I've been waiting to post this song ever since I discovered it in Guitar Hero TV. Really easy to play but it's fun to jam to. If I were to describe this song in one word, it would be "refreshing". Most of the music I listen doesn't catch me the same way this did: All pop music has to have a hook every five seconds, and all the alternative rock is starting to sound the same like a Mumford Band. Then along comes Wolf Alice, bringing it heavy after the dour, whispery verses that take their time in order to heighten the impact when the thunderous chorus brings it back.
Speaking of Guitar Hero, I finally got 5* on all songs on Expert. My last song? My white whale? Fucking Katy Perry's fucking "Waking Up In Vegas"
-Christmas was the past Friday, and it was pretty good to me. I'm sitting on one of my presents, a Cambodain slave child a new office chair RIGHT NOW
Also got two of my favorite albums from 2013 on vinyl: "The Next Day" by David Bowie and "The Electric Lady"by Janelle Monae.
Speaking of albums, I got a few books in the 33 1/3 series for some of my favorite albums, such as Flood, Fresh Fruit For Rotten Vegetables and The Super Mario Bros, soundtrack. I like the one for I Get Wet, so these will make for some good reading.
From the same series is a book on "How To Write About Music", which I'll take particular interest in, so hopefully my musings here can get better.
-And the benefit of posting these late is that you get the breaking news that Lemmy of Motorhead died at 70 today.
With his powerful bass sound and gravelly voice, rock music is missing a bonafide bad ass. Kick Satan's ass for us all, you glorious motherfucker.
MORE BABY MAKING!
We staple on baby traits like it's some kind of RPG. Granted, it's more abstract like "gifted orator", "dedication to one's city", etc. We're really not going to fuck up our messiah baby.
However, when we decided gender, we rolled dice: "Oh, negative, it's a dude!", "I was hoping it was blank so we can call it David Bowie"
Also, we staple on city traits like there's no tomorrow and arbitrarily teach them Engineering and Guerilla Warfare.
Then we find out we're fighting rape apologists, so their slaughter is justified. FANDOMANIA SPECIAL EDITION: CHRISTMAS MUSIC!
I was more than glad to partake in this, since FandomMania is also behind another BIG SURPRISE, especially when Mega Ran's on board.
Also, another Christmas jam I'd like to divulge you all is "Christmas Time (Don't Let The Bells End)" by The Darkness:
Yes, they have other songs!
Keeping their glam cred by doing a song about the most glam holiday. Justin Hawkins's voice really shines, and the guitar work, while relatively straightforward, is broken up by some nice riffs.
Can we talk about the music video? It's my blog, so fuck you, we are.
My favorite comedy trope is the ridiculous with a straight face. Justin's always five seconds away from crying, nobody acknolegedes the laser gun firing off, a talking robot, grinding guitar players on a double neck, it's great! A shame I forgot to mention it, but meh.
PROWRESTLING.COOL END OF YEAR AWARDS
I wasn't on for this one, as I was at Holiday Matsuri, but Owen asked me what I thought, and I'm here to deliver:
@RhythmBastard What do you think of the choices for PW.C's Best of 2015?
Best Network Show: Breaking Ground
Haven't seen, though I'm interested in the How It's Made type shows.
Best Show Aesthetic: NXT Takeover Brooklyn
Eh, not sure I agree, since how can one define aestehtic? After all the ho-hum decorations for this past year's PPVs, I liked how Wrestlemania Play Button looked: outdoors, big wide stage, and the matches becoming more important and dramatic as night falls.
Most Improved: The New Day
yesyesyesyesyesyes! Take 3 guys who have personality in abundance, and throw them in a stable together! What could go wrong? have them be positive black people: the stable. Goddamn it. Kinda racist, on top of all of that... The original concept where Xavier Woods was leading Kofi and Big E in a heel tag team was interesting, but then they debuted and the crowd hated them.
Then they leaned into the hate, and then they became AWESOME!
Basically, it's like me and my little brother: I do something, he hates it and comments what a stupid dork I am, and then I do whatever I was doing louder and harder and in his stupid neckbeard face.
Plus Xavier Woods runs a gaming channel UpUpDwnDwn.
And this is their official T-Shirt. God bless unicorns:
Best Theme Song: "Cool For The Summer" by Demi Levato
Hmmm... I'm with John, I'd listen to "We Like It Loud" outside of the theme song. "Cool For The Summer" is tolerable, and "We Like I Loud" is generic, but Sleeping with Sirens gets it.
Best Promo: New Day vs. Edge and Christian
This is the best because I have eyes and a soul:
Xavier Woods plays the Final Fantasy Fanfare on a trombone. You lovable unicorn magic dorks, may you shine forever.
Best Special Entrance: Rusev On A Tank Again, after a ho-hum string during the regular PPVs, Rusev's great Wrestlemania entrance was full of flair, showmanship, character developement, and most importantly: EFFORT!!
Also it's got a goddamn tank.
Best Surprise: RKO OUT OF THE AIR The amount of practice that went into to make this spot happen.
Dot-Coolest Moment Of The Year: That's a Picture Of Sting For me, it's the Salina Del Sol on the ladder. It's one of those "HOLY SHIT!" moments. Like fuck, there was BLOOD on the ladder.
Best Non-In-Ring Performer: Dario Cueto
Haven't seen
Best Feud/Storyline: Sasha Banks vs. Bayley
I spent my Christmas Eve watching matches between these two and
Diva Of The Year: Sasha Banks As much as I want to give this award to real life waifu Chandra from Magic The Gathering (aka Becky Lynch), and Diva of Eternal Sunshine Bayley, Sasha Banks has the attitude, charisma and talent to get over, and in NXT she was great, but on the main roster, they have not pushed her at all.
Superstar of the Year: Seth Rollins My brother started watching because of Stephen Amell at Superslam and John Cena memes, and Seth Rollins is his standout.
Best Event: NXT Takeover Brooklyn I was at NXT Rival, so that one wins.
Yeah, a cover of my favorite Christmas jam. Not as crunchy as The Kinks, but it still maintains the bouncy fun of the original, and it reminds us that sometimes, that not everyone gets to have an idylic Norman Rockwell Christmas.Normally I throw away my Jank Tank (extra Magic commons and uncommons) at shows, but I've been trying to find a good YMCA or Youth Center to donate them to.
It also reminds us The Kinks fucking rule.
So, here's how the past few days have went:
Thursday!
RECITAL
I'm taking voice lessons, and this is a thing I do. I think I did all right, I think I have some video from that....
Friday!
STAR WARS!
In the event that you haven't seen it yet, it leans very heavily on you remembering that Star Wars: A New Hope exists, but it had interesting characters, and things happened that I cared about.
Saturday and Sunday!
HOLIDAY MATSURI
DEFINITELY up there as one of my favorite cons of the year. A mosh pit broke out, my foot got (a little) messed up, and I went to bed drunk. That's a rock star weekend if I ever saw it.
Bulletpoints:
-LOTS of Undertale cosplay. Mettatons, Sans's and Papyrus's were in abundance, a lot being at least "good". Really, the cosplay here was top notch, like everyone saved up all their energy for one last hurrah.
-Propeller Anime ran a bunch of interesting panels. I caught their panel on Nerdy Music and the panel Mamoru Hasoda. I have a LOT to catch up on this holiday season, namely cleaning out my car... They run anime nights at Bikkuri Lounge in Orlando, and plenty of other events at The Geek Easy in Winter Park, FL.
-Playing lots of Boss Monster. The object of the game is that you are an RPG game style boss, with the intent of luring adventurers in you dungeon to kill them. There's a fair bit of planning involved, as different rooms attract different adventures, and having nobody come to your dungeon early can be an advantage, giving you more time to prepare a badass dungeon, especially as more badass heroes enter town. Also you can screw other players over by making adventurers more powerful, with even one point of health being the difference between survival and defeat.
-Running games of Werewolf is a lot more fun than playing them, because you don't have randos wanting to kill you because you have a hairy chest.
-Not seeing the guests.
Update: My brother got shit.
This week's jam is the bestest Christmas Jam ever!
Back in New York, this was the perfect "Driving home in the cold" song. It's bouncy, it's funny, and it's not overplayed unlike "All I Want For Christmas Is You" and Paul McCartney's MOTHERFUCKING GARBAGE "Simply Having A Wonderful Christmas Time".
Saxaphone Guy in that music video is having all kinds of fun in his "This is what the 80's thought Cyberspace Looked Like" world
SO WHATCHA GOT FOR US THIS WEEK R.B.?
Well, last night was the Album Release Party-
THAT SHIT WAS RELEASE TWO MONTHS AGO!
True but-
I HAD IT SINCE JUNE-
Thank you Jeff. This week the physical copies came in, and I didn't do a proper release for that so I decided to stream the music on Twitch!
-Basically, Jeff had a concert and Paolo was going to Yamacon. So Mystakin and I were talking on Skype, and neither of us wanted to do another Eric and Erich show so soon, but we didn't want to miss two weeks in a row, so we did this... thing.
Yes, nerds lost their shit about not playing titty game.
Yes, Weff and Arcanon will be pretty mad.
Also, because this episode was so short, here's some bonus content:
SLAYERS OF DECADENCE EPISODE 4:
In this one, some riff-raff ascends to Kindunos's Outpost of the True Warrior and he needs to decide if allow ruffians to innovate on our honed fighting style, and Zun-Quib-Slay fucks some more people and has more babies.
Then at the end is this incredible scene where we fight off a siege army using cunning, guile, FATE-level bullshitting and ZQS getting his freak on. There was a meme on Tumblr that I'm not going to look up right now, that lists how to do a simple task in each of the main tabletop RPG systems, and FATE's was "How well can you bullshit to the GM that you can do it?"
Also, Raymond of this podcast is an experienced roleplayer, so I couldn't have picked two better people (that I don't know IRL) to run this campaign with. Or at least the core two. There WERE supposed to be other people involved but they don't show up that often.
Like any podcast, the number of people change the dynamic entirely. For example, any Echo Chamber Podcast on it IMMEDIATELY goes to shit once we hit 6 people. And by shit, I mean awesome.
Holy shit Ctrl+Alt+Del: The Animated Series is bad. RETSUSTREAM!!!
Anyway this week's jam is a Christmassy Jam:
The entire point of it is for use in Mega64's "Aggressive Caroling" series:
I'm not joking, I want to do this at Holiday Matsuri.
HOLDIAY MATSURI? Yes, Holiday Matsuri. The biggest Florida party con that comes by the Holidays!
It's kinda late, at 10:30 PM, but it's on Saturday, so it'll be a good starting point to your evening's debauchery.
I've never been, but it's up there with MegaCon and the Supercons as the big ones to visit in FL from what I hear.
So, I'm making it a big awesome show, playing lots of songs, giving out lots of presents and digging up some songs I haven't played in a while! You even score physical copies of Status Quo Radio!
While I've gotten older, Christmas has become less special
since I know more about what goes on behind the scenes, but I love the
leadups to Christmas: Those last minutes before work or school let out,
the week or two before when all the decorations are put up, driving down
the main drag with a chill in the air, seeing stores lit up... This is
part of that experience, because I've got a recital with my vocal coach that Thursday, work stuff on Friday, and this on Saturday.
WAIT, WHAT WAS THAT THING YOU SAID? About what?
STATUS QUO RADIO! The listening party? Yeah, I-
NO, NOT THAT- WAIT LISTENING PARTY? Yeah, but that'll be after I get the physical copies of Status Quo Radio in. Which, I just found out shipped! I ordered a lot, so you don't have to worry about them selling out, and this was so easy, I'm probably going to do a run for Dino Hunter MD: The Sound Track, but one step at a time.
GAME SHIT
Guitar Hero Live is still taking up a lot of my time, but I've been streaming Borderlands 2, which you can catch here.
PLUGGING PEEPS!
Two albums are coming out soon and both had listening parties: "Fragmentation" by Professor ShyGuy
A Chip-Pop-Opera filled with sensational singing and boisterous bleeps and bloops!
