Lots of stuff
February 18th 2003 -
Spit
Further activity on the “Spit” front – the current demos on the webpage are a bit dodgy in quality, and it’s entirely due to the minidisc -> computer transfer. Fortunately, I’ve (finally) worked out a way of doing the transfer on the mac – a surprisingly difficult feat, considering how easy most other tasks are – and hopefully will get better-sounding recordings tonight. We’ll see. Amanda recorded another song at roleplaying on Sunday night (though the recording quality was fairly poor – more on that anon) which I’ll try and put up as well. It is, after all, a demo.
Recording quality
I was a little techno-snubbed to find that my cheap-ass microphone hooked up to the minidisc recorder provided a greatly superior sound to my extremely expensive one. The reason? The extremely expensive one is a shotgun mike, very directional, and the only way I could get acceptable levels was to stand a couple of metres back. When I did so, the guitar tended to drown out Amanda’s voice.
On the other hand, the other microphone had a much more limited range, and only really worked with it being tens of centimetres from her mouth, which meant that the guitar was relatively weak, and her voice came out beautifully clearly (which is good, because she has a fine singing voice).
There’s probably a moral there, but my techno-geek side refuses to acknowledge it.
March
Anna and I went out to the anti-war march on Saturday, and found that it was a bit deserted. We asked the similarly befuddled police what was going on. “The big march is tomorrow,” they said. “But there’s supposed to be another smaller march today.”
Well, there wasn’t, and damned if I can work out where I got the information on the alleged Saturday march. I thought that Nola had said Saturday in the email that she sent out, but noooo, she got it right. I think that my brain just fritzed.
The real march
Anna had to work on Sunday, so I wandered over to add to the numbers at the peace rally at Hyde park. I failed to organise to meet with anyone, so ended up wandering around fairly aimlessly – disappeared for half-an-hour for lunch – until the march started happening. Walked along in that for a while, trying to look out for people I might know (completely hopeless task, of course) then caught the train back home and went to roleplaying.
Most of the time I was just thinking about the war. I talked about it briefly with a radio reporter (after being intrigued by his minidisc setup) and was reasonably coherent, I think, but I’m not at all satisfied with my “moral clarity”, to borrow a phrase. I think this is a topic for which I need to assemble all of the arguments that I’ve heard, and burrow down to the base assumptions to work out what I really think. It’s all to easy to hear other people’s arguments and accept them without delving – my friends have a variety of opinions that are frequently stronger than mine, and in some cases, completely opposed.
It’s not unusual
Brain fritzing continued in my unwarrented belief that there was a party with friends Owen and Sinead on Saturday night. As it turned out, it was Saturday the 15th of *March* that they were talking about, having not mentioned the month in the email. For some reason they assumed that I’d just *know* it was March they were talking about, just because they happened to mention it was a St. Patrick’s day thing.
All right, I suck.
Anna and I were fairly pleased to have Saturday night off anyway. Friday had been very hectic, with all of those valentine’s day related activities. Games played. Odes sung. Cards hidden and found. Silliness ensued.
Sofa
The great-big-lounge-suite arrived on Monday, so we spent a great deal of yesterday relaxing on it. Soon we will have a sofa-warming party, a DVD watching type thing. Yay for the giant sofa!
Feeblitude denied!
After all the depressing feeblitude in the knowing-what-the-hell-is-going-on stakes over the weekend, I was rather pleased that at least
a) my table-tennis skills are going from strength to strength, and
b) my recall of Greek is actually much better than I was expecting.
I’ve been absolutely powering through the Greek tapes in the car. It’s the second time through, but I was still expecting to have forgotten more of the earlier tapes. But it’s all there. Happy.
Mooovies
Anna and I saw “Undercover Brother” and “Top Secret!” on Saturday, then “Ghost World” and “Clueless” on Sunday. Undercover Brother was a blast – clever and witty in the same way as “Top Secret!”, which was quite excellent on second viewing. Likewise, Clueless was just as delightful as I remembered, and even more quote-filled. Ghost World was pretty good, but didn’t really convince me as well as it might have. The friendship between the two main characters seemed cool right from the beginning, unlike in the comic. Not quite as bad as Jack’s “transformation” into a lunatic in “The Shining”, but still enough to put a disquieting air over the beginning of the film.
Games
Got “Fluxx” and “Scarab Lords” from Games Paradise, and have played a fair bit of them with Anna. She absolutely loves Fluxx, to the point that I’ve had to point out the time as she suggested yet-another-game. It’s simple and addictive in that “Uno” kind of way. Scarab Lords is a bit more complicated, and we’ve yet to really get into it, but I’m still enjoying it, despite having lost every game so far.