Vengeance Is Mine Now...

Vengeance part the first:


More coming, when it comes.

Rotwang is obsessed with my gay sex life

He keeps drawing these comics about Batman and me. Oh, and there's this one about a gay man in love with Dan Marino.



On a completely unrelated topic; Half Life 2: Episode 2 is awesome and definitely worth playing through. I still think Episode 1 was weak, but Episode 2 is solid and has one of the greatest final battles ever. Seriously, if you don't have the Orange Box yet, download Steam and buy it now while it's on sale through the end of the year.

Waldorf Blofeld Synthesizer

"You only ever post about things you hate." - Gemma

All right, then, here's something I like.


After I bought my Moog Little Phatty, I promised myself, and my girlfriend, that I didn't want/need anymore synthesizers. But at that point, back in August, I hadn't heard of the soon-to-be-released Waldorf Blofeld.

It's tiny, it's relatively inexpensive, and it's loaded with all kinds of fun stuff. All the Waldorf Q waveforms, all the Microwave wavetables, all kinds of routing and modulating possibilities including a step sequencer and an appregiator that is capable of having glide on or off depending on what step it is on... I FUCKIN' NEED THAT!!!

Plus, it sounds like this and this. Extreme Drive Curves!!! I NEED that!!!

Of course, all may not be what it is cracked up to be.

Here's a post from "Totty" at the Virus TI Forum:

"First off I haven't had much time to work with it, but yes it does sound good -
The oscs are sharper than the TI but I need to have a closer go on the wavetables. Obviously it may sound very much like a Micro Q, but having never used one I can't say. Very snappy envs, probably more than the TI and the LFOs do go into orbit! Very nice.

I know it's a cliche, but it is built like a tank! Very solid and sits very well next to my Polar.

It seems a little buggy to me as parameters were self editing!!

However the CD with the manual on it won't load on my mac or pc (scratched disc straight out of the box) and the quick start manual is good tinder for the fire this time of year.

Also there is a load of crap behind the screen (dust / dirt) which I am not happy with so I am gonna send it back. Beware if getting in the UK, you get a 2 prong plug and no adaptor. Luckily my left over adaptor from my Virus C came in handy!"

Yuck! Then a few days later, there was this post at Matrixsynth, accompanied by this YouTube video showing off some buggy behavior by the Blofeld:



Oh noes!!!

So the Waldorf Blofeld might be a buggy piece of shit. I already survived through an Ensoniq Fizmo, so I'm not really inclined to rush out and place an order for this thing until either:

a) Once enough people have them, it turns out only the first few shipped were flawed and everything is fine. (unlikely)

or

b) Waldorf releases an update that fixes these bugs and the early adopters say that all the bugs they encountered before the patch are fixed after the patch. (This process could take a few years.)

As far as I know, the Blofelds aren't shipping in the U.S. yet, so hopefully some Europeans are just getting screwed with a bad first run, but I'm going to have to wait this one out before I even think about picking one up.

Update: Breaking News!!!!

It appears the YouTube video linked above demonstrating some of the Blofeld's bugs has been removed, and the YouTube user's account has been "closed." WTF is going on there?!

I should point out that the YouTube user, Porcu68, had actually posted a handful of YouTube vids demonstrating the Blofeld, and all but the "Bugs" one were actually quite complimentary. Wonder if it's someone who got a hold of a pre-release Blofeld and signed an NDA or what...

Portal

There's a holiday sale on almost all the games on Steam going until Jan. 1st. 10% to 50% off. I seem to own all the 50% off games already (Vampire: Bloodlines, Stubbs the Zombie, Hitman: Blood Money, I think), but they had 25% off the Orange Box.

To be honest, I kind of resent the Orange Box. I bought Half-Life 2 in March and Episode One in April. The Orange Box came out in October and has those two games plus Episode Two, Team Fortress 2, Portal and Peggle. It's my understanding there was going to be a Black Box that didn't include HL2 and Episode One for a little less, but Valve didn't do that. Now I have an extra license for those two games that I can give as gifts. Oh boy.

Really, I don't care about Episode Two, either. HL2 was great, but I didn't really get into Episode One. I actually played it to the last big fight, not realizing I was at the last big fight, and then quit playing it for a couple months. Then I kind of said to myself, "Well, might as well finish it," and then *BAM* - done in fifteen minutes. Not so much into Team Fortress 2 either. I've said it before; I hate playing multiplayer online games these days.

So why did I buy the Orange Box? Motherfuckin' Portal. I could buy just Portal for $19.95, or I can get the whole damn thing for $37.45. Since Episode Two is $29.95 and I'll still probably play that through someday, it was worth it. I might play TF2 for about 20minutes before I get sick of all the 13 year olds and neckbeards and 13 year olds with neckbeards. Plus I got Peggle, which I had no idea what it was, but it turns out it is stupid fun that I'll probably get an hour or two of enjoyment out of.

But Portal - damn. If it was full length (10+ hours), it'd probably be the game of the year. It's probably one of the most humorous, entertaining, challenging, well-designed games I have ever played, and I am absolutely in love with it right now. I got sent home from the pork plant early today (Christmas Eve), downloaded it, and played it on and off all night and beat it. I think it took me about four hours in all, and while most gamers would complain about the short length, I fucking love it. I had some spare time, I played the game, now I'm done with it and I didn't get stuck or have to go to gamefaqs or any of that shit. I haven't been happier with a video game purchase in a long time.

I enjoy video games as a side hobby - waaay to the side. I work 40 hours a week, I fuck around with music stuff (even though my production this year has been nil, that's a whole 'nother post) and then I have horror movies and video games. I don't *want* these sprawling, 40 hour video games anymore (Knights of the Old Republic will always hold a special place in my heart, but KOTOR2 I really, really should have never played). But I'm not entirely ready to resign myself to PopCap games only.

All I know is, if Manhunt was only four hours long, it would have been one of the best games ever.

Edit: The Onion's A.V. Club lists Portal as the first of their "Best Games of 2007."

Edit2: An amusing video review of the Orange Box.

Ken Russell's "Lair of the White Worm"

A couple of years ago, Gemma bought me this book:


In case you can't read the title, it's "101 Best Horror Movies You've Never Seen." There are a lot of good, not-quite-famous movies that I was already familiar with in this book and a fair amount of movies that I had never heard of that I got steered towards thanks to it.

The blue snake-lady is from Ken Russell's "Lair of the White Worm," a movie I've been looking at in video rental stores since I was at least 9 years old. For some reason it is a movie that I would always pick up, look at the back of the box, and put back on the shelf. It's like I have a sixth sense for irredeemable, shit movies.

Ken Russell's best known film is probably the adaptation of The Who's "Tommy." I'm also familiar with his movies "Mahler" and "Altered States," and I also saw "Gothic" once about a million years ago, but I barely remember it. "Mahler" is kind of a sugarcoated biopic of composer Gustav Mahler that I had to sit through in music school (despite it having 0% educational value), and "Altered States," is a weird ass semi-sci-fi flick about a scientist who uses an isolation chamber and some, um, science-y type stuff to regress to a primitive state through reverse evolution. (The climatic scene of "Altered States" actually inspired part of A-Ha's "Take On Me" music video, specifically the part where the cartoon guy slams himself repeatedly against the walls to snap himself into the real world. That's just a stupid little nugget I threw in there in case Rotwang is reading.)

Interestingly enough, I also sat through "Altered States" as part of my musical education, because the film's composer, John Corigliano, at one point gave lessons to my teacher, Ronald Foster. Corigliano wasn't really a "film composer" per se, he only did 3 film scores (the 4th on IMDB is just a film adaptation of an opera he wrote), although the third film score was for "The Red Violin," which is actually a really, good movie that you should definitely see if you haven't yet. And while I'm name dropping, I might as well mention that I did have a half hour "masterclass" style lesson with Corigliano, he is one of the nicest men I've ever met in my life, and now I work in a pork plant... Keep that in mind before you let your children go to music school.

Back on topic: Ken Russell. He has this, "I-wish-I-was-art-house" style about his movies, and this is coming from a guy who loves the concept of art house horror, and sees it in the work of directors like Argento and Fulci. (An art house horror flick to check out if you haven't already: "Eyes Without a Face." Absolutely fucking beautiful.)

Russell's films all have these bad, cheesy dream sequences, with obligatory garish and tacky color schemes. For example, in "Mahler," the title character has a dream where a Wagnerian opera lady, complete with a horned helmet, sings a song to the tune of Wagner's famous "Ride of the Valkyries" that chides Mahler for being Jewish, which instantly inspires him to convert to Catholicism faster than you can say, "Eureeka!" (Oh, and I think during the entire dream, Mahler was trying to have sex with the Wagner-lady.)

Another thing I've noticed about Russell's style is that he sets up these nice, wide shots - then ruins them by doing these shaky, fast zooms. It's an effect not completely unlike some dad doing a quick, shaky zoom-in on his son at a little league game with a camcorder. It never looks good, yet he does it, over and over again. Finally, for some reason, with "Mahler," "Altered States," and "Lair of the White Worm," the cinematography has a definite 1970's PBS look to it, kind of like an episode of "Mystery!" or "All Creatures Great and Small." You can argue that Ken Russell may have been working with small budgets for these films, but I don't think that argument holds water when compared to the cinematography of Argento and Fulci in their late 70s/early 80s heyday, which likely involved even smaller budgets.

So - obviously I'm predisposed to not like a film by Ken Russell for various reasons, why did I watch Lair of the White Worm? Well, for one, the Fangoria book steered me towards some really great movies, like del Toro's "The Devil's Backbone," and recommended so many films that I already loved, like Fulci's "The Beyond," and Brad Anderson's "Session 9," that I figured, shit, if they not only recommend it, but also use it's monster as the single most prominent photo on the cover of the entire freaking book, it just HAS to be good, right? And two: it was fucking free, it aired on IFC a few weeks ago (part of their pretty decent "Grindhouse" film series) and I recorded it.

So onto the movie: it is based on a novel by Bram Stoker, author of Dracula, and if the movie could be summed up in one picture, this is probably it:

See that orange crap in the background? That is an abstract, visual representation of this movie. I don't know if this was a poster for it when it was in theaters, or if it was the cover of one of its VHS or DVD releases or what. I do know that this was *not* the cover of the VHS version I saw in video stores as a kid, nor is it the current DVD release's cover, which, features Hugh Grant's face according to amazon.com. He plays the third or fourth most important character in the movie, but, hey, he ended up being famous, so let's have *his* face take up 75% of the cover.

So the movie is about a Scottish archeology student who digs up a giant snake skull on the land rented by two chicks whose parents disappeared. The landlord is a wealthy English noble (played by Hugh Grant), whose ancestor is said to have slain a "great white worm" in ye Olden days; an event which the town - or village or whatever - still celebrates to this day with a catchy folk song, accompanied by flashing disco lights. Seriously. Thank you Ken Russell - may the 70's always be with you.

Well once the skull is dug up, in comes a mysterious, rich new neighbor, a sexy lady whom you can tell is sexy because she wears garter belts to hold up her thigh-high stockings which she manages to show off at every opportunity. And she's part snake and can spit poison that will cause you to have day-glo orange colored hallucinations involving the Crucifixion and nuns getting raped by Roman soldiers if you so much as touch a drop of it. Oh and by the way, her snake lady make-up looks way better in still photos than it does when she's actually moving around and shit.

So the plot of the movie revolves around tying together the skull, the mysterious snake woman, Roman-era paganism and the missing parents, and it proceeds in a somewhat predictable manner, except for a stupid twist ending involving a mix up at the chemist shop. BUT, this being a Ken Russell film, we need all the weird, random hallucinations and dream sequences we can get, so that the director can shoot his wannabe-Fellini load all over the audience's collective face. This is best represented by a sequence in the middle of the movie where the rich landlord guy (Hugh Grant) goes to sleep and has a five minute long dream sequence where he's on a plane and all the female characters in the movie are airline stewardesses, and the women are all wearing garter belts and thigh-highs under their stewardess uniforms, which you can see because they are wrestling each other and inadvertently hiking up their skirts in the process. The dream seems to point to some weird conflict wherein Hugh Grant is going to have to choose between the snake lady and the two chicks, but this NEVER HAPPENS. In fact, the only thing this prolonged dream sequence seems to foreshadow is that one of the sisters wears a ring with a crucifix on it, which ultimately does not end up meaning much in the course of the movie. It's like foreshadowing, without actually foreshadowing ANYTHING!

I should also point out that Hugh Grant's character is *not* the hero of the movie, the archeology student is, because he's Scottish - which, of course, means he not only plays the bag pipes, but also has a set on hand. Not only is *this* plot point *not* foreshadowed, there is actually a scene in the movie where his room is being thoroughly searched for a missing giant snake skull - no bagpipes. And in case you don't get what I'm inferring, bag pipes are important to the resolution of this movie.

In gathering info and pictures for this qausi-review, it appears a lot of people file this in the "so-bad-it's-good" category - the wikipedia article on Ken Russell even refers to this movie as a "Hammer spoof." Maybe it's my bias showing, but the things I hated about this movie I hated about other Ken Russell movies, so whether or not I found it funny seems inconsequential.
Maybe my "funny bone" just wasn't working today, or maybe I'm missing something, but I rate this movie: Crap!

I Can't Stop the Chop

Meraud is far to cuddly for the "Silent Hill" treatment to work.



Here's a more flattering / less lizard-like chop of co-contributor "Gemma."

Dear Meraud,

Step 1: Right-click, Save Image As...


Step 2: Save to disk


Step 3: New Post or Edit Post, select "Add Image"


Step 4: Under "Add an image from your computer," click "Browse" and choose the file you saved to disk.


Step 5: Once the file is chosen, click on "Upload Image"


Step 6: Profit.

Gay Batman

Herr Rotwang drew this. I couldn't possibly imagine where he got the idea for it.

I wonder if it has to do with all that Star Trek he watches.

PS. It sure does look like he worked extra hard on Batman's bulge...

PhotoChoppery

I've been goofing around with the freeware variant of Photoshop called GIMP on-and-off over the past year. Mainly, the only thing I knew how to do was copy/paste, resize images and layer things like my Eye-Teeth-Brain profile icon. Thanks to this Something Awful thread, titled "Let's make Silent Hill photos again!," I've spent the past couple of days learning to make photos more "Silent Hill"-esque.


I should probably take this opportunity to segue into a brief rundown/review of the Silent Hill games, as well as criticism of the Silent Hill movie, but it's late and I need to get some sleep, so I will make a note to do that some other time.

I love it when you’re wrong….

The release of the final in the Three Mothers series! For the uninitiated, one of the world’s greatest directors, Dario Argento, began this trilogy in 1977 with the classic “Susperia” and followed it in 1980 with “Inferno.” I don’t really know what the deal is or why it took him so long to release “Mother of Tears.”

All I know is that Mike told me that Dario would likely die without completing it. And now Mike is wrong, and that makes me happy. :)

Not necessarily because I want him to be wrong, but because the first two, especially “Inferno,” are some of my favorite movies ever! I love the plot line about three witch sisters, each wreaking havoc in a different city. And they’re absolutely terrifying.

I recommend seeing these as an introduction to Italian horror and Argento in specific, along with other fantastic works such as “Stendhal’s Syndrome” and “The Phantom of the Opera,” both of which feature the lovely Asia Argento. Argento’s use of color and his extremely stylized films make his work an absolute joy when compared with the bland Hollywood stuff.

“La Terza Madre” has already been released in the States, but it’s not playing anywhere near me. I guess I will have to wait for the DVD…Click here for the trailer.

New Blood

Since all I write about lately seems to be football and video games, I've decided to invite my future-mrs. to write for this blog. Hopefully she'll write about horror movies more than I have and kick start in me my initial desire to write about horror movies.

As for Manhunt, I've gotten to the level where it is essentially a shoot-out in the subway station, and I've put that shit on indefinite hold. Manhunt is not a shooter and the PS2 sucks for shooters (I'm used to mouse point-and-clicking on the PC for shoot-em-ups) so I've instead been playing Lego Star Wars 2. It's fun, but it seems like in an attempt to add to the game above and beyond the original, it has gotten a bit convoluted. Collect enough studs in Story Mode, then collect enough studs in Freeplay mode plus find the hidden red brick - oh and meet the criteria so you collect all four gold bricks in each level, blah blah blah... I loved the minikit building from the first one and having the option to actually play with your minikit vehicles is fun, but it just seems like too much shit has been crammed into it.

And I suck at vehicle levels.

Terror EBM

I was reading the Dark Sonus forums and came across a post talking about "Terror EBM." Clicking through a few links led me to this video from Dawn of Ashes.



Love the video, music's pretty good... I hate that kind of vocal processing though.

Makes me think... I'd really love to play keys in a "Terror EBM" band.

Manhunt (again)

An escort mission? In Manhunt? Reeeeally???

In a game where I play a convicted murderer, where the object of the game is to kill as many enemies in as gruesome of fashion as possible, I have to escort someone across the level safely?

In its defense, this is probably one of the best escort levels I've played, in that the escortee can be left in dark corners and doesn't wander off on his own, but still...

C'mon guys, give me a pen and paper and I can storyboard 16 levels of this shit that doesn't involve gimmicky escort levels or guns-only bullshit...

Reviews are coming in for Manhunt 2, the verdict seems to point to mediocre and censored to shit... not worth buying a Wii for certainly, and this is a good thing. I really shouldn't be playing Manhunt 1, so I'll definitely steer clear of Manhunt 2.

Packers vs. Vikings

3rd Quarter, 27-0, Packers up.

"Well the Green Bay Packers are 17 minutes away from being 8 and 1 for the season, so we're going to bring you a more competitive game, Eagles vs. Redskins!!!"

Fuck you Fox.

Fuck you Hoosierland.

FUCK.

Manhunt

Thing Number One to get out of the way - I know all I seem to post about are video games. I didn't intend for this to be a video game blog, but whatever, it is what it is. Talking about movies is okay, but takes some research... most movies are, at most, 2 hours. A single video game can take up anywhere from 5 to 40 hours. Experiencing something for 2 hours or less, unless it is both really fresh in my mind AND provoked a STRONG response, such as Rob Zombie's Halloween when I posted about it, I just don't feel like I have much to say about it. For example, I had been wanting to see Stuart Gordon's From Beyond for, like, almost 10 years. Literally. It was only in the last few years that I realized it was out of print. Okay, that's fine, from there I had two choices - buy a Tawainese bootleg off of ebay, spend WAAAAY too much on an old VHS cassette from an Amazon reseller, or wait until it *eventually* got reissued on DVD. I decided to wait, and the wait was worth it - in that when it was finally released on DVD this past September 11th (NEVAR FOGHAT!), it was an unrated directors cut previously not available. So I got it, watched it with the future-mrs., enjoyed it decently enough (the future-mrs. and I gave it a C-)... Not only is Re-Animator obviously waaaay better, but I think I actually enjoyed Castle Freak more... So yeah, pretty anti-climatic, but that's life. I'm glad I watched it, I don't regret buying it, but overall my review is, "meh - it's pretty okay." But to write a full article about a single movie that I've only sat through once just feels kind of weak... I don't know how professional film critics do it, but then most of them are chuckle fucks any ways, so... But it's kind of this crossroads between, I don't feel like I'm doing a movie justice to see it once and then write a response, but I'm also not so much into watching a movie multiple times in a short span of time just for the sake of having something to say on my blog.

As for music... I'm just, not in my skin about that, right now. 6 years of music school, I'm kind of sick of writing about it, and I've decided I'm not going to be a weenie and give academic treatment to the "pop" music that I love. When academics start writing glowing articles about your genre of pop music, it is a death sentence, and the industrial music scene is already on life support as is, so... not going to go there. I also don't feel comfortable writing "reviews" of industrial CDs and what not. When I buy a CD, I already know I will like it, either because I heard it on internet radio, myspace, the band's website or amazon's preview links, or because it is a band I already know and love well enough that I don't *need* to hear a preview (Skinny Puppy). So I could write glowing reviews about bands I already love, or I can talk shit about bands that, for whatever reason, I don't like. Not going there. I'm old, I'm crusty, I'm mature, if I don't like a band, I just don't care anymore. In high school, it's fun to absolutely *hate* on bands and genres, but there's a point where you grow up and work a mundane job and realize, "so-and-so might suck, but they're making their living doing *that*, and I'm making my living doing this bullshit..."

As for politics, I've had an idea to do a brief write up of all the major presidential candidates for the two major parties, but, meh... what does it really matter? I'll probably do it, just because it's 75% written in my head, whereas this post is so far 100% improv...

Which brings me to the subject of this post... Manhunt.
(Warning, longwindedness is a symptom of 6 years of academia. Consult your doctor.)

So in my last post about Psychonauts, I briefly brought up Manhunt... oh, and by the way, I finally did finish Psychonauts... great game, check it out if you haven't already.

Manhunt... gameplay... first off, the only "stealth games" I've played are Hitman 2, Hitman Contracts, Hitman Blood Money and Manhunt. Of course, I've dealt with the pain and frustration of "stealth levels" in many FPS's and platformers, generally where they DO NOT BELONG. I'm not interested in "traditional" stealth games, but I DO like the idea of sneaking up on people and murdering them in horrible ways. Go figure. Of the Hitman games, I've so far only ever finished Hitman 2 for PC. I have Contracts for PS2 and Blood Money for PC. I will definitely finish Blood Money on the PC someday, Contracts on PS2, I don't know. The PS2 interface is vastly inferior for the Hitman games, in my experience.

In mentioning Manhunt in my last post, I decided to "look it up." Read old reviews, glance at some of the "tips and tricks" on gamefaqs.com... My mind is a perverted and vile Rorschach test. I think of something, anything, and I start looking it up online... and I learned something. I never did "get" how to properly play Manhunt. The shadows in Manhunt render you completely invisible. I did not realize this the first time around. I would hide in the shadows, an enemy would turn in my direction, come close to me, be 2 feet away, and I would, for some reason, instinctively run the fuck away. I guess I was holding the game to a higher standard of realism, or something. I only got to the fourth level this way and never finished a level with more than 2 out of 5 stars. I guess I need things EXPLICITLY spelled out for me, because I am a moron. In talking to Herr Rotwang about this, I described it this way; "It's like playing Super Mario Bros., and every time you see a mushroom, you decide to run the fuck away from it because you think it's poisonous." Yeah, I'm that stupid.

So, I decided to give Manhunt another go... I think it's on my mind because I'm kind of wet and creamy about Manhunt 2 using the motion controller on the Wii... I've never played a Wii before, so I may hate the new control scheme, but I must admit that I am intrigued...

I last played this game in September of 2005. Go me! I decided it would be prudent to start all over again from the beginning, and instantly I get 3 stars on the first level. Shadows, it's all about the fucking shadows. I see the light now, and I am a fucking murder machine. I'm now on the 7th level after only a couple sessions, a huge improvement over my first crack at it, and I've got 3 stars on all 6 previous levels. I suck at doing this shit in a timely manner, so I lose my 4th star there, and I'm playing "fetish" difficulty rather than "hardcore," which disqualifies me from getting 5 stars on any level.

So Manhunt isn't as bad as I initially thought... though the gameplay of Manhunt and the Hitman games are in no way "addictive." They're very much games where you play in short bursts, which is good for me... a half hour to an hour of Manhunt, then I get frustrated and do something else. That's much better for me than something like Psychonauts, where I'm glued to the game for 2 or 3 hours at a time. Manhunt is also far more forgiving than Hitman, so it's a good balance overall and I'm enjoying it for now. I hear the later levels are a bitch and a half, so we'll see how I feel about it then. Just as long as there's no escort missions, I should be fine.

Psychonauts

Downloaded Psychonauts off Steam for $20... seems like everyone talks it up. It's a great game, the gameplay is unbelievably fun and addicting... however, it, like Bioshock, is a great game that ends with a fucking escort mission.

Who has ever played a game and said, "...and my favorite part was the ESCORT MISSION!!! It was totally awesome!!!" NO... NOBODY FREAKING LIKES ESCORT MISSIONS!!!

Yeah, I'm raging against a game that is two years old, but Bioshock pulled the same shit and that was released last month, so...

...I haven't finished Psychonauts yet, I should really spend more time making music and less time playing games. I'm on a bit of a binge lately, I updated my computer back in April/May, went from P4 1.6ghz PC-133 SDRAM with an ati Radeon 9800 to an AMD X2 (4200, whatever that means) with PC-667 RAM (motherboard can handle PC-800) and a Geforce 7600, so I'm kind of catching up with the past few years of PC gaming. Steam has been absolutely addicting for me. I downloaded Half-Life 2 and Episode 1, bought the Dawn of War games before they were available on Steam (if you're like me and hate multiplayer gaming (I hate people, I hate teenagers and I hate assholes) just buy Dawn of War: Dark Crusade. The singe player campaigns for Dawn of War and Winter Assault are totally weak compared to other RTS's. Dark Crusade is actually lots of fun, and you can be all the races in single player but not multiplayer). Then I bought S.T.A.L.K.E.R., didn't like it at all (sorry Phil, real life sucks enough!), Bioshock, Hitman: Blood Money, and finally Psychonauts. I'm still in the middle of Hitman: Blood Money, I like the Hitman games, but I tend to play them a little bit, leave them alone for a while, then come back to them. I'm not really big into "stealth" games, but the premise of the Hitman games is too cool for me to pass up.

So yeah, Psychonauts. Awesome art, awesome setting... best of all, it's a game that is obviously designed around the gameplay. Old school classics, like Super Mario Brothers, Zelda, hell, even Donkey Kong and Pac Man, they were all about the gameplay. None of that shit makes any fucking sense, narratively. Narratives and stories and concepts have become primary in the video game industry, some games are just plain not-fun to play - hello S.T.A.L.K.E.R.! Hitman too, although moreso the old games than Blood Money... and fucking Manhunt... oh god. But Psychonauts is just plain fun to play, it's fun to mash the buttons, it's fun to do everything in it.

Except escort that little shit around the meat circus. FUCK YOU PSYCHONAUTS!!!

Anonymous comments now allowed on this blog

People can now leave anonymous comments. I didn't realize they were not allowed by default. I doubt I've missed anyone, but whatever.

PS.

Haujobb - Vertical Theory. I just recently got this even though it was released in 2003. I saw Haujobb live in Milwaukee when they were touring to promote Polarity in 2002, and this album slipped past my radar... I was in grad school, dirt poor, and not really paying attention to this kind of music. For the past year I've been playing catch up, and this is seriously not only the best Haujobb album since Soultions for a Small Planet/the rmx matrix, it's one of the best industrial/ebm/whatever albums ever. Or at least I think so this week.

In Defense of "Torture Porn"

So today at the pork plant, Dr. Rotwang sent a pigeon over to me with a note that said something along of the lines of, "So what do you think of torture porn movies like Saw and The Hills Have Eyes remake?" I immediately flew into a frothy rage, ripped the head off the pig carcass I was gutting, and hurled it clear across the room. "Dang blast it!!!" I exclaimed as I proceeded into the men's room to write my response...

***

Torture Porn. Wow that sounds horrible. There are few more pejorative terms in the realm of art and entertainment these days. I love the Saw movies. Every Halloween, the girlfriend and I go see the latest Saw movie. We saw Hostel in theaters and loved it, but skipped Hostel 2. And, as I mentioned in the Halloween post below, I hated Wes Craven's original Hills Have Eyes, but loved the latest remake. So what do I think of movies like Saw and The Hills Have Eyes remake and Hostel and The Texas Chainsaw Massacre: The Beginning? I fuckin' love them. They're grrrrr-eat!

1) Torture porn - what kind of propagandistic "focus on the family" bullshit term is this? First, what is pornography? People have struggled with this question for far too long in this country, and I'd like to say, once and for all, that pornography = people being photographed or videotaped actually having sexual intercourse. Blow jobs, hand jobs, anal, masturbation, missionary, foot jobs, boob jobs, blah blah blah. Naked people? Not pornography. So-called softcore porno, where actors and actresses simulate having sex? Not pornography. A Photograph of a penis penetrating a vagina, but hung in an art gallery? Pornography. Does that mean that pornography should not be seen? should not exist? or should not be hung in an art gallery? Of course not. Pornography will always exist as long as human beings have the means to photograph and videotape themselves and each other. There is some innate human desire for some to photograph and videotape themselves in sexual acts and for others to view said photographs and videos.

One of the essential "problems" our society has had in defining pornography is that, in terms of human history, the ability to literally photograph, literally capture a moment, is relatively new. It used to be drawings, sculptures, woodcarvings, paintings, etc. were the only way one could perceive such acts without actually being there in the room with the... fornicators? (I don't like that word much, but I'm at a loss for a better one.) I put forth the argument that, in today's modern world, only actual recordings of people engaged in sex acts qualifies as pornography, and all drawings, representations and simulations of such acts can not compete against the actual act. And while there are moralists with authoritarian agendas cropping up every week to convince us that this idea or that is "pornographic" and "obscene," we as a society must learn to ignore the bait of those who would seek to gain power over us by turning us against things that we already don't like.

Following the definition of pornography I've laid out above, it is my intent to argue that literal torture porn would be photographs or video of actual people being actually tortured - therefore, the only widely disseminated "torture porn" of the modern era would be the Abu Gharib photographs. Does that mean they should not have been aired on the evening news? Absolutely not! Pornography in and of itself does not intrinsically harm anyone, it is how individuals react to it that is harmful, and that ultimately depends on the individual themselves and not the record.
But this is all beside the point of my argument, which is this: Movies that portray actors and actresses simulating being victims or perpetrators of extreme and/or graphic violence do not fit the criteria of pornography in our modern era of reality TV, cell phone cams, web cams, etc. etc. etc...

2) The level of so-called graphic violence in today's R-rated horror movies is a reaction to two things.
a) Mel Gibson's The Passion of the Christ made it okay for studios and major theater chains to show extreme, graphic violence and prolonged sequences of torture. (Chew on that, moralists!)
b) A new generation of filmmakers reacting to previous restrictions put upon the entire horror genre in the 80's and 90's. Rob Zombie, Alexandre Aja, Eli Roth, etc. etc. etc...

In the 70's you had the "Grindhouse" era of horror movies, where a decentralized system of theaters and drive-ins could show low budget movies depicting extreme situations, although the special effects weren't really that realistic... movies like The Texas Chainsaw Massacre, Don't Look in the Basement, I Spit on Your Grave, and Last House on the Left. When these movies went from being occasionally shown for short periods of time at certain theaters to being readily available on home video, the UK threw a shit fit known as the "Video Nasty" era, where movies like Texas Chainsaw Massacre, The Evil Dead and The Exorcist (the latter of course being an acclaimed, Oscar winning, major Hollywood motion picture) were banned outright, and other movies had offending scenes edited out by a government office. Meanwhile, in the United States, horror movies released by the major movie studios suddenly went from "scary" to "slapstick." For example, compare Friday the 13th Part 4 with Friday the 13th Part 6, or Return of the Living Dead with Day of the Dead. Not to say that humor has no place in the horror genre, see: Evil Dead 2 and Peter Jackson's Dead Alive, but there was, in the major Hollywood studios of the 1980's, a concentrated effort to neuter the horror genre. However, extreme cinematic violence did not go away - foreign directors, especially from Italy (like Argento and Fulci), continued right on making "splatter" movies. Meanwhile, in the 90's, with the greater availability of camcorders, amateur filmmakers began making and distributing their own low budget horror movies - with violence as graphic as the special effects they could afford and devise.

So in my view, the extreme violence of today's mainstream, major studio horror movies is simply an inevitable reaction of about two decades of the repression, censorship (whether governmental or commercial) and "ghetto-ization" of the genre. Today, it seems like every movie is available on DVD and easily obtainable from Amazon.com. (A month ago, I ordered the first DVD release of a movie I have sought after for years, Stuart Gordon's From Beyond.) Meanwhile, one can obtain the major works of Italian horror directors like Fucli and Argento, as well as the films of many other foreign directors from all over the world that you won't find at Blockbuster or on HBO. Horror fans of my generation are rediscovering a whole era of films that were seemingly kept hidden from us in our youth, films that our authoritarian moralist "overseers" surely intended to be forgotten.

***

Why extreme violence? Because it's there. Because it exists in our world. Because everything that *is* will be portrayed, will have a story written around it, and will be used as an allegory to demonstrate some larger point. And whenever a lid is put on anything, whenever anything is repressed or hidden away "for our own good," it will fester, it will rot, and it will become corrosive and eat its way out of its prison. Everything that is denied and everything deprived, will be fetishized.

And when a level of violence and a grimness of subject matter becomes taboo for two decades, that existed before and was repressed after, it is eventually bound to return in full force. And for every Hostel or Devil's Rejects, there will be a Turistas or Captivity, and audiences will learn to recognize the difference between purely shocking crap and a decent violent movie. In response, the movie studios won't erroneously assume that graphic violence = money, and the prevalence of it will once again recede a bit.

***

"...and finally, my dear Dr. Rotwang," I scrawled on the toilet paper with my shit-covered fingertip, "I'd like to remind you that your beloved Robocop was held hostage by the MPAA, and threatened with the same X rating given to lesbian, incestuous, fisting porno - and over what? 30 seconds worth of violence!!! You who would stand upon your mountain of smugness and look down upon me!!! According to some, your desire to see a man pulverized by a never ceasing shower of bullets form a giant robot makes you no better than me!!!"
And with that I rolled up the toilet paper, walked past the sink and went back to my pig carcass and the pigeon waiting there for my response. When I got back there, however, I found a second pigeon, this one with a note from Rotwang that read, "...because I really like Day of the Dead."

Rob Zombie Presents Rob Zombie's Halloween Directed by Rob Zombie

Remakes - we all love to talk shit about them. We're in an era where it has been determined commercially viable to constantly remake older movies, especially horror movies. A remake is not inherently bad, one of my favorite movies of all time is John Carpenter's The Thing, a remake of Howard Hawks' The Thing from Another World, which is a damn fine movie itself. Classic movies tend to get remade the most, but I personally like the idea of taking movies from the past that were flawed and remaking them. For example, I hated Wes Craven's The Hills Have Eyes, but I really liked the remake of it from a few years ago. The new one took the premise and built upon it, improved it and ended up being a better movie because of it. On the flip side, John Carpenter's The Fog definitely had room for improvement, but The Fog remake instead ended up being far worse than the original.

John Carpenter's work has been getting remade a lot in the past few years, and even though the quality of the new versions is nil, I don't get my panties in a bunch over it, because, fuck it, he's getting paid, so I'm sure he's happy about it. Unfortunately, the John Carpenter remakes are kind of becoming an obnoxious franchise of self-parody - I mean, go ahead, remake mediocre movies like Assault on Precinct 13 and The Fog, but then they announced remakes of Halloween and The Thing.

When I first heard that they were remaking John Carpenter's Halloween, my reaction was, "Well, whatthefuckisthismotherfuckingcocksuckingbullshit?!" And I'm not even a HUGE fan of Halloween or Michael Myers, but come on! Then I heard Rob Zombie was attached to direct, and my attitude changed to, "Well... maybe it can work." Let me explain - I really think Rob Zombie is a great director, but, in my opinion, is a mediocre writer (I feel the same way about M. Night Shyamalan post-Unbreakable, but I don't feel compelled to write about him).

House of 1000 Corpses, as a whole, was a crappy movie, at least when you look at it as one single narrative with its assigned beginning, middle and end. But - if you take it apart and look at each scene independently and appreciate it visually, the colors, the design, the cinematography, and, of course, the gory special effects, it could have actually worked as an abstract, art house horror movie if the narrative was either abandoned or at least backed away from just a bit.

Rob Zombie followed up House of 1000 Corpses with a quasi-sequel, The Devil's Rejects. The two movies are almost like parallel dimensions, where the over-the-top bad-acid-trip cartoon monsters from House of 1000 Corpses are re-imagined as ruggedly naturalistic real world serial killers in The Devil's Rejects. The visual style of Rejects is beautifully retro, even winning over horror-movie-hater Roger Ebert for its artful homage to 70's era grindhouse flicks (and might I add this came out a year or so before the movie Grindhouse attempted to make that kind of thing the latest trend in horror cinema.) Unfortunately, the plot of Rejects meanders aimlessly, and while each scene stands on its own, strung together it leaves the narrative lacking, especially since there's supposed to be a pretty heavy point to the movie about how one's morality can become compromised when the pursuit of justice becomes the pursuit of vengeance. Oh, and the end sucks ass. Seriously. Fuck Skynard, and fuck Freebird.

So anyways - Rob Zombie's Halloween. When the credits rolled, as I was walking out of the theater, I could visualize one word, in ten foot tall flaming letters: RETARDED. This is not just a remake, but also a prequel. In the original, Michael Myers was a little tyke from what appeared to be a well-to-do family who killed his sister and never spoke again. In the remake, Michael has a home life very similar to that of real-life serial killer Henry Lee Lucas - instead of his mother being a prostitute, she's a stripper, and instead of a legless father, he has his mother's wheelchair bound, abusive boyfriend. Not only does New-Michael off his sister, he takes out his mom's boyfriend, his sister's boyfriend, a bully from school and some animals for good measure, in case you were, y'know, doubting his psycho-cred. Then after the night of the initial murders, he goes to the loony bin and chats up a storm to Dr. Loomis, makes masks to pass the time, kills a nurse, and finally turns into a giant (what the fuck were they feeding him in that institution, steroids?!)

The rest of the movie is a condensed retread of the original, because, afterall, we just killed 30 to 45 mins on Michael Myers' new, more edgy, more extreme back story, and, as we learned from Grindhouse, 3 hour movies don't put butts in seats. Michael Myers is now a Rob Zombie cartoon monster, in addition to the aforementioned gigantism, his mask, which represented blank emptiness in the original, is now all worn with lines in the face to make it look more edgy, extreme and haggard. Oh, and New-Michael Myers has the magical ability to sense that Laurie Strode is his sister, a development that was left for the original Halloween's sequel, and which was, in my opinion, totally stupid back then. Why Zombie felt like honoring that part of the Halloween "canon," yet [spoiler!!! felt the need to kill of Dr. Loomis /spoiler] I will never understand. And of course, since the final act of the original is one long drawn out series of "is he dead? oh no he's not!" (which was great in the original, btw) Zombie has to get more edgy and extreme than the original and drag it out even longer, to the point where you feel like the movie has ended five times before it actually ends.

Wow, see how many times I used the phrase "more edgy and extreme?" Yeah, Halloween 2007 is like Halloween 1978 filtered through a Mountain Dew commercial. Personally, I like my Michael Myers as a normal kid who up and killed his sister one day, never spoke after that, and chose to stalk Laurie Strode because she won the bad luck lottery and happened to deliver a key to the wrong house on the wrong day. If Rob Zombie wanted to remake Henry: Potrait of a Serial Killer, or, hell, make a whole new movie about Henry Lee Lucas and the controversy surrounding him, I think that would've been awesome, but cramming this shit into a remake of the one good movie in the Halloween franchise was just weak.

In the end, I wish Rob Zombie the best of luck on his future films and hope that he takes his fat paycheck from this, collaborates with someone whose equally as great of a writer as he is a director, and makes something totally awesome that will blow everyone away. I think he has it in him.

DAMN YOU, BIOSHOCK!!!

You're the best FPS I've played in forever, hell, the best video game I've played in forever, yet you end with an ESCORT MISSION followed by the most LIMP WRISTED FINAL BOSS EVER?!

For shame!

(I'm gonna play through you again on hard and get the other ending.)

Ensoniq was so fucking cool...

video from http://insidesynthesis.blogspot.com/

I love Ensoniq gear. My first keyboard was an ASR-10 Sampler, and I liked it so much I bought its retarded younger brother, the Ensoniq Fizmo synthesizer, a few years later new for $500. Last April I sold the Fizmo to help pay for my Virus TI - I got $800 for it on Ebay.

I'm keeping the ASR-10 for now, maybe someday I'll replace it with the ASR-10 Rack to save space... but damn, they had some sexy, sexy instruments back in the day.

Bioshock!

Bioshock, BIOSHOCK, BIOSHOCK!!!!

The credit crunch and how we're all fucked...

By now everyone has heard of the sub-prime mortgage crisis, brought on by the practice of giving home loans to consumers who cannot realistically pay them off. What has not been talked about is the way other business sectors besides the real estate and financial sectors have been doing their part to screw us all over by enticing "high risk" consumers to "buy now, pay later" for whatever widget they're selling. (I'm not even talking about credit cards, here.)

Today's businesses are not interested in making money, they are interested in the price of their stock. The more a stock is valued, the happier shareholders are. It would seem like the best, most logical way to make a stock comparatively valuable would be to maximize the amount of money the company makes. Not so, anymore...

In the past few years, since Enron collapsed, more and more businesses appear to be content to count money owed as "money in the bank." The money owed to a business is reported essentially as gross profit, making the stock look better, but the fact is, that money simply isn't there. Consumers who have a history of not paying off debt, or even consumers who have outstanding debt with that very same company, are encouraged to sign on as "new" customers, perhaps with some limitations or strings attached. These "chronic" debtors then repeat their pattern of not paying for their goods or services, and the company counts what they once again haven't paid as revenue. More customers + more "hypothetical" money made = more valuable stock. A stock perceived as being more valuable attracts more investors, the more investors who want said stock, the more valuable said stock becomes.

One major factor leading to the infamous stock market crash known as Black Tuesday that heralded the start of the Great Depression was investors buying stocks on credit. The more investors who bought the stock, the more the stock was valued. When investors buy stock with money they don't have, that stock cannot possibly be worth what it was supposed to be worth if the investors were good for what they owed. Hence, when it comes time to "call in the chips," many of the investors don't have what they represented themselves to have had, and the stock takes a nosedive as more and more people come to the realization that a stock's value was overinflated.

If our chips are called in within the next few years, likely by foreign entities who have heavily invested in American stocks, the value of our stocks will be found to have been overinflated. By acting as though money owed is somehow money made, American corporations have set us all up for a spectacular economic downfall, where even those of us who manage to stay out of debt will be affected in the form of job losses. Those with debt, both legitimate (sensible mortgages, car loans, student loans, etc.) and illegitimate (credit card debt, loans that cannot be paid off at one's current income level) will all be in the same boat as these companies, in a mad dash to become solvent again, aggressively do everything they can to get what is owed as quickly as possible - at a time when many more Americans will find themselves out of work and unable to get work as these companies slash payroll in attempt to get out of their, self-imposed, debt.

Which brings us to an old pro-capitalist/pro-business/pro-libertarian catchphrase: "Rational Self-interest." Where is the "rational" self-interest in the scenario outlined above. If Tom owns his own restaurant and Joe skips out on the bill, Tom won't let Joe ever eat there again. But a typical modern American corporation these days is willing to take a look at Joe, consider how much he already owes, and bring him the most expensive dish in the house (but Joe can't have silverware, he'll have to eat Filet Mignon with plastic utensils.) Joe finishes his meal, walks out on the bill, and the corporation figures in a few months, they'll let Joe back in. You never know, maybe one of these days he'll not only pay his bill for *that* meal, but he might also pay up for the last three meals he skipped out on.

Joe's never going to pay up. If he ever intended on paying, he would have by now. And while he may be responsible for his own actions, it is the company that has allowed him to put the company in debt - multiple times. The problem is, it's all the rest of the customers who are going to have to pay Joe's bills in the end.

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Hurr!!!

Blogger doesn't like animated gif's...

I am a gear whore fuck bunny fuck buddy

Logic 8 is out and the cost to upgrade is "only" $200.

I bought Logic v.4 Gold back in late 2000 for about $350. Back then it was by Emagic, and they had three different "levels" of Logic; Silver, Gold and Platinum. I soon dropped another $90 on the ES1 software synthesizer, which was ass and poo, and another $250 on the EXS24 software sampler. Back then I was also using Windows98.

In July of 2002, Apple bought emagic and announced that it was dropping Windows support effective Dec 31st of the same year. At this point my only experience with Macs were the crappy G3 computers running OS9 at school - I had no intention of "making the switch." I tried and absolutely hated Cakewalk/Sonar and Cubase and I hadn't heard of Ableton. For some reason, I decided it would be a good idea to buy a package that included Logic 5 Gold and the emagic emi 6|2m audio interface for ~$400 off of ebay. The emi 6|2m interface was pretty poopy, six audio inputs, two audio outputs, all of them RCA. That's asstastic. Logic 5 also wouldn't run on anything past Windows 98, so I had my computer dual boot Win98 and WinXP.

In the Spring of 2004, I got it in my head that I needed Logic's ES2 synthesizer and EVOC20 vocoder. Logic 5 had a feature where you could demo any of the additional Logic software instruments for 30 days, so I did that and then placed a bid on the Logic Synthesizer collection on ebay. This was a disaster. The Logic synthesizer collection included the ES2, EVOC20 and a filterbank plug-in that I can't think of the name of right now. What I didn't realize was that Apple was no longer allowing people to transfer their licenses - to be fair, I don't think the ebay seller I bought it from did either, but when I found this out, his solution was to attempt to avoid it altogether. Fortunately, I was able to make out the guy's cellphone number from the FedEx label and after I made it clear to him I wasn't going to stop calling him, he sent me my money back. I offered to ship him the box of invalid software licenses and manuals (No CDs, all this stuff was *in* Logic 5 already, you just needed activation codes), but he declined and told me to keep 'em. Maybe he thinks I scammed him, whatever. In the end I dropped $125 on the synthesizer collection new from some place in the UK.

Math break: $350 + $90 + $250 + $400 + $125 = $1215.

In the Summer of 2004, the music department at college got funding for a massive music studio upgrade and I was hired on to help sort it all and put it together. Not much got done, because many integral pieces of equipment quite frankly never got there by the end of the summer, but I did have a chance to set up some hot new G5 Macs with OS X. Wow - huge improvement. I absolutely despise, to this day, Mac OS 9, but OS X had me reconsidering my entire opinion of Apple Computers.

In October of 2004 I was commissioned to compose music for a ballet via the school, so I was laying things down on my Logic 5 Windows set up at home and then bringing them to school to work with the Macs running Logic 6. After the ballet came and went in February of 2005, I took the plunge and got a refurbished, last gen G4 12" Powerbook with Logic Pro 7; the cost to upgrade Logic was $300 + $10 to upgrade to the latest version, 7.1. It should be noted that Logic Pro 7 came with all the previously sold separately software instruments included!!! Had I never bought es1, es2, evoc20, and exs24, I would have gotten them for the same price anyway. That always feels nice.

In April of 2007, I had some money saved up from working my first *real* job, so I splurged on a refurbished Access Virus TI. Unfortunately, in order to get the full use of the Virus TI's ability to "Totally Integrate" with Logic, it turned out I needed to upgrade to Logic Pro 7.2, another $50.

Mathbreak: $1215 + $300 + $10 + $50 = $1575

Logic 7.2 Pro sold new for $1000. Logic 8 Studio sells new today for $500 and includes all kinds of extra stuff above and beyond everything Logic 7 included.

I'm not posting this as a rant against Apple or to say any of this is unfair - it's just how professional/productivity software is. Logic 8 as of today still doesn't work completely the way it's supposed to with the Virus TI, but that's something that Access is going to have to figure out, I guess.

Mathbreak: $1575 + $200 = $1775.

Rock on.