Red Dead Redemption 2 Review

 

Red Dead Redemption 2 is the most character driven single player triple A game I've ever played. It's closest analog is the Witcher 3, but it's better written despite being just as huge. Just like CD Projekt's baby, it'll take you over one-hundred hours to do everything, which I probably don't recommend, unless you like playing poker with NPCs or hunting legendary animals to craft some hideous outfit. Come for the story and atmosphere, poke around a bit with role playing (this isn't an RPG) and then see how many months it takes before you've had your fill. I'm not a huge fan of long games nowadays; I'm too damn busy with life to play every title for one-hundred hours or more, but some games are worth investing time in, just like it's worth it to read the Brothers Karamazov, provided you enjoy character driven fiction.

In Red Dead 2, you play as Arthur Morgan, an outlaw on the run with the Van der Linde gang. Arthur's a great character to play; he ain't a good guy--you'll do some pretty bad things in his shoes, such as beating debtors and robbing households--but he ain't a sociopath either; rather, he's a man of his circumstances, a relic from the old West who knows his time is coming. Other members of the gang, all of whom you'll go on personal missions with, have their own compelling personalities. Hosea is a good-natured con-man who resents the increasingly bloody heists of the Van der Leinde gang, while Micha is a stone-cold shooter who resembles a seventies' serial killer in his hair style and general unhinged demeanor. These characters inhabit a world taken straight from classic spaghetti Westerns. There's one region that resembles frontier Montana; another is basically Texas or Arizona desert; Saint Denis is a New Orleans stand in; the red clay of Georgia is present in a Southern environment. All of these regions are beautifully rendered and inhabited by realistically behaving fauna--hunting is a big mini game that I mostly avoided, although it's well implemented. Fast travel is almost non-existent, so you'll spend a lot of time galloping around on your horse, admiring the scenery. Nothing happens quickly in this game--Arthur saunters about at a realistic human pace rather than a video game sprint--so you're best advised to take your time and enjoy all the artistry on display. One of my favorite quests has Arthur taking a young gang member named Lenny on a drinking escapade that plays out like a drunk's memories--did you and Lenny really dance hand and hand with the entire bar? Did you almost drown a man in a horse trough? Although Red Dead 2 isn't an RPG, you have opportunities to steer Arthur toward a more ambivalent direction. You can chose to give a stranger a lift or rescue a hog-tied woman from a vengeful husband, but you'll still take part in the gang's increasingly desperate schemes. I haven't finished the plot yet, but the warning signs are obvious, and you know that Arthur and his gang's time is limited. As a PC exclusive player, I haven't played the first game, but seeing how this is actually a prequel, that's not a problem. Even at two years old on PC (Red Dead 2 was a console exclusive in 2018), this is a beast of a game at max graphical settings. At 1440p, I'm running it mostly on High settings, with textures and soft shadows set to Ultra, and a couple others set to Medium (Far Volumetric Resolution; Water Refractions), and I'm able to run it at over 60 frames per second. With everything at Ultra, my frame rate drops into the forties. My solidly mid-range system has finally met its match.

If you're looking for a Western with the quality of the Witcher 3's open world, then you've already probably played Red Dead 2. As someone who's never been a fan of Rockstar (the Grand Theft Auto games are too damn cynical for my liking), this game lived up to the hype. Screenshots below (the photo mode is brilliant).

 

New Music Video: About A Girl

 

This is my favorite Nirvana song. I originally tried to sing it an octave higher like Kurt does, but my voice couldn't cut it, so I went with a double-tracked Elliott Smith whisper. The arrangement consists of two finger-picked guitars; one does the original chord progression, while the other adds dissonant lines of my own creation. I put a piano in there as well, but I'm only playing the root notes of the chords for the most part, and my timing is a little rough. However, I'm happy with the end result. I made the song more of a moody blues piece. I did mess up the lyrics, but oh well, personal interpretation and all that.

Conan Brothers Q&A

 

 

AreWeThereYet asks "What do you guys think about the nature of being?"

Dave: The nature of being what?

Arnold: I think this is a metaphysical question.

Dave: Never touched the stuff. I like my teeth.

Arnold: Well, I'll guess I'll handle this one. I think there are two ways to exist as a human being. There is the path of reason and the path of romance. This is a double-think sort of thing where to be fully human, you have to embrace both ideologies. Reason, of course, is the lauded strategy. "Why can't we all be more reasonable, more logical, more honest in our thinking? Romantic thinking, however, cannot be completely abandoned. Humans need religion to deal with death, just like an athlete needs to wear his lucky jock strap to continue his ten game hitting streak. Part of you knows that this shit's bogus, but you need to believe it anyway, because to believe is to be human. Love can't just be a chemical reaction, you know, it's something you feel and experience. Yet you just can't completely embrace the romantic ideology or you'll descend into idiocy, a la "This two-thousand year old book written by a bunch of people who had no concept of science or the very world in which they lived says it's evil to be gay, so let's ban all homosexuals."

Dave: I sort of get what you're talking about. We can't pray climate change away, yet it pays not to be an atheist in a fox hole.

Arnold: Yeah. Embrace reason but be willing to indulge your romantic every once in a while. You couldn't have art without romance, right?

Dave: There's nothing romantic about a Campbell's soup can.

Arnold: You ain't a true artist.

 ...

Hellbelly asks "How do I come back to training after being sick?"

Dave: This is a good one.

Arnold: We just experienced a norovirus that kicked our asses from here to Timbuktu. I was on my hands and knees puking my guts out for hours, and when I wasn't puking, I was shitting. There was a day that I shit forty times, I kid you not. Took about six days to finally feel normal. I was lifting on the fifth day.

Dave: Didn't go too heavy. Did some benches and pullups, followed by curls and one arm cleans.

Arnold: I didn't lose much strength, but my weight is about eight pounds less than what it was before. Fortunately, I'm eating like a horse again. It won't take long to get that weight back.

Dave: Don't eat at Wings and Rings. They poisoned us.

...

 

WackyGrey asks "What you all playing with?"

Dave: The bald-headed moose.

Arnold: Red Dead Redemption 2. Man is it a slow game but I am enjoying it immensely. I've never played a game that had such love for its characters or genre. This is one of the best Westerns I've ever experienced.

Dave: Don't give much of a shit about hunting, though.

Arnold: This game is so immense that I think you have to skip a lot of the open world filler shit. I've played for 29 hours and I'm just now on Chapter 3. Only forty-four percent of Steam players have reached Chapter 3.

Dave: What percentage of people have picked up War and Peace and finished it?

Arnold: True, but War and Peace didn't cost millions of dollars to develop.

Dave: Money spent doesn't automatically equate to great art.

Arnold: Yeah, but I'm sure it helps. Anyway, it's hard to tackle a video game this long. I ain't twenty-two anymore, you know what I mean? I got adult shit to do.

Dave: Like beating the bald headed moose.

Arnold: Where the fuck did you hear that?

Dave: Somewhere on the internet, before it became a place of degeneracy.

Arnold: 2007?

Dave: Yeah, probably around there.

Albums that Made Me: Big Star's Third

 

Third was the first Big Star album I heard. I used to listen to it in Muncie while in college, especially when I was feeling a little down or high. It's got great melodies like every Big Star album, but it's also filled with sardonic wit and a palpable fuck-off vibe. Only lead songwriter Alex Chilton and drummer Joey Stevens were left by this point, and the power pop sound of #1 Record and Radio City is mostly gone, replaced by an expansive production, full of instruments that ebb in and out. Chilton claims that Third isn't even a Big Star album, and that the release of the record was completely out of his hands. Regardless, it's a great mood piece, a melancholy dream to play when you just want to sit on the couch with a joint/six pack and wallow in your own strangeness. Jesus Christ is one of my favorites, a half-assed retelling of the Christmas story. Chilton's fragile voice fits the Velvet Underground's Femme Fatale better than Nico's monotone. "I'd rather shoot a woman than a man/I wonder if this is my last life," he croons on Oh Dana, a rambling rock song that doesn't quite rock as much as it fades in and out of existence. Holocaust is my pick for the saddest song ever written. "Your eyes are almost dead, can't get out of bed, and you can't sleep," with every line getting worse. "You're mother's dead, you're on your own, she's in her bed." Add in the brilliance of the backing instrumentation--detuned strings, a lamenting slide guitar, and a minor piano--and you have a song that you can't forget. It's not all dread, however. Kanga Roo sounds like old Big Star mostly, although it's as if Brian Eno tampered with the track after recording. Stroke It Noel has the half-hearted refrain "Do you wanna dance?" uttered against a chamber pop background, while For You embraces that genre a little more honestly. A truly great record, no matter the circumstances of its creation.

New Video: Boys Don't Cry

 

 

Man, the Cure was/is a great band. The live incarnation of TPM used to play this at Knockbacks bar on Seventh Street in Cincinnati. This is just me and an acoustic guitar.

 

Weightlifting: Building the Monolith: Week 4 Observations

 

Four weeks in, Building the Monolith ain't too bad. I've had a couple set back--got a terrible head cold that lasted over a week, which led to my separating the assistance work from the first workout and then doing workout 1 and workout 2 two days in a row--but I'm powering through and I've gained about two pounds or so of muscle, which ain't bad considering I'm not following the recommended diet.

What I've learned

Keep to the suggested percentages excepting the deadlift. I thought I'd jack up my deadlift working max considerably on week 4, because the 360 lbs max I started with is lower than 85 percent. Well, I just bumped it up to 370 and went about my business, because doing five sets of five deadlifts after seven sets of five bench presses and 100 curls and rows sucks. I can pull 480 any day of the week, if not 500, and 85 percent of 480 is 408, not 370. However, the deadlift is a different beast from other lifts, and while I don't really believe that it affects the CNS in some magical way, it does drain your resolve to live if you beat yourself up with volume. Given the ridiculous back work in this program, I think it's fine to err on the side of caution and go a little lighter than 85 percent (370 is 77 percent of 480). This is a bodybuilding program, after all.

Separating the assistance work ain't a bad idea if you're low on energy or time. Due to one hell of a head cold, this last week as been a bitch to get through. I do the first workout on Thursday, but I had to watch my kids, and I just didn't have the energy to do seven sets of squats at 90 percent. So instead, while they were at the playground, I did 75 pullups (still working up to 100) and 140 pushups. That night I did the facepulls and added some curls. This made doing the first workout on Friday a lot more reasonable. I do the assistance work in between sets, so I'm often gasping for breath. While the cardiovascular benefits of that approach are great, working out while sick sucks. The first workout takes the longest for me, so I may start separating the assistance for the last three weeks.

Eat more but the diet is unrealistic for anybody not twenty years old. As a thirty-five year old man, I'm not going to be scarfing down double cheeseburgers and twelve eggs like I'm trying to become a lineman. I have eaten more, but I've taken a more sustainable approach to weight gaining rather than see food, eat food. Of course the people who actually do the diet are going to get more out of this program. If you want to gain twenty pounds of mostly muscle, then by all means, listen to Wendler, he knows best. I'm thinking about longevity and overall health at this point in my life. Your goals might be different.

 

My Pile of Shame

 

I've seen a lot of posts on the net recently about managing one's video game backlog, or "pile of shame." The backlog is a result of a consumer culture, where one lives in perpetual fear of missing the next big thing and so purchases commodities that they will never enjoy or even experience. People are addicted to buying shit; gamers in particular, it would seem, probably because almost all video games now are digital downloads, and it's a lot easier to click on a Humble Indie Bundle than it is to drive down to the ol' Gamestop and plop sixty bucks down on a Blu-ray. My PC that I built last year doesn't even have a disk drive. The last game I bought on disk was Dishonored 2, and I still had to download the damn game off of Steam. So I decided to look at my own Steam list and see what games I had purchased but never played, in the interest of accessing my own backlog, and whether I too have the money-burning disease.

What I learned

1. I have almost no unplayed games. Not to toot my own horn, but if you define a backlog as games you've purchased but never played, then I have nothing that fits that criteria other than separate multiplayer modes to otherwise mostly single player games, such as Resident Evil Resistance. There are a couple of Quake expansion packs I've never played, Fallout 2 (I really should get on that), Fallout Tactics, and a bunch of games I've actually played, just so long ago that Steam doesn't remember, such as Portal and various Half-Life spinoffs. So yeah, that's good, right?

2. I have 13 games that I've played under two hours. Well that's not as good. Some of these are titles that I just bounced off of and never came back to, such as Monster Hunter: World (which came free with my graphics card, so it probably shouldn't count) and FTL: Faster Than Light. There was awhile there where I would buy popular indie titles just to try them out, even though I knew they weren't my jam, such as Super Meat Boy (not much of a platformer fan) and Crusader Kings 2 (everyone else loved it; I couldn't figure out how to play). Still, there's nothing there that I spent sixty bucks on, and I've since stopped buying games that I likely won't like. X Box Game Pass for PC is perfect for the dabbler and is a much better option than blowing cash during Steam sales.

3. There are still some games that I'd like to finish. I've spent 3.3 hours playing 2016's Hitman, and I remember enjoying those hours, yet for some reason I moved on to another game and never came back. Similarly, Dragon Age: Inquisition has taken up 3.2 hours of my life, and it was alright, yet I balked at the time commitment a massive RPG requires. I haven't even played LA Noir for an hour, yet it has a really cool setting and concept. Fallout and Fallout 2 are classics that I've hardly touched. I should probably at least give these games another shot before plopping down sixty bucks for another title.

4. You shouldn't feel the need to complete every title you buy; yet you probably should play a game a while before you buy another one. People can do what they want with their money; however, you have to come to terms with the fact that your time is limited and you will never play every video game, watch every movie, read every book, listen to every piece of music, etc. I don't want to spend time figuring out how to play Crusader Kings 2, and that's fine. I'm not much of a strategy gamer. Even games in genres I like, such as the Outer Worlds, I don't feel particularly compelled to finish, even after 18 hours. I think it's fine that I never beat Divinity 2, even though it's one of my most played games.

So in conclusion, I don't have much of a backlog problem, which I knew already. What a fine internet man I am. Stay away from those Steam sales, people. You won't play half of what you buy.  

Weightlifting: Building the Monolith

 

I've been wanting to tackle Building the Monolith for some time; however, my dislike of 5/3/1 as well as the volume crammed into each workout made me rather hesitant. How do I get all that shit done in an hour was my thinking, yet after a week on the program, I don't think it's really that bad. Admittedly, my training maxes are around the 85 percent that Wendler recommends, so the weights aren't that heavy. The most challenging part, I think, will be the diet. I usually eat around a pound of meat a day--twelve eggs is a different story. I've been averaging around eight a day, which isn't Gaston level, but that motherfucker was as big as a barn, which is the point, right? I've been wanting to get back to around the 200 lbs level, as opposed to the 193-194 I'm hovering at now. Anyways, let's get into the nitty-gritty of this thing.

Changes made

This wouldn't be an internet weightlifting program review without fucking the whole thing up with a bunch of needless changes, would it? The biggest change I implemented was box squats instead of free squats. My hips are messed up, but they've been fine since I started doing box squats and pin squats. The lateral shift I do when the weights get heavy can be controlled with box squats, and since I don't give a shit about my powerlifting numbers, box squats it is. I also switched dips for pushups because my right shoulder is a bitch. I don't have a good way to do weighted pull ups, so I'm doing pull downs. Everything else I kept the same.

Training Maxes

Squat-350

Press-150

Bench Press-255

Deadlift-360

So these are all in the 85 percent range with the exception of the deadlift. I've only been doing singles for deadlifts, so I thought I'd build my way back up instead of rushing headlong into madness. You adjust your training max during the fourth week, so I'll probably bump the deadlift up considerably.

Days (click here for percentages and details)

Day one is the heavy squat day, with 7 sets of 5, followed by 3 sets of 5 in the Press, with an additional set done with as many reps as possible. The assistance work is done in between sets of the main work; that's the only way you'll get this done in an hour.

Day two: Deads for 5 sets of 5, followed by 7 sets of 5 Bench press, with rows and curls done as assistance. This day is heavy on the upper back--I don't see how you can't get a Gaston-sized lat spread from this program.

Day three: 3 sets of 5 squats, followed by a set of 20; then 10 sets of 5 Press, with weighted pull ups (pull downs in my case). Not as bad as I thought, but the set of 20 only starts out with 45 percent. It'll be up to 70 by the end of the program.

Conclusion

Yet to be seen. Probably depends on how many eggs I manage to cram down my gullet. Wish me luck, folks.

 

 

New Video: Theme from a Tragedy

Put this together years ago when I was working on ambient/electronic music. The tune always struck me as something that would air during a particularly dismal scene. For all the songs I wrote during this period, I used a layered approach where an initial theme is compounded by increasing layers of complexity. This is a common approach in electronic music, where you can have a motif looping throughout a song very easily, and things like tempo changes are a little harder to pull off without the benefit of a live drummer as opposed to a drum machine. I enjoyed making all of these songs, which I tentatively put in a folder called "Winter Trees" but I've yet to return to making similar songs, preferring my garage rock niche. That being said, I find myself listening to ambient music very often these days. We'll see where TPM goes in the future.

Writer's Block: The Coming of Spring

 

Cold mornings awaken

To warm afternoons

Spent in the tops of trees

And down below

Pulling the prunings

Out of the rows

 

We wait for the bees

To give us labor

We pray for the frosts

To leave us fruit

We soak in the light

As it is given

 

I start the spring

Hidden from the sun

Hat on head

Arms covered in sleeves

Gloves hiding hands

Legs in sundered jeans

 

We are all ready

To leave death behind

The birth of a season

Brings new purpose

Fears vanishing

With the freshness of hope

 

 

Doom Eternal: The Ancient Gods Part 2 Review

 

Ancient Gods Part 2 is a disappointment. It's certainly not bad, and the difficulty curve is a little gentler than Ancient Gods Part 1, but as a finale to Doom Eternal, it's too short, with a frustrating final boss. Now, I've beaten Eternal on Nightmare, including all of the Slayer Gates, as well as Ancient Gods Part 1 on Ultra Violence. The fucking Dark Lord, however, is just too much for me, at least after about two hours, so I finally lowered the difficulty to Hurt Me Plenty and managed to take him out. He's basically a Marauder, which isn't too bad, but he also has five health bars, and every time he damages you, he heals. Oh yeah, he also spawns monsters constantly during the later stages of the fight. The only time you can damage the Dark Lord is when his eyes flash green, which happens much less often than you would think. One wrong move, and several minutes of gameplay, in which you patiently baited the son of a bitch to attack, goes down the drain. It's a slog, much more so than the Icon of Sin, Khan Makyr, or even Samur. I'm not a fan of games that have contempt for your time, and as much as I love Doom Eternal, I think Hugo Martin and crew have made a few misstep in their handling of the franchise. They've doubled-down on the difficulty, on making the game tactical and fast, but in the process they've abandoned the tonal constancy of Doom 2016 and embraced a Saturday morning cartoon vibe that's about as captivating as, well, a Saturday morning cartoon. The Dark Lord is a big muscly dude that looks exactly like the Slayer, only he's in a mech suit stolen from Warhammer 40k. You kill him, all the demons disappear, and you get put back into a box by the alien robot angels. The end. I dunno, it's very unsatisfying. I didn't give a flying shit about the story in Doom Eternal, but I expected something epic, like maybe a fight in a mech suit against a titan demon, for example, or a really far-out trip through hell, but Immora, the game's final stage, is just a generic dark fantasy sci-fi city. Hell, Doom 3 did a lot of things poorly, but its trip to hell was better than what we get in Ancient Gods Part 2.

I think one of the reasons that I love Eternal's gameplay is that it's influenced by Quake 3 and Unreal Tournament, with its focus on speed, weapon switching, and movement gymnastics. It's an engrossing combination, and nothing beats blowing the turret off an arachnotron's back, pivoting to blood punch a hell knight into oblivion, and then flying through the air to light a mancubus on fire before blowing it to pieces with the supershotgun and ballista. That said, everything else in Eternal--the cartoony monkey bars, the abandonment of the environment as a realistic place, the green bobbing extra lives, the shit generic fantasy story--isn't great. I think that's why there's a real divergence in opinion regarding Eternal between the hardcore base and the casual gamer. The casual prefers the more grounded and less artificial experience of Doom 2016, whereas the git good gamer loves the brutality of Eternal's demanding gameplay. I can relate to both, and I doubt that Ancient Gods Part 2 will satisfy anyone.