Category: music

The New Muse is Great, Thanks

Hope this “three things” isn’t getting tiring, because I’m quite enjoying it.

MUSIC:  Yesterday I whinged a bit that being suddenly snapped out of a 4-month-long nostalgic gloom might cause my creative impulses to dissipate.*  I got home from work, ate dinner, played with my kid, kissed my wife, and then headed into the music room, and about 2 hours later I came out with something that I’m still genuinely excited about.  I haven’t been this excited about something I recorded in a very long time.  It’s not finished, of course, and I have to keep reminding myself of that; this is normally the part of the recording process where I get excited about something and then listen to the mp3 about 500 times and then everything else gets derailed, and I’m very much determined to not let that happen this time.  If anything, I’m more excited than ever to get back to the music room tonight and pick up where I left off; last night’s demo is something of a departure from how I normally work and what I normally sound like, and I really like it, and I’m really anxious to get back and make more of it.

BOOKS:  It’s possible that I was in such a good mood because I’d finished Amy Poehler’s “Yes Please” on the way home from work.  (Did I really read it in less than a day?)  I’ve been a fan of Poehler since the ASSSCAT days at the old UCB theater in the late 90s; my friends and I would catch the free show (and then sometimes the paid show) every Sunday night and it was the best.  Man, I miss that comedy scene.  I was at Luna and Fez and UCB all the goddamned time, and even entertained the idea of taking improv classes (though I was still very much convinced that rock stardom was only a few gigs away).  The point is, a lot of Poehler’s early NYC days that she talked about is stuff that I might’ve been physically present for, or certainly I understood and related to her situation in my own broke-musician way.  The book itself is maybe a little uneven, in that certain sections feel a little formulaic and rushed, BUT a lot of it is really quite wonderful, and the chapter towards the end about her kids and her divorce and her trip to Haiti is fucking magical and beautiful and gorgeous and cathartic and OH GOD I WISH I WAS FRIENDS WITH HER.  Now I’m reading Richard Powers’ “Orfeo“, which I’d read quite a lot about last year, but never actually started.

GAMES:  Earlier this morning I ended up buying Sunless Sea as a present to myself for yesterday’s recording; that’ll be my post-recording wind-down process.  I also somehow managed to get The Talos Principle to start working again; every once in a while, one of my Steam games refuses to launch, and it drives me crazy.  Anyway, it decided to launch successfully, and given that I was somewhat jazzed with adrenaline after recording, I was needing something to wind down with, and Talos’s puzzles are a pleasant enough way to do that.  Solved a few rather quickly, actually, which was weird, given that I’d stopped playing around the point where some of the puzzles were breaking my brain in half.  So maybe I was just in a good thinking place, or something.  I’ll take it.

TONIGHT:  more of the same.

*  I’m not going to get into what happened; I’m just acknowledging that something did happen, and even if I’m not totally 100% certain that I, specifically, represented the punchline of a tweeted joke, I’m nevertheless taking it as a sign that it’s time to move on.

Three Things for Friday

Prologue to today’s three things:  I’ve had an incredibly stressful week, day job-wise, and yesterday was perhaps the roughest of all.  I was in no mood to make music; I kinda just wanted to play with my kid, have a drink after he went to bed, and then sleep.  On the bright side:  I did end up making music, AND I had a drink, AND I played some games and read.  But I was not in the best of ways, I guess you could say.

GAMES:  As noted above, I was in a rough mood.  I did happen to come across Patrick Klepek’s video/article about Grow Home during one of the quieter moments during yesterday’s storm, though, and that did seem to be the sort of thing that might alleviate some stress.  For those of you that don’t know – Grow Home is an experimental game that Ubisoft just announced only two weeks ago, a prototype thing that they were working on based on procedural animation techniques (and which we’ll probably see an adaptation of in the forthcoming Assassin’s Creed games, I’d bet), and in it you play as a charming little robot named B.U.D. who climbs a gigantic plant.  I was certainly charmed by it, though for some reason the game wasn’t working with my 360 controller, and so I had to use mouse/keys, which was a bit more difficult and not particularly intuitive.  Nevertheless, it was a welcome breath of fresh air; pure platforming, exploration, minor environmental puzzle solving, charming art style and sound design.  Hard to pass up for $7.

After a music session (which I’ll get to in a second), I then ended up finishing Far Cry 4; well, I saw the credits roll, at least, though I still have the very last fortress to conquer and a Golden Path epilogue to watch.  (And all the other side stuff to do, of course, none of which I will be doing.)  Kinda screwed up the ending, though.  I’ll try to talk about it in as non-spoilery a way as possible:  after the climactic battle, I was given the opportunity to confront the big baddie, and then, after a speech, I was given a choice to either do something or wait a bit longer, and because I was tired and a little impatient and perhaps somewhat distrustful, I did that thing instead of waiting, and now I kinda wish I’d waited.  I’m certainly not going to go through all 30 hours of that game again just to get the preferred outcome (I’m sure I could look it up on YouTube) and I don’t necessarily regret my course of action (as I simply didn’t care enough about the plot or the characters), but I do kinda wish I’d been a little more open to the idea of seeing what might happen.

What can I say about FC4 that I haven’t said over the last 2 weeks?  It is the same exact game as Far Cry 3 except more bland and far less risky, filled with superfluous side content that doesn’t really mean anything, some occasional, unnecessary nudity that somehow feels more obligatory than gratuitous, and a whole lot of shooting people and animals until they die.  Now that I’m more or less done with it, I’m sure that the only time I’ll ever think about it going forward will be when Far Cry 5 inevitably arrives.

MUSIC:  Again, as noted above, I was in a rough mood.  Really didn’t want to work on music; all I wanted to do was space out and relax and not be required to think.  But eventually I did relax, and realized that I owed it to myself to stick with this RPM Challenge thing and do it anyway, especially since I’d be missing tonight and tomorrow.  To that end, I decided that instead of working from scratch, I’d try to reinterpret one of my older songs that had never been given a proper recording.  This particular song is a bit tricky, given that it goes from 7/4 to 4/4 a few times; it’s also tricky in that I’d always played it on guitar, but decided this time to try it out on piano.  I only laid down one verse and chorus; I never figured out a bridge for it in the past, and in any event I’m not sure if it will make the final cut.  At the very least I’m glad to have learned how to switch time signatures in Logic.

BOOKS:  I remain flummoxed by the Your Face Tomorrow trilogy; that’s pretty much all I can say at this point.

More on the creative process, and etc.

As in my last post, three topics to discuss.

MUSIC.  It occurs to me that, as I glance down the calendar, I’m going to be losing quite a lot of recording time over the next few weeks due to being out of town on the weekends (which often involves travelling on Friday nights, too).  I’m still sticking to my plan, though; at least one loop a night, with no mixing or tweaking or editing or even listening, until Sunday evening.  On Monday night I put down 2 loops; last night I only managed 1, but I think it’s a strong one – or, at least, it probably has some potential if I sit down with it and work with it, though I won’t be doing that until Sunday.

It’s interesting to be working in this way, to just make something and then leave it alone and deliberately ignore it for a specific amount of time; it’s not how I normally work, but then again, I haven’t been this prolific in years.  (And it’s only been 2 days!)  I’m not worrying about if the loops are good or not; my only concern is that they exist.  The thing about loops is that they can be changed and extended and manipulated very easily, whereas whenever I’ve written down chord changes and verse/chorus structures and melodies and such, I have a much harder time deviating away from that script.  (Which becomes especially frustrating when I realize that I can’t accurately recreate on tape what I hear in my head, given my recording and budgeting constraints.)

As I said – I won’t be listening to any of this stuff until Sunday.  Curiously, I haven’t been listening to any other music, either, except at quiet moments at work, and those aren’t really the best conditions to really listen to anything.  I’m curious to find out what happens to my brain after Sunday’s mixdown session, though; will I start obsessively listening to these loops, and thus risk getting creatively stuck again?  Will I start listening to other music?  Will new tunes suddenly pop into my head?  I’ve been very much an empty page this week, and that’s not necessarily a bad thing, but it’s also created a little bit of a sense of disconnection between me and the stuff I’m recording.

It is what it is.  This is an experiment; it’s too soon to tell if it’s working or not.  I’m happy to be working on a regular basis, though, which is perhaps the best part.

BY THE WAY:  I’d mentioned in the last post that I’d had a friendly set of ears that was going to be helping me out with those Sunday mixdown sessions, and some other friends had piped up and said they wanted to lend their ears as well.  I’m inclined to let them, and you, too, if you want, though I’m probably not going to be handing these out to everyone.  Anyway, if you’re interested, let me know.

BOOKS.  Any concerns I’d had about the first two books in the Your Face Tomorrow trilogy have quickly been assuaged by book three.  There is, finally, action.  Plot!  Things moving in time!  Yes, there are still very long digressions and observational wormholes, but suddenly all these images from the first two books (described in occasionally excruciatingly tedious detail) are becoming relevant and clear and meaningful, and meanwhile the current story has a sense of momentum behind it that had been utterly lacking in the previous volumes.

I’m still highlighting passages by the dozens, though; sometimes these endless digressions contain deeply resonant feelings and ideas, and the translation is quite excellent as far as maintaining the author’s poetic prose.  There’s also this hilarious bit in Book Three, though, that is deeply ironic with regards to the narrator’s endless digressions – here he’s complaining about his boss, who also tends to ramble in tangents:

I wasn’t going to allow him to continue wandering and digressing, not on a night prolonged at his insistence; nor was I prepared to allow him to drift from an important matter to a secondary one and from there to a parenthesis, and from a parenthesis to some interpolated fact, and, as occasionally happened, never to return from his endless bifurcations, for when he started doing that, there almost always came a point when his detours ran out of road and there was only brush or sand or marsh ahead.

GAMES.  As noted before, my game playing is taking a backseat to everything else for the next few weeks.  I did one campaign mission in Far Cry 4 last night and upon its conclusion I was told that I should probably take care of any unfinished business before going to the next mission, which implies to me that I should probably finish those last 3 outposts, do that one last Fashion Week hunt, and maybe do the last 2 Shangri-La missions before finishing outright.

RPM 2015

So I have officially signed up for the 2015 RPM Challenge, which is something I’ve signed up for several times in the past, and which I’ve never actually finished.  (For those not in the know, the RPM Challenge is the musician’s equivalent of NaNoWriMo – you have the month of February to write 10 songs or 35 minutes of music.)  I’ve gotten quite a few demos and sketches and interesting things out of my previous attempts, but I’ve never actually finished anything.

This is partly because I inevitably run into technical problems that derail the whole thing, but mostly because I tend to pat myself on the back after coming up with something cool-ish, and then I slack off and fail to stay motivated.  (See, for example, the fact that I haven’t done any recording since coming up with that loop from last week.)

What’s different about this year?  A few things come to mind:

1.  First and foremost, I’d already decided to make a new album well before I remembered that the RPM Challenge is a thing, so I’m already raring to go.

2.  I’m going to do my best to limit my technological problems before they get started.  To wit: in years past, I’d sign up for this thing and then decide to buy a new bit of software, and then I’d spend most of the month learning how to use it instead of actually using it.  (In this particular case, there’s a part of me that really wants to buy the latest editions of both Reason and Logic, but that’d be setting me back almost $500 before I even record a single note.)  I do need to buy a new external hard drive, but that’s it as far as purchases are concerned; the hard drive is (a) necessary and (b) does not require me to learn anything.

3.  The last time I tried to do this in any serious capacity was in 2011.  I don’t know what happened in 2012, and in Feb 2013 we were getting kicked out of our apartment while my wife was 7 months pregnant – saying that “the timing was bad” is putting it very, very mildly.  Ironically enough, I did end up putting out Untrue Songs in May of 2013, which I did mostly because at that point my son was already born, and I’d started getting some sleep on a quasi-regular basis, and I felt like I needed to give him some sort of document of who I was, and what I’d done.  None of the stuff on that album was technically “new”, even if nobody besides me had ever heard it; it was basically just the best stuff I’d recorded over the last 6-8 years.  (Actually, now that I think about it, I’m pretty sure that at least 2 or 3 of the songs on Untrue were originally intended for my previous attempts at RPM Challenges.)

4.  I’m not sure if I’m going to be writing any lyrics for this thing (especially since recording vocals in my apartment is a very difficult thing to do with a toddler), but I do very much have some things I want to say, or convey, and that sort of thing carries a lot of weight.  When I’d signed up for NaNo last year, I did it because I wanted to do it, but I wasn’t at all prepared for it.  For this year’s challenge, it’s not only about me finally having creative momentum; it’s about having creative intention and direction, which are things I’ve not had in quite some time.  It would seem that I need to get some things off my chest, and this might be the best way to go it.

5.  It’s too early to talk about this yet, but when this thing gets finished (not if, but when), something interesting might be happening with it.  I’ll keep that cryptic for the time being.

Every time I’ve done this in the past, I hem and haw about documenting it; the RPM site has a blog function, and of course I have this blog and my Soundcloud page, and it’s always tempting to document the process (even if I know that nobody cares except me); but inevitably, once I post a demo or two, those demos become “finished products” and then I stop working on them.  So maybe I’ll post some vague progress reports here or on Twitter, but it’s probably just for the best if I keep my head down and stay focused and not get sidetracked by feedback (or the lack thereof).

A New Tune, and The Same Old Story

MUSIC:  Not other people’s, but my own!  Yes, I’ve finally gotten my recording studio set up again – I disassembled everything when my kid was born in order to make extra room (and also to make sure he couldn’t knock anything over), but that’s just a convenient excuse for me saying “I’m too exhausted to be creative right now.”  I’ve been wanting to get back to work for a long time, and the other day I decided that I’d procrastinated for too long.

Now, I’m not necessarily going to be posting everything that I end up making – I gotta save some stuff for the album I want to make, after all – but I am going to post bits and bobs every once in a while.

This particular loop is basically the first thing I’ve recorded in… almost 2 years, I think.  This is mostly a proof-of-concept, that I could successfully loop something in a 5/4 time signature, while also serving as proof that I still know how all my software works.  I guess I’m mostly just pleased that it’s not terrible.  It’s obviously going to need some further development, but in any event there’s something about this in its current state that’s pleasing to me.

Pity, though – while I’m relieved that my MacBook still works and that I remember how to use Logic, it seems that my external hard drive is dead, and so all the rough drafts I’d recorded since 2011 (some of which are pretty good, actually) are going to remain in the rough draft form I left them in unless I re-record them all from scratch.  Perhaps I’ll upload those to Soundcloud as well, just so that they can exist in some form beyond my iTunes library.

GAMES:  When I’m in need of a recording break, I’m continuing on with Far Cry 4.  I’ll find a tower I need to unlock, or a base to liberate, and then once those are over, I’ll save/quit.  The individual arcs to each of these events are enjoyable enough, but the game is rapidly becoming overstuffed with random side-stuff, and at this point I have absolutely no idea where I’m supposed to go in order to continue the story.  Maybe that’s not a bad thing, given that what I’ve seen of the story so far is kinda dumb, and in any case the game is so tonally all over the place that I’d much rather make my own way than try to engage with the game in any serious way.  I’m mostly focusing on trying to finish crafting all the stuff I need to craft, which requires liberating towers in order to open up the map to see where the various necessary materials are, and then I just hope I don’t die along the way.

Also:  I’m always a sucker for a match-3 RPG, and to that end I must recommend Hero Emblems on iOS ($2.99), which is surprisingly deep for one of these sorts of things – there’s an element of strategy involved where you must think offensively and defensively, all the while setting up combos and match-4s and the like.  Plus, the writing is pretty charming thus far, and I almost always skip past the writing in these sorts of things.  (Also, the King’s name is Henry, so.  GOTY, is all I’m saying.)

I have no opinion on today’s Nintendo news.  A new 3DS?  Of course.  Would I be able to play the new Majora’s Mask on my old 3DS XL?  Have I even turned my 3DS on in the last year, ever since I was so thoroughly disappointed by the new Mario Golf?  Meh, I say.  The impending re-release of Grim Fandango is way more important to me than anything Nintendo’s got to offer.

Failure, And Moving On

I turn 39 on Monday.  And as such, I’m feeling particularly reflective and ruminative today, with all the attendant melancholy that such navel-gazing generally brings.

This is probably as good a time as any to mention that I failed this year’s NaNoWriMo, and it was a pretty spectacular failure – I think I topped out at just under 7,000 words.  What started as a memoir-ish chronicle of a person I used to know ended up with a deep dive into my college journal and an inadvertent re-opening of a lot of old wounds that I thought I’d closed, and so I’m in this weird paralytic state where I can’t finish the project because I desperately want to reach out to people that I’ve lost, all the while knowing that some of those people probably don’t want anything to do with me.

I was emailing with an old friend yesterday about this:

I get hung up on a lot of stuff in my past, which sucks, because aside from [one specific thing that I’m redacting for purposes of this public blog] I’m very much in love with my present.  But the thing is, I still recognize a lot of my darker moments in my journal, and that’s the part that’s disconcerting, because it would appear that I haven’t changed nearly as much as I think I have.

So anyway, there’s that.

On the gaming front, this weekend is primarily focused on progressing through Dragon Age Inquisition, and I suspect that’ll be the case until I’m done with it.  If I need a break, I’ll go back to Assassin’s Creed Unity, because (a) I hate myself and (b) I’m almost done with the campaign.

On the TV front – and yes, every once a while I watch TV – the wife and I watched the first two episodes of Black Mirror on Netflix last night, and holy shit that show is incredible.  The Brits know how to make really good TV, people, that’s the lesson to be learned here.

I finished reading Emily St. John Mandel’s Station Eleven last night; I liked it, but it was the third post-apocalyptic novel I’d read in a row, and so as such I was probably a little burned out on the subject matter.  I’ve since started Thomas Ligotti’s Teatro Grottesco, which is really creepy and unnerving and good.  I came across his name the other day in a piece about True Detective and plagiarism; I haven’t watched the show but I’d obviously heard a lot about it, and Ligotti’s work is cited quite often as a direct influence on the show.  So I figured, hey, why not.

I’m not necessarily done with this just yet, but I figure I might as well start putting it out – here’s my Favorite Songs of 2014 playlist.

[spotify https://play.spotify.com/user/jervonyc/playlist/1qUgxbGW7oZehDejNwFsUk]

Stuffed

Capture

You may or may not have noticed that I keep a widget of what I’m currently playing.  I do my best to keep it accurate and timely, though sometimes I miss a few things here and there.  In any event, I’m marking this specific moment in time here because, if for some strange reason you’re reading this particular post in future weeks/months, it won’t look like that.  The current rotation widget may not look like that ever again.  Such a thing is simply unsustainable, because (i) unless I’m suddenly unemployed and (ii) I am also no longer required to be a parent, there can be no time to play all these games, and (iii) if everything in (i) and (ii) is (god forbid) true, then there’s certainly no money to purchase them.

More than that:  having this sort of to-do list is incredibly intimidating, and we’re not even taking into account my Steam backlog.   I’ve spoken before of the weird need to be part of the conversation, or to at least to have an understanding of what the current conversation is about, and this pathological need to be “up” on as many possible games as my brain can allow is basically a recipe for disappointment.  In my mad rush to dip my toes into all of these games, I’m resistant to letting myself get sucked into any particular one, and so I’m not having nearly as much fun with the fall blockbuster releases as I’d like.

I used to be this way with music.  I’d go to the record store and buy 5-10 CDs all at once (I realize that there might be some of you who are totally unfamiliar with this experience, and for that I pity you – to be fair, I also did this same sort of binging on iTunes and Amazon MP3) and listen to them all, only eventually sticking with the one that I liked the most.   It took two things to get me to stop acting this way:  the first was the realization that taste-making sites like Pitchfork, which I’d been relying upon since a few months after it launched, were no longer in sync with my own personal tastes (this 6.6 for the self-titled Forms album, for example – one of my favorite albums of all time – was the final straw), and the second was Spotify, which I was more than happy to spend $10/month on, considering how much listening I was doing (and continue to do).  (And yes, I do wish Spotify would modify their method of distributing revenue to artists – this Medium article has a much fairer and better approach.)  I still devour new albums and catch up on older ones I’ve missed, but I’m no longer putting self-applied pressure to absorb them into my bloodstream as quickly as possible.

I do still binge on books, but I can only read one thing at a time.  I have a good friend who’s constantly reading 2-3 books at once (while also writing her own novel and poetry), and I have no idea how her brain doesn’t explode.  As far as books go, though, the idea of a book backlog is comforting as opposed to intimidating; I generally read rather quickly, so I know I can get to stuff, but I also like knowing that I have a new book for nearly any mood that might strike.

Games, though… there’s this pressure to play them all, as soon as possible, and the pressure comes from all different angles.  If you’re into multiplayer, you more or less have to start from Day One – I just bought an Xbox One but I can’t possibly imagine jumping into Titanfall right now, since none of my friends are still playing it and I’d have to guess that only the hardest of hard-core fans are still around, which also implies that there’s absolutely no possibility for survival for a noob.  On the flip side, if you’re into single-player, you have to start early, too, so that you’re not accidentally spoiler’d.

There’s also the long-term pressure of simply staying current with the hardware you’re using.  If I’d never gotten around to playing, say, Red Dead Redemption, I’d be totally screwed now – my PS3 is in our bedroom, and my 360 is basically dead.  Sure, the PC is a bit better in terms of legacy titles, but by the same token – why would I want to start Baldur’s Gate 2 right now when I could instead start Divinity: Original Sin, which is itself already a few months old by this point?  And why would I play either of those when I have Dragon Age Inquisition on my PS4 right this very minute?

At some point I know I’ll get over this pressure to be on top of everything, especially since I’m currently under no professional obligations to actually be on top of everything.  But in the meantime, it’s driving me insane.  I think I said this yesterday – wanting to play all these games at the same time means I can’t actually allow myself to get sucked in to any of them.  I was telling a friend this morning – playing the new GTA V right now is an exercise in absurdity, because I’m too used to the first-person controls of Far Cry 4 to be able to deal with the changes in GTA’s 1st person scheme (even if you can change them), and similarly I’ve got Assassin’s Creed Unity in my fingers, which makes moving in GTA’s 3rd person scheme tricky, too (I keep hitting R2 to run, and I end up punching people in the face).  And having all three of those games in my hands means that the aforementioned Dragon Age Inquisition – the one game I genuinely want to play more than any of these others – is basically impossible.

In that list above you’ll also notice I’m currently playing Rollers of the Realm.  It’s a pinball/RPG hybrid, and it’s on the Vita, and it’s everything you could ever want a pinball/RPG hybrid to be.  (Here, let Kotaku’s Leo Wichtowski tell you about it.)  I played it during this morning’s commute and was charmed immensely; the dialogue is unexpectedly sharp and well-written thus far, but the pinball itself is solid and fun, and will be my go-to commute game for the foreseeable future.

I don’t know if this is true for all Vita owners or if it’s just my own particular experience, but my Vita’s download speeds are so ridiculously slow that it defies logic and reason.  Rollers of the Realm is 350 MB.  I started downloading it at 8:00 pm last night.  It didn’t finish until 7:00 this morning.  That’s 11 hours to download 350 MB.  The only reason why a 350 MB download should take 11 hours is because the current year is 1997.

The First Few Hours (for real): Xbox One, Sunset Overdrive, Forza Horizon 2

1.  Before I get into the topic at hand, a confession:  I haven’t written for NaNo in 2 days.  Nor am I sure I’m going to pick up where I left off, if in fact I do decide to keep going; the subject matter is a bit more emotionally loaded and intense than I’d thought.  If I’m going to successfully fictionalize it, I need to understand it first, and boy oh boy am I not emotionally prepared to do that at this present moment in time.

2.  And in keeping with things that make me feel depressed, I can’t help but notice that my writing just sucks these days.  Even just emails to friends, FB status updates, and twitter replies – they all feel like they’re coming out wrong.  I’m feeling very much like Salieri; I have a tremendous passion for writing, but I feel that I lack the natural ability to do it as well as I’d like.  I may very well end up taking more classes.

This is all to say that trying to write a novel about super-intense emotional stuff when I’m feeling like I can’t even write a simple declarative sentence that’s enjoyable to read is discouraging, and depressing, and ugh.

3.  It’s November, which means that it’s time to start getting to work on year-end Top 10 lists.  To that end, I’ve been making it a priority to listen to all the 2014 albums I’ve saved on Spotify that I’ve never actually got around to listening to.  I’ll be putting out a playlist of my favorite songs soon enough; but there are also some albums that I’m loving the hell out of that don’t necessarily have one stand-out song.  Case in point:  Adult Jazz, “Gist Is”, which is (to me) a beautiful, melodic mixture of the avant-garde songwriting structures of Dirty Projectors and the latent melancholy that dwells within certain Vampire Weekend songs.  I can see why some listeners might find it incredibly pretentious and off-putting, but it’s been hitting me really deep of late.  Another case in point: the new Deerhoof album, “La Isla Bonita”, which might be the best (and most accessible) album they’ve put out since “The Runners Four.”  Likewise, Run The Jewels 2 and Flying Lotus’ “You’re Dead” are both utterly amazing headtrips, and near-impossible to pick just one or two tracks that stand out from the rest.

4.  So:  when I got home last night, both Sunset Overdrive and Forza Horizon 2 had finished downloading.  I’m enjoying both of them, but it’s also entirely possible that my current weird, depressive mind-state is making it difficult for me to fully engage with either game.

I appreciate Sunset Overdrive’s over-the-top lunacy, it’s vibrant color palette, and that it’s breaking the fourth wall at every possible opportunity, just to show you that it’s not taking itself too seriously.  To that end, it’s also possible that being self-aware of how un-self-aware you are is also a form of overt self-awareness, and so the more bananas it tries to be, the more silly and toy-like it becomes.   It reminds me a great deal of Crackdown – it’s similarly graphically vibrant, non-linear, and you basically jump and soar and fly and blow shit up, but I don’t feel like I’m moving as quickly as I’d like (I suppose that’s something I’ll be leveling up at some point); it also reminds me a great deal of Sony’s Infamous games (especially the grinding and other traversal maneuvers), except that the traversal in Sunset Overdrive feels a bit more convoluted and non-intuitive – two button presses to grind, plus shooting?  I get the hang of it, but I don’t feel like I’ve mastered the controls as quickly as I should.

I’ve only dabbled with one or two events in Forza Horizon 2.  It’s astonishingly gorgeous – far better-looking than I expected – and I’m also really happy with how the Xbox One controller feels while driving.  The rumble is pleasingly intense, the buttons are well-placed, the triggers feel responsive; unlike in Sunset, I felt in control the entire time.  I may end up spending more time with this one, which is fine with me; I loved the first game, and this one looks like a bigger and better model.

As for the Xbox One itself?  I like it.  I like the system.  The dashboard is overwhelming at first but it does make sense, and it’s fun to engage with in ways that the PS4 isn’t.  My wife and I got rid of cable and we have a Roku3, so I don’t think I’ll be using the TV functionality all that much, but that’s fine.  I will still more than likely continue to use the PS4 as my primary console (especially as long as multi-platform releases continue to perform better on it), but I’m glad to be back in Xbox land, and I kinda forgot how much I liked earning Achievements.  (Sorry, Sony – trophies just aren’t the same.)

SFTC Mach II: Jazz Odyssey

1.  Since I decided to shut up the other day, I’ve been doing a lot of thinking.  And one of the things I’ve been considering is to widen the scope of this blog to cover books, films and music.  (Well, film not as much, as I don’t get that much of an opportunity to see new films in theaters, what with the kid and all – but perhaps looking at older movies that have been on my to-do list for some time.)   I’m interesting in doing this if only because sometimes (like right now, actually) I get down on games, and when I’m down I tend not to write, and I’d much rather be writing than not.  Like:  I’d much rather talk about how much I enjoyed reading Whiskey Tango Foxtrot instead of how much I’m not enjoying playing Shadow of Mordor.

I’ll also be posting recommended reading links more often, rather than hoarding them in a GoogleDoc for the end of the year.  I ran across 2 necessary links yesterday, for example, that I highly recommend:

2.  Regarding the aforementioned Whiskey Tango Foxtrot:  I can’t recall how it was recommended to me, but in any event I’m really glad I picked it up.  It’s ostensibly a paranoid sci-fi thriller about espionage, secret knowledge and post-government corporate cabals gathering all of our private data, but it’s also quite charmingly written and features 3 broken protagonists that I related to a lot more strongly than I’d anticipated.  It’s not necessarily poetically written, but I did get a lot of mileage out of my Kindle’s “highlight” feature – there’s a bunch of really wonderful, insightful, deeply resonating passages that struck me deeply.  From descriptions of ceiling fans:

“There was a ceiling fan in her two-room flat; it was on now. But it whorled and kerchonked around at such an unstable and idiotic rate that what it gave in breeze it took back in worry.”

to descriptions of regret:

There is a club for these people, the people who have waited outside the burning houses knowing that they will not go back in and knowing that the not-going-back-in will ruin them.

to achingly heartbreaking professions of love:

How long do you think a weak-minded addict will stay on the shelf? Because that day you walked in? That day I saw you? I swear, my heart slowed and my breath came easier. All that rabbiting I do—it just stopped. Not stopped by like magic, but stopped with reason. You are as strange and amazing as anything my stupid little brain has ever come up with, and you are from outside of it. You have no idea what great news that is. And I’m going to lift some copy here, but there is a time for everything, that day and night here you were the still point of the turning world, and I knew for sure that I had a place in it. That place is next to you…

I really am quite sure that there is something we’re supposed to do together, that there is more that is supposed to go on between us. Aren’t you? Isn’t there a held breath in your life right now? I’ve missed a few boats already, and I really don’t want to miss this one too. I realize that in that metaphor or analogy or whatever, you are a boat. That doesn’t really quite get what I mean, because I am also a boat. We are both boats and we are both passengers. We should not miss each other.

3.  As for music:  I highly, highly recommend the new Flying Lotus album “You’re Dead”.  I don’t yet know how to fully articulate my feelings about it; it has a density and depth that defies my attempts to describe it, which really just means I need another few dozen listens before I can wrap my head around it.  But if you’re already predisposed to what Flying Lotus does, then you’ve probably already picked it up.

4.  As we approach the end of 2014, I’m no longer as intimidated by the game release schedule as I thought I’d be.  By my count, there’s really only 4 AAA must-plays left on my list, a few indie/downloadable things I’m most likely buying close to day one, and a bunch of curiosities that I may or may not get to in an expedient fashion.

The Must-Plays:

  • Civilization: Beyond Earth
  • Assassin’s Creed Unity (heretofore named AssUnit)
  • Far Cry 4
  • Dragon Age Inquisition

The Indies/Downloadables:

  • Geometry Wars 3
  • Lara Croft and the Temple of Osiris

The Curiosities:

  • Evil Within
  • Vib Ribbon (almost bought this the other day for the Vita, actually)
  • Costume Quest 2
  • The Vanishing of Ethan Carter (which I’m almost certainly buying if it’s in a Steam Sale)
  • Driveclub (whenever the PS+ version is finally out, at any rate)
  • Little Big Planet 3 (if my kid likes watching it, I might keep it)
  • The Crew

It also should be noted that if Sunset Overdrive reviews well, and if the Halo boxset isn’t terrible, then I’m probably getting an Xbox One.  I’m still kinda tempted to maybe wait a little longer and see if Microsoft comes out with a redesign – considering that they’ve already cut out the Kinect, it’s not totally unreasonable to think that they might come out with a newer box featuring better optimized specs – but I probably won’t be able to wait that long.  I’m still itching to play Forza Horizon 2 and I’d like to be able to try it while there’s still a strong player base.