New Music: A Picture In My Mind

 

A 70's style singer-songwriter ballad that's currently sitting at 7 views on Youtube. There's just so much out there that you're basically pissing into the void whenever you upload a video or post a blog. Am I bitter? Ehh, I don't know. The times, they are a changing. I know that I've improved drastically as an artist and that I'm capable of producing art that would amaze my younger self. I've been very lucky in life, so my dearth of success as an artist is okay. At least, I'm at peace with it right now.

MAGA Explained by The Personalities of the Gang from It Is Always Sunny in Philadelphia

 

The Idiot

Idiocy is one of the defining attributes of the Make America Great Again movement. From brain-worm addled RFK undermining our vaccine expertise to ketamine-addicted Elon Musk accidentally firing half of our nuclear weapons administration, being stupid enough to believe and spread conspiracy theories is perhaps the cornerstone of this abhorrent ideology. Trump's entire economic policy seems to have been personally concocted by Charlie Kelly himself. Ask Trump to explain a tariff. Hell, ask him who his top bird law professional is, and I guarantee he will pull a name out of that vapid abyss he calls a brain. The idiot is nothing but confident, because he's too stupid to realize how dumb he really is. Perhaps Trump is an abortion survivor as well? I know Stephen Miller certainly is.

 The Psychopath

Trump's Chief of Staff Stephen Miller is a fascist obsessed with deporting immigrants. Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem bragged about shooting her dog. Elon Musk's DOGE eliminated USAID, which will likely lead to the deaths of millions of people. Being a psychopath seems to be a requirement to work for Trump, who also shares many of the symptoms of the disorder, from his superficial charm, manipulativeness, lack of empathy, promiscuity, and impulsive behavior. Also like Dennis Reynolds, Trump has a long history of sexual assault. Oh, and he buried his ex-wife Ivanka on one of his golf courses, which is a very Reynolds thing to do.

The Child

If you asked me to describe the mental age of most of the MAGA movement, I'd say 14-year old manchild, e.g, Ronald McDonald. Read any of Trump's Tweets or take a good long look at Elon Musk (I'm sorry) or JD Vance, and you'll recognize the self-delusion, blind misogyny, and mean-spiritedness of your average juvenile delinquent. Always the habitual liar, Trump approaches the truth just like Mac--as a vehicle for self-aggrandizement rather than an objective fact. "The cost of eggs has went down 93, 94 percent!" claimed Trump, right after eggs hit a record high in March. I bet Trump thinks he knows karate too.

    The Narcissist 

What does MAGA really care about? Itself of course! From trying to back us out of NATO to humiliating Zelensky to taking a jet from Qatar, everything Trump and his allies do is for their perceived benefit and not that of the America people. If you want to get into Trump's good graces, flatter him or give him money like Elon did. Sweet Dee uses people to make her feel better about herself because she has no friends. Rickety Cricket is more or less you and me, unfortunately. Hopefully the average American doesn't end up homeless and addicted to drugs!

 The Grifter

You know what really unites the Gang? Their penchant for grift. For MAGA, the grift is life itself. Trump loves cryptocurrency, despite not knowing what it is (creating a federal crypto reserve, lol!) and his entire career in both politics and business has been a grift. Did you know that the producers of the Apprentice had to renovate Trump Tower because it was such a dump? How did the son of a multimillionaire convince working-class America that he was their lord and savior? By being racist, of course! Trump is Frank Reynold, and Frank Reynold is the spirit of MAGA. Sweatshops, selling out, and living the trash life for all! We are all fringe class now, baby! Dr. Mantis Toboggan is running America, and he's neither a real doctor or an actual mantis, and like the recipients of Frank's schemes, we're all the worse for his leadership. This country has certified donkey-brains.

Video Game Review: Doom: The Dark Ages

 Doom: The Dark Ages is id Software's third game in their reboot trilogy that started with 2016's Doom. Technically a prequel, The Dark Ages shows what the Doom Slayer (uuggghh) was up to with his pals the Night Sentinels before he was sealed in a sarcophagus and opened in the first game. The tonal shift that occurred in Doom Eternal is back; unlike in Doom 2016, the narrative vibe is more Saturday morning cartoon than grindhouse horror rip and tear. And that's okay, I guess--John Carmack himself stated that a story in a video game is like a story in a porno--but the first game in the new trilogy hit the proverbial nail on the head so well with its contempt for bullshit narrative (the Slayer interrupts a droning monologue on how to carefully remove a piece of tech by just ripping the fucking thing out of the console) that it's ironic how far id have abandoned that approach. There's a turret setpiece, multiple giant Mech fights, and a cybernetic dragon to ride on in The Dark Ages, along with cutscenes featuring po-faced musclemen droning on about plot details no one in their right mind will care about. However, nobody is here for the story, and what's really notable is that The Dark Ages has pivoted its combat loops from Doom Eternal, which was a significant complication compared 2016's Doom. You no longer have to juggle armor, health, and ammo with the flame belch, glory kill, and chainsaw respectively, for fodder enemies will drop all three consumables when they die if you are low. Through the upgrade system, you'll eventually unlock a armor drop ability for the shotgun, as well as health drops for the ravager skull weapon, and an ammo drop for the mace. That's right, a mace--The Dark Ages's main selling point this time around is a melee system that features a throwable chainsaw shield that can parry projectiles back at the demons. The shield is a hoot, I will admit, and parrying doesn't feel that out of place in a Doom game, although fodder enemies probably shouldn't emit projectiles, since it's a little too easy to die from some little bastard spawning behind you as you battle the big baddies. The arsenal has also been tweaked, with two weapons of each type located in each slot. For example, you have two plasma rifles: the accelerator, which is inaccurate but fast-firing; and the cycler, which is slower but emits shock damage that can travel from enemy to enemy. Although all the weapons are useful and cool, you'll find yourself gravitating back to the basic shotgun for its armor shedding ability, as well as the plasma cycler, which just destroys mobs. The skull weapons (ravager and pummeler) are also good for crowd control, and the chainshot destroys armor, which really comes in handy. The super-shotgun, rocket launcher, grenade launcher, and nail gun weapons were used sparsely in my playthrough. As for the enemies, they have also been redesigned to fit the medieval theme. There are armored versions of the hellknight, macubus, and arachnotron, all of which need to have their armor heated up by damage and then busted off with either a melee shot, a shield throw, or a blow from the chainshot. It's a fun and challenging system, but not quite the FPS chess from Doom Eternal. While I liked Eternal, I think the Ancient Gods DLC pushed that combat system as far as it could go. Doom was never about difficulty, a la Dark Souls, and The Dark Ages represents a return to a more manageable challenge, although you can really customize and crank up the difficulty, if you're that sort of masochist.

The level design is pretty good, with the Night Sentinel maps being the worst and the Hell and Lovecraft-influenced ones being the best. Spoiler: Cuthulu himself makes an appearance and you even get to kick his ass, that is, after you battle your way out of his guts. Giant monster, Giger-influenced tentacles, non-Euclidean geometry--The Dark Ages has some creative imagery and wonderfully grotesque aesthetics comparable to Eternal's ruined cityscapes. Ray-tracing is mandatory for the game, although its effects were pretty understated, which is probably why it runs so well. With most settings close or maxed out, The Dark Ages manages a frame rate of around 70 to 80 frames per second on an RTX 3080 at 1440p using DLSS Quality upscaling. It doesn't seem to be in any way CPU-bound, and unlike your average Unreal Engine title, frame time graphs are smooth with not a stutter or hitch in sight. This is a nice-looking game that runs well, a true rarity in the PC triple-A space lately (I'm thinking of Oblivion Remastered and Spider-man 2, two titles I've played this year that have their share of performance issues). The Dark Ages might not be the best of the series, but it's a really good single-player FPS, and you got to hand it to id Software for changing things up again instead of simply putting out Doom Eternal 2. 

Screenshots below:

    

New Music: Water

 

A Theme Park Mistress standard, Water dates back to 2012. A dreamy trip into the deep, written, if I remember correctly, for Jeff Buckley, who drowned after taking a spontaneous dip in a river. This version uses more instrumentation than the original demo, with the main riff of the verse played on a keyboard using the 1969 organ patch from Propellerhead Reason. My Fender acoustic along with my Stratocaster through a Big Muff also are featured.

New Music: Lost Without End

 

I did a country-fried version of Lost Without End, complete with twangy guitars and piano. Just a simple song about being a hobo drunk. Let the good times roll.

New Music: Horror Stories

 

I wrote this in Muncie when I was staying in a tiny house for 300 dollars a month with some dude whom I never talked to and whose name I cannot remember. This version is the definitive one--it has a punk arrangement that always suited the song--and I managed to record it in about two hours today after getting the drums down. The guitar tracks are done with my Stratocaster on the bridge pickup with the tone knob rolled down to about 6, played through a TS-57 Tube Screamer and my Epiphone Blues Custom. You can get a good heavy tone with single coils! Humbuckers are cool, but I prefer the color of single coil pickups. Just my humble opinion.

Video Game Review: Marvel's Spider-Man 2

 

Spider-Man 2 is Sony's followup to 2018's successful Spider-Man, and it is in most respects a classic iterative sequel, delivering a bigger story with more cinematic set pieces, gameplay improvements, and more life-like New York to swing around. This time, you can switch between Miles Morales and Peter Parker, and although they play similarly, Miles has electrical abilities that differentiate his powers from Peter's, who goes through much of the game with the symbiote suit. Kraven the hunter is the main antagonist for about two-thirds of the runtime, until Venom shows up, with much fanfare. Sandman and the Lizard also make notable appearances, with the former appearing at the start of the game and more or less recreating his gigantic form from Sam Rami's Spider-Man 3. The story involves the dual Spider-Men attempting to prevent Kraven from offing their rogue's gallery, until the appearance of Harry Osborn, who has kept his life-threatening illness at bay with a biological suit of unknown origins, diverts Pete's attention. You can probably predict the rest, but playing through Spider-Man 2 is at least as enjoyable as watching one of his classic flicks. I have been thoroughly pursuing the sidequests, not just because of their quality (do the one involving Mysterio's virtual reality game) but because it's just plain fun to traverse this hyper-detailed New York. Both Pete and Miles have web-wings which allows them to fly alongside their web-slinging, and it is thrilling to glide in-between towering skyscrapers and across New York Bay. High quality ray-traced reflections look excellent and really add to the immersion. Combat has been expanded since the first game, with both Spider-Men having special abilities that they tap into during battle along with an array of gadgets and combo moves. Two-thirds in, you'll really master the system and start handling massive mobs with the supernatural dexterity of a spider-powered hero. All in all, Spider-Man 2 is right up there with God of War: Ragnarok as one of the best singleplayer games I've experienced this year.

 

A note on the PC version; it's not quite as good as you would really expect from Sony and Nixxies, who did the port. When it was released earlier this year, it was full of crashes and bugs and had terrible performance on even high-end hardware. A couple months later, the bugs aren't really plentiful (I got stuck behind level geometry a couple of times), but Spider-Man 2 still crashes more than is really acceptable. There's nothing that really prompts the crashes; sometimes I'll play for an hour or more and it will crash, other times just a few minutes. As for performance, this game is ridiculously CPU-heavy with ray-tracing enabled, especially when you consider how the Playstation 5 sports a down-clocked Zen 2 CPU. A smooth sixty frames per second is not possible without frame generation on my hardware. However, FSR frame gen can be enabled along with Nvidia's Reflex anti-lag tech and DLSS upscaling, and the result is pretty good. I played the game with an RTX 3080 and a Ryzen 7 5800x with a mix of High and Very High settings, with ray-traced reflections and interiors enabled on Very High at 1440p DLSS Quality, and my frame rates varied between 120 and 80 fps. I didn't notice any input lag or visual bugs due to frame gen, so I'd definitely enable it.

 In conclusion, Spider-Man 2 looks great and plays great, but asks for some serious hardware and requires frame generation to run smoothly on PC. It think it's worth the asking price at this point, but it is a shame that Nixxes couldn't port the title to PC without some hurdles. Screenshots below:

 

Bad Poetry: 2025

 

2025

Have we exhumed the corpse of sincerity

From its postmodern grave?

Have we dusted off the ideologies

of the dead past

To play dress up

Like a Nazi at a dinner party

Shooting the salute

With a wry grin

And a shrug of the shoulders?

Stochastic anarchy is a term

That I did not invent.

Metamodernism: the oscillation between

Sincere belief and ironic detachment.

One minute you are a Fascist on the stage,

The next you are a provocateur

Engaging in cosplay

To critique the illiberalism

of the liberal establishment.

People have a desire for truth

But it cannot exist

In a world of disinformation

Where computer algorithms

Trained on bullshit

Are increasingly appealed to

And utilized

By children too lazy to use their brain.

If we are past the time of labels,

If we parade the corpse around

moving its arms and hands

In a ghoulish dance,

Making a mockery of humanity,

What future can we embrace?

Call the truth the truth

But we don’t know what truth is anymore

Since we are outsourcing thought

To the vanity of billionaires

And Silicon Valley firms

Disinterested in any concept

That doesn’t raise their valuation.

We have to remember the past

Not to use as fodder for memetic creation,

But as a reference on how to learn

How to think

How to act.

There is agency

In admitting

You are an agent.

New Music: The Feel Good Dirge Of The Summer

 

I don't know why, but this song reminds me of Sly and The Family Stone's It's A Family Affair. It's a real bummer lyrically, but the music moves me, containing the slightest sliver of mellow hope. I'm really digging having an electric piano, although my favorite part of this song is when the dual guitars kick in. It's a real gut punch, a shock to the system (insert favorite cliche).

A Poem For Napoleon

 

A Poem For Napoleon

We took you from the Colerain SPCA

A little short puppy

With a tattoo 

Where your balls used to be.

The first time you met Lily,

You nipped her cheek so much that it bled.

In Cincinnati, you would sit on the armrest of the couch,

Legs spread out like a reptile,

Nose stuck beneath the blinds

To bark at any passersby you saw.

Prone to ear infections 

Due to your hairy Wookiee feet,

You would growl and snap

Whenever I tried to clean your ears.

Your nicknames were the following:

Pupperton-maximus,

Po-Po,

Wubus,

And wubbydoodle.

When they put you under at the vet

To clean your ears,

You clamped your tiny jaws

Onto a vet-tech's finger.

In your old age, you mellowed

and mostly kept around my heels

when I was in the kitchen.

Blind and deaf, you wandered out of the yard

Just last week to be picked up

By two older ladies 

Who took you

To David's vet clinic in Rising Sun.

You passed on the cool floors of the kitchen

Where you preferred to lay.

I buried you at the farm

Next to Lily

Your packmate

And true love.

I will miss your little short feet,

Your floppy ears,

Your shaggy coat,

And The way you rested your head

Chin jutting outward.

Little old man,

Last of the pack,

Vestige of my youth,

My first dog.

Goodbye.

 

New Music: Come With A Drink

 

A Theme Park Mistress classic, Come With A Drink dates back to 2010. A moody lamentation for alcohol and direction in the winter gloom, this version is mostly piano driven, as opposed to the original, which relied on rough, jangling guitars.

Video Game Review: Disco Elysium

 

Yeah...

I am very late to the party, for Disco Elysium is already famous for being a modern classic of RPG genre, and so my review, coming years after its release, has little reason to exist other than to tell you, my hypothetical reader, what I think of it. Quite simply, it's a marvelous game. A role-playing experience with heavy adventure game roots (you will spend all of your time reading, listening, pointing, and clicking) Disco Elysium is about an alcoholic police detective who awakens in a hotel room with no memory of his self or past life. After a few conversations in the Whirling Rags (your hotel), you discover a personal path of desolation and destruction that points to one hell of a night. Your detective was sent to the ruined city of Revachol, a post-war ghetto still suffering from a war that happened almost fifty years ago between the Communists and the Loyalist factions, to solve the murder of a hanged mercenary. In the present Revochal is controlled by the Coalition, a neoliberal government that adheres to a centrist philosophy the game calls Moralism. Politics and political ideologies are very relevant to Disco Elysium, but the game's main theme is the heavy burden of the past. Your detective is unable to recover from a broken relationship; similarly, Revochal cannot transcend its history of civil war and conquest. The disco dancer in the hotel whom you soon discover is very important to the case is running from past transgressions, and the murderer, without revealing too much, is a former deserter who cannot let go of a failed revolution. I played the detective as an empath and a physical being, the four main attributes being Intellect, Psyche, Motorics, and Physique, with six secondary skills being associated with those four. You'll have to pass various skill checks during lengthy conversations, and what skills you choose are important, for Disco Elysium is a game almost entirely about talking. Said conversations are fully-voiced and well-acted, and I often found myself listening to many of them instead of hurriedly clicking past to the next option. The dialogue is poetic and very well-written; here's a little sample from the end of the game, when you're speaking to a sentient cryptid that seems to have a completely alien perspective.

"I am the end of a narrow tunnel. Weightless. So light it only feels like "something" to be me. In truth--perhaps I'm nothing? I certainly do not have a soul. And if I did, it would never ache."

Disco Elysium's main designer is Estonian novelist Robert Kurvitz, and the game is based on the same setting as his novel Sacred and Terrible Air. According to Wikipedia, Kurvitz is a communist, and the history of Disco Elysium is dependent on Marxist theory. Class warfare, corrupt Union bosses, citizens taking the law into their own hands, governing forces attempting to hold what little is left together--this is a dense stew that doesn't necessarily point the player in the direction of the Comrade, although my cop managed reconcile his hustler drive with his occasional support of communist socio-economics. These ideologies can be researched and equipped under Thoughts, and they provide gameplay bonuses, as well as penalties. Thoughts such as Hobo-cop are nestled right next to Traditionalism and Radical Feminist. Disco Elysium wants you to be as invested in your political ideologies as your character's bizarre quirks and addictions.

My only real criticism of the game is there are a couple of skill checks that'll prevent your progress unless you increase them. One is pretty early; you encounter a racist Union henchman named Measurehead that'll kick your ass unless you've invested heavily in the Physical Instrument skill. You can steal a Union card and bypass him, if you see it--I didn't, and had to do other quests until I level up the aforementioned skill enough to put the behemoth in his place. I also had to reload a save because I progress locked myself on the first night by not having enough cash to pay for my hotel room, which was a pain, because I had to redo several quests, which meant clicking through a lot of dialogue that I'd already read.

Minor quibbles aside, Disco Elysium is a classic RPG adventure, and highly recommended to anyone who enjoys unconventional, well-written games. It's a true piece of art and up there with Baldur's Gate 3 as one of the best examples of the genre I've played.