Continuing with my recent trend for posts about bands and tunes that have been gracing my iTunes, I present Hadouken! (note the !) I’ll happily give credit to my good friend Dale of Not Even Wordsworth (go read — t-shirt love at its finest!) for introducing me to the grimey indie limey sound that makes up That Boy That Girl, the track featured. Frankly, an indie/grime/nu rave/D&B mash-up sounds good to me, and Hadoken! manage it well. Lyrics next!
I’ve long been a fan of user-generated content, maps and mods for video games, mostly because the games I want to play (a Stargate FPS or RTS, please!) never seemed to make it past the publishers’ veto. Rarely, however, have I found such a detailed and true replica of a setting than the Quake III Arena cum Springfield presented above.
That’s what I just shouted, rather loudly, at 2.50am. "The reason?" you might ask. The reason is this beautiful, wonderful, magical little program for Mac OS X: TVShows.
I probably couldn’t do a better three-line introduction than the site provides,1 so here is what they say:
TVShows is a Mac OS X application that automatically downloads your favourite shows. You don’t need anymore to manually download torrent files, TVShows does it for you. Manage your subscriptions and preferences from within the TVShows application, and TVShows takes care of the rest: a background process is automatically launched at a regular interval to check for new episodes.
What’s ultra-cool is that the TVShows deamon that runs in the background is so tiny but so powerful. It automatically looks up your favourite shows every fifteen minutes and if there’s a new episode available on torrent it will download the torrent file and launches it in your default torrent client. I’ve never known it miss an episode of a show I ask it to track, and I’ve never known it to double-download a torrent, or to get the wrong one by mistake. In fact, you can even specify what quality/file size you want if there are multiple available. Truly, I’m in love.
This all being said, I still haven’t answered the original question properly. What made me shout out my proclamation of love to TVShows? Transmission, my favoured torrent client, just launched with this torrent:
Oh yeah, that’s right season five, episode one of Atlantis will be mine in less time than it’ll take to finish writing this post2. Boo-ya! now Season five isn’t due to air until July 11th (I think) and clearly this torrent file specifies this is a pre-air. The first two episodes of season four appeared as pre-airs on torrents as well, and some of the visual effects and incidental music weren’t finished, so these may have similar problems, but like a true hard-core junkie I’ll be willing to overlook that to see the show three weeks early!
Though I could probably do a better job at the English! [↩]
Check out that *sick* upload rate. Damn do I seed well! [↩]
Hells yeah I want one! I was never really much of a Star Wars fan before Lego Star Wars came out for the PC. I’d seen them a few times each, but it just wasn’t the sort of Sci-fi that really grabbed me. Lego, on the other hand, has always been a love of mine. While I no longer have the (literally) buckets of Lego I used to own as a child I always secretly pined to recreate the sprawling citadels of race-tracks, police stations and the like juxtaposed with totally mis-matched roads in utterly unconvincing arrangements. Lego Star Wars and Indiana Jones have rekindled this feeling, and while I no longer desire the confused metropolises of old I’d certainly enjoy building an Imperial fleet to assault Hoth, or Tatooine!
We are talking over 3,800 pieces of lovingly crafted plastic designed, not just to recreate Darth’s holiday home, but allow you to recreate 14 key scenes from the movies, from the Trash Compactor Scene to getting electrified in the Emperor’s Throne Room.
After discovering Arcade Fire in a previous post I’ve been prompted to re-listen to some other bands I have neglected for some time. Principal among these was The Polyphonic Spree, a band consisting of between fifteen and twenty-five members (yup!) who, like Fire, pull out the stops when it comes to instruments on offer! The Spree offer us "a 10-person choir, a pair of keyboardists, as well as a percussionist, drummer, bassist, guitarist, flautist, trumpeter, trombonist, violinist/violist, harpist, French horn player, a pedal steel player, theremin player, and an electronic effects person." I highly recommend their first two albums The Beginning Stages of… and Together We’re Heavy. Sing along next.
If you’re a fan of rollercoasters you’re probably also one of these people who love pushing themselves to find the next big ride. Well you’ll have to go to America for that unfortunately, since they have all the best ones there anyway, but the new Fahrenheit ride at Hershey Park in Pennsylvania might be too much for even the most hardened of stomachs. Featuring a 97 degree drop — that’s 7 degrees past vertical — you’ll pull 4Gs as you spin around the bottom of the dip, which is more than astronauts experience during a space shuttle launch.
So I’m becoming rather enthralled with Arcade Fire. It was to be expected really; I’m a sucker for individuality and ingenuity of instrumentation indie/rock, and with seven members playing between them guitar, keyboards, bass, drums, accordion, piano, xylophone, hurdy gurdy, celesta, percussion, synthesiser, omnichord, glockenspiel, clarinet, violin, viola, cello, double bass, French horn, harp and mandolin (phew!) I was bound to get hooked. Lyrics follow.
I posted a while back about Spore, the creature/universe creation game due out early September. Today sees the release of the Creature Creator, a free trial is available here for both Mac and PC. It’s quite a lot of fun and is a nice way to shave time off of the usually time-consuming aspect of character/creature creation that would delay playing of the actual game when it ships.
[Update]
Videos of people’s creations have started to appear! Check this one out:
Gizmodo UK: LEGO Death Star: You Know You Want One
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