The Legendary Italian Westerns by Ennio Morricone - CD (10/10)

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This was a very important CD in the development of my musical tastes. It was the starting point of my love of Ennio Morricone’s music. The CD compiles some of the best known of his spaghetti western tunes (sans The Good, The Bad and The Ugly) ranging from the cheesy 60’s pop of “Gringo Like Me” to the sweeping epic, “Jill’s America” from Once Upon a Time in the West. If you are looking to sample The Maestro, The Legendary Italian Westerns is probably the best place to start.

Batman: Arkham Asylum on PC (9/10)

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I’m still waiting for that Wonder Twins game, but in the meantime this will do. After Arkham City this does seem less grand, but it still is more-or-less the same fantastic game. The fluid fighting system is just as good as I remembered it was in the sequel. Even the mindless Riddler trinket hunting works here. There is a wandering story about The Joker and super-henchmen that doesn’t really amount to much. But who really cares. When the game mechanics work this well, I’m fine with a second rate plot.

The Podcast Report

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Today is supposedly International Podcast Day. Well, let’s celebrate this phony-baloney holiday by taking a look at some of the podcasts that I’ve been listening to lately. I feel like this list will change as time goes by so I wanted to document it here for future reference. These are in no particular order so here goes.

The Fifth Column – This is probably the most recent show that I have started listening to. In it Kmele Foster, Michael Moynihan and Matt Welch review the week’s news from a mostly libertarian perspective. I’ve tried a few libertarian podcasts in the past and most, like the Tom Woods Show, were just simply lame. The Fifth Column manages to be extremely informative, entertaining, and, dare I say, hip.

Gilbert Gottfried’s Amazing Colossal Podcast – The strength of each episode depends on the guest and their willingness to talk dirt on old-time Hollywood actors or to play along with Gilbert’s over-the-top niche impressions. The show can sometimes descend into the hosts just saying “I remember that movie” and not much else but overall it’s entertaining week after week.

The Red Eye Podcast – There have been three incarnations of this podcast. All three have been loosely based around the cast of Fox News’ Red Eye chatting about the goings-on around the show. The first version was Greg Gutfeld, Bill Shulz and Andy Levy and it was usually specific to that night’s show and the topics they were going to cover. Then after a hiatus, it reemerged with Bill Shulz, Tommy O’Connor and Lauren Sivan. I loved that version (I think at this point they called the show, Not Live). Not Live was much more focused on pop culture and celebrity happenings and it was awesome. That show vanished, then all of the sudden, it returned this year with Andy Levy, Tom Shillue, Ben Kissel and Tim Dimond (the current Red Eye writing team). They avoid politics  and it’s much more like a short, funny, free form conversation about random topics. This might be my favorite podcast these days.

No Agenda – I started listening to this after I heard John C. Dvorak was banned from TWIT (a podcast I gave up on years ago when it became evident that it would only be about phones and apps). The show consists of Dvorak and Adam Curry (of Headbangers’ Ball fame… oh, and he invented podcasting) “deconstructing” the news. They play clips from various news outlets and then talk about how the stories are either slanted, planted or just plain stupid. There can be some great insight here, but I feel the two are just a little too cynical for my tastes. In the words of Sigmund Freud, “Sometimes a cigar is just a cigar.” In their universe, every story is a front for some external power when, in reality, the sloppy reportage is more a result of the fact that everyone is horrible at their job (and lazy). I tune out when they start drifting into Alex Jones territory, but still, they have a 70-80% success rate… if that’s even a thing.

The Bryan Callen Show – Hosted by comedian Bryan Callen along with Hunter Maats, this is almost more of a self-help podcast. There is lots of talk of the neuroscience, behavior, personal improvement and a dash of politics. Maats does most of the brainy commentary (and punctuates every proclamation with an annoying, “Right?”) while Callen provides humor and an everyman’s perspective.

EconTalk – Russ Robert’s long-running economics podcast is a treasure trove of insight and knowledge. Every once and a while the conversation is over my head but I have learned quite a bit about markets, statistics, and intellectual bias from the always skeptical Roberts and his guests.

The Open Apple Podcast – A monthly podcast about the Apple ][ computer that’s both heavy on nostalgia and current projects that push the limits of that ancient computing platform.

Lastly, here are a couple podcasts that I will still occasionally listen to but are gradually fading out of rotation for whatever reasons: Penn’s Sunday School, still don’t mind it but I guess some of the recent weight-loss talk has not been entertaining for me. Race Wars, Kurt and Sherrod are great, but it can be a bit much when there are half a dozen people in the room all talking at once. Getting On With James Urbaniak, entertaining short stories read by the voice of Dr. Venture… the episodes have stopped so this one may be over.

Political Word Trends

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The current presidential election cycle has made Facebook insufferable these days. As the various screeds flow across my feed from people who would normally be reasonable friends, I am noticing what I am calling, “political word trends.” Out-of-the-blue people start using the exact same words to describe something with which they have a political beef. I know this is essentially the same thing as talking points (like when every Democratic operative on the planet described Hillary “powering through” her illness), but what I am seeing is just a little more subtle.

I first noticed this when, over the course of a few unrelated discussion threads, libertarianism came up and, in addition to the usual “they hate firemen” arguments, someone would refer to libertarians as “children.” Maybe there was a huge write up in The Nation that used this term? I don’t know. It just seemed odd that it suddenly appeared 3 or 4 times without any prompting. Next, I began to hear the term “ghouls” used over and over to describe pro-gun advocates. Again, maybe John Oliver had a witty diatribe about these “ghouls” but this seemed weirdly coincidental to me. Or maybe I’m just jealous that I am not being invited to all the hip parties. Instead I sulk at home with like a ghoulish child. I will keep my eyes open for more. Stay tuned.

Call of Juarez: Bound in Blood on PC (6/10)

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I enjoyed the original Call of Juarez and its spin-off, Gunslinger, but this one didn’t really grab me. It tries to mix things up by letting you play each level as one of two characters, Ray or Thomas. But, in the end, it’s still just a very standard shooter with bland environments and no real weapon variety. I guess learning Ray’s backstory (this is a prequel) was interesting and there was a real attempt to craft some genuine character development. Otherwise, it was just so-so to me.

Borderlands: The Pre-Sequel on PC (8/10)

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Okay, here’s another Borderlands sequel. Actually, this is more of a large expansion pack to Borderlands 2—using the same engine and most of the same mechanics. The only new additions are the low-gravity environments and oxygen management. Admittedly, the ability to jump hundreds of feet into the air is pretty fun and opens up many of the levels, but, in the end, it’s still the same old game: run towards the map marker and shoot anything that gets in your way. Your reward is more guns and a mediocre story (unlike the excellent Tales from the Borderlands). Woo hoo. But really, the point here is that you are supposed to experience this mediocrity with friends and, as I begrudgingly have to admit, this is the best co-op game play experience out there these days. In the future, I would love to see more actual team-based tasks. You know, one guy holds the door while the other takes point or whatever military squads do when the aren’t practicing the Harlem Shake.

Radiant Historia on Nintendo DS (8/10)

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I bought Radiant Historia based on its reputation as one of, if not THE best RPG on the Nintendo DS. Well, it’s a JRPG so take that praise with a grain of salt. In fact, when I first got it, I managed to clock about 20 hours but eventually got distracted by other games. It’s easy to lose focus from this extremely text-heavy game. Once again, many clicks are wasted on redundant “…” dialogue boxes and the accompanying, un-skippable “…” word bubble animations. So, it took four years and a fun romp through Etrian Odyssey for me to muster the energy to attempt another play through. Rather than pick up where I left off, trying to remember the convoluted plot up to that point, I started anew. During this run I would try my darndest to differentiate between all the cutesy anime characters and not lose focus.

The main touted selling point of Radiant Historia usually is its complex time-travelling plot. At first, being able to redo past events to alter the current ones is an nice mechanism. However, once you are deep into the game and there are dozens of points to which you need to return again and again, it becomes a drag and a nuisance. For me it didn’t help that there seemingly was no way to skip the endless cut-scenes (I discovered it’s the “start” button about 30 hours in). Despite the grandiose concept, there isn’t that much in terms of branching story lines that would, like a Telltale game, lead to a unique game for each player. The plot is really only divided into two main branches. Any choices which deviate from these two lead to a short text blurb and a dead end (if you want to get 100% completion you need to follow all these dead ends too). If anything, repeatedly visiting all those moments and re-reading all that dialogue at least helped me understand what the heck was going on. Angsty warrior must stave off impending ecological disaster and bring unity to warring the races of furries. Got it.

All that aside, where the game actually shines is its combat system. Enemies appear on a 3×3 grid and their positioning effects the strength of their attacks and the amount of damage you can inflict. Players can then use special powers to knock monsters around the grid, stack them together and chain combos for stronger attacks. Also, because the main theme here is time manipulation, you can control the player initiative track and sacrifice a turn to set up bigger combos. It takes the standard, mindless JRPG combat mechanism and adds a puzzley layer of thinking to your choices. Most combat is avoidable if you are quick, but I actually found myself opting-in to battles more often than not. Too bad 70% of the game is talking, otherwise I would have scored it higher.

Kumiko, the Treasure Hunter (7/10)

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Amazon recommended this movie to me probably because I have watched a lot of Kung-Fu movies lately? I think we can relax about the singularity and A.I. for the time being. Turns out the computer who picked this one is a moron. Not that this is a bad movie, it’s just a little weak on the Kung-Fu. What it does have is a stereotypical indie film look and feel. There are lots of overly-long shots that linger on compositions that, no doubt, the director thought were gaze-worthy. If that’s what you need to do to get to feature-length, fine. Fortunately, the story of a crazy Japanese girl who’s obsessed with finding the money from Fargo had enough going for it to keep me from being bored.

The Mist (6/10)

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I knew most of the story of The Mist from an abridged book an tape that we listened to as kids on some long car trip. Like a lot of Stephen King stories, it’s a dumb concept that, when made into a film, depends more on the directing than the plot. Fortunately, this movie does the clichéd apocalypse survivor thing pretty well. Take a bunch of folks from all walks of life, trap them together, and watch as they devolve into anarchy as the looming threat grows. The pacing is good but the CGI monsters are terrible and that ending… well, it comes from out of nowhere in a way that makes no sense with the characters we’ve watched (sorta) develop over the course of the movie.