Skip to main content

2016 claims Metal Hammer

Image
By
In the 90s there was a ‘Rock Music Magazine’ called Raw Power (later renamed to Noisy Mothers, before getting cancelled) which aired on ITV in the early hours of Saturday morning. I often saw it in the Radio Times and sometime in the early 90s started recording it. As my obsession for Rock and Metal grew I also started reading the fortnightly Raw Magazine, which in the late 90s transformed into a more indie based publication for one issue and then died. At the same time I was buying Kerrang! weekly, Metal Hammer once a month and at some point I had a subscription to Terrorizer magazine. Raw Magazine was always my favorite, but then it went crap and died, Kerrang! became like Smash Hits for Metal kids (or maybe I grew up a bit) and Terrorizer didn’t have enough of a range of metal bands to make it worth the subscription, so I was left with just a Metal Hammer subscription which I maintained for the album reviews so that I knew what was coming out.

Last week 2016 claimed another casualty, Team Rock, the company who bought Metal Hammer from Future Publishing. It appears they just ran out of money, stopped and brought in the receivers. This of course means that there is hope for Metal Hammer if someone can be found to buy it and/or Team Rock. Although it’s not feeling very likely.

In the late 90s I would read all the magazines I bought cover-to-cover. In more recent years it’s just been the album reviews, of the bands I recognised, and the odd interview if it looked interesting. Did that make it worth the subscription? Absolutely! Convenience is something I’ve been happier and happier to pay for as I’ve got older and having Metal Hammer drop through my door once a month and enable me to keep abreast of the latest album releases was fantastic.

I am going to miss Metal Hammer and inevitably miss album releases, which will mean I save a bit of money. The alternatives mean me taking positive action to follow bands on the internet, Facebook or Twitter and I’m unlikely to fit it all in.

Metal Hammer was how I discovered the Bloodstock Festival, my now annual pilgrimage to Derbyshire with around 10,000 other metal heads. It’s how I discovered Dream Theater, Behemoth and countless others. I discover most new bands at Bloodstock now, but still…

I’ll be keeping my fingers crossed that someone acquires Metal Hammer, if not the whole of Team Rock and maybe I need to investigate a Terrorizer subscription once more.

Let’s just hope we don’t lose Princess Leia before the year’s out (or in the 2017 for that matter).




Comments

  1. Paul Grenyer27 December 2016 at 18:17

    Spoke to soon: http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/entertainment-arts-38446753

    ReplyDelete

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Catalina-Ant for Tomcat 7

By
I recently upgraded from Tomcat 6 to Tomcat 7 and all of my Ant deployment scripts stopped working. I eventually worked out why and made the necessary changes, but there doesn’t seem to be a complete description of how to use Catalina-Ant for Tomcat 7 on the web so I thought I'd write one. To start with, make sure Tomcat manager is configured for use by Catalina-Ant. Make sure that manager-script is included in the roles for one of the users in TOMCAT_HOME/conf/tomcat-users.xml . For example: <tomcat-users> <user name="admin" password="s3cr£t" roles="manager-gui, manager-script "/> </tomcat-users> Catalina-Ant for Tomcat 6 was encapsulated within a single JAR file. Catalina-Ant for Tomcat 7 requires four JAR files. One from TOMCAT_HOME/bin : tomcat-juli.jar and three from TOMCAT_HOME/lib: catalina-ant.jar tomcat-coyote.jar tomcat-util.jar There are at least three ways of making the JARs available to Ant: Copy the JARs into th...
22 comments
Read more

Write Your Own Load Balancer: A worked Example

By
I was out walking with a techie friend of mine I’d not seen for a while and he asked me if I’d written anything recently. I hadn’t, other than an article on data sharing a few months before and I realised I was missing it. Well, not the writing itself, but the end result. In the last few weeks, another friend of mine, John Cricket , has been setting weekly code challenges via linkedin and his new website, https://codingchallenges.fyi/ . They were all quite interesting, but one in particular on writing load balancers appealed, so I thought I’d kill two birds with one stone and write up a worked example. You’ll find my worked example below. The challenge itself is italics and voice is that of John Crickets. The Coding Challenge https://codingchallenges.fyi/challenges/challenge-load-balancer/ Write Your Own Load Balancer This challenge is to build your own application layer load balancer. A load balancer sits in front of a group of servers and routes client requests across all of the serv...
Post a Comment
Read more

AWS Summit London 2025

By
It felt good to be back at the AWS Summit . I got a lot out of last year and this year was interesting too. I attended some sessions on interesting topics and some which reassured me I’m doing the right things.  It was good to catch up with some old friends, see my colleagues in person and chat with some of our suppliers at their stands. For an event which boasts 24,000 attendees, most things run extremely smoothly. My only real gripes are not being able to get into some sessions as they were full and the length of time it takes to get a cuppa! Keynote I skipped the keynote last year as I was keen to get on with some hands on labs. This year I thought I’d find out what it was all about. It took place in the 4000 capacity auditorium, but that was full, so I watched in one of the many smaller theatres.  The theatres aren’t exactly small, each one holds more people than the entire nor(DEV):con conference in Norwich. Each is separated by only a curtain and headphones are provided...
Post a Comment
Read more