Okay, I have SO run out of money now, but life? Life is GOOD.

( Six things that have made me happy this week! )

So yes, that's what I'm currently being happy about. I hope you guys are all good, too. *attempts to hand around the happy in case anyone would like some*

Laters,
Rath

So I googled "moogle" just now for reasons that are not particularly important, and I am now in stitches over this. (Read the whole way down - this is a rare, golden exception to the "never read comments on the internet" rule!) I also discovered that moogle.co.uk is the homepage of a National Lottery syndicate, bizarrely. I am very confused as to why, and also I thought that was illegal/against the Lottery rules. Someone needs to buy that domain and fill it with actual moogles, stat.

In other news, zeldenthuis, I've just found something for the strange covers collection, in case you haven't heard this: Monumentum doing "Fade to Grey". Italian goth-dark-metallers do weird things. O_O

I'm also currently in love with Mono Inc's "Grown", which I can't find on Youtube but the lyrics are here. Because, well, yes. O_O (Although whoever transcribed those lyrics didn't have a very good ear, but they're close.)

[The administration thanks you for your time. This post was brought to you by http://www.relentlessenergy.com, because there are so many empties around the house now that even I'm starting to wonder if I have a problem. >.> ]

Laters,
Rath

This could've been a post about how miserable I was. But y'know what? Bad day, I defy you. Six things that are making me happy today!

1) Bon Jovi, because Iron Maiden may be my all-time favourite band, but Bon Jovi were my first favourite band and they still make me smile when not much else can. I am going to be unashamedly sappy and make you all listen to Thank You For Loving Me. And also It's My Life, which is very appropriate to my current mood. ^_^

2) Being into the Good Bit of my 2009 WWE calendar, ie the last five months which consists almost entirely of my favourite Superstars. This month, I have Edge smirking from my bedroom wall. There are so many worse ways to wake up than this. ^_^

3) Equilibrium, who are brilliant. I'm particularly in love with Ruf in der Wind, which is the wildest dancing song I've heard in forever. Seriously, if I put this on and shut my eyes I can feel the whole sky spin above me - it's amazing. ♥ (For the German speakers on my friendslist, here are the lyrics - and if anyone has time to poke them, I'd love to know roughly what they mean! ^_^)

4) Text from Mum, to say that the tiny stray black kitten who was outside their house at the weekend has been reunited with his owners! ^_^ I'm so relieved. Tiny kitten was very tiny, should not have been out on his own!

5) My headcast. No special reason today, I just love all of them very much and they make my life a better place by leaning over my shoulder and poking me. ♥

6) And finally, as if to justify my decision not to whinge, I got a phone call right after I started this post to ask if I wanted to come and view more houses! ^_^ Why yes, I do. Excellent!

Laters,
Rath

*IS TEN THOUSAND TIMES DED*

Oh my... I cannot articulate how much I love this, mostly because I am laughing too hard. But seriously, this has just given me an entire year's worth of joy in the space of five minutes.

Okay, everyone knows The Wind Beneath My Wings, right? Here's Michael Ball's version, which I happen to like, for reference (excuse the Xena, but this was the only version of it I could find on Youtube). Classic, slow, sentimental, much loved song you can play at weddings, funerals and your Dad's sixtieth birthday bash. You know the one.

Now, here are my beloved, beloved boys Sonata Arctica (YES, the Finnish metal band, for those of you sitting at the back) doing their version of this pop classic. I... am INCOHERENT, seriously. Oh, my BOYS. This is simultaneously utterly and soaringly gorgeous and the funniest thing I have heard ALL DECADE. ~♥~♥~♥~♥~♥~♥~♥~♥~♥~♥~♥~♥~♥~♥~

Dear power metal scene, and Sonata Arctica in particular, I love you very, very much. Please do not ever, ever change, and in particular please do not ever develop ANY sense of how you look to people whose senses of the ridiculous have developed beyond the embryonic. Please keep doing wonderful, ludicrous, utterly unselfconscious things like this for ever and ever, because the world could more easily spare a million scoffers than it could spare one band THIS AWESOME. ^_^

...I would totally dance to this if it ever got played in a club. And if they play it live next time I see them, I bet I cry. ^_^

Laters,
Rath

Okay, does anyone feel like helping out a Rath? I need music recommendations, because I think I have just noticed an odd quirk in my musical tastes, and I want to see if there is a real pattern here or just an illusory one...

The thing is, W. was kind enough to give me the first Eisbrecher album (and the second one, but I haven't listened to that one as much yet) and I've been devouring it enthusiastically. My favourite tracks are, without question, Willkommen im Nichts and Fanatica. Schwarze Witwe is hanging around third place, tieing for now with Herz Steht Still (which is gorgeous but being left aside for now cos it doesn't fit the topic under discussion).

Now, what's interesting about these three tracks? All of them are quite heavy, quite crunchy, solidly rhythmical, but they have - either in the backing vocals (Schwarze Witwe), the main vocals (Willkommen im Nichts), or both (Fanatica), a bizarrely conspicuous pop influence. The prechorus of Willkommen im Nichts has a brilliant looping, dipping pattern that really does sound like a pop chorus in a horrible, black, spiky, grinning disguise, and the English chorus of Fanatica probably wouldn't sound out of place on a chart single if it weren't backed by distorted synths and being powered from underneath by a vocalist who sounds like he's snarling through a static generator.

Which got me thinking, now, what other bands and songs do I like that feel like this? And the list is interestingly long. Lordi - are a melodic hard rock band with a harsh lead vocal, using a lot of pop and rock lyrical concepts with a dark twist. Devilish Presley - feel like the Fifties like the Fifties never were, twisted sideways by Johnny and Jacqui's sneering snarls and skewed lyrical concepts. Marilyn Manson covering Sweet Dreams. Children of Bodom covering Bed of Nails. Carpathian Forest covering the Cure. Power metal versions of ABBA songs. W.A.S.P. ballads. The list goes on. And as far as I can nail down, the mystic link between them all is the combination of pop/rock melody structures and/or mirrorverse-style twists on mainstream musical ideas, with vocals that are theoretically too harsh for but nevertheless follow the conventions of the melodic structure.

So. Dear flist, do any of you have any songs that sound like they fit this description (any genre from metal to electronica to goth to whatever, guitars not obligatory!) that you think I should hear? Caveat: I still tend to strongly dislike filks, "novelty" covers or pisstakes, some of which would fall into the description above. Some degree of straight face and musical integrity has to be involved, so the band in question has to be doing this style because it's what they want to sound like, rather than because they're looking at the audience going "are we funny yet?" But that aside, I'm sure there must be more Stuff That Sounds Like This, so if anyone has any, please wave it at me? Thank you!

In other news, a) I am going against the trend and actually kind of gutted at what happened to Jeff Hardy at Extreme Rules (and I really hope his shoulder and finger heal up quick, best wishes Jeff!), b) I think I have a cold, and c) I need more sleep. >_< How are you guys?

Laters,
Rath

Bon Jovi, Heartbreak Eyes.

This apparently is a lost demo from the first Bon Jovi album. The user who posted it has a ton of similar outtakes, demos and so on (man, gonna be here all night!), but Bon Jovi has a particular place in my heart, so this is something a little special for me.

Cos... one of the fucked up things, for me, about the invention of sound and video capture technology is that even while it gives us chance to have the past at our fingertips, it really rams home the fact that you can't have it all, ever. There's more material already on record than any one person could ever sift for everything they wanted to hear, and much of it locked in vaults or forgotten in attics where you couldn't get to it anyway; and that's before you start asking for the stuff that wasn't caught on the magic reels, the one-nights-only that nobody taped, the old episodes that the BBC threw out. The rehearsals where someone achieved that one perfect riff while the deck wasn't running.

And even what we do capture and get to general release, is never the same as being there. This is why I love eighties hair metal videos and watch them with tears in my eyes; they're like tiny perfect splinters, sent shattering to the winds when the nineties put a sledgehammer through my sonic birthright and sent the pieces flying through time on the precarious wings of VH1 Classic and fans' old tape collections. And somehow, miraculously, they survived until now, twenty years later, they can embed themselves under my skin and dump their small cargos of preserved light and sound and beauty into my veins. I'm staring through a Youtube-sized, pixellated window into an age that doesn't exist any more and probably never did outside the daydreams of a pack of fluffy-haired adolescents in tight trousers, and it hurts so much to know that it was broken before I ever got there - but I can never stop hunting for more pieces.

...maybe some part of me still does believe that one day I'll find them all and be able to put it back together. *soft smile*

Rath

Or possibly memes with ketchup. (What? I'm hungry.)

First, one from sternenstaub! The aim of this one - you comment, and I give you five words/concepts/things that I associate with you. You then trot back to your own journal with these thingies, and write about each of them in turn. Then do the same for anyone who asks for five of their own!

( Here are my five! )

So, er, yes, those were fun, thank you Lupie, anyone who wants to play please comment below!

I was going to do two memes in one post but I think I'll split them... this is getting long...

Laters,
The Navigator

Hello everybody...

First, I'd like to just direct anyone who doesn't read my Livejournal ((lj)faithinfire) over there briefly to this post featuring a photo of my NEW TATTOO! ^____^ Mostly I posted this as a thank you to everyone who's donated to the Rath Tattoo Fund over the last couple of years - so if that's you, please go and see!

Meanwhile, in other news, I am having terminally bad luck with matters musical today. A moment of silence, please, for a fallen trooper - the half-dead ghettoblaster in our kitchen saw fit to irretrievably chew up my old cassette copy of the Last Action Hero soundtrack. :( It's not that I can't replace it, but that tape was one of my old tapes, from when I was a teenager; one of the ones I picked up for cheap in one of the tiny, dusty old record stores in Bradford that I haunted on Friday afternoons when I'd sneaked out of school. Those tapes, the ones I bought with stashed dinner money back before I was even old enough to go to gigs on my own, are practically like horcruxes or something - there's a piece of my soul in every one, and to have one of them die such a sorry death is more gutting than it has any right to be. "Farewell my friend, you will be missed!" :(

And in the meantime, I also just discovered I've lost my copy of The Rasmus's Dead Letters, which is really annoying because I've had the gorgeous "F-F-F-Falling" stuck in my head for a day and a half now and really want to play it again on something other than YouTube. Did I lend that CD to anyone, by any chance? *peers forlornly into the abyss*

Laters,
Rath

Calling all stations... come in, England...

IRON MAIDEN have been nominated for the Brit Awards under "Best British Live Act"! (Along with, if anyone cares, Coldplay, Elbow, Scouting For Girls and the Verve - do any of those people do anything interesting onstage? I wouldn't know...)

Now, this category is judged by public vote - and you all know what happens when the words "Iron Maiden" and "fan support" turn up in the same sentence. *grins* So if anyone would like to join me in contributing to the metal scene's greatest mass polling exercise since Eurovision 06, please walk this way and get clicking!

Ithankyou!

Laters,
Rath

I didn't post this when I got in last night in the end because it was late and I was exhausted. So Friday's six, first:

1. Finishing work for the holidays! This is very important, obviously.
2. Getting a pack of the bracelet-type glowsticks on our table at the Downing Christmas dinner! And being very amused that all my colleagues were too, ah, mainstream to know what they were and how to make them work. *g* I stole two green ones in honour of DX, and a pink and a blue one just for the hell of it.
3. The fact that the puddings at said Christmas dinner CAME UP THROUGH THE FLOOR. Murray Edwards College (aka New Hall), where we were eating, has a servery area that can be raised through the middle of the dining hall floor, and they used this to bring up the dessert plates! Dimmed lights, sparkthrowers on the corners of the counters, and the James Bond theme as an accompaniment (O_O) - it was a fantastic piece of spectacle. Whoever came up with that one deserves a bonus.
4. Managing, early in the evening, to hit the DJ with one of those long balloons that you blow up and let go of and they go flying across the room. SCORE! (I wasn't even aiming for him, but don't tell anyone.)
5. Playing air guitar to Status Quo in front of all my colleagues. Admittedly that was the only thing they played at the disco that called for air guitar at all, but still. And the video was up on the screens (Rockin' All Over The World, for the record) and my gods, the Quo boys were adorable when they were young. ^_^
6. Stopping off on the way home to lie on the grass out on the fens, just basking in the knowledge that I was free for the next two weeks. I love the night, and the sky, and being alone just sometimes.

Admittedly (lj)naranek stood me up for said dinner, but you can't have everything. *pokes and grins*

And today, ie Saturday:

1. Being on holiday, which is still making me happy!
2. The epic success that was the Triad early-Christmas-dinner. I made a full roast dinner with all the trimmings and ate until I can currently barely move. No fewer than FOUR kinds of pudding were involved. I rock.
3. Getting awesome Christmas presents from my friends, the absolute pinnacle of which has to be the pageful of chibis that deepbluesquee drew for me. There are no words for how thrilled I am with this.
4. Decorating the Christmas tree(s) and getting tinsel all over everything and everywhere, including on my own head (where it still is).
5. Spending the evening belting out Twisted Sister, Lordi, Zodiac Mindwarp, Blue Oyster Cult and Whitesnake. I fucking love proper hard rock. I love feeling my heart lift and my feet tap and not being able to do a damn thing to stop it. And I love how easy it is to do anything from cooking to dishes to cleaning when I've got something to sing along with, too. Best of the night had to be Whitesnake's Saints and Sinners, which was one of the first rock albums I ever owned (taped for me by my cousin when I was only about fourteen) and I always love to hear again. I'm such a sucker for good memories. ^_^
6. The simple delight of hanging out with people I love... and who can reduce me to laughing until I think I'm going to turn inside out. Never underestimate the joys of daft, perverted, and completely deranged friends.

So yeah. Good day. Gooooooood day. *contented sigh* How are you guys?

Hail Slaanesh and happy Christmas,
The Navigator

[This is Thursday's post that I didn't make because the internet crashed. Friday's later on!]

More than half way! Though to be honest I don't know that I'm going to want to stop this after eight days... it's good for my mood as it makes me take a mental note of everything good that happens over the day. ^_^ So today:

1. lookingforsigns bought me a gorgeous opalite stone! Opalite is magic - in low light it's the blue-green white of winter ice, but any light shining through it comes out on the other side a deep, glowing red-orange colour. Like fire at the heart of winter... so beautiful I feel like I should have gone blind just staring into it. Thank you, sis. *s*
2. Looking at the moldavite pendants in Nomads, at sternenstaub's suggestion. I know exactly which one I want - it's a piece of rough moldavite held by silver wire, with a pink cabochon-cut stone above it. I held it in my hands for a few moments and my palms tingled for the next five minutes. Unfortunately it costs *whisper* a hundred and twenty pounds, so I will almost certainly never have it... but it made me happy to look at and touch it for a bit anyway. (Moldavite is earth that was thrown up by a meteorite impact and fell back fused into olive-green glassy stone, by the bye - it's weird and wonderful in the highest degree!)
3. Indigo's smoked-salmon-and-cream-cheese bagels - awesome comfort food - and their caramel slices, which today were absolutely fantastic. Basic-style good food is one of life's most underrated luxuries.
4. Koi doing an impression of a set of bagpipes attacking somebody. This is a noise I don't think I can physically describe, but I laughed until it hurt. Koi is great at sound effects. ^_^
5. Various mental images involving attractive men, whips, and black leather. Why my brain is generating this sort of thing today I do not know but I am not about to complain.
6. Music! Within Temptation's The Silent Force is a gorgeous, gorgeous album. *sighs happily*

Laters,
Rath

Tuesday's post. Today started out with a certain degree of fail, but has improved along the way. So:

1. As I was walking to work, passing a guy who was just starting his car. As he turned the key, the stereo came on along with the engine, sending a huge deep thumping blast of bass and guitars echoing into the hitherto silent street. It was just... exhilarating. Thanks, unknown guy!
2. Crossing Parker's Piece after dark, and seeing the ice rink had purple light-pollution glare above it instead of the eerie orange that I'm more used to. The big bright blue-white lights that illumine the rink must have been scattering really brightly off the ice to make that effect happen and it was gorgeous. The entire world needs to switch to blue-violet streetlighting now please!
3. The German Market, again on Parker's Piece. It's a whole lot of little faux-log-cabin things strung with lights, selling wooden toys and reindeer hides (which are all stroky and soft!) and strange candy and honey and who knows what else. Absolutely magic, especially after dark when the lights make it look like fairyland or something.
4. Getting #2 of Ghost Rider: Danny Ketch. Which was apparently written by someone who was aiming to make me, personally, fall over and die. That perfectly matched to one of my emotional hot buttons. Hell yeah!
5. On my way home, seeing A Car. I don't know what it was, though my brain is saying Dodge or Mustang (I am not as hot on IDing muscle cars as I should be, and it was dark) but anyway. Big, matt-black with no badging or decals of any kind, those beautiful hard brutal lines that you just don't get since they invented wind-tunnel design, jacked up painfully high at the back end. Massive bulge in the hood for the air intakes (this is the car equivalent of a roll of socks down the front of a pair of very tight pants), old silver-and-black license plates (which I adore) and an engine that sounded even at near-idle like something monstrous snarling for blood. Guh. I'm fairly sure the driver saw me drooling and I honestly don't mind if he did. Best part? Really heavy traffic on Newmarket Road so I got a good long stare at it instead of just a quick one-eighty and a "whoa!" as is so often the case with cars like that. Yay!
6. Getting chatted to at the Calling by someone I actually really quite liked. He was a nice guy, older than me AND still has long hair which is an automatic several point bonus, and danced to almost all the same stuff as me. Cool! ^_^

Oh, and a bonus 6a for Oliver's Calling set which was awesome and included Harsh Generation, Raising Cain, All Along the Crooked Way...

Right, sleep. NOW. Goodnight everyone!

Laters,
Rath

PS Bonus #6b, also, for the WWE After The Bell video of Matt and Jeff from Armageddon (warning - spoilers, obviously). Triple H hugging Jeff! And Edge doing the ZOMG-wide-eyes face over the announce table! (Yes, I admit it, I love the fights but I'm a total sucker for the fluff. *g*)

Hey, it's my kind of meme. This is Sunday's post, since I always fuck up my datestamps by being awake late. (Monday's, all being well, will consist of me flailing about WWE Armageddon... oh my gods can't wait... ^_^)

Six things today that make me happy:

1. Seeing my friends when I haven't seen them in too long.
2. Realising that I CAN get the high part in Never Have More - I just need to have my hands warmed up enough to have proper circulation.
3. Playing Never Again. I cannot get enough of that song.
4. Lordi's cover of Accept's Midnight Mover, which I have a terrible song-crush on today. *swoon*
5. The way my hair is just the right length to swish across my face like flying silk when I bang my head (as a result of #3 and #4 above). It feels gorgeous.
6. Authors who can tell a good story without making more mistakes than I feel obliged to fix to earn my keep. *happy copy-editor!*

(Why six? Because. ^_^)

Love,
Rath

Dingo, House Without A Name - I would never have heard of this song if Lordi hadn't done very evil things to it. Thank you Lordi, as ever!

Domination Black, The House of 1000 Eyes - someone, somewhere, will love this song as much as I do. Right?

Also, I have succumbed to temptation and now own a DX belt buckle, as an early Christmas present to myself. Ah, DX shinies - the ultimate mixed message. "Yes! I'm a rebel - and I have twenty bucks worth of corporate merchandising right here to prove it!" ~~God knows god knows I love this perfect world...~~ ^_^

Rath

I can't, cos I'm in CB2s, but never mind, because I always knew the Eagles were cooler than people gave them credit for. This song is just... yes. Exactly like this, dammit!

And a tribute to the power of the OTP that is Google/Youtube, too! All I had of this song was the chorus refrain and a memory of how the guitars sounded, and from that, I found it in less than fifteen minutes. How cool is that?

Laters,
Rath

I'd never heard this song before today, but I picked it up while Youtube-surfing and suddenly found myself with my eyes stinging: Belinda Carlisle, Summer Rain. Usually in my life, when I've been lonely it's been because I was missing one particular person who I already loved... but this song?

Just makes me wish I was in love at all.

And wish I was in America, but that's kinda a given with me. *s*

Though speaking of America, the other song I've been falling in love with today (for the millionth time, but, y'know) is Black Velvet, which I link here just in case there's one person left in the world who doesn't know it and happens to be reading my journal. I don't feel up to articulating right now why I love this song so much, but I really do.

Hmm. Looking at my journal, I note that of my last ten posts, more than half have been locked "private". This is not the way I used to do things. Guess I don't feel like sharing at the moment... I'm in the kind of mood lately where if you met me face to face, I'd be distantly moody and kicking at small stones on the asphalt and not really able to explain why. Halfway between not feeling sure I want to say anything, and not being convinced that anyone wants to hear it anyway.

Oh, well. When we can't speak for ourselves... that's what music's for.

Laters,
The Navigator

(lj)oml404 told me this last night but I only just got around to checking the internet for details - Goteki have reformed! I am stupidly happy about this. Apparently, they had as much fun at their one-off show in London as I and the rest of the audience did. ^____^

New songs. More gigs! Gotekiiiiiiii! *strings self with party lights in celebration and races away to dig the CDs back out of the top of the stack, waving arms gleefully*

(Also, have the Myspace page open in the other tab and the onboard player just randomly spun up Shinjuku Lullaby. ♥)

Laters,
Rath

I had a dream last night that I was in the middle of nowhere with a few people I know, and we were looking up at the sky and I saw what must have been a million million shooting stars all at once. It was as though the whole sky had always been one great dome of clear glass, and someone had smashed it and all the pieces were falling at once. I don't know why I dreamed that, but I'm just posting it because it's the kind of image you want to remember.

Having mentioned that... the rest of this post will now consist of stuff I want to show to everyone. In no particular order:

I've just discovered Tiny Ghosts. This is a strange little photocomic that isn't really "comic", but a sequence of little thought-provoking two-sentence stories. Mental jumping points, if you will. Some of it is a little too sentimental for my taste (the anti-war ones and the more mawkish romantic ones in particular sometimes cross the line) but the more macabre, weird or just plain leftfield ones are great. This one in particular struck me with some nameless sense of realisation, and left me looking round like I'd just seen the world slip sideways an inch; this one feels awfully believable; this one is sheer poetry.

I think my absolute favourite has, though, to be this one.

Meanwhile, also in the department of visual arts, I was talking to Koi while it was sitting with its graphics tablet the other night, and asked "draw me something Black Metal?" The result? This, which is absolutely awesome though you may have to adjust your screen brightness a bit to actually see it, looking at how it's come out on the work monitor. ¬.¬ Thank you Koi!

Finally, I've been haunted of late by a piece of music. I was in the cinema and caught the trailer for Babylon AD, and my ears instantly pricked up and I went "I know that piece, where do I know it from?" My brain distantly pinged a flag that said Sunshine, and, yes, it's the same piece of music that was on the trailer for that! It turns out to be called Lux Aeterna, and has appeared in about a million different guises on various movie soundtracks/trailers including Requiem for a Dream and, apparently, a trailer for The Two Towers. It's also on Youtube, where it's been used as a songvid piece for every remotely heroic/depressing fandom you can think of. Seriously, have a listen to a few of the versions. It's a gorgeous, spectral piece with a refrain that makes me think for some reason of the mirror scene at the end of Prince of Darkness - it sounds to me like a key, like a song that if played in the right place at the right moment could unlock our reality and create a gateway to another one. One where there's something that really, really wants to be on our side of the gate... and that we really, really don't want here, even if we don't know about it yet. I have no idea why this song affects me like this, but...

Okay, post long enough for now...

Laters,
The Navigator

I'm sitting on a Saturday morning, installing software on my laptop, downloading old Vond albums from Rapidshare, and listening to Mortiis's The Grudge while I wait for Koi to get up and watch Hellraiser: Hell on Earth with me. (Yes, downloading is the root of all evil; no, my chances of picking up proper copies of the albums in question are fuck-all and they'll be second-hand anyway if I do. I will if I can.) I'm decidedly unused to this kind of mixture of privacy and free time. Usually, these days, I'm either with someone else, working, or trying to sleep. Frequently all three at once. >.>

*muses* Late-era Mortiis is actually quite uneasy listening. It's always difficult to listen to something that raw when it's got that much pain and honesty screaming through it... it's like Nine Inch Nails or Type O Negative only a lot worse because I've always genuinely cared about Mortiis. There's not much more lame, I know, than wishing you could reach out to someone who's got far more fans and fame than you have, because you know you'd never get close to them without them thinking you're just another fan - but that doesn't stop me, however cliched it be, from poring over Secrets Of My Kingdom and the lyrics of the albums and thinking "yes, that, and I wish I could tell you to your face that I know it's all true!"

In other news, Koi has discovered to its amusement that I can be rendered absolutely harmless and turned into a ball of fluff by the simple process of picking up my plushie skeleton and animating it in my general direction. Try it yourself next time you visit me and watch the result, I gather it's extremely entertaining.

[Update: Koi has come down, flopped next to me, and glomped my arm. Typing this left handed. Laters...]

The Navigator