Okay, so I've had it with Xanga. The past couple days really did it for me not being able to access this thing for half of the day both days. LiveJournal has proven to be far more reliable lately and it has some much nicer features. I feel confident that I could pay for the added features of a paid LiveJournal. Xanga I'm not so confident about. So I will keep this account to comment on friends who remain here, but otherwise I will be posting from now on at LiveJournal.

You can find me there.

I have left it open for anonymous comments, too, so you won't need an account to comment there. I hope to see some of you folks here on Xanga commenting there.

And so now, I bid farewll to my Xanga.

Xanga really sucks ass this morning. At first I wasn't able to get through at all because it was down for maintenance. Then when I did get through it was half the time giving me the stupid bug message or I was getting internal server error messages. And slow? You betcha! Maybe I will switch over to LiveJournal after all. I really see no benefit to Xanga over LiveJournal except that I have more established friends over here. I see benefits to LiveJournal, though, such as threaded comments and more reliable. I don't think I'd ever pay for Xanga but I could see myself paying for LiveJournal.

Anyhow, last night was awesome. I went to a metal show at the Pemi Youth Center. It was incredible! Chris had been talking a lot about the band Dark Minions cause he works with the lead vocalist. I decided it was time to see them for myself since I liked their CD. And for $3 it was well worth the price of admission and then some. The place was packed and there was a decent mosh pit going on.

The first band was Red To The Day. They were really good except I wasn't entirely impressed with the lead vocalist. When he was screaming it was great. When he tried to sing, it was horribly off key.

The second band was Never Say Never. These guys kick some serious ass. I highly recommend them if you like bands like Pantera, Sepultura, Disturbed, etc. They didn't have a bassist but the low end was cranked up on the two guitars so you didn't notice the bass missing so much. And who would have thought that when you put our state motto to metal it could sound so impressive. It makes for good lyrics! There were some politically charged lyrics apropos to our times which I really enjoyed. I bought their 6-song demo for $5 and I love it! All the songs are available for download free from their site so I recommend going there and downloading. You won't be disappointed. Most likely a review will be coming soon on my other blog. Along with the previously promised MC Chris review.

The third band was Black Dragon. They were good, but they spent too much time tuning on stage and such. They really need to learn to use their locking nuts. If you're going to play metal, locking nuts are your friend. Seriously. They aren't an inconvenience. They were invented for a purpose. But otherwise they were good. They definitely had some good crowd interaction going on.

Dark Minions were up last and had the biggest set. I finally got to see the plastic Mr. Snowman, the ever elusive fifth Minion. These guys were even better live than they were on their CD, which was good to hear. They really need a new bassist, though. Or at least he needs to learn how to play right if he's going to finger instead of pick. The slap of the strings against the pickups was a constant annoyance. I wish I could have stayed through their entire set but it was getting late enough that I had to go pick Kathy up from work and head home to eat.

Our newest volunteer at PCC3 was excited about being a Public Access User so he decided since this was something he liked he was going to film it. I'm proud of him. He got the okay from the youth center, talked to all the bands to get their okay, got some background info on all the bands and filmed the whole thing. He got some good shots of the moshing, as well as some good shots of the bands performing. He had a hard time with the low-light setting but the video should still come out alright. He got the bands working with him to have the  house lights on for a couple songs each so he could make sure he had at least a couple good songs to use if he had to cut the other stuff. I'm ecited to see some local bands performing on PCC3!

I should eat.