Skummy

I'm behind on episodes, so haven't been able to notice the change yet, but Omnibus Project have left IHeartRadio to go independent, and launched a Patreon. https://www.patreon.com/omnibusproject

I agree that too few levels on Mario Maker 2 feel like they could be real Mario levels. Sometimes that's part of the fun - thinking outside the box, breaking the mold and whatnot - but quite often it feels like they're designed out of spite. The beauty of Mario's level design is that it's so rare that you're ever blaming the game, or the design, for your mistakes. I can only think of one instance of a Mario game getting me into a controller-throwing rage because the camera, the controls, or the timing, or an enemy appearing out of nowhere, was the reason I was dying. That, to me, is the sign of a good game - when, even when you keep losing, you know it's because of your error, not because the mechanics don't work properly, or the design is conspiring against you.

I still haven't stopped laughing at Tyler and Pete being in last year but not Trent, tbh.

I finished it last night. It's still good, but I thought this series just got way too "busy", compared to how tightly focused the first series was, especially. The final episode was perfectly put together, though. I wasn't sure how they'd tie everything together without it feeling forced, but everything from the Suzie scene onwards was perfect. I kind of wanted to hate it as just a Deus Ex Machina, and lazy '80s nostalgia, but it was so good, and I popped for Suzie reading Ursula Le Guin. Back to it being too busy, though...there were just too many plotlines going on at once. The first series worked because it was about insular small town weirdness. The bigger the story gets, the more people have to know about it, and the less convincing it is that it can keep happening with only a select few people being really involved. The Bodysnatchers/The Thing plot of the Mind Flayer taking control over people really didn't pay off at all for me. We saw dozens of people apparently under its control, none of which ever served a purpose aside from Billy, who would disappear for several episodes at a time. Not to mention that Billy being the main "flayed" character meant the stakes were pretty low, as he was already an asshole, so you're not really rooting for him to be saved, nor is there much sense that he's acting out of character the way it would have seemed if another character had been controlled. It really felt like this whole plot only existed because they needed a way for Eleven to interact with the larger Monster, and could only figure it out by giving it a human face. Giant Monster was a bit of a letdown too. The unknowable spookiness of the Upside Down is far, far scarier than a slasher movie, "hide in a cabin while a monster stalks you" scene. Again, it felt like there needed to be more of a physical threat than the more supernatural element of the Upside Down, just because they needed an obvious way to up tension. Evil Russians...how many antagonists does this one series need? Evil Russians Part 1.0 being the Terminator-esque guy stalking Hopper, Part 2.0 being the crew under the mall. I'm not sure why the Russians feel the need to access the Upside Down to give them an advantage in the Cold War, considering they've already been able to infiltrate America so comprehensively as to create a heavily defended military installation there, but hey, what do I know? Again, another enemy that's not as compelling as the nature of the Upside Down. I also don't see why it needed to be Russians, other than a hacky Cold War arms race analogy - we know there are shady government agencies experimenting on the Upside Down, would it not have been more plausible, and believable, for it to be them operating here, rather than The Russians? I kind of hope this is it. As much as it was left open for another series ("The American" will be Hopper, I'm sure of it), and as the kids growing up while physically more separate from one another is the logical next step in the coming age of story, I don't know if I want to see the series get "bigger". I don't want to see it expand beyond Hawkins, and introducing Erica as a new character felt like a Cousin Oliver move to get a mouthy young kid in the mix as the original cast get older. In terms of casting and performance, she was probably the only weak point. All criticisms aside, the quality of the directing and acting is good enough to improve on the weaker parts of the writing/plotting and make it work. It left me wondering how from the first series this didn't lead to a broader career resurgence for Winona Ryder, I still love Hopper, Dustin and Steve, and I will never understand how Cary Elwes hasn't been a much bigger star. He was so brilliantly smarmy in this, and perfect as the uber-'80s corrupt mayor archetype - there was a point at the 4th July celebration when he speaks, and affects more of a "rural" accent than you've heard him speak with before, as it's the first time you see him speaking to the public, and I immediately felt my skin crawl. So good.

Not that it ever went all that far downhill, but Omnibus Project has had a real return to form lately - the Droodles episode is my favourite in a long, long while.

There's been a cultural shift in how we purchase music, and I'm really curious what - if anything - will be recognised as the culturally defining songs of this decade. The notion of defining songs of certain eras and genres was more or less dictated by radio DJs (both in what got played first time around, and what gets codified as, for example, "The Sound Of The 80s" on oldies stations), music journalists, and later by music TV. For all extents and purposes, all of those have gone the way of the Dodo. Kids aren't listening to the radio to hear the latest hits, music journalists and DJs have lost pretty much any power they had as tastemakers, and music TV is dead. There's not the energy behind one or two songs, or one or two artists, as "defining" one era or one genre. I haven't DJ'd in a few years, but when I go see friends play, or watch covers acts perform, the setlist is the same as it was ten to fifteen years ago. The requests you get are the same as they were ten to fifteen years ago. Kids ten or twelve years younger than me are requesting nothing but what was played on Kerrang! and MTV 2 when I was their age. I couldn't tell you what's in the charts right now, despite knowing people who work for the UK Charts, and I doubt any of my students could tell you either. It feels like precious little breaks through into a wider consciousness any more. Because the way we consume music, and discover new music, has become so intensely personalised, that there's no longer that mass energy behind a single song or artist.

I would legitimately say Tetris. I first played it more than quarter of a century ago, and could still gladly play it every day now. I still get enjoyment out of it, still push myself to get better at it. And it was already an "old" game when I first played it. Even the biggest and boldest of the recent AAA titles being discussed here, aren't going to be played in thirty years time. And if you're talking "greatest ever", you have to factor longevity into that discussion.

It's the first Chronicles that I'm playing. You're right that it's not really a JRPG, just that's the bracket it had always fallen into in my head, I'd always heard people comparing it to other games in that genre. It's a lot more fine-tuned, strategically, than I'm used to, so there's a definite learning curve, though the battles tend to be intuitive enough that if you fail at first you soon figure out what you're meant to be doing. I just had my first battle run out of turns, though, against Maximillian's tank, which is an absolute bastard.

I'm playing Valkryia Chronicles now - an impulse purchase based on vague memories of it being spoken about as one of the great JRPGs. It's pretty good, and mind-bogglingly complex, but not at all what I thought it would be. As much as I like - but am admittedly terrible at - a tactical RPG, there being no real exploration element to it is putting me off investing too much time, as just battles interspersed with cut scenes isn't the most engaging of gameplay.

I'm not a huge fan of season 2 of Conchords, but Murray is one of my favourite characters in anything. His reaction to being told they have girlfriends being, "what, even both of you?" is one of my favourite jokes ever. I've started watching Chernobyl and have no idea how people binge it. It's incredible, one of the most powerful things I've seen on TV in years, but it just wears me down, it's so heavy going. After one episode I need time to mull it over.

Good Omens was flawed but great. I don't know if I enjoy it more or less for having re-read the book very recently, though. Its biggest strength is in the performances of Tennant and Sheen, and it kind of meanders a bit when not focused on those two, though the casting of some of the supporting cast is really inspired, and you can tell it was made with love, and is bursting with little easter eggs and references.

If it weren't for yesterday, that would be the maddest thing I've seen in football in years. Mental.

I'm not a football fan, but that was fucking incredible. Watched with my parents, both Liverpool supporters, and my half-brother who isn't, and even he & I were jumping out of our seat cheering. That corner will stay in my mind for as long as I live. Incredible stuff. And, as much as I don't follow football, I don't think there's a better atmosphere in the world than a celebratory Anfield crowd singing "You'll Never Walk Alone".

100% this. I have a friend who worked on the live action Beauty & The Beast as a costume designer. The Beast was originally going to be live action, and she'd worked on the costume and physical effects for months. One day, someone in a boardroom decided that he should be CGI instead, and my friend's entire department were sacked with zero notice. That's exactly the sort of thing that will happen here.

It looks fucking terrible, and at least a decade out of date. Which is pretty in line with Sonic as a franchise, really. I saw all the Tweets and jokes about it and figured, "how bad could it be?", and it's even worse. I thought it would be a trainwreck, but it's not even that, it's so paint-by-numbers lazy kids movie wrapped in dated '90s "Attitude". It's fucking dull. Jim Carrey's performance just made me shake my head, because it's Jim Carrey doing the schtick that had got old twenty years ago and that, by and large, he hasn't done since. I don't understand how this movie is happening in 2019.

Went to see Jawbreaker on Saturday. They fucking killed. Amazing gig.

I think the "Rise Of Skywalker" will refer to Leia, some grand final gesture from her. Though LD's prediction is probably closer to the mark. Definitely sounds like the Emperor's laugh at the end, huh? I give no shits about any of the new trilogy leads, though, given how inconsistently they've been written for the past two movies, so *shrugs*.

I concur. Blitzball is fucking preposterous. A game where you'd think the whole selling point of it being underwater would be the ability to move in three dimensions but, no, you can only move on one plane. So what's the point? It's stupid. Final Fantasy X is stupid. Rewarding drudgery rather than skill or exploration/curiosity in an RPG is stupid.

He's an absolute musical idol of mine - as you say, just an utterly remarkable, extraordinary career. Even ignoring the teen pop stuff in the '50s, and starting at the Walker Brothers, he could go from a '60s crooner in what was essentially a teen heart-throb boy band to, fifty years later, recording an album with an avant-metal drone band is incredible, and that you can chart that process and see it more or less make sense is even more incredible. It's a career trajectory that would be unthinkable today, not least of all because no artist of his fame would be allowed the creative freedom to follow such tangents, or to spend the better part of a decade allowing an album to gestate. "Tilt" is one of the greatest albums of all time, when I first heard it, being only notionally aware of his work outside the Walker Brothers' hits, it felt like I was listening to the future of music - and the album was already more than a decade old at that point!

Offshore sounds great, definitely going to check that out. I'm currently reading "Natives: Race and Class in the Ruins of Empire" by Akala, and it's absolutely brilliant. I, to my shame, didn't know Akala's work until very recently, and it's a wonderful mix of sociology and biography. The first couple of chapters were interesting but "tell me something I don't know", and then the third goes into the public perception of black athletes, and constructs of blackness and whiteness, and I was just absolutely gripped. Phenomenal stuff.

I disagree about Velveteen Dream being a heel. If you look at his matches on Cagematch, he routinely teams with the likes of Ricochet, Aleister Black and and Matt Riddle (all faces) against the Undisputed Era and Tomasso Ciampa (all heels). He's clearly booked as a babyface.

I didn't realise "Look Who's Back" was a book - there's a film adaptation on Netflix, in a kind of Borat-y unscripted style, and it's fucking chilling in places.

Hal Blaine has passed away - the greatest drummer in pop music, and someone whose music you have absolutely heard even if you have never heard his name. Most famously, and iconically, he played the opening drumbeat on The Ronettes' Be My Baby. The greatest intro of all time. But he played on some of the greatest, and some of the most famous, songs ever recorded. This list is far from complete, and is just a litany of hits;

I think the reason The Fix didn't work is because it was trying to adapt the whole panel show format to a US audience (and allow Jimmy Carr to break the US market), and so fell into this weird hinterland between a panel show and a kind of Daily Show series of monologues. As much as being a quiz/game is a conceit in most of these shows, even by those standards they didn't do enough to keep up the pretense.

Super hyped for Mario Maker 2. I never got to play around with the original nearly enough, as it was my girlfriend's console, and by the time it came out on 3DS I'd more or less given up on using mine. The Switch is a pretty perfect set-up for that kind of game.