Rory Franklin

A friend of mine recently bought Rock Band for the Xbox 360. This game is absolutely fantastic. Fact.

It is a lot like Guitar Hero, except that it comes with a drum set and a microphone as well as a guitar. (I say comes with, you have to buy the intruments separately from the game) and the premise is that you start a band and go on tour, trying to get as many fans as possible (all the while making money from your gigs).

There is a reasonably robust character creation mode, although the one thing that annoys me about it is that (as far as I’m aware) you can’t use a character for more than one instrument (not at the same time, obviously, but between different band set ups). That is a minor inconvenience though, nothing major.

A while back, when I got my exam results, I went round to my friends house with a group of friends and we basically played Rock Band from about 10pm through till 3:30am. It was awesome! It was so much fun playing with everyone, and at one point we had 6 people playing at once. Two guitarists, a singer, and three people on the drums (one person using the left drumstick, another with the right drumstick and the third person using the foot pedal!).

My friend lent me the instruments and game while he was at Glastonbury festival so I’ve been trying to improve a little. I was absolutely terrible at the drums previously, and could play Bass on medium pretty confidently. I’m still absolutely terrible at the drums! But at least I can play through songs on Easy mode! I have trouble with the foot pedal and doing three things at once basically! I’ve become more confident playing Lead Guitar, but still struggle on some songs at Medium difficulty.

It’s safe to say that I’ve avoided the singing aspect of the game as I really can’t sing! It doesn’t help that I don’t know many of the words at all!

The 10th studio album, Rising Down, by the Grammy-winning group The Roots was released on Monday (in the UK).

I’ve only had a chance to listen to it through a couple of times (I’ll explain further on in this post why), but I really like it and find the addition of many more guest appearances (from artists such as Malik B and Dice Raw [previously part of The Roots] as well as Mos Def, Talib Kweli, Common, Truck North, Wale and Chrisette Michele to name a few) to be quite refreshing as usually The Roots stray away from heavy use of guest appearances. Not that these appearances are carrying the record at all. They do in fact compliment the band rather well.

I’m a big fan of The Roots, and can’t wait for them to tour the UK again so I can see their new live show. I saw them twice last year (well, December 2006 and July 2007) and absolutely loved their live show. They are simply amazing live. Fact.
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The title of this entry is somewhat misleading, but it does hold true in some respects. More and more services are appearing on the internet that allow you to publish information about yourself in some for or another. Whether it is information about what you are currently doing (Twitter) or photos you’ve taken (Flickr), user generated content is booming. Just look at how popular websites like YouTube are.

There are various other sites that allow you to publish information about yourself however, and they are slightly more interesting to me. It’s all well and good letting someone know that you are currently eating last nights leftover meal (Ok, so I may have told Nicola that I was eating reheated Dominos pizza earlier), but that doesn’t really tell me all that much. Seeing what people have been listening to recently and having music recommended to you based on your own personal music habits is something that is quite exciting.
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How many people associate certain songs, artists or albums with certain periods of their lives or even just a particular moment?

I know I do, and I guess that lots of other people do too but it is something that I find rather interesting. I listen to a lot of music, I’m usually listening to music unless I’m somewhere that requires me to have full use of my hearing or if I’m sleeping. I’ll be the first to admit that my music tastes are a little bit rubbish, but I’ve been branching out a lot more in recent years (I’m fairly sure I’ve blogged about this in the past).

So, back on to the subject of this entry… There are albums that remind me of periods of weeks because during that time all I listened to was that album, or there are songs and artists that remind me of particular people either because they recommended them to me, discovered said artist/song at the same time as me or the song itself has some kind of association with someone (their name is in the title/lyrics somewhere etc.).

Well, things have been kind of hectic recently, so not many updates. Just thought i’d say hi. I have various assignments for my course at university that need doing, so that is starting to take a lot of my time up. I’ve also been working on a portfolio script (reasonably basic, I don’t need anything too complicated) but that has been put on the backburner for a little while whilst I finish my assignments.

I also love America. Well, more specifically, a certain company who I recently bought some CD’s from. I have an insatiable urge to listen to music. I love it, and can’t get enough of it. However, I also like to support the artists who produce the music I so dearly love. This, understandably, gets expensive and being a student with not a huge amount of money (no job currently, so i’m living off fumes!) makes things harder. Recently i’ve been getting some money here and there from various sources (nothing illegal, just projects and web hosting etc.) which has mostly gone on buying CD’s. Back to the original point, I recently bought 5 CD’s from UndergroundHipHop.com which set me back just over $100 (around £58 with conversion rates). Seeing as one CD was a special edition, limited release (7500 copies), and some of the others were CD’s a few years old, I thought it was quite a reasonable price. I also got to choose a free gift (out of about 30 options - ranging from CD’s to posters) with my purchase. I chose a poster, because I thought it was quite cool. Now, international shipping takes 7-14 days so I was expecting about 10 days or so. It arrived today however, the 7th day since it was shipped, with everything I ordered, plus more! It came with two free CD’s (one of which is being advertised on the site as free with every order over $35) and two extra posters.

Result.