>>Nostalgia For Infinity

I’m feeling a bit disheartened about the blogging thing at the moment so there’ll be no new posts for a bit, apart from one or two that have been queued up for a while.

I’ll be back, though, got a load of notes on a bunch of things that I’ll turn into reviews at some point.

Take care, y’all.

It would have been hard for Cyanide Studios to mess up Blood Bowl; after all, all they had to do was port the well-established board game’s rules to a digitised format and then dress everything up with pretty graphics and sounds. In fact the short version of this review is… yeah, they’ve done that. Job done, move along.

More?

Oh, okay: yes, the game is an accurate port of 5th edition Blood Bowl rules and makes reference to the game’s unique lore (mostly background fluff, that, like “McMoot” sandwiches and other hilarious puns). The board game, for the uninitiated, is a fantasy take on American Football with the violence ramped up to 11 (some entire teams are built around the strategy of injuring the opposition to the point where they can no longer muster an effective defence).

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Del.icio.us links for March 4th through March 10th:

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“In the circus, acrobatics where one person lies on the floor balancing another are called “Icarian Games”. Considering the fate of Icarus after he flouted his father’s advice and flew so close to the sun his wings melted, perhaps some dark humor is intended.

“In our particular re-enactment of this mythic relationship, it was not me but my father who was to plummet from the sky.”

Fun Home, by Alison Bechdel

So begins Alison Bechdel’s groundbreaking work of memoir and comics, Fun Home. It’s an apposite beginning: at once literary, darkly humorous, and reservedly dramatic. Here, as throughout, Bechdel’s father is centre-stage, for this is a story of the last twenty years of his life, and the first twenty of Alison’s.

Bechdel’s artwork is fantastic; stylised and thorough with a wonderful eye for detail, and often playful. Sometimes she points out her small flourishes of authenticity, like part of a Halloween costume worn well after the event is passed. A fine example of more subtle detail is in a panel that follows several pages discussing the Gothic Revival house Bruce Bechdel has restored and in which the family live;  below the caption “Yet we really were a family, and we really did live in those period rooms” is a scene of the family in their 1860s living room. The children are playing and the parents are watching television whilst sharing a bucket of KFC. The anachronistic nature of the scene speaks for itself.

As any honest work of memoir must be, it is at times brutal in its depiction of events and character. Bruce Bechdel is portrayed as a man of violent tempers, intolerant cruelty towards his children, and central in driving the comic’s author into an obsessive-compulsive disorder. He is also shown as capable of simple acts of kindness and warmth, as a master of period restoration and interior design, and as a highly-cultured, well-educated man. The picture that emerges, overall, is of a man with severe problems, tragic weaknesses and admirable strengths.

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I’ve not reviewed Bomb the Music Industry! on NFI before, although I did reckon last year’s Scrambles was the second best album of the year. That aside, it feels difficult to review a band that you’re so outrageously fond of without just spewing hot, exciting love all over the place. But! The idea behind Adults!!! (surely wins most ludicrous title of the year if nothing else) is that it was recorded in five days, so here is a short review that I wrote in five minutes. It would probably be more in keeping with the spirit of the record if I spent five hours on this review but I don’t have the patience for such an outrageously pointless conceit.

So! First up, Adults!!! is more ska-centric than either Scrambles or 2007′s Get Warmer. It opens up with ‘You Still Believe In Me’, which could almost be an Arrogant Sons of Bitches (Jeff Rosenstock’s old ska-punk band) song, driven as it is by brass, rolling drums, and simple hooky chords. Right after that you have the faster-paced ‘Planning My Death’ ska-punk tune which is characteristically tongue-in-cheek, light-hearted but dark: ” I’ve been planning my death ’cause I wanna have a really good death. I want heroism, mystery and courage.”

Lyrically the entire EP reads like is a snapshot of where Jeff is at in his life right now: “I used to be an awesome listener. But now I just drift in and out or get pulled away by beats and measures like I don’ t have a choice but failure and running from a brighter future.” » Read the rest of this entry «

Some radspiffy news over at Rock, Paper, Shotgun:

Some indie games make a lot of money. Most don’t. Worse, many never even get off the ground because they have no funding. The freshly-announced Indie Fund means to change that – it’s an angel investment group set up by some of independent gaming’s greatest current luminaries (the likes of 2D Boy, Jon Blow, Flashbang…) and intended to help the next generation of indie devs get started on making wonderful toys for us lot to play with. I.e. more Worlds of Goo, more Braids, more Audiosurfs, more Solium Infernums…

PC indie gaming has been experiencing something of a renaissance over the past couple of years, with games like World of Goo, Braid, VVVVVV, Kudos 2 and Solium Infernum garnering significant attention (and, in some cases, the sales to match). However, there are still a lot of games that don’t make it to release or that disappear due to limited / poor promotion. Hopefully grants from this fund will help alleviate this problem and allow more wonderfully inventive independent projects reach fruition.

American Hardcore: A Tribal History by Steven Blush

It’s difficult to approach this book, originally released in 2001, without bringing a certain amount of baggage with you. It’s probably among the most well-known collected histories of the early American hardcore punk movement, particularly after it was adapted into the notorious film of the same name. It’s widely regarded as an essential resource in tracing the bands, people, geographical and musical trends of the time; a book almost anthropological in its attempt to thoroughly document a long-dead scene (no no no hardcore is not dead, nor is punk, but in this exact form it’s gone). It’s almost as widely castigated for attempts to assert itself as ‘the’ undeniable true history of American hardcore, 1980-1986, for maintaining a pretence at objectivity even as it recounts personal recollection as fact and presents stories that are sometimes one-sided and often poorly recollected by those quoted.

I’ve got a good amount of distance from the book, being an English bloke who was only born a year before Minor Threat split up. Whilst I can’t and won’t attempt to dispute any of what the book claims as fact, I can observe that where a particularly controversial subject arises (such as the infamous dispute between the Bad Brains and the gay Texan band Big Boys over the former’s homophobic attitudes and generally shitty behaviour) a variety of participants and observers are given space to speak their piece. The difficulty in retrospectively covering something that was erratically documented at the time speaks for itself, especially bearing in mind that a lot of early participants were young and prone to extensive indulgence in alcohol, drugs and extreme violence; the sort of thing that, over time, can fuck with your head pretty thoroughly. And that’s not even to mention the amount of difference time can make to memories: over time people’s minds will inevitably distort details to fit their opinions.

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There seems to have been limited coverage of this incident so far. A cursory search with the obvious keywords turns up nothing on the Guardian or Beeb websites.

Del.icio.us links for February 21st through February 28th:

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