New blog of mine

Yeah check this new blog of mine if you're into BATTLEFIELD: BAD COMPANY 2 and video games in general: http://fieldoperative.wordpress.com.

A RETRO KICK (part#1)

A couple of years back, we played a gig with STRAIGHTHATE and support was provided by Mantas' project VOIDHEAD. A friend of his helped him out on the guitars, Helm from LOCUST LEAVES, who's also a great comic artist. I had a short chat with the dude, we also talked about computers a little bit. I don't remember how/why I mentionned the AMIGA and he told me that I could grab one for a reasonable amount of money from the eBay. This totally rang a bell...

A little bit of a background. When i was a kid at the 80's I was constantly fantacizing about home computers, reading magazines and getting to use them a bit at friends' homes. The home budget was tight though and didn't allow the purchase of one. When I finally convinced my parents to buy me and my brothers one, my choices were either the Atari ST (512 or 1024) or the Amiga 500... BUT the colleagues of my father gave him the fucked up advice to better get us a PC compatible, which was a more "serious" machine. And this is what happened! So instead of the outstanding multimedia capabilities of the ST and the Amiga, we ended up with the COMMODORE COLT, a PC XT compatible with glorious CGA graphics (4 colors at a time!!!) and two 5.25", low-densitey (360kb) floppy drives. Oh well, I can't really complain, because using MS-DOS and trying to get the most of out of this piece of hardware (I was so proud when I discovered a secret/undocumented key combination which was one of the earlist forms of overclocking, making the machine run at 9.54 Mhz instead of the standard 4.77Mhz and turbo 7.16Mhz CPU frequencies!!!), made me realize that messing around with computers was what i wanted to do for a living.

To get back to this post, owning an Atari ST or an Amiga, was a repressed urge that has been awaken by the chat with Helm. So I ordered one from eBay for a cool price but without the original box and manuals. In order to save cash, I chose the lowest shipping option, so this made an eternity to arrive, the Amiga which I should have had almost 20 years ago as a teenager, sailing across the seven seas from Australia. When I mentionned this to komrade and fellow retro-maniak Tsamashi Toyo he was like "Why the fuck do you need an Amiga, where you can make old games/software work though an emulator?". I couldn't provide a reasonnable answer, except that "You know me man. I have a collector's soul". "Παλιατζής" would be the proper term in greek.

When it finally got in Athens, I made a research on how to connect to a modern TV set, I plugged to my LCD TV and then I realized that it had the most weird power plug. I tried to get an adaptor, but somehow regular australian-european power adaptors didn't work. I had to cut the power cable and connect the wires into a local "Suko" power plug. But I am a lazy motherfucker and I kept postponing that for maybe 2 years.

2 days ago I grabbed my tools and did it! I connected it through the A520 mod and a composite cable to my LCD monitor but the image is crap. So right now I am trying to figure out what needs to be done. I just ordered a VGA adaptor but I think that it will do it only for the Workbench and not for the games. Do I need a scandoubler/flickerfixer? My friend Dimitris X. just got me the number of an Amiga enthusiast and I will give him a call later this afternoon.

RANDOM PICS FROM MY MOBILE

The Playstation 3 has been hacked?

Geohot, the dude who hacked the iPhone, has reportedly hacked the PS3, supposed to be unhackable until now... Check out his blog for some juicy details: http://geohotps3.blogspot.com

Kommpound live@Kinky Kong in Athens 21/06/09

KOMMPOUND LIVE ANNOUNCED!

NOISE/AMBIENT SPECIAL FORCES LIVE

sabbath20jun200999 @ KINKY KONG/Athens:

KOMMPOUND

NAΦΘALYN

(feat. Mantas: Voidhead, Dephosphorus)

LUNAR MIASMA

(ex-Red Needled Sea)

More details soon.

PLAYLIST, COD4:MW (Xbox 360) anti-cheater patch, “Noise vs. Subversive Computing”

• PLAYLIST

SUFFOCATION "Blood Oath"

SLAYER "Seasons In The Abyss"

AGORAPHOBIC NOSEBLEED "Agorapocalypse" (they should be paying me royalties for stealing my last name!)

ROYKSOPP "Junior"

GUNS N'ROSES "Use Your Illusion I&II"

O.S.T. "Wipeout Pure"

• Cheaters have stormed COD4:MW for the XBox 360 this last couple of weeks! A new patch is going to fix this. Read more about it at http://tigertelevision.blogspot.com/2009/04/call-of-duty-4-modern-warfare-anti.html

• As per KOMMPOUND, latest outing is going to be the track "Softmod Exploit" plus the "Black Box Secrets" text about Xbox hacking, part of the “Noise vs. Subversive Computing” USB stick compilation, an international premiere by my komrade Pascal Cretain. Here goes the press release.

COMPUTATIONALLY INFEASIBLE RECORDS 001

“Noise vs. Subversive Computing”

This is the “Noise vs. Subversive Computing” Project: A Collaborative release split between Noise/Experimental Artists and Subversive Technologists/Computer Hackers. Ten representatives from each camp were asked to contribute a piece of work which could be anything at all: an audio track, a drawing, a written passage, software, video, combination of all that, or anything else that can be converted to binary. The Noisicians had “Subversive Computing” as their central theme, and the Technologists worked with “Noise”.

This is the outcome:

NOISE:

0. BBBlood (UK) - Bicep Venoms Gut Virus [AUDIO]
1. Config.sys (DE) - Bit Bucket [AUDIO]
2. Family Battle Snake (DE) – Black Hat [AUDIO]
3. Francisco Lopez (ES) – Untitled 223 [AUDIO]
4. GEN 26 (SI) - Untitled [AUDIO]
5. Hellboy106 (GR) - stgzknmhtrka [IMAGE+AUDIO]
6. ILIOS (GR) - 4000 ĉevaloj kriegas Mi ami Vi [AUDIO]
7. KOMMPOUND (GR) - Softmod Exploit [AUDIO+WORDS]
8. La Jacquerie (IT) – Re: If you're angry don’t [AUDIO]
9. Sarah's Charity (DK) - Colour of Clarity [AUDIO]

SUBVERSIVE COMPUTING:

0. Ach3n0r (GR) - Noise Steganography [SOFTWARE]
1. Ashrae tosh & KaOS (BE/DK) - Netglitch [AUDIO+WORDS]
2. E (US) - Sifting through the Noise [WORDS]
3. EK (UK) - Rainbow [AUDIO]
4. G0rg0g0l (GR) - Gorgogoogle: Web, Search, Noise [SOFTWARE]
5. Gorrrrgar (RO) - My kind of Shithole [PHOTOGRAPHY MATRIX+WORDS]
6. Jazra Khaleed (GR) - Noise [POEM]
7. Pascal Cretain (DK) - Information Pollution [VIDEO]
8. Rodrigo Marcos (UK) - MySQL Sounds [VIDEO+SOFTWARE]
9. Stelios Douskos (US) - LawyerFish [SOFTWARE]

The merger is truly fascinating; explosive to say the least. The radical thinkers at work in here have the momentum, the mindset and the technical skills to crash Adaptive Firewalls, defy traditional definitions of music, “hack” live performance semantics and bypass Intrusion Detection Systems.

Only this is not Cyberspace. We are subtly injecting polymorphic shellcode into your reality, brainwashing you with white noise and reverse engineering your obsolete modus operandi.

Alas; you can’t pull the plug.


“Noise vs. Subversive Computing” out 01.06.2009
Limited release of 256 Numbered Copies in 1GB USB Stick format
Contact Pascal Cretain (pascal.cretain [at] gmail.com) for Ordering Information