Any feedback on the Showtime/Storytime DVD from Nightwish? I have seen a few live clips with Floor and my interest in the group has been renewed, I feel some songs may be represented better than ever now. Has anyone watched this one/is it worth it?

I had no idea the job market was so bad. Around here I see 'now hiring' signs almost everyday. Also I'm pretty oblivious due to thefact tthat I'm over employed. Not in the sense that I work a job that I'm not qualified for but in the sense that I work way too many damn hours (mostly due to the severe lack of intelligence in the management of my division). Just this week I put in 39.5 hours in three days. Typically I do 60+ a week usually 12-14 hour shifts.

It's quite good. Floor is so fucking good, especially on the old songs (although pretty much every Nightwish fan is in accordance with Anette having been awful with the old material), that you'll forget there was ever a singer between Tarja and her. The Wacken show itself is worth the price.

Yeah, I'm fortunate enough to live in an area that's growing and has a lot of jobs everywhere. Although I'm not sure what exactly I'm going to do once I graduate from college.

Yup, Floor's stage presence is superb, better than even Tarja.Tuomas is still faking a lot of the keyboard sections and feigning like he is playing a lot of passages that he really isn't, which is incredibly irritating (to me, at least).

Yea, its starting to irritate me also. Even though he writes most of the material, in essence, he's just some guy posing behind an instrument and trying to be a pirate. Also, it's taking me a while, but I think I'm warming up to Floor. I was the same way with Anette, I didn't like her voice at first, but her sharper and more playful voice was still able to soar and soothe at some points. I miss her, but hopefully the next release will really showcase Floor's strong points and we will get a taste of her creativity.

Floor is too good for Nightwish as they are now.

So is Marco Hietala for that matter.

You know what, let's just pretend they broke up after Once.

My wife gets this sort of attitude with the fishing gear I buy with the comment "you bought another rod?! Don't you have enough already?" and of course the answer is always no. You can never have enough. Clearly.



Holy toledo batman! Our mortgage isn't that extreme. Mind you, we don't have a palace (2-3 bedroom house), and have quite a lot of renovations to do, but it still works out cheaper than if we were renting, and it's close to everything, train stations, schools, shops, restaurants and more importantly, walking distance to a couple of pubs - plus we bought the place when house prices were cheap. When we're done and want to sell, we'll be doubling our original purchase price.

That teaching job in Korea sounds like it could be something exciting though.

Isn't that the only way to do it? I just do what I always have, gone to "my mix" and normally I will get the studio version of songs (or live if it specifies) with images of the band shown while it plays and an advertisement now and again. The last two times I attempt to play my mix, it links me to random Youtube videos of people covering the song instead of the actual song itself. I noticed on the bottom bar it says "suggest a better video for this song". Why is there a video at all though? What? Why? How? Etc.

I'd even say that was relatively cheap for DC. You say you were out in the suburbs? I'm here on a two-year job, and have basically given up any hope of saving any money for when I go back home. It costs silly money in the city proper, like Manhattan or central London. My original plan is that this would earn me the money to be stable while I jobhunt back in the UK, if need be, but that's unlikely to happen at all. I guess you can share with somebody, but I feel I only want to share with someone I particularly like at this point: my last flatmate here, a "friend" from my football team, who turned out to be a bit of a tool to live with (and, has just got a job with the NRA)... I can't face another experience like that. Too many things we disagreed on, and I don't much fancy the Craigslist lottery.

So you've never, say, linked the program to your media player and just let it automatically read and scrobble what you were playing from there? Because that's how like 80-90% of the website's users use it.

Oh, yeah. I forgot you lived in this area. That first set of prices I quoted are for apartments here in Germantown (in Montgomery County) while the second set was from an apartment complex in Bethesda (North Bethesda, actually; Bethesda proper is probably pricier still). In the actual city is ridiculous. I've seen apartment buildings in Foggy Bottom ask over $2k/month for studios, $3k or more for a 2BR and like $4-5k for a 3 BR apartment.

And yeah, Crushed, you can typically save a lot of money by buying a house, as you can get a mortgage that winds up making your monthly payments way lower than typical rent for a similar sized house in the area, but then again you've gotta have a boatload of cash for the down payment and a pretty squeaky clean credit history to do it. I'm not in any position to do that at the moment and even if I was, I'm not sure I'd want to buy a house in this area. So yeah, fuck the States, Hail to Korea.

Diamhea, I mainly use last.fm to keep track of the stuff I listen to via scrobbling, to see upcoming live events and to see what kinds of stuff it suggests to me based on what I scrobble. I don't use it as some sort of ghetto radio. Your complaint sounds like Jerry Seinfeld's dad complaining about the tip calculator on his expensive new PDA not really working correctly. "It does other things!"

To MutantClannfear:

No, no I didn't know that. Guess that would solve my issue(s) then. Forgive me, I was just using it on the browser, I am new to Last.FM. Thank you for the clarification.

I have a grand idea: take your written note and rubberband it around a baseball, pumpkin or other hard object. After he places your mail and he's walking back to his mail truck, go, "hey, fuckface," and just peg the shit out of him with the baseball/pumpkin and tell him to, "read that shit."

I prefer the one-two, "oops, it went in the butthole on accident" move. Peg him with a pumpkin, and when he turns around, chuck a baseball at his face with the note. That'd be pretty goddamn funny, I think.

Ellen Page has come out of the closet...



...now there is no hope...

That image says so much yet so little.

Don't do it! It's not worth the ensuing trilogy of mindless buttonmashing!

Your tax dollars at work! From what I've read, DC is like that because of all the short-term, highly paid government workers.

One thing I'm jealous of comparing the USA to Australia is the number of small-but-decent cities you have. In Australia, literally everything is packed into the state capitals which drives the prices up massively. Your choices are to work in agriculture or mining and live in the boondocks, or pay through the nose to live in one of 5 major cities which are increasingly becoming overcrowded and difficult to live in. As a lifestyle choice, I'm hugely envious of your college towns (being just about to finish a qualification in academic librarianship). I'd love to be able to live and work in a place that had the amenities and atmosphere of a small country town while working an interesting job and being surrounded by like minded people (rather than rednecks).

I'm in the "Nightshade Forests is Summoning's best release" camp, too! Well, unless the newest or the debut change my mind.

Nightshade Forests is pretty cool, but my favourite Summoning record is definitely Dol Guldur. The immersion is just unrivaled.

http://peopleoftheblackcircle.blogspot. ... flesh.html

This guy talked about this place in his blog.

Some photos I took today of the town Romsey,

Neat pics, mindshadow. Gotta love some architectural grotesques. As an American I envy your plenitude of odd-faced knobs. Lucky fucking bastard...

@TeachingEnglishinSouthKorea: I'm sure waiguoren could weigh in fairly meaningfully on just how "exciting" that line of work is. Still, I wish you well, batman! The South Koreans won't be able to tell you apart from Ben Affleck and you can proceed to cut a swath through their as-yet-uncolonized womenfolk. Then, once you've tired of easy conquests, you can sneak over the border into enemy territory and embark upon the most dangerous successful dating spree in recorded history.

@RidiculousRentalPrices: The rent on our 2BM apartment in Brooklyn is just now going up to $1,600/mo (beat that, motherfuckers!!!). And I'm still paying for all of it myself with my "office monkey" job, so I guess it's possible to make that equation work. Unless you guys are supporting families or have insane student loan payments or something, no mercy!!!!!!

@NightshadeForestsIsTheBestSummoningAlbum: I'd say Nightshade Forests and Dol Guldur are essentially equal in their overall merits/quality. NF just stands out to me a tiny bit more because of how condensed its awesome is, and because the nuances of a lot of the songs on there have a slightly unique/curious quality in comparison to the rest of the Summoning catalogue. But yeah, DG/NF is Summoning's peak, for me. That period of theirs has such a special vibe to it.
I think I'd rate Mortal Heroes higher if it weren't so annoyingly riddled with media/vocal samples. That stuff pulls me out of the musical experience at times in a way that I kind of hate. Up through Stronghold that shit was basically nowhere to be found and that's part of why their earlier period works better, imo.

Jesus, looking at these rent prices make me realize how lucky I am that I'm paying $420 a month for rent/utilities for a 5 bedroom apartment in Chicago. Granted, it's on the far northwest side of the city, but it's only about a 45 minute public transportation ride to downtown and like a 15 minute bike ride to my university.

These are my favs,


I went to Notre Dame once, they're bloody scary!

"Concentration camp of retardation"? Well..... That's a new one.

@Mindshadow: ever considered being a photographer? Those are some damn pretty pictures.

I love that. "If you weren't born in the 80s and you like Bonded By Blood over Pleasures of the Flesh, you're obviously a trend whore and just doing it to look cool on Facebook." People like that are the plague of the Internet.

I'm checking out Dol Goldur now. I like it...very immersive indeed. I still really love Old Mornings Dawn though, that hasn't changed. That album just has this incredible sense of complexity in composition - the build ups and subtle melodies used. DG is more of an atmospheric, "feeling" kind of experience. They're a bit different that way.

FFA XVI has been named!

Emp: Summoning's stuff got more and more heavily layered as time went on, and at this stage they sometimes have almost too many layers happening in a given composition, to the point where it starts to muddy up the sound. I think their newer albums would've have had a greater degree of artistic success if they'd paid less attention to how many different instruments they could heap on top of one another and more attention to just writing better melodies. The older stuff has a much better aesthetic economy to it, achieving evocative results with a much smaller number of musical voices.

That Exodus "review" was a good laugh.

Is there nobody that can dislike this site and not come off as a total doofus? It seems like every single person that has a public gripe over the site is just a whining little dipshit about it.

No, no. Remember Starmere; we have to get to Postradamus first.

You haven't noticed the worst posters being eliminated/banned lately? Oh, good!

I can definitely see what you mean. Since I'm so new to this band I can't really debate you much about it yet, except that what I've heard from their latter material is just as engaging as DG, just in a different way.

That ezine/blog is run by the vocalist of this band, who is a cool dude and has a reputation locally for being a crazy death metaller. I love this album, it's a really cool mix of heavier oldschool NYDM with the doubled growls/snarled vocals of Deicide and some exotic-sounding melodies. It's the type of stuff that made me fall in love with death metal.

It's definitely a considerable world to explore. One of the (many) great things about Summoning is how much their catalogue feels like this vast artistic world that you can dive into through a variety of gates, each leading to a separate valley or grand garden in this huge, unified expanse, offering unique experiences that ultimately relate to and enrich the greater whole.

I guess not many bands make me think or speak in those terms, but Summoning is one of them.

UGH. I feel all of you on the unemployment thing - i was promised a three month contract headhunting, and well...it only lasted a month and a half. I have enough to make it through March, but goddamn, DC is just so ridiculous. I always forget how many of you are out here too.

Me like!

Erk... there are 3 USDM bands with that name. Good thing metal bands tend to have recognizable logos.

I haven't listened yet, but based off the name I'm gonna like them.

Damn, can't find a way to listen to the whole album, not even legally!