Sunday, May 31, 2009

5/31/09

Linkdump Today--

I'm a big fan of Modest Mouse, from early to late. I liked their last album quite a bit, through Sherri prefers the one before. They have a bizarre sensibility and the lead singer possesses a distinctive voice. I'd like to see more of them on Rock Band. "Float On" was an obvious choice and I think there's more and better songs they could have up there. Anyway they have a new album coming up and an advance video for one of the songs. Bonus points if you can name the Kurosawa film they're borrowing images from.

Here's a nice retrospective on Thief: The Dark Project, one of the great PC games. I had a hard time getting through the game itself, but I have fond memories of it-- along with System Shock 2, Half-Life and Deus Ex I had some of my favorite PC first-person experiences here.

An interesting site for people doing DTP or just trying to put together game handout and things-- a collection of public domain images from old books.

The classic old-school rpg game has players delving into caverns and caves. I'm not a geologist so I hardly take into consideration scale in those things. However, this recent discovery kind of brought me some perspective-- both for how absurd some of the cave layouts in games are and how enormous they actually can be in real life.

The Literal Version of "Total Eclipse of the Heart", if you haven't seen it already.

3 comments:

  1. The MM song is great, the video really is disturbing (bad bird house! No treat!) and I have no idea what Kurosawa movie sourced which images.

    On an older post, of the three albums, I like Middle Cyclone more than Hazards of Love or Furnace Room Lullaby. They're all great albums, but MC has a few songs I just can't get out of my head. "This Tornado Loves You", "Never Turn Your Back on Mother Nature" and "Don't Forget Me" are really catchy. I have a weakness for songs about love as a destructive force. Finally, the cover just kicks ass. I want to see a whole comics series about a sword girl and her loyal '67 Mercury Cougar. The whole album is full of surprising and inspiring imagery.

    Lowell: dreams of being a charming and murderous rogue. Gene: dreams of being an early 70s medieval bar fighter.

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  2. I love Hazards of Love because of its epic, prog-rock, rock-opera asperations. I'm fully expecting some college club to put on a full production of it some day. Interestingly, Sherri loves Middle Cyclone the more she listens to it-- whereas I'm fonder of Fox Confessor.

    The images in the MM video come from Kurosawa's film Dreams-- which is a strange collection of short imagery pieces. There's a procession of Fox Spirits in the first sequence that the video borrows from nicely (including the weird and striking movements).

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  3. I'm abashed to say that I saw Dreams around 1991. I don't remember that segment at all.

    Lullaby is great, but a little too close to Patsy Cline for me. I luvz the Patsy, but it's as familiar as a campfire song to me.

    If I'm to form a long lasting bond with an album, it needs to start off difficult for me but eventually become stuck in my head. Too quick and I forget it. So far, Hazards is too grand for me to comprehend at once. I keep listening to it, but it's still a maze for me. I've mostly acclimated to the first song and The Rake's Song, but the rest I still take in in bits and pieces.

    Now I'll try to track down a copy of Fox Confessor...

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