Monday Chat #7 – Album Roundup

So as it turns out, college has left me much more busy than I had originally anticipated. So much so that Monday chats might actually not occur every Monday after all… just a quick warning. I’m also planning on only uploading these on the original blog from now on, simply because it’s much easier on me and I don’t have to fix formatting and insert images over and over again. Fortunately I do have a pretty good topic for today, and that is my current listening roundup.

Over the past few weeks I’ve had little time to consume heavy focus media like movies of videogames, so I dedicated most of it to listening to music. New music. Some of it I loved, some of it… not so much. I figured I’d share a few quick fire opinions on the albums that I’ve listened to, as well as what I plan on checking out next.

God Tier

Brockhampton – Saturation

My friends have been going on about Saturation for awhile now, but it was only shortly after the release of Saturation II that I finally decided to fall into the hype. To be honest, I knew nothing about the album going in – I didn’t even know that it was a hip hop album. So it came to a pleasant surprise that it was exactly the type of music I usually really like listening too; a good mix of modern R&B mixed with group rap. Saturation II might as well be here too, though I haven’t actually finished listening to most of that album yet.

Carissa’s Weird – Songs About Leaving

Okay, this one’s a lot more special. I found this album by complete coincidence – those who know me know that, in addition to jazz and hip hop, I also listen to a lot of dark music (fits with some of the Monday chat topics, doesn’t it?). So I was looking through an emo rock thread on /mu/ where there was only one song posted. I was about to leave this boring thread when I decided to give the single song on the thread at least a try before I did. That song was “So You Wanna Be A Superhero” from this album.

Usually most “dark” songs have either one thing going for it: either really good lyrics and a pretty basic rhythm (a la A Crow Looked at Me) or really shitty lyrics but damn good bangers (a la The Devil and God are Raging Inside Me). So I was surprised this song had a good mix of both. So I listened to another song on the album. And another, and another, and another…

Soon enough I had listened to the whole thing and I could say I loved pretty much every song on it. This is a pretty special occasion for me personally because this is the first album which I’d say would fit into my top 25 favorites of all time and yet no one I know has ever heard of it. That includes my really in depth music fan friends. I imagine there’s probably a lot of emo rock that sounds like this (I’m not very well acquainted with the genre) but damn does this album sound really, really good.

Good Tier

Mac DeMarco – 2

Based on the wide amount of negative criticism Mac DeMarco gets, I would have assumed I wouldn’t have liked him. However, after listening to “My Kind of Woman” I decided to give the whole album a shot, and honestly… it wasn’t that bad. Some of the songs are just generic indiefolk which I hate, but there’s some decent bangers in there.

Mobb Deep – The Infamous

Though I still think this album is a little overhyped, I’ve gotten to appreciate it more over time. “Shook Ones” is still one of the best old school hip hop songs of all, and most of the album has a pretty consistent quality level.

Mark Ronson – Uptown Special

After being a big fan of Mark Ronson in elementary school, I kind of skipped out of town after he became famous. I figured Uptown Special would be, for the most part, a cop out album – however, after finally deciding to listen to it, I can say it’s actually not that bad. The quality and theme is consistent, and there’s some nice bangers in there that were simply overshadowed by “Uptown Funk”.

Slime Girls – Vacation Wasteland

I normally hate chiptune music, but the sort of shoegaze infusion that occurs in this album is super tantalizing. Probably has one of my favorite intro preludes ever. Worth listening to even if you aren’t into 8 bit (or 16 bit? 32 bit??) music.

Meh Tier

The Antlers – Hospice

Not going to lie, this album would probably down into Shit Tier if it wasn’t for the fact that the main vocalist in this band is really good. Like, really good. This is coming from the guy who thinks some of even the best singers in the world sound kind of cringy. This is the first time I’ve ever listened to a song and actually said to myself “Oh wow, this guy is actually really good”. It’s worth listening to at least a few of the songs in here to at least get a grip on how good this guy is (I recommend “Kettering” and “Wake”). Other than that, unfortunately, Hospice lacks a whole lot of substance. The lyrics are pretty meaningless, and the sound is simple.

American Football – American Football

This album is full of pretty nice emo math rock, the only problem with it is that… well, all of it sounds pretty much exactly the same. Like, literally, exactly the same. It gets old after awhile.

Shit Tier

Giles Corey – Giles Corey

And now we get to the one album here I really just didn’t enjoy. The lyrics on this thing are so basic and obnoxious (one of the songs is just him repeating “I’m going to kill myself” over and over again) and the beat is so practically non existent that there’s not really much to talk about here.

On Deck

Black Emperor – Allelujah! Don’t bend! Ascend!

Black Emperor – Yanqui UXO

Miles Davis – Bitches Brew

David Bowie – Blackstar

Sufjan Stevens – Carrie and Lowell

Sunny Day Real Estate – Diary

Television – Marquee Moon

Mf Doom – Mm… Food

Slowdive – Pygmalion

Slowdive – Souvlaki

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Currently reading: The Emperor of All Maladies by Siddhartha Mukherjee!

Currently watching: Narcos Season 3!

Currently playing: Nothing!!

Currently listening: I think you know what I’ve been listening to.

Well, that’s all for now. Remember to follow Codex of Aegis on Twitter and Facebook for more updates.

Monday Chat #6 – Ideas for the original Codex of Aegis blog

This post will be a lot shorter, mostly due to the fact that I’m still trying to get used to this whole college thing, but I think it’s pretty important nonetheless.

For awhile now I’ve thought about going through the old stories that I have on the Codex of Aegis blogspot (http://codexofaegis.blogspot.com)  and deleting ones that I don’t think are good anymore. My standards for my writing are way higher than they were when the blog started around 2013, and I feel like it’s time for the content up on there to reflect that.

Of course, I don’t want to outright remove them from existence. I know that there’s probably some people who like ones that I don’t like, and besides that I find it fun to look at old stories even if I don’t think they’re good. In that case, I’ll probably bring back something similar to the Astuka Looks Back series – a series, this time having its own separate blog entirely, that deals with looking at some of my older, less good stories in a more critical lense. This way people will still have access to them, I will be able to learn from them individually, and the whole process will be much sweeter.

I’m not sure exactly when I’m going to start this process, but hopefully it will be sometime soon. I will start by actually removing the stories, then go back and begin on the new critical series. Anyway, I’m short pressed on time now like I mentioned before, but I still wanted to release a Monday Chat, and this is what I’ve come up with.

Currently reading: I’ve decided to drop all my previous reads, mostly because each of them I either didn’t have time for or just wasn’t interested in continuing. I’ve now begun a book I have been meaning to read for quite awhile now, that being The Emperor of All Maladies by Siddhartha Mukherjee. So far I’m only 30 pages in, so I’ll update as time goes along.

Currently playing: Nothing! No really, nothing. The laptop I’ve brought to university is pretty bad, and it can only play the SNES/N64 roms I’ve downloaded onto it (that being literally every single SNES and N64 game in existence). But besides that, I just haven’t really been motivated to play much recently. I was meaning to play Overwatch again when I visited home, but I was too busy doing unrelated stuff that I didn’t really have time to fit in.

Currently watching: Also nothing! Though this one is a bit more concrete – I did catch up on Twin Peaks, a series I had kind of lost track of for a bit due to university stuff and everything, but now I’m back in. I’ve also successfully dropped Game of Thrones seeing that I now fortunately don’t have the time to keep up with it and that has helped me stay away from that burning dumpster fire. Unlike with games, I do have some plans to see some movies – Michael Haneke has been brought up recently, and speaking that I haven’t seen any of his movies and nearly his entire filmography has been on my watchlist for years (the only other director to have that honor is Kurosawa), he’s definitely in my sights now.

Currently listening: Recently discovered Brockhampton, and have been listening to Saturation Parts I and II almost constantly this week.

Well, that’s all for now. Remember to follow Codex of Aegis on Twitter and Facebook for more updates.

Monday Chat #5 – Video Games: A Constant Cycle of Rehashed Ideas?

So today’s topic originates from this Reddit post: https://www.reddit.com/r/gamedev/comments/6slno9/cartoon_network_stole_my_game/?utm_content=title&utm_medium=user&utm_source=reddit

Basically what happened is that the creator of the flash game A Dance of Fire and Ice found that their was a Cartoon Network flash game strangely similar in concept released on their website…

Now, to be fair, A Dance of Fire and Ice is one of the top rated (and most played) Kongregate rhythm games whereas Cartoon Network tends to throw out their flash games every month or so to make way for content more relevant to the current programming; so overall, this specific instance isn’t that big of a deal. But what about the concept in general? After all, this has happened plenty of times – Bejeweled and Candy Crush, Crush the Castle and Angry Birds, and Pandemic and Plague Inc (just to name a few). So is there something inherently and morally wrong with the concept of “Great artists steal”, or is there some justification in it after all?

Now in order to really get a case on what a true “rip off” is, we need to focus on two things: style and substance. Let’s take an example with the CN debacle. A Dance of Fire and Ice and the CN game both have the same core gameplay element – rhythm based timing game based on two constantly rotating sprites that one has to time correctly to keep on the path. However, in style, both games differ – Dance has more of a concrete, minimalist style that models after the two elements which the game is named after, whereas the CN game… just has a bunch of shitty Gumball sprites. Secondly, there’s the substance – there’s the fact that its clear the CN game doesn’t run on Dance’s stolen code, cause the game runs like shit. That means that there’s only on real similarity between the two – the gameplay. But is gameplay copyright-able?

As you’ve probably been able to tell, of course not. There’s plenty of turn based RPGs, or first person shooters, or 3D collectathon platformers. Once one person makes a subgenre, its free for people to refine and edit themselves – as long as they make their own source code. After all, we don’t see people paying royalties to the creator of Wolfenstein, do we?

Another thing though, and perhaps a bit bigger of a deal, is with the size of the business. Bigger businesses can market better than individuals, and thus the mainstream appeal of two very similar games can go to a later game rather than an earlier one. Rovio probably had a much bigger budget to advertise Angry Birds than Armor Games had for Crush the Castle, and Armor Games had a bigger budget than all the other small developers doing similar games way before that! There’s also the choice of distribution. Crush the Castle was originally flash exclusive, which only has the audience of the every diminishing minority of those who play flash games. Rovio, however, took a chance with the ever expanding mobile app market and it ended up paying off big time. So, although people might not like it, business sense does play some part in it.

Now, all these games discussed so far have been fairly different in style and substance, but there is a possibility of blatant rip offs succeeding over the originals. Such is the case often within the mobile market. For a specific example, back in 2014 the app Bad Apples, a blatant stolen version of Cards Against Humanity, reached the top of the app store, causing it to overshadow Cards by over tenfold. Fortunately, due to some clever marketing by Cards Against Humanity – and the poor development upkeep by the Bad Apples creators – Cards was able to regain its spot in popular culture as the original adult party game. Still, one might consider poor moderation of the App Store like this proven case to lead to many other undiscovered rip offs that succeed the original in popularity by many times.

Now, to go back to the main question – is the original always the best? After all, is it really that much of a shame that the content rich and well maintained Plague Inc is more popular than the fairly barebones Pandemic series? Honestly, I think that as long as there are not blatant rip offs of a game, it’s fine to have a sub genre generate and to enjoy better, later games that come out of it. It’s always good to remember the roots, but it’s not mandatory to love them. So while the developer behind A Dance of Fire and Ice isn’t exactly justified in his worry, I think he’s in pretty safe hands.

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Just a quick heads up – there will be no new Monday Chat next week. I’m moving into university, and then on that weekend am going to a related camping trip, sparing me no time to write. But hopefully after that I’ll be able to make room for continuing to make new posts in my schedule.

Currently reading: I finished Metamorphosis by Franz Kafka in a single night, and damn was it darker than I expected – a great read, and worth spending a couple of hours on. Still, I’ve decided I’m going to chill on the digital library for now, seeing that my physical book collection is pretty sparse and I can probably run through them fairly fast. I’ll probably make this my main backlog goal going into university.

Currently watching: As I mentioned before, I saw Dunkirk in theaters. While I really enjoyed the movie, I still don’t understand Christopher Nolan’s insistence on adding some level of non-linearity to his stories, even if they don’t make any sense. In this movie its particularly blatant – each story takes place a certain amount of time from each other, a la one week, one day, and one hour. But the stories all end up lining up in the end… so what’s the point? It seems like Nolan just added this in since people know him as “the weird mindfuck story guy” and kind of as an afterthought. I feel like the movie would’ve been a bit more cleaner and more coherent without this in place. Still, despite this – I mean, it’s a Nolan movie, right? – it’s still damn good. 8/10.

Currently playing: Mostly Skyrim and Mount and Blade Warband mods… though I DID start running a new NCAA Footbal 09 dynasty game (you know, what all the cool kids are doing right now) with the plan of making a long game that would use the import feature for Madden 09’s franchise mode (pretty basic stuff, everyone knows this), but then I remembered I was going into college and probably didn’t have time to do all this. Whoops.

Currently listening: Been picking up on a few new tracks. INOJ’s Time After Time cover has some pretty bumpin’ aesthetic. My Dead Girlfriend’s Danke is a solid banger. Other than that, I’ve been listening to some miscellaneous KPM tracks.

Well, that’s all for now. Remember to follow Codex of Aegis on Twitter and Facebook for more updates.