Alex Holland

A new pair of Levis 501 jeans having the leather patch removed with a seam picker.

New jeans ritual. Reading Pattern Recognition by William Gibson twenty years ago made me properly understand that *I* own my clothes, and I can just remove any branding or labels that bother me. I do stop short of sanding down the rivets, though!

Expectant pets waiting for a delivery of 96 bags of dry food. No old b3tonians at Mars or Purina?

photo of six pumpkins carved into glowing jack-o'-lanterns, in front of a brick wall. a large pumpkin has the cow tools cow carved into it and another large pumpkin has the barn. in front of them are 4 small pumpkins, each carved with one of the cow tools on them. the lump pumpkin has no stem and the prongler pumpkin is laid sideways so that the stem lines up and forms the bottom half of the prongler, it's top half carved into the pumpkin.

happy halloween i am ready to confuse some trick-or-treaters

A 2CD Tim Hardin compilation called “Hang On To A Dream: The Verve Recordings”. It’s less of a compilation and more all his Verve studio albums crammed into two discs.

Climate of Hunter by Scott Walker. Old “Compact Price” Virgin CD. That ugly sash usually indicates a nicely mastered CD!

A few spun today. Tim Hardin in the afternoon - this cheap ‘94 set gets you Tim Hardin 1, 2 & 4, plus some bits, all well mastered.

For a rainy Halloween evening, Climate of Hunter by Scott Walker. A big Hardin fan who borrowed his album naming scheme, and covered a few of his tracks.

#cdFriday

Well I, 👏🏻 👏🏻 👏🏻 👏🏻 met a traveller,
From an antique land,
Who said, in the desert
Vast trunkless legs do staaaaaand!

The plaque says Ozyman-ian-ian-dias
Out in the lonely sands.

“Oh look”, 👏🏻 👏🏻 👏🏻 👏🏻 “on my works,
Ye mighty and despair”
While his shattered visage,
Up at the Sky does staaaaare…

I think I asked last year, but have you played the SMS Castle of Illusion? Totally distinct from and arguably better than the MD one!

"I DON'T NEED YOU TO FUCKING REWRITE WHAT I'VE JUST WRITTEN!"

Maybe she’s a wanted fugitive in the county of Northumberland? Very odd.

Not my photos, but here are some from York. Plenty of people openly taking photos and videos, no repercussions or bad vibes.

bsky.app/profile/brok...

Two CDs in front of an Aiwa portable CD player. - Milk Man by Deerhoof - Getz/Gilberto by Stan Getz and João Gilberto

Two new pickups for #cdFriday. I have a nice routine when working in the office of hitting up Oxfam Books for some randomised post-lunch listening.

Very surprised to find some Deerhoof! Getz/Gilberto is the old WG CD, nice warm analogue sound.

Odd, no photo restrictions at the York gig the night before. Maybe it’s a sit-down-gig thing? York was standing.

I didn’t mind the material being from the last three albums, she had the band for it. Couldn’t imagine them playing Mug Museum stuff, or the band from that era playing this.

It also becomes impossible to find threads with the same issue that were posted (and solved) previously.

I got a MiSTer last year, and found almost all forum and Reddit posting had ceased in about 2022 as the community migrated to Discord. As a result, it’s impossible to find up to date advice.

My cat Kiki, being a big furry fortune cookie.

I’d swear these two are related.

Getting on for 25 years ago now, but one Southport lad on my corridor at uni had never had pasta, pizza, curry, kebabs, Chinese food. Also no idea how to cook, do dishes, make bed, clean clothes, etc.

18 years babied in a 1950s time capsule, then abandoned to fend for himself at University. Cruel!

Cate Le Bon’s latest album, Michelangelo Dying, on CD.

Cate Le Bon’s other albums on CD. Me Oh My CYRK Mug Museum Crab Day Reward Pompeii

I saw Cate Le Bon play live in York on Tuesday, and picked up her latest album from the merch table.

It’s cracker, and the live show was nothing short of incredible. A real culmination of everything she’s been doing from Reward onwards.

Are there any other seven album runs this good?

#cdFriday

Will you employ the ghost of Tom of Finland as official city hoodlum costume designer?

I wish you success, but be prepared to swallow a massive dose of dramatic irony when the Mad Gear Gang kidnap your daughter Jessica.

They’re kind of *both* the first game, the development/licencing history is a real mess!

Amazing that two such great games came out of it.

a pixel art drawing of a waterfall and a person on a swing Alt: A gif of A Short Hike. Main character Claire the bird-thing is gliding down the side of a mountain in a fetching hat.

I feel like I’m sacrificing my retro credentials, but I’d honestly pick A Short Hike. It would be a fun, relaxed speed run (100% feathers, any % fish).

I’d pick Wonder Boy In Monster Land on SMS if I was allowed to use save states for the buggy ladder-lifts in the final dungeon.

The awfulness of the name astounds me. I get the whole Smith & Jones association, but it’s so awkward - not just the repeated phoneme between “G” and “Jones”, but “Joneses” is so much more of a hobbity mouthful than “Smiths”.

Even Tee-Gee-Jay is awkward to say. In its own way, it’s a masterclass.

SNES and MD were fairly even in my neighbourhood, at least after SF2 came out; I had a nice varied 16-bit diet as a result. On the flipside, I only ever played a NES in Dixons, and only saw a PAL Saturn once in its commercial lifetime.

Hope things pick up for you. Super Metroid will surely help!

I played a bit on a PAL SNES at a friends back in the day, the huge box with a bundled strategy guide. But I didn’t *really* play it until the SNES9x days, using the shift keys for shoulder buttons as my gamepad didn’t have them.

I’m fairly sure I’ve never beaten it on real/FPGA hardware. Hmm…

Presumably these were soft soap for any poor souls who picked this up as their first Lemmings game, but they fail to serve any of the tutorial purposes of the original game’s intro difficulty. I have learnt nothing about fall height, traps, how to use climbers, floaters, bombers etc. Very tacked on.

A cheap 1080p Monitor showing Oh No, More Lemmings being played on MiSTer/Amigavision.

With the nights drawing in, I’ve started playing Lemmings again, this time Oh No, More Lemmings.

Just cleared Tame difficulty (the first 20 levels), which was an utter waste of time. All trivial with no threats or falls, and with 20 of every skill. Mostly just bashing, didn’t lose a single Lem.

Gosh, there's a memory. I listened to this when it first went out in 2008... while on the ward of my local hospital, recovering after nearly dying of viral meningitis. It struck me at the time as probably the best adaptation of the Discworld that I'd ever encountered, in any medium.

Just started ONML last night - something about the nights drawing in called me back.

Tore through the first 10 levels in as many minutes! Looks like the Tame setting is there for people who never played the original Lemmings, very basic. Odd to find yourself looking forward to feeling frustrated.

A screenshot from How Long To Beat showing my active games, which are: - Donkey Kong Bananza (Switch 2) - Oh No! More Lemmings (Amiga, via MiSTer) - Please, Touch the Artwork (Mobile)

In terms of currently playing, as the old rhyme goes, “Something old, something new, something to play on the loo”.

Recent completions (and ratings) include River City Girls (8), Donut County (6), Gris (7), Lara Croft Go (8) and Zelda: Echoes of Wisdom (9).

Dig Man, star of highly memorable Lucasarts game The Dig, in ScummVM rendered using the crt-caligari shader.

TBH, you'll probably have a better time if you use ScummVM rather than the Steam executable. Instructions here: wiki.scummvm.org/index.php/Th...

ScummVM also supports RetroArch shaders now, so as well as vanilla pixels you can (optionally) use some very decent CRT emulation.

The spines of three Rolling Stones albums from the 1994 CD reissue series on Virgin. They all have a ™️ symbol after the band name. Rock and fucking roll.

The 1994 Rolling Stones CD reissues had this after the band name on the spines. Awful.

Weird, my whole life I’ve used the term “spong” for any kitchen tool of unidentifiable purpose. I had no idea it was an actual kitchen tool brand. I wonder if I subconsciously magpied it from somewhere?

It was a computer, with a Z80 CPU and an OS, just one laser focused on a target market - I think it booted into the word processor. A lot of people kept using them long after they were obsolete.

You could get games for it, there’s an interesting looking hi-res version of Head Over Heels.