Skummy

It's an extra couple of hours gameplay, some quality of life improvements, and a tiny bit of customisation, not bad for free DLC at all.

Two Point Campus and Return To Monkey Island for me - particularly the latter. I very, very rarely buy new games at full price, and other than during lockdown I rarely play any AAA games in the first place, so I don't tend to have a lot game-wise I'm looking forward to, but both of those scratch particular itches for me. Two Point Hospital was brilliant, and I'm curious about the Campus setting now that they don't have the framework of Theme Hospital to so clearly build upon, it'll be fun to see how it plays, and what sort of metrics for success and whatnot it uses. A new Monkey Island, and not only that but a new Monkey Island by Ron Gilbert that purportedly will build directly on the ending of Monkey Island 2 has been an absolute pipedream for years, so can't wait to actually see it. I'm not sold on the art style from the screenshots that have come out, but I'm sure I'll get used to it. My girlfriend started playing Monkey Island 2 for the first time over a year ago and hasn't touched it in months, I'll have to get her to go back and finish that before playing this one.

The best thing about Shagrath is this from his Wikipedia page; Trying to "before it was cool" about Lord Of The Rings is fucking hilarious, and doing it while getting the name wrong is even funnier.

they reformed a few years back for a charity gig, and then this was the 20th anniversary of the Do Dallas album, I don't know how much else they've been properly active aside from that.

saw McLusky earlier this week, supporter by JOHN. As excellent as ever. Last night we saw Sparks at the Roundhouse - we watched the Edgar Wright movie last week, I was curious if they were touring soon, turned out they were playing London that week. Tickets were mostly going for extortionate amounts (close to £200), but I set up some alerts and kept checking back, set myself a limit of £70 as the absolute maximum I'd be prepared. Two days before the show, some face value tickets came up. Absolutely brilliant, there's no other word for it. One of the best gigs I've seen in years, perhaps ever. What an incredible band they are. Just couldn't stop grinning from ear to ear the whole show.

accidentally murdered in a dude in a Last Man Standing match at the Performance Center; That wasn't the finish, but probably should have been considering the move to actually keep him down for the ten count, a moment later, was this:

Massively hyped for that, and curious what it ends up being - I love Curse of Monkey Island, but it was the first game in the series without Gilbert, and it just hand-waved away the mad twist ending of Monkey Island 2. Gilbert has long claimed to have had his own version of Monkey Island 3 planned out, following directly on from 2, and it sounds like that's what this will be. I can't wait to see what his version of the story will be, how it follows on from 2, but also whether it renders subsequent games non-canon or if he comes up with a way of tying the whole thing together. The presence of (possibly?) Murray The Demonic Talking Skull in that trailer makes me think the latter is on the table.

I've never done ArcTangent, but my girlfriend goes every year. I've been eyeing up the line-up, and while there's not a lot I know, there's enough to pique my interest; Opeth, Cult of Luna and Amenra are all firmly in the "I'd definitely go and see them if they played a festival I was at", while Mono and The Locust are must-sees, McClusky and Lightning Bolt are always great to see, and then there's a few others like Perturbator and Jamie Lenman I'd be interested in checking out. One of our friends is really, ridiculously into The Armed and their whole deal, and St Pierre Snake Invasion are a favourite of my girlfriend's, so it's a pretty strong line-up. I'm increasingly tempted. Before that, I've got tickets for Nine Inch Nails and Battles in June, and John Cooper Clarke, Shonen Knife, and the Sun Ra Arkestra next month, so a good fun couple of months lined up.

working my way through some of the new releases on my list this morning, and these are the two that have stood out so far: The band were described as "post-rock", but that normally suggests big sweeping soundscapes and tape loops to me, whereas this is groovy and danceable, and really brilliant stuff. Whereas this is from The Dead South's new covers album - it's a bit patchy in places, but this a really fun version of a CKY song I haven't even thought about in years, the riff translates surprisingly well to a country arrangement, much better than the cover of Chop Suey on the same album. There's also a fun version of my favourite Misfits song, Saturday Night, and a great version of "We Used To Vacation" by Cold War Kids.

I'm glad I did the tutorial, because I'm not finding these controls intuitive at all, though they do seem to make things flow a little more naturally than they used to. It's just that I'm so accustomed to the old way of controlling these games for the past, like, twenty years. I keep forgetting that it's square or X to do a move once you've grappled someone, and end up whipping them out of the ring every time instead.

yeah, that's my take on it - I don't think they're really for me, but if it teaches people how to properly "read" a text, I'm all for it. Much better that than either blindly believing TikTok "my Psychology professor told me X" nonsense that no psychologist has ever claimed, or the Cinema Sins/Nostalgia Critic school of "criticism" that's just angrily pretending to hate everything, and thinking that rattling off a list of faults is the same as a critique. Funny that conversation has turned to Spoony et al - I've never really got too into YouTube, but used to watch Spoony's stuff all the time. Can't even remember how I ended up there, but I watched all his Final Fantasy 8 stuff, loved things like the reviews of Reb Brown movies and weird video games so on, that all felt very much up my street. I didn't get on with many of the TGWTG crew as they started to crossover more, but I watched some stuff by Nostalgia Critic, Linkara and Cinema Snob, because a lot of the time they were covering media I was interested in, or at least were a guaranteed short video with a few decent gags. I even toyed with the idea of getting in on the act myself, and filmed a couple of reviews, but never got round to doing anything with them. There just seemed to be an absolute perfect storm of it all turning to shit, though, to the point that I'm always amazed when I see someone like Doug Walker, or even Linday Ellis', name surface, because it feels like they all just imploded years ago and belong to some previous age of the internet. That Nostalgia Critic is still churning out review videos to 100s of 1000s of views is crazy to me. I know he tried to move away from that character and ended up going back to it because it's all people wanted from him, but it just feels like a bit of a time capsule that people are still doing and watching this stuff when a lot of YouTube content is now far more sophisticated, or else people have migrated to Twitch for the more "Let's Play" side of things. I just remember starting to go off Spoony, ironically, around the time he started doing videos talking about wrestling. He would upload a review of a PPV that was longer than the PPV itself, and around the same time his videos just got more and more entitled and obnoxious. I know there was a lot of behind-the-scenes drama, but he started to come across as a really unpleasant person, and I just lost any interest in what he was doing. I probably haven't thought about any of this in years, but I'm being encouraged to find ways to make use of some content I've had to cut out of my book, and was contemplating whether YouTube videos might be the right format for it all, but the whole Channel Awesome scene of ten years or more ago is the only real frame of reference I have.

really struggling to get invested in an Obi-Wan Kenobi series. I loved Book Of Boba Fett - I'm a sucker for Star Wars as Space Western, and think that the criminal underworld on Tattooine is by far the most interesting part of the Star Wars Universe, but the operative word there is Universe, and that means there's more to it than Tattooine! Star Wars is at is best when its fleshing out minor details - I loved seeing a little bit more of how the Tusken Raiders' society operates, beyond them just being vague threats - and giving the suggestion of a larger universe; the reason Mos Eisley Cantina is the best scene in the whole original trilogy is because it gives the impression of a dozen other stories all going on at the same time as the one you're watching, and of characters that all have their own thing going on, you just happen to be focused on one narrative. It makes the universe feel vast, and alive. The prequel trilogy actively conspired to make that universe smaller, by drawing utterly needless and bizarre connections - Yoda and Chewbacca being mates, Darth Vader building C3PO, Stormtroopers being clones of Jango Fett, Jango Fett in general, they were all terrible creative choices and the franchise is weaker for every one of them. An Obi-Wan Kenobi prequel series is just going to be more of that. Because it's introducing at least one new lightsaber-wielding baddy, and because it's sending Obi-Wan off on adventures. So it undermines Obi-Wan as being an old hermit keeping a low profile by the time of A New Hope, and it makes a mockery of an already ridiculously truncated timeline. In A New Hope, Han Solo doesn't believe in The Force, nobody seems to have heard of the Jedi, and even people who work with Darth Vader mock it as an old religion. It feels like something from ancient history, kept alive by only a few adherents. Except, given the timeline between Episode III and Episode IV, it's only been 19 years since Jedi were not only pretty widespread and known to everyone, but since they essentially ran the entire universe. Hell, the current Emperor was a senator in that government! How do people not remember this?! To further flesh out the time in-between the two movies with more Jedi and Force antics, and new Sith baddies, makes that even more preposterous.

yeah, the green screen for Kinga and Max is very not good, and Kinga in general feels much more like she's in cosplay rather than inhabiting the character. The audio seemed to be slightly out of sync in their sections of the show, too. The hosts and bots stuff looks great, and I agree that some of the riffs were brilliant, and it feels very Joel-era MST3K. As nice as it to see Joel, the intermission stuff was pretty awful - the Nachos bit dragged and dragged with no pay-off whatsoever, and the producer just wasn't a very likeable presence, so did a lot to undo Joel being generally affable. I get that the intention is for Joel to be able to thank some of the backers, to offer something unique, and to show off some of the "Invention Exchange" stuff his students have made, but it all really fell flat, and wasn't particularly welcome at 2.30am or whatever time I was watching it given how late the stream started in the first place. I get it as a Gizmoplex thing - they have to be looking for things that they can offer in the new setting that they weren't able to on Netflix or conventional TV, and an "intermission" fits the cinema gimmick. That said, in future I'd rather that - if they do want "intermission acts" - that slot be used a bit more inventively, maybe for sketches from other comedians or something, and chats with Joel and the producers can be strictly pre- and post-show fare. The new theme song did feel a bit clunky, but the stream still wasn't 100% for me during it and, as with all their other segments, I was distracted by the lip sync issues for Kinga and Max.

It's showing up as available to rewatch for me, but that night be different depending on whether or not you donated at that tier. I enjoyed it, and everyone seemed really understanding of the technical hitch at the start. Once it got playing, there weren't really any other issues that I remember. The Gizmoplex isn't anything like as revolutionary as they'd hoped it would be, as it's just a stream with live chat, and with 4000+ people trying to use it at once the chat was completely unusable anyway. The movie itself was a Santo movie I hadn't seen before, and a rarity as it was dubbed into English. It wasn't as camp and nonsensical as some of my favourite Santo movies, and really obviously an existing horror film that Santo had been awkwardly tacked on to, but still surreal in the ways all Lucha movies ultimately are. Some fun host segments (Mean Jonah!), though green screen for the Mads is going to take some getting used to.

My set-up is pretty dismal right now, but about to start streaming J.R.R. Tolkien's Lord Of The Rings - Volume One for the Sega Mega Drive/Genesis for no reason. http://www.twitch.tv/patrickwreed

Was just about to post about the new Orville Peck stuff, it's great. There's a four track EP, but it's being launched as "Chapter One" of his upcoming album.

Still 100% in love with Three Bean Salad, cannot recommend it enough. I'm listening to a lot more podcasts than I used to, now that I have a commute that allows for it. I'm not generally one for True Crime podcasts and whatnot, but I have a couple on the go at the moment: Wild Things: Siegfried & Roy is a weekly Apple podcast about Siegfried & Roy, and the incident when the tiger attacked Roy on stage. Sometimes feels like they're padding it out, but it goes into their backstory, the USDA and police investigations, and so on. There's the sense at times that they're looking for a big twist, rather than the story naturally providing one, but it's interesting all the same. Fake Psychic is, thematically, right up my street. It's a BBC Sounds thing by the people who did Fake Heiress, and it's about a "medium" called M. Lamar Keene who wrote a tell-all book in the '70s about how he conned people, but also about a "Psychic Mafia" that ran the industry and allegedly had a hit out on him. I love stories about con men and magicians and so on, so the subject matter is great, but they do the really irritating Radio 4 thing of dramatising sections of the story, which I don't like at all. Short episodes, though, so easy to keep on top of. Also, I've been listening to: Ringheads - a Lord of the Rings retrospective with Bill Corbett from Rifftrax/MST3K, and Sean Thomason, one of the Rifftrax writers. Good mix of insight and not taking it all too seriously, talking through the movies scene-by-scene but with regular comparisons to the books. Unclear and Present Danger - Podcast looking at political thrillers of the post-cold war, but pre-9/11 era; think Tom Clancy stuff, and anything in that vein. Mostly it's about discussing what those movies say about America's place in the world, and how it viewed itself once it's core ideological rival was effectively finished. Really interesting stuff. I Don't Like Mondays - I may have mentioned this before. It's by Guy and Catherine Kelly; Guy is a voice actor/comedian, Cat is a philosophy graduate and his wife. It's a Garfield retrospective, where they look at every Garfield comic strip from the beginning, despite neither of them particularly caring for Garfield, and they refuse to do any preparation or any editing. I love it.

Norma Waterson, celebrated British folk singer, dies aged 82 | Folk music | The Guardian Norma Waterson passed away this week - just an absolute icon of English folk music. I've been revisiting a lot of her work in the last few days, having been a fan of the Waterson/Carthy family - and Norma's daughter Eliza Carthy in particular - for many years now. A great loss.

Looks like Team17 have already dropped the idea.

I had a lot of fun with UFC 4, though it gets super tedious after a while. In career mode, I don't think I've had a single fight over several years go out of the first round because I just focus everything on big fuck-off head kicks. It's immensely satisfying, but does get old eventually. If you're not up to date with current names or anything, it's not so much of a big deal, as there's a lot of older and weirder names in there to play as too - GSP, CM Punk, Bruce Lee, Matt Hughes, Anderson Silva, Wanderlei Silva, Vitor Belfort, Kimbo Slice, Dan Severn, Royce Gracie, Tyson Fury, Anthony Joshua. You can even play as Dana White or Bruce Buffer for some reason. There are "Kumite" settings to make it all a bit more arcadey and fantastical, and to do openweight fights. I probably wouldn't have ever recommended buying it, but definitely worth getting as a freebie.

I have got into this series of Junior Bake Off so much more than I have ever enjoyed any proper GBBO series. I've only just got past episode 5, so haven't met the second round of kids yet, but Lola is the most adorable child I have ever seen. 100% pulling for her to win.

I got this one on the third guess (the formatting always freaks out when I try to C&P the results to EWB), which is actually my best yet, but really should have been second, I just went with a completely insane choice of second word based on the letters I already knew. Just real brainworms stuff when it should have been immediately obvious.

To an extent, yeah - I have a modded Mega Drive Mini and a Mini NES, and just ordered a Raspberry Pi retro kit thing. If I were a bit more tech-savvy, and had a better idea of how to get old consoles to work on newer TVs, I'd be cultivating a collection of old consoles.

The ending stretch I mostly just interpreted as, "look, this isn't the same game" - establishing a different timeline, and a different "universe", so that they could freely chop and change the story from that point without people complaining (though they invariably still will). It doesn't help that it seems to tie in a lot of the expanded FFVII stuff, with all the spin-off games and whatnot, which tried to make Zack more of a thing than he ever really was, and that even I barely understand. The main issue for me was how much Sephiroth shows up early on. He's all over the opening stretch of the game, while also making it pretty explicit that every time you see "Sephiroth" it's actually one of the men in black robes and not the real deal, and I don't think that's made clear in the original until much later. It feels like it foregrounds a lot of stuff that, in the original story, you don't find out until you get to Nibelheim at the earliest, and some things you don't find out until the Northern Crater. I get it - given the scope of the game only covering the Midgar section of the story, they couldn't really release an FFVII game that just didn't have Sephiroth in it at all, but it felt like it went too far in the other direction. There are changes to the story I found interesting - Aerith comes across as almost a clairvoyant character in some respects, like she knows her fate and has a sense of what's to come far more than she did in the original - but yeah, not surprised to hear that it's barely comprehensible without having played the original.

That's really it, that his songs were utterly bombastic, ridiculous, and lacked any real "pop" or commercial sensibility, but worked regardless - "Paradise By The Dashboard Light" is preposterous, and should not work as a pop song at all, but somehow it does. He was never someone I got massively into, but "Bat Out Of Hell" was one of those albums that absolutely everyone seemed to own, and in the last couple of years, before I left Jersey, I'd often end up in my mate's café after closing time with a few cans of cider, and at some point during the night we'd almost always end up sticking some Meatloaf on and just reveling in how utterly ridiculous and audacious everything about it was. After Jim Steinman died, I listened to a lot more of his stuff than I ever had before, and what Steinman said about his music holds equally true for everything Meatloaf did without him - if you don't go over the top, how are you ever going to know what's on the other side?