Glam Me A Beer!
This weekend was kind of weird. After seeing Iron Man I didn't expect all that much to happen, but it did anyways. Saturday was uneventful for the most part...I just relaxed for most of the day. When it came time to run the session in ceg_lylat, apparently a huge storm broke over the entire South. I'm not sure if we had a tornado here or what, but power went out at numerous times during the night before finally giving out completely at a crucial moment involving my character. Arrrgh! So yesterday I went back and talked with some of the players and GM to figure out how things were resolved. We kind of fudged a judgment involving the clone of my character. OOCly I'm on the fence about it, since with Coon knocked out, she couldn't present her arguments in the clone's defense. We decided to have the team capture the clone instead of kill her, and now Coon is trying to get her to see through all the brainwashing and realize that her creators did not have her best interests in mind. I'm just wondering how much breaking character it is for the team to pick up Coon' s clone, even though they knew she wanted to try something with her. Everyone else wanted to kill her, and with Coon not there to argue against it...
She may have to kill her anyways. So far, her attempts at getting the clone to "see the light" have been unsuccessful.
Aside from the usual round of rp sessions, I went to a concert on Second Life, and saw a band that has apparently been making waves down in the Florida rock scene. Friendly Fire seems like the kind of group that was on the cusp of making it at one point before something happened that knocked them down a few notches, and now they're back trying to get to where they were. Something about their old drummer getting into a fight with their guitarist. They have a new guy now, and the band sounds pretty good. They do...hmm...I'd call it Roots Rock. Kind of a biker bar sound with pop sensibilities and a little bit of punk. Really like the lead singer's voice; she has interesting articulation, but still sounds very much a woman. They have one album out at the moment, and are working on another (It's nothing major, $5 for 5 songs), and they have at least two cd's worth of free material available on their website if you want to give them a listen. Anyhow, they used to do the bar circuit down in Florida, but are now exclusive to Second Life.
I ordered a copy of Revelations from the Journey Store. They have a deal going on where they are packaging it with an exclusive t-shirt. I have enough clothes, but it's Journey, and I couldn't resist. It should arrive sometime on the week of June 3rd. Speaking of music, I heard Boston found a new lead singer. Even more, they did almost the same thing Journey did, though this was after they had already hired on the former lead singer of Stryper. Here's the story, as found on the Journey forums:
And here's another article from USA Today:
Amateur singer gets more than a feeling from Boston
By Marco R. della Cava, USA TODAY
See how this rock 'n' roll fantasy sounds: One day you're trying to get Home Depot shoppers to apply for in-store credit. The next you're rehearsing with Boston and getting ready for a national summer tour.
"I never could have dreamed this," says Tommy DeCarlo, 43, Boston's new Brad Delp-channeling frontman, who is taking leave from his credit manager job at a Charlotte Home Depot to perform with the band. "That first gig is going to be something."
Bands ranging from AC/DC to Lynyrd Skynyrd have found new singers in the wake of tragedy (Delp committed suicide last year), inevitably choosing road-tested replacements. DeCarlo's rocking Cinderella tale includes the fact that he never has even been in a band.
"I did sing After the Lovin' at my grandparents' 50th wedding anniversary," says the affable DeCarlo, who is married and has two teenagers. "I think they enjoyed it."
All Boston founder Tom Scholz knows is he can't believe his ears. "During rehearsals, it can get downright eerie," he says. "I forget it's not Brad. It makes me feel like someone was at work up there."
In tribute to Delp, DeCarlo posted MP3 files of himself singing Boston over a karaoke soundtrack on his MySpace page. (He had hocked his prized keyboard in 2006 to buy his kids' Christmas gifts.) An impressed visitor to his page urged him to contact Boston management and offered up an old e-mail address. Doubtful but with nothing to lose, DeCarlo sent off a note with a link. Destiny intervened.
"My wife was at her computer playing our tunes, and I asked her whether it was us playing live," Scholz says. "She said, 'It's some guy in North Carolina singing your songs.' I said, 'I know Brad's voice, and that's Brad.' She turned it up, and only when I heard the backing track did I know it wasn't us."
Scholz flew DeCarlo and his family up for an audition, which led to a Delp tribute show and the tour invite. DeCarlo and the band's other new member, Stryper frontman Michael Sweet, will appear on Boston's next album in early 2009.
Finding a new band member online "could happen more and more, because you no longer have to be anywhere specific to audition," says Howard Kramer, curatorial director of the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame and Museum. "Journey just found their new lead singer (Arnel Pineda) in a Filipino cover band that put their stuff on YouTube."
Even if DeCarlo's Boston idyll proves short-lived, he's unlikely to forget this summer. His colleagues won't let him.
"It's like we've got our own American Idol winner right here in our store," says DeCarlo's manager, Mark Ortiz. "When he plays nearby, we'll all be there, orange aprons on."
So now Boston has two lead singers, both of which will be contributing to their new album. Way cool! It's so great to see bands soldiering on after things that should have killed them. The Internet is making it possible people, it really is!
In other news, here's the story of a town who lifted a 44 year ban on the Rolling Stones. I bet they never expected these guys to have the lasting power they did. :p
Setting a new precedent for data recovery, a specialist managed to successfully retrieve mission data from a melted disk found in the swath of debris left by the Space Shuttle Columbia.
I can't remember if I posted this before or not, but a huge particle experiment is getting ready to commence somewhere in Europe, and a scientist has sued the project over fears that it will destroy the world. Some concerns are the possibility that a stable black hole might result from the experiment, or that colliding particles could rip a huge explosion, or that the experiment could somehow turn the sun into a quasar star, or that "strangelet" particles would convert everything it touches into exotic matter, eventually effecting the whole Earth. So far, the lawsuit has only resulted in delaying the project, and the atom smasher is slated to be turned on this fall. Scientists on both sides have good arguments, but the ones that are for the project have been able to poke holes in the logic of some of the ones who are against it. I guess we'll see what happens.