Metal Monday

YouTube Obsession

I am not someone who seeks disaster videos, street fights or any other voyeuristic trauma media, but I’ll be damned if a tornado or earthquake shows up in my feed, I will probably watch it.

To this day, if I have nightmare, it most likely involves tornados. Being that I grew up in an area that was prone to severe weather, it makes sense that some of my earliest memories of fear involve tornados. Though I think it is a layered fear because my trauma with severe weather isn’t just about the tornados themselves. The house I grew up in did not have a basement, we had an unfinished crawlspace, we had to go outside into the tornado weather to access. And, once hunched inside, it was cold, wet and covered in spiders. We would have to do this multiple times every storm season growing up. Needless to say, if I ever live in the midwest again I will live someplace with a finished basement that I can access via stairs.

Earthquakes are a different fascination. Though not entirely unfamiliar, having grown up right on a fault line in Indiana¹ , the earthquakes experienced out there were rarely anything that could cause damage. There were only 2 two large quakes I can recall in my whole 32 years living in the midwest.

After moving to Los Angeles I have experienced many earthquakes of various sizes and “feels”. And the creepiest thing about quakes that I never experienced before living out here is that -at times- you can hear the rumble before you feel the rumble.

Overall, I think my interest is more driven by awe of nature and my melancholic predilection to ‘feeling small’. Nothing takes away my ego-centric illusion of control faster than knowing -at any moment- the earth could move and toss me like so much dust.

Watching

If you’re a long time reader you will know that my partner is a huge horror fan who has been taking me through various horror franchises and classics throughout our relationship. There’s been a lot of hits, some misses but I’ve thoroughly enjoyed myself.

We’ve recently started watching the filmography of Italian director and acclaimed horror influencer Dario Argento. He is also my partner’s favorite horror director, they even met him in Rome and got his autograph.

Dario Argento is the best bad-movie maker but also the worst good-movie maker. I don’t know how else to describe his oeuvre. His movies are simultaneously exciting and boring. He has an eye for dramatic and dynamic shots but achieves these shots through technically clumsy film making.

He has moments of unparalleled vision:

Followed scenes so tone-deaf and flat that they ruin the entire film:

THESE CLIPS ARE FROM THE SAME MOVIE.

Listen, I have no idea what it must’ve taken to get these movies made in 70s and 80s Italy and really that is Argento’s greatest achievement; His movies should not exist. I can completely believe, in another universe where I saw these movies when I was 15, I would have been obsessed with them.²  

As it is, of the Argento films I have seen, I can only truly recommend Suspiria from 1977. It’s a modern surrealist fairytale that still presents an effective and exciting story.

Reading

Did you know Keanu Reeves co-authored a comic book? No? Well, me neither till I heard he was releasing a book based on his comics. Oh yeah, Keanu Reeves wrote a book.

The comic is called BRZRKR and I read the first trade. It’s story is pretty standard (so far) but the art really suits the feel.

The story is “what if there was a dude who couldn’t die?” As I said, pretty standard. But tropey stories are fine, especially when the art is so good. I’m going to keep reading to see if Reeves can put his own spin on it.

Playing

For a freshman outing, game studio Rockfish could have done a lot worse than 2016’s Everspace. In fact, they really couldn’t have done much better as it’s follow-up Everspace 2 is basically the same game with all it's predecessor’s flaws removed.

The original Everspace is a fairly traditional space-combat focused rougelike. Each run starting with nothing and moving over a map with lanes and arenas, featuring bosses, fights, shops or puzzles. The arenas are beautiful by the way, I need to to stress that as a space nerd, I really appreciate the beautiful sky boxes. Each time you jump to a new (beautiful) arena, finish whatever challenge awaits, gather resources or chat with NPCs before being forced to move on by an always-invading force. Herein lies my first issue with the original game: Please just let me explore these cool arenas that you created!

Luckily, Everspace 2 drops the rougelike elements and moves the player into a more traditional RPG gameplay loop and progression. This allows me to explore the areas at my own pace, really taking in this beautiful game.

The original game also suffers from what most rougulikes suffer from: A slooooooow and steeeeeeep meta-progression. Thankfully, Everspace was a fun enough game for me to push through the early game doldrums. E2’s new design removes the start-stop hiccups of the early game, creating a better paced experience.

I highly recommend Everspace 2.

Listening

Considering I started listening to rap in the mid 2010s I really should be a Drake fan. Also, I’m white.

Don’t get me wrong, rap is a cultural lodestone, I would grow up knowing the hits that would break through to the pop mainstream but I never fully invested in discovering what I like about rap until 2014. This era was arguably Drake’s peak. But I could never get past that Drake was on a Canadian teen melodrama but he would talk about “being hard.” It always felt corny to me. In fact, the only song of Drakes that I know other than Hotline Bling³ , is his vocal distorted 2.5 second feature on Kodak Black’s “Can I”

Idk, Drakes music always felt like it was perfect for a NBA2K soundtrack but nothing I really want to listen to.

Of course, it’s been impossible to miss Kendrick v Drake beef that exploded this year. I think anyone with a braincell could predict who would end up winning but I never felt it was my place to get too invested in the drama. But of course F.D Signifier did a 3 hour video breaking down the entire beef.

There are a lot 3 hour YouTube video essays that people say are good but this is actually one of the good ones.

Also, F.D’s video put into context so much of the high-strangeness from this Vice PARTY LEGENDS video from 2017.

This may feel like a “I didn’t like Drake before it was cool” post and it sorta is but I want to clarify that I basically didn’t like him because he was Jimmy Brooks on Degrassi.

Other Notables

** How Does Open AI Survive?

** The bomb that killed Hamas leader Ismail Haniyeh while in Iran was planted 2 months before the attack. 

1  The Wabash Valley Fault Line

2  I often think of Rocky Horror Picture Show in this way. I saw it when I was 28 and had already experienced other, more exciting queer media and even experienced queerness first-hand by then. Rocky Horror had missed it’s window to influence my younger, less experienced self.

3  “Started from the bottom…” is a phrase I know divorced from the song.