Fizzle

The Angry Cankle

So I decided to watch ‘The Curious Case of Benjamin Button’. Basically the storyline revolves around Brad Pitt’s character, Benjamin, a guy who is born an old man and througout his life gets younger. The movie had been getting some pretty alright reviews so I thought it would be good. My experience did’t begin well as in the aisle of the theatre I bumped my foot on some sort of metal thing and making it bleed, something I discovered a good hour later. The movie was watchable but a little slow. For the first hour-and-a-half Benjamin didn’t really age at all, leading me to ask myself how long it was going to take for him to become a baby again. The movie was also narrated, kinda the same way that ‘The Princess Bride’ is if you have seen that. There was also some intertwining of Hurricane Katrina and this whole storm motif that I didn’t really understand. It wasn’t a terrible movie, but when you give three hours of your life to something, you expect a decent level of satisfaction.

You’re not from around here?

The last year has been a bit of a bludge for me. I didn’t work for the first couple of months. I got a sweet-as job doing something I love for the past 6 months. Been on about four holidays from Greece to Port Macquarie. All this fun but I must admit I’m getting a bit sick of it. This is good news considering in a couple of months I will start studying. I’m guessing this will be a bit of a rude awakening after not studying or dealing with time constraints or any sort of genuine pressure for 16 months.

As some of you know, I’m heading over to Canberra, which is 3 hours from Sydney and about 3 hours from Albury. I’m doing a course called Sports Media, which is pretty self explanitory. The other week I took the drive down to the capital to check it out. The Uni seems pretty awesome so I’m pretty excited about that. On the whole, I’ve been told Canberra is a bit quiet and perhaps dead, we will see. I’ve also been told that If you live on campus, which I will be doing, “you will never not be able to find someone to share a few drinks with”, this quote coming from my campus tour guide. I guess that quote echoes some of my views on what campus life is about, but we will wait and see.

I move down in mid-Feb so I’ll make the most of my last couple of months in Sydney before heading down.

Vasco Era is my Bitch

I’m back and I’ve marked my return with a post actually worth writing, yeah they are pretty rare. Last night I went to TZU with Miz and a couple of other mates. I had seen them a couple a months ago and If i was to be honest I would call them pretty average from that experience. They were supporting then so didn’t have a heap of fan involvement and their song choice seemed a bit dodgy. Anyway, they definetley redeemed themselves this time.

The gig was called Red Bull Soundclash, a battle between two bands. The other band was The Vasco Era, some Indie band. Basically there were four rounds of competition and each band had their own stage and ’stage assistants’. There was a warmup, where they both played three of their own songs. Joelistics and co started on fire with Computer Love, She Gets Up and In Front Of Me. The next round was each band had to do a cover of a song of the other band. Vasco Era had to play Mondays, but their lead singer pretty much failed and it didn’t sound the best. In the next round both bands had to play a couple of their own songs from a chosen genre, Tzu chose Got to Do and In Front of Me, and their styles were country music and reggae. They went off and people were loving it. The finale was pretty much the highlight of the night. Each band got to pick a special guest artist to help them. You could see it coming from a mile away, but Tzu chose Urthboy, to the cheers of everyone there. Their song was a collaboration of We Get Around and Won’t Get Played. Everyone, including lame Vasco Era Indie kids, was loving it. Vasco Era had some no-name support guy and they pretty much sucked. Also I remember Tzu playing Back to Front, but can’t remember for which round.

In the end, the winner was decided by ‘The applause’ometer’. Vasco Era won, but ima blame it on their teenybopper fans. Everyone knew that Tzu put on a better show but who cares, certainly not me.

I was designated driver on the night so at first that sucked but I got used to it. Josh, after a couple of drinks began shouting “JOELISTICS” at the top of his lungs. After about the fifth time, Joelistics replied with “shut up dude”, which made Josh happy and he obeyed. At the end of the gig we went up to Joelisitics, autographed it and got a photo.

Possibly the best night of 2008 my life.

Edit- Tzu is releasing an album of remixes in January, I’m pretty excited about that. Also, no one apprecaites the music from the stupid game Miz put up plays when you open fizzle.

geezers need excitement

something that i’ve started doing lately (i’m not sure why) is making characters out of the empty boxes/utensils left over at the end of a meal. it’s probably cos i got bored of the conversing, but i have fun.

this was the first one, a mexican bandido.

and then this monster thing was from bible study’s christmas dinner, hence the bonbon shell.

don’t hate the player

here’s a fun little game i found on the net. one of those new fangled now popular “physics” games where you make stuff do stuff. it starts off considerably easy (at first i thought it was a kids game) but some of the last levels require a fair amount of thought.

in this game there’s also the ability to save your “contraption” and share it so others can see what you did. here’s a conveyor belt i made.

playing my part

in the interests of Moving Things Along and Getting Things Done, ima see if i can go at least one post every two days this week.

so to start with, there’s always the fall back topic of music. recently i downloaded Girl Talk’s latest album (that’s legally kiddies, you can choose to pay $0.00 if you want). i was talking to tricky about it last time he was here. Girl Talk often gets called a mashup artist, but i like to think of mashups as two or maybe three songs mixed together as a version of one of the songs. girl talk is more like “lets chuck together 10s samples from 100 tracks and make a 4 minute ’song’ from it”. i would probably call him a Sample DJ. that being said, i quite like it, and being the wannabe music nerd that i am, i find great pleasure in picking the samples used in each track (wikipedia of course has a list to check against).

whilst listening to the album, it reminded me that i pretty much have no idea how mashup artists or Sample DJs do what they do. i mean, i understand that they get bits from songs and put them together, but i can’t fathom how they manage to juggle things like song keys, tempos, melodies and timing etc to get it sounding so neat. and do they have access to the mixed song’s master tracks so they can single out just the vocals or melodies etc, or are they able to split up the normally released track into various parts? and how does he do it live?

it does somewhat annoy me, because i can understand how someone might be a really good guitar player and be able to play scales and solos be great at that, but i don’t even know the basics of how someone would start mixing it up. i’m guessing it’s mostly on computers and maybe there’s programmes that do a lot of hard work for you, but i’m even ignorant about that.

anyway, here’s a clip of some girltalk if you were interested and don’t know what he sounds like (watch out, there are bad words), and you too can rip him off choose how much to pay and download it from his site if you so desire.

What Have You Done For Me Lately?

yeah, so it’s been over a month and nothing has happened on fizzle, other than living up to its name.

unfortunately nothing of note has really been happening, or if it did, writing it up made it sound lame.

we’ll try to be more productive in the near future, but hopefully this will tide you over till then.

also, check it: we got a favicon. (cheers tricky.)

there’s a bear in there

last saturday night some of us watched a rad B-grade horror movie, Grizzly Rage (wiki/imdb) at huw’s place.

having seen very few B-grade movies, i was surprised at it’s incredible lack of quality, but it was still enjoyable — if only for laughing at the dodge. i still managed to get scared/shocked a few times, and yelled loud enough to scare everyone else.

the bear was pretty rad though. it was able to throw people 20 odd metres, crush jeeps and even had opposable thumbs.

possibly the best part was after the movie was finished when huw gave us a lift home. we were still a bit on edge so i grabbed him (i was sitting behind him) and yelled really loud. he jumped pretty good… probably not the safest thing to do to the driver, but it was worth it.

in conclusion, i thoroughly recommend Grizzly Rage.

Mondays

Last night I went to a mates house for a bit of a get-together. I had some high expectations. It wasn’t all that bad. The food off the BBQ was a bit raw, so raw that even my usually iron stomach was struggling a bit. Here’s where the party failed a bit. Besides alcohol good friends, whats the main ingredient of a good party….thats right music. See my friend Pk didnt put music on. He instead chose to put Futurama, Simpsons and Family Guy on the widescreen telly. Yeah like that didn’t promote anti-sociality, I may have just invented a word there. Later in the night possibly one of the most disghusting things happened to me. I was trying to be stealthy in the backyard, tippitoes and all. I stepped and felt something soft. I looked down to found a massive dead rat with ants all over it. I ran inside with speed, tipped a beer all over the floor and stepped in the bath and turned up the heat and soaked there for a good minute. Also my car got ‘coned’- where people got ice cream and put it all over the car. I decided to get them back, and being the original thinker I am I went over to Maccas and bought 12 soft serves for the value price of $3.60. Needless to say only 10 made it home after the bumpy drive. I was dismayed to realise all cars were gone when we got back and I let my little pigfat soldiers melt away. The night ended with a bit of Friends watching…seriously PK get some freakin music.

listen to your body tonight

this kid is rad, and the person who put it together goes off