Thoughts of a Bearded Gent

Right, I’m not normally one to indulge in a spot of nerdrage, even when it comes to games and DRM, but after being subjected to four or five days of developer Blizzard‘s draconian DRM solution for Diablo III, I’ve just about had enough. Don’t get me wrong; I absolutely love Diablo III, it’s easily one of my favourite games of the year so far – and that from someone who arrived a bit late to the party to really get much out of Diablo II. However, all the fun I’ve had so far has been set against a backdrop of sheer teeth-grinding frustration caused by Blizzard’s requirement that players remain connected to its servers at all times, even when playing solo.

Feature Not Bug

Why do players need to be online at all times to play Diablo III? Ostensibly, because  Blizzard have added new features to the game – such as an in-game currency and real-money auction house – that would be rife for abuse if Diablo III was plagued by the cheats and hacks that afflicted earlier titles in the series.

In Diablo I, and to a lesser extent the second game, it was possible to create and level a character offline and then use various techniques to modify stats and duplicate powerful items before taking them online, giving these characters a massively unfair advantage in internet play. With the arrival of the auction houses, abuse of an offline item duplication bug could see the game’s economy debased and eventually completely ruined. Worse still, with the ability to cash out money earned via the real-currency auction house, vast sums of cash could potentially be obtained by wannabe fraudsters.

I say ostensibly, because of course, there’s more to it than that. As well as introducing the auction houses and various social features, Blizzard have also moved almost all of Diablo III’s game logic – player movement and commands, scripting, hit-detection, the nuts and bolts of the game, really –  server-side. For the uninitiated, the vast majority of single-player games do all this kind of processing locally on the player’s machine. It’s only really multiplayer-only titles, particularly MMORPGs, that have everything handled server-side, partly because of the scale of the games but also to maintain control over the world and stop local hosts altering the game’s code to allow the game to be played in a way it wasn’t intended to.

 

ERROR ERROR

This dependency on Blizzard’s servers means that Diablo III suffers from incredibly annoying issues that normally only afflict multiplayer games, even when playing locally. In the last few days I have experienced:

• Ongoing difficulty in logging in to servers – and thus play – the game I spent £30 on (and that only because I pre-order ages ago before Blizzard set RRP at £45)
• Unplayable lag. While playing single-player.
• Losing an hour of game progress and a not insignificant amount of gold to an unexplained error.

The biggest problem here isn’t so much the need to always be online – my internet connection is absolutely rock-solid – it’s the fact that your playing experience is completely governed by Blizzard’s servers. If the login or authentication servers are down, you can’t play. If the servers keel over and die mid-fight, you are unceremoniously dumped back to the login screen until such time as they come back up, losing anything from the last ten minutes to the last hour of progress you’ve made. If they start to creak under the weight of the sheer number of players logged on, like when the US and EU communities are playing in force at the same time, you experience crippling, unplayable lag. You are entirely at the mercy of the developer’s online infrastructure at all times, EVEN IN SINGLE PLAYER.

Obviously this isn’t acceptable in any way, shape or form, as many of the army of gamers who have been beset by Errors 37, 75, 3003 and the rest know all too well. When the servers are up and running smoothly, Diablo III is simply unrivalled fun, a triumphant masterclass in how to ensure players have a good time. But the launch period has, unsurprisingly, seen millions of people trying to play the game all at once, resulting in instability and extreme difficulty in connecting at times. Blizzard, of all companies, should know better. Having run World of Warcraft, the world’s most successful MMO, for the best part of a decade, they should know a thing or two about server loads during the launch window and be able to adapt accordingly.

On DRM

The why of all of this, which I’ve been circling around for the last 400 words, is patently Digital Rights Management – though Blizzard have yet to come out and say so explicitly. Moving game logic to the game servers is the real giveaway – this prevents pirates from cracking the game and allowing it to be played in single player mode gratis. With all of the maths happening at a server farm in California or France, there’s not enough of the game code in the local client files to actually play without some serious reverse engineering that, even if successful, will only allow for a shallow facsimile of the full Diablo III experience. By taking so much of what makes the game a game onto its servers, Blizzard have effectively created a game that’s almost impossible to pirate.

Now, I appreciate that piracy is a very, very serious issue for PC developers and support their right to take reasonable measures to prevent pirates from ripping them off. Clearly there’s a wide spectrum of opinion on this, from a vocal minority of gamers who view all DRM as intrinsically evil to publishers like Ubisoft who have been extremely forthright in their efforts to protect their products against the pirates. Both of these polar-opposite views are wrong; pragmatism shows that even developers like CD Projekt Red who haave shipped major titles without DRM as a gesture of faith and goodwill to the PC gaming community still suffer from astronomically high piracy rates, while Ubi et all have seen sales plunge as gamers steer clear of titles with punitive DRM measures.

Steamworks is the best compromise solution I’ve seen so far. Implemented through Valve’s superb Steam service, it centralises DRM for multiple titles and though it insists on players being logged in to access most online features, it allows them to play games in single player while in Offline Mode. Steamworks is far from perfect but it’s definitely the least worst solution around at the moment; gamers get to play without too much inconvenience and hassle and publishers are able to protect their investment without completely alienating potential customers.

Infernal Madness

Returning to Diablo III, I have no problem with Blizzard taking steps to protect both their revenue stream and the integrity of the game’s virtual economy – up to a point. The inconvenience caused by Diablo III’s infernal always-online DRM simply goes far past that point and away towards that mountain of skulls in the distance. There’s an argument doing the rounds that players foolhardy enough to buy the game before seeing how the launch week panned out should have known what to expect and learn to put up and shut up instead of getting vocal about it. I certainly don’t accept that – the game didn’t ship with a warning that it would be sporadically unplayable during the first few weeks after going live and, in any case, it’s not unreasonable to expect a company with Blizzard’s pedigree and experience of online-only titles to get the launch of a new entry in one of its core franchises right.

There’s a relatively straightforward solution to all of this; Blizzard could simply release a (probably monstrous) patch that enables Diablo III to be run locally when playing solo. In order to make this work and protect the integrity of the online economy, the single and multiplayer aspects of the game would probably need to be separated entirely – no offline characters could be taken online – but I can’t see too many gamers being bothered by this (though of course, some will happily complain about anything). Many would even welcome this approach as a fallback for when servers come down for maintenance - switching to an offline alt while taking an (enforced) time-out from your main character is not without its appeal. This doesn’t entirely protect against piracy but at least ensures that players need a legitimate copy to access online modes, one of Diablo III’s biggest selling points.

Of course, a more likely scenario is that connectivity issues will gradually diminish as the initial rush after launch fades over the next few weeks and the DRM fiasco will be largely forgotten until the first expansion pack rolls around in 18 months time. By then, Blizzard will have hopefully seen the error of its way and opted for a less draconian solution, though I’m not holding my breath. Until then, Diablo III’s incredibly badly-handled DRM solution remains a very black mark against what is otherwise a towering achievement in game design.

 

I am absolutely chomping at the bit to get home and install Diablo III today. A day at work has never seemed so long. It’s odd because I came to the second game a bit too late to really get into it but I cannot wait to get my hands on the third installment.

Fours hours to go!

It took a little while but I’ve finally gotten around to uploading the first batch of photos from my trip to Stockholm, Sweden last month to Flickr. These are from the first and second day of our trip – mostly the second, really, and are of various sites in Gamla Stan, the Old Town, as well as the Historiska Museet in Ostermalm and the islands of Skeppsholmen and Kastelholmen in the harbour.

It was extremley overcast for most of the holiday but thankfully it stayed dry and fairly bright on the day these photos were taken. The camera used was a Panasonic Lumix TZ18. It was only my second time actually using the camera and I think I managed to get some quite impressive shots considering. All photos have been uploaded to my Flickr account – if you like any of them, please feel free to leave a comment!

Primordial’s Empire Falls – quite probably the best Irish metal song ever.

A cold wind is blowing
Through the graves it is blowing
And it bares a poisoned tongue
And the foul breath of deceit

I am my fathers son
And his deeds
Cannot be undone… be undone

You trade in his blood
Writing your history
In the sacrifices of the dead

Where is the fighting man?
Am I he?
You would trade every truth
For hollow victories

Every empire will fall
Every monument crumble
Forgotten men who watch the centuries

Whose silent words
Rise up in betrayal
We will rise up in betrayal

Where is the fighting man?
Am I he?
You would trade every truth
For hollow victories

Every empire falls
And the earth to ashes turn
The lands of my birth
Shall be my tomb

The are the lands, the lands of my birth
Soon to be ruins, the ruins of my past
And when the sky should fall
The earth to ashes turn
Then you know they shall be my tomb

Where is the fighting man?
I am he
You would trade every truth
For hollow victories

 

My technological awakening came early in life, though today I find it difficult to pin down precisely when. Growing up in an Ireland crushed by the weight of recession and emigration in the 1980s, my access to CDs, computers and other gadgets was limited at best but this only served to make technology all the more tantalising when it did cross my path.

My first real memory of being enthralled by tech was at the age of six, sometime around 1989, when I sat spellbound in front of a Nintendo Entertainment System at a school friend’s house, begging for another try at Super Mario Bros and Duck Hunt. It wasn’t until a couple of years later that we finally got our own home computer system – a Commodore 64 – but by then the bug had already bitten; my soul belonged to technology.

The Three S’s

Tech is such a fundamental part of who I am and what I do today that it’s extremely difficult to take a step back and choose a single product that I hold above all others. Almost every device I own has become integrated into the fabric of my life in one way or another, often displacing a less-advanced precursor and allowing me to do the same things better, faster and more easily.

A case in point is my Amazon Kindle e-reader which now serves to feed my voracious appetite for books, a love that precedes even my obsession with technology. While physical books will always hold a place in my affection, the ability to carry a small library in my pocket, search for and buy new books in just a few clicks and then share my thoughts on them with friends has transformed the way I read, not to mention making living in a small flat already crammed with books that little bit better.

So instead of choosing a single gadget to wax lyrical about, I’ve opted to write about three different pieces of technology that more than anything sum up my life as it is today. Perhaps surprisingly, none of these is a physical product; rather they are reliant on hardware produced by other (sometimes rival) companies. Without meaning to veer off on a tangent, that’s perhaps an interesting insight into how the new software and services-driven online ecosystem has encouraged platform agnosticism and greater accessibility to cutting edger products. But I digress.

The three technologies that arguably underpin my daily life are Steam, Spotify and Search. As a keen gamer since that first fleeting encounter with the original NES all those years ago, Steam for PC is my platform of choice today and has revolutionised how I spend a sizeable chunk of my leisure time. Music too holds an important place in my life and Spotify, while imperfect, is both an excellent piece of software for musos and one of the biggest challenges to the music industry’s traditional business model in generations. Finally, Search – as in Google, Bing, Yahoo and the rest – is what pays the bills and keeps me awake at night while be an endlessly fascinating discipline,. underpinning everything from blogging to big business.

Steam

If I say that Steam may well herald the beginning of a new golden age of PC gaming, it’s only because I was lucky enough to live through the first. From around 1996 until 2002, the PC was the platform of choice for serious gamers. Sure, the consoles had their masterpieces too – Final Fantasy VII, GoldenEye, Tomb Raider, Ocarina of Time, Metal Gear Solid to name but a few – but those seven heady years were simply an avalanche of riches for the PC faithful. Quake, Civilization II, Thief, Half Life, Deus Ex, Geoff Crammond’s Grand Prix 2, Unreal Tournament, Baldur’s Gate, Planescape, Freespace 2, Hidden and Dangerous, Diablo II, Starcraft, Warcraft 3… the list is almost endless. To own a top-of-the-line gaming machine back in those days – often maddeningly expensive thanks to the relentless advance of PC hardware – was to see beyond the veil of what was possible on the consoles of the time.

Much of the next decade saw PC gaming take a back-seat to console development, thanks in part to the need to recoup rising development costs, though owing in no small part to astronomical piracy rates following the rise of BitTorrent. While mostly characterised by general gloom around the platform, these years also saw the seeds sown for the revitalisation of PC gaming in the 2010s. World of Warcraft, Crysis and Half Life 2 were all phenomenal success stories in their own right but Valve‘s high anticipated first person shooter turned out to be a Trojan Horse for a truly revolutionary piece of technology – Steam.

It’s easy to forget today just how brave Valve’s introduction of Steam back in 2003 really was. At a time when broadband penetration was low and many gamers still relied on dial-up – if they even had an internet connection at all – inflicting online authentication, downloadable patches and non-physical software distribution was a supremely risky move. Things didn’t always work as intended and the release of Half Life 2 in 2004 saw much gnashing of teeth, with activation servers falling over as gamers rushed to dive into what was clearly one of the best games of all time. Over the next half decade Steam gradually added more and more features: friends lists, multiplayer infrastructure and a much expanded storefront that offered not only Valve titles but games from other publishers too. The period also saw the first wave of indie gems that has come to define the platform for many in more recent times.

Around the tail end of 2009, Steam finally reached critical mass with an explosion of lower budget and independent titles offering a real alternative to the increasingly iterative release cycles of the big publishers on consoles. With most of these self-same publishers now firmly invested in the platform, Steam’s now-legendary sales offered gamers the chance to snap up the classics of yesteryear at knock-down prices, encouraging a renewed interest in the past and offering hope for developers keen to try something a little bit different.

Thanks to Steam, I now own a catalogue of nearly 200 PC games spanning nearly two decades, including milestone releases I never got the chance to play first time around. Indie developers continue to thrive and Steam has allowed games that would never have received the green light from big-name publishers to go their own way and become phenomenally successful in the process. Steam’s revitalisation of PC gaming has led many publishers to put the platform at the forefront of their plans once more while the success of Valve’s business model has seen the likes of Electronic Arts launch their own rival service, Origin.

Spotify

When choosing a product that captures how I approach music today, it’s a very close fought thing between music streaming service Spotify and wireless hi-fi system Sonos. But while Sonos has undoubtedly changed the way I listen to music at home, Spotify has had a deeply profound impact on how I find, listen to and share new music. Perhaps even more impressively, it has thrown a lifeline to a music industry in desperate need of reinvention after its failure to come to terms with the new digital world.

I’ve been a militant supporter of Spotify from the very first time I used it at the start of 2009. Much like Steam, Spotify was – and still is – a paradigm shift in how millions of people viewed music consumption. Although digital distribution channels like iTunes had been around for years and streaming services such as LastFM and Pandora were nothing new either, nobody else had really thought to offer a searchable, on-demand database of millions of albums that you could listen to gratis. Granted, there were holes in the original business model and in its early years Spotify was crippled by poor support from many labels but once the train started moving, there was simply no stopping it. The big labels and some artists grumble about the revenue it generates (not enough, apparently) but despite setbacks – like greatly curtailing free use for non-subscribers – Spotify has gone from strength to strength.

In the two years that I have been a subscriber to Spotify, only once have I been tempted to walk away. Last summer record label Century Media pulled their entire catalogue from the service, a massive blow to metal fans like myself. Overnight some of the world’s very best metal acts disappeared off Spotify, decimating playlists and leaving the genre under-represented. As I wrote last year in a piece called “Is Spotify Bad News for Independent Record Labels?“, I decided to keep my subscription partly in protest at how record labels were trying to dictate the way I listen to music but also because Spotify offers an absolutely fantastic service that’s a proper legal alternative to illicitly downloading mp3 files.

In the last year the tide seems to have turned in favour of Spotify and more labels seem to be getting behind the platform. During this time, the company has worked on various improvements and additional features, including advanced Facebook integration and support for various apps, both of which have helped to address its only one real failing, music discovery. It’s still not perfect but with apps now able to serve up customised playlists on demand and the ability to see what my friends are listening to, it has never been easier to discover and listen to new bands. Better still, I can access it from home, on my work computer, on my phone, on my tablet and through my Sonos system, allowing me to access new music wherever I go.

Search

I’ve already touched on my love of reading in this post but I was perhaps unusual in that until the age of around nine when I finally discovered the joys of fiction, I would happily lose myself in an encyclopaedia or atlas for hours. I’ve always had a thirst to know how things work, to find out more about them and where they came from and in a pre-internet age, a set of encyclopaedias was perhaps the best way to do this short of a full library and a stack of index cards. A few years later, Microsoft Encarta on CD-ROM became a mainstay of school project work but it was really the internet that allowed me to fully indulge my odd desire to know the most trivial and useless facts on any given subject. Even today I’m partial to late night Wikipedia trawling a la XKCD.

Perhaps it is fitting then that I have ended up working in SEO – Search Engine Optimisation, for the uninitiated. At its most simple, SEO is the art of optimising on-page content and trying to build links and social mentions to improve a website’s ranking on search engine results pages (SERPs). These days that mostly means Google in English-speaking countries, though Bing isn’t to be forgotten and there are plenty of giants in other markets, like Yandex in Russia and Baidu in China. Of course, SEO is a broad church and my particularly specialism sees me doing lots of work with blogs, content management systems and community sites, allowing me to indulge both my technical and writing/editorial skills.

One of the most fascinating things about search today is how it has grown to reflect the diversity of the web today. Google in its present state incorporates everything from news to maps (a real joy for someone who used to pore over atlases as a child, wondering how all the different countries and borders came to be) to video to images to blogs and more. While Google+ may be struggling to establish itself as a bona fide social network, it’s exciting to see Google using it to help improve search rankings,  feeding data on what people really find interesting or cool and turning the tide against spammy link practices and other black arts.

I still find it remarkable that I can find out virtually anything I want to know  - or at least somebody’s considered opinion on it – with just a few keystrokes and a couple of mouse clicks. Google is a remarkably powerful tool and while there are certainly ethical concerns over how it handles data and user privacy, it is my belief that the company acts as it does with an altruistic as much as a commercial motive. Not only do I make my living from observing and predicting how search engines work and how users behave, modern search greatly enriches my online life and leads me to content I would never have discovered otherwise.

In Summary

Technology has become perhaps the central fixture of my daily life, governing everything from my day job to my leisure time. While the three tech innovations I’ve written about in this post – Steam, Spotify and Search – are amongst the most important, they are by no means the only ones. Apps on my iPhone help me stay fit and eat healthily, games consoles under my TV double as movie players and platforms for catch-up television and programs on my computer enable a myriad of activities, from making music to writing blog posts such as this one. Rather than thinking of myself as debilitated by my reliance on tech to live my day-to-day existence, I feel privileged to live in a time when gadgets put the world at my fingertips.

This post was written as an entry for BE Broadband‘s “Tech I Love” competition.

 

Yep, I’m still doing this. Some resolutions are already starting to look out of reach for the year but we’ll see.

Watch 50 films I haven’t seen before.

1. Source Code
2. The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo (Swedish Version)
3. Stranger Than Fiction
4. Old Boy
5. Galaxy Quest
6. The Girl Who Played With Fire (Swedish Version)
7. The Artist
8. The Muppets
9. The Mummy Returns
10. 13th Warrior
11. Drive
12. Raising Arizona
13. Lars and the Real Girl
14. Batman – Adam West version
15. Eagle vs. Shark
16. Hugo (new)
17. Master and Commander (new)
18. Neds (new)
19. Grosse Pointe Blank (new)

Complete 20 videogames I haven’t finished before.

1. Assassin’s Creed Revelations
2. Dear Esther
3. Mass Effect 2 – Lair of the Shadow Broker (new) – cheating as it’s DLC?
4. Batman: Arkham City
5. The Elder Scrolls V: Skyim
6. Journey (new)
7. Max Payne 2 (new)

Try 12 types of whisky I’ve never tried before.

1. Highland Park 12 Year Old
2. Springbank 10 Year Old
3. Lagavulin 16 Year Old
4. Bowmore 10 Year Old
5. Port Charlotte An Turas Mor
6. Ardbeg Uigeadail
7. Tomatin 19 Year Old Single Cask
8. Ardbeg Blasda (new)
9. Bruichladdich The Laddie Classic
10. Bunnahabhain 10 Year Old Cask Strength
11. Glenburgie 10 Year Old
12. Springbank Rundlets and Kilderkins
13. Glenfarclas 15 Year Old
14. Glenfarclas 21 Year Old
15. Laphroaig Triple Wood
16. Glenlivet Nadurra
17. Aberlour A’bunnadh Batch 39

Read 25 books I’ve never read before.

1. The Hero of Ages – Brandon Sanderson
2. The Last Wish – Andrzej Sapkpowski
3. REAMDE – Neal Stephenson
4. KJ Parker- The Hammer
5. Brian Cox – Why Does E=MC2
6. Ben Aaronovitch – Rivers of London
7. M.D. Lachlan – Wolfsangel
8. Raymond E. Feist – A Kingdom Beseiged
9. M.D. Lachlan – Fenrir (new)
10. Andrew Jefford – Peat Smoke and Spirit (new)
11. Brent Weeks – Perfect Shadow (new)

Get my full driver’s license.

• Still nothing

Learn to cook 10 new meals.

1. Sag Aloo
2. Cannelloni Carne

Get my weight/BMI down to the normal range for my height and keep it there.

• Lost another 2.5kg or thereabouts this month for a total of 19.5 kg so far. Less than previous months, probably a combination of finally starting to plateau a bit, exercising less due to a bit of a cold and then the disruption of holidays and a busy schedule later in the mont.

Learn to play 12 new songs on bass/guitar.

1. Clutch – Big News #1
2. Nirvana – In Bloom (new)
3. Cream – Sunshine of Your Love

Learn to code webapps using Javascript (I’ve signed up for Codecademy’s Code Year lessons)

• No further progress

Regularly post on this blog (10 posts a month/120 posts over the year)

1. January – 12 posts
2. February – 9 posts
3. March – 12 posts
4. April – 10 posts

Not bad, I’d like to improve on the weight loss in May obviously but I’ll need to see if I’ve burnt off all the easy flab and have a slower slog ahead of me in the coming months.

 

I’m going to be writing a few posts about my recent holiday to Stockholm over the next few days so I thought I’d whet your appetite with five weird but wonderful things I learned about Sweden while I was there.

1. Swedish Bus Drivers Are The Best in The World

Bus drivers aren’t generally known as the friendliest bunch but Sweden’s lot really do challenge the surly stereotype. Typical scenario: Elderly couple get on the bus into Stockholm City Centre and ask (in English) how much they need to pay. The driver explains that tickets are pre-paid and that he can’t take cash on-board. The couple look crestfallen and frustrated until the driver winks at them and says, “Of course, you didn’t know about that, so I’ll have to drive you to Stockholm so you can buy tickets,” and beckons them on-board.

2. Everywhere Has Free Wi-Fi

Okay, this isn’t actually strictly true but while in Stockholm I did notice that almost every public building – and particularly museums – all offers free wi-fi to visitors. Not only is this fantastic for tourists like myself, who can check on emails and social network updates during the day without paying punitive data roaming charges, it’s a fantastic way to let native and non-native alike share their experience at the museum. While in the Historiska Museet in Ostermalm, I checked into Foursquare, talked about how fantastic the museum in on Twitter and uploaded a photo to Facebook. As far as free publicity goes – and bear in mind that Sweden’s museums are largely reliant on paying visitors, unlike in the UK – you can’t do much better than that.

3. You Get What You Pay For

There’s no denying that Sweden is expensive compared to the UK; you’ll do well to find any kind of sit-down lunch with a coffee/soft drink for less than a tenner. Thankfully, this high entry cost is abated by mostly astoundingly high quality, particularly when it comes to food and accommodation. Our hotel breakfast was beyond superb and our hotel itself great value compared to what we’d pay for similarly appointed digs at home. Our main meals weren’t that much more expensive than what one would pay in the UK but the food, service and surrounding were excellent in all cases.

4. They’re Into Calorie Counting

As someone who has devoted quite a lot of thought and energy to losing weight in the last few months, I was somewhat dreading managing my calorie intake while on holiday. Thankfully almost all supermarket foods in Sweden seem to carry calorie labelling, and often give a real indication of how calorific or high in fat a product is in its totality, rather than giving sometimes misleading “per portion information”. Thanks to the numerous healthy options available in most Swedish eateries and the vast amounts of walking we did, I managed to continue to lose weight while out of the country.

5. Their Museums Are Stunning

Sweden, and Stockholm in particular, is fantastic for history geeks. I arrived not knowing much about the country’s past, apart from some general notions about sovereignty over what is now Finland and around the Great Power period and Gustavus Adolfus. I departed with a real feel for how Sweden evolved to its present state and for the link between what I saw around me in Stockholm every day and events past. The absolute highlight was the stunning Vasa Museum, home of a restored and intact 17th century shipwreck that’s simply one of the most impressive things I have ever seen.

So today is Earth Day.

Have some Devin Townsend in celebration.

I was absolutely amazed to see this video of a freak tornado in my hometown of Bray, County Wicklow in Ireland this morning. Bray is located on the east coast of Ireland, around 15 miles south of Dublin city centre and while we sometimes get the odd strong storm that sees waves lashing the town’s promenade area, I’ve never seen anything like this. We’re not known for our twisters, safe to say.

The video was shot early this morning from the seafront, when the videographer was trying to take pictures of the sunrise. The sloping cliffs you can see in the first 10 seconds are Bray Head, the steep hill that overlooks the town and that forms the first stop along the narrow cliff walk that leads to the town of Greystones, about 5 miles to the south.

Today marks the second anniversary of the death of Peter Steele, vocalist, bassist and songwriter for Type O Negative. Pete was one of my favourite musicians – our vocal ranges aren’t massively dissimilar and he’s a big inspiration for me as a bass player -  and I was lucky enough to catch them in 2007 at Hellfest in Clisson, France on one of the few nights that Pete was coherent and playing at the top of his game on that tour. The same year saw his long-term drink and drug problems follow him on stage, leading to some utterly shambolic performances. At the time of his death in 2010, Pete had by all accounts cleaned up and was back writing and recording music. I’m gutted that we never got to hear a follow-up to the excellent Dead Again.