Just an update what’s happening. I’ve uploaded a new theme, dfBlog by danielfajardo.com, and threw in a few widgets in there. Once again, I really like the ease of use wordpress gives me, and the ability to mess around with the theme without breaking any content, as well as having a broad range of themes and widgets and plugins. It’s not so painful to maintain a blog as much.

I haven’t been podcasting much with Mat, it would seem that we have no material, and but material, we mean we’re bored. It was a fun time to talk chat and have feel of being a douchebag radioguy, but alas this was only a transient state of mind.

I’ve sent the acceptance letter for my exchange placement, applied for lodging, and all the miscellenous paperwork. Still waiting on a reply from many parties, particularly the British Consulate, who made a mistake on their part on accepting my visa application.

I’ve finished work now, just spending my time preparing, seeing old friends and trying no to spend money, which is a difficult thing to do. I’ve only got one more gig to go to left in Austalia (The Butterfly Effect 11th June 09), before my epic trip overseas for All Points West, Lollapalooza and Reading Festival. It is big times ahead, and haven’t really worked out the minor details in my trip yet, but hopefully it will work out (as it always does).

The problem I have with sequels is that often it leads to a trilogy. For some reason, Hollywood thinks that making sequels are a good idea, and they’re probably right as they rake a buttload of money.  I really liked the first Transformers, so much so I watched it twice at the movies. It was refreshing to see a new movie based on my childhood memories, and no doubt the success of this has lead to a production of new films such as G.I Joe (which I saw the trailer for and looked terribad). Transformers didn’t really need a sequel. This felt like a money run. The movie plot was thin, and there was way too many deus ex machina to solve problems, and introduction of new characters who brought nothing to the film. Without giving too much away, there’s 2 autobots that really get on your nerves during the film, and really added nothing, unless they were targetting stupid children who are easily distracted by robots stereotyped by bling.

Of course the CGI was great and so were the action scenes. Having robots fight each other is amazing, almost picturesque as they destroy locations around the globe. The only problem I have with this is that because they are robots, we as the audience has no way to judge how much damage they can take before dying. Some robots are resilient as hell, get hit by F16’s, Abrahm Tanks, 40 Cals, other get killed in one plasma blast. So really, the narrative dictates how the battle ends, I don’t think that the Deceptions are exceptionally weak as portrayed in the movie.

Introduction of new characters felt like a marketing ploy, to see more toys. I don’t even know the names of the guys, and I like Transformers a lot. I really liked Devastator though, I got really excited when I saw that construction equipment in the foreground, with the ominous and subtle hints that they are Deceptions.

Given more human-like personas to the robots didn’t work. Bumblebee, which I would say has the most connection with audience and human emotion, achieves this through gestures, as he is unable to talk. Robots who did talk, there’s just no connection to the audience.

I’m guessing that T2 would net a buttload of money, and there will be a sequel, just as long, with paper-thin plot, but a hell of a lot of Megan Fox and robot-on-robot action. And that’s why you go see the film. 5.5/10

Triple J is running a competition for the top 100 of all time. You can vote for free, and it ends tonight. The link is here. I’ve voted my top 100. They are:

• Joy Division – Love Will Tear Us Apart (as #1)
• Tool – Lateralus
• Nine Inch Nails – We’re In This Together
• Radiohead – Creep
• Massive Attack – Teardrops
• Stardust – Music Sounds Better With You
• Rage Against the Machine – Killing In The Name
• Depeche Mode – Just Can’t Get Enough
• Ladytron – Evil
• Symphony X – The Odyssey

Those are the tracks that I tend to listen a lot, the lyrics of Love Will Tear Us Apart and the emotion put in by Ian Curtis, on top of the life he had just adds that extra layer of emotion over the already very emotional song. The musical rhythm of Lateralus and the magic lyrics of that song probably places as a second, and I chose this over A Perfect Circle’s 3 Libras (which is my favourite APC song). We’re In This Together, awesome song by Nine Inch Nails, this and The Big Come Down are my favourite NIN songs. Creep is probably the most well known single of Radiohead, but I have a feeling that Karma Police will win this for Radiohead. Teardrops was added in for some electronic ambiance, it’s the House MD theme song. I chose Stardust over Daft Punk, all of Daft Punk songs are catchy and awesome dance songs, but I still song is just catchier than Daft Punk’s Around the World. Rage Against The Machine, great fusion of metal/hip hop I think, and when played in clubs this song definitely gets people bouncing, and how can we forget the political message behind it. Depeche Mode is another band I really enjoy, so much that I’m travelling across the globe to see them 4 times, I chose this as my most favourite single, but I really like Blasphemous Rumours and People are People… but I think Just Can’t Get Enough is much catchier. Ladytron is an electroclash band and I love these guys, as a previous post would prove, and Evil is such a damn catchy song that will get you hooked. And finally, a metal epic… The Odyssey is a 26 minute metal piece with epicness of sounds, riffs, lyrics following the story of Homer’s Odyssey. That’s my wrap up.

The winners, I would say, will be Thiller by MJ, thanks to his recent death. And of course the usual… Beatles, Rolling Stones, Eagle’s Hotel California, Elton John, Metallica, Guns and Roses, ACDC, Queen and possibly additions of those boy/girl bands like Spicegirls and anything that sold a shitload of records even though they are mediocre. Maybe Muse’s Cydonia, White Stripes’ 7 nation army as more contemporary pieces. There’s just so many songs and bands to chose from.

Meeting your avatar’s death is inevitable in a video game. A simple mistake in judgement, a mistimed jump, a poor weapon selection are some scenarios a player can face and ultimately meet their doom. The problem with death is not that it happens, it’s the way that the game mechanics deal with death. Death in real life is a big deal, human emotions are spilt and tears are shed, a recent example is Michael Jackson’s death, and the pay people reacted to this around the world. In a video game however, it’s an acceptable fate and a player can deal with and there is no sense of game immersion or human emotion in the real world, and most of the time it doesn’t make sense that a player can die many times, but a core character in the storyline can only die once.

The first time I felt ‘death’ in a video game was in Final Fantasy VII. It was a long time ago and a very nostalgic place in my heart. This was one of the finest RPG’s ever made, and the characterisation of the protagonists made the player have an emotional connection with each of them. Spoiler; in one of the cutscenes, Aeris (Aerith) gets cut down and dies just under halfway through the game. She is not resurrect-able. Instead, this forms as a literary technique of tragedy and places more anger towards the villain Sephiroth. Aeris keeps having a role in the story though, she pushes the storyline ahead and acts of a guide of the world through visions, and you can revisit places and see ethereal images of her. Some might argue that this is unfair, that the time put into leveling up the character and equipping it with items is then wasted, but rather I see it as a compulsory emotional connection to this character and only through investment of time can we really feel a ‘loss’ of the character.

Another game with a different style of death was Planescape Torment. Since you were already dead, dying didn’t mean a loss of anything, but rather a ‘rebirth’, and pushing the storyline and new locations through the dying process. Obviously this only worked because the protagonist was undead, but this is a game that thought ‘outside the box’ and introduced death to drive the story.

The traditional way of handling death in most videogames is GAMEOVER. The game you were playing is over, and you have to either restart, or load a saved game to a previous location in which you were alive. The variations of this is a ‘lives’ based system where you essentially get ‘chances’ before the GAMEOVER, but ultimately death in these sort of games just involves a whole restart or save game reload, and quite frankly, unimaginative.

One game tried to be creative with the way it dealt with death. In the underwater world of Rapture, Bioshock coined a system where you could activate a vat or some sort and it would respawn you (cloning or some sci-fi trick), so when you die you would spawn to an already activated/discovered area. This devalued death severely, you could run around, kill as much things, then just respawn and run back up. In a way, it rewards players who are risk takers, and allows the freedom to have that style of play. How is this respawn point system different to excessive save and then loading once you have run in and scouted the area and where the enemies are?

Save/exit is another system where a user has a freedom to save whenever they want, but it would exit the game. Essentially this gives the feel of a single play-through, in that you would only load a save game if you quit before hand. I’m not a huge fan of this one, sometimes you want to keep a save game from the past for a moment in the storyline you want to relive, or to reload later if there was a decision to be made or fork in the storyline.

MMO’s also have different ways of dealing with death. Nick Yee has a paper here, which I recently read. I love his work and his papers and hope to someday have some input into the industry and get involved with designing an MMO. It’s worth a read if you’re interested in the history of death in MMOs, and the difference between early MMO design in UO/EQ and modern MMO design in WOW.

Recently (E3 period possibly), I had read that there’s a new dungeon/platformer game, which is a solo experience. But it has online capability. It records players movements during their play time and records how they die. Then the game uploads their death sequence, and gives other players a heads-up on how other people died through seamless incorporation. Ghosts will animation through the dungeon showing some other player’s death, there will be blood splutters on the wall, and whispers. I think this is a great move and innovation in death, however I still think that there needs to be more, so that the players can emotionally get attached to their avatar, not enough so to cause distress, but enough to invoke some emotions.

I’ve not seen Karnivool the same amount of times as Birds of Tokyo, but I got into them first. Kenny is a brilliant singer, and I love his voice and his work. I really liked their EP Persona and their album Themeta but haven’t really listened to Sound Awake that much, on initial listens I didn’t find any songs to have the same hook as songs from Themeta, but I think it’s one of those albums that grow on you.

The gig was at the Metro, not at the Enmore as I thought it was. This is good for me because Metro is easy to get to, I love that venue, and much prefer the sound there. The support band was Sugar Army, they played songs that were a mixture of tribal/Indian tunes and melodic rock, and they were a great support band. Karnivool played a mixture of Themeta and Sound Awake material, primarily Sound Awake (as I didn’t recognise the songs). A lot of the old songs got huge movement within the crowd and singing, Themeta blew the place away. Change pt1 was the encore, which is a long long long song, and fitting for an end (I was hopeing that Change would mix into some EP stuff, but alas it did not.

Karnivool provided a good gig, their visuals was great, with some screens and projection and lights (borrowed from Birds of Tokyo), provided a nice visual soundscape to accompany the music. I think it’s probably the most impressive visual gig I’ve seen for a low budget band… tickets were only 40 dollars. They’re playing tonight at the Metro All Ages, so if you’re reading this as soon as it gets posted, you have 1 hour to get to the Metro

I’m trying a new wordpress template out, Arthemia 1.0 by Michael Jubel Hutagalung, available here. I think it is much more readable, navigated easier, and better use of colours. I really love that wordcloud on the right there, it’s magic. I don’t plan on putting advertisements up, even if I did, I wouldn’t know how to. I’ll mess around with the settings and widgets later when I have time.

Right now, I’m working on packing, photocopying all my papers, getting all my tickets and documentation in place. I’m still in the preparation phase but that’s soon to be completed, with only packing and anticipation left to do. I’m ending work this Friday, and have 2 weeks to get everything in order… so I hope that the Oxford Brookes letter gets to me in time, and that my visa gets reviewed by then.

The hangover is a pretty mindless comedy, the ultimate Vegas bachelor party goes wrong when the soon-to-be-ex-bachelor goes missing, and no one remembers it. It’s got very funny moments, but on the whole it’s a rather meh movie. Probably give it a miss if you’re tight with movie, and just get it on “video” later. It’s got the dan band belting out some tunes at the wedding, a cameo appearance from Old School which was nice. It’s a forgettable movie.

There’s a few laughs to be had in this though, and some of the scripting is genius. I was also amazed at Ed Helms as Stu, who ends up losing a teeth. I wondered how they made it look so realistic, turns out the actor never had an adult incisor grow, so all the times we were watching him in the Office, he has a prosthetic tooth shoved up in there.

I would probably give this a 3/10, probably not worth going to see if you don’t see many movies, but if you love comedies no matter how terrible they are, then give this ago.

I used to love the shit out of COG. I really enjoyed The New Normal, and their EPs. I went to see their gig at Coogee Bay Hotel, and it wasn’t too bad, but it doesn’t have the same vibe they used to have back in my UOW days. I’ve seen these guys at least 10 times, 5 or so with my mate Doogsey, who I think has to be their number 1 fan. On the What If? tour (just before Sharing Space came out), we went to both Metro shows and bootlegged their stuff, one example is Town of Lincon (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=f2qyyLhNIZs). But there’s something missing. The new album didn’t really grow on me. I really loved their older, heavier, and longer songs, all the new songs seem to be shorter and much more pallatable to the mainstream. Whilst this isn’t a good thing, they’re selling tickets and making money, it really ends an era of my total love for COG. From The New Normal (a really strong debut album), they only played Silence is Violence, Resonate and Doors (which opened the gig), I would have liked to hear Spine and Elephant (which apparently never gets played). Moo was also an old song from Just Visiting (a new one I haven’t heard live). Are You Interested?, The Movie’s Over, What If, Bird of Feather, Swamp, Sharing Space, How Long, Problem/Reaction/Solution where also played. There was no encore.

The venue wasn’t too bad. Nothing special, there was an upper level, and it was quite small. I am bad at guessing numbers, maybe 800 or so people? It didn’t seem that packed, and apparently it holds 1800 people. The crowd were quite subdued – a big change from the early days when you’d expect an actual moshpit with at least a circle, I remember coming out that those gigs with a drenched shirt and requiring a purchase of a shirt just to change out of it. I really miss that COG. Most of the gig I was moving around, people entering and exiting the pit (I was next to sound desk as usual), some faces I recognise as they were going for that vital beer refill, seems like there is more interest in the drinks than the band, but then again could be the venue and clientele of Coogee. I’ve only ever seen COG either at the Metro or in the gong at Unibar or maybe Shelly’s Workers. It was quite annoying, beer spillages were rife, and mad exchanges of sweat as some of these people really liked to just shove instead of carefully weaving through tactfully.

While I’m sure that they’re catering for a wider audience now, I think the aura and their special sound when they were just starting has changed to become something more mainstream, and I long for the old days where there seemed to be much more energy eminating from this three peice band. At least this time there was no speech about the government or some conspiracy theory.

Still, there were some great COG memories to be added to my extensive list (Metro bootlegging with Doogsey and Maryam, COG supporting at Workers, headlining Unibar Garden Parties, Unibar gigs)… maybe I’ll revisit their album sometime in the future.

On another note, we threw in some Rammstein Live aus Berlin in the car on the way home, Doogsey mentioned that Rammstein are recording a new album. I got home, logged into their site, and bought a ticket to see them in Paris on the 8th of December! \o/

Last night I had the honour of going out with my uni homeboys to check out the new Terminator movie. We went to the Bavarian Bier Cafe before hand, and I had some taste platter, and it was delicious. I cannot wait go to Germany and eat copious amounts of sausages and sauerkraut.

I’m going to write a little blurb about terminator, so if you haven’t watched it, don’t read it.

Terminator was a great action flick. It was certainly entertaining and inline with the previous movies, and didn’t feel like it was going to drag out. I really enjoyed the post-apocalyptic atmosphere, it’s a setting I really enjoy and to see CA locations was a treat (having seen the DC region of USA in Fallout 3). The robots were pretty awesome too; it felt like there was a lot of inspiration from transformers in terms of design and movement, and more variations of unit types, snake-like protusion drones, flying hunter killers, massive combined-transformer-like behemoths in the shape of ‘Bruticus’ destroying outposts and squishy humans, people smuggling vehicles, really cool CGI and explosions. The combat scenes between the resistance and skynet are well cherographed, the traditional ’storming the beach head’ is there, with one scene near the start with is one long cut of John Connor manning the helicopter, really immersed the audience into the film and battle. But I did cringe a lot of the action scenes, too many deus-ex machinas, and random things that just happen to work out in favour of the cast, throwing a tire iron at a flying drone moving irradically. or Skynet in it’s eternal omnipresent form would have a system override once you plug your USB device in and the user typing… ‘override’, or that they put manual controls on their motorbike robots? I could go on, I know it’s Hollywood, I know it’s action flick, I know they only have 2 hours to tell a story, but this is just lazy.

Nameless humans are lined up in a row reminding me of concentration death camps, a poignant scene which delivers a message about humanity, emotion and the solidarity of mankind. A man tries to escape and get mowed down by a T600, desperation and fear takes hold.

Sam Worthington does a great role as the support cast; I think he had the better character in the movie. Other than that, the substance and plot was pretty dull with a few loop holes (I suppose this happens when you deal with time travel), the ending was almost spew worthy (besides the fact you can see what’s going to happen before it happens, maybe a conditioning of too many cliched endings?), and you don’t feel the emotion and turmoil John Connor goes through. JC just tends to yell at people and be a lone marine, not Christian’s best acting (*gasp* another Australian actor usurping the screen with their acting). Young Kyle, I just couldn’t typecast him out of his role as the Russian pilot in Star Trek… he does well for a kid but it seems that maybe these movies were released too close with each other. There’s a CGI cameo of Conan as the T800. There’s no doubt there will be 2 or 3 more sequels; T800 was just introduced with this, the crappy short conclusion speech by John Connor saying there’s fragments of Skynet (I thought this place they infiltrated was the main HQ- it was certainly told this way), and the fact that I’m pretty sure they want to make boatloads of filthy money. But you should go see it, because it’s one of the better blockbusters, and there’s still some magic in the old Terminator beast yet. 4.5/10 (I rate harshly so make that a 7/10 in traditional ratings if you want to justify your 15 dollars).

Dystopic science-fiction movies always represent this question: “What makes us human?” Apparently having a human heart, it would seem.

There’s something about public holidays that I really like. Could be the day off we get from work, and not really about the celebration. It is quite strange this year, how ANZAC day was not celebrated with a public holiday (as it fell on a weekend day) and Queen’s birthday is celebrated as a public. Is it a suggestion that the idea of Australia republicanism is dead? Do we not celebrate the dead and their sacrifices, or do we not celebrate the glorification of warfare? Just a few thoughts.

This weekend I did a little bit of arty stuff. I got around to spraying some stencils that had been cut out a while ago, and also learnt how to screen print. It is rather easy, and rather fun. I’ll do a little write up now on how to go about it.

The materials you need will be a stencil and stencil related tools (stencil knife, a design, cutting board, metal ruler and patience). It’s very easy to get a stencil made, you can get a photo or image with colour and trace/redraw it to make a stencil, or import this image to photoshop and use the filter “threshold” in the IMAGE > ADJUSTMENTS menu. Make your threshold adjustments so that you can visualise your stencil. Also keep in mind about the use of bridges, it’s the creation of a “bridge” to an “island” in your picture so when you cut it out, you retain the bits that are not connected to the ends of the stencil. For further explaination I looked to wikipedia: “Sections of the remaining template which are isolated inside removed parts of the image are called islands. All islands must be connected to other parts of the template with bridges, or additional sections of narrow template material which are not removed.”

Other materials you’ll need: Fabric (shirt/cloth to print on), fabric paints (get them from an art store), EZ CUT stencil paper (it is heavier, thicker plastic paper), silk/nylon screen (wooden frame with nylon/silk meshing) and a squeegee designed to fit your screen. You’ll also need cellotape and masking tape to hold things down and fix things up.

Below, I have an image of Alice Glass from Crystal Castles, and from it, I used the threshold filter to create a stencil. It is rather jaggy and messy, but when you are cutting it out, you would adjust your cutting to smooth it out.

Materials:

• stencil knife, a design, cutting board, metal ruler
• fabric, fabric paints
• silkscreen, squeegee
• paper, EZ CUT paper, cellotape and maskingtape, a stencil design

Method:

Step 1: Create your Stencil. With the method above, print out your stencil to paper (A4 is goodsize on most t-shirts).

Step 2: Tape down your printed A4 onto the EZ CUT paper. Then cut this out. The reason you do not print on the EZ CUT paper directly is that the heat applied from the printer will shrink and distort the EZ CUT paper. If you make a mistake on EZ CUT paper, you can tape it up using cellotape, but it’s much better if you don’t fuck things up in the first place. After this step, you’ll have a cut out stencil on EZ CUT Paper.

Step 3: Get your fabric ready. Tape it down on a flat board, and put newspaper behind it (so you don’t stain the table), and betwen the front and back of the shirt so you don’t get the paint bleeding through all layers of the shirt. Stretch it out using masking tape, so you get a nice flat image on your fabric (and not some wrinkly one). Once you have your fabric ready, give it a nice dust down.

Step 4: Do a test print. You NEED to do this to get your stencil stuck to the silkscreen. So basically what you do is get your EZ CUT stencil on some test paper, put the screen behind it (mesh down first), throw a nice thick line of paint sausage (put a lot, you will recover most of it and it won’t lead to a faint, thin design), then use the squeegee to run this paint down in a nice thin layer. When using the squeegee, pull it towards you in a 45 degree angle, it needs to be firm and natural and one movement. If it’s disjointed movements, you will have streaking lines through it. Do a few passes. Remove excess paint. Then lift (hold one side down, pull up from the other side of the screen). You’ll see your design on your test print. So if you’re happy with it, all you need to do is tape up the stuff you don’t want to print out (which would be borders where the EZ CUT paper( with masking tape. Make sure that there is no globs of paint on the mesh afterwards as you don’t want random blobs in your design.

Step 5: You’re ready to transfer to your shirt. Place your design down carefull, do as in step 4 with the test print.

Step 6: Wash the screen, squeegee and let your fabric dry.

Conclusion: Easy.

I have my original image, stencil image, spraypainted stencil, and 2 screen prints.