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Spam

30 November 2009, 3:09 pm

Well, having migrated this blog over to its new Wordpress-based setup, I quickly discovered the downside to this arrangement: comment spam.

I never had any comment spam before. I don’t know whether the system I had before was just particularly resilient to spam (possibly because having the comments hosted externally from the blog itself was confusing to bots) or whether it was just unusual enough that nobody had bothered to write a bot for it. It may have been a combination of both. But whatever the reason, the only time I got comments I didn’t want, they were from real-life flesh-and-blood wankers rather than automated bots.

However, no sooner had I got my Wordpress installation set up than the comment spam began to trickle in. Just one every day or two to start with, but then suddenly a large stream of them started pouring in.

I managed to catch 95% of them by blacklisting the string “www.playlist.com/blog/entry/”. But this didn’t stop the comments being posted, just ensured that they were marked as spam and not displayed. I still had to go to the admin panel and delete all the spam every day or two. So I tried looking for a plug-in that would add a captcha or similar to the comments form. I know these aren’t usually completely reliable, but it would at least be worth a try.

In the end I installed a plug-in that supposedly stops bots from posting comments without needing a captcha, or indeed anything that is seen by users at all. It seems to be working so far; I haven’t received any more spam comments since installing it last night. I’ve also tried posting comments myself, both logged-in and anonymously and they still seem to work.

If one or two other people could post comments to confirm that everything is still working? Come to that, can those people who were checking this through the Atom or RSS feed also comment, so I can be sure they haven’t been stranded by the move? I think I set up the appropriate redirects, but it’s as well to be sure.

Filed under General Mumbling.
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Forge World Medusas

24 November 2009, 11:09 am

This morning, unexpectedly, I received a package in the post, containing a pack of Epic Medusas from Forge World. I ordered these back in June, shortly before they became listed as “TEMPORARILY OUT OF STOCK” on FW’s website.

This is good news for two reasons. Firstly, because as I suspected the chassis from the Basilisks and Medusas (and the Earthshaker cannons from the Basilisks and platforms) are exactly the same, so I now have an artillery company of nine Basilisks (and also three Medusa platforms if I ever feel like putting them together). Secondly, because it shows that there is some progress being made towards re-stocking Forge World’s Epic range and making the models available again. There have been numerous reports from people who’ve contacted FW, some of them contradictory, about what will be coming back and when. It’s nice to have some real, concrete evidence that something, at least, is happening.

Filed under Miniatures.
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Loudness War and the future of recorded music

21 November 2009, 6:20 pm

I was recently pointed towards an interesting article on the future of the ‘Loudness War’ that is plaguing recorded music (I’ve posted about this issue before, but if you’re still not sure what it’s about, see the original ‘Over the Limit’ article).

The gist of the article is that as CDs are replaced with purely electronic formats like mp3, and as volume-correcting technologies like ReplayGain, which allow for shuffled, jukebox-style playback at consistent volume, therefore become ubiquitous, mastering for maximum loudness will cease to be possible. Once over-compression has no effect on the overall volume of the music, but instead only makes it sound shittier, people will stop doing it.

I must admit, I have always seen the demise of CDs as a bad thing. I still prefer to have an actual, physical product when I buy music. I like to have a package with artwork and sleeve notes. And I worry that the unbundled nature of electronic music downloads will lead to the demise of the album format, which I think would be a great loss. There are also issues of audio quality — although downloads in lossless formats are becoming more widely available — and of permanence — although at least the DRM aspect of that seems to be going away.

But if the rise of electronic formats means we can go back to sane mastering practices, then maybe it’s not all bad after all.

Of course, there is some uncertainty over how doomed CDs really are. According to a recent survey, 77% of people (aged 14-24) said they would carry on buying albums even if they also had legitimate access to unlimited downloads. Interestingly, 64% of those cited the desire to own a physical product as a factor. A quick calculation shows that to be 49% of the total number of people polled, which is quite a reassuring thing to learn; I had previously suspected that this was just a peculiar fetish of mine that most people didn’t really care about.

Of course, it’s not clear that these albums people would still be buying would necessarily be on CD. Vinyl is making something of a comeback at the moment, particularly among the kind of collectors and real-physical-object fetishists that still prefer to buy albums that they could download instead. I’ve never had any particular fondness for vinyl. I’m not quite old enough that it has any nostalgic value for me, and while it clearly has aesthetic advantages over a CD, its technical disadvantages have always outweighed them in my eyes. Particularly, I like the fact that a CD can be easily ripped to electronic formats and placed on a portable player, so that it simultaneously has all the advantages of both a physical and purely electronic format.

More long-term, though, I suspect the days of recorded music as a product to be bought may be numbered anyway. I think it may only be a matter of time before recorded music becomes a service one subscribes to. Whether that will necessarily be a bad thing, I don’t know. But I am inclined to be pessimistic.

Filed under General Mumbling, Listening.
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World Painted Blood

18 November 2009, 7:46 pm

So the new Slayer album, World Painted Blood, was produced by Greg Fidelman (with Rick Rubin as executive producer). Fidelman engineered and mixed Metallica’s Death Magnetic album last year and notoriously screwed it up quite severely. Now he’s been let loose on the latest CD by another classic thrash band, so I was intrigued to hear what it sounds like.

At first listen, it’s immediately obvious that this isn’t nearly as badly distorted as Death Magnetic. More careful examination, however, reveals that it’s still not a very dynamic-sounding record. Analysing it using vorbisgain gives a suggested AlbumGain of -12.13dB, making it one of the loudest albums I’ve come across (I think only Death Magnetic and Iggy Pop’s remix of Raw Power were worse). And listening with headphones, there is definitely some clipping going on.

On the other hand, I’m not sure that it matters quite so much. The distortion is audible, but it doesn’t completely smother the recording like it did on Death Magnetic. Instead it just sort of adds an extra harshness to the overall sound which doesn’t sound entirely inappropriate to the music.

Aside from the excessive compression, the production isn’t bad. The bass is a little bit quieter in the mix than I’d have liked, but otherwise it’s pretty good. On the other hand, listening first to World Painted Blood, and then to a couple of other recent thrash albums: Testament’s The Formation of Damnation and Exodus’s The Atrocity Exhibition…Exhibit A (both engineered and mixed by Andy Sneap), I can’t help but feel that both of those records sound noticeably better. I’m not sure to what extent that’s due to the fact they aren’t quite so badly clipped and over-compressed, though.

So I guess overall the production scrapes a pass, but just barely.

Although this post was mostly about the album’s production, I think I probably should express some opinion on the music itself, too. It’s pretty good. A lot of people have been saying this is the best thing Slayer have done since Seasons in the Abyss, but I can’t really comment on whether that’s true, since the only other album of theirs that I’ve listened to very much is Reign in Blood. It’s definitely good, though, and noticeably better than what I heard of their last album, Christ Illusion, which I wasn’t that keen on. It isn’t a marked departure from much of what they’ve done before; it’s still unmistakeably a Slayer album, but that doesn’t mean that it sounds stagnant or stale. There are still some new ideas and even when it’s covering familiar ground it does so pretty well.

And judging by Unit 731, apparently Jeff Hanneman has run out of Nazi atrocities to write about, and has been forced to move on to the Japanese.

Filed under Listening.
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Wordpress

11 November 2009, 9:02 pm

Welcome to the all-new, all-singing, all-dancing* Strange World of Axel Fendersson mk. II!

So I finally got around to doing something I’ve been vaguely considering doing for almost as long as I’ve had a blog at all: migrating it over to Wordpress rather than using Blogger to administer it and Haloscan for comments.

I’ve set up some redirects so the transition should be largely seamless, but if you’ve got any bookmarks or feed-readers pointing at it, it might be worth checking that they’re going to the right place to be certain.

Importing the posts from Blogger was very easy; Wordpress has an automatic import feature. Strangely, it required me to temporarily move my blog to Blogspot in order to work, but otherwise it worked pretty well.

Getting the comments from Haloscan was more difficult. In the end I just transferred them manually, entering each comment myself and then changing the author and date-stamp as required. Perhaps unsurprisingly, this was a collossal pain in the arse and took bloody ages. Apparently there are scripts that would have allowed me to transfer them more easily, but even then the process isn’t straightforward, and I can easily see something it going slightly wrong and fouling things up horribly. Still, done now.

Everything seems to be working well so far. Let me know if anything seems to be broken.

The visual theme may not be permanent; I haven’t decided for certain yet. I’m reasonably happy with it, though. If you know of a better one that is a) variable-width and b) not ugly, let me know.

*not actually all new. Singing or dancing not guaranteed.

Filed under Geek Stuff, General Mumbling.
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Government advisor sacked for giving wrong advice

31 October 2009, 6:06 pm

Links: BBC News, The Guardian, The Times.

So the government has a board of scientists to advise them on drugs policy. That’s good thinking. It’s good to have some hard facts available when making policy decisions.

Unfortunately, the advice they give is at odd with that of the tabloid press, so the government ignores them. If you aren’t going to actually listen to their advice, it’s hard to see what the point of having advisors is, but fair enough. The tabloids decide how the public votes, so politicians do sometimes have to do what they say.

However, the head of the advisory board continues to give the same advice as before. In the words of Alan Johnson, "I cannot have public confusion between scientific advice and policy and have therefore lost confidence in your ability to advise me as chair of the ACMD." Or, in other words, ‘I can’t have you giving me advice that doesn’t match the policy decisions we’ve already made. So I’m afraid you’re out’.

Going against the advisory panel is one thing. But sacking them when they don’t change their advice to match your new decision? That’s just taking the piss.

If anyone’s interested, here is David Nutt’s recent report on the issue.

Filed under General Mumbling.
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Spyglass/Eolith miniatures

14 October 2009, 12:30 am

Almost a year ago, I posted that I’d got a few models from Spyglass Miniatures. They weren’t for any particular game, just really nice models to paint for the fun of it. One of them I painted up fairly soon after getting them, but the other two I left untouched, distracted by other painting projects, until the end of last week, when I finally got around to starting another.

It was seeing a picture of this model, the 28mm version of ‘Shae’, the half-elven archer, that first drew me to check out Spyglass. I was struck by how nicely posed and simply but beautifully sculpted it was. Eventually, I bought this model, along with the 54mm version of the same character, and another 54mm model, ‘Anastasia’, which I painted last year. I have yet to paint the 54mm Shae, but the other Spyglass models are two of the best paint jobs I’ve done, and count among my favourite models.

So here they are. Firstly Anastasia, which was painted last October:

Anastasia

And here’s Shae, mostly painted on Monday, but with some stuff done on Friday and Sunday.

Shae (28mm)

Spyglass Miniatures, incidentally, no longer exists under that name. The man behind Spyglass, Steve Buddle, has switched from making metal models to resin ones, which he now does under the name of Eolith Miniatures instead. Happily, several of the old Spyglass sculpts are now available in resin from there.

Filed under Miniatures.
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Progressive Nation ‘09

11 October 2009, 6:49 pm

This post has nothing at all to do with miniature painting!

Both my brother and I have birthdays in the coming week. Yesterday, in celebration of this, he and I went to London to see Dream Theater and Opeth, who were performing at Wembley Arena as part of DT’s ‘Progressive Nation‘ tour. It was a fine evening indeed.

Travelled as far as Hillingdon by coach, then took the tube to Wembley Park. Journey was uneventful. Tube fare was slightly more than expected. Found venue easily, with about half an hour to spare before doors opened. The venue was quite a good size, I felt. Large enough that you felt part of quite a sizeable crowd, but not so enormous that there wasn’t a sense of intimacy. At a very rough estimate, thee were probably about 8-10 thousand people by the end. Dom and I were about six or seven spaces back from the front.

First act was UnexpecT, an avant-garde metal band from Canada. It took me a couple of songs to get into them (and it felt like it was the same for most of the audience), but once I did they were excellent. Set lasted about half an hour. Bonus points for a nine-string bass.

Next on was Bigelf. Bigelf are basically a 70s psychedelic hard rock band that have got lost in time and somehow ended up in the present day by mistake. Very good stuff. They played for just over half an hour.

I hadn’t heard either of the above bands before, but I enjoyed both, especially Bigelf. I’ll have to check out some more of their stuff in the future.

Next up were Opeth, who were well on form and turned out a cracking set, which ran as follows:

  • Windowpane
  • The Lotus Eater
  • Harlequin Forest
  • April Ethereal
  • Deliverance
  • Hex Omega

This lasted just under an hour, and was absolutely superb. I was particularly pleased when they played Deliverance, which I think is probably my favourite Opeth song.

Had the gig ended at this point, I’d probably still have gone home happy. However, the headliners were still to come. DT’s set consisted of:

  • A Nightmare To Remember
  • The Mirror
  • Lie
  • Solo keyboard spot from Jordan Rudess
  • Prophets of War
  • The Dance of Eternity
  • Percussion solo from Mike Portnoy, then duets between him and the drummers from each of the supporting bands, and finally all four drummers playing together.
  • Wither
  • Take the Time
  • Encore: The Count of Tuscany

Of the three things I’d been hoping for (In The Presence of Enemies, any of the longer tracks from the Images and Words album, and Jordan Rudess wigging out on the continuum), I got to see two (no ITPoE), which was good enough. I was quite surprised that everything (besides the solo spots) came from albums I own, despite having only about half of DT’s catalogue. A Nighmare to Remember featured a guest appearance from Mikael Åkerfeldt on growled vocals. This was a definite improvement over Mike Portnoy’s embarrassing efforts on the record, which were something of a blot on the album. The drum solo/duet portion was entertaining. I think Unexpect’s drummer came off best of the three. The chap from Bigelf seemed slightly out of his element, not in that he wasn’t good enough, but just that flashy solos weren’t really his style. Martin Axenrot’s portion began with what seemed to be a competition as to who could play the fastest, most precise blastbeats, and I’d have said that by a whisker it was Portnoy.

Mike Portnoy’s drumkit, incidentally, is a sight to behold. One person can only play about half of it at once, and all the collaborative drumming bits were played on the one kit. I had already seen it in photos and in the making-of video from Systematic Chaos, but it is all the more impressive to see in person.

DT’s set lasted about an hour and a half, until 22.30. Then they did their encore, and the concert finished at about 22.55. A fantastic gig.

Filed under Listening.
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Necromunda

6 October 2009, 10:49 pm

So recently, I’ve been thinking about Necromunda. In particular, I wondered whether I ought to dig out and paint my old Orlock gang. I do have a painted Necromunda gang in the form of my Spyrers, but they’re a bit odd, and it would be good to have a regular house gang painted as well. I also considered doing another gang, in which case House Escher would be pretty much the only option. Most of the models for Necromunda were sculpted by Gary Morley and Michael and Alan Perry (with a few contributions by Aly Morrison and Colin Dixon), but House Escher was sculpted by Jes Goodwin and, although I also love Michael Perry’s Orlocks, I think the Eschers are probably the best-looking sculpts of the range. They’ve got a cool, vaguely cyberpunky look to them. In addition, the Escher weapon lists and skill tables give them a significant bias towards close combat, which would make them quite different from the Orlocks, who lean more towards shooting.

Unfortunately, GW don’t sell the complete range of models for Necromunda any more. The basic boxed gangs are still available, and you can get extra gangers (although you can’t order individual gangers, just three selected at random) for some gangs, but the alternative heavies and leaders aren’t available at all any more. This is annoying even if I don’t start a new gang, as I could really do with an Orlock with flamer to round out my starting gang. I used to use a guy with a converted melta gun, but I put that together quite some time ago, and it’s not really up to standard any more.

So, off to eBay. I now have on order an Orlock heavy with a flamer and an Escher with Heavy Plasma Gun.

Of course, painting priority still goes to my Epic Titans. I have 3,775 points done so far, and I hope to get up to 4875 by the end of the month. Eventually, I hope to get the army up to 8,500, but it probably won’t be until some time in the new year that I get it to that stage. That said, it would be good to get some Necromunda stuff done in between the Titans, if only for a bit of variety.

Filed under Miniatures.
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Eldar photo update

25 September 2009, 7:19 pm

Following my post on my Epic Chaos Space Marines, I went back and had a look at the photos I took of my Eldar army (which I posted here), and, as I suspected, some of them were quite shockingly awful. So this afternoon, I took the models and re-photographed them all (although I didn’t bother re-doing the whole-army shots). The pics in that post should now do some kind of justice to the models they depict.

Filed under Miniatures.
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