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.
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.
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.
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:
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.
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
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.
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.
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...
