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Skummy

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Everything posted by Skummy

  1. is this where we talk about X-Men 97? Watched the first two episodes last night, and really enjoyed them. The tone of it all feels perfect. I watched the original cartoon religiously, and was starting to read comics at the time, so it's all powerfully nostalgic and feels like "my" X-Men. The direction of the story feels fairly obvious for someone who was reading at the time, but I imagine there will be some fun timey-wimey twists to come.
  2. Skummy

    WWE 2K24

    For people not currently under contract with WWE, they have to negotiate each appearance/royalties fee separately. So it's a matter of 2K either not being able to get Finkel's estate to sign off on it, or not trying, rather than WWE themselves blocking it. They should just replace every person they couldn't get rights for with The Enforcer from 2k16.
  3. has PS Plus gone weird for anyone else? If I try and sort the available free games by "Recently Added to PS Plus", it's just a ton of old games that have been on there for months at the top, not the most recent ones.
  4. I never got into Dragon Ball, but it's hard to argue how iconic and influential his artwork was, and Dragon Quest and Chrono Trigger alone would be one hell of a legacy even without DBZ. I'm currently playing the remaster of Secret of Mana, and his influence is on everything in that game.
  5. I've bookmarked this, as it sounds right up my street. Apologies if this is already mentioned in the video, but the other thing that always comes up when people try and use Native cultures' stories to support the existence of Bigfoot, UFOs, or anything else along those lines, is that these are often oral traditions, and the stories are adapted and evolve over time to fit in new information and reflect people's prior knowledge. So even if stories being told today sound like they are about Bigfoot or UFOs, it's because those things are in the zeitgeist and have been folded into newer versions of the story.
  6. I land in pretty much the same place on most of those - the new Idles is incredibly dull; the song with LCD Soundsystem is better than anything else on there, but it's still boring. I'm a little higher on the new Sleater-Kinney, but it doesn't hold up to how good they used to be. I was disappointed by the new Hurray For The Riff Raff - they kind of came out of nowhere for me and I loved what I first heard from them, but there was nothing that jumped out to me here. There's not many albums I've listened to this year that I've flagged as good, let alone great or potential album of the year, and there's been a fair few disappointments. I enjoyed the new The Smile album, and the new Dead South is good for what it is, but mostly it's been things that I was looking forward to and didn't quite land for me, like the new Laetitia Sadler, which is nice, but nothing special, or the new Pylon Reenactment Society, which has some high points but is mostly a bit patchy. On the heavier side of things, the new Obsessed has one or two decent tracks but nothing that holds up to their best work, and Ihsahn's newest is good but nothing I can see myself going back to.
  7. Skummy

    WWE 2K24

    also, the title of that Pigsx7 song is a Brodie Lee tribute. Pigs and Colter Wall are some out of the box choices for a wrestling game soundtrack, but not much else really jumps out at me.
  8. yeah, "Daddy Lessons" from Lemonade was a better avenue into "Beyonce does country", particularly the version with The Chicks, than Texas Hold 'Em, which feels too contrived.
  9. Skummy

    WWE 2K24

    similarly, watching the newLegacyInc stream of it, one of the things they were most excited about was being able to throw and catch weapons which, while fun, is once again something that we had in the first two games. Same thing really with the 40 years of Wrestlemania stuff - based on the artwork, it gives us Hogan, Andre, Rock, Austin, Bret, Undertaker...all people who have been in these games countless times already.
  10. didn't he basically pivot all the way back later on, though? He was a big Trump guy, IIRC. Toby Keith was one of the many people Jarrett tried to convince into buying or bankrolling TNA over the years too, and put up some of the money for GFW. I listened to the (mostly excellent) album of Willie Nelson's 90th birthday concert, and remember thinking that Kris Kristofferson sounded really frail on it, and then realised that he's 87 years old.
  11. I think this week's episode put paid to that criticism, some absolutely brutal work from the Gladiators. I'm not feeling what they're doing with Viper at all, I just don't buy him as a heel, there's no personality there, and it feels forced. It's for kids to have a baddy to boo, though, so that's fine. I hate the backstage dressing room camera stuff. Skirts the wrong side of kayfabe for this show for me.
  12. Depends if you have the option of going back into retro games - aside from the games already mentioned, I think Smackdown vs. RAW 2010 was the first WWE game to not allow you to play intergender matches. Any of the main series WWE games prior to that on Playstation and subsequent equivalent generations of console would allow for an intergender Rumble.
  13. Skummy

    WWE 2K24

    it's pie in the sky stuff, but just thinking in terms of likely rights agreements and so on, I'd think a genuine 40 Years of Wrestlemania series could look something like this: That's 39 matches, mostly main events and some semi-main events, that they could choose that involve people that have already been in the games in recent years, and allows for some variety in terms of different variants of the same characters, and a few different match types. I'd love something more wide-reaching, with people not in the games previously, and some weirder midcard matches, and varieties of gimmick match, but just to keep it simple in terms of the range of people involved, it's surprisingly easy to come up with a feasible list of matches from every Wrestlemania, and it's surprising which are the harder ones to find something - Wrestlemania 2000 especially.
  14. Skummy

    WWE 2K24

    it's classic WWE games that so many of the new features they're promoting were already in games twenty years ago - better backstage brawls with interactive elements, special referees, casket matches; these are all things we had on the PS1! There's some stuff for MyGM that I've never played, but have heard specifically requested by Youtubers and podcasters who do, so that's fair enough, but so much of these games always feels like you're expected to be grateful for stuff that should be the norm by now. The 40 Years of Wrestlemania mode doesn't sound meaningfully any different from previous showcases; that it's 21 matches means that there's not going to be something from every Wrestlemania, which is what the name implies to me. At the very least, I hope you can unlock every 'Mania's arena. From the AI art poster, it's not like "40 Years of Wrestlemania" is allowing us to play as stars that haven't made it into the games before - again, we've been able to play as Andre, Hogan, Bret, Austin and Rock in WWE games for 20+ years now.
  15. I have fallen completely in love with this channel, and it's become the only YouTube channel I regularly watch with my partner, and fairly regular easy viewing. Nothing has topped Planet Zoo so far, but a lot of it is incredible. EDIT: The dealbreaker for Nebula for me is the lack of a dedicated TV or PS4 app, because that's how I watch YouTube 99% of the time. First world problem time - I could maybe get it to work using the Fire Stick, but that seems like effort. I would be curious to check it out; I listen to the podcast It's Probably Not Aliens, which is by two YouTubers whose work I've started delving into a bit more - Step Back, and NerdSync - and they're both big on pushing Nebula. It would be great to have a streaming site to genuinely rival YouTube, and to be more creator-driven and creator-friendly, so I feel like I should check it out properly.
  16. Skummy

    songs with sequels

    the Ramones had Judy Is A Punk and The Return Of Jackie and Judy.
  17. Skummy

    Taskmaster

    Nick Pemberton could be superb, and Nick Mohammed promises to be absolutely deranged - if you've seen him at all, it's likely to be as his alter-ego "Mr. Swallow", who is fantastic. I don't really know any of the others well enough, but I trust Taskmaster on this stuff - I didn't know Mike Wozniak at all before he was on the show, and he's one of my favourite comedians now.
  18. I have a few still to check out, but here's what's stuck out to me most so far: Joyous and Danceable Pop/Rock Category: Sparks - The Girl Is Crying In Her Latte The Go! Team - Get Up Sequences Part Two Jake Shears - Last Man Dancing Dorian Electra - Fanfare Extremely Heavy Category: Khanate - To Be Cruel Godflesh - Purge Boris and Uniform - Bright New Disease Divide and Dissolve - Systemic Wolves In The Throneroom - Crypt of Ancestral Knowledge Racetraitor - Creation And The Timeless Order of Things Transcendently Beautiful Category: Ahnoni & The Johnsons - My Back Was A Bridge For You To Cross PJ Harvey - I Inside The Old Year Dying Bonnie Prince Billy - Keeping Secrets Will Destroy You World's End Girlfriend - Resistance and the Blessing Hip-Hop/Rap/R&B Category: DJ Shadow - Action Adventure Aesop Rock - Integrated Tech Solutions Quirky Not Quite Fitting Another Category Category: Reverend Kristin Michael Hayter - Saved! Half Japanese - Jump Into Love Laibach - Love Is Still Alive Alabama 3 - Cold War Classics Vol. 2 Buddy & Julie Miller's In The Throes is in there somewhere too. I might write more about some of these later, but that's everything that has felt like it really needs documenting from this year. The new Creeper is an outlier, in that I think it's ridiculous fun, but probably doesn't quite make the cut.
  19. he was so good in Homicide, but Brooklyn 99 is rightly what made him an absolute joy of an actor to watch. It very quietly has become some of my favourite comfort viewing over the past year; my girlfriend used to put it on while she had lunch or something, and I never really cared about it, but the more I paid attention the more I liked it, and that's almost entirely down to how much I loved Captain Holt as a character and Andre Braugher as a performer. Someone said that you can see as the show goes on, how it starts to orbit more and more around him as the heart of the whole thing, which can't have been the intention from the beginning, but is testament to just how good he was.
  20. I adored Unpacking. I found it so unexpectedly emotional in a few points, and fell absolutely in love with it when I realised what they were doing.
  21. finished Oddworld: New 'n' Tasty, at least the base game, none of the DLC. They changed the threshold for getting the "good" ending from rescuing 50 Mudokans to rescuing 150, so I absolutely didn't manage that. I'm still not very good at this game, but other than the final level and some of the DLC, I don't find it as frustrating as I used to in parts, as what you have to achieve is always pretty clear, and having infinite lives in which to do it was pretty revolutionary for PS1 but feels a lot more normal now. It's basically a puzzle game disguised as a platformer in a lot of places. The Boardroom level can still fuck off, though, couldn't do it without save spamming. Also finished Call of Cthulu last night. It's fine. The intrigue kind of dries up halfway through, and when it gets into the "descent into madness" part of the story, there's some interesting setpieces but for the most part it doesn't have a lot of new material to offer in terms of plot development or mystery. And after all that, the ending is a bit of an anticlimax - of the several possible endings, I got one that probably wasn't the worst, but wasn't the best. Although there's not really a "good" ending, from what I understand.
  22. I never really used to be into YouTubers, or be someone that idly scrolled through YouTube for stuff, I only used it if there was something I was specifically looking for. In the last year or so, though, I've started putting stuff on during my lunch break when walking from home, and these are the non-wrestling related people I have been following most: Stuart Millard - a.k.a Frantic Planet, I've followed his blog for years, but only started watching his YouTube more recently. Very funny deep dives into forgotten bits of pop culture - '70s variety shows, lost media, bad sitcoms, awful '90s and early '00s "new lad" content and early reality TV. He did a series on Royal Variety Shows that are absolutely superb. At least one laugh-out-loud moment for me in every video. NerdSync - someone I'd have probably almost immediately rejected a few years ago for being a bit too earnest, a bit try-hard, and a bit too much of a stereotypical "YouTuber", but I've cooled on a lot of that stuff now. I got into him through the podcast It's Probably Not Aliens, about Ancient Aliens, pseudohistory and conspiracy theories, but this is his main gig - videos about comic books, pop culture, and cartoons, especially Scooby Doo, with the more recent ones usually having a social justice focus as well. I like what he does because it tends not to focus obsessively on in-universe lore like most comic book nerds do, but on the actual history of characters, comics and creators, so there's interesting stuff about Stan Lee, Jack Kirby, art and publishing trends - there's a whole video on the disappearance of thought bubbles from comic books - and I find that far more interesting. Step Up - The co-host of the aforementioned It's Probably Not Aliens podcast. Similarly, I can find him a bit too try-hard and earnest at times, but he does good work. The stated objective is to look at how understanding history helps you make sense of the world today, and so any focus on historical events will also link into a "why this is important now" discussion, which I think is the best way to approach history education. A lot of his focus is on the far-right and conspiracy theories, so that end he's just done a really good video on the JFK assassination and conspiracy theories, and a while back did a long critique of Graham Hancock's Netflix series. I haven't really followed any video essayists since the largely pre-YouTube days of the Spoony Experiment and That Guy With The Glasses, so it's been nice to see how far a lot of people have moved on from the worst of that era, and while there's a whole new set of YouTuber tropes that I don't have any time for, it's great that it's not just performative anger across the board any more.
  23. Skummy

    Spotify Wrapped.

    Listened to 78 genres. Top were Singer-Songwriter, Alternative Rock, Crank Wave, New Wave, and Chamber Pop. This was the first time I ever heard the phrase "Crank Wave", and while "Chamber Pop" is on my list every year, I'm still not entirely sure what it is. I played 6969 songs, nice nice. Top songs were: Chappell Roan - Pink Pony Club (fair enough, it's a banger and I obsessed over it) Laibach - Amerika Ryuichi Sakamoto - Merry Christmas Mr. Lawrence Ghost - Jesus He Knows Me World's End Girlfriend - Ghost Of A Horse Under The Chandelier Top artists were: Laibach (top 1%) Alabama 3 Tom Waits PJ Harvey They Might Be Giants Top podcasts were: It's Probably (not) Aliens! Behind The Bastards Deadlock Must See Matches Unclear and Present Danger Spotify stats are always a bit skewed for me - there's a couple of playlists that will be in heavy rotation, because I put them on when I can't sleep, and that's what results in stuff like Sakamoto and World's End Girlfriend, as brilliant as they are, pretty consistently being in my top listens. I usually listen to podcasts while walking or commuting, but I have a couple of playlists of just stuff to put on in headphones if I don't have podcasts to catch up on, or aren't in the mood for them, and that tends to lead to some songs being played a lot more than I otherwise would have done too. Podcasts-wise, there's a couple I listen to more than most on that list, but via Patreon, so they don't show up here. I'm surprised Deadlock is that high, as I only started listening to them late in the year. I can't really account for that Ghost song being high up - it was definitely on one of those playlists, and maybe a road trip playlist or something? Also a possibility that it was getting played a lot in the run-up to the wrestling show I promoted, because I was trying to stay in a bit of a goth rock frame of mind for that one. More important than Spotify Wrapped, though, is JUDGE MY SPOTIFY - https://pudding.cool/2020/12/judge-my-spotify/ Mine came out with; The "you know there's good music from before 2019" thing is because in the last couple of years I've started using Spotify to keep on top of new releases, so whenever I'm working from home, I listen almost exclusively to new albums, which is another thing that will completely throw these things off in terms of what my listening habits are outside of just Spotify.
  24. A couple of their albums really suffer for that, and it's a shame, because there's some fantastic stuff absolutely buried under bad production. I absolutely love The Pogues, though. I got massively into them when I was around 19-21 or so, and still think Shane at the height of his powers was one of the best lyricists around - I'd think that if all he'd ever written was Rainy Night In Soho and The Old Main Drag, but there's just so much there. When I got into him, I was really deep in the kind of Beat generation bullshit idea about drink and drugs being mind-expanding, and how there's wisdom in old drunks and all that, and that probably played a part in how much I got into MacGowan, and also into Tom Waits, and a few other artists too, even though at their best they're not about that at all. Now, I always think of the Alan Moore line, "William Blake said that the road of excess leads to the palace of wisdom, which was naughty of him, because it doesn't" - but listening to the more booze-soaked Pogues songs now, I don't really think he does glorify or romanticise any of it (though, by his solo material, that's pretty much all he ever did). Their songs are earthy and quite unpleasant, and just singing about the world he knew and lived in, there's very little about any of it that makes me think you're supposed to find the subject of his songs aspirational or romantic or anything like that. Whatever. He was brilliant. I love his voice, love his lyrics. There's a lot of shite in the back catalogue, but his best stands up against anyone's best.
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