Another obscure song has resurfaced! Years of looking for the song “Somebody Tell Me” by Tirez Tirez have finally paid off.

It’s not that great of a song, a bit of mid-80s jangle-pop, but it was on one of my mix tapes and I’ve never been able to find a digital version of it.

For your entertainment, for anyone else looking for this, and for a limited time, here’s the track:

I don’t see anyone talking about Diablo 3 anymore, other than when it popped up because of some scandal involving gold hacking and the real money marketplace or something. Actually playing the game for the game itself isn’t something I hear anyone claiming to do anymore. I also haven’t heard anything about any downloadable content or expansions, suggesting that even Blizzard has pretty much lost interest in it.

In addition to those gateway games, I also grabbed the complete Ultima 7, Crusader: No Remorse (which I’d been aching to play again), the Baldur’s Gate Enhanced Edition, Torchlight, and Legend of Grimrock. Out of all of those, the amount I’ve touched since I got the Xbox in September is nearly zero. I did a fair amount in Torchlight, but haven’t even looked at the opening screen of Legend of Grimrock. BG:EE, which I couldn’t wait for, languishes on my hard drive.

Part of it is, of course, the Xbox. The experience of gaming there is so much more robust that it’s just something I enjoy more. I even re-bought Fallout 3 for the Xbox, so when I re-play it, it won’t be on my computer. But that’s not the whole story.

Let’s say it’s an evening when Becky wants to watch a movie or tv show, so I don’t have the TV. That would be a perfect time to do some gaming on the ol’ laptop, no? No. I don’t know why, but I don’t. I’ll sit in front of the computer still, reading things online, goofing on Twitter, or whatever, but firing up one of those games and playing it, for some reason, just doesn’t happen, and I don’t know why. After rediscovering videogames on my laptop I’ve inexplicably rejected it as a platform. People tell me about good games to try out, such as FTL, but when I find out they’re PC-only, that kills my enthusiasm. I already have a bunch of PC games, and they don’t get played, so why add to the pile? (There’s a similar issue with the iPad.)

I don’t know what it is. Part of it might be that the games I like to play are all long-ass questy things, so an occasional night away from the Xbox would mean figuring out where the hell I was since the last time I was at the computer. But that seems like more of an excuse than an explanation. I really don’t know what the deal is, and I should work to fix it.

If you’ve been waiting on a copy of Beasts of the Southern Wild from Netflix, I’m sorry. We held on to one for, like, months, because neither of us could bring ourselves to have our hearts ripped out, which is what we were expecting. We finally got up the nerve this past weekend.

This is a beautiful, heartbreaking, funny, problematic movie. The posters describe it as “magical” and make it sound like it’s from Pixar or Hogwarts, and I guess that’s because there’s a bit of business in it that doesn’t quite jibe with what people expect from a movie. (These are the same folks, I think, who describe a film as brain-twisting when there’s some non-chronological narrative or something remotely fantastic takes place.) The fact that there are giant monsters (sort of) and its narrated by a child have made people treat it like some kind of fairy tale, but it’s a solid, grown-up movie saying some real things.

The things it’s saying — about class, about race, about gentrification and disaster capitalism, about well-meaning but misguided charity — are multifaceted and not straightforward, to the point where it also makes some pretty disturbing and troublesome statements along the way. It’s not easy to tease these threads out of the whole, and following them casts some unflattering light on the rest. But that’s not a criticism, that’s praise. This could have easily been the movie the posters seem to think it is, but it’s not, it’s far more subversive than that (whether by accident or design, I don’t know.)

Beasts of the Southern Wild is a movie that will stick with you. It doesn’t let itself be easily sorted and processed. There’s a lot going on with it, and I’m glad we finally watched this copy and let it make its way to the next person.

This was already a band with a bizarre catalog. Their early work was remixed, renamed, chopped up, and divided across multiple compilation releases that took liberties with song titles and descriptions. (One “unreleased 7″ mix” was, in actuality, the exact version found on the album.) There are even two completely different versions of their second full album, Jam Science, due to a label dispute. So the stuff that had been officially released, along with the stuff that was unofficially released, along with the stuff I had of dubious provenance combined to form a perfect storm of having the same song multiple times with three different names.

This weekend I took a microscope, tweezers, broom, and dustpan to the bunch and went through identifying what I had and cleaning out all the duplicates. I had a lot of help from this page, even with its weird formatting. I now have a handle on all this stuff and eliminated duplicates by not keeping all these compilations intact. There was no need to keep duplicate tracks so I could easily listen to then compilations because I never listen to those compilations as themselves. Except for one.

When I first got The Infinite (in 1986 or so), I didn’t even know it was a compilation, even though it says, “The Best of Shriekback” on it. I really didn’t know anything about the history of the band, or why this was on a weird record label. To me it was just more music from a band I liked, only sounding a little more distant and eerie. I came to regard this as just a straight-up album and I still love it as that. Turns out it’s a mish-mash of remixes and tracks from the band’s first two releases, the Tench EP and Care, with a couple of singles thrown in as well. When I later got my hands on Care and some of these singles (I never owned Tench for reasons explained here) the “new” (to me) songs chafed against the ones I already knew.

I’ve mentioned before its powerful opening combo of “Lined Up” and “Cleartrails”. On Care, where they originate, the version of “Lined Up” is different (better, actually) but the combo is undercut by being followed by “Hapax Legomena”, a weird, quiet(-ish) instrumental that drains some of the energy. On The Infinite it goes into a remix of “Accretions” that keeps the mood going. The whole thing keeps up a dark yet kind of funky beat, all the way to “Working on the Ground”, the only song off this collection, oddly, that made it on to a Cool New Music Tape.

It’s strange that I still like listening to this one. The strongest memories I have of it are from when I was at UNO, and that was one of the most miserable times of my life. You’d think I’d want to stay far away from it. But no, not only do I love it and listen to it as it is, it’s the only one of these compilations I preserved, even though it means duplicate files. The Dancing Years and Priests and Kanibals and even Evolution, the “sequel” to this collection, I never listen to as-is, but as far as I’m concerned, this is every much a Shriekback album as Oil and Gold or Big Night Music.

Also, just look at those guys on the cover!

This crazy thing dropped a week ago and I interrupted Prince of Persia to play it. Blood Dragon is a strange thing, it’s basically a Far Cry 3 mod, but completely separate from and playable without the original game.

It’s soaked in the 80s, or — as it seems to this person who actually came of age then — a young person’s impression of the 80s. Generally they do a good job, but there are some elements that are unwittingly parodying other parodies.

You play Rex Power Colt, a cyber-warrior who has to defeat the evil Sloan and his Omega Force. Everything glows in eye-searing neon colors and is accompanied by either 80s-style “rock” or 80s-style keyboards (the music really made me want to listen to some Tangerine Dream or Vangelis.) Your character is a wisecracking badass who we should be glad is on our side, and the plot is a mishmash of 80s kitsch, with cyborgs, ninjas, dragons, and the ol’ Red Scare.

Blood Dragon is a hoot, even though a lot of its stuff is wasted on me. Not lost — I get the references — but I was one of the only kids growing up in the 80s who wasn’t into dumb action movies, ninjas, and heavy metal. I know the things the game is evoking, but they don’t have the nostalgic heft they may for other folks. Still, it’s a pretty good parody of both those things and video games (the opening tutorial is hilarious.)

That said, the game itself…I suggest you stay very close to the scripted path of the game. Sure, you can liberate garrisons and find collectibles and do side missions, and you’ll want to do some of this, but the further you get from the main storyline the more obvious it is that the game itself isn’t that good. It becomes boring and samey pretty quickly, and since your reward for completing missions and finding things is more powerful weapons, with no appreciable increase in enemy strength, it just gets easier and less challenging. I tried to do as many missions using stealth as I could just because that was more interesting to me, even though most of them I could just walk in and take whatever I wanted.

(The tutorial makes combat look a lot more complicated than it is, by the way. There are all these weirdo takedowns you can do but there’s no need to do most of them and the rest pretty much happen automatically through context.)

The majority of the game’s humor is in the main plot, and for that matter, in the long cutscenes. They’re funny — especially a particularly hilarious training montage/sex scene — but they’re also you not playing a game. In fact, the end of the game is via cutscene, which, even though I’m not a big fan of boss battles, I was scratching my head and thinking, “That’s it?”

The other elements of the game’s humor are kind of troubling. Once of the things you can find and collect are VHS tapes which have descriptions sounding like 80s movie parodies. A lot of the jokes in these aren’t so much satire as just straight-up immature modern gamerbro stuff, featuring a nice scoop of “gay” jokes (one involving — ha! ha! — the hilarious concept of prison rape). Rex’s mutterings throughout the game are probably supposed to be over-the-top “badass” but I can easily see another game doing the exact same lines played completely straight.

There’s probably fifteen bucks worth of fun in Blood Dragon, but don’t forget you’re playing a jumped-up mod for a game and start expecting too much out of it. You’ll be disappointed.

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Crews finish installing World Trade Center spire

Construction workers bolted a 408-foot spire into place atop One World Trade Center on Friday, symbolically capping New York’s comeback after the September 11, 2001, terror attacks.

The spire brings the iconic building to a height of 1,776 feet — an allusion to the year the United States declared its independence. It also makes the building the tallest in the Western Hemisphere and the third-tallest in the world.

For too long America has been castrated. Finally we are once again swinging the biggest dick in the hemisphere.

All that’s left for the new, ultra-tall WTC is the neon sign saying “COME AT ME BRO” in Arabic

Sticker of Calvin peeing on Mohammed saying, “HATERS GONNA HATE”

America: our kids shoot their siblings and we teach fairy tales as history and we shit where we eat, but goddamn we got a tall building

I think the super-tall new WTC proves once and for all: Jesus blesses our way of life.

Now all we need to do is fill our giant new WTC with a bunch of white assholes stripmining the economy for their own benefit

“Imagine all the useless fucking financial djinns we can cram into that big tower! We can really ruin some pensions now!”