So, as those of you who read (lj)faithinfire will already know, yesterday I was formally diagnosed with depression. This is a good thing, arguably, as it gives me some framework for handling the overwhelming sense of "oh shit, universe falling to pieces" that I've been suffering for the last few weeks and assuming was somehow entirely my own fault.

So while I was at home feeling sorry for myself and very small indeed, koilungfish went out and came home with lookingforsigns, and they brought me presents! ♥♥♥ There were cookies! And Seiber bought me pizza! And... and, and, and...

There were also a whole five booster packs from the Pirates CSG that Seiber and me have been fangirling over lately! Including one from the "Fire & Steel" expansion that has the gorgeous Switchblade and Scorpion miniatures, which have tiny moving parts! Blades that turn on miniature plastic cogs! Now, Seiber had been lucky enough to get a Switchblade ship, HMS Salient, in our very first packs of boosters and I'd been profoundly jealous. But...

As I tore open the Fire & Steel pack, I saw the glint of silver. My eyes widened. Silver-stamped cards! Black super-rare corner tags! All of them! And...

...three entire cards that went to make up a great, pale, hideous monster of a ship. Grey and black and dust white, the pallid shade of old skin and the rotten muted red of dead, stripped meat. And dazzling, silver, twin scythelike blades...

A super-rare, Cursed-fleet Switchblade. Oh. My. GODS.

Her name is Skin Flayer and she is gorgeous. I cannot believe that a random booster pack my friends grabbed for me as a "please cheer up!" present could manage to be the single most coveted set in the whole expansion - witness the bit of paper that fell out after the Skin Flayer (not to mention the Silver Coffin, the Soul Mark treasure card, and Tabitha McWarren, the Cursed pirate girl who joined the crews of the damned when she threw herself from a clifftop for the sake of a dead pirate lover): a note that read "Congratulations! You just dug up the most sought-after treasure chest in the Pirates of the Cursed Seas Fire and Steel pocketmodel game! It contains every super-rare game piece in the set!"

I mean, how extraordinary is that, in those particular circumstances? I think something out there loves me at least as much as my friends do. ♥♥♥

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

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

If you can hear this sound somewhere in the distance:

./~BURN DOWN JERUSALEM
My wish is your command...!./~

it is almost certainly me singing along on the astral plane loudly enough to be actually audible. Cannot... stop... listening... to Dream Evil's Crusader's Anthem. And every time I play it I seem to be turning it up another notch.

Have not felt like this since was seventeen and playing air guitar while standing on bed listening to Dio and Manowar. Currently not sure which of mp3 player, heart, brain, and universe is going to explode first. \m/^_^\m/ ♥ ♥ ♥

SEND HELP. AND BIGGER SPEAKERS.

The Navigator

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

Just watched 3:10 to Yuma with (lj)oml404 and I honestly can't recommend it highly enough. It's a classic Western of the old school, beautifully shot, laden with character and that special kind of controlled emotion that the genre does so well. Short version of the premise: a crippled war veteran whose ranch is on the verge of repossession volunteers, in exchange for the money that can save his family, to help escort a captured outlaw to the "3:10 to Yuma", the prison train that will take him up to his execution, and the long and convoluted road there causes both men to reassess their own ideas of honour, courage and loyalty. Both Christian Bale as burned-out good guy Dan Evans and Russell Crowe as charismatic, blackhearted villain Ben Wade turn in magnificent performances, and the ending moved me to the brink of tears. I won't say more because it's one I'd honestly rather people saw than were spoilered for, but it's wonderful. See it!

We followed that up with Jet Li's Fearless, which while it doesn't grab me so hard as some of the Chinese epics I've seen is certainly pretty good. It doesn't quite have the emotional intensity of things like House of Flying Daggers or Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon - mostly, I suspect, because Jet Li's acting honestly isn't all that - but any great martial arts movie should stand or fall on its fight scenes, and in that regard Fearless delivers and how. (Although at a couple of moments I admit I was thinking "dude, this is actually just ancient and honourable Chinese version of the WWE, isn't it?")

And finally, while we're talking videology - Youtube blindsided me this morning with one of the more startling things I've ever found on it. This is an old bit of camcorder footage from a Mayhem rehearsal, back in 1990 when both Euronymous and Dead were still in the band. I clicked this with interest, having seen a snippet of the footage before, and for a moment I thought it was actually some kind of joke - because - oh, just click it and you'll see. The opening segment looks like one of those dream sequences from some feelgood family movie, or possibly a Timotei advert. Like it couldn't possibly have less to do with the lords of true necro Black Metal.

Except of course it isn't a joke, it's a real clip. Boys and girls, Per Yngve "Dead" Ohlin, singer for Mayhem and Morbid, suicide victim at the age of twentyone, legend of the Black Metal scene - and someone who got himself caught on camera, out of all the poses he could have been throwing, like that. Flowers in his hair, no less. Laughing in the sunshine and then ducking into the shade to join his friends and pick up the mic and sing his heart out like the world would never end. If someone had written that sequence into a Mayhem fanfic they'd have been crucified for OOC, and it's real. I love that.

(I know most of you won't know or care what this is about, or why it affects me so much - but for the two or three people who will, there you go. Inner Circle Kodak moment, just for you guys. *s*)

Laters,
The Navigator

PS - and for the one person who might want to know this, keep watching that Mayhem video if you've ever wanted a good look at Hellhammer's nipples. Seriously, I have no idea what was going on there. O_O

-N.

For once, I did NOT ask to be awake at five in the morning. But I am. Also I think I have found the song I want to slice my own ribcage open for so I can tuck it into the cavity of my heart and never be without it. Song in question is Goteki's Shinjuku Lullaby, as if everything they've already done to me over the years wasn't enough, now there's this and it's so much of the truth and beauty of this perfect fucking perfect world that... I don't have words, and I just typoed that as "I don't have worlds", which is not right at all because the problem is more that I have too many of those. Every time I think it can't get betterworsewhatever it does, and every time is one more step towards an ultimate mystery that's an infinite number of steps away and somehow, all the same, this is progress.

...oh, and then there's a remix which may actually be more beautiful and therefore hurt more than the original. I think I want to die. Please. Now, quietly, lying in a gutter in the grey before the dawn, with the sky turning silver-blue between the tops of the skyscrapers and the gulls calling above, and this song playing in my ears. Maybe that way I'd rest in peace. I almost think I would.

(Not suicidal, btw. Just want to die this way. Not the same thing. Don't worry.)

The Navigator, staring at the sky and watching the neons blinking...