The One with the Thoughts of Frans

Today I noticed Muse’s new album is available in “the cirquit”. I do think that whoever misuses trust by leaking stuff like this should be shot, but anyway, on to the album.

The first track, Take a Bow, starts of as a classic Muse song, but then somewhere along the way the electronics kick in. While it starts promising, there is never a sort of climax and the song doesn’t stick to my head like with Apocalypse Please on Absolution.

The second track, Starlight, sounds a bit on the poppy side. The vocals never get truly interesting. Overall an enjoyable song, but no feeling of euphoria just yet.

The third track is Supermassive Black Hole, the first single. You might have heard it already. While I do like it, I noticed that it works far better as background music (to put up loud while doing the last Grand Prix in Burnout 2) than as actual listening to music, if you get what I mean. However I did notice that I put this track up more often.

The fourth track, Map of the Problematique, is different. It does sound a bit poppy, but contrary to the former tracks it doesn’t feel forced on Muse’s generic style. Perhaps I just got more used to it by now? Regardless of that however, it’s possibly the best track on the album. Later on in the track they go even more all out with the electronics and that’s good.

The fifth track, A Soldier’s Poem, is just some kind of intermezzo in a more classic style.

The sixth track, Invincible, doesn’t sound very good at all in my opinion. I suppose it sounds a bit like Absolution, but then… well, less interesting and on top of that not very new of course.

The seventh track, Assassin, was pretty good. It was almost metal-like at times, but the vocals were generic.

The eight track, Exo Politics I liked a lot on first listen. A catchy guitar riff to start off with, getting better and better towards the end. After listening it a few more times my opinion stands, however I now think it starts off fairly boring and repetitive.

The ninth track, City of Delusion, I really like.,It’s something really different and possibly therefore cool, but it just sounds good on all fronts.

The tenth track, Hoodoo, sort of continues the previous track (in feeling only) and therefore even the quite measly 3:42 seem too long for it.

The eleventh and last track of the album, Knights of Cydonia, is very nice and bombastic. The vocals sound Yes-like here, which is definitely not a negative thing.

In conclusion, I think that overall I’m slightly disappointed. But you should realise that when your expectations are high, it’s easy to be disappointed. I certainly welcome the change in style. Perhaps it is a forebode that if Muse decides to go further down this route, they will produce an absolute masterpiece in the future?

I loathe ye who do not support this.

Loathe is perhaps a bit strong, but why so few browsers support this? Opera already has supported display:inline-block for years, Safari has since fairly recently, Gecko has a really buggy test implementation, and IE7 supports it flawlessly like Opera.

The part about IE7 was sarcastic.

Luckily the environment was completely controlled (my laptop), but damn. Just damn. Just how many stupid workarounds one would have to make for some things to look (nearly) identical.

I should create a webpage which specifically uses the more stable parts of CSS3 and see it grow more supported over time or something like that…

I just thought I should mention that Opera often gives very useful error notices. Sometimes Firefox gives more useful one’s, like in this case missing : after case whereas Opera only informed me of a parsing error on the same line. Internet Explorer doesn’t add much useful information in it’s “error-console” (which doesn’t even exist in a similar sense which makes it even harder to use).

I wonder how I can forget a : and not even notice it. I guess I was just convinced I didn’t forget something that simple. Ah well…

If you’re wondering what this is about, I’ll probably write something about it when it’s all over, which is in about two weeks. Essentially it’s a UI demonstration which I wrote in HTML+CSS+Javascript, which most people would probably have created in Flash.

Why do I post this if I actually said nothing at all? I don’t know, I think I just needed a break. Should I have taken it away from the computer? Yes. But in 30 minutes, that’s exactly what I’ll do. Besides I got gold on the first race of the last grand prix of Burnout 2 about 1.5 hours ago.

Most of the spam I get (which is of course intercepted automatically) seems to focus on hot Swedish babes. Do they have a reputation in the US? Other than mostly being blonde, I don’t see anything particularly special about Swedish babes.

Right now I’m SOG-ing, which means studie ontwijkend gedrag, or in English, study evading behaviour. That can range from posting on a weblog to going out to take a bike-ride in the nice weather (with a stop by the supermarket on my way back), all of which I’m going to do.

In other news, we’re on to the quarter finals. Kick-ass. 😛 Anyway, I may work something out with a girl from the US to send her a mega-wuppie, as she saw them on a picture of me with a mate and fell in love with it.

The last CD I bought was Kiss Me (EP) by Clayborn. You should check them out once they release an album, which is planned for later this year. Except one song you can get them all from their website in 128kbps mp3.

I just discovered that summer vacation is only a few weeks away, yet I haven’t really made any plans yet. Perhaps I should work out the going to Romania for a week thing, where I’d stay at the place of some guy who lives there.

Internet is sweet for international relations.