The RSS Feed for Blackmore Feed Me Content from the Crypt of Blackmore!!! en-us http://cryptofblackmore.xyz/en/rss.xml Crypt of Blackmore https://cryptofblackmore.xyz/favicon.ico https://cryptofblackmore.xyz/en/rss.xml STATE OF THE CRYPT: 2026 Edition Wed, 07 Jan 2026 16:45:00 +0100

Hello to you all and happy 2026. Hope that you are going into this new year strong.

2025 is now a thing of the past and I think that it calls for a bit of reflection time, as I sort of usually do (in the past, this was done on Instagram, but the more time I can stop using that, the better). It feels like a blur, that the year just came and went before I noticed. There's been some personal struggle that I've been through. It's not unlike 2024 in that aspect, where I've been at a personal low for some time. However, there has been bright spots, which puts it above 2024. Lots of music, rekindled friendships, goodwill hunting, cool uncles club, and....well, chickens.

So all in all, not a terrible year (even if parts of it felt like it).

As for this website? Well, I'm happy that I at least got three posts out in 2025 - as opposed to just one, the year before - but I do want to try get more done. It's not easy and sitting down to write is still a challenge sometimes, but I have been more inspired lately and also have some new thoughts for this site in the year 2026.

The first thought is the bilingual translation job. I'm still happy of my decision in 2023 of having my website in two languages. It would be easy to only have it in English, but there would be language barrier then, and while us Danes are pretty good at getting grasp with the English language, not everybody is aboard and I see the importance of still holding on to one's mother's tongue. Also, I think that it's beneficial in learning about language more by having the same content in two ways.

Having said that, the translation work is still a hassle. I did say in 2023 that I would publish every new article/post in English and Danish, and that the translation would be done by myself, i.e. no help from machine translation like Google Translate. This worked well for the smaller posts that I wrote in that year, and I learned a lot from it. However, I began to bite my words only a year later with my blog about the Carpark North video shoot. That piece was a long one to write and I'd planned it to be out around the first half of 2024. That's where the translation job seemed nearly impossible and it just killed my motivation to get it done. So with the last two articles in 2025, I switched over to translation programs (Using DeepL Translate atm.) to help me getting the bulk work done quicker. I still have to proofread it several times and edit the HTML file accordingly to make sure that it comes out good, but this method is now the way forward for me.

The second thought is about how this site is made. The site still looks amazing to me, but its skeleton is frankly all over the place. I realized that in 2023 when having to split it up bilingually, but it's more than that. My blog system is powered by lb, a script by Luke Smith that automates the publishing process for articles/blogs to the website and RSS feed (#UseRSS). It's a very neat system for me, but the script is no longer maintained anymore. At some point, I want to learn about Hugo which is a static site generator and should streamline the structure of the website significantly. It would be good for this website to experience a facelift. When would that be, I don't know, but I think that would be good and also make editing this website less hectic.

So there's some reflections that I will take to the future and hopefully work on. Oh, and I'll try to pump out some more articles out when I can, of course.

Have a nice one and Godspeed.

P.S. Look at that. A update written and published on the same day. Wish it was like this, all the time.

]]> The Art of Preserving Media (Backing Up The Collection) https://cryptofblackmore.xyz/en/2025.html#the-art-of-preserving-media-backing-up-the-collection Tue, 30 Dec 2025 20:30:00 +0100

In the past few years, I have grown my interest and desire to begin and backing up my vast collection of physical media. Something that I've always been doing with CDs, but was a bit hesitant to do with DVDs and games. Well, as I found an external disc drive for sale (and a 5TB hard drive) at the electronic store last Christmas, I thought to myself that it was time to get serious. So after payment was done, I have done nothing more than going through my boxes of games and DVDs, and backing up almost all of it to my hard drive with various degrees of success and a bit of failure.

I will go through all the different formats that I have in this article and talk about my experiences with archiving them; what software that I will recommend to use and also why I go my way to preserve my physical collection.

Audio CDs (fre:ac)

My personal experience of ripping CDs is extensive. Ever since my introduction to the personal computer and Windows Media Player, ripping CDs has been somewhat of a pastime hobby for me. It was something that my dad and I would periodically do, whether it was ripping from his collection of CDs or going to the public library (the silent enemy of the recording industry) to loan CDs there and ripping those at home. This was well before Spotify entered our lives in 2012-13, so this was an exciting way to discover new music for me.

Alas, time moves on and both WMP and the .wma codec have shown their age. Despite having FLAC support in recent times, WMP is just an ancient dinosaur program that does most things really backwards compared to modern programs. Having badly optimized album art for the rips and having a separate location for metadata tags instead in the files themselves is not something that one should deal with anymore, despite its fine user-friendly UI.

As for WMAs, I was hesitant to take the task of re-ripping my then 400+ CDs (Now 700+) that I had ripped over the years (and also all of my parents' CDs) to FLACs. That was until 2023 when I found out that my Pixel 7 didn't natively supported WMAs. That turned out to be a good decision, and it also made me correct all the mistakes that the old files had during the re-ripping process.

There's a free open-source program called fre:ac, which I now use for ripping CDs. It's really straightforward. The program will detect the CD and what kind of album it is. Other than that, you can tinker with all its metadata before ripping to ensure that the info is correct to your preferences. For example, I like to have the songwriting credits for all of my files, and I would want to mark all the bonus tracks, so I know what the core of the album is. Fre:ac also let you choose what the output folder to the finished files should be, which is very convenient to organize everything. The other neat thing about fre:ac is the implementation of AccurateRip which determines if your CD is ripped perfectly or not. Very practical if your CD has scratches.

As for playing music on the computer, I would recommend Strawberry for Linux and foobar2000 for Windows (ugh...). Both are free to use and have a simple but functional UI.

DVDs (Handbrake + DVD Shrink + MakeMKV)

The process of a hundred years.

DVDs are obviously a different beast compared to CDs with how much more versatile they are (It's in the name). But that also means that their content isn't as streamlined and becomes a bit more complicated to navigate and preserve.

There's a million ways to go about with DVDs, from ripping them as ISO files, to just ripping the movie and nothing else. Personally, I want to have as much of the DVD preserved as possible, but as video files that I can view on anything. Computers, phones, TVs, etc.

For most operations, I use Handbrake. Another free software that is used to re-encode videos to a variety of different formats. It's a pretty handy program with a lot of options, like passing through Dolby/DTS audio, keeping subtitles, upscaling video and so on. Handy, but not enough. Sometimes, DVD extras are hidden in chapters or menus that Handbrake doesn't recognize. So to fix that, there's DVD Shrink. An old Windows program used to backup full DVDs as folders. You can also explore the content of a DVD and then re-author it, essentially picking what parts to keep from the original DVD so that you can re-encode the content later.

But even that has some problems like not reading and decrypting some discs (with wrestling DVDs being a weird sticking point), which is why I also use MakeMKV. A popular tool that preserves all audio and video tracks, metadata and chapter information in their as-is standard definition quality via MKVs.

I use all of these 3 programs to conjunction with each other. If one fails, the other should solve it and continue the process. And boy, is it a process. As said above, I try to preserve as much as possible which includes DVD extras, but the amount of extras is sometimes too much. Outtakes, making-of documentaries, production stills, montages with multiple viewing angles, easter eggs, the whole kitchen sink. Also doesn't help that some DVDs with multiple languages chooses to have separate video tracks for each audio language. There's also the PAL-speedup, but I've talked about that long enough.

It's a process that's much longer than how I would want it, but that's how it is.

Wii and GameCube (Homebrew + cleanrip/Wii Fusion Backup)

The best dumpers can just be the consoles themselves.

Everybody hacked the Nintendo Wii, despite the big N's best efforts. It wasn't uncommon back in the day to see it paired with a hard drive by its side and the Homebrew Channel installed on the home menu when it was turned on. And with the Homebrew Channel opens the functionality of the Wii. For the case of dumping games, there's the cleanrip utility. It's name is very self-explanatory, but it also does the one thing that you can't really do on other hardware - namely, dump Wii games.

Nintendo is probably most famous for their proprietary game formats, mostly with cartridges. It's pretty effective against piracy and with their switch to disc-based systems starting with the GameCube, they wouldn't stop that practice. GameCube discs (apart for being the size of a chocolate chip cookie) and later Wii discs were custom-designed by Nintendo with extensive proprietary technology to make them unreadable on a normal DVD drive. There exists some drives that can natively read Wii discs, but they are few and far between so the Wii itself (or Wii U for that matter) is the best option.

However, cleanrip does come with a caveat as it only dumps the games as full-blown ISO files. By that, I mean every ISO has all the unnecessary empty space from the disc included in them, resulting in a standardized file size of 4.4 GB for every game. That's not ideal (and rather insulting if, say, you were to back up a glorified SNES ROM-on-a-disc or something), but luckily, there are programs like Wii Fusion Backup (for Mac and Linux users) and Wii Backup Manager (for Windows users) that can shrink those ISOs into WBFS files.

Before WBFS:
After WBFS:

With WBFS files you save a good chunk of space and can now play these games on a Wii with a hard drive and USB Loader GX. You can also use USB Loader GX to install games onto the USB drive directly and play straight away. Good times for everyone.

If you are interested in hacking your Wii, then this guide is heavily recommended.

PSP (Custom Firmware)

A second verse, but same as the first.

The PlayStation Portable may go hand-in-hand with the Wii as tag team champions of all-time easily hackable consoles. Installing CFW (Custom Firmware) on the system will provide you with quality-of-life improvements to an aging handheld. For the purpose of dumping games, it's miraculously simple in spite of the weird disc format of UMDs. The CFW gives you options on what drive directory of the console that the PC will see via a USB connection. Directing it to the UMD drive (with a game or movie in it), you should see an ISO of the UMD that you can just copy over to your PC. Even better is copying the ISO over to the memory stick, afterwards. That's how I still play games on the PSP, as the UMD drive of mine is failing.

Simple and easy. Wish most media were like this.

PS2 (MPF/redumper + Imgburn/Brasero)

Gotta say. Having dumped these games onto a hard drive made me realize, how the console of origin sometimes betrays the fact if the discs are good or not. Because I managed to dump almost my entire collection of games perfectly, which I didn't think would be possible.

The PlayStation 2 was a console that I grew up with since childhood, and when you were a child, you were pretty dumb didn't know any better and unintentionally scratched your games (as well as your father's and sister's games). So it's pretty weird to see them in working capacity again. There's childhood games which doesn't play properly on my PS2, yet plays like wonders on PCSX2.

I was going to dust out Imgburn, until I discovered a different program called Media Preservation Frontend. MPF is a front-end for a command-line script called redumper which aims to do a complete 1:1 dump of a game, and for the most part, it works. However, I found that it had difficulties with blue CD-ROM disc games, so Imgburn was used instead and worked effortlessly. In essence, you can use any kind of disc-ripping tool. As long as the dump is good (which PCSX2 has a good verifying tool for), then all is good.

PS1 (Imgburn/Brasero + PSN + Internet places)

What I said above about CD-ROM games applies here. Well for me, at least. Assuming that dumping PS1 games would be relatively easy, the task soon turned into confusion, head-scratching, and frustration.

Simply put, my disc drive struggles a lot with CD-media that isn't audio CDs. MPF and Redumper wasn't playing ball with ripping CD-ROMs, so I used Imgburn again. Only to hit a roadblock with CDDA tracks and more scratched discs.

A bit of technical information: Since PS1 games were on CDs, it was possible to include uncompressed Redbook audio (also known as CDDA, Compact Disc Digital Audio) for music and other sounds via a mixed mode CD, which also means that you can play some PS1 discs in your stereo and listen to game music. That is a very cool feature, but it's also an issue. ImgBurn is not very good at making perfect dumps with mixed mode CDs. Case in point, my attempts at dumping the original Tomb Raider. Tomb Raider not only has the music as Redbook audio, but also the tutorial dialogue. The data track was a perfect dump, but not the audio tracks. I assumed that the game would still work fine, but the tutorial narration was not playing on its appropriate cues, meaning that dialogue would appear at random and end abruptly. Same thing with the music.

Researching on this issue, I found that only certain CD drives supports dumping mixed mode PS1 games 1:1, while most CD drives can't. This made me dread and ultimately abandon the prospect of dumping all of my games myself, only dumping the non-mixed mode CDs, but that wasn't the only problem.

Remember when I said that I had next-to-no issues with scratches on PS2 games? Turns out that many of these discs received much worse care and were more prone to scratching. To be fair, we are talking about old games with the majority of them being my dad's, and if blame is to be shared then I firmly believe that he too wasn't that kind to his games at that time. To be honest, this is where I just turned to the internet to find these game ISOs elsewhere. Some of my "undumpable" games I already own digitally, thanks to the PS Store on the PSP, while other games are mostly in the "gray" area which I obtained through other means.

If companies have a problem with that, then note this: Simply an issue of service.

PC (MPF + GOG.com + Good luck...)

This is where things get even more complicated and sometimes outright impossible. The latter sentiment outweighs the former, as I pretty much gave up at this point. Mainly because of the complex issues that plague old physical PC games.

I could only get like 4-5 games dumped over to my hard drive, because CD-ROM games would not budge again. Imgburn also wouldn't work for some reason, but that's not even the biggest issue. The anti-piracy DRM-infected discs have in ways sabotaged these games from being playable again on newer hardware. It really brings attention to why you can still find used physical PC games in droves for bargain bin prices, but can't necessarily play them. Some of the DRM in those discs are simply unsupported on modern Windows, and even if you managed to dump some games, you still have the issue of disc check that many (if not all) of these games have. Virtual mounts of ISOs are nice and all, but if the game launcher can't recognize them, then it's a waste of time.

It's right there that I gave up on PC games and went straight into GOG.com. GOG has since their inception been great at preserving and re-releasing classic PC games DRM-free, so you can buy games from their platform and install them on every computer possible - free of restrictions (#NotAnAd). Keep in mind that not all games on their storefront will work 100% out-of-the-box when attempting to play them on current PCs, but there are workarounds and patches by fans or the developers to ensure at least playability for the classics.

My Reasons for backing up physical media:

Now, all of this seems kind of excessive, especially in the days of streaming services and such. Even as a physical media collector, I didn't see the point of undertaking this project (besides ripping music CDs which I've done all my life). Well, it wasn't until last year when I discovered my reasons.

1. Physical media (and its hardware) has a lifespan

It sucks, but it's true. You have probably heard about it or maybe have it affected part of your collection. Like most consumer goods, physical media wasn't really designed for much longevity. It's sort of incredible that so much have survived throughout the years. Nevertheless, discs are soon to die and I'm not just talking about scratches, as disc rot is also an issue that's becoming more prevalent. Hell, I've just had a Wii U game crap out on me, despite the disc looking totally fine. Sure, one can say the same thing about hard drives being prone to fail, but data on hard drives is easier to keep track of and more transferable to backups. And as I have mentioned above, hardware (and by that, I mean especially video game consoles) is also a failing element. As much as I like playing games on 'Le Original Hardware', disc drives not reading and such makes it necessary to have and preserve it through emulation.

2. Clear convenience

A year ago, I moved from my apartment back to home where I don't have the luxury of having my massive collection set up, so most of it are still in boxes. This makes it difficult to go through my backlog or just wanting to play some game or watch a movie that I own. This fixes the problem and opens up for more benefits. TV shows with only 3 or 4 episodes per DVD can now be binged in one setting; movies and music can now be transferred over to hard drives, phones and TVs with more ease of access; and gaming is now just the best thing ever. At the beginning of the year, I went over to visit an old friend with a laptop, some controllers and my hard drive with my whole PS2 collection, and we had a total blast playing SW: Battlefront II, Burnout Revenge and Bomberman with close-to-perfect performance throughout. Now, just imagine that but with the hassle of 'Le Original Hardware' and all of its components.

3. Chance to clear out (and not miss* a thing)

This is where the inevitable adult truth comes in and tells me to grow up and stop with this hobby of collecting. OK, not really, but I'm sure that we've all been there. I've been apprehensive and avoiding the question of "When to downsize the collection?" for a long time. Mainly because I know that I would eventually get around to properly dissect my backlog. But when I slowly realized the benefits of this project, I could finally take a step back and actually begin to downsize, somewhat. I saw the absurd parts of my collection which had no business taking that much space (like 2-4 episodes per DVD releases) and also the "filler" part of the collection (like games I was only interested in for like 5 minutes). So I've taken the baby-steps of getting rid of those things that I'm not going to miss, with the asterisk indicating a double-meaning: 1. Not miss the taken space of those goods, but also; 2. Not miss out on the content of those goods, as they are always on the hard drive should my interest peak around again in the future.

Thank you for reading this article. This was a pretty large undertaking, starting already at the beginning of 2025 where I wrote a good bulk of this article. But I'm happy that it got done just before 2026. I might update this in the future, as I did leave out some game systems out. However, this should be satisfactory for now. See ya later.

]]> How To Fix The PAL-Speedup Of Videos From DVDs https://cryptofblackmore.xyz/en/2025.html#how-to-fix-the-palspeedup-from-dvds Tue, 04 Nov 2025 19:00:00 +0100 Hello.

So this little tutorial is to tide y'all over until my next big article is ready. That piece is related to what I'm about to discuss here, which is my hatred for PAL DVDs, of course.

I've touched over this subject in my review of my Panasonic Blu-Ray player, a few years ago, but to give you a refresh: Over the years I have been increasingly annoyed with the dreaded PAL-speedup that has plagued most European (and Australian) DVDs. This speedup happens because of the issue of converting film to television. In the world of motion picture, film that runs at 24 frames per second used to require to be converted, as TVs weren't able to run natively at 24hz. The American video standard is NTSC which runs at 60hz, so half of every frame of film needed to be doubled while the other half of frames needed to be tripled so that it could run at 60hz. This method was called the 3:2-Pulldown method. Meanwhile, us Europeans are unfortunately stuck with PAL as the television standard in 50hz, and 24 doesn't add up to 50. So the 24fps were instead sped up to 25fps which resulted in a slightly shorter runtime and a higher pitch.

To kindly demonstrate the difference, I present these three videos. The first is a direct comparison between NTSC and PAL using a Simpsons clip. The two others are a scene from Prince's movie Purple Rain and the title track from the movie's soundtrack. The Simpsons clip shows the speed difference and how out-of-sync NTSC and PAL becomes side-by-side, while the Prince clips are more to display the blatant semi-tonal difference in the audio. The higher-than-usual tone of the song should be noticeable if you compare to the record, but take a look in the comment section and you can see that not many (if any) either notice it or are just unassumed.

How Purple Rain normaly sounds like
What PAL does to a classic

But it's that pitch which still irks me to this very day. While many music DVDs did get pitch-corrected, the movie-to-DVD landscape was mostly left unfixed due to either company laziness or mainstream unimportance, as companies just want their movies out in a speedy fashion and the average normie doesn't notice the small difference. Heck, I've even discovered that some people prefer the speedup pitch, as it could enhance the mood of a given scene. I don't agree with this take, but I can understand why that would be the case.

But the worst is when companies CHOOSE to be inconsistent about it. Keyword is CHOOSE, because I can't come up with any other rational explanation for why they decide to fix the pitch in certain cases. My next article is about media preservation, as I'm in the long process of ripping all of my DVDs and it really boggles my mind. For example: The Simpsons Season Sets are all unfixed, except of Season 2 for some reason; the Danish Panique au Village DVDs are pitch-corrected, except for the movie (where only the French dub is fixed. Why?) and the specials (where the last special is the only one unfixed. Again, why??); the UK DVD of Metallica: Through The Never concert film is pitch-corrected except for the bonus material(???); while U2's Rattle And Hum DVD (a CONCERT FILM) is still pitched up.

Examples like these are the main reason why I almost only buy movies and TV shows on Blu-Rays, as the format natively supports 24fps playback which makes it a nonissue. However, not everything is available on Blu-Ray and replacing a DVD collection to the newest format (or just NTSC DVDs) isn't really cost-efficiant, so I thought about fixing my ripped DVDs instead. And I found a method that turned out to be a somewhat easy and great solution to this problem: Ptich-shifting the audio and remux it to the video.

TUTORIAL:

Things/Programs you need:
A DVD (duh)
DVD-drive
Handbrake or MakeMKV
Audacity (with ffmpeg)
MKVToolNix GUI

First thing of course is to rip a DVD. I am going to use the Simpsons Season 3 DVD for this example. For ripping the contents of a DVD, you can use MakeMKV or Handbrake. MakeMKV is a easy, straight Disc-to-MKV converter for the DVD. It preserves all audio and video tracks, metadata and chapter information in their as-is standard definition. On the other hand, Handbrake (the one I use) is a re-encoding tool. Its aim is to re-encode any source video file into something that suits your needs. You can pick and choose what you want to keep from the source, while also upscale the video, crop the video, burn-in subtitles and whatever else. I would recommend encoding to MKVs instead of MP4s, as MKV is a more versatile video format.

After ripping the DVD it's time to fix the audio. The program I use for that is Audacity, a free audio editing software that has the necessary effect tools for this pitch-fix to work. You will also need the ffmpeg library installed, if you need to edit AC3 audio (i.e. Dolby Digital Audio).

First, drag and drop the desired MKV to Audacity. If your file has more than one audio stream, select the one you want to edit. After a while, you'll see all audio channels. One thing to note is that stereo tracks are generally paired with each other and is shown that way. However, a 5.1 Surround stream is separated into 6 individual tracks, so you have to keep track of that.

Then you need to highlight the desired tracks and find the ›Change Pitch‹ option in Effect. In this popup window you need to change the semitones value to -0.76 which is the equivalent of -4.27% change in frequency. You don't need to change the other values, as they will follow suit when you change just one value. There's also the option for high quality stretching, but it takes quite longer and I haven't noticed any audio issues with it being unchecked. For your consideration, you can try it out with some samples to see if it benefits you.

When it's done pitch-shifting, you want to export the audio. I mostly keep the options as-is with the source file. If you worked with DTS audio you have to choose a different format as Audacity doesn't support DTS export. You also need to choose ›Custom mapping‹ and configure it, if you don't want to lose the surround mix.

Depending on how many audio streams you have exported, you should see them alongside the original MKV.

Lastly, you want to multiplex your MKV with your fixed audio. To do that, there's MKVToolNix GUI. A very handy program when it comes to edit, fix and multiplex MKV files. You start by opening the MKV in the program and then drag and drop the audio streams into it. MKVToolNix will then give you some options. Just pick the default and click OK. The new audio streams will be color-coded to differentiate from the MKV source file. Uncheck the audio streams from the source MKV. A neat thing to do before multiplexing is to add tags to the fixed audio streams such as language, track name and (if you have multiple audio tracks) what the default track should be. When you are done tinkering, click on the ›Start multiplexing‹ button and you should have your finished file in no time.

Ending Thoughts

Obviously, this is just a makeshift solution to this problem as it doesn't address the slightly shorter runtime of PAL video. I'm personally not too bothered with that because it's not as noticeable as the sound, but of course it's not ideal. Ideally, a customer shouldn't take their one time to fix the incompetence of DVD makers. It also devalues one's DVD collection, because why would you now own these discs when the optimal way to watch the content is now on the hard drive? Granted, watching video from a hard drive is not the same experience as DVDs, but it's less cumbersome. If there is one positive from this, is that it now makes me prioritize what to keep and what to get rid of in my collection. I'm now also not in a hurry to replace those pitch-affected discs with Blu-Rays which is also a bonus. At any rate, I hope that you find this article a little helpful if you also are stuck with this issue.

Now if you excuse me, I'll be going to the nearest goodwill to flood their stock for the betterment of the environment.

]]> Ozzy Forever (R.I.P) https://cryptofblackmore.xyz/en/2025.html#ozzy-forever-rip Tue, 29 Jul 2025 16:00:00 +0200 Ozzy is dead.

As I was ready to leave work, last tuesday, I got a text from a buddy that Ozzy Osbourne had passed away. It was to be expected at some point, given his health issues since 2019, but it was still surreal, as he had just performed for the last time, a few weeks ago.

With that in mind, I reflected on his impact on my musical upbringing. Growing up, I was exposed to his work with Black Sabbath via covers from other metal bands. Most prominently, Pantera and their covers of Planet Caravan, Hole In The Sky and Electric Funeral. Soon after, my dad began to play Black Sabbath for me, and I was forever hooked. The old but very heavy and doomy sound with a hint of blues, and a singer with a voice that hasn't been replicated that much.

And if it wasn't Sabbath, then it was his solo output that became my soundtrack to my solitude in middleschool. No More Tears dominated my ears as I wandered around in the schoolyard. Ozzy became my escape from reality.

It only became more special on my 12th birthday, when asked of which upcoming concert I wanted to see. The answer was clear: Black Sabbath.

November 26, 2013 - Forum, Copenhagen. My second metal concert ever, and boy was it a evening to remember. Seeing Ozzy, Tony and Geezer was a blast. It didn't matter if Ozzy's voice wasn't what it used to be. It was all about experiencing those songs live by the original masters of heavy rock. A once-in-a-lifetime moment.

A dream come true for this little fan

I would catch Ozzy again live in 2018. A cool affair, but you could sense that he was perhaps tired, as there was a rather irritating 10-15-minute guitar/drum solo in the middle of the show. But it was fine considering that it was his final tour and he was 69 at the time.

Since then I became distant from his music, only occasionally spinning a Sabbath record. It didn't help the fact of being underwhelmed by his last couple of solo albums. That's why the "Back To The Beginning" show was exciting. A proper send-off for Ozzy Osbourne, the performer, and Black Sabbath (with Bill Ward). Not many dead artists can claim to have such a last stand as Ozzy had.

This past week has just been a crazy one with the recent deaths of not just Ozzy, but also Hulk Hogan and Julian LeFay (regarded as the father of Elder Scrolls). But Ozzy's death is something that I will never forget. Not only because of the impact of his music, but also because of the birth of my nephew. Which just made the contrast of the news weirder, you know? It reminds me of a religious saying that as a life departs this earth, a new life takes its place. However, nothing can replace the legacy of one John Michael Osbourne.

Ozzy Forever

]]> 20+ Takes = 5-6 Seconds of Screen Time https://cryptofblackmore.xyz/en/2024.html#20-takes-56-seconds-of-screen-time Tur, 05 Sep 2024 16:50:00 +0200 Gather 'round, folks. Story time with Uncle Thunder, here. A telling of a peculiar, but fascinating once-in-a-lifetime experience.

Sometimes, life throws you an opportunity to do something, that seems very unreal. It's not like winning the lottery, but it's close enough.

Five years ago, my school was working on a play to show for our families and any locals. It was quite a lot of work, considering that we only had a week to prepare all the props, write the scripts, learn songs, make costumes, etc. I was all over the place during that period. Unlike the year before, when I just was part of that play's music crew, I was helping with the script and had to act and read lines for the first time, in addition to playing the music.

One day after lunch, our music teacher calls the band in for a short meeting. He had just received an invitation for us to participate in a music video for a well-known Danish band called Carpark North. They were going to celebrate their 20th anniversary by doing a music video in the efterskole, where they first met and became friends. To make it a bit more special, they invited five other efterskoles to their school in Mellerup and play their biggest hit Transparent And Glasslike with 'em.

Naturally, we were excited by the prospect of joining such a production (even though none of my bandmates really knew Carpark North, to my bemusement), so after we were done with the play, we threw ourselves into practicing the song (when we weren't doing schoolwork anyway).

My recollection is that we all practiced our parts individually and only rehearsed together three-four times before the day of the shoot. At that time, I was very much into playing drums. I was pretty much an amateur, but I had timing (somewhat), so I could play. Loudly. So to practice my drum parts (and spare my band's hearing), I went to the studio room to play on an electronic drum kit. We weren't given much reference to learn the song from, so I used the studio version to play along to.

Day of the Shoot

Thursday, February 28th, 2019.

We all loaded our gear into the slightly-broken-but-still-working "bus" (actually a small Renault van) and then drove off to Mellerup. When we arrived, we noticed some bigger buses than ours. As we were ready to unload our "bus", a cameraman approached us and asked us to drive around and come back with him on the backseat to film our arrival, and after that, we went to unload our gear at the gym, the location of the shoot. The band was already shooting some takes with a few bands from the school, but we weren't interrupting. After all, the video concept was built on the band starting to play alone, while more and more bands joined in, so this was also filmed.

I remember being a bit nervous before the shoot, because I was still struggling to keep in time with the drums. Even knowing that it would be playback, the idea of multiple drummers playing the same thing at the same time to the same beat seemed to be somewhat of a daunting task. Especially, when it ended on being 20 bands from 6 different schools. Because our school was a small all-around-type efterskole, our one band was really all that our school could contribute to this, compared to the others that specialized in music performance. Luckily, I got introduced to the marvelous technology of in-ear monitors. With these, I could block most of the noise out and really focus on the song and the click.

To Make A Music Video Is To Play It To Death

As soon as all the bands were set up to play, and after some instructions about the start cues from (what I presumed) the director, we went ahead with a rehearsal take without Carpark. After that, the band was queued in to play with us next, but the director (I presume?) thought of surprising them with all of us performing the song just for them. A very cool moment for us and them. They even joked afterwards, if they could just go home now. Clearly, good vibes were shared by everybody in the soon-to-be-hot gym. And then, the shoot went on...

If you were wondering, how long it takes to make a music video, then I can say for this shoot, we were at Mellerup for 8-9 hours. 6-7 of those hours was playing the track, over and over again. Part of the reason was for the camera crew to capture every possible angle of all 20 bands (and there was a lot to cover). After the first 4 takes or so, I started to see some of the guitar players getting shirtless, which I did as well, as it was getting hot and sweaty. But we were later told to not change any part of our outfits, afterwards, to avoid any continuity errors. Because of the weight of my in-ear monitors, I did need to tape the wires to my back, just to not lose the click and timing. As we went on, there was also a couple of varied takes to do. One take was all in the dark with flashing lights, which went unused. Another bizarre one was an drums-only recording. Well, bizarre for everyone, but the drummers. All of us bashers drummers still had the backing track in our ears to play along to, but not for everyone else sitting around. They had no idea what was happening, when we all suddenly started playing to (for their ears) nothing. At the time, I thought nothing of it, until I saw footage of it. Definitely an unique experience. After the production crew got enough shots of every band together and we all did a big group photo, we realized that all was not over yet. Extra shots of other bands entering the room was done, as well as a recording of all the vocals only, thus concluding the entire shoot of a song played well over 20 times in one day.

The Aftermath

Tuesday, April 2nd, 2019

I was pretty sure that everyone involved was kind of burned out by Transparent. I could feel that from my bandmates, who didn't want to play, listen or quite frankly discuss the track ever again. However, we were anticipating the eventual release of the video. Then one month later, it was released on the band's SoMe platforms. I discovered it in the forenoon and instantly messaged it to our teacher. But it was sort of bittersweet. Our entire school was gathered to watch the video, and we did get a pop, when we appeared on-screen. For about 5 seconds....

....and that was it.

Personally, I kind of expected a bit more of us. I did understand at the time of how much you needed to condence and sacrifice down to 4 minutes, but 5 seconds was just too little of us. Granted, It could have been less, and well, I fine with it now.

1 / 12
Camera in the bus
2 / 12
Our arrival
3 / 12
Setting it up
4 / 12
Ready, set, play!
5 / 12
Playing along
6 / 12
Playing along
7 / 12
Group photo
8 / 12
We keep playing on
9 / 12
We keep playing on (Now with spectators)
10 / 12
Q&A
11 / 12
Negotiations
12 / 12
Our group photo

Special thanks to Anders, my former teacher, for providing images and videos for this article.

]]> November Depression https://cryptofblackmore.xyz/en/2023.html#november-depression Mon, 27 Nov 2023 15:00:00 +0100

Hello. It's been awhile. Hope you're doing OK in these dark times.

November has crept up on us again, and so has November depression. The type of Winter depression that I'm familiar with. It seems to be commen for people at this time. Less daylight, colder temperature, more indoor time, being sick, etc. There can be various factors into why we get hit with it. I think an accurate description of it is being in a rough little nut. It's exhausting and it sucks, but you're not there for very long. I have my reasons for having it, so I thought that I would discuss about it and the ways that I deal with it in this little piece.

I've dealt with this November depression on and off for about six years now. I'm not going into too much personal details, other then that I know the root cause of it, and I'm still not quite emotionally equipped to deal with it. I'm a introverted person, and asking for help or advice requires some broken barriers. It's not easy. But in times like these, you try to fight it and keep yourself active in different ways, which is what I'm doing.

One thing that I've picked up from last year is writing lyrics and poems. When you bottle up your emotions inside, you're bound to address them somehow, before the pressure gets too much. Having them written down helps a lot. I am actually surprised by what has been written, so far. When I was in a boarding school, I used to play music a lot, but I was not a songwriter. By that I mean, that I really didn't know how to structure riffs and such to create a song. And lyrics was the last thing that I would think about. Now, however, ideas for lyrics come together much easier for me. I guess that writing about your own emotions is more natural than writing about a non-personal topic. I have plans to turn these lyrics into songs, which will be interesting to add music into words instead of the other way around.

Other than that, I'm doing some exercise in my spare time. I'm fortunate enough to live near a forest, so semi-daily walks have become a routine. I've also picked up on Wii Fit, since late September. That has more to do with listening to various podcasts and being inspired to live a more healthier life. Also, I can save money by doing exercise at home than, say, doing it at a fitness center. Though I have slagged off for most of this month, that has more to do with foot problems (that will hopefully be detailed in a future blog), but I'm getting back on track. Everything takes time.

All in all, I just trying to pull through like most people. Fits of depression sucks, but it's better to fight it than let it blackpill you to death. Life is too precious for that to happen. I may feel a bit down now, but tomorrow may be different. On that note, have a good day.

"As sure as it is true once we all shall die: true it is not all men lives
A king shall fall: a child be born: the Gods will take and Gods will give
Before your time has come: do climb your mountainside on a morning fair
And smell the fragrance carried by the wind: let it blow freely through your hair
Damned he who sits still and curse woe the dark but will do not a thing
To light the torch: to shed the light: for him the dark is all within
Slowly across the sky the golden disc of life it tumbles on
The wheel of life and light: rebirth: the seasons: behold the wheel of sun"

- Thomas B. Forsberg (Quorthon)

]]> Site Update: MOBILITY https://cryptofblackmore.xyz/en/2023.html#site-update-mobility Wed, 09 Aug 2023 16:08:48 +0200 Hello people. Got another site update for ya.

If you recall from my last update, I mentioned that while the site menu and language button was good additions to the site, as a result of me still being quite a newb in CSS, the enhancements didn't translate well to smaller portrait screens (i.e. smartphones) and therefore looked pretty cluttered. Well, I've since learned a bit more about CSS (thanks to my boy Michael, and the ever-so effective tutorials on W3Schools.com), and the knowledge has now manifested itself on mobile.

It looks quite nice, doesn't it?

For the mobile users, I've moved the site menu to the buttom of every page for ease of access. I could maybe have retained it as a sidebar overlap, but I don't know how, and since I want this website to be light, minimalist and fast, I can imagine it putting a damper on the performance. Besides, this is fast enough.

Another thing is the sticky language botton, which is now fixated to the top of the screen even if you keep scrolling down. The intent is to have it simillar to the desktop version, although the bottom being sticky may be removed in the future for redundancy reasons. I don't know, but we'll see to that time.

That's about all. See you and do your best.

]]> Don't Let The Little Annoying Things Get To You https://cryptofblackmore.xyz/en/2023.html#dont-let-the-little-annoying-things-get-to-you Sat, 05 Aug 2023 15:29:00 +0200 I would like you all to keep this phrasing as a reminder, as the opposite can quickly lead you into a slippery slope of bitterness and negativity on you and the people around you, unless you remember to get a hold of yourself.

To set the stage, I had an irritating situation at work, yesterday. The work that I thought was done by one of my co-workers, the day before, came back for me to deal with. I was not pleased with that. It didn't help that this particular co-worker's shift only started some hours later, so I was left with this mess without any answer to why it wasn't done the day before. So I worked on while wondering what the possible answer to this question was. Minute-by-minute, package-by-package, these possible answers turned into assumptions, doubt and ignorence about this individual. This in turn gave way to some bitter mood, overall very negative intuitions that I began to feel about other people in my life; and thoughts about how "they would go against/not care me in the future if I was ever down".

These depressing thoughts stuck with me for a few hours, until I realized that all of this started, because of a relatively small thing that really only had a slight impact on the workday, and that I should stop this bitterness, so it wouldn't effect my other co-workers. Took a little while, but I finally found some peace of mind and regained some positive spirit for the rest of the day.

Now, why am I writing all of this to you? Simply put, I don't want you to become bitter. Not that you should force happiness upon yourself, but it's too exhausting being bitter about meaningless stuff. The world is full of shit to make life dull, and it's too easy to fall into the trap of an unpleasant mindset than staying in a positive one. Remember that there's more joy to life than animosity, but you have to work on finding and keeping that virtue and meaning of life.

Also, I think that this, too, needs to be stated:

Take a break with the self-depricating humor

Or any form of demeaning remarks on yourself or on people you love. I'm gonna echo the sentiments of my buddy Denshi on this topic. Even if it's in good spirits, the more that this type of humor gets used daily, it can then lead people into being more pessimistic, less secure about their skills and believing that they will never be good enough. Which again, I don't think that you need to add more unneccesary negativity into your daily life.

And always remember: If you can see yourself in the mirror and find any flaw to fix or room for improvement, don't ask when. Start working on being a better version of yourself. It will be brighter in the long run.

Godspeed.

]]> First update of 2023 https://cryptofblackmore.xyz/en/2023.html#first-update-of-2023 Fri, 21 Jul 2023 17:48:47 +0200 Hello again...........

...no, I don't plan on making this a annual tradition. I'm just lazy, ok?

Lots of things going on, just not on this site. However, you may have noticed somewhat of a redesign to this site. I've slowly been working on this since last blog post. I've now implemented a side menu, so navigating the site now is easier than ever. That took some time to implement, as I had to manually add it to every page here, Danish and English (also used some time to fix any other tags and such).

Danish? Well, almost. This is also something, that I wanted to do since the beginning of this site. This also took time, as I had to essentially split the site in two directories and then re-edit all the pages again and redirect links, images and so forth. Trust me, when I say that it takes a lot of time.

After all that, then it's the matter of actually translating the pages. This is very much a learning expierience. There are many ways to go about it, but I seem to translate quite literal, while making some workarounds with certain phrases. As of now, not every article has a Danish version, but new articles will be released simultaneously in both Danish and English (with maybe some few exemptions). There's also new RSS feeds for each language, so if you're subcribed to the old one, make it go to bed and resubscribe again.

Best edition to the site is the Language Select. This was my first time making a GIF in GIMP, and I had a whole stupid grin after making it. Pointy hands got that rythem.

Last thing to note: Having the Site Menu and language switch is an improvement, but it doesn't seem to work well on mobile, so apologies for the inconvenience.

thats it bye bye

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