Hello chat! I have arrived in the UK. Or, more accurately, I arrived a week ago and have been too busy doing that thing called "living life" and "having fun" to update the journal. I'm sure you'll forgive me. That said! With there being so much having happened since I last updated, there will be a couple posts on the journal, some trip-related, some not, for you to enjoy.

If you're wondering, it's been lovely so far. It's incredible going from all the awkwardness of a text chat to stepping out of arrivals in Heathrow and suddenly there being zero inhibitions from me or Caby. Seriously, living online sucks, but it's nice to get that reminder that it is entirely the medium that tends to put me at odds with people (maturing also helps). I think you'd all like me more if you found me playing Point Blank in an NQ64 in Soho. (That post is for the group blog though!)

Let's start with something simple and timely. Caby and I went into Kellys yesterday! Kellys is a record store I have written about with adoration before, effectively blending the quality assurance and stock of a really good record store with the ragtag prices and organization of a flea market. Quite literally, it's one guy who owns the entire balcony in Cardiff Market and uses it for vintage records and clothing, and it is well worth the pilgrimage to grab some CDs and watch him just decide on a price on the spot.

The picture shows what Caby and I got in all. From top left:

• Warpaint's self-titled (which we were listening to earlier, absolutely gorgeous slow burner 2010s dream pop that gets better as the album goes on)
• Ben Folds Five's self-titled (which if I don't like, I can just pass onto dcb, though "Underground" is already a killer tune)
• Wilco's Being There (need to expand my Wilco knowledge—dcb, they also had Wilco (The Album) if you're curious)
• Counting Crows' Across a Wire (gotta dip back into my old-time love of the Crows, and this one came right after Recovering the Satellites came out)
• Cracker's Kerosene Hat (get off this! Get on with it!)
• My Vitriol's Finelines (which I picked up because I'm pretty sure it's the original UK mix of the album and not the US reissue mix with Between the Lines, though we don't have a working CD drive to check)
• Moby's 18 (or as Caby calls it, Happy Moby/Sad Moby)
• Feeder's The Singles (don't normally go for comps, but I love "High" and they didn't have any Feeder albums there and Feeder is Welsh and I always wanna pick up Welsh music while I'm here)

Caby also got a Specials best-of, because UK ska is very very different to American ska, an Elvis Costello best-of, which we were enjoying while I was writing this post, plus her own copy of OK Go's debut! It's so cool to see her expanding her music collection and getting braver about it. She has a really fun taste in music. What other girl will give you Flipnote music and Elton John's "I've Seen the Saucers" next to each other?

F's in chat for the eMachines Box's hard drive once again.

This was a sudden failure. The machine was really slow all of a sudden, which I thought might've been an errant background process, only for XP to tell me that the C: drive was not formatted! That's an error you don't want to see. I quickly booted into my Ubuntu (10.04 LTS, Lucid Lynx if you prefer :lince:) rescue drive and thankfully was able to copy off basically everything I wanted to that I hadn't had backed up, which included my Bryce projects, game screenshots and some saves, and some other scattered files here and there. When I checked the SMART status of the drive, I got what you see up there.

This is now the second hard drive in the eMachines Box that's gone bad. Thankfully, I'm a lot more prepared for it this time. What I plan to do when I get back from Wales is to get an IDE-to-SATA adapter in there and just use a modern SSD. I'm going through drives at a rate of one every two years, which isn't great, and IDE drives are only getting harder and harder to find. I don't need a ton of space, I just want something reliable, and hey, speed increases aren't bad either. (Fun fact, I have never owned a computer with an SSD in it. That's right, I am Stone Age in 2025, but to be honest, I've yet to really notice or care. I probably will when I upgrade though. Let me have my naivete until then.)

Time to obsessively back up all my shards and vaults in case my daily driver is getting ready to go as well. I love computers.

We're into the final two weeks before this year's trip to Wales! We've already bought most everything I'm bringing, including the vintage digicam for good measure. (I drunk bought another AOL PhotoCam a couple days ago for cheap, though fully working with pictures showing it powered on and in-box, so that'll be arriving tomorrow as well. What can I say? Fourth time's the charm.) Now all that's left to do is wait.

If you're not following the RSS feeds for my album reviews and game reviews, go do that! I implemented a really simple tweak in PHP that will let me schedule stuff to go up, and I'm being very smart lately and writing a ton to go live automatically each week while I'm abroad. I suspect I'll write some more stuff while I'm on coaches and things, so ideally, this will be the start to a backlog I can feed very healthily while I'm in the mood and then not worry about when I'm not feeling it as much. I'm also revising how I do the "catalog reviews", where I cover an entire bunch of albums from a single artist. Since I feel having a bunch go up at once makes it more likely that people miss stuff, I'll probably evenly spread them out throughout the month alongside the normal reviews, on the same day or maybe something twice a week.

As a final point of housekeeping, scores with game reviews are no longer displayed or even fetched from the database. I never found a way I like to score games, and I'd rather just talk about what I find interesting about them rather than try to rate it, easier as that is for folks to glance over (and I really don't yearn for glanceover traffic anyway). I've got summaries and some cutesy extra text instead, which I'm much happier with.

Anyway, back to score hunting on Rock Band I go! I've got 55/58 gold stars for the first game's setlist and 11/18 for the AC/DC Live Track Pack. I doubt I'll be able to full game gold star RB1 and I'm not even trying with the AC/DC pack, but the fact that I've gotten so close makes me damn proud.

Folks, say hi to the retrocam you'll be seeing my upcoming Wales trip through. If you're a longtime Cammy fan, you'll probably remember my multiple run-ins with the AOL PhotoCam, and I was eager to not repeat those mistakes by buying an actual digicam from a reputable brand this time. I was a little hesitant to go Canon, only because I thought the sample images looked a little too good for the specifically hazy, shitty look I prefer from my retro digicams, but I've decided that usability matters to me more than aesthetics at the moment.

Anyway, this one works great! Very comfortably chunky in the hands. It takes four AA batteries, so I have no rechargeable packs to worry about, and transferring photos is as simple as sticking the CompactFlash card (the seller on eBay sent me it with a 128MB one inside) into a reader and dragging them off. It can shoot in three qualities, and three sizes, up to 1600x1200.

I'm not too terribly sure what kinda page I'll make for this trip—I didn't even finish the ones I was working on for the last trip, and truth be told, every year, I seem to have less interest in the "hey guys, look at what all I got up to!" grind. Projects are a different thing, but just my vacation photos? Whatever, they're fun. I'll let you have a peek soon. Here's a sample shot if you wanna know what kinda quality we're dealing with.

Above all else, I'm just happy I only have to take my 3DS this time. Carrying two DS consoles, one for games and one for pictures, into a foreign country is a bit clunky!

I keep forgetting to make this post, but it's only been a few days, no harm done. No, not the Justin Bieber song, though that certainly is on brand given that 2010s nostalgia is ripe in the group these days. A chance encounter at a thrift store! With sixteen burned copies of a student film from New York:

I don't normally go to thrift stores. I don't have anything against them, but they've always felt a little sad to me, a reminder of what extreme poverty looks like. Is what it is. After a really successful flea market outing about a month ago, though, my mom suggested we go browse the CD selection there, and I like adventuring.

These uncurated selections have definitely piqued my interest this year. At a record store, you largely know what you're getting, and you'll be paying for that guarantee, but at a flea market, thrift store, library sale, or any place not specifically built to sell you music, you could find anything. Lots of garbage of course—I found a copy of Cher's Believe in just about every bin I looked in at the flea market, and you bet there was plenty of gospel and karaoke CDs at the thrift store, but then there's not garbage! Then there's indie rock CDs, copies of Windows Me, sealed blank CD-Rs you pick up for a dollar entirely for the novelty of having a 1999 Verbatim blank you burn Tony Hawk's Pro Skater 4 for the PS1 onto! That's not even counting all the mix CDs, home movies, and strange locally-released albums I found in the shelves.

And then we have Baby. We naturally took our time going through the bins in the back of the store, cassettes, VHS tapes, DVDs (where stray PC games like to hang out, but nothing all that great this time), and tons of used monitors and TVs, all of which I'd much prefer to deal with over a shitty smart TV you buy new. (Can you believe our cheapo Onn Roku TV requires you to enable the composite inputs in the settings before you can use them? What the fuck?) I found a box of circa 2005 HP slimline jewel cases that I thought were unused, and not realizing I had a ton at home already, I picked up the whole box.

Before we'd even paid, though, my mom and I looked closer. There were discs in these cases! Each DVD-R looked exactly the same, a screenshot from some kinda independent film with some text reading "Baby" on them. They were dated 2008, by "Muse Productions". (Better than Passion Project Studios, I suppose!) Now her and I were immensely curious. What was on these? A really low-budget indie film? Porn? They came with the box of jewel cases, which was $6, so we were gonna find out one way or another.

As it turns out, it's a student film! It's about nine minutes long, probably multiple people's final, and absolutely reeks of late 2000s Final Cut Pro goodness, even down to the DVD authoring. Ithaca College in New York is thanked in the credits, and there seems to be a decent-ish cast to it. It's not all that interesting of a short film, but it is pretty competently mixed, edited, and structured, so I hope whoever was involved with it got a nice grade. (We didn't want to stalk the names we found too hard, but of the two girls who got top billing, we found one has been working as a head of production VFX artist at the same place basically since graduating in 2008, so that's a happy ending.)

If you're curious, I have uploaded Baby to The marf Collection on YouTube. Like I said, it's not really that interesting—some light commentary on quick hookups that aren't all that appealing the next morning. I suppose we'll see if anyone involved awkwardly finds it in a few years and asks me to take it down. I don't think it's anything to be embarrassed about, though. Certainly a lot better than the result of my attempt at a film degree.

That does leave me with one final question, though: what were sixteen copies of Baby doing in my thrift store 150 miles away from the college they're attached to? It's one thing if, say, twenty copies were made and then given out to production staff and professors, I totally get that. These are untouched though, and not only that, in the cases, they were aligned perfectly upright, meaning they were placed very intentionally and then never touched again. Were these intended to be given out and then they just didn't get around to it before graduation? Did one of the girls or production people bring them back home to here in town and then they just went to the thrift store? If you're curious, the DVD-Rs varied in brand, which tells me they were using the college's media to burn onto, and as I said, the HP box branding was copyright 2005, which means they went into these jewel cases at the time and just have not been unearthed since then.

I'll keep a copy for myself and then, as I need cases, recycle the rest or something. What a bizarre and fun find.