outside just because he was wearing a bandanna exactly like mine, as well as a leather trench coat, like me. When he went on the stage, I just knew he had stolen my idea (if I ever became the frontman to a band that is 🙂 )

Crystal Crow in actionI must say that they were pretty good. The singer could grab both the high and the low notes and used a guttural voice similar to old school Sentenced. Their songs were a bit melancholic and dark-themed as well which was a good change from the rest.

I think this might be a band worth looking into in the future. I’ve been meaning to find another darkware metal band as a replacement for the now disbanded Sentenced.

Liquid Horizon The next band on the line was Liquid Horizon, a clearly progressive act with quite a melodic undertone. The singer, as you’ll be able to see from the vids, was also the Guitarist which imho is a no-easy fit when you’re playing prog.

I took two videos of these dudes mainly because I run out of space on my mobile phone and had to move some files around.

Big Chief DrummerFun fact. During one of the songs, due to the beat that sounded similar to native american rythms, the drummer put on a feather headress for the whole song. Nice touch 🙂

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At this point, our other friends had already left because they were tired, leaving just me an Maubi. Fortunately I had already started talking with various people around the place, including the owner who even bought me a drink. During my conversation with the owner, I asked him directly, how could he manage when he was charging such low prices for entry and drinks. He explained to me that it was quite difficult in the start, where he almost closed down, but now that people have learned the place and more gigs are happening.

You know it actually makes sense. Bands don’t come to play here for the money and as such don’t expect a high income (perhaps 10 euros). This in turn allows the owner to charge low entrance and drinks which brings more people to the scene. These people then promote the bands using word of mouth (like I am doing currently) and even buy the bands’ own merchandise. In the end everyone wins, unlike Greece where everyone was losing.

ScenesAnyway, now the next band was on the stage, going by the simple name: Scenes. We had already been told by enthusiastic people around there that they were the best of the lot and as they started doing the soundcheck I could see that the singer would make a good performance.

Scenes in actionI was not dissapointed. The singer was quite the frontman and their music was quite enjoyable really. Although it was not not the band I liked that night – and there were a few people headbanging on the front row, which goes to show that I was probably in the minority – I must admit that for an underground band their music was quite impressive. They reminded me quite a lot of Queensrÿche.

Unfortunately at this point it was time for me and Maubi to head out as well in order to catch the least train so we couldn’t really see the whole gig. We said our goodbyes, I received my flyer as promised and I vowed to return for more 🙂

Ahem, just one more time…5 FUCKING EUROS!!!1!one!