January 30th, 2013 Videos Of The Week

MUSIC VIDEO OF THE WEEK: "Ode To The Bouncer" by Studio Killers

This is "Ode To The Bouncer" by The Studio Killers. The chorus of the song is right up there with the catchiest of any of the Top 40 here in the States, and the verses, in their drunken, ranting stumble, paint a desperate picture of a girl who wants to get in to the club.

Said girl (despite the fact that the song is actually sung by a male), can be best described as "beautifully grotesque", like something Tim Burton would come up with if he took some anti-depressants. Bright and colorful, she stands contrast the oppressive black of the titular bouncer. The rest of the band has personas/characters as well, but they don't matter and have stupid names anyway.

LIVE VIDEO OF THE WEEK: "Gangnam Style" by PSY on Bass

Dude, it might be the half of a bottle of vodka I've been pounding, but SHE'S HOT!!!

Echo Chamber Post Game Episode 26

Sonic is putting this link in your ears VIA HIS RECTUM

Since this episode is a little weird, um, lemme just post up the links:

1. Halloween Party! In which I roundhouse kick a zombie. 

2. Frog Fractions! In which you put a warp drive on your dragon and make bug porn.

3. Burrito Bison! In which you beat the ever loving shit out of some gummi bears.

4. Visualnovelty! In which you can make your own visual novel about pooping.

5. Tails Gets Trolled! In which Sonic does not shit in Tails' mouth, but in fact particpates in a comic that's way better than Sonichu.

6. Sonichu! In which your eyes shit in your mouth which shits in your brain which shits out your butt then back into your mouth again.

DHMDTST RBN LIveblogging Part 2

DID YOU GET THE ALBUM OFF BANDCAMP YET?

5:35 PM- Diet Pepsi, The League and more RBN work. Woohoo.

Yesterday I was able to meet my quota by doing all the drums for College Party and Pass The Class AND able to do 1/3 of the vocals. Since "Pass The Class" is open, I'll continue on that.

5:40 PM- After seeing supergreatfriends LP of MODE I want to make an FMV game of my own.

5:50 PM- OK, MODE has to be the most pretentious game ever.  Right now this girl is talking all about synchronicity and auras and what not. It looks like the stream is full of horny bastards as it seems they want to have sex with nearly everyone who has shown interest.

5:58 PM- Still authoring vocals. There's a lot of breaks in this song, so I'm covering a lot of ground in a short amount of time. However, there are a lot of slides, so I'm authoring everything, but adding the lyrics afterwards, EXCEPT for when there's slides. It's tiring adding lyrics everytime I author a note, and it gets confusing adding lyrics in afterwards with all these note changes.

6:30 PM- Now authoring to Game Grumps. Vocals are finished (for now) and working on Bass.

6:32 PM- My homeboy Jesse might not be the best bassist, but damn does he make it easy for me to author these parts.

6:52 PM- Aaaaand Expert's done. Gonna move around for a bit, then come back to it. 

RBN Liveblogging DHMDTST Part 1

6:15 PM- Reaper's open, The League is on TV, LET'S DO THIS.

Just a brief update as to where this all stands: Robotman's Lament is ready to be compiled, as it was the 1st song I started work on before "Hell Yeah". There's still somethings missing from that like overdrive and a crafted venue, but it's SOMETHING for now.

 Tonight I will be working on "College Party", and earlier today I just finished the Expert Drums. Tonight I'll be working on reductions and some vocals.

6:35 PM- Drum Animations and Hard Reductions are done. "College Party" is a pretty fast song with a lot of fast 16th note kicks, so for hard, I removed the consecutive 8th notes, EXCEPT for when there's a double kick. On to Medium.

6:55 PM- Enjoying The League so far. Paul Scheer, for those interested, does a podcast on Earwolf called "How Did This Get Made?" about bad movies. They did an epiosde on The Super Mario Bros. I'm probably going to check out after this DVD.

7:20 PM- I know jack shit about football and am digging The League. Medium Drums proved to be a bit of a problem, since there were a lot of parts where it would be a single crash followed by a single kick. Going on to Easy Drums.

8:00 PM- Paul Scheer has ass ugly teeth. Wow. But it's OK, cause I got beer and am gonna watch Dredd later.

8:25 PM- So it looks like I'm going to be watching Dredd in a bit. Drums are done, but I didn't get too far on the vocals. I figured to 1/3 of the Vocals (since they're all solo) for two songs per day.

Dino Hunter MD: The Sound Track Is Now Available!

Download it on Bandcamp for only $6!

Echo Chamber Post Game Episode 25

DOWNLOAD LINK TO THE PODCAST

Self titled albums!

-I'm both surprised and not surprised Jeff didn't bring up Foxy Shazam's self titled. It's a lot more refined and focused than their earlier albums, but it has "Unstoppable" and "Oh Lord", which is probably the most uplifting combination of two songs since Akira The Don's "Slow Down Ghandi" and "Bittersweet Symphony" Mashup.


-Now the trifecta of Weezer's self titleds:
"Hey man, what's up? Yeah? That's awesome! Right now I'm doing this thing, but like my girl isn't that into it, but..."

"Oh? Yeah, that's cool. Defintely." (looks around the room, checking out who else is here) "No, man, I'm totally paying attention."
GREEN ALBUM
(ignores you, and is totally talking to the kinda cute Asian chick in the corner, drinking a can of PBR)
"Later" (as you leave because fuck this party)

-Tenacious D's  Self Titled, featuring all the songs from their HBO show that made them famous(er) before Jack Black blew the fuck up.



And for NON-self titled albums, Rhythm Bastard put "Dino Hunter MD: The Sound Track" on Soundcloud!

Dino Hunter MD: The Sound Track Pre-Orders!

Preorder now and get 2 free tracks  "College Party" and "Hell Yeah", AND get the album for only 5 dollars!

Echo Chamber Post Game Episode 24

So if you lookin' for some ho's 
Now you know where to go
Drop down to the flo'
An go to the likasto
Likasto Likasto
Lika lika likasto

Here's my Top 5 Of The Past Year for comparison sake.
5. Minecraft (XBLA)- I haven't given this game a shot since just this year, and now I regret both the time I wasted not playing this and the hours I've wasted playing it since downloading it. My main motivation for getting was really just to have something to play when I want to relax on the couch. You can play around with it for 5 nminutes or five hours and still do something even if its just clearing out some dirt or putting some sand in a furnace to make glass. I'm a huge fan of glass structures.

4. Rock Band Blitz (XBOX 360)- More than anything, this is the game that still gets me to buy Rock Band DLC: I don't need to break out my instruments, I can do everything at once, and like my choice for #2, my friends and the "OK, NOW I know what to do" makes this the second biggest time waster on the XBLA.

3. FTL: Faster Than Light (PC)-Dear Jesse, I love you, but goddamn it this fucking game. I'm not big on strategy games, but this one is just action-y enough and reminds me of all those Flash Games I waste my time on where you can upgrade stuff, and yeah. FTL.

2. Trials Evolution (XBLA)- I've spent hours on this game and I haven't even gotten on to the level editor yet. It's a very simple premise: just get to the end of the level. But the difficulty increases so slowly that you actually need to get better at it, and when you go back to the earlier levels it's like "Wait, how did I fail so hard at this?". The allure of the perfect run always keeps me coming back for more, and I've seen some people do amazing downloadable tracks all for FREE.

1. The Walking Dead (XBLA)- If I wanted an easily accessible example as to why video games can add to a narrative, this is what I'd give them. I talked about it in the past before, but this is just a gentle reminder.

STATE OF THE BASTARD ADDRESS 2013

1. I'm 25 now. Hell yeah.

 2. NEW(EST) SONG: "Ride On" 3. SONG FROM THE DHMD SOUNDTRACK UP FOR DOWNLOAD BEFORE WE HAVE ALL NEW AND EPIC VERSIONS: "Heroes Die" 4. For my RBN output, 2012 was the year of MC Lars with:
"This Gigantic Robot Kills" AND
"Lars Attacks"

5. So, with the album coming out SOON, one of my songs, "Hell Yeah" is in Peer Review, and I do plan on putting the following songs up there, so to reiterate, it would be:
"College Party"
"Pass The Class"
"Robotman's Lament"
"XZ71"
"Heroes Die"
"Invisiball"
"Cliffhanger"
"Hell Yeah" (in progress)

6. HOLY SHIT I CAME OUT WITH A MUSIC VIDEO, "Pass The Class"

I'm looking to do another one, so if you're withing driving distance of the Palm Beach County area, send me an e-mail to rhythmbastard@gmail.com

7. Now that I live in Florida, there's a ton of conventions in the area, so I'm going to be e-mailing those guys again. I-Con was a lot of fun to do, and I hope to get in touch with some guys at PAX East, maybe do a little networking.

8. The album "Status Quo Radio" will be worked on again after Dino Hunter M.D. is done.

9. ALSO YOU GUYS SHOULD TOTALLY LISTEN TO THE Echo Chamber Podcast, courtest of Zone-Casts!

Hey, GUESSWHATIT'STIMEFOR?MY2012HIGHLIGHTS!

BEST PODCAST- The Echo Chamber
Started in July. this podcast has some fucking geniuses on it. Seriously, click on any of those and you'd get pure gold.

FAVORITE MOVIE OF THE YEAR- "Looper Unchained"
It was a toss up between Looper and Django Unchanined, so I dedcided, why not? Looper was shorter and more punchy, but Django Unchained was more exciting. There was a lot of good movies that came out this year, but these two were the best movies as singular entities.

BEST MOVIE THAT I WAS IN- "Halloween Party"
Yeah, I roundhouse kicked a zombie, whatevz.

FAVORITE MOVIE THAT WAS BASED ON SOMETHING AND/OR SETTING UP A SEQUEL OR ANY OF THAT OTHER BULLSHIT MOVIES ARE TRYING TO DO NOWADAYS- The Avengers
It was a lot of fun, but it was more of an event than a straight up movie. RDJ was as charming as ever, Hulk stole the show, Loki has so much villain swag I can't even contain it, and it was content to have a couple breaks from the action to let the characters interact. I wanted the Dark Knight Rises to be good, but it tried to do so much and it failed. Credit to Nolan for trying, but it felt a little unfocused at times.

FAVORITE GAME OF THE YEAR- The Walking Dead
It told it's story the only way a video game could. It felt like a real adventure, and most of my decisions were based on what I was thinking as opposed to what the game wanted me to think. Comedian Dana O' Briain has a bit how you can't be bad at watching a movie or reading a book, but you can be bad at video games, and I think that's what's holding them back as an art medium. You can give any doubter a copy of Bioshock or Shadow of The Collosus, but there will be a section they can't beat. The point of the video game requires you to finish it.

Gameplay wise, The Walking Dead is very simple, and the game rarely punishes you for a decision, it lets you punish yourself.

FAVORITE WAY TO PLAY A GAME- Dancing to Dance Central 3 in Stark Confusion
Yeah, I've hopped on the Dance Central train. I like it. But wow is the story straight up weird for a dancing game. Understandable, since Harmonix wanted the story a little more interesting than "Yeah, OK dance to progressively harder songs"

FAVORITE TOP 40 SONG I'LL ADMIT TO LIKING- A Lot of Them, Because It Seems That Now Labels Are Looking to Indie Rock For Inspiration

FAVORITE SONG THAT WAS ON THE RADIO THIS YEAR- "Little Talks" by Of Monsters and Men

For a while it seemed that music was becoming more condensed because FUCK WE HAVE TO HAVE NOISE EVERY SECOND OR ELSE THE PEOPLE WILL TURN OFF THEIR RADIOS, but with fun.'s output and Gotye's "Somebody That I Used To Know", it seems that we might be calming down after having a lot of club-inspired music for the past year.

FAVORITE SONG RELEASED ON ROCK BAND- "Party Hard" by Andrew WK
Just BARELY making the cut.

FAVORITE GIG- I-Con 2012
Duh.

SADDEST DISAPPOINTMENT OF 2012- Anything Bille Joe Armstrong  Did
The Uno! Dos! Tre! trilogy was all right, but the  "I'M NOT FUCKING JUSTIN BIEBER!" line just made me lose all faith in that man, possibly moreso than describing Rock Band Green Day as "like Mortal Kombat with guitars"

FAVORITE BAND I JUST BECAME AWARE OF THIS YEAR- Foxy Shazam
Thanks Jeff! If you were to combine Queen and noise rock, this is what you'd get.

FAVORITE SONG I RELEASED IN 2012- "Let The Bombs Go Off"
In the same year as "Hell Yeah", this one gets the vote. I liked what I did with it, I liked how it started, and it ws my first song done in Studio One.

So that's the  State Of The Bastard, I'm gonna make 2013 kick ass!

Echo Chamber Post Game Episode 23

What was I supposed to be doing again?

Yes, Ice Festival is a real thing.

Some 2013 predictions I didn't/forgot to bring up:
-MUSIC: I'm not sure this counts, but harmonized music/boy bands are coming back. This was something a co-worker of mine stated sometime in late 2011/2012. To be fair though, that DID come true in the form of One Direction and  The Wanted. Maybe we'll see that happening in proper rock, but who knows.

-WORLD: The Republican Party, after losing the election in 2012, hyping it up ever since Obama's election in 2008, will either become more reserved (not necessarily more liberal, just less willing to open their mouths) and getting a fresh start in 2016 with new faces OR double down and become absolutely motherfucking batshit crazy to the point where they have scorhed the earth and have rendered the Democratic Party too scared to react.

-GAMING: The Anrgy Birds bubble will burst, as that stuff will have reached market saturation, and any future attempt to capitalize on it will become more desperate and fail miserably.

-GAMING: PC Gaming is going to come back. Not out of any creative decision, but because costs are going to be so prohibitive that mid-level games and studios are going to flock to the PC for it's lower development costs.

At work on the album, TRYING to have it out by the 11th.

Django Unchained and Movie Talk

There's a phrase I constantly call myself around my friends called "Movie Retarded". While I do enjoy a good movie, most of the time I'll think "Bah, I don't have the time/patience to watch this!", then play Trials: Evolution for 3 hours. That, and all my friends I want to see a movie are either broke or now in another state. (For example, Wreck-It Ralph has been on my to see list for a while).

So when I do actually go out and see a movie, it's always an occasion.

Recently I went to see Django Unchained, Quentin Tarantino's latest, and while it is long, you never feel its length once it gets going. The only other movie I've seen by him was Kill Bill Pts. 1 and 2, and while I still liked it for all its craziness, there was not much need for it to be two parts. He has a way of bringing this levity and humor to even the most brutal scenes, all while maintaining the drama of the moment. In Kill Bill, this was in Pt. 2 with Elle Driver's final scene where The Bride rips her good eye and Driver fumbles around intensly, knocking shit over. It's makes for a good cathartic counterbalance to having her buried alive earlier in the movie.

Same here Django and the climax. Everybody gets theirs, and in classic QT fashion, blood's everywhere, but doesn't get in the way of a simple "hero saves the damsel in distress" story. It also avoids the cliche "White person helps black guy defeat slavery", due to aforementioned simplicity.  

Go see it.  

Also, I might be doing a video essay on X-Men Origins: Wolverine (ala the 90 minute long Plinkett Reviews). ComicBookMovie has recently had a lot of articles on the special effects/makeup regarding the end with "quote" "Deadpool" "unquote" and over beers a lot of friends have expressed their excitement at the still lingering possibility of a proper Deadpool movie, so I'm thinking about doing such a thing. Time has been gentler to Origins, but it's gone from "offensively bad" to just "We dropped a lot of balls bad"

To end on a good note, here's some robots playing "Ace Of Spades":

Happy New Year!

Hopefully it won't suck! All of my New Years Resolutions can wait until the State Of The Bastard Address coming January 11th. So, here's what I've been doing:
1. Working on THIS (coming Jan. 11th):
 

2. Playing Dance Central 3. Got into the series late, but the story, while not quite Deadly Premonition ridiculous, is Deadly Premonition charming.

3. Also been playing Jet Set Radio. Controls aren't quite what I expected, since I'm use to Tony Hawk's Pro Skater.

4. Listening to Foxy Shazam and The Protomen. A LOT MORE CROSSOVER THAN YOU'D EXPECT.

5. After doing Ride On, I've been kicking around some ideas for the last few songs on "Status Quo Radio", my TF2-inspired concept album.  

6. Song of the time period when I remember to do this: "Playin' Invisiball"