This is a little YouTube video that shows a photoshoot of Angelina Jolie's when she was a teen. As you will see, she is a lovely looking girl, but that is not the reason I am posting this in my blog. The reason is the feeling that I am having watching this: dread. Here is a 16 years old girl, faking all the emotions in all the pictures that are made of her, with an ice cool professionalism, chewing gum when the film is being changed in the camera. You can imagine what kind of pictures will result from this shoot, when all of this is probably filmed in a small humid room with people watching TV at its more stupidest. Can you imagine trying to concentrate with that noise around? If you ever thought Angelina got to where she is because of her looks only, think again. This little human robot has good programming.

No, you are not mistaken, the voice for this band is Juliette Lewis herself, a pretty known actress that usually interprets beautifully screwed up characters. No wonder her music is similar :) But when I first heard of the band I didn't even bother to listen to them. Not another acting celebrity trying to sing! But when I found out the vocal on Prodigy's Spitfire and Hot Ride songs was Juliette Lewis, I changed my mind. And I am glad I did. Here is the weird and nicely sung Hot Kiss.



Licks:
MySpace page for Juliette & the Licks
Wikipedia entry
Juliette & the Licks fan site

I am obsessed by this song, I am just listening to it again and again, typing at hyperspeed while I am doing it (I wish I would type meaningful things, too :) ). The video itself is from Smack My Bitch Up, but YouTube again blocked a cool clip so I had to take another from some other place. I couldn't find the original video for the song. (One that wasn't a fan made anime clip :-|)

Update: even worse, all video platforms other than Youtube have been sued out of existence and even on YouTube the only versions of this song you find are live concerts. It's amazing: a beloved video of a famous song just vanished off the Internet... If you find it somewhere, please let me know. Meanwhile, this is a remix version...



Usage: Pump up the volume and get in front of a keyboard on monday morning. :)

Long time since I posted a song on the blog. This is one old, but good song AND video. Rarely you find a truly good combination of sound and presentation nowadays. Quoting from the Wikipedia article for this song: Radiohead frontman Thom Yorke wrote the song about a narcissistic friend of his, which on closer inspection is showcased by the imagery in the lyrics - a parallel to earlier My Iron Lung EP track "Lewis [Mistreated]". He also says that it was somewhat of a competition between him and Jonny Greenwood to see who could fit the most chords into a song. "Just" is especially notable for Greenwood's guitar solo, which showcases some of his first uses of the Digitech Whammy Pedal. The guitar work in the song has been seen as an homage to post-punk band Magazine, one of Radiohead's key influences at the time.



The video reminds me of an old sci-fi story I've read about a word that, when heard by a person, would transform them into a purple jelly cone, including the one saying it. When someone finally understood and accepted the reality of it, it all turned into a race to stop a deaf person going to a radio station and speaking the word. He was immune, you see. Anyway, enjoy.

Now this is one cool song. If the quality would have been just a little bit better... Anyway, I have been searching the entire videosphere looking for something even remotely similar. Bjork is weird, but usually restrained in her singing. In this video she shows the power in that tiny Icelandic body. Still searching... Skin sounds great as always, but I feel she can't really keep up :)



You might want to see this video as well. High quality and a collection of weird instruments, but not my favourite way of remixing a song.

Another game in the Vampire universe, this time everything is happening in the present, with a lowly human being Embraced out of a sudden by a rebelious vampire. The outcome is that your "sire" is killed and you are left alone to discover what a vampire really is.



Now, at the start of the game I thought to myself "Redemption was way better". It's true, Bloodlines is trully 3D, but you have 1 character only. It does employ a lot of elements from first person shooters, but the only thing the main character seems to be able to do is take orders from everybody. But then the story really became interesting. The annoying lack of free will remained a thorn in my side for the rest of the game, but with each quest I had to finish there appeared more ways to solve problems, more and more innovative quests (not just go, kill, exit like in Redemption).

What I found really cool is the little quiz you get to answer in the beginning of the game. The answers to it determine the vampire "clan" you belong to and they give you some special abilities accordingly. It guessed me right, too. I got to be Gangrel and killed almost all enemies with axe or sword, even if they had Steyr AUG :). That means that they had a way of ending any situation according to the chosen clan, which is very cool indeed as programming goes. Also, the 3D characters are really well defined. Chicks are sexy, movements are natural and facial expressions are almost realistic!

As with Redemption, the story is really well defined and together at the start of the game then it goes faster and faster as the end approaches. I didn't like that. Also, when you are close to the end and you want to escape a collapsing cave using an inflatable boat the game crashes to Windows desktop. What you need to do, actually what you need to do from the start of the game is go download the patch and install it. Here is the link. Also, the minimum requirements are 512MB of memory, but you will find yourself unable to control your character from time to time, and in this case you must tweak the game a little. It will provide a modest help, the only real solution I found is to save the game when this happends and then some memory gets freed or whatever. You can also try all kinds of console commands provided you start the game with the -console command line option.

My conclusion: another great game probably plagued by deadline management. They were planning even a multiplayer option in the game, but they scratched it. The ending also allowed for at least a dozen continuations, but they didn't pursue this. Bottom line: if you liked Redemption, but you thought it wasn't "killy" enough or you wanted to be more FPS like, you will love this one.

Update: Damn YouTube and their lawsuits! I had to change the song with another live performance, but it isn't that good. Well, the quality of the video is better, but not so emotional.

This is a song that I find myself liking while listening to my music in the background. It's a pretty difficult feat, since I usually type away and don't really pay attention to what I listen. I am putting the live show from Spain, because I think that the official video for this song is crap. Enjoy!

I was looking for songs by David Bowie, one of my favourite singers, but I wanted to find something different than the brilliant Under Pressure which he performed together with Freddie Mercury and which is my "subway song" :) And I found another "coproduction", this time he teamed up with Nine Inch Nails, another band that I enjoy (Perfect Drug is their best song, I think, although I may interpret it more personally than others).



The funny thing is that I remembered to post a Bowie song when I heard a quote from Criminal Minds, a series I am watching:
Garcia: [To Reid and Morgan] When I was in the ambulance I could hear the song 'Heroes' playing in my head. I kept flashing in and out of consciousness and I remember thinking, 'Wait. Is David Bowie really God?'

Here is the video for Adrenaline:



Pleymo is a French band, friends of Enhancer and Aqme, two other French bands that I enjoy listening to. Check them out:
French Wikipedia page
English Wikipedia page
Pleymo official site
Myspace page

Hey, a long time since I posted a song. Here is a Japanese rock+hip pop video for one of the soundtrack songs of Naruto.



And if you like it, listen some more on this MySpace site.

There are a lot of people in the world having problem with lateral parking. It is not only difficult to manage when you have nothing to go on but the little tiny images in the car mirrors, but stressful as well, as normally the procedure is done on a crowded street with drivers behind you urging you to do it faster.

Not a problem anymore! The Chinese have found the perfect way of parking in under 5 seconds! Here is a video tutorial on how to do it:



Here is an alternative solution.

I saw this chick sing "They" on Mtv. She was stripping in space in that video, a thing that I found a bit distasteful, even if it did link to a Jane Fonda scene in a film called Barbarella, Queen of the Galaxy. But that's the MTV world: strip if you want to get noticed. True enough, I haven't seen any other of her videos on any music television since, but then I stopped watching them.

Jem (real name Jemma Griffiths) is a Welsh singer and this is (I guess) the original video of "They". She is young, beautiful, but also has a nice voice and sound. Check her out at her official web site or the MySpace site.

I remembered today of a song that I liked to listen to called Everything for Free, by K's Choice. Back then (oh, my tired bones) the Internet was not yet as... evolved as these days and you couldn't really get all the discography of an artist in a few minutes, so I only listened to this one song that was also on MTV.

I am putting the video clip here, but really do look into the singer, Sarah Bettens, who also has a solo project beyond K's Choice and has a lot of videos on YouTube. Here are some sites you can visit:

	K's Choice	Sarah Bettens
Official Site	X	X
Myspace Site	X	X
Wikipedia Site	X	X

[youtube:AxY6KrqGnCw]

This song is one of my latest favourites, even if the sound itself is a bit too much like country music, the lyrics are really funny. I wasn't able to find the video for the song, so here is a random video one.



Poe, by her real name Ann Danielewski is the daughter of the Polish director Tad Danielewski and is singing since 1990. Look for her other songs as well, some are really smart and they sound pretty cool.

Yes! A message for women everywhere :) Garbage has better songs, but this one is with dedication ;)