blog

may 1

I added new youtubers to the list. go check it out. everything after quinton reviews is new

mar 30

every time I update this I feel like it's been longer than it has

music

I started writing down things in a document instead of trying to remember it while I'm writing this and I think it's working. although I do have "terrific ambient. write more" written for one. oh well.

while doing this though it helped in a way I wasn't expecting. it's actually less work to do these lists now. instead of writing html code and thinking of what I'm going to say I just write what I already said, maybe change it if I thought of something different.

here's some stuff I liked, and as a bonus, some I didn't!

  • David Byrne - Feelings: excellent take on classic rock. expands on the tropes a lot. I like his weird vocal vibrato, it makes songs sound so eerie.
  • New Order - Technicolor Dreams: great synthpop or post punk or whatever it's called. I also listened to Low-Life but didn't like it.
  • Perfect Angel at Heaven - Imploder: not as crazy for it as I was the EP but it's still good and I'm still excited for what's next.
  • full body 2 - infinity signature: kind of sounds like someone singing over someone else playing a dreamcast. it's good.
  • RUMKICKS - 反骨 (Born Rude): fun, fast punk. good melodies and party vibes.
  • Lucie Viktová - Cave Acoustics : cool cave sounds with some harrowing instruments here and there.
  • zzzahara - Tender: decent bedroom dreampop. some catchy tracks.
  • underscores - Wallsocket: Kickass album. Great followup to their last album. Leaves a lot of their hyperpop roots behind. Some slow sections I didn't care too much for. Should've listened to it way earlier.
  • Blank Banshee - 4D: kickass vaportrap, leaning more into club and synthwave. all the songs sort of melt together but in a good way.
  • Prince - Purple Rain: good. some of his performances are too over the top for me. hot take but more songs should be as overtly sexually explicit as darling nikki. it feels like furries are the only ones making music that descriptively explicit.
  • Dan Mason - Devil Killer: good retro gaming style breakcore.
  • Jimi Hendrix - Electric Ladybird: a real powerhouse of a record. not in songs as much as style. Everything feels so discordant yet cohesive. can't comprehend what kind of talent we lost when he died. on a sidenote, the museum of pop culture had an exhibit on him with some artifacts that was pretty cool.
  • Loris S Sarid - Wood, Metals, Clay, Glass, Plastic, Fabric, Paint, Grass: sweely sad 36 minute ambient track. it's good.
  • Thought Beings - Interdimensional EP: excellent 80s revivalism. all your favorite 80s noises in one EP.
  • Sweeping Promises - Good Living is Coming For You: I really liked Hunger for a Way Out but this felt like more of the same. maybe I'm over lofi punk stuff.
  • Diamante Electrico - Mira Lo Que Me Hiciste Hacer: good spanish modern yacht rock. there's a cover of who wants to rule the world on here.
  • Captain KRB - Slow Toast: ear tickling DAWcore, which is a term I just made up to describe something that sounds sort of like dungeon synth but less refined. like someone messing around in a DAW. doesn't mean it's bad. it's charming actually. if I wasn't a coward I would've released music like this.
  • Jim Lauderdale, Del McCoury, The Po' Ramblin' Boys - The Long and Lonesome Letting Go: I think I'm off the banjo train for now. this sounds a bit too similar to me. I really liked the title track and Ghost of a Rose, but everything else was sort of the same bluegrass I've always heard.
  • Everyone Asked About You - Paper Airplanes, Paper Hearts: good, emotional 90s emo pop punk. they can hold a note a bit too long and be off key, but it adds to the charm.
  • Robert Finley - Black Bayou: Excellent soul, but listening to the album all at once gives you the impression that he's a hopeless romantic who's constantly in and out of 'definitely the one' relationships. alligator bait is funny though.
  • Romance - Endless Love: woeful yet sweet 35 minute ambient track. sounds like a love lost.
  • Neutral Milk Hotel - On Avery Island: man I wish he kept making music. kind of feels like odd and offputting music has been forever relegated to electronic.
  • Neil Young - Harvest: protest music done right. I wish more music took this approach
  • HMLTD - West of Eden: kind of edgy at the beginning. not as bombastic or good as the worm album. satan, luella & I is a bop though and I almost certainly heard it before hearing this album.
  • Sferro - PETTY: not as iconic as emotion engine but still decent cyberpunk vaporwave.
  • Photay with Carlos Niño - An Offering: excellent and calming ambient music. I wasn't actually expecting ambient since the last thing from Photay I heard was Waking Hours but it was a welcome surprise.
  • Luli Lee - Phoenix: decadent korean power pop. short and sweet. awesome guitars. vocals still feel weird, like the microphone is off or something. hard to describe, sounds flat not in a performance way but a production way.
  • Monte Hills - International Monte Hills Week: groovin' and pumpin' future funk with a variety of electronic styles sprinkled in.
  • Marvin Gaye - Let's Get It On: now THIS is music. last half drags a bit but the first half is banger after sexy banger. I liked What's Going On but this is another level of bop. we need to bring back strings in popular music.
  • Future Islands - People Who Aren't There Anymore: the hits are really good (peach, the tower), but the rest of the album is trying to fit the a square peg (unique deep vocals) into a round hole (surfy rock style that doesn't always fit).
  • GUHTS - Regeneration: sort of if you put punk girl vocals on messa. the first half of the album blends together but the last half picks it up.
  • Kevin Holliday - LADYBUG: smooth rnb with guitars. very good. just enough going on to make it interesting while also having a casual vibe.
  • blurhie - nala: the new age of youtube recommendationcore is here and this is one of the good ones. it's like my bloody valentine with more varied vocal delivery. production isn't great but it's indie as fuck so whatever.
  • Mdou Moctar - Afrique Refait: did not like this much at all. none of the remixes were much in the spirit of the original tracks.
  • Geno7 - Knives: a cute collection of humorous short and entertaining jingles.
  • Coolin - one day away from home feels like a hundred: I feel guilty for leaving florida, like there was anything I could do, but everywhere I've been for the year since has been better in every way. like idk if I would choose florida over anything else outside the southeast. I just know that if I grew up outside of florida I'd be one of those northeast liberals saying we should burn it down and start over. but I'm not and I know the potential being lost. it just sucks. I hope it gets better soon. the courts have been ruling on the side of justice and the whole conservative movement is losing steam but still. hopefully the thousands of conservatives leaving their states for florida works out for the states.

it's kind of funny when the bandcamp lists feature something which ends up being the whole album (because it's one song) so I just add it to my list, like oh how convenient lol.

video games

I told myself I would start playing new games this year... then got sucked into rimworld again. I need the game to be harder but I don't feel like dealing with the things that make it harder so I end up with a hundred well-equipped colonists who manage to overwhelmingly succeed.

I did get into helldivers 2 though. finally, a PvE game that I can hang with. I waited until all the server garbage sorted out before buying it and thankfully my friends are still into it. never seen a game do bug combat as satisfying as helldivers. hopefully this bodes well for the future of Gaming.

finally got around to Kitten Burst. it's an excellent web love letter from jam2go. imagine broken reality but with gameplay. it's very sweet, well-written, and probably induces motion sickness into those sensitive. highly recommend for people who grew up online in the way I'm thinking of.

have I talked about lethal company yet? I didn't know they could make funny multiplayer horror games good but damned if they did. terrific multiplayer survival whatever the fuck.

palworld took up too much of my time. at least I got my money's worth. time to come back in a year and see if anything got improved or added. the discourse doesn't interest me that much anymore. you won't find me rushing to defend nintendo.

still on that forza grind. they're adding car packs monthly that aren't included with the ultimate edition. it's sad. really put me off future games. that said, I'd probably get them if they were 50% off. but I'm not holding my breath. that said, they're still keeping up with the free new cars, so it's not totally written off.

I did not buy forza motorsport and that was definitely a good idea. I just remember one of those gamefest presentations featured FM, but they talked about the history of cars or some shit and nothing about the actual game. that's how I knew it would be rocky.

feb 6

sorry, it took me a while to get settled in.

I made an email at unevaluated at protonmail dot com if you want to chat!

music

ok so music... I'm disappointed about the bandcamp news like everyone else. firing half the staff for no good reason sucks. bandcamp daily seems to be still getting updates, but for how long I don't know. it's still the best place to be, though, so I'll still link them. it's just sad.

so if you know me, you know I like to listen to "obscure" stuff. I want to be the person finding hidden gems (although bandcamp daily generally does that for me) and spreading them around to people who might like it. so I leave off the more popular things (100gecs, parannoul, etc. liked all three btw).

actually, here's a list of releases that I liked without commentary:

  • Louis Cole - Quality over Opinion
  • Big Thief - Dragon New Warm Mountain I Believe In You
  • Two Door Cinema Club - Keep On Smiling (yes they're still making music)
  • Parannoul - After the Magic & After the Night (Live)
  • Willi Carlisle - Peculiar, Missouri
  • Nickel Creek - Celebrants
  • Sunny War - Anarchist Gospel
  • Colin Stetson - When we were what wept for the sea
  • George Clanton - Ooh I Rap Ya
    •

that said, I'm not really looking up stream numbers for all these people. the player I use doesn't even have that data. so I'll probably put some popular stuff on just out of ignorance. still like it though.

the following categorizations are going to be very broad. to keep things simple I'm going to include things from 2022 and 2023, probably no earlier. my listen list has a lag of about six months and it's simpler for me to check years than specific dates.

electronic

that was a lot. electronic continues to be the most plentiful genre for me. it's easier for me to like an electronic album than anything else, probably due to video game nostalgia.

I'm very particular about metal in infuriatingly undefinable ways. I don't like screaming except the "good" kind of screaming. I don't like the black metal tropes except when I do. I'm just particular about it.

other

that's all for right now. sorry for lumping a bunch of stuff in "other," I felt like the main genres I listened to this year fell under alternative and electronic. all of these are great and worth listening to.

I'm doing a new thing this year while listening to albums: taking notes! that's right, doing the thing that anyone serious about music writing does. I easily fall into the trap of listening to something and thinking I'll remember anything about it later. I need to work on using specific words and terms (and using them correctly) but I am really not sure how I'll do that. maybe there's a glossary of music reviewer terms somewhere lol.

I do need to separate my entire blog out. I should have pages for each of the things I talk about individually, not all on this blog page. I think that would help users more. I regret not updating that often because this is a muscle to me and I do need to keep training it to keep it strong. I feel burnt out right now and I shouldn't really be. I also need to write more notes in general. I started to use obsidian to write notes so that should help as long as I'm dilligent about it.

dec 19

happy holidays! I made an addition to the travel blog! it's about the place my partner and I stayed for 5 months. mostly food-based. we didn't do as much as I wanted, but it was our first time living together so we took it easy.

I'm going to do a music wrap at some point. I'm relistening to all my favorites and then I'll have something put up. might be a while.

we've been traveling a lot so I don't have a lot to say about video games or media I've watched or listened to right now. I have watched and listened to quite a bit, but I just wanted to get the travel blog out.

I really need to make this blog more blog-like, in a technical sense I mean. it doesn't scale well as it is right now, and eventually I'll have to make pages anyway.

nov 10

took my car in this month. we haven't gone anywhere since last month was so intense, but the intensity is going to ramp up real soon.

I bought a pen for my tablet but I can't get myself to set it up and draw. I have so many issues with starting things again. I really want to find some good digital art tutorials. to do everything right this time. I really don't want to draw on paper.

the eclipse happened and we were in a pretty good spot!! it actually snuck up on me, but i lucked out and got a gnarly picture.

I'm so glad I caught it. this was just me pointing my phone camera at it while there was just enough cloud cover. I didn't prepare at all unfortunately.

my left headphone separated for some reason. both arms that hold it on broke off, but I managed to tape it together, and it's holding strong right now. this was about to be a hopeless section about how I couldn't find the superglue, and then I used the superglue but it didn't work, and then I used the tape but it didn't work, but the tape worked so you should really commit before writing out a whole paragraph of despair.

went up to a cool beach, moonstone beach. took a lot of photos. california is so beautiful it's hard to believe. I should've touched the rocks more.

video games

battlefield 2042 has become an idling game for me cause it has a pretty dope coop vs ai mode that's just like much older games. just straight up you and the ai. although, as far as the game experience, cracks are starting to show. I am running into some pretty egregious bugs, like black screens after rounds and disappearing models. I'm pretty disappointed in how much of that is still in the game after so long.

more vampire survivors. doing a thing where I go consecutively through every character and then back. decided to do Hurry! mode from now on since there's not a whole lot of difference between it and normal runs, and I don't care too much about getting a level 30 santa water anymore.

played a tiny bit of rimworld. I had an idea of playing rimworld, then drawing a scene of something that happened that day, but I don't really like my start or my ideologion so I haven't touched it much. plus it was a really hard start.

I forgot to do forza weeklies for two days in a row haha. I can't tell if I'm really falling off the game or not.

that's it really. my partner is back on her block schedule so I'll basically go a week without playing video games that much which is a pretty big block of time all things considered.

music

422 albums, so 22 since last month, mostly at home while washing dishes or cooking.

some cool stuff this time:

  • Tirzah - trip9love...???: I wouldn't call this technically good--the production can be pretty poor--but there's something about it that is oddly compelling. it's british bedroom pop. it can be really catchy at times.
  • georgi1802 - Once That Always Was: very compelling classic vaporwave. very catchy moments with god tier sampling. somewhat emotional and dark.
  • the anchoret - it all began with loneliness: all the progressive metal you've been missing since ayreon. lots of fun, twists and turns you don't expect.
  • michele mercure - pictures of echoes: an anthology of avant-garde electronic songs from the 80s. I'm a big fan of her work and this one is no different. interesting sampling, eerie and cool synths, and a look into what independent electronic musicians were doing before aphex twin.
  • simple syrup - bloom: terrific vaporwave that pushes the boundaries of the genre, along with ambient in general. vaporwave 0 is the place to be.
  • cyndee with a c - confessions of a fangirl: short and upbeat with tight lyrics and production, and a terrific vocal performance.

    • videos

    I'm really falling off youtube. not like I'm watching any less though. I will say, however, that as far as political videos go, I've reached the point where all new videos are more or less rehashing points I've already heard and know about. people have talked about this phenomenon before, but it's weird to experience it. I'm skipping videos that talk about stuff I already know about.

  • 7 Unsolved Video Game Mysteries From Hell: this one's got some shit. sheesh. good video.
  • that's right, techconnect has opinions on power outlets in Power outlets are topsy turvy - but does it matter?. you are not safe from reprogramming.
  • the video that prompted that big paragraph up there, The Manosphere to Alt-Right Pipeline (we should all be talking about this), is a very good video if you haven't already seen three other manosphere videos. otherwise it's retreading the same points with no new perspective or information.
  • hoog videos are always good but the ad read in The $41 Billion Plan for Tokyo Explained is bizarre. just a completely different tone than the rest of the video.
  • The Rise (and Fall) of Patreon is a cool video because it goes into the financial technicalities of enshittification. there's a lot of videos that do a surface-level read on community reactions to website changes but none that go into why those changes happen in the first place.
  • remember when some point of contact at a glitter company let it slip that a lot of their glitter is sold to buyers she couldn't disclose? well chuppl discloses it in The End of the Glitter Conspiracy.
  • What (or who) is SMASNUG? is a surprisingly informative video about those offbrand products on discount websites.
  • fast-paced and funny writing in Fallout 3 is definitely one of the games of all time.
  • good shit in 100 car batteries wired in parallel!. real "don't try this at home" energy.
  • one of the best and most succinct videos about road safety in the US in Pedestrian Safety: We Just ERASED 40 Years of Progress.
  • OtherRuns does it again in These Speedruns Go Too Far, a video about how rules come about in speedruns, and how communities decide what exploits are too exploitative.
  • What If Clone High Was A Manga (And Also Insane) is very entertaining. he does a good job at pulling together context and absurdity in a concise video.
  • peter pulls together a bunch of retro tech in If YouTube Existed in 1998 in an attempt to make and upload a youtube video.
  • the rhetoric in VELMA & The Ugly Truth About "Good Representation" can be messy, but it's a necessary conversation about what representation in media really means.
  • neopunkfm makes another hit with Black Metal Lyric Or /r/atheism Post?, a pseudo-game show where contestants try to do the title.
  • Just Buy Everyone a Car is a response to people who claim that the cost of public transit projects could be used instead to buy everyone a car. which you know, if that works why hasn't it been done yet? it's cause it doesn't work.
  • I just found patrick boyle and I like his very dry sense of humor with very dry financial topics like in The Inevitable Decline of WeWork.
  • strange aeons is hit and miss but How Slenderman Became Real is a very good video about the cultural impact of slenderman, and doesn't pull any punches.
  • succinct and well done description of automatic content moderation in PSA: Don't Send this Photo on Discord!.
  • good little personal essay about The Creepypastas That Mattered, To Me.
  • I'm glad that people are moving off of Fandom. Stop Using Fandom goes into great detail on why it's a bad service, and why ultimately self-hosting is a better idea.
  • What is Lost Media? is kind of a funny premise, because everyone involved in the video (youtubers) materially benefit from "lost media" having the broadest definition possible and they don't address that. still a good video though.
  • it turns out the RCT2 manual has a shocking amount of misinformation. marcel vos goes into it in How Accurate is RollerCoaster Tycoon 2's Manual?.
  • there's some good jokes in Roasting Cars at the Rich People Mall.
  • surprisingly lighthearted video about cults in Answers From The Beyond. unless the narrator just didn't go deep enough. slick editing.
  • a retrospective on teen dystopian books is a great video that provides a lot of relevant context to those of us who weren't reading those novels at the time.

    • negative reviews

  • nerdcity spends a 40 minute runtime in The world's highest-paid artist talking about how a cryptoscammer scams people and then caps it with "I don't think this guy's malicious" and then ends the video shilling NFTs. like the video itself is fine but the take at the end really left a poor taste.
  • why starbound LOST. puts "the game takes too much after terraria" on the same level as "the manager of the project manipulated and defrauded his employees. the latter sounds more interesting and topical to do a dive on.
  • the review on the 2023 Acura Integra A-Spec: Regular Car Reviews was one I was anticipating but he just spends half the video complaining that the car doesn't have a real manual witout giving any good reasons why it should other than superfluous car guy preference.
  • Why is THIS in a PlayStation Game? might be one of the most poorly sequenced videos I've watched. it will repeat things, and tell you things it already told you like it was the first time, and you can see a lot of the twists a mile away. this video could've been 20 minutes. good at describing the technical information at least.
  • Markiplier, Welcome to the Game, & The Ethics of Developer Trolling doesn't actually get into any real ethics or philosophy. it's just surface level. he just tries to lead a "is developer trolling always good or always bad?" when that's just a stupid false dichotomy. the good parts of the video is when he describes the trolling being done to markiplier and others.
  • mostly a negative review because clickbait. ZOOMERS: A Deep Dive Into The Lonely Generation. isn't actually a deep dive into gen z. it's a self help video. the narrator just tells you to go outside.
  • pop culture detective was not cooking with Searching for Humanity in Fortnite. it tries to be about how much effort it is to form human connection in virtual spaces of violence but comes across more as someone mulling philosophically about how people are more likely to talk to strangers at a bar than the grocery store.

    • 1 hr+ videos

  • The Creation, Evolution and Exhaustion of Call of Duty Zombies goes into the history call of duty zombies. it's opinionated, which I like. it keeps it interesting, and puts you in the mind of a player at the time when all of it was going down.
  • my hot take is that TRANS PERSON INFILTRATES A HATE CHURCH was a reckless video concept with very little gain. you can see what people believe by reading their posts online or watching their news. you do not need to put yourself in a dangerous situation to find out that bigots are bigots and are also kind of normal people sometimes too but also consumed by their hatred.
  • a normal creepypasta retrospective is a pretty fun video.
  • THE ABSURD DEPTHS OF THE POKéBLOCK is a fun video that does a deep dive into a game mechanic in the gen 3 pokemon games.
  • super eyepatch wolf's The Simpsons is Good Again is a good video, if still beholden to those ever-present super eyepatch wolf tropes.
  • philosophy tube made a good video about ethics in AI in Here's What Ethical AI Really Means that explores how the marketing surrounding AI bills it automatic and self-sustaining when really it relies on exploiting labor in poor countries.
  • majuular's Are You Afraid of the Dork? | A Dark Seed Series Adventure is good listening material. sometimes you can appreciate someone playing a game so you don't have to.
  • sovietwomble's What's so strange about The Forest? (2014) is a good video that talks a lot about how quality control can affect player experience in a variety of ways. it can be repetitive in parts, but it goes into design choices that I don't see people criticize enough.
  • something to have in the background but 150 RuneScape Facts & Easter Eggs is more random update notes and quest spoilers than interesting facts and easter eggs.
  • bobbybroccoli does it again in The Company that Broke Canada. I think it's interesting as well in that it goes into how the united states affects canada economically and politically and how that affects the citizens of canada.

    • tv shows

    bet you didn't expect this did'ya? all I really have to say is that the new season of our flag means death is good so far. my partner has been showing me what we do in the shadows and I really like that one too. we watched the most recent season though so I saw that first before the rest of the show lol.

    we've also been watching the walking dead but that fell off hard so I'm probably not going to watch it again for a while. let her get through it.

    misc

    jesus that was a lot. why did I do that

    oct 7

    whew. what a month it's been. since the month began ive been to sacramento and los angeles. travel blog pending, we still have to review photos, and it's itself a lot of work and I have so much other stuff on my mind that I want to write down first.

    blog updates

    new youtube recommendations page!! I collated all my favorite youtubers onto a list there. it's on the drop downs above too. some of them have favorite videos linked as well, not all though.

    I want to do a "favorite songs" one as well, so stay tuned for that.

    video games

    I have simply stopped playing cookie clicker. you know how it is. i got to the point where it takes a long time to get anything anymore so it's time to do something else.

    getting back into vampire survivors. I have a big backlog of youtube videos so I'm idling on it while watching those. there's always new maps and stuff and new characters and items so I try to unlock those as well. still haven't figured out the night sword upgrade though. hard to have anything to say about the game lol.

    been playing rings of saturn since I was told it was like captainforever, which is itself one of my favorite games of all time. it definitely has simularities in the physics, and it's cool so far. I'm taking it really slow, although it seems like you're supposed to learn through dying and making costly mistakes, and I can definitely see how those mistakes can happen and you can go bankrupt.

    I guess I should tell you about the game lol. it's a space mining game where you mine rocks in saturn's rings by shooting at them, and then you take them back to sell them and upgrade your ship. it's a meticulous but relaxing gameplay loop but I can see how it can be stressful. there's supposed to be space pirates but I've only seen other miners. one of them stole rocks from me...

    I haven't gone deep into the rings yet at all but I'm anticipating it.

    played counterstrike 2. that's counterstrike all right. uninstalled.

    played battlefield 2042. I'm a schmuck and got 2042 day one cause I just assumed it would get better over time. and to be fair, I don't hate it as it is right now. they seemed to fix all the gamebreaking bugs (the one I remember was just not being able to aim down sights at all). we played a gamemode that took you to maps with weapons from earlier battlefield games, namely battlefield 3, bad company 2, maybe 1942. that was honestly really cool. it felt really good.

    as far as shooter engines go, i've never been more satisfied than with frostbite. like the jank is part of why I love it. I don't really see any reason to polish it except to make the game merely playable.

    you can change attachments on the fly which is neat. I haven't used vehicles too much. my strategy in 3 and 4 was always to rush into tanks with other tanks because you could flip them over that way. no idea if you can still do that here.

    had a forza buddy for a minute but he got bored. I need to take my laptop on vacations more and preload forza and stuff so I can do the weeklies in the hotel.

    oh and I played party animals. I just hate these games with funny physics. I don't enjoy them much at all. I know I'm just kind of bad at it but also the randomness in the floppy limbs and stuff isn't funny to me it's just frustrating. a friend bought it for me but I had him refund it.

    some other friends wanted to play minecraft so I set them on the server that the other friendgroup is on, so hopefully they log in one day and see a giant castle across from their cherrywood village and be like woah :)
    I spent so much time in modded minecraft that in vanilla minecraft I just like collecting surface raw materials like wood and filling chests with wood for people to use. like an old warrior retiring to a simple life. I used to be good at minecraft...

    music

    I'm at 400 albums! which means i've listened to 24 from the last update, most of those being on a couple long drives. it includes EPs too btw so it's not immensely accurate

    here's some recs:

  • TEKE::TEKE - hagata: some crazy japaense psychedelic rock. it goes hard.
  • fria fartyget - första resan: bandcamp page describes it perfectly: playful, contemporary art jazz from sweden. it's fun. maybe even funny if I knew swedish.
  • hmltd - the worm: pink floyd's the wall but less insane. does that make sense?
  • nourished by time - erotic probiotic 2: bedroom pop with a soulful singer. makes you feel like you're floating.
  • kuroi ame - data garden: synthwave has a high bar to pass nowadays. easy to make but hard to excel in. this excels. I actually found kuroi ame through their collab with an artist recommended by supereyepatch wolf. funny how that turns out.
  • the pink stones - you know who: fun country music with songs you can sing along to. I know a lot of people on neocities probably aren't into country... but give it a shot. its not all the stuff your parents are always listening to.

    • videos

    i watched. a lot of videos. my backlog is still immense. I've had no time this month to watch. but I still watched a lot.

  • i'm obsessed with these terrible video game records. is a pretty interesting look into an obsolete and also terrible product made to cash in on several franchises.
  • I just like the guy's energy in More unremarkable and odd places in Mario 64. this is the kind of thing I'd be doing in video games. just making a perimeter around the place looking for odds and ends.
  • f.d. signifier made an interesting point in Fresh and Fit are gone... here's why that doesn't matter basically saying that algorithms don't radicalize anyone who didn't already want to be radicalized. he says it much better in the video. course what comes to mind was those kids saying we hate women to sneako. those kids were like 11, were they algorithmically made like that or was it more the socialization and lack of parental guidance? I just thought of that now so idk.
  • I found a video by zoe bee about How PragerU Hurts Students (and Teachers), which goes into how the mechanics of lesson plans provided by prageru are poor and ineffective at being lesson plans. I thought it was really interesting since it's from an educator point of view.
  • apparently table tennis is the most difficult rockstar game.
  • RCR goes hard in his review of the 2023 ford bronco. just leaves no stone unturned there.
  • redlyne had a great video on Exploring Forgotton Minecraft Servers in the same style of his exploring mmos series but minecraft servers on legacy versions of minecraft. it's cool and gets emotional at times.
  • started to watch this duncan guy. The Philosopher Tierlist has some funny editing and writing.
  • 2003 Porsche Boxster: Regular Car Reviews goes into the history of the origin of the boxster which is interesting.
  • neopunkfm had a good video on 100gecs in when your fanbase gets the joke which analyzes 100gecs and their fans in a more respectful way than the usual music commentator.
  • I think it's funny that hypixel had its own rares and a duplication bug. purple party hats all over again time is a flat circle in How Hypixel Skyblock's Richest Players Lost 1 Trillion coins.
  • jan Misali made a good video on why the /hj tone indicator is worse than useless.
  • noodle made a video on Why games are too big that goes into how a game with too big of scope can ultimately doom the company making it.
  • higher tier recommendation than the rest in Solving the Mystery of VelmaDinkley.com. very effective editing and storytelling. keeps you engaged.
  • also a higher tier recommendation is aMSa: The Only Yoshi (who could do it) does a very good job at making you hype for a game you've never played.
  • lsupersonicq made a video about Nickelodeon's Lost Employee Yearbook, Found (1998) which itself is fine but like the premise... that it was "lost" doesn't make sense to me. it was more or less an internal document that was given to employees as a keepsake. is it really "lost media" if it was never intended to be publicly released and is probably well kept by the people who it was intended for (other than the people who. you know. sold it on ebay)?

    • negative reviews

    videos I specifically did not like. I got pulled into a lot more youtube-recommended videos this month, as opposed to subscriptions + friend recommendations, and some of them I did not like!

    zackary smigel got in the recommendationsphere after his admittedly decent video on the recommendation algorithm but I went back and watched his YouTube Subculture Is A Mess video and all you need to know is he says "this isn't supposed to be a drama video" then immediately goes into the background on drama in four random youtube communities.

    emplemon's Rogue Waves tries to pull a defunctland and go comedically far into the past in the intro to go back to it later but it fails to deliver and just wastes half the video runtime.

    I've fallen off sarahz's videos. for the most part sick of the writing (which is ironic given that I like her cowriter's videos). I feel like if you need to caveat caveat caveat then the writing isn't really strong enough in the first place. anyway I Was Wrong About Queerbaiting takes 39 minutes to say that judging people based on their appearance alone is bad.

    razbuten's My Favorite Games I've Forgotten is a clone of Games I Wish I Never Replayed, which itself was a much stronger video imo.

    Why Your Favourite Racing Games Don't Have Your Favourite Cars is just full of baseless speculation except for the literal porsche EA exlusivity deal. doesn't satisfactorily answer the title. maybe an actual journalist could do this.

    1 hr+ videos

    This is Financial Advice makes me feel weird. his videos have taken place in my mind as definitive breakdowns of scams and dishonest practices, but This is Financial Advice came across more as a drama video. he just details the rise and fall of a cult. it's still a good video but put aside parasocial antics.

    sophie from mars's The World Is Not Ending | Sophie From Mars is a bunch of long-winded book reports strung together. I can't recommend it. the audio makes it hard to focus on.

    The Incel to Trans Pipeline and Inside Mari is a good video. it starts off with humor but eventually gets more and more personal. it can get emotionally rough. the video talks about how pre-transition incels internalize their feelings and relates it to the book.

    kind of a tim rogers inspired video in NOMOIDA Reviews Shenmue. it's good, more or less a comprehensive history of shenmue and the cultural context it existed in and its impact on video games later. the last third of the video is a lot of philosophical rambling that I don't particularly find interesting. you'll know it when you get to it. it's obviously very personal to them but it's something I've heard a couple times before.

    I Watched All the Peanuts Specials You Didn't Know Existed is mindless entertainment with good humor. good video.

    hello future me's The AI Art Apocalypse is very thorough on the issue, but gets more and more existential as it goes on, which is probably necessary but my ears tend to glaze over that (see NOMOIDA Reviews Shenmue). still very good and very thorough on the issue.

    The Unhinged Meltdown of Reddit's Worst Meme Stock Influencer is just a movie length video of raw video from the video subject's youtube channel with minimal analysis, which itself is video of a guy engaging in very cringe behaviors in public. you can imagine that being difficult to watch. this entire video was obsoleted by that part of folding ideas video that off-handedly featured this guy.

    drama sublist

    famous urbanism youtuber notjustbikes posted on bluesky saying that people should give up on america and move to the netherlands, which the urbanism community did not take well. his point was that substantial improvements in urban design in america would take too long so you might as well move to a country where it's already done for you, which makes sense I guess aside from being worded hilariously poorly and an incredibly privileged point of view.

    but it also brought up some interesting elements of parasocial relationships. obstensibly urbanism youtuber fans are not children[citation needed], but they still created a person in jason that he just wasn't. he never wanted to be the de facto leader of the online urbanism movement, he just wanted to make smug videos on why the place he moved to is cool and awesome[citation needed].

    so you had all these people mad that he wasn't the person they thought he was. I got caught up in it too. it was still a dumb take but the revelations of parasocial relationships within the urbanism community is fascinating.

    misc

    that's it!! travel blog is still forthcoming. no more travel plans for the rest of the year, thank god. this was a difficult month with a lot of traveling that I'm as happy to be done with as happy it was happening.

    for now I'm going to catch up on videos, update the website, and maybe start to draw.

    sept 1

    sept 1 cause it's so early in the month

    video games

    I have fallen back into cookie clicker. you know what it is. the initial idle game. he added the final building so I'm just playing it to idle as it were. I like golden cookies so I tend to fill my field with golden clovers to get more golden cookies and to go for that frenzy + building boost + dragonflight combo. hasn't happened since I started playing again. but it will.
    I will say that I like the writing in cookie clicker. it might be weird to say, but the little funny and surreal upgrade descriptions are a joy to read, and give me zombie estate vibes, which is a good thing.

    UPDATE: it happened AS OF WRITING THIS! writing on my website just gives me good luck. not dragonflight but still.

    I played some garrys mod with friends. why does every server need to download 10gb of extras now? not like the game is any good. idk if it's me but the engine needs to feel better to play. I just want to shoot but source isn't good for shooting despite the video game playercounts.

    music

    I'm at 366 albums as of today so far this year. it's definitely slowed down.... I really try to listen to an album a day but it doesn't work out that way too often.

    my last couple favorites are:

  • karate - unsolved: I'm not normally into this, but something about the vocal delivery combined with the bluesy, slightly discordant instrumentals makes me feel... sad. I don't know why bandcamp says it came out in 2023. it came out in 2000.
  • Loris S Sarid - a tiny reminder: puzzle game music with some quirks here and there. loris s. sarid is my favorite ambient artist right now. he makes very calming but still interesting to listen to music.
  • mammal hands - captured spirits: more emotional hands from my favorite jazz trio. this one is me going back into their discography to listen to more of it since gift from the trees hit me so hard.

    • videos

    I figure I'll also put down videos I really liked, as well as long videos.

    not an essay or long video but new world record for super mario bros.

    massive takedown of the ford bronco in the scathing regular car reviews video 2023 Ford Bronco Sasquatch 6MT. not in a video length way but in a rhetorical way. just kills and buries it.

    very interesting video on How PragerU Hurts Students (and Teachers) by zoe bee. instead of taking a political angle it goes into how the provided lesson plans are just bad.

    there are some channels that I stop everything to watch when they come out with a video, and jam2go is one of them. Where's the dude singing "Hey There Delilah"? is a fun video with twists and turns, and cool geometric y2k editing, and it's not just about hey there delilah.

    I also watched skibidi toilet. kind of neat but it's losing my interest. toward the end is just escalation into escalation like a marvel movie. need to do more abstract storytelling to keep my attention.

    I started watching LSuperSonicQ, who specializes in lost media stuff, which I just find interesting. some of the videos are superfluous, but I guess lost media channels gotta stretch to find content. can't devote your entire channel to finding metropolis.

    I started watching Kyle Reid Music. he's an excitable guy who talks about music in ways that makes me happy. some cool video concepts like reviewing albums anthony fantano called "not good". the videos where he makes his dad listen to stuff aren't as bad as you'd expect.

    1 hr+ videos

    I watched quinton reviews The Decay of Sam & Cat. I'm kind of mixed on it. definitely a must watch if you've been following it but it gets a bit too off topic imo. last half is good but maybe think of the whole video less of an analysis of sam & cat and more of a vlog about quinton's experiences doing this series, cause that's what it ends up being about.

    I watched 50 Internet Oddities You Should Know About: Weird Internet Iceberg by kylie. it's more or less a list of interesting things from the narrator's history online, which imo is cool cause there's stuff on this iceberg that aren't on any other. so if you're into weird internet horror this is a good video to watch.

    How to make it as a Video Essayist is a neat dive into the process. it's very detailed. kind of like F.D. Signifier's video essay style but applied to a tutorial. although I wouldn't really call it a tutorial. for more videos in this vein, quinton reviews had a pretty personable video on his thoughts on the "algorithm". I wonder if the F.D. video was prompted by this, lol. I'm pretty sure he's a fan of quinton reviews.

    drama sublist
  • linus tech tips also got caught running their company like a frat house, which is a bit more surprising to me. so they took a stab at gamers nexus in a video, which is reddit's favorite tech youtuber, and he made a big takedown of linus tech tips, in which apparently:
    1. got an evaluation model of a graphics card cooler.
    2. used it on the wrong graphics card.
    3. said it was bad in a video.
    4. sold it at auction instead of giving it back.

    so. lol. brainless company. but that's not all. they published a jokey response video, then a former social media manager came out to talk about how horrible her treatment at the company was. while researching this I found a dexerto article that explains it pretty well. it looks like they're deciding to handle the latter allegations internally, which I don't have a comment on.

    misc

    check out the new travel blog. we went to vegas!!! it was a lot of fun. hope you have fun reading about it.

    not a whole lot happening in my life. applied for a job and got rejected. still trying to figure out life. got more trips planned but we'll see if it's enough content for a blog post.

    • august

    long time no see.

    video games

    these should be grouped by paragraph

    I played the hammerwatch II demo and it looks pretty good. I really liked hammerwatch and heroes of hammerwatch. they're simple top down dungeon crawler games where you can pick up items and you always get me with items. I'm apprehensive of the control scheme in Hammerwatch II, but I usually get over it.
    Hammerwatch had a lot of custom maps that I spent a lot of time in, and I played a lot of them with a friend a very long time ago. I couldn't get anyone to play Heroes of Hammerwatch with me. I get it though, it's a huge time sink of a game. nobody has time anymore for that.

    I finally got aphrodites' favor in Hades, and after that I kind of lost interest in the game. it took way too long to get dusa and aphrodites' final dialogues, and now the heat is getting to the point where I'm not having as much fun. holy shit I have 150 hours in it. jesus.

    I played Pentiment. it's neat but dialogue mechanics are really annoying so I don't know if I'll complete the game. by dialogue mechanics I mean literally the mechanics of dialogue coming up too slow and being too slow to click through. I thought the art style would be more impressive but maybe I was thinking of a different game. it's still good, don't get me wrong, but it's still just a visual novelly point and click adventure.

    I played needy streamer overload. it's just ddlc but the whole game is collecting endings. baby's first edgy game I guess. I liked the visual effects though. I think the game is well made I just don't really care for it.

    I played through Hammerwatch again on hard mode. it's still a time sink. I was energized to get achievements but realized there's a whole other campaign and so I didn't do that one again, but I did complete castle hammerwatch. it was nice to do that.

    I think they took out the thief's ability to get money from kills. that was so overpowered cause you could buy everything by the end of the game. I chose the thief cause I thought I would get to do that but I was never able to buy the upgrade. oh well.
    I have a friend who really likes getting steam achievements, but I never really went for them. I just can't be bothered. so many of them require you to do very specific things and a lot of the time those things are just too tedious.

    duck game was back in my life for a bit. I have six friends with the game but only three of them play at a time so I haven't got to play a 4 player game yet. I am very good at duck game. I got platinum in all the arcade challenges. I've only lost one game since I started playing with them, which I hope isn't too disheartening.
    the problem with 3 players is I can just wait around until the other players fight each other and then I finish off the last one. not hectic enough.
    duck game is my favorite party game. maybe combat game in general. it's just fun and fast although the map variety is getting slim. maybe I can fix that myself. it also has an impeccable aesthetic. it's styled like a genesis game. and it's actually fast. minimal inter-round match time. I just wish the news segment was in online multiplayer even though that would probably be so annoying for everyone else.

    forza is adding alpha romeo and lancia so that's neat. I'm still doing the weekly challenges. I'm going to try for the paint and livery accolades by remaking textures from some n64 racing games. went through a big trial trying to dump textrues from a rom, but it was rough going.
    what I DID find however is somebody made a whole texture viewer for world driver championship and it's fucking awesome to have. I really did not want to have to play through the whole game AGAIN lol.

    falling into bad habits. started playing custom cnc generals zh missions again. idk they can be really hectic and fun or extremely difficult. ones that were hard when I was younger are very easy now, especially since I have a fast computer. this is a game I can really write a lot about if I wanted.

    music

    I'm at 343 albums as of today so far this year.

    my last couple favorites are:

  • airiel - Molten Young Lovers": this really perfects that british post-punk style, like the smiths or the cure. dark and airy in the best way possible.
  • The Murlocs - Calm Ya Farm: a lot of fun. witty. hate looking at the cover. you could convince someone this came out forty years ago. it sounds old but in a good way.

    • I'm starting to have higher standards for what I listen to, so my collection of tracks has stopped growing as quickly. I'm not driving anymore and that was when I listened to albums the most, so I'm having to find time, in between listening to bandcamp articles too.

    videos

    this is where I'll start to 'review' 1hr+ videos. I figure if a youtube video starts reaching feature length, maybe it should be worth your time. I'll also just talk about whatever. I haven't actually watched that many long videos this month.

    I watched action button reviews boku no natsuyasumi. excellent video, if comically long. just a lot of emotions in it.

    I've been keeping up with littlest joel cause I like his takes and perspectives

    .

    I watched The WEIRD World of Jimmy Neutron in which a guy describes to you every episode of jimmy neutron. if you have seen every episode of jimmy neutron, this has no new information for you. there's no additional context surrounding the show or its production, or really any insight. but if you want to watch the whole show without actually watching the whole show, this is for you.

    I watched The Top Gear Iceberg Explained. this is a self-berg. the person making the video made the iceberg. he's opinionated, but it's a good video if you want to know about behind the scenes top gear lore, so to speak.

    drama sublist
  • idubbbz did a really interesting apology for his past content. it made me think about what the new generation will have to do to atone for edgy pasts. that's a reductive way to put it, since people can be (like in idubbbz case) very vile, racist, etc. in their past online, and all that stuff is just out there forever and everybody knows, but if someone looks back and realize they're on the wrong path, and changes their mind, then what are they supposed to do? kill themselves? imagine having so much evidence online that you suck and nobody should trust you but you genuinely want to change. sounds rough.
  • little joel had a really good take on the situation. moist critikal had a really bad take where he said "uhhh it was a different time" and then made a followup video doubling down. stupid.
  • turns out matt and ryan supermega should've run their company like an actual company and not like a frat house. common mistake I guess. they're done making videos forever now as a result.

    • misc

    I do not know how to use the fancy camera. we did get some lenses for it though, and it is fun to play with. the battery life sucks though. you can have a picture as a treat.

    look how clear it is. wow. honestly though I understand why photographers have pictures in galleries of just mundane stuff. looking through a camera like this makes everything feel important. there's so much weight in pressing the button. hearing the shutter. the limited field of view. it's momentous.
    I want to get macro lenses to take better pictures of bugs and plants. maybe things too.

    we're scrapbooking now. maybe I'll find a way to scan in some pages. we've only done a few so far. my original 'scrapbook' was going to be a corkboard but that would be really hard to lug around.

    it's really late and I'm really tired so I'm going to call it a night. thanks for reading. it's nice to get this all out there.

    july

    mind the mess. I want to get back into neocities. I have more ideas now.

    I want to talk about some of the albums I really like. I like how I did these last year, and just want to make more

    I want to start a travel blog, maybe including scans of things I pick up.

    I have a nice but old camera now. I can add stuff related to that.