Dave Finally Watches: Beasts of the Southern Wild

Posted on May 15, 2013 by

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.

Posted in Movies | Tagged ,

Let’s Look at the Record: The Infinite

Posted on May 14, 2013 by

When it comes to bands I like, I’m not much of a completist. Oh sure, in the heady days of Napster I did some digging around (most of which ended in heartbreak) but nothing obsessive…except when it came to Shriekback. I grabbed and held onto everything I could find. During this same period of time the band’s frontman and caretaker, Barry Andrews, was selling CDs containing some hard to find material as well, and I bought those.

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!

Posted in Music | Tagged

“What Kind of Death?” “The DANGEROUS Kind.”

Posted on May 13, 2013 by

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.

Posted in Games | Tagged ,

Electronic Games Sunday: Pliant Females

Posted on May 12, 2013 by

Posted in Games | Tagged ,

This Delicious Week

Posted on May 11, 2013 by


Shared bookmarks for delicious user
legomancer

Posted in Delicious

Twitter Tirade Theater Presents: The World Trade Center

Posted on May 10, 2013 by

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!”

Posted in Politics | Tagged

Hey, Where’s the Replacements?

Posted on May 9, 2013 by

A couple months ago Google announced that, in order to focus on useless social network wannabes (Seriously, Google, you know how absurd commercials for Bing are? That’s how Google Plus ads look.) they were ditching their venerable Google Reader site, which let you follow blogs and things via the magic of RSS syndication. Google Reader was the way that I read the web; a webcomic without an RSS feed was a webcomic I wasn’t reading. Losing Reader was going to be pretty frustrating.

Almost immediately others who relied on the site were panicking, trying to figure out what to do. The weirdest thing about the crisis was the amount of stuff I read saying that RSS itself was a thing of the past, now that Facebook, Twitter, and Tumblr were around. I had no idea what to make of that. Were people really using those things instead of RSS? How? Why? That would be like, instead of having your mail delivered, calling up some place every morning to see if you HAD mail, finding out who had sent it, and then contacting those people directly to find out what they wanted. Still, Reader wasn’t going away until July, so my strategy was that I’d let other people do the legwork and then, come June, see what had shaken out as the best replacement for Reader.

Yesterday, though, Reader started acting weird and unusable, so the apocalypse came a little sooner. I did the checking and found out that apparently creating an RSS feed reader requires three unicorns and a magic lamp because nobody else had really sussed it out yet. There was still no consensus on what to move to, so I tried a couple of things that were suggested.

Feedly was right out because it’s a browser extension. I use Chrome only because it’s the browser I hate the least, and if something better comes along, I will jump, so I didn’t want to be tied to this particular program. The Old Reader (named because it simulates Google Reader before Google tried screwing around with it a few years ago) and Bloglines were top contenders, so I tried them as well. Neither of them is that great. The Old Reader seems very much like something written for a few people that is now struggling with a massive influx of users. It doesn’t get all the items it should, and some feeds, such as MetaFilter’s, it doesn’t appear to see at all. Bloglines has a problem with the Flickr feeds I use to look at stuff for Lego Diem. Neither of them are aware that Dinosaur Comics has updated twice in the past two days. So neither one of these is looking like a reliable substitute. I have a couple more to try, but these are the top options.

In the same way, my Twitter app of choice, Echofon, has also been abandoned. Its developer dropped the desktop versions in favor of mobile products, and the desktop version was starting to have issues, so again, I was looking for a replacement. Nothing I tried (Tweetdeck, Janetter, couple of other things) worked as well as Echofon did — even with its known issues — so for now I’m just using the Twitter page, which is pretty suboptimal but still my best replacement, given what I want a Twitter client to do.

I know that part of this is an aversion to change, that I want the transition to be as seamless as possible, and that no one app will be all things to all people. Maybe I’m being way too picky. In time I imagine I’ll be forced to choose a replacement and just roll with it, ignoring its “faults” until I don’t even notice them anymore. In the meantime, I do not need to have to deal with two of these issues at once, people! This is not fair!

Posted in Argh! | Tagged ,

You’re Reading a Magazine. You Come Across a Full-Page Nude Photo of a Tortoise.

Posted on May 8, 2013 by

Posted in Images | Tagged