Amon Amarth gig, bbq, etc

Yesterday, I got up at the early hour of 11am and struggled out of the house 2 hours later to pick up some groceries from Tesco, and a cheap 19" TFT monitor from Compuplus. It was a cheap monitor, and already I have spotted the first problem with it. Unlike a CRT which has a large flat area on the top, TFTs do not, leading to the issue which I will demonstrate visually:



Hopefully I can get that sorted out soon, and things will be ok! One game I have that runs in 1024x768 does indeed look shit on this monitor, as expected. That should be ok to increase to 1280x1024 though. Not sure if I can get Oblivion to run smoothly at that resolution, but I can't play it anyway right now so it's not all that important.

After that, I made an epic 2 minute trek to the house of Chris/Gareth/Mr Pink where a BBQ was ensuing. Unfortunately the skills were not quite on a par with denatone who had given a masterclass last weekend, but eventually the coals did get going and food did get cooked. I also watched yourapocalypse get beaten on Guitar Hero 2, a game I'd not actually seen before yesterday. It seems quite fun, but it's all about the controller - something Nintendo seem to have realised.

Then I headed down to the pub to meet terrorhol and gloomie_cookie, and had a quick chat with darkwaveart before heading across to the Amon Amarth/Finntroll gig. The doors had apparently opened 15 minutes late at 7:15, and by the time I got in there at 7:35, I'd already missed openers Octavia Sperati. That was a shame, but then I'd already seen them twice already so no great loss. Anyway, upon getting in there, the room was rammed (sold out apparently), the air conditioning was turned off, and someone said the heating was on. FFS. It was much too hot to bother with standing in the middle and I couldn't get to the front, so I took up position near the back where my view was no worse but I was in less danger of evaporating.

Finntroll came on, were good, and left. Is it really 4 years since I last saw them? Time passes so quickly. :( Probably because I waste half of my life away writing Livejournal entries. Oh well.

Then Amon Amarth. Not much to say really - they played a good set, of all the 'classics', and put in an almost perfect performance despite it being way too hot for such music. I didn't enjoy it as much as I would have liked because I couldn't really see anything and the temperature was distracting. Such is life, I suppose.

Afterwards, most of us stuck around for the club night, which in my case seemed to largely involve watching kingamj indulge in deliberately ridiculous dancing, and l0stxstar indulge in leading various men around the club by the hand (tsk tsk!) as well as having an annoying trendy bloke harass me, insisting he is a 'rocker', how he used to have hair like me, etc. Moron. Also not impressed at having to wait 20m to get served a drink at one point, just because the woman wouldn't come down our end of the bar. Great service!

Today, laundry will be done, I may finish off mixing this recalcitrant music track, and I will meet Allan for a quiet drink. Rock. \m/