August 14th, 2008 by erisian

Knowing the people that come here, I think this will be a well read post.
The attached video is nearly 100 megs streamed, so i may need to move it to youtube if my bandwidth takes too much of a hit.

It is a far cry from perfect, but read below and get the details, then enjoy :)

~~~~~~~~~

Back before I moved to Oregon, I had some crappy Qwest DSL that i never signed up for, but didnt complain too much about at the time.  i was able to download at a whopping 14 kb per second. Real player was suddenly usable crap instead of just crappy crap. My Napster usage increased significantly (the real Napster, not the joke it s now). I could stream radio and still read the news!!

In the computer world, most people do not learn how to do something until they have enough drive or interest. Capturing streaming media was one of these things for me. If I heard music I liked, I would just find it elsewhere (Napster / Ratio driven FTPs), buy the cd, or dub it off someone else.

Cue the point already Jason.

One afternoon, I ran across a small news blurb advising that The Cult was on tour again. Giddy with Joy, I broad banded my ass out onto yahoo and dogpile, and started digging. Tickets were on sale, and before you could snap your fingers twice and say “The billionth living person in India is born on May 11th this new millennium”, I had a couple of those tickets into my sweaty hands and was headed back home from the local rapemaster (ticketmaster) outlet.

A couple weeks later, after the show was over and the rock n roll was beginning to leave my bones again, I ran across another news article. It read something along the lines of “Police cut Cult concert short due to riots”. What the fuck does that mean?

Apparently, Maxim Magazine had a big ol’ party on August 10th 2000. They held it at the Farmer’s Daughter Hotel in LA. There were a bunch of bands, lots of celebs, and a short guest list of 1000 people. Per Salon.com others in attendance were police in riot gear, a fire department task force and helicopters circling overhead.

Apparently, outside the event, some DJ had let the public know the location, and a throng of 2000+ people all showed up uninvited. They stopped traffic, raised hell, and pretty much got the whole event shut down 2 hours after it started. I don’t blame them, sounds like it would have been a fun night. Why keep it to the guest list when you could push the door.

Inside, there was no chaos. The only reported issue that occurred was Billy Morrison (not to be confused with Billy Duffy) getting into a scuffle with someone who worked for the magazine. As listed in Maxim’s “100 Greatest Moments”:

#73 At a Maxim party in L.A., Cult [should read ‘part-time’] bassist Billy Morrison starts throwing hay­makers when a very senior Maxim staffer makes some quip about the rocker’s fiancée being a Love Removal Machine groupie.

Again, back to the point.

Per Ian Astbury, before they played In the Clouds, Maxim chose them as the Ambassadors of the Masculine Spirit, “Fuck knows why”.. I have no idea what other bands played that night, but The Cult was able to get at least 5 songs in before being shut down. Maxim Online had just launched and they were streaming video for the Cult portion of the 2 hour party. i spent 2 days learning how to scrape streaming video off websites in order to get a copy of the show. I actually thought i had lost the mpg i made, but recently found a back up CD with it burnt. decided now i should get it out on the web again before i lose it again :)

VIDEO:

Get the latest Flash Player to see this player.

Video set-list:
1- The tail end of Lil’ Devil
This is where Maxim started their stream, There was no way to view the whole song.
2- Sweet Soul Sister
3- In the clouds
4- The Witch
5- Rain

~~

The video has been improved on over the years and cleaned up. I am pretty sure it was originally RealVideo, so there were a ton of artifacts. I cleaned up the audio a bit as it was full of static. ran de-noise filters and other stuff to make ti watchable. i have gotten it to a point where it is enjoyable, hell, there are even point when it looks clear :)

the only horrendous part is when you see the drummer. the color and block noise that occurs each time you see him was completely out of my hands. You can blame the poor quality on Real Networks and other shitty technology companies of the early 2000’s.

I was not going to post this at all, but realized after a little research that NO ONE HAS THIS ONLINE.., I seriously have to ask, what the fuck happened there? I highly doubt I was the only person to scrape this and hold onto it…. If anyone has a better copy, let me know and I will work a trade.

Band line-up at the time:

Vocals: Ian Astbury
Guitar: Billy Duffy
Bass: Billy Morrison
Drums: Matt Sorum
Bass: Martyn LeNoble

Special thanks to Jon Taylor over at http://www.cultcentral.com/ for keeping his page updated. Ever since I found his site, I never have to wonder whats going on with the band. he always knows before I do :)

per Jon “One minor correction, the bass player at that show was Martyn LeNoble, blonde dude usually has a cigarette hanging from his mouth. Morrison came on later, probably early 2001 if I recall correctly.”

April 22nd, 2008 by erisian

So, Jenn and i have been looking at houses to move into. we need someplace that will allow us the room to have our animals and not go crazy. finding a house removes so many issues due to timing, wasted days off etc.Well, we found someplace, and we got approved to move into the property. we will be getting keys on the first of next month. Our new house is out in Beaverton, but the pro’s of the situation outweigh the cons so we are both happy with the outcome.

i have lived in the same area for 3-4 years now.. feeling nostalgic, with the upcoming move out of my neighborhood, i was looking at some satellite images of different property’s online. i started thinking about how many times i have moved in my life. and decided, hey… lets see what things look like at some of the places i used to live/where family used to live.

i ended up browsing google and looking at my grandpa’s old house. it is the house that family grew up in for many years in mapleton utah. it was the last house that grandma betty lived in. where pepsi the goat raised hell and mice could be found nested comfortably in old vacuum cleaners. i have a ton of good memories of this house. i have even more at the house with grandma marilyn though, and i am glad that their locations are completely separated.

Using google, i was surprised to see that it looks very different than when i was younger.
seems like they turned it into some kind of duplex. there are a number of trees and it is a different color.
next time i am in town, i wonder if they would let me come hang out on the porch for a while.

Click

To

Enlarge

Similarly so with the old Cutler address.

Cutler looks nearly the same as when i was growing up. the porch that mom and dad made is still there. the railings, the color schema.the strip of grass that phreekachu and i would have water drinking contests on, back before we knew you could die from drinking too much water :)

parents bedroom on the top left, girls in the top right.

i wish i could see the backyard too.. i miss that place.

February 27th, 2008 by erisian

i have a list of my top five favorite video games of all time.

ChronoTrigger (snes)
Final Fantasy III (snes)
Legend of Zelda: A link to the past (snes)
Secret of Mana (snes)
Lufia II (snes)

i pretty much lost interest with most video games once the systems started moving away from cartridges. i cant stand the long load times, i dislike the emphasis on graphics rather than story. if i had my way, i would go back to all games being purely sprite based. there is a decent culture built around this same feeling. i know at least one friend who is in the process of writing and making his own pixel based RPG because he shares the same feelings.

So back story out of the way, a year or so ago, i bought the new release of Final Fantasy VI Advance. This is basically a rerelease of Final Fantasy 3, but with a new cleaned up translation done by Tom Slattery. It is pretty good, but i miss the old Ted Woolsey translation that was done for the Super Nintendo.

I have played this through three or four times since i got it and have had a hell of a lot of fun. recently i got the itch to play again and pulled it out.. in an attempt to get everything accomplished before the catastrophic point of no return mid game, i decided i would take advantage of a walk through. this is something i try to refrain from doing, but sometimes it is easier to reference someone elses work, especially if you have already hammered out a game ahell of a lot of times.

i am now officially glad that i did so. i have not even referenced what i got the walkthrough for yet, mainly because the writing of the introduction is incredibly incredibly enjoyable to read. i decided that i would back it up, post it for access here and throw a snippet of it up for reading.

i know that most people who visit thsi site will not be interested in this, but, as always, tell me it sucks and move along.. there is no reason to try to force you to read it.. you will be missing out though.. seriously..

if you want a great introduction, read the foreword,
for straight up humor, scroll down to the introduction excerpt,
if you want the whole kit n kaboodle, scroll down to the GameFaqs link

Foreword written by Imzogelmo

The year was 1994.
Until that time, humanity seemed a bleak existence — why, the 20th century alone saw the world ravaged by two world wars, a tense period known as the Cold War, and various regional conflicts. Finally, in the latter decades of the century, a new ray of hope emerged — the video game. Instead of fighting and killing one another, now mankind could do sovicariously or, if it was preferred, two could team up and do battle against
a fictional foe.

Like all forms of expression, the video game underwent many reformations (or generations) before the recipe became “just right.” Several genres of game sprang into being: platform games, shoot-em-ups, action/adventures, sports, puzzlers, fighting games, and RPGs. Each type of game appealed to a different
type of player or interest, and all the while advances were being made both in capacity of games’ data and complexity of the hardware used to run it. By the early 1990’s, the types of presentation that would work with a given genre were well-established, and players could afford to specialize in a particular genre without narrowing the field of games too greatly.

That brings us back to 1994, or, as Nintendo called it, “The year of the cartridge.” In that year,  _Final_Fantasy_VI_ was released, and there was much rejoicing. The genre was RPG; the fictional foe was the evil Emperor Gestahl, and later, the pompous nihilist Kefka. Sure, there were other RPGs before it, but none that struck the perfect balance of character similarity vs. diversity, importance of storyline vs. gameplay, and plot linearity vs. non-linearity.

The depth of characters and robustness of the game engine (plus the time investment required to fully explore the nuances of the game) made this one of the highest-rated games in terms of replayability. Furthermore, the vivid graphics and moving musical score made it a complete experience, not just a game.

“But it is just a game!” I hear someone in the back say.

No, it is not just a game. In the fast-paced world where information is old as soon as it can be emailed, a video game generally has a very small window of time that it is considered new or exciting. For the early history of
video games that may not have been so true, but for the entire history of this game, the internet has been a very influential medium for discussion among players. For many fans of the series, this is still the greatest game, in spite of the hype surrounding some of its successors. So no, it is not “just a game” — it is a culture. And like many great cultures, it needs great works to explain, enhance, and record its story.

To document every piece of useful (and no-so-useful) data on a culture — that’s a difficult task. Many approximations have come forward, but always they have had inaccurate, inconsistent, or insufficient information. That is not meant as an insult on previous guides — like I said, it’s difficult. Much information has been uncovered through deliberate playing and replaying of the game, through hacking its internal code and data, and through combined effort of its many fans. This guide seeks to improve upon and surpass all
previous attempts. This guide seeks to be the great work of which I speak.
This guide covers _everything_.

 an excerpt from Djibriel’s Introduction.

The original document was first released in November 2005, and we’re roughly two years down the road now. It may seem weird to some that ’simply ‘adapting the original 1381 kB file took about as long as writing the monstrosity in the first place, but you’d be surprised at how much work it is! Saint Jerome and Ted Woolsey would’ve shared my pain I’m sure, had they not both passed away 16 centuries ago.

At the very start of this document I’d like to mention that none of this would have ever happened if there weren’t so many righteous characters out there who advised my walkthrough to people on the message boards, who e-mailed me just to say they enjoyed the FAQ in one way or another or otherwise made me feel like I didn’t spend all this time just for personal enjoyment… I had a market to work for. Hotels around the globe replaced their Holy Bible with a printed version of the Battle Tactics Walkthrough. Rumors have comely women carry snippets of my guide in their panties to feel sexier and more confident. Like Stephen King and Robert Jordan, I had to struggle to deliver my ultimate work before Death’s ever-fickle hand took me in its grip. Before you, you see the results. The all-inclusive Walkthrough and Battle Tactics Guide for Final Fantasy VI Advance.

But what is this document you’re seeing? Does it really contain everything? Is it some kind of Hitchhiker’s Guide to FF VI Advance? The Encyclopedea CCLV VI Supremea? The Cosmog Sutra, where you’ll learn all about Tantric Gameplay (lasts for hours; winning the battle is NOT the main goal)?

Anyway, thats all i had. it was just well written and continues to be so all the way through the end.

link to the orgininal file on GameFaqs

The Advance Walkthrough and Battle Tactics Guide; WoB
Version 1.2
Djibriel, August 2007
~~~~~~~~~~~
“Read this” graffiti image found via google images in a subdirectory called ~epstein on OFB.net
lots of great images in both places, go check them out if you get the chance