My tribute to Planet Pimp Records has expanded! I finally got my hands on a copy of Neil Hamburger Pays Tribute to Diana, Princess of Wales. Read my insightful commentary and make sure to listen to the audio clip from side B. Prepare to shed yet another tear for Our Fallen Angel.
A little maintenance note here: I added a few links to the home page in the form of that quick links widget off to the left. If you click the bar at the top it disappears. Pretty neato keano I'd say.
Yesterday I came across this incredible Web log, Twilight Zone for Your Listening Pleasure. This guy posts tons and tons of great garage and rock 'n' roll records with large cover scans and links to the full albums in MP3 format. Usually, you just click in to the comments of each blog post and you are given a link the the MP3s in zip format. Cut-n-paste the link and you can grab the files for free. There is a limit of one package download per hour, but it's worth the wait to get your ears on some of these comps.
Happy New Year! My overview of my entire CD collection continues. Read more about Revisiting Old Music Part III (Ch-De)...
My overview of my entire CD collection continues. Lots and lots of Cabaret Voltaire! Read more about Revisiting Old Music Part II (Bu-Ca)...
The past year or so I have been an iPod owner and have not paid much attention to my wall o' CDs. Well, the same songs are popping up just a bit too often during shuffle, and I thought it would be a fresh change of pace if I started popping in a good old CD every now again. To make sure not to miss anything, I decided to pull the CDs down for listening in alphabetical order. I happened to be listening to Big Sandy and the Fly-rite Boys when I made this monumental decision, so that's where I started. Read more about Revisiting Old Music...
My overview of the video game classics continues with the LucasArts adventure game, Grim Fandango. In many ways Grim Fandango can be seen as the high point of point-and-click adventures. The genre, at least as a commercially viable entity, has since retreated into the more uncomfortably geeky corners of gaming world—the gaming world's parent's basement as it were. Rather than calling these adventure games, these keepers of the flame prefer the term interactive fiction. The hardest of the hardcore scoff at the notion of representational graphics cluttering up the ASCII purity of a command prompt. However, even these holdouts can't deny the artistic vision and narrative brilliance of Grim Fandango.
If it wasn't for the fact that the game requires a user to click and solve puzzles, Grim Fandango has the makings of a Pixar-type animated feature. We all know the tried and true Pixar formula. Take a group of non-human things: ants, toys, cars, fish, etc. Anthropomorphize them, and show us the secret workings of their society when the people aren't around. In the case of Grim Fandango, we get to see the secret life of Mexican Day of the Dead statuettes. Read more about Retro-Gaming Continued: Grim Fandango...
Well, I just finished The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time and I have to say that it does live up to the hype. I've always noted that whenever they come up with top ten lists of the greatest games of all time, this one is always near the top of the list. And by they I mean game reviewers and critics... you know, those bespeckled nerds who provide the four pages of non-advertisement content in the video game magazines. By the way, is it me, or is the top-ten list the primary literary device of these publications? Whatever happened to the plain old 500 word, rhet 101 essay about a topic of interest? If Swift were alive today would he be known for his Top Ten Most Modest Proposals... year after year, number one would always end up being Citizen Kane. Read more about The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time...