Status Quo Wednesday Celebrates Black Current-cy Month

TINY DESK ENTRY


NPR's Tiny Desk Contest was due this past week, so I farted out an entry 30 min before the deadline. I figured "Status Quo Radio" was that fine line between "Sounds good for NPR" and "Trupunx". Still, I'm on a hot streak with putting up video content!

JAM OF THE WEEK: "Q.U.E.E.N." by Janelle Monae


It's Black History Month (which I'm making Black Current-cy Month), and I firgured I'd focus these jams on black artists I like who are doing cool stuff today.

First up, Janelle Monae. I've gushed about her before on this site, but she deserves way more attention, even with two movies coming out in 2016. "Q.U.E.E.N." is the first single of her 2013 album The Electric Lady, and while "Dance Apocalyptic" is my favorite track, this one can't be discounted, because it was the song that got me into her.

The music video starts off in this very clean, elegant museum, while a voice over talks about "time traveling rebels". Then the sick guitar riff kicks in and so it begins, slowly ramping up until Erykah Badu's verse breaks it down to the slick bassline. Finally, top it off a tight, defiant verse set to so,ething striaght out of a James Bond movie.

"Q.U.E.E.N." is everything thing I love about J.M.'s music: smooth, weird and proud.

I wanted to see Hidden Figures, where she plays one of the black female NASA mathematicians that helped launch the programs' first sucessful space missions but it's a movie and apparently I don't watch movies.

GIANT ROM 4!
Giant Bomb's Game Jam is going on right now, and I'm working on a project with frequent I'd Rather Not guest Trace Evans. The themes for this edition were "ONE GIANT CHOMP" and "EAST VS. WEST".
EXCLUSIVE PREVIEW

SHIT YEAH.

Status Quo Wednesday: Does No Man's Sky and Stranger Things Take Place In The Same Universe?

MIZUCON!!! 
Working my ass off to get my set perfect for this weekend. If you were at Mini Iwai, you heard a new song I've been working on, hopefully by Mizu I'll have another one ready.

Regardless, Mizu was one of the first cons I played down here in FL, so I'll definitely be down to have a good time, especially to catch Mega Ran's show. Friends Chaotic Neutral will be running a shiiiiiiitton of panels, and they have been pretty fun. 

Also running a special deal: If I get 500 FB likes before Mizucon, I'll play shirtless. ;)
You can tell how desperate for attention I am because of the clickbaity title.

THIS WEEK'S JAM:

Much appropos, since Mega Ran. Any time he's got Xavier Woods/Austin Creed on the brain he puts out some good stuff. I hope that one day he makes it as the official theme to one of the PPVs. One day, him and Keith Apicary will show up on a proper WWE event, and at that point, wrestling will finally be real.

Shovel Knight's got a great soundtrack, and I think only Undertale rivals it in how many awesome remixes I've seen from a recent game.

I MADE A GAME!Giant Bomb held a community Game Jam called "Giant ROM" and I made a game for it! It's a top-down shooter called "The Last Game You'll Ever Play"

The thinking behind it was to make a game in the vein of something like Ridiculous Fishing or Indigo Prophecy (in theory at least with the latter) where the better you do in one half, the more challenging the second half is.

So for TLGYEP, what I thought of doing was an E3 presentation where you pitch a game to a bunch of cyborgs, who you eventually have to fight. Right now there's only five options and one question, but fixing the game and expanding it is on the greater priority over fixing the art and presentation.

PODCAST RECAP FOR 7/16/2016: Bogs For Poglins

WE HAVE A RADIO STATION!

Currently Up:

• Echo Chamber Episodes 1-10
• Echo Chamber Episodes 160-167
• I'd Rather Not Episodes 1-12

 I seriously need to catch up on these...


ECHO CHAMBER EPISODE 173

-There seems to be a Monopoly game for pretty much anything, 
 

-Betting on CS:GO/Controversy As Summed Up By Jim Sterling:

-Dan Ryckert is "for the love of God he's trying" in human form. It seems that every week on the Bombcast he says something that makes me blurt out "Wait, how did you NOT know that?" But, as he reassures us week to week, he is trying new things and undoing old bad habits.

Except the whole "I expect a palette of diet soda to be shipped to my house every month"
I think during Giant Bomb's 2015 End Of The Year Podcast he was compared to Papyrus from Undertale.

-We've shittalked Livin' Da Dream enough on this podcast. I feel bad about it, but I also hope that NBA 2K17 has a similar stupid campaign mode story.

-For comparison, here's the beginning of "Up":

-Sakaguchi's Mega64 Video:

-Gnarls Barkley's Music Video for "Run":

-Barney in Robot Chicken:



I'D RATHER NOT EPISODE 19
-Andy is a married man with a child, so of course his friends list is zero. HAHAHA OWNED says the man who 95% of his social circle is from Magic The Gathering and Conventions and never goes out.

-In theory, aren't all magnets anti-magnets? Because I learned in Basic Fucking Science that magnets have these things called "poles" and similar poles repel each other.

-Soylent is the latest new trend for Tech Bros who don't want to bother with shit like "Reasonable Work-Life Balance", "Cooking", and "Nutritional Supplements Made By People Who Know What They're Doing" named after a movie where all food stuffs are made out of human beings.

-The Turing Test is a test for intelligence in a computer, requiring that a human being should be unable to distinguish the machine from another human being by using the replies to questions put to both, developed by computer scientist Alan Turing. 

The Reverse Turing Test is a computer convincing you that you are a computer, as shown in XKCD:




 The Douglass Test is a burger that convinces you to eat yourself because the I'd Rather Not Gods hate your stupid ass named after Podcast Emperor Owen Douglass.

-MY BURGER BUDDY AND ME:

Echo Chamber Recap Episode 135

THE PREFERRED BAND OF US GARFIENDS IN THE GARFANDOM IS GAWRFIELD


-The lead singer is Odieus Urungus. Also in the band is Nermalus Erectus, Pookielus Maximus and Jonmak the Gusha.

That's ricotta cheese shooting out of Odie's nose.

-Guacamelee is a very fun game so far. Even when though I'm not that far in, the aestechtic is enough to give me plenty to look at.

-In this week's edition of "I swear I'm not crazy, this exists", Pearls Before Swine:

This could be a dope rap.

For newspaper comics, you take what you can get, and Pearls Behind Swine did the impossible by eliciting a sensible chuckle every now and then. Oddly enough, there was enough a Rugrats daily strip around the time the first movie came out. It wasn't terrible, and I was old enough to still like the cartoon.

But the comics even 8 year old me hated qualify for the worst, like we can agree Family Circus is grade-A bullshit, right? FUCK YOU JEFFY!!!

-I could spent HOURS talk about all the memes and nuances in the Garfandom and the most popular Garfiction writers and ships (NERDIE (Nermal/Odie) OTP (One True Pairing) 4 (for) LIFE!!! (the period in which a being is considered alive (not dead))), but a true Garfiend like me knows that the best place to start would be LASAGNA CAT.

-SNOOD is basically Puzzle Bobble/Bust-A-Move. You launch shit at same colored shit and you gotta do it before they go down. The website says that it's for the GBA and PDA. Yeah...

-GIANT BOMB PLAYS... ROCKET LEAGUE!

West coast = Best coast?

-And last, but not least, the Buck Bumble theme, part of my mixtape called "Booty Jams To Fuck To Vol. 7"