Father Black

Been meaning to upgrade my home office desktop for quite some time now.  Purchased my current machine parts in 2008(!) and since then I’ve upgraded the RAM once and the GPU twice.  

Suffice to say, I’ve gotten as much as I can get out of it now and it’s definitely time for upgrade.  This because doubly obvious when I’m putting artwork together and Photoshop takes forever to do stuff that should be done relatively quickly!

I bought a Dell XPS 17 laptop back in April which at the time was the first of the Dell higher spec range laptop that had the new i7 Sandybridge processors.  Awesome machine and I use it pretty much every day but when at home I tend to use my desktop as it’s more suited for design and gaming (and my dual monitors 22” monitors make life much easier).

So I hopped on over to the awesome Overclockers and built a machine last night.  The price tag I came up with was good but I noticed they had a pre-built machine that with a few customisations was not far off the mark and to be a bit lazy, bought that instead.

Intel Core i5 2500K 3.30GHz @ 4.40GHz DDR3
GeForce GTX 570 1280MB GDDR5
Kingston HyperX Genesis Grey 8GB (2x4GB) DDR3
500 GB SATA HDD
Corsair Force Series 3 60GB SATA SSD
Windows 7 Professional 64-Bit

Sex in a case I think!  Nice upgradability too.

99.9% of the time I totally blank out the adverts that appear on Facebook because they are mostly totally irrelevant to me, poorly targetted and quite often just totally spammy.

Today however, I noticed a nice little picture of Jim appearing on the sidebar with a little bit of text plugging what this picture was about.  It did what it was supposed to do and actually lured me into clicking it!

The page that loaded depicted a not so impressive mosaic portrait of Jim

But, I thought, perhaps this was a giant mosaic and would look pretty killer in my office.  On the right of this, as you can see, are a couple of thumbnails, one of which affords you a virtual preview of how it would look on a wall.

Not quite the vast piece of art I had imagined.  As this thing is made of just colour stained tile, no doubt machined (contrary to what the description actually says), I thought it’d be a nice affordable purchase and went back to see what the seller was asking for it.  Bear in mind this is from some supposed ART site.

NEARLY TWO FUCKING GRAND!  I promptly exited the page and marked the Facebook add as ABSURD, never to be seen again.

Nothing like milking the name of a dead artist is there?  Which brings me on to my second point.

The super-smashing-great SONISPHERE Festival that happens here in the UK every year just made an announcement regarding who’s playing.  I actually knew about a chunk of the bands slated to play, including the legendary QUEEN.

Now, Queen, much like The Doors are a band I’ve loved since childhood (perhaps not as much as The Doors, but pretty damn close).  When Freddie died, the Queen-machine kept on a’turnin’ and generating millions and millions for the Queen brand.  That was fine with me.

Re-releases, remasters, b-sides, rarities, clothing lines, tacky merch, Broadway & West End shows etc. etc.  All very corporate, but fair enough, Brian May, Roger Taylor and John Deacon (who is a bit at odds with the other 2 guys!) deserve to garner some bonuses from the band they each built.

Brian May, one of the worlds much loved guitarists, doing his own thing, solo stuff, collaborations, putting his name and skills to stuff (some rather dubious stuff - remember 5ive?) - But that’s cool.

Roger Taylor, carried on with a marginally successful solo career (which was slated quite a bit in parts) etc.  Like May, doing his own thing.

John Deacon not so much doing anything, he made the choice not to for one reason or another.  All good.

Then Mr.May and Mr.Taylor had the genius idea of reforming a band that could ONLY attribute it’s phenomenal success to it’s flamboyant and insanely talented front man.  They recruit ex-Free / Bad Company singer Paul Rogers to fill (which is pretty much impossible) Freddie Mercury’s boots and go on tour under the name QUEEN + Paul Rogers.

Paul Rogers himself is a fine vocalist but any Queen fan will agree that he couldn’t hold a candle to Freddie Mercury.  I’d argue no man walking the planet at this moment could do that, else we would have seen it by now.

The project, as far as I can tell, has run it’s course and the band have just hung in limbo since.  I could be wrong here because I honestly just switched off to Queen after they announced they’d be reforming all those years ago (I’ve seen the live show and it’s not happening).

Then I hear the band would be headlining Sonisphere.  I naturally thought Paul Rogers would be doing it but I was so very wrong.

They’ve gone and recruited some fucking AMERICAN IDOL product.

FUUUUUUUUUUCKKKK!

I’ve listened to him, it’s just absurd.  Take a band like Queen, you employ someone who has earned their stripes not gained them from a manufactured engine such as American Idol.

Any credibility Queen had is now gone.  Dead and gone. RAARRGGHH!