Metal Monday

YouTube Obsession

I’m all for games going into early access on Steam, especially smaller games that need the extra eyes to QA . I often buy them just to support development until 1.0. Likewise, I am sold on Ostranauts because of Pr1vateLime’s recent LP of the of the intriguing “derelict spaceship scrapping debt simulator”.

I’ve enjoyed Pr1vateLime’s other LPs; like his entertaining challenge runs of Project Zomboid¹ . However, Ostranauts seems to be -as contributor Andrew once put it³ - “A game for sickos.” Not in any kind of sordid way, but that it is a game with numerous intermingled systems. Deriving “fun” from these games is not the traditional instant gratification sort but with observing how these systems interact and the emergent stories that arise from them.

Ostrsanauts, is from the same developer of Neo-Scavenger which I already spoke about in a previous post about YouTube creator Rycon. The credentials are there and I can’t wait to play when it releases 1.0 sometime in 2025.

Watching

1992’s Candyman is a movie I think everyone should see.

Just this scene alone is so strange for a horror movie: It’s midday, it’s not frantic chase through the parking garage and though Tony Todd is imposing he isn’t outright horrifying (at first). The choice of dialog here is important as well because Candyman is ultimately about the power of and dynamic nature of stories.

By the end of the movie it is implied that Helen is the reincarnation of Candyman’s lover from the 1800s. It’s more that the story has subsumed Helen, creating a new role in the narrative for her. The original story of Candyman -as told by a white sociology professor- does not sound like any of the Candyman stories we hear from the Black characters or even the suburban white teens. That’s because the truly great stories, change with the times.

I’ve said for years that every story can be found in the 16th century saga of Journey to the West. A Chinese epic following the Great Monkey King and his rag-tag crew as they escort a naïve monk across ancient China. All the tropes in modern media are found here: The self-serious group leader, the hot-head, the party dude, the Brainiac; Not to mention plots, like body switching, gender swapping, trapped in a time loop, meeting an enemy who turns out to be a friend- they are all here. Now these stories have been retold millions of times in everything from Star Trek and Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles to Sex and the City and Golden Girls.

What Clive Barker proposes with Candyman, is that stories are alive and must evolve to keep living and that’s just a cool idea for a movie.

Reading

Regular readers will know that I love a good Neo-Noir. Especially in the style of James Ellroy; dark, nihilist and sad. Though Inherent Vice by Thomas Pynchon may seem like the antithesis of Ellroy’s noirs; Vice’s light, funny and chill surface serves only as a cover for the general apathy that is rotting at the core of 1970’s Los Angeles hippy scene.

It is a brilliant book that highlights hypocritical liberal baby-boomer reaction to fascism. The main character, Doc, a perpetually stoned private eye, is able to occasionally reconnect synapse or two just in time to avoid getting killed while a menagerie of burnout side-characters spout platitudes about authoritarian regimes and Nixon’s mishandling of the Vietnam war but are contented to restrict their revolutionary action to smoking weed on the beach.

It’s a hilarious novel and it has made me laugh out loud multiple times on the bus. I highly (no pun intended) recommend.

Playing

Welp. It finally happened to me. I like a Call of Duty Zombies mode.

I never really understood the mode’s appeal before. It always felt like running around a Doom level hitting the “interact” button on every surface hoping to reveal a secret, while shooting annoying enemies with underpowered guns. And that is what Zombies is supposed to be for the first few waves of enemies. The idea is that you and 3 friends look for secrets that help advance the progression and lead to more powerful weapons and gear. Any chaos that ensues is made fun by playing with friends.

As a solo player none of this mode was never entertaining. Black Ops 6 however has introduced Directed Mode. This mode does what it says, it guides players through the progression of a zombies map with helpful waypoints and dialog. The direction is not fully explicit, there are puzzles and set-pieces that the player must work out on their own. Adding in it’s own progression system to grind and I finally understand why people like this mode.

Don’t even get me started on the gobble gum system tho, I have no idea how that stuff works.

Listening

One of the blogs that originally inspired Metal Monday is Perfectly Imperfect. Almost daily, some “celebrity”² recommend what they’re into at the moment. Admittedly, these recommendations range from very lame like to “Rice” to the very cool like Roadside America. But anyway, I figured if pseudo-celebrities can talk about their inane interests (like Belts) on the internet, why not I?

As someone who enjoys eclectic music and is always trying to confuse my brain musically, Radio Garden is a godsend recommendation from PI contributor Phil Elverum. It’s Google Earth meets internet radio.

The first thing I did was try to find WHUM - 98.5 Columbus 98.3 Seymour in Indiana. I got sober in Seymour and as stifling as that place felt to me this radio station helped me realize that there are weird people everywhere. This station will play Jewel, a Disney song and a Lotus Dickey folk classic all back to back, truly, the strangest station programming I have ever heard then or since.

Some other favorites found:

Wax Radio out of Indianapolis giving all the mid-west house beats.

Radio.D59B out of Belgrade, Serbia. Boppy, ambient lo-fi vibes.

Kiosk Radio out of Brussels, Belgium. Gives me GTA III radio vibes and most of the time they have video of the DJ spinning their sets.

Other Notables

** “What is perhaps most salient within the history of fortune-telling is the way it both reifies and subverts capitalist economics.”

** “Among that movement’s defining features were trying to shame or scare voters into voting against Trump, rather than for the Democrat, an over-reliance on pop culture signifiers rather than policy, and a hope and a prayer for the system, in particular prosecutors and the FBI, to deliver us from evil.”

** Preserved history

1  Another early access game I own….still waiting on 1.0

2  They range from the interesting like Connor Oberst of Bright Eyes fame to the “huh what?” like Brent Davis Feanery “best known for founding the creative-tech company Special Offer”

3  In reference to Alpha Protocol.