Hey Napero/anyone else who was vaguely interested, here's some siberia photos



edit: i can put a few more up if you're so inclined..

Listen to this man. He knows.

iPods are wonderful and all, but iTunes is seriously the worst software ever.

What's wrong with iTunes...?

I meant to post this in now playing.

I've never owned an iPod, and I am glad for it if only because I never had to deal with iTunes or Apple's shitty and difficult (at least for this PC user) proprietary file formats.

It's ram intensive and tends to freeze if you have a large collection.

Oh man does it freeze. Oh god, the horror. I mean, it freezes for no reason. A reasonable piece of software it is not! I mean, I was about to call you a nerd or something for dissing iTunes, but the truth is I fucking hate it's 1s and 0s. I despise the very 1s and 0s that compose the demon spawn we call iTunes. But I like the way it lays out all my albums so I can see em and it's compatible with my iPod. I think foobar is kind of shit because sometimes the entire library will get wiped, and I don't know why. I only use foobar for my flac music collection.

So last night was pretty awesome. The missus and I drove down to a mate's place, got changed into something swanky, then was picked up by a BOSS 600 class Mercedes Benz jet-black limo. This then drove us to Circular Quay at Sydney Harbour (a stones throw from the Opera House), where we walked to a smallish pub called The Australian and there we sampled some truly excellent local micro-brewery beers. After two beers or so we went back to the harbourside to a great place looking directly at the Sydney Harbour bridge where we dined on ocean trout sashimi, flathead fillets, local fresh oysters and champagne.

All this was utterly fantastic, and to cap it all off, we then enjoyed some more champagne inside the Opera House, before witnessing a mesmirising, enthralling live show by the one and only DEAD CAN DANCE!

Good company, great food and beverages and a stunning show

Tfw you wish you could experiment with making music but you have no tools or ability to play.

Just have a $250 Ibanez, 10-watt practice amp, a pinhole mic from an old mp3 player, and Audacity! You'll be making low-quality guitar-based music like me in no time!

My meager rig has been improved since the last time I recorded (~1 year ago), though. Now I have a Metal Muff (with top-boost), EHX Memory Toy, and a 50-watt Ampeg SJ12T. Now all I need is a mic that isn't complete shit...

Hey caspian, those photos from Siberia are pretty cool! In fact, I want to know exactly how cool they are: How cold did it get there? What does that kind of cold feel like?

Yeah... dude I was just imagining. As if I would ever feel such an unimaginable boost in will to apply myself to learning an instrument. I'm going to be too old and die before that happens. I'd opt for an acoustic guitar or something, because I'm not sure I'd want to create something heavy. I actually already have one of those in my house.

It all depends on what type of music you want to create! Personally, I've been wanting to buy a portable recorder for some time now so I can record 'cool' noises I find, edit them heavily, and create a strange dark ambient project as the end result. All I need at the moment are the funds...

Out of curiosity, do you know of my other identity on a website that you frequent?

I swear I'm the only person who hasn't had problems with iTunes ever, and I've never owned a Mac either. It's a memory hog? Boo hoo, my computer has always ran fine, what do I care? My music is always there, it's reliable, it doesn't crash or freeze or wipe my shit at the drop of the hat, it's neatly organized, what more do I really want out of a program whose only purpose is to list my music and then play it when I click on it? It also syncs my iPod just fine, no issues. What the hell do you people do to make it fuck up so badly?

The one you used to call me a "poop eater" when I banned you for a month last year?

Attended my first thrash show last night, Overkill and Testament, caught me one of their picks! Quite the show.

Besides, complaining about programs being 'memory hogs' is so 2005. You can get 8GB of memory for like $50 nowadays.

I hate the look of it mostly, that's my primary issue with it, and the reason I don't use it for playing music. It's also done some weird shit like trying to import my old directories when I got a new computer, which lead to a LOT of fucked up files. I don't like programs that try to do things for me and that's happened twice because it tries to be too smart for it's own good, but I have gotten used to the whole syncing thing now and think I would miss it if I had to go back to manual addition.

Lucky you! Testament is VERY fun live. Watching Alex play is always a treat.

Chuck Billy had a lightsaber microphone. It was fun indeed!

I'll be seeing it on the 5th, techincaly tomrrow but since its only like 30 minutes into the 4th basically in two days buy yeah Overkill is basically the best live band in the world and it'll be fucking awesome mosh ur balls out

Agreed, Overkill was stellar. They played Elimination, my favourite tune of theirs, 'twas life changing.

hehe no I haven't figured it out. Although to be honest I haven't really tried to. The anonymity makes it interesting. Two like-minded strangers somehow coming across each other in this great e-ocean of forums. I'll keep an eye out for someone with a hard on for Overkill!

Fed the mantises, took me a while since I had myself a glass of Booker's bourbon and that packs quite a punch! I didn't want to be too buzzed to feed the mantises so I waited a couple hours. I'm a nighthawk anyway.

The Creobroter mantises are quickly becoming my favorite among the tiny ones, though some of the tiny ones aren't so tiny anymore.

I have 21 mantises, but it'd be insane to feed all 21 each night. Instead I grouped them - the big ones and the tiny ones. The big ones include the 5 Ghost mantises, 3 Texas Unicorns and 3 Orchid mantises. The tiny ones include three Chinese mantises, three Oxyopsis gracilis, two Creobroter pictipennis and two Sibylla pretiosa.

Tonight was the tiny group, and boy are they a fun group! But sometimes, they can be a pain in the ass. Or sometimes my ass is a pain to them. Take the Sibylla pretiosa for example... very hyper little thing. Because of that, my usual trick of getting a mantis to sit still did not work, because they are WAY too ADD and hyper. They react to every tiny movement I make, and they can run very fast. One day I was feeding them and the Sibylla didn't stay in view. I had no idea where it went. I looked around for a good 15 minutes before I felt my bottom and a rather stunned little mantis landing on my hand. I thought I killed the poor thing! His legs were bent close to his body and he didn't move very well. Miraculously, the next morning he seemed just fine - only a slight limp in one of his legs. Now there's no sign of injury and he refused a fruit fly, which is a sign of a molt. Hopefully that goes well!

Tonight it seemed to be "Be annoying as hell" day though, since the Oxyopsis, Chinese and Sibylla mantises were all crawling all over the place and acting all ADD, but ignoring fruit flies. For the one Chinese mantis and the one Sibylla mantis (the subject of the previous anecdote), it was clear that they were ignoring the fruit fly because they are approaching a molt, and also had fat abdomens to show for it. I put them aside for observation. The rest were clearly just in the mood to crawl all over the place.

Except for the Creobroters! They are tiny but stout, in fact among the tiny mantises they need to eat the most fruit flies. That might change with the Chinese mantises molting, one of them already molted and is now just under one inch long. I'll have to put him in a new container in the coming week because the current one will be too small for him! Anyway, back to Creobroter pictipennis - lol, always got to remember to double the 'n' - they are very docile and sweet for being as tiny as they are. They crawl right onto my finger when I wanted them to, and they chase down the fruit flies quite happily. If all goes well and all of my mantises reach adulthood, the Creos will be the smallest. They only get to an inch in length. Right now they are the shortest in length of my mantises, about the size of a large ant.

It got down to -58 one morning, we were in the coldest part of the country, but most of those photos were between -45 and -55 I reckon. That last one where I'm completely covered up was the -58 moment.

It's pretty fucking cold man. Once you get into the 50s you really, really feel it. Like obviously -45 is cold but at that temperature you're ok to have a quick smoke, to get your camera out and spend a minute or two taking photos, you don't necessarily need your fur hat + your beanie + every possible layer on if you're just going outside for a few minutes for a piss or whatever (no indoor toilets).

At -58 you definitely do.. Every single layer's got to stay on, every exposed area hurts. Taking a photo leaves your hands freezing cold and your gloves don't warm them back up. At -45 you can breathe almost like normal (just not sharp intakes of breath) but below say -55 you pant, basically, a lot of super shallow breaths otherwise you cough your lungs up. Your nose drips and freezes, your boogers turn into rocks. It's pretty intense.. I've had a few +50 experiences in Australia and you're fine for ages y'know, you just keep your fluids going. -50 and below could kill you so quickly if something went wrong. All in all it was pretty awesome but not something I'm going to do again for a fair while

edit: all temps are in C, because fahrenheit blows

Caspian, that panorama photograph was gorgeous.



Seen them live twice and they're always a treat.

Dude.. -58?!! I freeze my nuts off and almost don't want to go outside when it's -30 here. That's just preposterously cold.

itunes is Satan spawn plain and simple. When I first converted from windows media player and a Sandisc itunes ate almost all of my music and I had to go back and upload Cd by Cd, it took a long ass time. Secondly every time I do anything other than simply upload a CD itunes has a shit fit and doesn't work right and they are always updating it to a newer shittier version that becomes harder and harder to use (at least for this lamen) and lastly you can't use anything but apple products cause they are all just evil and don't want you to be able to use anything but apple software ever again.

You know something, Goatfangs? I think that you'll end up becoming a supervillain some day.

Oh look, magic:

And this: http://wiki.hydrogenaudio.org/index.php ... ronflow%29

Never happened to me. You must be doing something wrong.

Or a very creepy tenant in an apartment building.

Well, at least I finally understand what the fuck "tfw" means now (I don't use 4chan, ok?).
God, 24 hours of smug, snot-nosed dweebs making "tfw ____" shouts on the My Bloody Valentine shoutbox, and I finally understand what the fuck it means.

Now those shouts are even more annoying.

Today I had the awkward realisation that I'm starting to prefer Darkthrone's middle-era black-metal to the classic albums... I can feel credibility cascading away from me at great speed...

So I downloaded the new MBV album in that 16 bit WAV format rather than the 320kb/s I usually go for for plain ease. First time I listened to it (other than the mp3 leak before) was through my ipod plugged into my amplifier. It didn't sound all that good for some reason, there was just something missing in the sound, a bit of tinniness, or something not really sure how to describe it. I then listened to exactly the same album, but through my laptop plugged into the amplifier instead, and it sounded infinitely better.

I thought before that when I listened to music on my ipod it didn't sound all that great compared to when I use my cd player or record deck, but attributed it to the fact mp3 wasn't so good sounding, whereas now I'm fairly sure ipod's just don't have very good quality sound regardless of what filetype you're playing through them, and 320kb/s is probs just fine.

Also I got hell awaits, highway to hell, and if you want blood, you've got it in the post today on vinyl, and I'm actually enjoying a module at uni. Never really happened before!

I await the winter on here where no one brings up the Celsius/Fahrenheit difference. You never see it during the summer time because 90 degrees in Europe would mean everyone's practically dead.

Lord Kelvin must be turning in his grave. Anywho, it's 293 K right now.

Kelvin's unit increment is based on Celsius and Celsius is based on the physical properties of water at 1 bar, so Celsius wins.