It's just another manic Monday (but I'm glad it's not Sunday)

So as you've seen, I have started a new tshirt blog which I am hoping will promote some of the best stores on Cafepress (which is the company I sell my tshirts through). But I have also started a new metal related blog called Metaholic Music. This blog is an online fanzine type blog, and there is more than just myself contributing to it. So I think I'm going to be pretty busy with the 3 blogs, my store, working and everything else I need to do. Not complaining though!

What else is happening? Well I found a SWEET band on Myspace last week (when I say found, my mate told me about them, I didn't go out looking for them). They're called SubVerSi0N, and at the moment there are only 2 of them. Their tracks on their profile blew me away. They do sound slightly empty without the bass in there, but once they've got their full line up, I have a feeling these guys are going to go far!

It does make me jealous though. I'd love to be playing in a band again and writing music. I'd love to buy myself a lovely new bass and get practising again and see where it went. But I don't have the cash to do so, so the idea is still sat on a shelf gathering dust for the time being. I guess that's the reason I keep starting up metal groups and blogs as well as continuing on with my street teaming.

Today I'm going to the opticians. My eyesight has got to the stage where I'm squinting at the TV, which is rubbish! So off to Boots we go. I've seen some new specticals I want to buy too, that should match my new purpler hair!

Other than that, I'm gonna have to sort out covering letters. As if writing a CV wasn't hard enough eh? I just can't survive on the poor hours I've been given and being messed around while new people get given more hours than me. Nice to know staff are valued. I may go into a rant about this another time though.

And that's about it from here. Just take a look at the other blogs and let me know what you think!

UK Illegal Downloaders Face Internet Ban!

I was sat watching News 24 earlier (it's probably one of the main channels I watch), when I saw this news story http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/business/7240234.stm you may need to read this first for the rest to make sense.

Now, I am one of these terrible people who download music. I am also one of these people who BUY the albums I like after I've downloaded them. I bought so many albums last year by artists I had never heard of before! Threat Signal, Blinded Colony, Edge Of Sanity, Nightrage, even artists I've been listening to for a long time such as In Flames, Soilwork and my favourite band of all, Opeth, I found through downloading!

In fact, if it wasn't for my downloading habits, I doubt I'd be listening to half the bands I listen to today! I wouldn't own the majority of the CDs I own today, and I wouldn't be paying money to see these bands playing or buying their merchandise, because I would probably never would have found them otherwise!

Now I can understand that they're all upset when people download a new Kylie album, which would set you back all of £9.98, but unfortunatly, those of us who don't listen to radio friendly unit shifters (ah, managed to get a Nirvana reference in there) like Kylie, we will be the ones who suffer under this new "3 hits and you're out" proposal. It cost me £15 for my Threat Signal and Edge Of Sanity CDs, and when money is tight, and you don't want to be throwing that kind of cash at just anything, and these small bands on independent labels are REALLY going to struggle!

I'm still angry that metal albums cost so much more than those of more popular artists. I mean surely a CD costs the same to make either way? But I refuse to pay that amount of cash on a hunch I have about a band, before I hear the album! Hell I could be wasting £15 on the biggest amount of crap produced in the 21st Century, and I don't want to keep taking CDs back and swapping them because they're crap, I'll get banned from my own place of work!!!

But that is another rant for another day.

I would love to work out just how much money I have spent on the bands I have downloaded in the past on their CDs, tshirts/hoodies and gig tickets over the years. I'm sure it would add up to a very large amount of money! I mean there are plenty I've found without downloading through music magazines giving away free CDs, or listening to rock shows on the radio, but most of them I have found through downloading.

Even now, I am downloading new music from bands I'd never heard of before, to give them a try. If I like them, I will purchase them, if not, I will delete them. But I'd never heard of Charon or Theatre Of Tragedy until the other day. Theatre Of Tragedy I am pretty sure I will be buying after hearing a few of their tracks, but if I hadn't downloaded them, I would never have heard of them or contemplated buying anything by them.

So here is my little list of bands I have downloaded over the years, which I wouldn't have heard or bought stuff by otherwise. Note: I own CDs by all of these artists, albums I downloaded and others by them that I bought on the strength of the album I bought.

Opeth, In Flames, Soilwork, All That Remains, Threat Signal, Blinded Colony, Fear Factory, Edge Of Sanity, Guano Apes, Rammstein, Alice In Chains, Jerry Cantrell, Mark Lanegan, Tiamat, Scar Symmetry, Terror 2000, Coldseed, Nightrage, Nuclear Blast Allstars, Weezer, Spiritual Beggers, Factory 81, Mr Bungle, Faith No More, 36 Crazyfists, Lacuna Coil, Mad Capsule Markets... that is just a small handful of bands that I can think of off the top of my head. A lot of them I own ALL their albums (or the majority), a few I own their merchandise and quite a number I have seen (or want to see) live.

I don't always download. I do use Myspace a lot to look up bands and have a listen, but I find that a couple of tracks doesn't always show the bands in their best light, and they'll tend to put up tracks from their more recent stuff, or tracks they like a lot, rather than ones that sum up the band/artist as a whole.

If I were to become one of those banned from the internet for downloading music, and people like me who buy what they download and become fans of the bands, the industry will find they have more problems shifting these artists albums. And this in turn will be damaging for up and coming artists and their small independent labels who struggle enough as it is.

Metal Infestation

So you may have discovered from my previous postings, that I am rather fond of metal. No, I don't mean steel or silver! I mean that fantastic genre of music which is sometimes brutal and sometimes rather beautiful.

The problems I have found, since becoming a fan of metal, are the dreaded metal forums!!! I like talking to other metal fans, don't get me wrong, most of my mates are huge metallers, but these forums seem to be filled with over opinionated, elitist, egomaniacs. Now I'm opinionated, so if someone rubs me up the wrong way, I do get rather bitchy. So me in one of these forums = chaos!

Elitism in metal seems to be a big problem I have found over the past 10 years I've been listening. Yup I am fairly new compaired to most, that doesn't mean my opinion is less important than that of someone who's been listening to metal since they were in the womb, and my opinion isn't any more important than someone who's been into it all for six months.

There are a lot of bands which are classed under "nu metal" which a lot of the elitists won't accept as being metal. The Slipknots, Limp Bizkits and Korns of the world. Sure they're not the best bands on the planet, but they're metal whether these people like it or not (I'd rather not class them under metal, even if I do own their albums and am rather fond of Limp Bizkit).

I also hate the people who think their bands are better than yours. Sure I wind people up about their tastes, and I'll tell them they listen to crap metal, but I'm just a big wind up merchant, it's your choice at the end of the day (and if you want to listen to crap, so be it, haha!). I know not everyone has the supreme taste in music I have, but then again, it'd be boring if everyone did listen to the same as me, I'd never get to see the bands I wanted, and I'm sure if my mates didn't listen to different stuff, then I wouldn't discover new music, and that would be pretty dull!

So after one forum too many, fed up of the elitism and the insults (I will throw my horns any which way I like thank YOU very much), I decided I would start my own little metal community on Myspace, which is one where I have to approve people before they join (elitism? No, I just want to keep it free of spammers). It's actually turning into a nice little group, though very quiet at the moment.

Sound ideal? http://groups.myspace.com/MetalInfestation

Musical Phases/The Hunt For New Music

I have a terrible habit of having musical phases. I guess it ties in with the obsessive compulsive I'm sure I mentioned in a previous blog, which runs in my family, but I will go through a phase of listening to certain bands, a certain style or just one singular band. For example, I've been listening to a lot of Opeth, Blinded Colony and Threat Signal recently. Before that, I was between In Flames, Soilwork and Terror 2000, and the other year, I was only listening to industrial bands.

After a few weeks of listening to the same albums over and over, you get a little bit bored. I've been trying to bring in other bands, but I need something totally fresh to break me out of this. I have gone off all my metal at one point in the past and listened to crooner music, Rat Pack/Frank Sinatra/Dean Martin, for a good few weeks!

So I am currently seeking a mixture of bands really. I want to find more doom style stuff, along the same lines as Katatonia, Anathema, Tiamat, Swallow The Sun and Novembre (who have elements of melodeath in them), more melodeath stuff along the same lines as Opeth, Soilwork, In Flames and Blinded Colony, or just some metal which I really should have discovered a long time ago by myself!

I have a Last.FM account, http://www.last.fm/user/mentalinfest, which may help anyone wanting to recommend me some music. I am pretty fussy about vocals. It seems to drive people around the bend when they're recommending me new music! I would have been a big fan of Smashing Pumpkins, for example, if Billy Corgan didn't sound like he was singing through his nose! And I don't like black metal. I can't be doing with the high pitched girly sounding squeely vocals, I like my metal in the same way I like my men... With balls!

So please feel free to leave comments of recommendations for me to check out! I would really appreciate your help in my hunt for new music!

And On A Lighter Note...

One of my lovely online buddies, Paul, *waves*, sent me to these two videos earlier today. If you are easily offended, then I advise you don't watch these (no it's not dodgy pictures, it's some of the language that some may be offended by). But if you like your metal (and especially Machine Head) you should love these!

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ap_9Dff0HfA&feature=related

and

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Sbz1HmMtoQ4&feature=related

Funny as f**k!!!

Myspace, Friend or Foe?

Myspace is that lovely social networking site that everyone (and all their pets) are signed up to (yup even fictional characters). But I can't decide whether it's a good thing, or a bad thing...

The problem with Myspace is spam and friend collectors. Now I've been bad in the past and I have some of these "friend collectors" on my list. Why? I dunno really, I think I was being just as bad when I first signed up. At the same time, I wanted to add people that looked interesting that I might be able to have converstations with. Partly promoting, partly just having a general natter about my likes and dislikes (the usual every day converstations).

Through Myspace I have indeed met some of these awesome gems of people who will have fantastic conversations through comments or PMs (private messages that is) and I wouldn't trade these people for the world, even if I only know them through the t'internet (I met my other half through the net, and a lot of my closest mates who I've since met in person). I'm sure these people, who may be reading this, know who they are!

But these are a small minority of people who have added me to their friends lists over the past year or so that I've been on there.

The amount of bands, comedians, politicians and worst of all porn bots, that try to add you, is just unbelievable! Now if I want to add a band, I will do. I blocked the invites from them a long time ago when I was recieving about 20 band invites A DAY! So if you are a friend collector, don't ban the bands, you'll have a million friends in no time! Most of these bands are shit! People that have thought it was cool to get a band together and pump their bullshit out over the internet even though they haven't got a single ounce of talent between them.

Now there are good bands on there too, don't get me wrong. I've added a fair few to my list. But I find even they struggle to have geniune fans adding them, and they'll have a zillion people add them that ignore them, post "ADD ME" comments on their page and just added them because they had a zillion friends already.

Myspace isn't just for friends, it's for networking too. I've met a few really good contacts through there for my tshirt company. A few of these I will probably mention on here at some point, and show you a bit of what they do. But I find that even the networking is watered down with garbage too. The number of "artists" or "musicians" on there who are 14 year old girls and boys who would like to be these things to appear "cool" but haven't got any artistic flare at all.

I don't claim to be a designer, I like to draw, and though it's not everyone's cup of tea, some people actually like and buy the pictures I create on tshirts, stickers, pins etc. But I am no designer, you want to be looking up Travis Smith or DarkicoN for your CD covers or Squink!, Tado or Tim Biskup for your designer toys or others who do different design work in different shapes and forms who actually do it as a career. I just like to have a creative outlet, I'm not going to have my designs in a gallery, and I don't pretend that I ever will do. At the end of the day, I play and write music, I just haven't the equipment just now so I'm finding somewhere else to put my creative ideas into.

I do get upset when I post up a new blog or bulletin where no one (other than the select handful that read everything) reads them. I always miss bulletins because there are far too many people on my list that post up rubbish (PC4PC anyone?) so I miss the important bits, but I'm glad to see that I can now see on my "home" page when my friends post up a new blog so I can read and leave comments on them, or when they add new pictures or update stuff on their pages. I find that when I subscribe to people's blogs I end up forgetting to have a look, so this makes it a lot easier for me to see the latest stuff.

Even when mentioning this blog on Myspace, there were only a handful of people who responded (and/or looked) to one of the many bulletins I'd posted about it. It confirmed to me just how few people actually cared about what I was posting up, and gave more reason to why I started using this blog instead.

It's very frustrating when all you want is a response, a sign to say that people are paying attention whether it's another page view or a comment or a message relating to it. It's not just personal messages, it's asking for feedback, it's informing people, it's promoting, it's everything I post up that seems to just end up on the heap with everyone elses messages that people couldn't be bothered with. And I know it's not just me that gets a bit frustrated by it all or gets ignored.

Today I went to have a look at a blog posted up by a band I love to bits, Blinded Colony. Now they'd posted up on Tuesday this week (today being Thursday) asking if people could vote for them, and out of 13450 "friends" only 11 people (including myself) had bothered to vote for them. 11!!! It's pathetic! And out of those, I was the only one to reply to the original blog post to confirm I'd voted and to wish them luck.

Depressing.

So, Myspace, Friend or Foe? Well it's good in some ways, I've managed to get back in contact with people I thought I'd lost contact with (though did the same on Facebook), I've heard some new bands, and have managed to hear music by artists I probably wouldn't have otherwise, I've made some great contacts for the store, and found out bits and pieces faster than I would normally have done. But it's full of fake people, friend collectors and spammers, you just have to be aware of these things, and if you're smarter than me, only add people you already know!

The Day Today

Since a blog is meant to be a personal thing, I thought I would use this to post up stuff about me, and my thoughts on life. I never really kept a diary as such, and I probably won't keep this up for very long. I will probably rant and ramble about stuff, and it may not always make much sense, but bear with me! Hopefully it'll be of some interest to someone.

So why did I never keep a diary? Well my brain is a bizarre thing. I don't want to sound sorry for myself, it's not something I talk about a lot, but I have mild dyslexia and scotopic vision. I also have problems with my balance and co-ordination. Great start. But this means that I struggle to read, and though my spelling isn't too bad, getting ideas from my brain to the screen (or piece of paper) just doesn't seem to work. I've also got a bit of an issue with obsessive compulsive (it runs in my family), so I may end up writing on here every day for a month, then I'll get bored and find some other obsession.

What is scotopic vision? Well it's where there's a problem with the cones and rods in my eyes. I'm not too sure what the problem is, but it means that the way I see colours is slightly warped.

The best way to describe it is, try going close up to a television. Can you see how there are pixals that make up the colours? Yeah well that is how I see colours. I don't see blue as a solid colour, I see it as prodominantly blue but there are tiny dots of other colours (which keep moving) that help to make up the colour. I even see this in the pitch blackness and when my eyes are closed.

I didn't find out I was dyslexic until I got to college. Though I did well in my Standard Grade exams, I really struggled at school. I found reading a real chore, and the subjects I did well in were the ones that were artistic (music being my forte) or the ones where we discussed the subject, such as history. English was a real pain in the backside! And I always hated the bit where you had to read out loud, because I knew I'd end up struggling and some idiot in the class would start laughing.

Now it's not just reading and writing that's the problem. Organisation is something that I've ALWAYS struggled with. I even find I'm having problems with it now.

What do I mean? Well on my store, I never know what to do next! Do I add more designs? Do I change the layout? Do I add more sections? Do I start on the advertising? How the hell am I going to do that? And instead of sitting down and going through it, I get stressed by it and go into a strop! I just get so annoyed with myself for not being able to go through it logically to solve the problem.

Even in my "proper" job, I was told on Sunday that I needed a kick up the butt because I got too involved in the area I've basically taken on myself, when they actually want me to do other stuff as well. But because there's no structure that I've been told of, I end up not knowing where to start and work out what needs to be done straight away, and I go off on a tangent and try to do too many jobs at once. It's now proving to be a problem, and I'm not sure what to do! I love my job, but it doesn't look like they want to keep me, and I've gone from working full time before Christmas to working just Sundays (which I can't afford to do).

So that's the negatives.

On the positive side, I've been playing music since I was 3. I've been writing music since I was 7, performing since I was 9. I can pick up an instrument and play something that resembles a song pretty much straight away. My problem is, I can pick up an instrument, but as soon as you say "practice makes perfect" and expect me to take lessons and go home and learn stuff I don't like, I get turned off and move on to something else. I get bored pretty quickly.

That doesn't mean to say I won't learn stuff. Oh no! I have played in a couple of bands, we used to play shows, we practiced at least once a week. I loved it! Playing on stage gives you the greatest buzz ever! Even if you're pooping yourself before you go on stage, once you're there, you don't want to get back off of it again.

I lost my confidence after my last band split up, I've been trying to rebuild my confidence (after hitting rock bottom) for the past 5 or 6 years, and I don't just mean in the playing music sense either.

I was a pretty depressed teenager, but I got to a point where it was really bad! Something happened to me (I may tell you later on what that was) but it made me have to pull myself out of the dirge. And I forced myself back up the spiral that I'd been spinning down for years.

Now apart from meeting my other half, who has helped me a lot, I also pushed myself into Street Teaming for a music label, and that has helped me out a lot! I met some of the bestest mates I could ever imagine, boosted my confidence and managed to learn a bit more about organisation! I adore street teaming, which I still do (but for a different label)! It's so much fun to do. But that is a different story which I may come back to.

So that's a bit about me. Most of you won't have known that about me before, so now you will know a bit more about where I'm coming from. You'll learn more with all my posts I guess.

But for now I am signing off. I need to grab some Z's!

P.S. If you're wondering why Albert Einstein is on this blog, Einstein was also dyslexic, along with many other great inventors, artists, musicians etc.













Me aged 15 in my first band, Quarter.