Richard Soderberg’s Neighborhood

and "Pure Morning" is annoyingly compelling too

It's slightly disturbing that Brian Molko is probably one of the prettiest people in pop.

As a bonus track - not strictly 90s but I really like the Placebo cover of Kate Bush's "Running Up That Hill" which Q magazine memorably described as "sound[ing] more like a 'pact with the Devil' than the original 'deal with God'"


even if the video is like a better dressed emo version of Feeder's "Just A Day" (which for some reason I can't help watching every time it comes on)

Hmm - no nerdy music factoids so far. Errm. Ok - the reason why drummer Steve Hewitt is blurred out in the Nancy Boy video is because he was still contractually obliged to a band on another label at the time.

 

- via Arnold Kling commenting on Robin Hanson's "Overcoming Bias"

Two words: Ham Daquiri

Because I'm doing this somewhat haphazard today I'm giving you the extra special LOOK!!!! @@@RARE@@@11!!11 original version which features the oft mentioned Billy character wandering around - something that was subsequently cut to produce the more common form of the video most people are familiar with.

Looking round to find the reasons the general consensus, including the commentary on Wikipedia, calls this inexplicable but, having watched both this 'original' and the more common one (which you can find here for comparison) I think I have an answer - the edited version is better and the guy who plays Billy comes across as an insufferable douche who I'd really like to give a good shoeing to.

Anyway, with that particular issue settled we can get onto even more obscurity like, for example, the fact that the song is actually a pretty much word for word recital of the poem "Fun" by Wyn Cooper (who is credited as a co-writer and made, apparently, a metric fuck-tonne of money from the royalties)

“All I want is to have a little fun

Before I die,” says the man next to me

Out of nowhere, apropos of nothing. He says

His name’s William but I’m sure he’s Bill

Or Billy, Mac or Buddy; he’s plain ugly to me,

And I wonder if he’s ever had fun in his life.

We are drinking beer at noon on Tuesday,

In a bar that faces a giant car wash.

The good people of the world are washing their cars

On their lunch hours, hosing and scrubbing

As best they can in skirts and suits.

They drive their shiny Datsuns and Buicks

Back to the phone company, the record store,

The genetic engineering lab, but not a single one

Appears to be having fun like Billy and me.

I like a good beer buzz early in the day,

And Billy likes to peel the labels

From his bottles of Bud and shred them on the bar.

Then he lights every match in an oversized pack,

Letting each one burn down to his thick fingers

Before blowing and cursing them out.

A happy couple enters the bar, dangerously close

To one another, like this is a motel,

But they clean up their act when we give them

A look. One quick beer and they’re out,

Down the road and in the next state

For all I care, smiling like idiots.

We cover sports and politics and once,

When Billy burns his thumb and lets out a yelp,

The bartender looks up from his want-ads.

Otherwise the bar is ours, and the day and the night

And the car wash too, the matches and Buds

And the clean and dirty cars, the sun and the moon

And every motel on this highway. It’s ours you hear?

And we’ve got plans, so relax and let us in—

All we want is to have a little fun.

 
... and lets face it, who doesn't like a good beer buzz early in the morning?

its popularity was spurred in part by the (slightly) risqué nature of the title and the, hmm, evocative lyrics

"This bed is on fire with passionate love, the neighbours complain about the noises above, but she only comes when she's on top"

meaning that, although it 'only' got to number 23 in the UK charts and peaked on the US Billboard charts at #61 its cult status on college radio stations  drove it to #3 on the Billboard Modern Rock charts and was later used in the American Pie films.

The album itself is fairly interesting. Recorded as a series of session with Brian Eno it actually produced enough tracks for two albums - "Laid" being the "song album" and "Wah Wah" being the more experimental release.

You note, of course, that I use the term "interesting" in a way that means "if you're a huge music nerd like me"

the track is, allegedly anyway, about Courtney Love and specifically how she broke up the friendship between Ms Amos and Trent "Nine Inch Nails" Reznor who also weighed in with the track "Starfuckers Inc." on "The Fragile" ('starfuckers' being a lyric from "Professional Widow").

No video was made for the original version of the song but an official clip was made for the Star Trunk Funkin' mix using segments from other Tori Amos videos. It is, according to Wikipedia, the only Tori Amos video from between 91 and 98 not to appear on the "Tori Amos: Complete videos 91 - 98" VHS - a video with a title that really needs little explaining.

I honestly thought I was going to have more to write about this track - although, when I went back and looked at some of my earlier, more ... terse 90mm entries even a couple of paragraphs comes across as a nigh Homerian epic.
 

Based somewhat on this recipe which is, in turn, based on a recipe I posted to a mailing list 4 years ago.

The modifications I made were to cut way down on the sugar - between half and 3/4 (I eyeballed it rather than mesaured so I'm not sure) - and up the vinegar slightly to 250ml. Instead of red wine vinegar I used a combination of balsamic and white wine.

I also couldn't get hold of any chillis except Jalapenos. I put quite a lot in and the result is nicely spicy albeit with that slightly odd jalapeno ascerbic taste in the back of the throat. It's not unpleasant though and, in fact, works quite well with the sweetness.

I also pulled the jam off the heat much earlier than I usually do to make it slightly runnier - I always forget that it's going to set much jammier than it looks in the pot.

Containers furnished by the Glad Family of Products Mehfil Indian Takeaway.

The screen shot doesn't do it justice recently - what looks like a drab, greyscale world is actually an oddly rich and achingly stylish city scape. Giant robots stomp about in the background, craft scream over head and pigeons scatter as you run past.

Not that you'll notice much - the aim of the game is to run as far as possible. It's very simple - there's only one control: jump but you spend all your time fixated on the right hand side of the screen scanning for obstacles.

You can play it here as a Flash game on the new official site which also pimps the brand new iPhone version, or you can play it on the old site which has a version, at least for me, which is zoomed much further in and makes the game more difficult (and less visually rich).

I warn you though - it's horrible addictive.

Yet I remain somewhat conflicted.

Don't get me wrong - it's a beautifully constructed game and the little touches elevate it to a new level. I can all too readily imagine a version with exactly the same game play mechanic, hell even one with exactly the same - save for the music, the animation and the look - which wasn't quite as good (for example it's not completely dissimilar to Pixel Jam's Dino Run). And I also imagine we'll get to see that borne out when the inevitable army of poor imitations descends.

But it does have its flaws - I'm not the first to touch on them by any means but, what the hell, it's an unexpectedly slow Sunday night and the alternative is drinking whisky alone ...

... actually that sounds like a damn good idea, hang on ...

... and we're back with a 12 yr old Balvenie double wood. Anyway, where was I. Umm, conflicted, flaws - oh yes.

So, one of my niggles with the game is completely personal and is purely a matter of taste but - I don't like games without a finish. Moreover I find games without even periodic breathing breaks annoying as well.

Now, I'm aware that this could very well be just me. I am, after all, a person who likes to make endless lists, sometimes with items I've already done on them, just because I get a nigh sexual thrill from crossing things off them, let alone the completing the whole list.

I want, hell - need, a goal.

Now, with a game like this I could create a sort of personal goal - get to 3000m, beat my old distance, whatever, except for the second, more egregious niggle in the game.

It's unfair.

Unfair arbitrariness and gratuitous randomness in games really annoys me. It's one of the items on my list of biggest sin committed by games designers right after

1. unskippable cut scenes
2. boring but easy sequences just after save points
3. repeated levels
4. places where you can get stuck without the necessary tools to advance even if you kill yourself and go back to the save point
5. Levels where you wander around for ages because it's not clear where to go next and you missed the brief thing that the game threw up to tell you and now you can't bring it back
   

and the reason why I hate it is because it robs you of any sense of achievement and, orthogonally, discourages you from practicing to get better.

See, the point is - even if a particular level is difficult, if you can feel yourself making even a tiny bit of progress then you'll keep coming back to it. And when you finally do crack the problem you'll get an enormous amount of satisfaction.

But if the reason why you fail, and hence why you succeed, is completely random then what's the point? You just keep dying and respawning until you happen to get the right combination of things that allows you to finally squeak through. And after all that impotent frustration you don't get the buzz of finally overcoming because you know, deep down, that it was just luck.

In some ways it feels churlish to criticise such a simple game but the randomly generated levels in Canabalt make me feel exactly that way. My high score is around 7500m I think but, when I achieved it , I immediately wondered if it was because I was in the zone or whether I just got lucky with the layout.

See, each time you play Canabalt it's different and some sequences are more difficult than others - windows are particularly hard for example but conversely you sometimes get several long, unimpeded roof tops and cranes with little to do but rack up the distance.

Moreover, some sequences are impossible. Or become impossible.

It took me a while to confirm it and I could still be wrong but occasionally I've seen sequences where there's no way you could pull it off. This mostly involves a box you don't have enough room to jump over but, if you stumble over it, you don't have enough speed to make the next jump. Or worse a bomb that you can't avoid without plummeting over the edge.

Now, I have no conclusive proof of this - it might be that actually there is enough space and you just have to be pixel perfect to manage it. But I still feel cheated when it happens. And conversely when I make an extended sequence of one touch jumps between roofs - barely touching down before launching off again - my satisfaction is muted by the fact that I don't feel that it was necessarily anything special that allowed me to pull that off.

I've tried to think of various ways to solve the problem - make the level generator smarter than it is might work. For the problem of not knowing whether you have enough room to jump I'm wondering if you could use some subtle visual cue like, saying, the shadow from the next building  or something. Maybe, as you speed up, the game could zoom out a little.

One idea I did like was that if you did a quick jump just as you hit a box or chair then the man would vault over it. It might lose you a little speed but nowhere near as much as if you'd run head first into it but it would also mean that you're not about to overshoot the end of the roof top. A similar mechanism could be used for the bombs - you could maybe slide under them like Faith in Mirrors Edge.

The other thing I'd quite like is some second chances - maybe three per game - whereby if you screwed up by just a little - just fell short of the next roof by a smidgeon, jumped a little too late and fail to be at the correct height for that window - then the dude would grab the ledge by his finger tips and swing up.

That said, the game is still hella addictive so clearly it can't be bothering me that much.