algroth

Many people are excited to see Ant-Man shoot up Thanos' rear. Or maybe this:

This looks about as appealing as a new P.O.D. album.

More 2019 goodness:

More stuff from this year: Seven Horses for Seven Kings by Black to Comm

It's my favorite album of the year thus far, great stuff! Also quite enjoying Weyes Blood's newest, Titanic Rising:

A band with Sons of Kemet connections...

Watch. English dubs. D:

This is quite the choreography. Curious about checking the whole film out.

The thing I'm not convinced by with regards to this is that the events as portrayed in the trailer at least make the drama look very broad and "kick the dog" levels of hamfisted, like presenting big daft superhero emotions with an ostensibly realist approach and having the latter shed light on just how far-fetched and artificial the former looks.

Yeah, Road Trip and The Hangover were dire. Haven't seen Due Date but wouldn't expect it to be any different. Right now I get the feeling, thinking back on his films and some of his contemporaries, that he lacks that element to remove his style of comedy from the pedestrian, especially compared to the likes of McKay's flair for absurdity or the Farrellys' edge. This trailer does seem like quite the departure so I'll keep an open mind about it, but weirdly enough he's again seeming to turn the character into a more prosaic, ordinary psychopath than the more uncanny takes on the character by directors like Burton or Nolan. I guess we'll see.

I didn't despise Old School. That's about as much a compliment as I can give it. I heard his GG Allin documentary's very good though.

http://ikeaordeath.com/ I got a 10/20. Either I don't know my black metal (which is true), I don't know my Ikea (which is definitely true), or both.

am gonna quibble over designation o' "greatest cast o' zombies" appellation. these guys have stranglehold on quintessential zombie casting. that said, zombieland may be the only zombie movie we ever enjoyed, so resurrecting bill murray, as it were, and doing a humorous zombie film with folks such as carol kane, steve buscemi and adam driver is gonna get our attention. were it really necessary to do zombie makeup for iggy pop? didn't try to make bill murray look older after all. overkill? HA! Good Fun! I figure the makeup was necessary for Iggy lest he resembled a mummy instead.

Sorry for reviving this, but I'm currently playing the game again on patch 4.1.2, and this quest is showing similar issues. I haven't even been to Hasongo yet, but I've managed to progress deep enough into Xoti's quest that I've just had the dialogue about dumping souls into an adra pillar, and if you propose the animancers as an option, Xoti will speak openly about Eothas' intentions. The way this dialogue reads out, it seems to me that it should be intended to occur after Ashen Maw, or at least at a point where we know what Eothas is up to. I think this is a pretty important bug, because while it doesn't break the game per se it does spoil the eventual reveal of what Eothas is up to.

It's good, that CDPR don't know about this While Witcher 3 is a stellar game, all of its ancillary content (contracts, side quests, horse racing, fist fights, Gwent etc.) only serves to detract from the primary story. The side quests were well-written, but most of 'em had nothing to do with the main story. A focused narrative needs a linear (or a restricted faux-open-world) design. To be fair, you could say the same of most games that are pretty heavy on side-content, from Witcher 3 or Skyrim to, say, Baldur's Gate. I personally enjoy this freedom, I enjoy finding off-shooting stories within these settings, especially if, like in both Pillars or Planescape: Torment, they also add plenty of facets to the story and themes as well. Thing is, however, that they ought to be interesting in and of themselves, and where I have trouble with Witcher 3 or Skyrim is that much of the content there just *isn't*, and is rather repetitive and fillerish in turn. A lot of people like to point at the Bloody Baron storyline as "a great side quest" but not only is a large chunk of this part of the main story itself, but for every one of these there were in the game there were five standard "use witcher senses to hunt down beast" contracts, fifteen "loot the box right next to the body" treasure hunts, and sixty trash mobs padding the way between each. All the same I cannot say that I felt the side content really *distracted* from the main story, but I do wonder if the full open world approach didn't spread the worthwhile content a little too thin - it is especially troublesome when you get some massive areas like Oxenfurt that ought to be brimming with stuff to do and yet at best offered a couple of tasks and one or two stops for other quest or story events (I understand that there more to do there in one of the DLCs but I haven't played them yet myself). I wonder if Novigrad wouldn't have been that much more memorable a city had so much of the effort spread across the 140km2 of open world terrain would have been centered on smaller and meatier areas instead.

Ha. Maybe umbrage is too harsh a term? It's more a slight annoyance that I have, that nostalgia is often used too loosely. However, nostalgia for the printed music press is a curious thought and something I wasn't thinking of. I can see that, yeah. No need to apologize anyhow.

I think the fracture in today's music scene is less the product of the disappearance of a music industry and more of the loosening of its ubiquity and monopoly over the means of circulation. I think the internet and streaming platforms have done a great service at providing a platform for niche artists and listeners alike, but there's still an entity pushing the Ariana Grandes and Taylor Swifts and traps and reggaetons out there, and even giving them a privileged position in the new platforms that have slowly been taking over radio and TV. But it's definitely feeling a bit like a jungle over here, especially as a new act trying to find its niche off a first EP or album. I will also take a bit of umbrage at the use of nostalgia as a reason again, as I don't think it's what motivates the ongoing love for acts like Bowie, Genesis or the Beatles. By now their fandom extends well beyond people who were even alive at the time these were at their heights of their artistic power and/or talent. You go see a Deep Purple show nowadays and will find over half the attendance are in their 20s, and even younger. Their music keeps being a major source of inspiration for several acts nowadays and I think this is less because we are nostalgic for an era and more because either their music has never really stopped talking to the audiences since it was conceived, or because these were the shining acts of a movement that was dominant through the better part of the last 70 years. I don't believe the discussions surrounding Mozart or Coltrane have declined any amidst the followers of their respective areas either, but rock has itself been so much more ubiquitous throughout recent history. It's only through the last ten or fifteen years that the currents have really started to shift away from rock and into either hip-hop or whatever else becomes the new dominant scene, and if the former it'll be no real surprise to see endless articles about Kendrick or Wu-Tang or Public Enemy twenty years from now either. Many of these acts have become recognizable brands of their own and it's what hooks new readers to these mags, I suppose.

R.I.P. Agnes Varda... What a week.