Ministry : C U Lator
Sunday June 1st – Carling Academy Bristol
I wasn't too fussed about going to the gig to start with but Dok convinced me and so on sunday we headed over the water to Bristol.
Happily we didn't get massively lost getting to the venue, which was nice.
After purchasing some band merchandise Dok took leave of his senses and bought us drinks from the bar. Now I understand that venues inflate the prices, but really the percentage of profits raked in at such events even if each person bought only 1 drink .
Anyway back to the gig.
We caught the last 3 songs of the support act named illuminatus, who seemed pretty good. From what I've seen there was a different support band on each gig of the tour.
At 8:30 Ministry took to a fenced off stage with a lowered area in front of Al's goat skull adorned mic stand. The band strolled on with Al looking like a metal version of Fagan, including a hat that appeared to have animal ear attached to it.
Getting right into the swing of things the first song was Let's Go followed up with The Dick Song.
The next 3 songs also from the last sucker album Watch Yourself, Life is Good and finally The Last Sucker.
After unleashing the last sucker tracks the focus changed to the “Houses of the Molé” playing the first 4 tracks in order: No W, Waiting, Worthless and finally Wrong.
Switching to yet another album the tracks came think and fast from Rio Grande Blood, starting with the title song Rio Grande Blood followed by Senor Peligro. LiesLiesLies one of my favourites from the album was next and this section of the gig was completed with the song Khyber Pass.
So after an hour I managed to mosh away to the last 3 albums, I really should have kept my energy as the next section was to be the most furious with a selection of tracks from the earlier albums.
Beginning with So What each following song upped the BPM and got the crowd moving. Then came N.W.O. the one alot of people had been holding back for, it was quickly followed up by Just One Fix. The last song in this section was the wonderful Thieves which was one of the first Ministry tracks I ever heard and one that encouraged my following for the band.
A poor number from the earlier albums but classic choices all the same.
The final part of the show comprised of covers, the first was Just Got Paid by ZZ Top which was fantastic and quite fitting as it was from the 'Rio Grande Mud' album that Ministry parodied with there 2006 album. The next two songs appear on the last Ministry album “Cover Up” starting with Roadhouse Blues originally by The Doors and to be honest this cover is fast, heavy and a great change to the original.
The last song to be played was Louis Armstrong's Wonderful World which starts in very deep mellow tones and builds up into a crescendo, bursting into a fast and frenzied 2nd half of the song.
Now there was a bit of talk both after the gig and about other shows that considering it was a farewell tour there was too much new material and less from the older albums. Admittedly the setlist wasn't the same as they played for the US leg of the tour but I feel that the post Paul Barker albums were more writing and performing with other musicians but all things considered it was still a rather fitting set for their goodbye.
Overall it was a great gig to attend and I'm rather glad I went.
Adios Ministry!
Comment Spam redux
Well the steps I introduced to reduce the number of comment spam that was plaguing my website seem to have made an impact.
As I meantioned before I added a new step to avoid known spammers by interacting with Project honey Pot.
In the first few hours after I added the new features it became apparent how much my website was being hit by automated bots. In a quick count the figure was up to 10 IP address attempting over 40 times in one hour.
As another level of protection I've added a new feature to close the comment functionality on older posts.
There was one execption but the reason soon became apparent once I had checked the website logs, the spammer was a Human. The only course of action was to block them outright.
Other than the one comment spam I've been pretty pleased with the whole detection and avoidance system that is now in place. Althought there are a few upgrades that I can make in futures versions.
City of Heroes/Villains : Issue 12
Well as promised here is my post on the recently released Issue 12 (I12) update to the “City of” franchise.
There is only one way to discribe this update : zomgwtf.
This update has includes a vast ammount of 'quality of life' changes, which range from the very small to the frequently annoying
There are far too many features for me to begin to list, so here is a brief update of the items that I feel are quite
