Metal Monday

Youtube Obsession

I have mentioned Highwang before during my Darkest Dungeon 2 review but I really want to promote the rest of his work. Mostly because his LPs are informative¹ and he does not have an annoying over-the-top personality.

All of his stuff is great but the LPs I return to over and over again are:

But also, his last LP was posted 5 years ago. I’ve mentioned before that sometimes, for various and sundry reasons, LPers just stop doing LPs. He’s still regularly streaming over on Twitch so give them a follow.

Watching

Incase you missed the sad news, actor Donald Sutherland passed away last month. In his honor I thought I would talk about a movie in which he held a pivotal role: Oliver Stone’s JFK.

I don’t think I have discussed my love for JFK before and it’s high time I amended that. Before we get to the camp of it all, I have to make clear that, on its face, JFK is a great movie. There is not a better edited movie ever made. To present so much information with haunting and striking visuals without confusing the audience is truly a feat. It is easily the best looking movie that Oliver Stone has made² . There is a long single take that is a marvel to see. There is so much style in each shot that pathos just oozes from every scene.

Now lets get to the best part of the movie: The acting. Think of a famous actor in 1990; They are in this movie and they are acting to the ROOF. I don’t know how else to explain it to you than to show you a clip of the late John Candy eating crab cakes WHILST smoking a cigarette…

I know camp when I see it and that is CAMP. Again, the editing here is insanely good.

If you’re thinking to yourself “Well Stone’s theories don’t hold up anymore” you’re missing the point I’m trying to convey. This movie is infinitely watchable (and quotable) in spite of it’s thesis. This movie isn’t remembered fondly because folks go into it thinking the will have some big revelation. Let me just say that you should not take this movie seriously. Just sit back and let this unintentional camp masterpiece hit you like a freight train.

Reading

I have found myself re-reading Pale Fire … again. And though I have called it “the best book I have ever read” I want to clarify that it is not my favorite.

I would say Infinite Jest is an excellent book, it was fun, extremely well-written and one of the more challenging books I have ever read. But it too, is not one my favorites.

So maybe by listing some of my favorite books we can discover common threads between them.

• The Count of Monte Cristo by Alexandre Dumas.

  I can still remember the first time I read the abridged paperback edition³ as a teenager. It pierced through the veil of my almost constant and self-imposed drunken fog I was under at the time. It’s non-stop action, it’s courtly deceit, it’s justified anger and revenge spoke to me. I tend to re-read it every other year, it’s a fun book that flies by and is perfect for a long trip.

• From Hell by Alan Moore and Eddie Campbell

  An essential book. It covers so many topics; Gods, kings, the nature of crime, occultism, conspiracy, misogyny and geographical destiny. Topics that illuminate the all too human failures of society. One of the few books to make me physically sick, not from revolting subject matter but from pure overload of information. A yearly re-read for me.

• Diary of a Drug Fiend by Aleister Crowley

  Long before I would understand the prolific osmosis of Crowley’s influence on society and long before I would understand my own substance abuse disorders I -almost randomly- read Diary of a Drug Fiend and I felt it spoke directly to me. I was meant to read it in that moment and catch a brief glimpse of a possible future and a possible solution to my alcoholism. It was ultimately not a solution to my addiction but it implanted the idea that there was a solution somewhere. I have only re-read the book a few times and I have not re-read it since getting sober 10 years ago for fear that I might hate it now⁴ . I am resolute to remain precious about this book because when I think of it, I remember the exact feeling of relief, a lifting of weight off of my chest when I could finally relate to someone else’s using.

So there you go. There are the first three books that come to mind when I think of my “favorite books.” I have many more that could change depending on the weather but these three will always be at the top.

Listening

There’s a reason why the “listening” section of Metal Monday^TM rarely makes an appearance: I have basically listened to the same music since college. There are of course exceptions. From 2015 to 2019 I was a regular attendee of a weekly free metal show on Monday nights at the Highland Tap Room in Louisville Kentucky, the show was called Metal Monday (sound familiar?). This introduced me to tons of new metal and punk bands from all over⁵ . In 2015 to 2017-ish I really got into pop-rap and hip-hop because I hadn’t really listened to rap since Chronic 2001 from Dr. Dre and I wanted to update my references.

Then two things happened: Algorithmic streaming and COVID⁶ .

During COVID I really leaned on my comfortable classics; Returning to albums from high school and generally giving up on exploring new music for lack of emotional and mental bandwidth.

Streaming services seem to play a bigger part in destroying new music discoverability. I just don’t trust what services push to me. It never seems to follow my interests but what is “hot” at the time. (Y’all can keep trying to make Billie Eillish happen for me but I’m not interested!) Even YouTube music, who’s “Discover” playlist for a short time yielded new stuff that I was interested in, began pushing the same songs or artists over and over despite what I liked or disliked.

So what are the solutions? I’m not a staunch genre-elitist so I prefer random playlists because, sometimes, even I don’t know what I’ll like⁷ . Also the random playlists should have a chance to be weird. I like weird music, I want to be surprised, I want to hear something I’ve never heard.

Solution 1: College Radio

Back when I had a car, WIUX out of Indiana university college radio was always on dial. Student radio is a great source for human curated new music. And since they’re all just kids trying to out-cool each other by finding the deepest cuts and unknown tracks you’re guaranteed to hear stuff you’ve never heard before.

College Radio App on iPhone is the best app I’ve found for college radio. There are others but non of them have the stable performance that College Radio has. A great collection of stations and a simple layout, I couldn’t recommend this app more.

Campus-Fm is web-based and offers a ton of college stations, basically making them searchable and in one place.

Solution 2: Radiooooo

Radiooooo, available online and on the app store, is what I listen to at work. Basically, pick a country and a decade and you will hear music from that country and era.

They also have a tabs to help guide the randomness; Slow, Fast and Weird. You can do one or all three. Unsurprisingly, Weird is my favorite as it has given me bizarre new music.

I never would have heard this song any other way.

Playing

I played Demon’s Souls in 2010. I enjoyed it but I think mostly for the novelty of a new kind of game and it’s interesting Eastern interpretation of Western fantasy. I played a lot of it but then I hit The Wall^TM . The Wall^TM is when I am running through the same section of a level for the 15th time to fight a boss that is 90% trail and error with obtuse controls and a cantankerous camera, and I think “I could be playing a fun game.”

I have played a bit of all the other souls games because I can appreciate their design and what they bring to the gaming landscape but they are just not the games for me.⁸ I’m saying I want to like these games.

I played a lot of Elden Ring when it was released because I liked the idea of being able to walk away when confronted with a tough obstacle. Go to another part of the map, over-level and come back and beat what was formally blocking me.⁹ But again, after getting pretty far into it, The Wall^TM returned.

I recently re-rolled a character in Elden Ring to see if I could capture the magic that I see so many (casual gamers even) enjoying. The Wall^TM hit me within the first 2 hours of playing and I think I figured out why.

Roguelikes do everything that Souls games do, but better.

Roguelikes, as a genre, have only gotten better since Demon’s Souls initial release. Games like Dead Cells, Enter the Gungeon, Risk of Rain 1 & 2, and Hades are not easy games, they require me to “get gud” and learn from my mistakes. Roguelikes also return me to the beginning of my run when I die, losing everything, but I know that my next run isn’t going to be the exact same run I made 20 times before. And for my brain, that is the key difference.

One thing that I always hear from Souls fans is that you have the freedom to build whatever character you wish. From my experience and from what is explained by people who enjoy the game, that just isn’t true. Because loot drops are mostly pre-determined you either have to follow a guide or know what you want to build from moment one, spilling all your souls into one attribute. There’s just no incentive to freestyle.

Idk, I will always support FromSoft because what they do is so unique but I will have to do it from afar.

1  Of the varieties of Let’s Plays; “Informative” is recognized by the Let’s Play Archive and is my favorite kind of LP.

2  And I love Oliver Stone movies.

3  Having read both the abridged and un-abridged versions, I can whole-heartedly say that the abridged version is a perfectly fine place to start with Count. You can always read the un-abridged if you want more!

4  As I have read a lot of Crowley since and… it’s not great.

5  Also, metal band merch is always rad. My t-shirt collection is still mostly unknown metal bands.

6  I must mention the meteoric rise of podcasts as a huge business and section of audio streaming over the last few years. 90% of podcasts suck and in reality I only listen to same 3 since 2008.

7  Willow Smith is a prime example, I’ll admit that I had zero expectations to like her stuff without early YouTube Music pushing it too me.

8  The only other pre-Elden Ring souls game that I get the urge to return to on a regular basis is Sekiro and that’s mostly because it’s controls are tight and not intentionally obtuse.

9  Also, I had COVID for 2 weeks when it was released and there was nothing else to do but read and dig deep into Elden Ring.