OMbot

Mausolea show last night at the Lobot Gallery in Oakland. Easily our best performance....the night turned weird as the junkie punks starting dancing with some WASTED hispanic soccer dads. There should be some photos to follow.

Saw OM on Saturday night. They are one of the off-shoots of Sleep... the other being High on Fire. They were OK, droning/sabbath/bass/drums with some chanted vocals.

that's it.

Oppo

I've been setting up the home theater and just bought one of these: Oppo DV-970HD . It kicks major ass. It's played pretty much every format i've thrown at it - DivX, .mpeg, PAL (auto-converted), crappy burned dvd-r's, VCD....a couple movie files on a picture disc wouldn't play but i could view the .jpeg's. There's also a hack for region free which is nice. I almost went with a DVD recorder but have read a bunch of bad reviews and a friend returned one he just bought. Screw it, I have a solid player that will play all the random formats I have. Next up is the DVD-A test. Matt (Mausolea bass player) was an engineer on the Talking Heads surround project so he's giving me a copy to check out along with Metallica's Black Album.

Games

I'm sure some of these games are old news but I don't care. I've been playing them and they are fun.

PS2:

• Katamari Damacy - Quite possibly the greatest game of all time. Just play it and shut up!
  
• Splinter Cell: Pandora's Tomorrow - My first "stealth" game experience. Pretty awesome and a good practice on restraint. Every time I say fuck it and decide to shoot my way through I get bitch-slapped back.

PC:
Finished URU and now I'm dying for Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion. I need to upgrade my Vid Card though. Also, once I get DSL back I'm going to get some online gaming going. Some friends are playing Civilization 4 and I think I'll try it.

Board:
Just went to my old roommate's bachelor party which consisted of playing board games and Tapas. First off, fuck Tapas. $30 for a couple slices of cheese and an olive.

• Robo Rally - You program robots to manuever around a warehouse to collect flags. Crazy game.
  
• Settlers of Catan - I've been wanting to play this game for a long time. It didn't disappoint. Quite a few details but once you get playing it flows nicely.

Games are cool.

Void

Thursday night was the big 400 Blows/Oxbow/The Mass/Made out of Babies/Black Elk show. Good times, although I felt like I was going to puke during the first song. (Ed). I didn't though and got it together for the rest of the set. We played OK.. we all felt we played a better set on sunday in San Diego playing to 5 kids. Oh well.

Black Elk - great band from Portland. Eric the guitarist is a badass. He rocks on a Steinberger and used to play for Wadsworth. This band is much more technical hardcore madness.

Made out of Babies - great heavy band from NY on Neurot. I kinda missed most of their set as I was tending to duties outside the bar.

I've posted about Oxbow and 400 Blows before. 400 blows had the new guitarist, and although he rocked out the songs i missed Christian. It seemed exactly like what it was - 400 Blows with a guy playing the guitar parts.

Friday night was the second Mausolea show at the Stork Club in Oakland. We played with Ari Ari from Indiana, Black Elk again and Totimoshi. Matt broke a bass string 30 seconds into our first song. We played decently...there's still a lot of kinks to work out. Totimoshi played a new song which was heavy and good. They are touring this October and if they come through Chicago check 'em out.

The two week show-a-thon is over and I'm looking forward to a weekend of nothingness.

Back

Just got back from the LA/San Diego shows. Pretty much a bust. We spent most of our band fund on gas and played to no one. On Friday we played at The Scene in Glendale with Longmont Potion Castle. He's famed for his prank phone calls but has a one man band shred-a-thon that he performs. Awesome.

SoCal is tough. ....fuck it, we watched the World Cup finals, ate too much mexican food and spent some quality time killing each other on Quake III.

Alignment

Holy shit. Well, this could be THE dream Chicago sports season. With Ben Wallace on board I say the Bulls at least make the Eastern Finals. The Bears better make the freakin' Super Bowl. And, although I'm a Cubs fan (sorry ed), the Sox could round out the Chicago triple crown.

World Series title
Super Bowl title
NBA title

Who's with me!!