General Fiasco @ The Underworld 23/02/2012

So as you may have seen (but I doubt) in my vlog, I saw General Fiasco on Thursday at The Underworld. I went with 2 friends and it was pretty rad. There were two support acts, More Than Conquerors and The 1975.

Firstly, the venue. It was a nifty little place where the small stage was underground. The stage also wasn’t that far off the floor, which could be bad, I guess. One other thing that baffled me was the rather thick pillar which was like…. quite far forward towards the stage…. but we didn’t mind, it meant we had something to lean on while we watched the music. It was pretty much the optimal distance from the stage, as you could see everything and weren’t even that far back.

The crowd that arrived was mostly 16-18 year old kids (possibly younger?) or at least mentally aged so. Now, I may be an old fart (at the ripe old age of 18 and 8 months) but kids are a bunch of dicks. Basically there were a bunch of people who thought that acting like a complete dick was a right “larf”.  For a lot of them it seemed like it was babies first live concert as well so they thought the only thing you do is act like a BIT of an arse…

There was one group of kids (lead by a boy with his big ball of afro-like hair… basically a “Jewfro”, are they even cool these days?) where I heard one of them say to us “You basically pretend it’s a metal concert and go crazy!”. Now I had two problems with this statement. Firstly, if they were at a metal concert they’d get the living stuffing beaten out of them as those things are fierce. CRAZY fierce, heads will roll. Secondly, it was General Fiasco! They’re not exactly the most rocky thing, so it’s just crazy!!! Le sigh.

Anyway, the first support band were More Than Conquerors. Now I sort of liked them. They had a good sound. It wasn’t GREATLY original but still, it was kinda good. I wasn’t the biggest fan of when they tried to go a bit more hardcore as it just didn’t sound great, but for the most part it was good and the lead singer was rather friendly. There’s not much more I can say really, they were listenable to (that’s a word) and I would check them out, if I were you.

The next band to come on were The 1975. Now, my friends and I judged these guys while they were setting up, expecting sort of harder rocky stuff. NOPE. They played some nice sort of melodic tunes. I’d say, maybe a bit like The XX, but probably more upbeat. Probably the best part was when some of the kids on the front row started to clap and the lead singer told them to stop because they can’t keep a beat for shit (which was true, they tried clapping in all the songs, clapping =/= improvement). The lead singer also had a Mortal Kombat logo tattooed on his arm so my friend and I just quietly yelled characters at him as well as going “MORTAL KOMBAT!” between songs. We confronted him at the end and got some signed thingies, which is jawesome.  Sadly I can’t find any online presence for them 😦

FINALLY we got General Fiasco on stage! Loads of people suddenly crowded in at this point including the above mentioned kids with the afro. One of them stood RIGHT in front of us, so I just yelled at the back of his head until he turned round and eventually moved. Good times. So anyway, General Fiasco were pretty fantastical! They played a LOT of songs, including Sinking Ships which is probably my favourite song EVARS by them. They played more than when they played at Reading Festival 2011 which was sweet! They also played A LOT of new songs, which some people complained about, but I liked it. It’s like a taster of the new album they’re going to release, like an advert… it’s how the music industry is meant to be. It also meant that a lot of the teenagers couldn’t jump around like loons as they didn’t know the song…. they also couldn’t clap out of time as they didn’t know the structure of the song. Some of the teenagers started to climb onto stage and then try crowd surfing…. one of the girls got pushed towards us… we stepped back. LOL. Plus some girls got on to sing, BIG mistake…. they couldn’t sing. It’s like…. no…. It was amusing anyway.

Afterwards we waited in line to get some swag and bumped into someone on our course (well, me and one of my friend’s course) who we didn’t really know but still. We got two posters (one signed by the band) for £5 which was AWESOME as well as the little card thing signed by the guy in The 1975. Sadly we didn’t get any More Than Conquerors stuff, but we didn’t really see much around… :S

It was a good night with good music and I’d definitely check out everyone I mentioned (bands)

Buying Soap is the Sign of Adulthood

So I felt like it was about time I became mildly self centered and write a blog post about… my life :S

Sadly, I’m shocked to find out that WordPress has completely changed it’s layout and tried to make it more like Tumblr (from what I can gather) and I must say, I don’t like it, I feel limited in what I can do now.

This disjointed and near schizophrenic (all over the place) blog will EVEN contain some University stuff, like WOAH!

So I’ve basically realised that I’m going to have to buy some more scentless hand soap soon and then I realised that I’m basically an official adult. This happened last night and I quickly found it strange how out of ALL the things I’ve done at Uni (being not much) the one thing that really hits me as becoming self reliant was having to eventually buy some soap… I probably need to get out more.

Strangley I had a whole list of stuff to talk about last night, but now that’s just gone by morning (it was a mental list)

So recently I managed to forget my PIN, like…. I forgot it over the xmas break but I’d managed to avoid using my card until recently when my travel card ran out. Basically, I had gotten it wrong to the point where it locked me out of my card and I suddenly felt VERY poor. The biggest problem, my Oyster travel card had also ran out at pretty much the same time, so I was having to find what little money I had lying around to try and get to and fro university (it came to about £24 in a week, OBSCENE). The good news is yesterday my PIN arrived back in Suffolk so my mother told me (I eventually heard it over the yells of my friends trying to embarrass me…. and succeeding)

(Only now after I quickly restart Firefox is it that I realise that the WordPress publishing layout has not changed at all and I was just on the wrong bit)

So today just now I popped down to my local Barclays and BAM! I’m back with some money, so I even redid my travel card, it was £78.x0…. is that right? (Yes, it was always that expensive, or it’s just gone up, seeing as zone 1 to zone 1 also costs £2 at any time in the day) so now I don’t have to worry about running out of cash, and just worry more about the fact that if I keep eating I’ll be too poor to live (work that one out)

So, I’ve found myself watching a lot of films recently with my friend Holly as she gets bored of working. These have included in the last week: Battle Royale, Hostel, Chocolat, The Human Centipede 2, Howl’s Moving Castle (<3), Rabbit Proof Fence and probably some others that I just can’t think of right now. I must say, The Human Centipede 2 (having not seen the first one) EXTREMELY boring. The level of gruesomeness was just too silly to take seriously. The few bits I didn’t like were the knee surgery, purely because my knees are messed up and they just hurt when knees are the main thing, the teeth knocking out (to an extent) and then the baby head being crushed under the accelerator peddle and that was purely because it was a baby and it just seemed a bit too much. Honestly, it wasn’t that bad. The character was a bit creepy and what not and then when everyone’s pooping it was just stupid with the added noises AND the poo/blood splatter effect on the camera. Honestly, it was just a bit boring. (Now Hostel was gruesome)

University? Oh  yeah, I’m at university aren’t I. I’ve decided that I have no reason to even bother remembering my life in Suffolk seeing as it’s apparent there’s NOTHING for me back there (oh boo hoo, cry me a river, right?) as is apparent from my recently “removed” blog posts that you may or may not have cared about. Due to this decision I sort of forget that I haven’t spent most of my life in university, which would have probably made things easier/more torturous.

So yeah, how about that university eh? The first year at the moment has been MOSTLY A-level stuff just gone over again and occasionally containing more detail. There’s FAR too much biology for my liking (it’s basically all a Biology A-level just split up, so naturally I hate it all) but there are some parts which are tolerable. You’d think with the logic of “It’s just A-levels, wah” I should OBVIOUSLY be slamming everything into the ground? Sadly, I’m a stupid person so I didn’t do well in my exams. In Biochem I got 75% (woo?) as well as in Pharmacology (which I guess equates to a first). Sadly I got 62% in Physiology and 61% in Cells to Systems which are like a bad 2-1 in both of them. My average was like 68.25% which is EVEN WORSE! Bleh. (Is anyone even reading at this point any more?)

I guess some of my coursework is all right as a lot of them have been A – A++ (which is 70+%) while sadly one piece was a B+ (65- 70%) and then test I got maybe a B…. gross (a B is 60 – 65%) so I guess it’s going well, but not great. I know, gross right?

I joined a fencing society! So now I fence, with swords! I’m apparently sort of good at it and I’ve found myself applying to be on the committee next year… wait, what? I thought I was really lazy and didn’t do any work? Yeah, mildly bullied/ pressured into it. I’m sure it’ll look good on my UCAS CV.

The food in halls is very hit and miss so I go through great periods of starvation and then have like one meal and rinse and repeat, it’s sort of gross how much I eat now. Too much.

I’ve recently gotten into Death From Above 1979. Seriously, listen to them, they’re AWESOME!!!! Like, amazing.

I’m also going to see General Fiasco in Feb with my friends Holly and Neil (Although Holly may drop out so I’ll have to find someone else)

Other than all that, I’m fine.

New Blood Festival at the Hoxton Square Bar & Kitchen – 24/01/2012

So last night I was very Scott Pilgrim. No I wasn’t fighting evil ex-boyfriends, sadly. Instead I found myself at what you could say was Indie (I mean, no one would have heard of the bands) rock gig thing. It was in some small venue somewhere in London, around Hoxton… wherever that is.

Anyway, there was some bands who played some music and there were some people (like me) who watched and listened. BEHOLD!

Fever Fever – This band opened the night. A band of three from Norwich, which I guess I could count as “from back home” … maybe? They’re basically Sleigh Bells in stereo. I say this as there are TWO girls on guitar screaming down the mic while the guy drums instead of the one (like in Sleigh Bells). I mean, they were okay and I could tolerate them. The guitar was pretty decent, with the girl with darker hair (who needs names these days?) probably being better as she was doing most the work while the blonde one did most the…. singing? I dunno, I mean there were times when it sounded like they could actually sing but then continued to yell. At least Sleigh Bells have some sort of variation. Now obviously they were playing live and after listening to the studio recorded song, it does song better. I mean, yeah, they’re something. Tolerable really. Would be nicer for a bit of variation hither and dither. Also, there were a lot of awkward interludes during the set which was rather off putting :S

Purson – Now I liked this band. A 4 piece band with a woman on lead guitar and vocals. Looking at them you’d expect something a bit more…. psychedelic what with the band mostly dressed in 60s “hippy” clothing, but not really. It’s a nice bit of rocky rock? It’s not exactly RAWK and then not something completely basic and bland (see Mumford & Sons and Ed Sheeran). The singer was amazing. She was insane on the guitar and her singing was incredible. It felt like she, pardon the cliché, owned the stage. It was weird every now and then as it seemed like she was trying to do some thing to make her eyes really wide every now and then, but that could just be mild paranoia. I could definitely see myself listening to them in the future. As I listen to some of their stuff again now the opening of Twos and Ones sounds SO much like an old band (for me anyway, so like maybe 70s) which I really can’t place.

Cold in Berlin – The last act of the evening. It’s a bit of a worry when you notice the sheer amount of 30 – 40 year old men with dyed black hair, big boots and piercings multiply. I quickly found out why. Now, they’re hard to categorise but it was another band of just the woman singer screaming down the mic, but this time it had added dancing like you’re dead inside! Woo! Also I got the feeling she secretly wished she was Emperor Palpatine from Star Wars with the amount of force lightening hand gestures she was doing. The band seemed almost as if they didn’t exist though as they had very little presence on the stage as they were overshadowed by the woman who seemed to be having a mental breakdown. Occasionally the guitarist in his odd cloth reaper (?) hood would walk up to a mic and then mumble something incoherent and then go back to his job of wishing he was Johnny Greenwood (from Radiohead, because let’s face it… we all wish we were). If you’ve seen Scott Pilgrim vs The World and seen the sort of stuff Scott does while playing the bass… it’s much to the same as the bassist here. Sometimes it’d seem like he was getting too into it and nearly fall across the stage. There was a lot of space on the stage for him to do this as the singer would occasionally decide to walk down into the standing area and then sing/jump/breakdown in the crowd. Although this was somewhat engaging it just made the rest of the band even less apparent as you were just turned away from them to make sure she didn’t stand on you. It’s a band which I could listen to if it was ON (and like, not rip out my ears) but it’s not exactly something I’d willingly listen to in my own time.

The night was alright, it was rather off putting when you realise that other than the 16 year-old girls (in their Addidas trainers) who left after the first act, probably past their bedtime, you were the youngest one there. It was mostly old, middle-aged, beer bellied men. Specifically 3 men who were stood in front of us the ENTIRE time. Then the other bunch of people seemed like either businessmen who had had a bit too much to drink and would probably wake up with Whiplash in their neck from all the head bobbing and then a bunch of rock scene 20 – 30 year-olds. Who need to accept the fact that they’re not 16 any more and dressing up like one is rather embarrassing.

So yeah, there are some bands who did some things.

2012 is THIS year?

As it’s the new year I thought I might as well do the ONE blog post that seems to be always constant (as I feel I ought to update it at least once a year so why not at the start?) being the new year thing! There will also be Christmas as well, I guess. So here goes!

I’ll start with Christmas, Christmas has come and gone already and it was an interesting one… and when I say interesting I mean exactly the same as every other one. As I’d already been home in Suffolk for a week I’d already gotten tired of being around my family, but that’s just natural. Anyway, Christmas day had “everyone” wake up at about 10:30am… I say “everyone” as my brother woke up at about lunch time, so we went straight to that. My grandparents weren’t here this time so it was smaller and… I guess LESS stressful than most years. We eventually opened some presents:

That’s a blurry photo of most the things I got for Christmas:

• Captain America on DVD
• X-men: First Class on DVD
• Assassin’s Creed Brotherhood on Xbox 360
• Deus Ex: Human Revolution on Xbox 360
• Batman: Arkham City on Xbox 360
• Disgaea DS… on DS
• Some Mittens
• An Ugly-ish Jumper
• Some PJ bottoms
• The Rogue (hardback) by Trudi Canavan
• Atomic Robo Vol 5
• Two boxes of Winegums
• A box of Lindor
• Some Mr Happy Bath stuff
• Some Ted Baker Bath stuff
• Some Mango and Lime Curd
• A chocolate Reindeer (santa)
• Some Chocolate animal biscuits (santa)
• Some Haribo Star gummies (santa)

The day after Xmas we went to My Grandparents house for the day, so that’s like 3 hours in the car either way…. fun. The day after I slept until 2:40pm….

Quick Gaming blar – Assassin’s Creed Brotherhood is TOO easy…. The combat you just use the hidden blade and kill EVERYTHING. It feels like I haven’t actually had to make an assassination for a while yet (like story-wise where they normally make it more difficult in a little area and you’ve got to sneak around instead of just normal jump off roof and kill) then there’s the crossbow which is as strong as the gun (in that it kills the big heavily armoured guys in one bolt) yet also silent. Then worse still is your little Brotherhood of Assassins…. Just walking down the street they do most the killing of the guards… I’m just left to loot the bodies :S I’m only into maybe the 5th sequence but that’s because I know own every building I can at this point….

Deus Ex: Human Revolution – I didn’t get to play a lot of this before going back to Uni, but I have liked what I’ve played. I obviously cranked it to the hardest difficulty straight off and then am playing pacifist as well as making it so there are no alarms going off ever, just to make it a fun challenge. The sneaking in the game does feel very legit (more so than Assassin’s Creed). Sneaking around and monitoring the guard’s movements and then trying to hide the bodies in places where they wont be seen! It’s all so tense! (No infinitely large haystacks here!) Although I must the hacking has now become a joke now that I have the 3 Augments that decrease detection rate, but not getting spotted WHILE hacking is another challenge xD I’ve NEVER used a code I found yet… I always hack, but I’m fun like that.

Gaming blar over!

Now for the quick year review where I just make a quick comment (or a long one) on various things that have happened in my life, but hey, It’s legit as I haven’t written many blogs this year! 😀

So I finished Sixth form! That was pretty neat… stressful as well, mostly waiting for offers from Universities… I didn’t do as much revision as I should have for my exams it was the normal last night cramming sort of thing except for Maths. I guess you could also include Chemistry as well but then I only did papers in lessons as we had nothing else to do and I didn’t do many as I just chatted. Maths was, again, only doing papers in class and stuff as we basically had NOTHING else to do and I still had to go to lessons and it was the sort of lesson where talking through it and not doing anything was frowned upon. Biology, on the other hand, we finished the course in the last week of our time there…. and I’d already had a Biology retake before then (which I didn’t revise for). I got AAB so I got into King’s College London where I’m currently at studying Biochemistry.

I turned 18 in 2011, which I also just forgot as it wasn’t a big thing. I mean, not even my family remembered and I didn’t have a party (no friends to invite) so it wasn’t the biggest part of my life.

I went to Reading Festival, which was pretty amazing! I met some people from Twitter (although not as many as I hoped or as often either) and to say it was my first experience of live gigs… it was pretty amazing! 😀 I’m still sort of shocked that I went by myself (on the trains and stuff) which freaked a few people out at Sixth Form.

So September came around and I was bored out of my skull… I’d basically already cast off my secondary school life as it wasn’t exactly great and I was greatly looking forward to University! So it eventually came to the point where I was by myself in my room in halls not knowing what to do. I guess the first term has been okay (as long as you don’t look at my arms), I’ve made some close friends and then have also made a bunch of others. Again there’s not really one SOLID group, it’s lots of people from groups I was in but it’s still cool. I’m happy with the people I’ve befriended… which makes me sound like a bit of an emotional so and so… :S Which I’m not…. ugh, emotions. Lame. Am I right?

The actual learning part of Uni is pretty intense… it’s only now that I’m not doing ANY revision AT ALL when I should be for my exams starting on the 9th that I realise I should probably focus a bit more :S I joined Fencing as well! Made a few friends there… I guess?

I believe the expression I’d use to describe the first term would be “socially confusing” I would have said “Confusing” but that could be mistaken for me not understanding the course material and looking over the main reason for the word “Confusing”… I mean…. GAH!

I don’t want to go back to old habits of just moaning for ever and ever about everything and I’ve really tried to not do that…. I’ve slipped once or twice but I’m getting better and better at bottling up everything that’s wrong and just telling everyone I’m fine. As well as hopefully taking on other people’s problems as well… I mean, although you may not think it (what with the blog posts showing me being a bit of an arse when people are getting up in arms) I just want to help people. Not ALL the people, the people I actually care about yeah. As well as friendly strangers. People I’ve known for a bit and I’ve just grown tired of, I will not listen to their problems and care… I’ll barely even listen. But listening is fun as it fills me with guilt (oops, did I type that? It’s cool, no one will read this far down anyway).

I must say I do hate New Years…. as it’s just that sort of time where you reflect on the year and you realise how bad it’s been and then you realise that the coming year will probably be equally as bad as well…. same with Birthdays… I’ve come to hate my birthday as I basically realise I’ve not made a positive difference to anyone’s life or to the world around me in the X amount of years I’ve been alive while at the same time I’ve probably made A LOT of people feel bad. Then there’s also all the stuff I haven’t done either that 12 year old kids are doing these days…. (I am pathetic…) WAIT NO! Ignore me, I’m bottling that up…. sorry.

So yeah, yesterday I went to see the fireworks with some friends, it was pretty sweet! We ended up waiting around in a big crowd of jostling drunks for like… hours! It also rained but it was really heavy rain at times so that made up for it! (gosh I love heavy rain). Then I got to count down with everyone in London and then KABLAMO! Fireworks! They were pretty amazing fireworks as well. I swear at some points it seemed like they just threw some flashbangs up in the air :S Suddenly the music changed to people talking about the Olympics and then saying London and everyone cheered…. I then remembered, the London 2012 Olympics are THIS year…. 😦 That will not be fun….

Resolutions? I know I normally review my resolutions from last year and say how they went, but I’m fairly sure I failed a lot of them so I don’t want to carry them on again, for some that’d be like… 4 years in a row or something, so instead I’m coming up with a new resolution:

To not make any resolutions.

Oooh, paradoxical!

Oh yeah, over the Christmas break I managed to increase my song count from 4926 to 6988 songs (I can’t download torrents in Halls (well I can, just not the .torrent file) so I have to do it all elsewhere) which is pretty rad 😀

A harrowing defeat?

To expand on yesterday, I have now gone down as the defeated. (lulz)

The story goes that the poor helpless Pie was being attacked by the big scary dragon (me) in a hate fuelled rage with no proper backing (except maybe half a year of reading nearly the exact same thing on a nightly basis, oops). However, out of the mist the brave and scary (?) hero, mynameisedd, came in and scared off the scary dragon and then SAVED the day.

The story goes on with the dragon apparently unfollowing the brave knight but then quickly refollowing due to a fear of no friends. To mock the dragon the hero then apparently stopped following the dragon due to finding the dragon boring. Then everyone laughed and sat around congratulating each other on a job well done.

However, as with nearly every legend ever or every battle there are always two sides to it. One of which is normally not filled with lies and not made out to look so black and white.

The truth behind the legend:

Basically, Rachel (aka Pie) was having another one of those times when every one of her tweets was along the lines of “Urgh…” “Gah!” “I don’t know why I bother.” “This is just ridiculous” “I feel like crying.” “I am crying” “Why does he just leave me alone” “I just want to be left alone!” or with example of yesterday “*screamsstampsfeetcriesetc*” (seriously, how is that NOT a temper tantrum?). I finally got tired of gritting my teeth and bearing with it while trying to sift through the never ending spam that comes from those two to actually read something slightly more interesting, so I commented on it. Sure, not in a nice way… It was obvious this was all going down for attention, so attention is what she got and as we all know, beggars can’t be choosers. After getting upset about me commenting how despite supposedly being an adult she still seems to deal with things the same way a 5 year old does, screaming until it went away, she decides to lash out.

Sure, I’m not the most mature person in the world. I mean, it’s not like I deal with things in a mature way either *looks at wrist* but saying someone isn’t mature on the premise of them playing computer games is a pretty lame argument. As well as judging a person now for something that happened nearly two years ago and any other weak argument she came up with.

Anywho, I decided it was probably time to give it a rest, so I went back to my work and continued enjoying University life (you know, work and socialising with people and making friends). It turns out that not shortly after the argument stopped, everyone else jumped in. Including Pie’s boyfriend, mynameisedd (aka the heroic knight), saying such like things as “If you have something to say, say it to me!” and other things which are horribly cliché and rather pointless as he’s not the one screaming on the floor, or 18 so my entire argument doesn’t work on him :S

Seeing as I had already left to continue making notes on DNA and talking with those on my corridor, I didn’t see any of these “threats” so it was assumed that I went running with my scaly tail between my legs when I saw the eSight of him (seeing as it’s the internet we’re on here people). You know, it’s surprisingly easy to look brave when the battle is already over, right? So yeah, it is assumed I ran away, in actual fact I was just not looking for confrontation any more as it was just boring now.

So while Pie was doing the “Oh gosh, you’re my hero!” bit, Edd had said that he unfollowed me but somewhere down the line between reading and processing it got mixed up with Pie to “He unfollowed me, lol dick lololololol” being me unfollowing him, which I have yet to do. The general view is “good riddance! He was boring, the twat! I should have unfollowed him sooner!” yet Pie hasn’t yet and oh look what turned up in my email:

Yeah, good one there Edd, nice unfollowing of me there. So now it seems to be viewed I unfollowed him and then re-followed him, which is funny. If you look in the people I follow (which is displayed in chronological order) you can clearly see that mynameisedd is not at the top and actually where he has always been (roughly) but if you look in the people who follow me, oh wait! Is that mynameisedd at the top (or there abouts) funny that.

So now everyone gets to sit around and enjoy the truth. I get to continue being a complete arse. Pie can continue ignoring any form of help that comes her way and continue to moan and scream every single night on twitter and Edd can continue to try and control Pie’s life and think that he’s the macho man (if he wants to). If this doesn’t go down well, I guess I can just hang out with everyone at university instead.

The truth will set you free, etc.