Given how people have been complaining about LJ's decline lately, let's have a quick reversal of fortune: please welcome a new victim user, Mike aka scars_of_jude! Be nice to him, he's a refugee from Facebook... *g*

Laters,
Rath

Well, it's been a hell of a busy few weeks around here. And as usual, I'm behind on reviewing it all, so let's start here:

( April 22nd-23rd: York and heavy metal! [long] )

Laters,
Rath

Massive thanks to a_belladonna for turning me on (so to speak) to the existence of this clip! >.>

Hoest from Taake guests with Shining. Kvarforth, er, HAPPENS to him, circa 2:55 onwards.

...just, mmmm. Love Kvarforth nudging Hoest in the ribs and whispering to him, and Hoest unhesitatingly moving in on him in response - it's like "hey, do you wanna...?" "HELL YEAH!" Love the way Hoest twists into the kiss at the end and grabs Kvarforth (wish the camera had pulled back a bit, as I'd badly like to see where his hand went to, heheh). And I nearly laughed out loud when Hoest breaks away, cos it looks suspiciously like his eyes are rolled back. Damn, Niklas must be good...

(Oh, and this is an awesome version of Claws of Perdition as well. Just saying. *g*)

Laters,
Rath

Now playing: Bathory, The Return
Now doing: my, er, TAX return. >.>

*facepalm* I swear I didn't even set that one up on purpose.

Laters,
Rath

I've always wanted to try my hand at the Urban Explorer thing. I love lonely, lost, derelict and secret places, and climbing around them with a camera sounds like awesome fun. Unfortunately, due partly to having been raised with a healthy fear of the law and therefore being a bit nervous about the whole potential-trespassing aspect, and partly to not having a suitable adventuring partner, I've never managed to get around to really trying it.

However, just to pretend I'm cool, here's a few pictures of my favourite easily-accessible, severely entry-level-UrbEx, Derelict Place in Whitby. :) anglonemi, remember the Terrace I was telling you about? Well, since there weren't any photos online, I went and got a few myself...

( Fallen glories and a blocked-off view. 11 large pics under the cut. )

Laters,
Rath

Today, I spent all day expecting a phone call from the printers to tell me that they'd done my flyers that I need to promote the upcoming Ravenage/Old Corpse Road gig around Whitby Goth Weekend, and also the other flyers I'm also handing out which are for the new record store in Whitby Shambles (run by an awesome bloke name of Paul, his website is here if anyone's interested and he has a ton of cool stuff!) Said phone call finally arrived at about eight pm(!), long after I'd given up on it, from the blokes on the night shift. "We've done your stuff!"

"Can I come and pick it up now?" says I, somewhat surprised.

"Course you can, we'll be here for ages!" was the rather dejected reply...

So off I went. Now, it's quite a walk to the printers, as they're on the industrial estate right at the southeastern corner of town, and the quickest route is through the Larpool Cemetery. It's a hell of a night tonight, weather-wise, as well - the sky is a solid roof of low cloud, leaking intermittent rain, and it's been foggy on and off all day. So as I prowled through the cold and the dark, I couldn't resist a strange compulsion to...

( Take some photos! )

Thank you, this has been your random picspam for the day. We now return you to your regularly scheduled rambling. ^_^

Laters,
Rath

No, not the semlor recipe, ironlord, but something related, in that this is a recipe I started doing to use up the spare cardamom from the semlor. It's actually a golden syrup cake recipe stolen from the internet, but I've tweaked it a wee bit and stuffed cardamom in it, so here we go...

( CardamOMNOMNOMNOM Cake! )

Laters,
Rath

They say, beware of [horror] geeks bearing gifts...

...or in this case, accept the gift with enthusiasm, cos it turned out to be a fantastic one. ^_^ Many thanks to the lovely hellbound_heart for providing the material for this episode of Movie Night, in the form of a film that I'd heard of a few times in the past, but knew nothing about. Quite how, based on a relatively short acquaintance, she managed to size me up as someone who would love this genuine oddity of a movie I'm not certain, but she was, if you'll forgive me a terrible pun here, dead right. *g*

( Cut for spoilers: Dellamorte Dellamore. )

Rating? Oh, go on then - since this has so firmly made itself at home in my heart, I can't justify giving anything less than a 5/5. ^_^ Thanks again, Keri!

Laters,
Rath

Okay, so. Further to previous post, indeed... I don't think I need go into how much I idolise Per Yngve "Dead" Ohlin, if you know me you know what I'm like when I get fannish about someone, and you know the kind of people I get obsessed over. Say no more. However, sometimes I make some REALLY STUPID MISTAKES with my fannishness...

...like trusting websites to stay up. *facepalm* What was by far and away the most extensive and complete of Dead's fansites, www.peryngveohlin.com, has gone down and has a "domain expired" notice on it. I've tracked down every address I can for the owner and emailed her to ask if the site will be coming back, but two of three have bounced and I can only pray she's still checking the third one.

And like an idiot... I didn't save my own copies of all the site's actual files, and that site had fucking everything. Scans of a bunch of Dead's and Euronymous's letters, a load of Dead's drawings, the scan of his newspaper obituary notice and more besides. Most of that material wasn't widely distributed anywhere else, if at all, and now it's fucking gone. I am an IDIOT. Just because the damn site looked like such a labour of love, it never even occurred to me that its owner might orphan it like that.

There will now follow a lengthy process of trawling through tumblr, flickr, and the depths of every cache site I can find to try and recover as much material as I can. Possibly followed by starting my own damn fansite. *mutter*

Laters,
Rath

PS I would just like to mention that I was, however, massively cheered up by stumbling across this photo of Abbath, if only because I wish I could manage to look quite that iconic when I'm having a bad day. Immortal♥

Today is Easter Sunday, 8th April, 2012. And on this date is rightfully honoured the most important person ever to die, come back, and then do something awesome:

( No, not Yeshua ben Yosef, get out of here. )

Laters,
Rath

( Graphic credits. )