Over the weekend, I decided to give this band known as The xx another spin. 2 Fridays ago I heard the DJ at Home Club play one of their numbers (I think it was "Basic Space"). I actually first got to know about them when they opened for Florence & The Machine in February 2010. Didn't know anything about them before then, but when they opened with "Intro", I suddenly felt like I was getting high on their aural emissions. Same feeling I had when I first watched Mogwai performing in Singapore in 2006. The feeling that let's you drift in your seat, actually chilling out with your feet on your chair, with not a care in the world.
Now, while there are 2 vocalists in The xx, I'd have to say that the voice of Romy Madley Croft steals the moment everytime. She reminds me of the female lead vocalist, Tracey Thorn, from Everything But The Girl - beautiful vocals, low, smooth and rhythmic.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-u9ezLmjBSs&feature=related
The guitar riffs sent me back to the time when Chris Isaak first burst into the scene with his number "Wicked Game" - a time when when I fell in love with the drifting, lush sounds of the weeping guitar on top of a high hilltop down to the world where people are standing around listening.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-oaHHrNQVrg
Interestingly enough, for both songs, the bass guitar plays a big role, almost leading the beats, with the drums and guitar as accompaniments.
All right, that's it for now.
Woweee Zowee
I finally caved in a week after the release of Blizzard's Wow:Cataclysm expansion. I don't know why - even though the answer is obvious. I love WoW, especially now that so much has changed since Cataclysm's release. Rubin is back with a renewed interest in the game, after 1.5 years of retirement from the game. I love the fact that they've made levelling from level 1 to 60 so much easier, made quests so much easier to complete, and cut down on downtime when it comes to travelling ingame (e.g. some quests that require you to travel a distance to complete your objective actually provide you with a quick transport to the location of your objective, comes in handy, especially if you're below level 20 and don't have a mount yet).
Talent trees are more straightforward now, and therefore easier to manipulate when calculating damage and stats potential.
While they've had this even before Cataclysm was released, cross-realm interaction has also greatly improved a game. Whether I'm playing DPS or heals or tanking, my average wait time for a dungeon group is an average of 10-15 mins. Shorter wait time for heals and tank (as usual), a bit longer for DPS.
At this point I have 4 active major characters on different servers, and I've attached some screenshots here:
My favourite of the 4 - a one-man army primarily because druids can tank, heal and dps. (especially now with dual specialisation, I can now choose to take a break from tanking/dps in dungeons and switch to restoration for healing). It also helps that Exotramp is in an LGBTQ guild with lots of experienced players.
I love this girl!
As a DPS class, warlocks are the easiest to play, - and since hunters have recently been badly nerfed - it leaves warlocks in high demand, partly because of pet capabilities and partly because of other perks such as the ability to summon players into a dungeon by calling up a portal (I suspect this is why I got invited to raids so often.)
I haven't got the heart to transfer Feydra to another realm - the guild that Feydra resides in is run by a gay couple living in Sydney (both paladins, protection and holy).
Right now, this little guy is my all time favourite - since the release of Cataclysm, I've tried several different classes for the goblin race, and finally decided on a priest. For specialisation, he is a discipline priest, after some research I found that going discipline provides for good dps as well as good healing.
He was christened Viacheslav by a close friend, but in humour, my friends and I also know him as the Russian Vagina.
And now, last, but not least, the last of my 4 major characters. She was first known as Caillech in Thaurissan, but when my guild disbanded and everyone went their separate ways, I had her transferred to Frostmourne, and renamed her Unutjob. The mage, I feel, is the most difficult dps class to play - but once you know what you are doing, it can be easy to become overpowered like the warlock. At the moment Blizzard has created a pet for frost mages, which helps a lot, considering we tend to be so squishy sometimes. Back when I first started playing WoW in 2005, my second character was a human mage but I never got used to the difficulty of playing a mage.
I will be transferring Unutjob to Barthilas, for practical reasons, while I level up the Russian Vagina.
So you must be thinking, after all this, am I falling into the stereotype of the avid WoW player? The one with practically no life, no love and no ambitions? I have to say that in my case, it is quite the contrary. I have time for WoW, but real life is bigger than the world of warcraft. So while I have so many epic-geared high level characters (OK, OK so Russian Vagina is still struggling to get there), I still go out and smell the roses, have drinks with my friends, and work, work, work.
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