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I'm not into posting spoilers about movies all over the internet in the name of post-mortem-type debates, so I'll keep it simple.

No Brick isn't the new Donnie Darko.
Yes it has flaws.
Yes it's still brilliant.
Go see it.
Or wait for the director's cut.
But that might be a while.
Thank you for your time.

Muse is going to conquer the world. Through the medium of pop.

There are a small collection of bands who have been "My Favorite Band" at one time or another, and three of them have released new singles showcasing new albums: Primal Scream, Gomez and Muse. Normally this would be a great thing, unfortunately Gomez's "Girlshapedlovedrug" and Primal Scream's "Country Girl" seemed to have been bleached of all personality and come out of the wash as godawful bland MOR rubbish. It'll probably sell pretty well to the James-Blunt-buyers of this world, but is nevertheless cack. I only hope there's some more interesting stuff on the albums.

On the other hand Muse have injected a heavy dose of New York clubscene into their song "Supermassive Black Hole", which sounds a million miles away from their previous material, and it's just fabulous. It's one of those songs that only gets better the louder it's played, and it's the first new song for ages that got me dancing around the room. Can't wait to hear it in a club. Huzzah!

In other news,
- M83 are my current "OMG THIS IS AMAZING" band. A few of their songs give me goosebumps. Synth-ambient stuff… Think Lemon Jelly but darker. And apparently they're French.
- Tal's Party was sweet. By the time we got home it was getting light. See Tal's pics here.
- I have a brand-spanking new SATA 300GB HDD, which gives me so much room it's ridiculous. I'm copying shit and not-deleting-stuff, just for kicks! Woo! And when that acreage eventually runs out I also have a shiny new DVD-RW sitting on my desk. I should probably install it into the machine but as I have no writable DVDs anyways it's not really high on my todo list. …Below blogging rubbish apparantly.
- Anybody caught paying good money to watch the Da Vinci Code will be prodded with with muddy sticks.

In response to Laurie's post, because these little discussions are nifty.

""Coolness" is shorthand for "the respect of your peers"."
Says who monkey boy? It's a little dodgy pulling a definition of 'cool' out of your ass at the beginning of a post and the claiming to be cooler that the snow man's frosty bits at the end of it.

Regarding coolness, Mikey's comment on your post was spot on.

Regarding Myspace, listen to 'I've Been Stalking You On MySpace' by John B, it's funny and true as well as good.

Regarding you geekpoints: cash some of them in to fix your permalinking.

(Personally I regard "coolness" as doing and/or seeing interesting stuff.)

Is Myspace "cool"? No. Why? Because I knew about it a long time ago. This doesn't make me cool, because I know people who knew about it waaay before I did. Maybe they're cool? Probably. Besides it's well on the way to becoming the most popular website on the Internet off the back of teenaged social insecurities. It's way too popular now to be /really/ cool, never mind that you have to be 16 with a 10 o'clock curfue to properly appreciate it.

Grime is pretty good but nothing I'd go to see. Think Dizzy Rascle++. Is it cool? God only knows; it's totally not my scene for so many reasons. I've heard a few good cross-over tracks but in general it's a pretty alien culture.

Is blogging cool? Probably not when I started it a few years back, and certainly not now. Yet the vast majority still don't really know what it is.

Is Gmail cool? I'd say I joined that one early (Thanks Laur!), and so back then maybe it was. It's well pass? now, though again the vast majority of people still dutifully log on to Hotmail's bloated system. Which had maybe the worst GUI I've ever seen, by the way.

I like Death Cab a lot, as you probably know. That's not cool though, as I only got into them a couple of years ago despite the fact that they have been going since '97. They have a load of material, I think I have 75+ songs from them on this machine, and they're consistently in the top 5 artists played on Last.fm. (Beaten at the moment by The Beatles, Radiohead, Coldplay and the Red Hot Chili Peppers; not small bands.) To add insult to injury they "sold out" to big record label a little while ago. So definitely not cool then. So how come so few people know who they are here?

My point being: coolness is all relative, and thus complete bollocks. In any case anyone who harbours even the faintest suspicion that they might be cool after having danced drunkenly at the front of the stage at Top Banana needs their head examined.

It's a glorious sunny morning, admittedly. But I could really have done without the hundreds of miniature avian participants in what has flatteringly been dubbed "the morning chorus" waking me up at 5am to tell me so. It was still very nice at 8am; there was really no need for the panic.

What with the New Job (hurrah!) I now spend all day mucking around in dev environments and tweaking photoshop documents without actually doing any design, and having seen the latest CSS Reboot has got me all itchy to get back to the sketchpad. (Partly because I'm relatively unimpressed with most of them) Although it seems a shame to redesign Mochaholic so soon it'll be a while before I have concrete set of ideas so this beige mess will be around for a while.

It's local election day! Go vote n stuff!