Mr eel
New Metal Irregular #1
She Said Destroy - This City Speaks in Tongues
In my opinion their last LP was seriously under-rated and this LP is even better. Mechanistic and limber, it’s fucking vicious. It’s got all your metal tropes, but is precise and emotive — a record of tightly controlled and clearly expressed rage.
I have to make mention of the production on this album; it’s fantastic. The drums in particular are excellently recorded and mixed. Rather than a low-end rumble of kick-drums, they’re mixed into the mid-range, which suits the fast and mechanical rolls across the toms, the punctuated kicks and blast-beats.
Agalloch - The Mantle
Many black metal bands have been open to traditional/folk influences and honestly, the results are usually complete shit. Agalloch have dodged that bullet here, by framing the integration of folk in acoustic-rock. Beautiful melodies and crisp guitar. It doesn’t have the form of black metal, but it certainly shares the spirit of much of it. Yearning and sorrow and loss.
I honestly didn’t expect to like this album so much, but it’s very good.
Menace Ruine - The Die is Cast
Traditional European music passed through the lens of black metal. Cold and bitter elegies smothered in distortion and pinned down by dim, cavernous blast-beats. It’s a bizarre but beautiful combination.
Mord - Christendom Perished
Basically these guys are fucking pissed off and hate everything. Not particularly innovative, but if you want some harsh and unremitting black metal, these dudes will sort you out.
Getting the Rug Pulled From Under Your Feet
So, recently we’ve learned that Merb will be merged with Rails.
This is complete bullshit. I’m strongly opposed to the idea and I think it’s a huge mistake. I won’t enumerate all the reasons why — I think that’s all going to be thrashed to death in the coming days — but I do have a number of specific objections that I want to highlight.
Firstly, this means removing choice and competition between Merb and Rails, which despite the occasional friction, I considered to be a good thing. It doesn’t benefit the Ruby community to shift back to one monolithic framework.
I choose to use Merb for practical and philosophical reasons — basically it’s smaller, faster and easier to grasp as a whole. The development process has also always seemed more transparent and open to contributions from outside the core developers. It was a real viable choice to Rails.
But, what’s most irritating about this decision is the secrecy. There is a community of Merb users and developers who weren’t given a chance to comment on or participate in the choice. Instead we get one secretive clique schmoozing up with another secretive clique. It’s damned rude.
The end result is that the term Merb Community has no meaning to them. They don’t give a shit. If you ever used Merb, pimped it to clients or other developers, bought a Merb book, made a plugin, paid for training or went to Merb Camp — you’re being treated like a sucker. They’ve just given you a kick in the balls and you’re being told you’re gonna love it.
I’m damned bitter. I hate the idea and am disgusted at the lack of transparency and condecention implied in the decision.
I now have no interest in Merb at all. They can go to hell.
EDIT: For a good explanation of the merge, read this post by Matt Aimonetti. I’ve since tempered my views a little — although I’m still against the merge in principle and hate the secrecy surrounding the choice — Matt has helped put things into perspective.
Putting All My Stuff in One Place
For no particular reason, I decided to fiddle about with a bit of Javascript and rebuild my personal/portfolio site. It’s just a single page intended to act as a hub for all stuff I amuse myself with.
A few mildly interesting things for you web-wonks out there. It validates as XHTML 1.1 and CSS 2.1, something this blog doesn’t do — blogging software makes that hard. It degrades nicely without CSS, since the mark-up is nice and semantic. It also behaves itself if Javascript is missing — the CSS accounts for the default state and then has a few tweaks when Javascript is available.
That’s an interesting trick — when the JS loads, it attaches a ‘javascript’ class to the body tag. We can then use decedent selectors in our CSS to supply JS specific styles. Degrades nicely.
In the future I think I might experiment with some pre-loading or at least a loading display to make the experience a little nicer.
Lastly, this will break in Internet Explorer 6 and has some issues in Internet Explorer 7. I am indifferent. I’ll fix ‘em, just not right now — in your face Microsoft!