My Addictions #457-459

In Which: Our Hero Delves Into Yet More Narcissism, Albeit Narcissisum With A Fantastic Soundtrack.

Given recent circumstances I decided it would be better if I cut down on a few things, including beer and CDs, which seem to be my largest expenditure. Which I suppose is odd; I must be one of the few people remaining in the world that still buy real copies of albums.

Anyway, having thought about this, I thought I'd do a quick investigation and see exactly to what extent my CD-problem runs. As yet, I have not decided to investigate the depths of my beer-hobby, I know the results will be more frightening than my CD report, and that was scary enough.

Here are the CDs (and a couple of vinyl) I bought throughout October of this year, in chronological order:

Elgar/Stanford - 'Great Is The Lord'

Copland/Tavener/Vaughn Williams/Messiaen - 'Mass in G Minor and other A Cappella Works'

Nitkowski - 'Chauffeurs'

Hreda - 'Minnows/Dead Horses'

Tubelord - 'Propellor' single

Clark - 'Totems Flare'

and the accompanying 'Growls Garden' EP

Kong - 'Snake Magnet'

Fuck Buttons - 'Tarot Sport'

Oceansize - 'Home & Minor' EP

Tubelord - 'Our First American Friends'

Blakfish - 'Champions'

I bought all of these from Amazon or direct from the bands, except for the first two which came from the second hand CD shop on Notting Hill High Street. Possibly more worth commenting on is that they're all, without exception, British.

I'm not sure if any of this is interesting at all, I just felt the need to share it. Admission is the first step to rehabilitation.

Choons And That

In Which: Our Hero Discovers An Amazing New Website

Yeah so the days of Myspace are mercifully numbered. Found Soundcloud, which is incredibly useful, user friendly, and let's you store a huge amount of music for free. Sorted.

Worthful Loud by CarpetTheCeiling
Waltz For The Complacent by CarpetTheCeiling

Thanks Mum, Thanks Dad, Thanks Google

In Which: Our Hero Tires Of Repeated Error ID:0x800CC0fuckingE, Attempts To Set Up A New Email Account, And Quickly Tires Of His Confusingly Overused Name.

Given that my tiscali email is constructed of pure eShite, I have decided to take a step into the twentyfirst century and get myself an email address that actually enables me to send emails from an email program rather than the tiscali website, which is constructed from pure eWhiteNoise and adverts exclusive holidays in car insurance call centres and £10 a minute celebrity news updates. I am told that Googlemail is the best around, so I popped onto their website, and indeed, it has to have been about the easiest set-up procedure on the web. Except for the age old problem of what email address to create. Given my almost unbroken record for being three years behind everyone else, pretty much any permutation of my name has already been taken. For example, on trying benjamin.thompson, google suggested to me:

thompson.benjaminthompson.benj
or
benjamin.bthompson.thompson04

Presumably this means there are already three other 'benjamin.bthompson.thompson's out there. Anyway, having decided against using all my names (benjaminandrewhugothompson@googlemail is brutally long, and trust me, this gets very tedious very quickly - I should know, I have been battling with the terrible decision that lead me to create i_dont_like_jamie_theakston@hotmail.com for years) and several abbreviations of my middle names Bah! Thompson! or Benjaminah Thompson being both stupid sounding and ridiculous.

So I went with my old 'clever' avoidance of including chains of numbers and half names - ben.mcthompson. Not stupid or inappropriate at all, I think you'll agree.

So please, help me celebrate and send me an email, you can henceforth catch me at ben.mcthompson@googlemail.com