Scraps

(Feed)

News

Back Home

About

What is roseability?

Interviews

Close as I'll get to stardom

Flick Her

Photostream

Entertainment

Music, and other not-so-important things

Community

Networking

Last.fm

Currently Hearing

Just Can’t Shake It

I pre-ordered Kate Miller-Heidke’s Curiouser a few weeks back. It took three weeks to arrive, which defeats the point a little bit.

I also accrued some other music in the last little while.

• The Firstborn Is Dead, Kicking Against The Pricks, and The Boatman’s Call by Nick Cave & The Bad Seeds. Great albums, and now I have slightly more legit copies…

• Sonicanimation’s Orchid For The underworld, which I had also borrowed from a friend a long time ago, my own purchase long overdue.

• Feeder’s Tumble and Fall single.

• Kate Miller-Heidke’s Can’t Shake It single, which I bought to tide me over until the album arrived. It has a remix called the ‘Deadwood Remix’ which gets all hillbilly ho down on ya.

• Lisa Mitchell’s Welcome To The Afternoon. Erase whatever you saw on TV from your mind, and think Sarah Blasko / Holly Throsby.

• Clare Bowditch & The Feeding Set’s What Was Left.

• Jackson Jackson’s The Fire Is On The Bird. Great concept album of soulful, funny, storytelling hip-hop.

• Daft Punk’s Musique Volume I, because I’m not really a hard core Daft Punk fan; And

• Viva Piñata, a sampler from Paper Bag Records, home of such acts as You Say Party! We Say Die!, Sally Shapiro, Tokyo Police Club, and The Acorn. A friend gave it to me. It’s pretty cool, some remixes and junk.

I did get a free calendar with my pre-ordered album. And it was signed too… but I’d rather have got it three weeks ago. It’s more consistent that her previous stuff, and I like it a lot. (Nice review here). Really fun music, but interspersed with reflective emo tunes. I’d say that I’d like to meet a girl who has that sort of balance, between fun-loving and reflective-thinking, but to be honest I just wanna meet a girl who wears a clock in her hair.

Dying Breed

On the weekend I saw Dying Breed at the cinema. It was the first proper horror movie I have ever seen at the cinema, and I didn’t enjoy it.

I was staying with Huw, and we saw the movie advertised in the newspaper. The premise hooked me - some kids go to Tasmania to try and photograph a Tasmanian Tiger, and end up running into a tribe of inbred cannibals. Inbred cannibals. In Tasmania. Awesome. I suggested we go see it, not fully grasping that it was a horror movie. It made me very scared, and I got angry at one of the characters, so the film makers must have done their job well enough, but I didn’t enjoy it at all. The build up was massive, it took almost the entire first half of the movie, and that’s the way I like to be scared. It didn’t rely on gore, which was good, but there was still too much for me - enough to make me look away for significant periods of time.

Kind of glad I watched it just for its premise. Who knew Australia was capable of such movies.

Charlize Theron

Like a Handful of Colour Thrown on the Street, That’s Right

I got a letter saying that I had earned a discount on my drivers license renewal, because I have no demerit points against my name. That’s cool.

I think I’m a safe driver. Well, to be honest I don’t think my car is the type that even could do anything unsafe.

The other day I was driving home, cruising at twenty below the limit with the window down as I tend to do in summer, and listening to Art Of Fighting. Your Easy Part came on, and I closed my eyes for a bit to listen to it. I know that’s dangerous, but I couldn’t help it ’cause, I mean, that’s pretty close to nirvana–if such a thing exists here on earth. When I do die in a car accident, it’ll be because of Art Of Fighting.

And oh you don’t wanna know, you don’t wanna be known
And oh you don’t wanna see, you don’t wanna be shown
That I
just
wanna
be
your easy part

Good Girl

My love of the song Umbrella is fairly well known. I’ve also got a few remixes of Rihanna’s Disturbia that I like. The other day Joshua recommended that I download the whole Good Girl Gone Bad album, which I did. But I didn’t like it, there was too much Ne-Yo, and too many slow songs. If you’re plastic pop, there’s not much point in a slow song.

I’m not much a part of the ‘indie’ scene, but Josh is possibly the most ‘indie-kid’ kid I know. So it got us to thinking, We all start off listening to pop music. We want something more, so we look at old rock, before discovering Nirvana’s grunge and becoming hard core rock kids, and then quickly moving on to being something close to true indie-kids. This lasts quite a while usually, and may include dalliances into broad trends such as Britpop (1995-2000), any artist as long as they are obscure (2001-2005), or electro-pop (2006-current); or it may involve obsessions with certain prolific artists (The Mountain Goats, Sufjan Stevens). But after a while it wanes, and wanting a bit of edge we start listening to hip-hop, and soon after that we start listening to pop music again, completing a full circle, and thus reaching… er, nirvana. Not that everyone follows those exact stages - it depends on the climates and trends I presume.

Maybe there’s something to be said for people who have been content to listen to Madonna for twenty-five years straight.

I Peed in a Cup, It Was Ace

I went to the doctor and had a psychological evaluation. I didn’t go just for that, but that was part of it, you know. I’m not crazy. He said it was hard to tell after meeting someone for ten minutes, but he gave me a tick because I seemed calm. Then when I got out into the car park I wondered what it’d be like to go on a spree and see how much damage I could do on the way home. Just to make the doctor look silly, you know, to see what happens when you tear the world apart. And that reminded me of last night, when my brother was watching Star Wars Episode III, and we discussed what the reaction would have been if the director had messed up the end by making Anakin die, or Obi Wan, or Yoda, or all three… you know royally mess the whole thing up so it didn’t make sense. It would have been funny. Except for the kids who were sad about their ruined movies I guess. It’d be remembered forever. I think people should do those sorts of things but no one does.

Twenty20$20ml

The Stanford Super Series was played on the weekend. Two teams, England and the Stanford Superstars, a couple of warm up games against local West Indian teams, and then a winner-takes-all twenty million dollar match. It was a money-grabbing circus, and the actual cricket was fairly boring.

© Cricinfo/ESPN

But I got a laugh out of this photo of the English players’ wives and girlfriends, biting their nails as their men let twenty million slip by.

Mobile Woes

When it comes to using a mobile phone in Australia, the options suck. At least as far as I can tell.

I currently have a pre-paid deal with Telstra. I can send text messages to other Telstra mobiles for 1c per text. That’s nice. I don’t send text messages to anyone who doesn’t use Telstra, because then I’d have to monitor how often and who I sent text messages to, and I don’t want to do that.

It’s too expensive to make any calls. I suppose I could make ten dollars of calls per month, or whatever I thought I could afford, but then I would have to monitor how often I made calls, and I don’t want to do that either. You know, you call someone a couple of times, and you set an expectation with yourself and them, you can’t just refuse to call them the next time. And I can’t stand talking on the phone knowing that the per minute rates are so high I can almost feel my wallet getting lighter.

So I use my phone only to send text messages to other people who have Telstra phones. That’s been okay for the last couple of years, as nearly all my good friends use have Telstra phones. But at the same time it makes the phone fairly limited.

So I’ve been thinking of changing to a better deal. Telstra has none. I mean, I am on an old deal - even the current version of the deal I am on forces you to recharge a minimum amount per month, which is far above what I use. I even go to a Westpac bank ATM to recharge, because the ATMs still use the old system which allows me to purchase small amounts of credit with long expiry times. Even with all that I still have to send credit to my sister (who then sends it back) when the expiry date nears. Who would have thought it’d be so hard.

After searching all over the place, the most likely deal I found was the $34 Cap from Vodafone. A flat $34 per month would get me $310 credit to spend on calls and text messages. That would allow me approximately 40 text messages per day. Sounds a lot, and I’m not sure how many I do send, but some days I definitely send more than 40. And that’s currently, when I only send to people who use Telstra. Assuming I sent an average of 20 text messages per day, the call rate of almost a dollar per minute, plus a flagfall, still doesn’t leave much useful calling time.

I would consider testing Vodafone out… except that if I stop my current Telstra deal I can never get it back. And It’s a twelve month contract, which is a long time, not to mention a lot of money, for a contract that doesn’t suit. I could get a second handset… anyone have a spare?

Which brings me to my second big complaint. Address books. I wanna be able to sync my address books. I hate having to maintain a GMail address book and a phone book on my phone. It would be excellent if I could maintain one address book on GMail, which synchronised with my phone. At the moment I have a Nokia 3315 handest. It’s awesome. Unbreakable, and night uncrashable. No games, Internet access, or any other rubbish I don’t need, it’s just a phone. But I’d buy something new if I could synchronise address books. An iPhone or some such might do it, but they are all locked into plans and contracts. With this age of APIs, it should be so much easier to synchronise things like address books!

So maybe I should just keep my eight year old phone, and just use it to send text messages to four different people. Lame.

Edit: I’m tempted to go for $54 per month. It’s expensive, and I am unemployed / a poor student. But $600 worth of calls and text messages would cut it for sure I reckon. Hrmm.