Nevsky

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Posts posted by Nevsky

  2. Posted

    It's mostly called "post-rock" everywhere, but I really hate that tag, as it's so vague. Crescendo-core seems to be gaining momentum - and while it kind of does the opposite, by oversimplifying things - I think it sounds pretty fucking cool.

    Fair enough. I admit it's catchy, but definitely over-simplifying, I think - at least post-rock meant nothing, so could be re-defined to mean anything. I don't think crescendoes are a defining feature, even if many of the bands did explore them (to simultaneously awesome/absurd levels - I'm thinking of Explosions in the Sky here, 'First Breath After Coma' especially, or Sigur Ros).

    Spotify isn't available in North America, but we've got similar stuff like Rhapsody, last.fm, Pandora... Actually - on a techincal level, those are all quite different, but you catch my drift I'm sure...

    I get you. What turned me onto Spotify is the really impressive library, which I've never really seen in last.fm, etc. Hopefully they'll crack the NA territories in the future.

  3. Posted

    I think the biggest problem is that the "non-racist" UKIP actually managed to beat Labour!

    Yep, that's pretty bad as well. Although, I'd like to think that as UKIP are primarily a one-note party (the UK leaving the EU), then the majority of the voters who went for them knew what they were going for. Not that I agree, but I can understand if people didn't want to be in the EU, they'd vote UKIP.

  4. Posted

    That's a big overlap actually. I listen to a lot of crescendo-core

    What a funny term! Never heard that before - Mogwai, Explosions, etc have mostly been referred to as 'post-rock' in my experience, not that that is a good genre term at all.

    I've been listening to a lot of varied stuff recently, mostly because I got around to downloading Spotify - and I've had loads of fun mining its depths. I used to cast my net wide, but minimal funds and a small hard drive meant I always had to be modest (well, in my view anyway). Spotify changes all that!

    So I've been trawling through the dark periods of otherwise great musicians' careers (like Neil Young in the 1980s), and getting to grips with some great stuff I'd never had the inclination to check out before. For example, today, I've been writing about a film called Homegrown: HipLife in Ghana - which is about West African hip hop crews that perform a fusion form of American-styled beats, with Afrobeat/Highlife samples and rapping in local languages. And I found a couple of compilations on Spotify - what a marvelous world we live in (in this specific case).

    Anyone else here on Spotify? If not, and it's available in your country, I think it's worth a try. I remember some of the Grand Thumbsters were chatting about it (and how it won't work in the long-term) last week, but I think I was too busy being launched into the air by Toblix-in-a-sportscar.

  5. Posted

    It's easy to say "oh they're a bunch of morons", but really they're just normal people with fears and insecurities that the other parties failed to address. It unfortunately leads people to feel that they've got no other choice, which is incredibly lame.

    Oh, I agree, hence why I tried to present a sliding spectrum as opposed to just calling them morons. I'd like to think that if the majority of the 900,000 were better-informed about the BNP, or if we weren't currently in a scary wave of political populism, then the amount of votes would be far less.

    It's a sad day for my country, but I blame the people who didn't bother to vote and the other parties for not putting up a good enough fight.

    Yeah, I blame them too, and that is the real fault here. The BNP votes were only up a smidgen over the last EU elections - so it was more that votes for the bigger parties decreased. Funnily enough, the three biggest windbags I know, who were debating and raging over the election didn't vote, either through apathy or idiocy. And they're educated, committed people - one even works for the Sunday Times.

  6. Posted

    If I could spend my life punching each and every one of those 120,000 BNP voters in the crotch I would. Absolute fucking cunts.

    Plus the 130,000 North West BNP voters (the North West!), and the 700,000 other UK people who voted BNP. 940,000 is a startlingly large number of misled/flippant/ignorant/evil people.

  7. Posted

    First time life-splurger.

    I've been trying to make progress as a freelance writer over the last few months. I've mostly written for sites like Den of Geek, on an unpaid basis, but as they're pretty well connected with PRs, they have good opportunities for interviews, reviews, screenings, etc. So through them I've been able to do a lot, and get a lot of varied experience - and do special cool things like interview Neil Gaiman and Henry Selick for Coraline.

    Last week was probably the biggest 'success' week I've had so far. Games-wise, I was invited to go to a preview event for the new Luxoflux game, the movie licence game for Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen. It was the first time I'd been able to do any 'games journalism' stuff in terms of previews, and even though it's a flawed area of writing, it was great.

    But the real success was having my first paid article published - a feature on Games for Laptops for Micro Mart magazine (a relatively popular tech/hardware weekly in the UK). Really excited about that, as now I can actually call myself a journalist without having to qualify by explaining the complexities of unpaid professionalism.

    In comparison, this week is really slow, with nothing scheduled and not much on the horizon. So I'm getting anxious, ish. Oh, it's a complex world. :violin:

  8. Posted

    ...And now my Twitter feed has erupted with pronouncements of Sony 'winning E3', and how the trailer for The Last Guardian made people cry.

    What is this insanity?

    Hey, looks like a few good games are coming to each console in the coming year.

  10. Posted

    Nintendo didn't fail, they just didn't impress as much as everyone was hoping. People wanted a complete blowout to make up for last year's debacle, and when they only got a reasonably solid presser instead, peppered with stuff for non-gamers as well, they were disappointed. Really though, Nintendo's new market is not going away so how is it an unwelcome surprise that they're making things for them? They announced 3 new, hardcore-aimed first party titles, and Golden Sun DS. The fact that they did it over an hour and fifteen minutes with a bunch of padding is just to be expected.

    Sure. And I think a lot were taken along by the admittedly-awesome PR theatre of the Microsoft conference.

    Because, really, it was mostly a bunch of (impressive, promising) sequels that people already knew about, or sequels/spin-offs that people didn't know about. And then some crazy, baffling new tech and some scarily earnest Molyneux for good measure.

    As a package, though? Very impressive. Even though Nintendo had a good spread of games in there, it was mostly people in suits and spruced-up slides. And some crazy, baffling new tech - but without any rambling pseudo-geniuses or living legends.

  11. Posted

    Lots of interesting games brought up in the Nintendo conference. Of course, Metroid and Galaxy 2 crown that, but I'm still intrigued by some of the DS stuff.

    But, as my Twitter feed and other commenters are telling me - Nintendo failed, just because. Metroid isn't even new, pff. Forget it. Give me sequels that will explode my bowels instead. (or something to that effect)

  12. Posted

    Army of Tutu?

    Archbishop Desmond, fist-bumping his way through apartheid South Africa? Nobel Peace Prize Achievement Unlocked!

    Slowly catching up with the videos from yesterday. Project Natal's video is, understandably, so stagey and contrived that I'm having a really hard time discerning what it can do, and what is just play-acting for the applause. (people are huddled very closely on a sofa and it can detect vague movements in the lap?)

    Also, makes that horrendous furniture-wholesalers advertisement mistake of showing a living room that is of an insane size.

  15. Posted

    ...I crashed it into several small trees and - bizarrely - and elevated pipe. This crushed the lights on the roof, and so made the cop car siren sound like a Rolf Harris concert whilst under the influence of several illegal substances.

    That was my comedy highlight. That mode frequently conjures up those hilarious moments.

    I'm just as bad at the driving - very conservative and slow. So I was really shocked when, in another round, Toblix immediately ramped off one of the overpasses onto the roof of a warehouse far below!

    Is it pretty much a given that Cops + Crooks and GTA Race are the best modes? I know I'm coming in 27 installments into the franchise, but what are the feelings towards the other modes?

  18. Posted

    I reviewed it for Den of Geek, and really didn't get on with it. It had a quirky, post-modern, anarchistic approach to adventure game conventions, but the gameplay was very repetitive, tediously linear and quite shallow -- consciously so.

    Sorry to link to yet another review, but looking back, I think I really nailed my response to the game when I wrote it (even though it was my first 'proper' game review). I wouldn't recommend it to anyone, really.

  22. Posted

    Season two of the Wire is kindof blah compared to the rest of the series but three, four and five are rad—with four being a kind of high water mark that the fifth couldn't possibly live up to.

    I'm glad to hear someone say that. Almost all of my friends said 'Season Two of The Wire is my favourite', seemingly in some sort of collective contrarian stance.

    It still has some (very) good bits throughout, but whereas the first season made me feel like the hours were well spent, and well used, the second made me feel cheated a bit. I don't watch TV, usually, because of the time investment, and didn't feel it paid off that time.

    I'll get around to the latter seasons in due time, I think I needed a break from it.

  23. Posted

    Very enjoyable evening!

    I agree about far blips being a bit :tmeh:.

    The set up created some hilarious moments of madcap jumpiness with the smaller level and the rockets, but the other time/s, when the map was a little more spread out, and contained more pedestrians and cars, I spent more time trying to find people than anything else.

    My highlight was getting jacked in my fire truck. Or going in for haphazard potenti-kills with the knife after running out of rockets.