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A brief technical update. Illusion City now runs on HTTPS, in compliance to the new security standards for a good website. Enjoy your stay!

Music of the Week – The Saints – Night in Venice

Hello guys, another track selected for you by your trusted fellow Snake…
This week I’ll propose a classic to celebrate 40 years of punk ’77: one of the best track off The Saint’s debut album, “I’m Stranded”, recorded in…1977. :D

They are a milestone group for classic punk, even if now maybe they have faded a bit into obscurity. Their phenomenal debut maybe is my favorite effort from them. The classic line-up that recorded it lasted only 4 years, from 1974 (year of the group’s inception) to 1978 (one year later the recording of the album, after moving to UK).
After this, the two main members, Ed Kuepper and Chris Bailey, parted their ways. Kuepper went for a very prolific solo carrer, Bailey on the other hand, took the reins of the Saints monicker but playing a different kind of music, a more authorial and mature rock, without the fury of the debut.

And now…enjoy the Saints!

Music of the Week – The Pop Culture Suicides – Personality Crisis

Hello, fellow readers. I’m happy to share a little, hidden, good song with you today. The Pop Culture Suicides are (or maybe was? The most recent news about the group are dated 2011) the main project of guitarist Zim Zum, of Marilyn Manson’s fame. Not much known by the casual MM listener, Zim Zum played on the Dead to the World tour in 1996-1997 and, most importantly, co-wrote a good deal of Mechanical Animals album, which is still today maybe the most famous offering of MM, giving it the distinct glam sound and feel that it has.

Glam influences can be also clearly heard in his own work, both as a solo artist and on the Pop Culture Suicides project (started in 2005). He is quite a talented guy and surely deserves more attention than it currently has. On what I had the possibility to listen (a couple of solo tracks and of Pop Culture Suicides ones) he has a quite original style, mixing classic glam influences (Bowie on top) with industrial metal and a bit of electronics, sometimes with dramatic, complicated and well built song structures.

Unfortunately the band didn’t release anything officially, only a batch of songs on Myspace. So if you currently have news or tracks of this project or other Zim Zum’s penned music, drop a line! I’ll add this to the wanted page as soon as I can.

Enjoy!

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aVQifs7WWAQ

New version of M88 is out

Hi guys,

A little update regarding the PC-88 emulation page. A new version of M88, maybe the most used and known PC88 emulator out there, has been released in the middle of June. I’ve added it to the emulation page. It lacks some advanced features that other version had but I think they can be easily put back in it by copying the DLL files and working with the M88 conf file. But I’m not sure, since I’ve not tested it yet.

Enjoy!

News + Music of the Week – Massive Ego – I Idolize You

Hello again my fellow readers! I’ve did a small site update. I’ve added UTF-8 encoded version of the wanted and found list, many people had problems with the SHIFT-JIS encoded ones. For now, I’ve not received complaints about the other stuff list so I haven’t added a UTF-8 version for them. If you have problems visualizing the site’s material, don’t hesitate to write me.

Also, I’ve did a small update on the PC88 emulation page. A new port of the QUASI88 emulator for the Wii, titled wii88, is in the works! Check it out.

Now, let’s get down with the music. Another good song off the “Beautiful Suicide” album of the UK band Massive Ego. I’ve previously posted the title track of the album and now I’m offering one of their singles off it. They are very good and by discussing them with a friend some days ago, made me want to spin them again on the site.

Also, their tour with Blutengel in Germany is still going, so if you’re interested in them and you happen to be in Germany, go! You can check the dates on the band’s site here.

Music of the Week – KMFDM – Stray Bullet

Hello my fellow readers, how are you doing in the mid of this very hot and agitated summer?

I hope you’re all doing well…very few things are better than a good song for uplifting the spirit and soothing the mind. So enjoy this little hidden gem. It’s the second track off Symbols, recorded in 1997, the tenth album of this very talented band, started in the early ’80s as an action-art group and then evolved into an EBM/Industrial act. If you’re wondering, KMFDM is an acronym for “Kein Mehrheit Für Die Mitleid” which loosely translates as “No pity for the majority“.

Originally, I wanted to post the track “Anarchy”, from the same album but it’s maybe their most popular song. So I decided for the equally good, but less known, “Stray Bullet”.

Enjoy!

PS Also don’t forget to check, from time to time, the wanted and found pages of the site. I update them without giving notice here in the news.

Suggested Reads: The Uninhabitable Earth

http://nymag.com/daily/intelligencer/2017/07/climate-change-earth-too-hot-for-humans-annotated.html

One of the best articles related to the climate change question, in it’s gorgeous annotated version. It was written by David Wallace-Wells, who dealt a lot with scientific and enviromental issues in the past for NYMag.

It really gives a concrete outlook on the subject, exploring the most uncomfortable sides of it without any reticency,  and gives a vast outlook on the whole scientific and political debate currently ongoing.

Read it if you’re interested in:current events, science, climate change and possible outlooks of it, biology, environmental cascade effects.

Music of the Week – Of The Wand & The Moon – Immer Vorwärts

Time to go back to the neo folk territory again, my fellow readers. :)

This is one of the best songs from the last album (The lone descent, 2011) of one of the most important bands in the whole genre: Kim Larsen’s Of The Wand & The Moon.

Larsen (NOT to be confused with his namesake that played in Gasolin, him too from Denmark) experimented a lot in his career, starting with extreme metal (Doom and Black, with Saturnus) then moving gradually to folk / chansonnier music, penning a string of very good albums, all filled with melancholy and a sense of loss. He collaborated of a lot of artists of the most different genres, even going back to his most extreme roots sometimes (he collaborated a bit on Necrophagia’s “Death Trip 69” album).

This song is a short (running under 3 minutes), moody, introspective and heartfelt piece. I hope you’ll like it.

Suggested Reads: The TTY demystified

http://www.linusakesson.net/programming/tty/

A very deep and interesting look at the history of the use of terminals in computing and in how Unix system implementations do actually work, with a very interesting focus on how the system’s kernel hands the terminal(s) workings and the logic behind it.

If you are even a bit of a nerd, or interested in nerdy things, this is a must read.

Read it if you’re interested in: informatics, Unix/Linux systems, OS workings, computing history

Music of the Week – Slapshot – Punk’s Dead, You’re Next

Hello, fellow readers. This week, I’m proposing to you some very good old classic Boston straight-edge hardcore. What is the best way to combat the scorching heat than blasting it away with some good, heavy music, after all? :)

Let the music do the talking…enjoy!