forkboy

@nablith said:

Hey, thanks for sharing this because I had totally missed that Daughters had a new record coming out. This is exciting, albeit also really surprising to see them doing a 7 minute long track.

Because I've not been keeping up with this thread, lemme just dump a bunch of names of cool shit I've heard from this year and a short description.

Abstracter - Cinereous Incarnate - Some belting blackened doom metal
The Atlas Moth - Coma Noir - Some sludgey posty kind of metal with some post-hardcore touches.
Aura Noir - Aura Noire - Classic Aura Noir, one of the very finest purveyors of blackened thrash.
The Breeders - All Nerve - Indie rock from the Deal sisters, real return to form.
Deafheaven - Ordinary Corrupt Human Love - Really really special post-black metal. Which I realise is a term that means little to most people but eh, that's the vocabulary I have.
Gnaw Their Tongues - Genocidal Majesty - It's uhhhhh? A bit black metal, a bit noise, a bit electronic weirdness. Has to be heard to be believed and I imagine most people would find it verging on unlistenable but if you "get" it, it's amazing imo.
Panopticon - The Scars of Man on the Once Nameless Wilderness - A double album which was my most anticipated record going into 2018, a one man black metal band, only it's black metal with bluegrass & other Appalachian folk influences. Austin Lunn is a fucking genius, and I don't use that word lightly. But really, his songwriting is excellent and so is his performances on this album, well, double album, it clocks in at just shy of 2 hours.
Parquet Courts - Wide Awake! - I liked their last album but the first time I heard Total Football played on the radio I genuinely thought it was a song from '78/'79's punk scene I'd never heard before and got really excited. It's great.
Sleep - The Sciences - It's Sleep doing what Sleep do, heavy heavy riffs. That sort of stoner doom thing isn't for all but it's probably the 2nd most approachable record of all I've listed so far.
Slugdge - Esoteric Malacology - It's slug themed death metal and it's the best new death metal I've heard in a long fucking time. The gimmick is a bit silly but honestly no more so than Cannibal Corpse or every goregrind band.
Uada - Cult of a Dying Sun - I turned into a bit of an evangelist for this earlier in the year, it's pretty straight forward black metal but by Christ it's perfect at that. Can't stress strongly enough how much any metal fan should give this a spin.

I'm very confident that my top 2 games of 2018 are going to be Yakuza 6 & Yakuza Kiwami 2. I'm so glad GBE introduced me to the sheer madness of Kiryu and friends.

Other that that, Frostpunk, Vampyr, but the other big surprise for me was Nantucket. Which no one else seems to talk about but I fucking love that whaling game.

I mean, yeah, I think Funkos are pretty tacky and lazy wastes of plastic that almost all look fundamentally the same and would never buy one. Hate might be a bit strong, I don't stay up at night cursing the existence of Funko Pops, but I do not see the appeal to them at all.

What is your theory actually based on? It feels like calling the director of critically well regarded games like the Legacy of Kain: Soul Reaver games and Uncharted "a hack fraud" is a pretty broad statement that you can't just leave hanging (well, you can of course). Even if she's never involved in a finished game again that seems a fairly solid CV right there.

At some point Disney have to be taking a long hard look at this deal. It's been what, 5 years, half way into the 10 year exclusivity deal. We've gotten Battlefront & Battlefront II (with all its assorted issues & controversies harming the brand), Galaxy of Heroes on phones, and that's it. The Old Republic soldiers on, but was also a deal made before the exclusivity contract. In that time we've had 4 movies come out.

I know games take a long time to make, but 2 console games in the 5 years and none expected this year or next is a very poor return. Especially with the damage done by the handling of Battlefront II, even if it was perhaps unlucky to be the microtransaction game that was at the centre of the storm.

I figure I'd be into them 10 years ago, when I was happy to play online games despite generally being a bit shit at them. Now I just want to have the illusion of being an unstoppable machine, which happens much more often in single player games where if I get frustratingly stuck I can just cheat without ruining it for everyone else.

A press conference to announce "hey, our game is still every bit as mediocre as the last one" is an odd choice, but WWE fans seem to lap it up so why bother fixing it when people still buy it?

This is my actual bugbear. I grew up being taught metric, but we still use miles & m/h on road signs & car speedometers. I prefer metric personally but honestly I just wish we'd settle on one or the other globally. The dumb mashup of both is needlessly confusing. I don't want to have to remember that 1 foot is 30.4 centimetres, and that 1 yard is 3 feet and that 1760 yards are in a mile which means 1 mile is 1.61km to make sense of distances. It's a ballache. As it is I end up using metres for shorter distances & things like height (I am 1.84m tall for example) but the ubiquity of miles when it comes to driving mean I often end up thinking in them for travelling.

I just wish we'd standardise this shit. It's helpful. We live in a global world these days after all. Using the same scales of measurement and temperature and so forth doesn't seem like a huge ask.

Once Britain used non-decimal currency. I can't even begin to wrap my head around it, it was based on Roman currency, Pounds, Shillings & Pence. 12d in a shilling. 20s in a pound. Fortunately that changed in 1971, before I was born, but it was alarmingly recently for such an overly elaborate system. And then you have farthings which were 1/4 of a penny & the halfpenny which is a 1/2 a penny obviously. 5 shillings is a crown & 2/6 was half a crown. And the guinea, which was used by some business for luxury items and was 21 shillings (or 1/1/-). Look I don't know why. Tradition, as with most stupid things in this godforsaken country.

Limp Bizkit were the first metal band I got into. I did ewrestling and my character was in a stable who came out to Nookie and I had no idea who that was and so someone told me to download Napster and listen to it and I ended up buying Significant Other. In hindsight it's impressive how short my nu-metal phase was, from about the time Korn's Issues album and RATM's Battle of Los Angeles came out until around the time Chocolate Starfish & Hybrid Theory dropped. So about 12 months. Although Slipknot's Iowa was I guess a year on from those 2 and was my real departure point from nu-metal. It was a good gateway drug to stuff I still like nearly 20 years later though, despite being just a bit embarrassing in hindsight.

Fred Durst must be one of the most irony free men around.

If you count every annual iteration of Football Manager going back to the days it was Championship Manager (I got on board with CM2, in '97 or '98. 20 years.) I've probably put in close to 10,000 hours. Actually might be more than that, I was horrendously into those games for years, though I've finally got out of the habit now. And I probably put in 1,000+ hours into CM01/02 because CM4 was a bit of a mess, and so was the one after that so I played it for a good few years.

You weren't wrong. I can't think of another dude on the crest of turning 50 who is as good as Minoru Suzuki.

It was a fun card in general. Takahashi holding the ropes open for Naito only for him to slide under the bottom rope instead was really charming. Naito is just a dude who exudes charisma and confidence in the most endearingly lackadaisical way.