On the bus

On the bus, originally uploaded by SteveBeck.

on the way to Lee's. He offered to make us a slap-up roast! It was fuckin HUGE!!!!!!!! I still feel fat today

Blind Voyeurs - Stoner Jam

Here's my first video from Vimeo. Wanted to test how long my videos can be cos YouTube is limited to 10 minutes. It appears that the only limit on Vimeo is by the size of the video file! Sweet.


Blind Voyeurs - Stoner Jam from Steve Beck on Vimeo.

Vimeo

Just discovered a nice video site called Vimeo. It's like YouTube but without all the pointless videos of some guy being kicking in the nuts! This one's more about art and small magical packets of peoples lives. The videos have a better compression and are a lot better quality than YouTube. There's even a HD section. I've signed up, gonna start making videos and put them on there. Here's some of the cool stuff that you can find on there...



Stairwell from Ted on Vimeo.


HV20 Canon LOCUSTS - The Eighth Plague from scope2000 on Vimeo.

Pitchfork.tv

Check it out! It's a new video site from pitchfork.com. They have videos of live gigs, interviews, exclusive videos etc of lots of really cool bands. It's currently one of my favourite sites. Bookmark it

The Apprentice

I watched The Apprentice last night. Just caught the end of it actually. It's a great programme to watch if you enjoy seeing smug naive toffs make fools of themselves. Take this clip from last night's episode for example...



The guy in the middle did well considering. He nominated himself as team leader but the toffs didn't listen to him, purely based on the fact that he's 'lower class' than them. What a couple of pricks! And how slimey is that Nicolas?!?! This series could well be compulsive viewing

Portal

Well, as you can imagine I've been busy with my lovely new console (PS3). Discovered a new gem called Portal. It's part of the Orange Box which has Half Life 2, Half Life Episodes 1 and 2, Team Fortress 2 and, of course, Portal. I bought it cos I'd heard a lot about Portal from the Totally Rad Show and really wanted to try it as it sounded interesting. Believe me it's MORE than interesting... it's fuckin AMAZING! I've not played a game that gripped me like that for a loooooong time.



For those of you that don't know what Portal is here's a excerpt from the wikipedia entry...

Portal is a single-player first-person action/puzzle video game developed by Valve. The game consists of a series of puzzles which must be solved by teleporting the player’s character and other simple objects using a single handheld device, with the goal of getting to an objective point.

It has a really dark sense of humour. If you have a next gen console I seriously recomend you BUY IT!! Here's one of my favourite levels - Level 9

Playstation 3 RULES!!!

I've just got myself a new PS3! It's such a good machine. Really user friendly. I'm not anti-Xbox360 though, just want to make myself clear on that, but I just found that the user interface on the PS3 has a better feel than the clunky and confusing Xbox360 ... and yes I have tried navigating the menus. Also, I was really un-impressed with Halo3. When I played it it just felt like Halo2 but with a slightly better shine! Xbox360 has an add-on to enable you to watch HD-DVD's, so I'd have to pay extra to watch films on a now defunct video format!!! PS3 has Blu-Ray built in! PS3 has wireless internet so I connected it up to my network, it automatically updated my system software for me - I can now watch DivX movies on my PS3. Basically, this machine ticks all my boxes and Xbox360 just didn't! Also, no Ring of Death for me!

2 bottles of wine and a highlighting kit!

So Thursday was pay-day for me! Finally after 2 weeks of being totally skint I had some cash so I did some food shopping at Somerfield - got a few groceries in... and some wine of course. They've got Linderman's on offer right now so I thought I'd give it a go - a bottle of white and a bottle of red.
On Friday we opened up the red to go with our pork loin steaks and it tasted so good Lisa popped down to Somerfield to get another bottle. After opening the second bottle I asked Lisa if she was ever going to use that hair highlighting kit that she bought about a month ago. She says "D'ya know what? I was just thinking about using that!!"
I said "Well, I wanted to get the ol' clippers out on my hair this weekend. But if there's any left over highlighter can we stick in my hair to see what it looks like. If lit comes out shit we can just shave me head!"

Now I used to be a bottle blonde a couple of years ago but thought I'd stop to let my my hair rest, so this was kind of like 'for old times sake' type-thing. I only wanted to put slight highlights in it but cos my hair's short (and we were pissed) we ended up covering all my hair. So now I'm blonde again. Completely freaked me out when I woke up the next morning. I'd forgotten all about it!

Don't feel neglected...

Dear Blog,

Please don't feel neglected. I know I haven't been around for a while but I still love you. I promise I'll make it up to you. I know it sounds like an excuse but I've been busy. And then there was a time when I was feeling ill. I got a new mobile phone and I thought I could post on you from there but it didn't seem to want to work like the old one. I promise I haven't been with other blogs or cheated on you. Sure, I've been seeing facebook, flickr and myspace but they mean nothing to me. They're more like friends. Yes, I know I've just started seeing Pownce but it's not a replacement. And besides they all link back to you. You're the original. You're the best. I promise I won't leave it this long til I see you again. I'll even give you a facelift in the next couple of weeks, how's that? You feel better? Good. Wipe away those tears, have a cup of tea and you'll soon feel a right as rain.

Steve

Classic moments

I loved playing this gig. This was last May at the bank holiday weekend. My band, Blind Voyeurs, aired the track Chapter13 for the first time and it went down really well. Was really nervous about playing it at first but I soon got into it. Here it is recently uploaded to our YouTube channel...



This is proving to be a bit of a nightmare to record unfortunately!! We'll keep working on it though - I think it HAS to be on our first album

Celeb Blog No 1 - John Kricfalusi

The website of Ren & Stimpy artist John Kricfalusi, where he analyses cartoons and posts tips for upcoming animators. Interesting stuff, even if you lack the ambition to create scatological scribblings.

http://johnkstuff.blogspot.com/

The 50 Greatest Arcade Cabinet Designs in Video Game History

Check this out. From After Burner to Tron, this in-depth list covers over 3 decades of arcade games and ranks them based on the artwork and overall quality of the cabinets themselves rather than the actual games. See if your favorite arcade cabinet designs made the cut.

Click me to see the top 50 | digg story

What? You mean batman wasn't REAL???

Can't believe it! Next they're gonna tell me that wrestling is fake!

Film night

Just watched Clerks. Hadn't seen it in a while but it was still a great film. We're now in bed watching Clerks II cos I haven't seen it yet. I've had it in my DVD collection for ages but I just haven't got round to watching it. I dunno how much I'll get through before I fall asleep though (not that I'm saying it's a boring film .... well I haven't watched it yet so I could be !! But I doubt it cos it's a Kevin Smith film... although there was Jersey Girl (I know, I'll just shut up and continue!))



Anyway, Me and Lisa have been watching Hellboy over the last couple of nights and have fell asleep during it. We've now spread it out into a Hellboy mini series. Still got part three to watch. Which reminds me Hellboy II is coming out soon. I read a news story on Digg about Hellboy II recently saying that they're gonna have Kung Fu in it! Not sure about that. Goodnight

New Cloverfield Viral Footage

Since I heard about this film last year I've been been following the secrecy of JJ Abrams latest venture called Cloverfield. For those that don't know it's basically a moster movie where the plot 'Revolves around a monster attack in New York as told from the point of view of a small group of people.' (imbd) From what I've read it's going to be filmed in a Blair Witch style using nothing but hand held cameras, which should be interesting.

Anyway, a couple of short viral films have surfaced recently which show fake newsreel clips from around the world about an incident at an oil rig. One of the films is below...

...the rest can be found HERE - but they're essentially the same thing but in German and Spanish.

Happy New Year - 8 days late!

NYE was fun - we went to Scotty & Lottie's flat to hang out with them and see the new year in. Got wasted and had a general good time. I've got pics somewhere, I'll put some up on my flickr when/if I find them.

Xmas in general was good. How was yours?

Radiohead played a NYE gig which I missed. If you missed it too it's here...

Rascal cat

Caught in the act!!

Radiohead have made a packet out of me!

OK, so In Rainbows is still my most listened to album this year. I think they must've put some sorta weird sub-conscious hypnotism interweaved into this album as it's always in my mind. It was starting to make me feel bad that I'd only played a quid for the download as I was definitely getting WAY more than my value for money.

But then they announced the tour... well I had to go to that. So I ordered 2 tickets for me and Lisa - that cost near £100 after order fees etc.

...and then they announced that the diskbox was about to be discontinued and once the last of them have shipped out of the warehouse that was it: no more re-pressings or re-releases. So, knowing the potential rarity value of it I HAD to buy one of those too. So that's another £40 .... except I accidently bought 2 of them cos I didn't check my basket after my browser crashed during check out!...so that's actually £80 I'd spent!!!! Solution? Ebay!

My conclusion to this is that although a lot of people were thinking 'wow, Radiohead are gonna lose out of lots of money cos everyone's bought the download for free!' it turns out that if I were an average Radiohead fan then there will be millions more like me who would either have bought a ticket, a diskbox, or both! And Radiohead are still the world's biggest unsigned band so all the money goes to them, not the record company! I'd say that they've made a fuckin' mint!!!

Recording

Lee popped round to our flat on Sunday to do some recording. He needed to record his parts for Christening, Pale Blue Dot and we had a stab at the vocals for Ghost Written - but we'd left our popscreen at Andy's so we had to do a make-shift one out of a wire coat hanger and a t-shirt. Wasn't too happy with the recording though - Lee's voice was a bit shakey and the popscreen made his sound a bit muffled. We'll try it again another time. Other than that the other recordings were successfull and we had a laugh to boot!

Bill Bailey

Me and Lisa went to see Bill Bailey at the BIC on Saturday. It was amazing. I'd completely forgot that we'd bought tickets until about 2 weeks ago. We ordered the tickets in May after we saw him on the Jonathon Ross show and he was talking about his up-coming tour.

The German Market is in town again for Christmas. We had a steak burger and 2 glasses of Glühwein before we went to the concert. Glühwein is mulled wine and is great when you mix it with a pint of strong German lager - get's ya pissed quicker!

I'll upload a clip of Bill Bailey later on.