Skummy

had a pretty good run of it so far this year - saw Sparks at the Royal Albert Hall, which was absolutely phenomenal, and then The Mars Volta more recently, which was superb. PJ Harvey coming up in September as my next "big" gig, though may try and fit in the Sun Ra Arkestra again in August.

I had this with MCU a long time ago. I stopped particularly following it after Age of Ultron, have only seen a couple since then, and none since Endgame, which I thought was a massively overwritten, self-indulgent mess of a movie. When the first Avengers movie came out, I loved it - I wasn't a fan of the Christopher Nolan Batman movies, and thought Marvel had finally managed to do a superhero movie that actually gets the tone and mood of the comics right. If you'd told me then, or better still, if you'd told me when I was a kid obsessing over Spider-Man and X-Men comics, that there would come a time when a new Marvel movie comes out every few months and I wouldn't care, I'd never have believed you. But there comes a point when seeing a thousand identical third acts and CGI laser fights over macguffins just wears thin, and "it's that guy from the other movie!" ceases to be an interesting hook. I don't think there's a single franchise I particularly care about any more, and I think it's the nature of franchises that make it that way. It's the same reason I try and avoid getting into books that are part of a series any more; the writer is no longer prioritising telling a good story within set parameters, they've got one eye on what the next one is, and the one after that, and so on forever. It's deeply unsatisfying.

On VP's spoiler discussion:

On the FF7R alternate timeline, in the original, there's a point towards the end where the game clearly switches timelines, and the SOLDIER recruitment posters with the dog mascot "Patch" change to show a different breed of dog. So I think the bulk of the story will be the same, but there will be odd digressions into other timelines, partly so even people who have played the original to death won't always know what happens next, but also to incorporate characters like Zack who weren't as major a part of the story as they've kind of retroactively become through spin-offs.

even if he weren't in as a playable character, there's little gameplay prompts and hints voiced over by Regal, which stand out like a sore thumb now he's gone. Obviously Yukes can't have known what was going to happen with him, but if they'd had more of a "video game" head on than a "wrestling" head for that bit, Evil Uno would be a great fit for the guy to talk you through tutorials.

I think people would feel less aggrieved at Jeff being DLC because he was a later arrival too. If it were something like having Matt in the base game, but Jeff and "Broken Matt" being the DLC, I think more people would go for that, and it would seem less bizarre. Doing some needless number-crunching, the DLC we know of so far is: 2x Matt Hardy - Matt debuted in AEW in March 2020, so well before plenty of people in the game, Jeff is just the most glaring FTR - debuted May 2020 The Bunny - debuted as The Bunny in November 2019, but was signed to AEW before their first show Keith Lee - debuted February 2022 Hook - first appeared December 2020, debuted December 2021 Danhausen - debuted January 2022 So while their likely was a cut-off date, it's not like the DLC is just people who missed that point - because Jeff Hardy debuted in March 2022, later than anyone currently announced as DLC, but is in the base game. Hopefully DLC will expand the game to include more members of the roster that haven't made the cut, including Evil Uno, and I'd like to see it grow to include more "Legends" - whether the likes of Jake and Arn that already work for AEW, or to get a bit more outside the box.

I love the skateboarding stuff, it's a daft throwback to stuff like how you used to be able to just get on The Undertaker's bike and ride it around. Wrestling games are always going to struggle to find the right balance between arcade-y action gameplay and simulation, not least in part because a competitive game can't reflect how a wrestling match is cooperatively put together and worked, so I have no problem with them leaning more towards fun party game stuff. The minigames concern me, as they just seem like mobile phone shovelware stuff, but if the rest of the game holds up, that's all good. The Hardys thing is weird, with Matt having been there so long and Jeff not only debuting later but having only actually been on TV a relatively small number of times thanks to missing the better part of a year. I'd get if they'd just put Broken Matt Hardy as a pre-order thing, but to have two versions of Matt as DLC while Jeff is in regardless, that feels weird and a bit cynical.

Sting is in WWE, WCW, TNA and AEW games, so I think it must be him. I thought maybe Raven, as he's in WCW, ECW and WWE games, but he wasn't in a TNA game. A few people have managed three - RVD is in WWE, ECW and TNA games, Dusty Rhodes is in WWE, WCW and ECW, but I can't think of anyone else that will have managed four.

In terms of having people like Cody in, a long time ago they mentioned that the career mode would effectively begin at the start of AEW, so they didn't see it as being a drawback to have older names still in the game. No idea if that's still true, or if it was just a bit of spin in the first place. "Play through a match with at least 50 wrestlers" suggests that, assuming it's not expecting you to flesh that out with CAWs, the game will include at least 50 wrestlers, anyway! FTR are apparently going to be DLC - wrestlers who debuted later than them have apparently been confirmed, too.

"Jesus He Knows Me" is definitely the highlight; that's been in pretty constant rotation for me since it was first released. "We Don't Need Another Hero" is good too, could see myself DJing that one if I were still playing rock/metal nights. The rest doesn't really do anything for me; Phantom Of The Opera, in particular, just makes me want to listen to the original instead. Khanate dropped a surprise new album yesterday - it's very, very heavy, and I love it.

Season 3 was the Neville Brothers, and it's not great. I love the Blind Boys of Alabama version, but I'm a huge fan of theirs in general. Tom Waits is notoriously picky about who gets to use his music and how, and apparently he didn't sign off them using his version for series one, but enjoyed the series enough to allow them to use it for series 2 - and then because they'd changed it once, they figured that they would change it for every season. There's a great story about Tom Waits not giving them permission until very close to the production deadline, and when David Simon managed to get in touch with him, it turned out it was because Waits couldn't operate his VCR, so hadn't been able to watch the tapes they sent him, and had to get his wife to play them for him.

struggling with new albums this year. In the last few years, I've had a spreadsheet I use to track new releases, and make a quick knee-jerk reaction on them. Anything I think is quite good or deserves another couple of listens gets highlighted in yellow, anything I think is going to make my personal "best of the year" list gets highlighted in green. By this time last year, I already was well into double-digits for albums that I found good enough to be worth a green highlight, and more yellow. So far this year, my only "green" albums are by The Go! Team, Pigs Pigs Pigs Pigs Pigs Pigs Pigs, and Belle & Sebastian. There's a few in "yellow" that I might go back to up and upgrade; Depeche Mode, Laibach, Fever Ray and John Cale have all done good stuff. Still a few to listen to - The National, Beach House, Mars Volta, Pet Shop Boys, and Kim Gordon's new thing to name but a few - but I feel like it's been a fallow year so far. Anything important I might have missed?

Also that not completing a film and leaving the studio to cobble something else together, often because he was either over-stretched or had got bored and moved on to the next thing, was pretty much the pattern for Welles' entire career. Mr. Arkadin had about six or seven different versions on the market because it was edited without him, The Lady From Shanghai was largely edited and cut without his involvement, as was Touch of Evil. Most of his Shakespeare films were either shot in a handful of days, or over a period of years because the money kept running out. That's before you get into all the truly unfinished, unreleased, and often probably never even meaningfully started film projects he'd talk about. To make matters worse, he was a complete bullshit artist of the most brilliant kind. You can't believe a single story he ever told, he contradicted himself constantly, and whatever version of a story he gave depended entirely on whoever he was telling it to.

The last time I saw an episode with Chalmers in it, Skinner called him "Gary", and that feels like such a fundamental misunderstanding of their relationship. Everything I see about new episodes is always weirdly referential of older stuff, too

Not all of them, but some definitely were - a bunch of wrestlers appeared on there. They had a phone-in number, though, and people would call in with stories of their own, and if they were faking it, it was off their own back, not the producers of the show making them do it. The show, like too much reality and talk show TV, needed to get more outlandish and weird and shocking as it went on, and became more exploitative with it. And perhaps there was an element of casting actors in quiet weeks when they didn't have anything odd enough to keep up with that. I liked Jerry Springer himself whenever I saw him on TV, despite not having any interest in watching his show. He always seemed affable, genuine, and self-effacing. He was a long way from the likes of Jeremy Kyle that came after him, who were actively antagonistic to their guests, and had an entire infrastructure built around exploiting the most vulnerable people who only reached out to him because they felt they had no other choice. The extent to which Springer can be deemed culpable for what came after him is negligible, I suppose, but his show was a symptom of the culture, it didn't create anything.

it depends on the kind of "stuck", I suppose. My girlfriend has been intermittently playing Monkey Island 2, ahead of me eventually playing Return to Monkey Island, and I've helped her with a few puzzles by kind of making suggestions of where she should go next - I haven't played MI2 nearly as much as 1 or 3, so it's not like I know it all inside and out anyway - but there's been a couple that I've just told her what she had to do; she was never going to figure out the "monkey wrench" puzzle, and the spitting contest is one of those infuriating puzzles where you basically get it, but chances are you're going to miss one out of the four or five steps. I don't think there's anything wrong with using a walkthrough in that kind of situation. I'm playing Horizon Forbidden West at the moment, and there was a collectible (the vista point, in the ruins of Las Vegas) that I just could not find at all. It's super fiddly, and neither the clues or the map are any use at all, so I just looked that one up. I'll rarely use YouTube videos, but if there's a text walkthrough, that'll do. But when the options are looking it up, or wandering aimlessly for an hour and getting frustrated, I'm going to look it up once it becomes clear to me that I'm not figuring this out on my own. It's never my first choice on a puzzle, though. And with a game like Horizon, it'll never be something I look up for hints in combat, because there's always a clear path to beating any enemy, no matter how difficult it is. Sometimes I'm just not good enough at the game. I started playing one of the Wolfenstein games recently, and I suck at it. Got killed like three times in the first bit of real combat. Luckily, it lets you change difficulty mid-game, so I knocked it down one setting. I still suck, only slightly less. I don't know if I want to play it on the easiest possible setting, so I might just give up. I don't think there's anything wrong with looking for help or hints or walkthroughs, or accepting the kind of help that some Nintendo games give you if you keep dying on the same level. You've paid for the whole game, so you deserve to access as much of the content as you can, rather than some of it being walled off by your ability to perfectly time a series of jumps. I think the distinction for me is always that I'll look up where to find something quicker than I'll look up how to solve something.

Every time I try and watch a newer episode of the Simpsons, it seems to be some variant on "Homer and/or Bart do something that goes viral online" or "Homer and/or Bart and/or Lisa befriend some hipsters", and they're always pretty mean-spirited in the way they treat those concepts. And by the way, did you know that you can get flavoured coffee now? What a concept. Only the trendiest of posers must be ordering that. By contrast, I always find the way King of the Hill dealt with characters that we might think of as "hipsters" today to be the best - Hank was usually shown as unreasonable for refusing to accept them the way they are, but by the end of the episode they were usually revealed to be hypocrites or grifters anyway, so ultimately nobody ever learns anything.

If you see any scene of the Hibberts at home, it's very explicitly modelled on the Cosby house, he always wears sweaters when not at work, the random laughter is meant to be a Cosby reference, and I think Cosby's character on The Cosby Show was even a doctor. So I don't think it's a stretch that the voice was pulling from the same source material - if anything, when they more explicitly reference Cosby, the voice they do is likely so much more of an outlandish parody because they already have Dr Hibbert's voice on the show. I can't see any other reason they'd re-cast and not even try and get close to the original voice, as they have done with Carl.

Dr Hibbert's original voice was based on Bill Cosby, so I imagine they've made a conscious effort to move away from that.

I can never get as into MDickie games as I should, and I think part of is that I find watching other people play them far funnier than actually playing them myself. I could watch New Legacy Inc play them all day long. Maybe if I was streaming them, or playing with others, I'd enjoy it more, as the fun comes from just sharing in the chaos and the absurdity of it all.

It was, at least in part, an experiment in writing a "hit record", but the timing of it right after they signed with a major label made it look like they'd sold out. It's not a great song, but more interesting musically than it's perhaps given credit for. I haven't watched their recent documentary, but they had a lot of idealism around the idea that by getting booked to play on TV, at big festivals, and so on, because of Tubthumping, they could sneak in anarcho-left wing messages on a major platform. I suspect that the general message of the documentary will be that it didn't work. They're a brilliant band, though I lean more towards their folky output than the early punk stuff these days. "A Singsong and a Scrap" is one of the best modern folk albums ever.

A Game Of You is probably my favourite Sandman book, helped along by it being the first I read. It was the first positive portrayal of a trans character I had ever seen in any media, and it always stuck with me. I read it back in maybe 2001/2, and it was published in 1993, yet people still have the audacity to pretend that trans issues appeared out of nowhere in the last few years.

That's one of my favourite episodes in a long time - it's rare that the studio stuff is funnier than the tasks, but this was all incredible. I was really looking forward to Frankie Boyle because the dynamic between him and Greg wouldn't be anything like any with any previous guest, but I hadn't expected so many genuinely sweet moments of glee and emotion from him.

A lot of supposed "one hit wonders", outside of outright novelty singles, are far more interesting bands than they're ever given credit for. Bands like Chumbawamba and Dexy's Midnight Runners are only known by one (or, in Dexy's case, arguably two) singles that are far from their best, and far from representative of their best work. There was a trend in alternative music in the mid-00s toward Swedish electronica, which produced a lot of artists that never reached the heights they could have done. The Knife - and Fever Ray's solo material - looked prised to become something pretty exceptional, especially after Jose Gonzalez's cover of Heartbeats ended up in some commercials and seemed to be everywhere for a little while. Lykke Li was another in that same vein; from her first album, I thought she was going to be huge. I thought Little Bit from her first album, and Sadness Is A Blessing from her second in particular should have been massive, but the zeitgeist moved quickly on from that genre.

Relationships should be based on in-game implications, more than on rumours, gossip and social media posts. When it comes to things like "Alexa Bliss hates Sasha Banks" - do you think either would be likely to get so pissed off as to risk quitting WWE over the other being signed? Almost certainly not, so it doesn't warrant a "hate" relationship, nor does, from your list, a pairing like Alexa Bliss and Nikki Cross warrant a "strong friendship".