Park Lake Speakers

Something that the interview I just reblogged on Japanese vs Western video game design didn’t...

Sun, 19 May 2013 19:32:54 +0100

Something that the interview I just reblogged on Japanese vs Western video game design didn’t address is that Western and American are not interchangeable, and localising like they are causes its own issues. The rest of the world, or even just the English-speaking bits of it, is a pretty big audience!

One of the more immersion-shattering localisation things I have come across in a Japanese game was in Ace Attorney, a series that generally gets praised for a good localisation that finds alternatives for a lot of Japanese cultural references and humour that wouldn’t have been widely understood.

Problem is, the games carefully never actually state where they are meant to be set, and still have plenty in them which gives away their Japanese origin. At one point in one of the games there is a puzzle based around a car, and in the version I played you find that that car was imported from the UK. The point is meant to be that the car has the driver sitting on the opposite side to other cars.

Up to that point, I’d been playing with a fuzzy but unquestioned assumption that the game was still meant to be set in Japan; in Japan, cars are driven on the left, the same as the UK. To solve the puzzle, I had to work through a thought process that while I was playing a British version of a clearly Japanese game, it was nonetheless intended that I should assume, unprompted, that the game was set in the US. It made my head hurt a bit.

East vs. West: An Interview with Keiji Inafune & Hiroyuki Kobayashi

Sun, 19 May 2013 13:35:01 +0100

fetchquests:

I was going to talk a bit about an interview I had found about 3 years ago, with Keiji Inafune (illustrator/co-designer of the Mega Man series) and Hiroyuki Kobayashi (producer of the Resident Evil series), regarding the culture-clash in game design between American and Japanese gamers. The interview went over how, as a result of the contrast in cultures and history, western gamers prefer a different style of gameplay, a different art style or colour pallet, a different learning curve, and even different savegame and death elements than eastern gamers.

This contrast obviously becomes a critical consideration when marketing and designing a successful game, not only because a well-received game by American players may be received very poorly among Japanese gamers (and vice versa), but also that America-intended games are often designed by Japanese production companies, and their own cultural bias must be overcome when designing games that need to appeal to an international market.

Buuut I did a little digging to see if I could find a transcript of the interview, just to make sure I wasn’t getting any of the quotes wrong, and I found it. So instead of any personal analysis (which is clearly bias, as I’m already using western gamers as the pivot point in all my examples), I’m just going to clean it up a bit and paste it here for you to read. […]

Read More

This interview has some ridiculous evo-psych stuff that’s hopefully completely tongue in cheek (“For instance, as a hunting and trapping society, an American may go deer hunting and encounter a bear. Japanese would be scared by this encounter, whereas the American will probably shoot the bear and go back excited that he got a bear instead of a deer”!) but also some very interesting thoughts about the differences between Japanese and Western game design. In particular the broad question of how much the player’s experience is controlled by the developers and the different ways in which that manifests, and the idea that higher difficulty might be a method to try to discourage rentals.

piratemoggy: truckzilla: to all you americans out there this is eurovision This almost made me...

Sat, 18 May 2013 21:21:22 +0100

piratemoggy:

truckzilla:

to all you americans out there

this is eurovision

This almost made me emotional with the sheer beauty of it- it was like Freddie Mercury had lived to make an EDM album, I am literally buying it right now.

When I saw the video for Little Mix’s “How Ya...

Sat, 18 May 2013 15:15:00 +0100

When I saw the video for Little Mix’s “How Ya Doin’?”, the look of much of it reminded me of the start of Girls’ Generation’s “I Got a Boy” video. fundamentallyexcellent has just pointed out that the similarity extends to members wearing the same top! Various Batman items and others are also the same brand if not exactly the same.

Not trying to claim this as definitive proof of K-Pop influence on UK-Pop (it’s a London brand that it seems Little Mix have worn before), just found it funny.

One of the things I’m most fixed on in Vampire...

Thu, 16 May 2013 19:03:00 +0100

One of the things I’m most fixed on in Vampire Weekend’s “Hudson”, apart from the aforementioned choir of the damned, the clock ticking too fast that’s more like someone trying to use a lighter, the ominous bass that sounds like Muse’s “Muscle Museum”… apart from all of that, is the line “We watched the Germans play the Greeks”.

I suppose ‘play’ doesn’t have to be so literal, but it immediately made me think of the Euro 2012 quarter-final - the timing is possible, I think, and at least one of the band is a soccer fan. And I really like the image. It’s a song which turns real estate and flags and maps into incomprehensible things of doom. And there the people in it are, sitting down to try to take their mind off that, and doing so by watching a match that was widely viewed through the lens of the financial crisis and resultant relations between the countries.

contrarybritt: I can’t think of a time in recent memory when I...

Thu, 16 May 2013 18:30:23 +0100

contrarybritt:

I can’t think of a time in recent memory when I have been so devotedly going over song lyrics, even ‘batshit Ezra Koenig spoken word interlude’. My favorite lyric from Modern Vampires of the City though has to be the opening to “Hannah Hunt”:

A gardener told me some plants move but I could not believe it /
‘Till me and Hannah Hunt saw crawling vines and weeping willows /
As we made our way from Providence to Phoenix

I don’t want to belabor the point by pointing out alliteration, or whatever. You all had high school English. Let me just say instead I love the imagery and also the naivety—aw they’re roadtripping, this couple, they’re run off to see the rest of the country, and it’s probably not going to end well. Crawling vines and weeping willows, jesus. But everyone Ezra sings about on the album sounds both in-love and terrified about it.

I relate to MVotC mostly because it is so anxious about the inevitability of death, and from the POV of twentysomethings. (This album could also be called When You’re Young and Pruned, Dying Would Really Suck*). Our age group isn’t supposed to be so fixated on death as we are statistically further away from it, and we’re to leave the griping to those whose bodies aren’t as limber as they used to be, who have accumulated piles of responsibility hard to leave behind. While I’m not sure if I buy the notion that the elderly are more resigned to death (it seems more like a sickness/health thing than an old/young thing?) there’s no fear sharper or sweeter for me, right now. I joke about being struck by a car while crossing the street in Center City probably because it’s the only most realistic option for my untimely death; I get honked at by impatient drivers trying to make a turn while darting behind the flow of pedestrians just before the light changes. And I’m always thinking to myself You’ve hardly done anything yet, hurry up. Or It would suck if I died before Laura Marling finally leaked. “Hudson” is particularly terrifying; it sounds chased-up by a choir of the damned.

*It took me way too long to realize that Diane Young also = Dying Young, even hearing it over and over

This is a great post and really helping with my processing of this album. “Hudson” and its choir of the damned (yes!) is my favourite at the moment.

thesinglesjukebox: KE$HA FT. WILL.I.AM - CRAZY KIDS (REMIX)...

Wed, 15 May 2013 21:01:00 +0100

thesinglesjukebox:

KE$HA FT. WILL.I.AM - CRAZY KIDS (REMIX)
[4.58]

Album sales in the toilet? Buy a will.i.am verse and your score will be too. Limited time only!

Anthony Easton: Ke$ha as always flirted with earnestness, and positioned her partying as a kind of self-actualization. It was hinted at, never quite made explicit, but it was kind of a road-of-excess, Blakean thing. The interesting bit about that is that she never let the inspirational process fall over the genuinely pleasurable bits. It was a bonus. Making it the main course — and adding will.i.am — kind of ruins the meal.
[4]

Will Adams: When will his reign of terror end? Never mind the whistling (I’d rather not talk about it), someone please explain to me who decided it was a good idea to replace one of Ke$ha’s sharp-tongued verses for will.i.am’s dribble. He loses a point for “boobies” alone (though to be fair he gains it back with the mumbling bit, which is genuinely funny). The song itself is mediocre, another in a line of Ke$ha’s mission statement and another in a line of a build-drop template composed of two disparate parts held together by Scotch tape. It’s not nearly as crazy as the title wants it to be.
[3]

Alfred Soto: Her career fading a bit, she turns to the track with a redundant will.i.am bit and revs up the riffage. Who needs this when “Die Young” and “We R Who We R” exist?
[4]

Rebecca A. Gowns: I’m one of those people that adored Warriorwhen it was released — it’s just a fun set of songs. So I’ve heard this song several times by this point (and yeah, this is super close to the album version; as is typical lately, the “remix” just consists of a VERY lazy will.i.am. verse being shoved into the middle for 25 seconds). My seasoned review of “Crazy Kids” is as follows: the whistling sounds as if it’s being performed by an asthmatic, the guitar parts are dreary, it’s full of that “youth!!” marketing flavor that’s all over the radio, and the song is not NEARLY crazy enough. The verses are fine enough to dance to, but even then, it’s still warmed-over Far East Movement. The song as a whole has too many sleepy parts to really get a crowd moving; frankly, those parts are not even rousing enough for people to pull out their lighters (or cell phones) and sway them slowly. 1 point for being dull but serviceable, 2 points for being a Ke$ha song, after all.
[3]

Daniel Montesinos-Donaghy: Despite the successes of “We R Who We R”, the underlined Up With People approach in Ke$ha’s music has never successfully aligned with her most famed aesthetic - the spirit-drenched mix of goofy rapping and standardized four-on-the-floor beats. Her optimism isn’t at odds with her flippant club persona, but rarely have they clicked successfully, with one overpowering the other. But suddenly on the “Crazy Kids” remix, everything makes sense. The verses’ muffled techno programming allows Ke$ha and guest will.i.am to enjoy the spoils of their silliness, the latter seeming more human than he has in years. This gives way to the chorus’s mix of strumalong guitars and appropriately tribalistic drums, the setting for the artist to build a community out of the clubhoppers, make-out kids and weekend warriors: “We are! We are we are!” The repetition of ‘we’ above all else makes it a mantra, a charmingly naive message of inclusion topped off with a whisper: “WE ARE THE CRAZY PEOPLE.” The whisper, straight from a theatre-kid playbook but undoubtedly effective, seals the deal of inclusion. The bridge (returning to her apocalyptic imagery from “Die Young” and “Out Alive”) acknowledges that there may be little more to her politics than to gather people together for celebrations, but even that is enough in a world spinning out of control: “This is all we’ve got/And then it’s gone.”
[8]

Brad Shoup: I’d like to add a point to my Mariah/Miguel score, please. I forgot the no-whistling curve.
[4]

Jer Fairall: Ke$ha remains, to me, a one-trick pony whose one trick I never cared much for in the first place, though I’ll give it up a bit for will.i.am’s “speaking in a mumble” bit—the only time he’s ever made me laugh on purpose.
[4]

Katherine St Asaph: Lots of pop stars start or moonlight as session writers, but it’s only ever brought up on two occasions: when they’re trying to break out, the “she’s written for Britney!” script; or when pundits want to prove their authenticity with the trusty Procrustean rubric “she writes her own songs!” (As always, always she.) Everything else is just assumed to be part of the artist’s grand 360-deal vision — which can be misleading. The chorus to “Crazy Kids” is so clearly a Kesha Sebert work for hire: a pretty, melodic clarion call to whoever you are, singable by whoever you’ve got: Avril, Selena, Britney, Katy, Amy out of Karmin had she not reached her “hello” limit. Ke$ha took this one herself — maybe under duress — and because Ke$ha can’t yet release a single that’s entirely fluttery plaint, it’s awkwardly grafted onto a dirty bit, with a will.i.am verse grafted onto that for the single. (Give Will this: that muffled shutting-up of an ending is probably fanservice for lots of people, and he knows it.) Session writing isn’t inherently bad, and Sebert’s very good at it; that intro “hello” is some Lionel Richie shit, but to a kid alone with the airwaves, it probably sounds like her fairy godmother. The verses are identikit$ha, but they fill their time. It’s just that none of this, content or construction, is crazy.
[5]

David Lee: will.i.am is definitely one of those assholes who likes making Roller Coaster Tycoon POV videos in which unfinished roller coasters pull their passengers to thrilling heights only to fling them into the air and kill them. It wouldn’t be an endeavor all that different from his work of late. Like “Scream and Shout,” this presents a buildup that never achieves any kind of recognizable, cathartic chorus. I shouldn’t be surprised, though, since will.i.am seems to have a knack for making bland party anthems. Only the Ke$ha parts of “Crazy Kids” - no, not the rapped bits that are covered in will.i.am’s fingerprints - redeem it from total failure. They make up about 40% of this remix so it gets a
[4]

Crystal Xia: The original without will.i.am is one of my favorite songs of last year, probably my favorite album cut off of Warrior. It features a lot of things that I am really into: dumb and probably needless whistling; acoustic guitar serving more of a rhythm role; Ke$ha faux-rapping about her coochie in her perfect bratty intonation; and that grounded “Like a G6”-esque beat in the verses. Those things are all still here, except now we’re down one Ke$ha verse where she gives us a bratty “booty paahp” and more vagina talk (coded as “kitty kat”). It’s been replaced by a giant, awkward pause from the fun when will.i.am verse comes in. It is impossible to describe how bad he is; all I can say is that there are un-fun boob jokes and there is actually part where he just goo-goo-gah-gahs like a child. What a shame the original wasn’t released as the single.
[6]

Ian Mathers: I mean, there are obviously ways, musically and not, that Ke$ha is admirable, and her songs are often quite good, but she can’t elevate will.i.am (no matter how hard the production tries), she can’t quite make whispering “we are the crazy ones” in a song at least partly about partying any less dodgy, and she can’t make this one feel much less distinctive than her great songs.
[5]

Sabina Tang: Ke$ha has the intonation and the laugh of a high school cool girl; not a bully so much as someone whose gaze would have raked me with contemptuous mild amusement in the locker room. Such girls will always be a different species. Find a specimen who’s in school now: no matter how old you are and how much you’ve changed, she’ll look at you and see that you weren’t a cool girl then, and fail to respect you accordingly. That frisson of… native enmity?… is what makes me pay attention to Ke$ha; even in moments like this one, when her surroundings vie to render her anonymous.
[5]

[Read, comment and vote on The Singles Jukebox ]

Oh my god, the start of David’s review here.

will.i.am is definitely one of those assholes who likes making Roller Coaster Tycoon POV videos in which unfinished roller coasters pull their passengers to thrilling heights only to fling them into the air and kill them. It wouldn’t be an endeavor all that different from his work of late.

!!!

This is largely the product of not having transferred much music...

Wed, 15 May 2013 20:01:23 +0100

This is largely the product of not having transferred much music onto my new phone yet, but I enjoyed the moment of realisation that Owen Pallett’s three album titles line up in alphabetical order so neatly.

The NME’s review of Vampire Weekend’s new album leads with: Vampire Weekend had the...

Wed, 15 May 2013 19:50:00 +0100

The NME’s review of Vampire Weekend’s new album leads with:

Vampire Weekend had the misfortune of arriving in 2008, just as the landfill-indie boom was hitting its peak. Clean-cut and puppyish, the New Yorkers were often dismissed as poster boys for indie music’s most vapid incarnation: the giggly-wiggly, T4 On The Beach pig-noise peddled by the likes of The Wombats (eugh), The Hoosiers (gah) and Scouting For Girls (just kill them)

For those unfamiliar with landfill indie (or T4 on the Beach), it was a term coined in 2008 by Andrew Harrison in The Word magazine and well summed up by an Independent article from the same year:

Once-eager festival organisers have a struggle on their hands. How will they fill that gaping hole on Sunday afternoon? Who’s going to warm up the crowd for The Ting Tings? Luckily the current UK music scene has just the thing. Someone has even compounded a helpful term to use when you call the record companies in a line-up emergency; this uninspiring, guitar-gelled Polyfilla – of which The Fratellis are a fine example – is now known by some as “landfill indie”.

The key words there: festival, guitar, UK. It was a very British thing, a response to the success of The Libertines and Arctic Monkeys, which is part of why the claim that it affected Vampire Weekend is such a bizarre straw man.

I had a look to see whether I could find any sign of anyone calling Vampire Weekend landfill indie. The phrase made it into the Collins dictionary, or at least ‘indie landfill’ did, with the less than helpful definition ‘a derogatory term for indie music considered to be mediocre’, which seems to be how it is widely used - as a stick to beat whatever the user feels like.

Even so, “Vampire Weekend” + “landfill indie” got me a Drowned in Sound thread where their presence on the soundtrack to The Inbetweeners was cited as evidence that it wasn’t just landfill indie and a blog saying that people were moving on from landfill indie to Vampire Weekend and Fleet Foxes. I did find one 2010 blog entry calling Vampire Weekend landfill indie… which also levelled the same accusation at The Cure, in one of many displays of mind-boggling wrongness.

The thing is, though, when I read the NME’s line I had another fundamental problem with it. I was quite certain that Scouting for Girls and The Hoosiers weren’t landfill indie either. As I saw it, landfill indie didn’t peak chart-wise in 2008 at all; the scene was named in retrospect, or at least when the bands were festival circuit regulars but with no sign of having any more hits. The Fratellis, The Kooks, The View, The Pigeon Detectives, The Holloways… laddish, monochrome music from bands that established no lasting chart presence. The Hoosiers were too smart and too pop to fit. I hate Scouting for Girls, almost as much as The View, but to me they were:

1) too late

2) too successful

3) too inclusive of jaunty piano

to ever be landfill indie.

Only, there were the articles that I found when searching for the term.

Peter Robinson in The Guardian. Urban Dictionary. last.fm. One of the blogs I already mentioned. Tim Walker in The Independent again.

Without fail, every one listed Scouting for Girls, often as the prime example. Consensus is the only way to reasonably define something like that.

I can’t remember how much I’ve used the term landfill indie in the last few years, thinking that I knew a clear definition of it. Maybe not that much! Yet still, I was slightly taken back to realise that I’d been using it wrong as well.

inat40: Wiley & Chew Fu - Take That Three and a half years...

Wed, 15 May 2013 18:54:29 +0100

inat40:

Wiley & Chew Fu - Take That

Three and a half years on and this is still incredible. But what I want to know is this: when Wiley was in a Bedford nightclub, exactly which member of the group Take That did he see?

I agree with Ed’s conclusion on the Jukebox that it was probably Mark Owen

(also yes, still amazing)

Rejected openings for the review of Momoiro Clover Z's album 5th Dimension that I may never manage to write

Tue, 14 May 2013 23:41:00 +0100

Between the song by the guy from OK GO, the song by the guy from The Go! Team, and, well, everything else, GO! is something that 5th Dimension definitely has going for it.

I put the euphoric space pirate pop metal of “Mugen no Ai” at the end of my personal best of 2012 mix because I figured there was no possible way to follow something like that. HAHAHA, comes the response from 5th Dimension.

The fact that the group’s outfits on the 5th Dimension’s cover make them look so reminiscent of the masked, pyjama-d figure on the back cover of Mansun’s excessive, sublime nu-prog opus Six has to be significant.

Last year I went to watch Momoiro Clover Z perform a concert, which then turned out in fact to be a bilingual Sailor Moon launch event. In Japanese and French. Listening to their album is sort of like that experience, only enjoyable.

Absorbing the girth of this behemoth in one fell swoop is rigorous and harrowing; one comes away feeling ruptured, dislocated from expectation but determined to listen again.

One more: I wrote on the Vampire Weekend album, which I liked a LOT more than I expected to.

Tue, 14 May 2013 22:54:54 +0100

One more: I wrote on the Vampire Weekend album, which I liked a LOT more than I expected to.:

The New York band’s third album isn’t exactly lively, but it’s definitely undead.

thesinglesjukebox: LOVEABLE ROGUES - WHAT A NIGHT [1.20]...

Fri, 10 May 2013 23:55:03 +0100

thesinglesjukebox:

LOVEABLE ROGUES - WHAT A NIGHT
[1.20]

Who’s in the mood to be puked on and pawed by a drunken twat? Don’t all rush at once, guys.

Katherine St Asaph: Like a wild party, where all the guests are being hazed.
[0]

Scott Mildenhall: Fire up the Bantmobile! The Loveable Rogues are here for an irony-free celebration of deliberate doltishness. Never has hedonism sounded so tedious. It’s illustrative of a curious thing about “lad culture”: as it’s pretty difficult in Britain for anyone to get away with thinking they’re amazing, it often involves a reconciliation of self-deprecation and self-awareness bred by that with an inclination to go ahead and be an absolute tool anyway, thus rendering that awareness redundant. In other hands, lines like “I don’t get drunk, I get awesome” could be loaded with pathos (or snobbery), but even though Loveable Rogues aren’t trying to be cool and know that this is all a bit rubbish, they wear its stupidity as a badge of honour, ploughing through the putrescence with rhymes like “beer pong, Pokemon, everybody sing along,” leaving them no time to realise that “party” is not an adjective, and that “screwing” does not mean what they think it does. As a song it’s egregious in every way, horrible down to its rusting hook - the only people who “make” money are millionaires, the people who are buying this song merely earn it, that’s if they’re lucky enough to have a job - but as a cultural artefact it would serve as a great time capsule of one sorry aspect of society in the early 2010s, if only there were any chance of anybody at any point in the future ever remembering it. Jack Peñate died for this?
[2]

Edward Okulicz: People who say “I don’t get drunk, I get awesome” are not loveable, they are the kind of people who make their obnoxiousness your problem and expect you to be OK with it. “What a Night” celebrates the nocturnal behaviours of the Western world’s most annoying gits, and does so with a jaunty smirk that says “We’re just a bunch of lads having a good time.” And they are the only ones, because the sheer artlessness of this song calls to mind nothing so much as a bunch of overimbibing light-weights who’ll puke everywhere but in the toilet, after which they are too incapacitated to do anything but post on Twitter what a great time they’re having, possibly accompanied by pictures of the mess. I’ll give them credit for a song that is a reasonably good aural representation of the vomit from one of their no doubt frequent mini-binges; every sound added to the bog-standard strum-a-long seeks to evoke FUN but instead is embarrassing. This song makes me feel like a designated driver at a pub crawl, having to put up with stupidity only I can see, and is going to take some beating as the worst song of 2013.
[0]

Anthony Easton: One point for making the Uke sound less than boring. One point for the hand claps. One point for how he sings “swimming pool.” One point for the chorus. One point for the growl after the line of ripped sheets. Minus one Point the “haha only” serious self aggrandizing bit. Minus one point because the ironic quality of the manic joy is not well articulated. And minus one Point for the McLovin reference.
[2]

Alfred Soto: As a production the song is dreadful: the horns, record scratching, crowd noises included to gin up enthusiasm, like a roofie in a cocktail. No doubt there are girls who’ll think this is cute.
[0]

Patrick St. Michel: There is nothing redeemable about this song, which celebrates home invasion in the very first line and features backing music Benny Hill would have turned his nose up at. I want this song to be destroyed from history.
[0]

Iain Mew: It sounds like a cross between the worst elements of Rizzle Kicks, Kate Nash and Jamie T, which is already enough to be massively irritating even if it was just a typical party song. The lyrics are too vile for that, though. “I can’t be held responsible for getting naked in your swimming pool” says one of the first lines, and that sense of entitled immunity looms over everything else. They act terribly and ruin a stranger’s house against her protests, but refuse to accept any regret because it was all just a good laugh, wasn’t it? Can’t you take a bit of banter? Isn’t it hilarious to treat other people like shit for no reason? Especially women? And of course they’re releasing all of this under the name Loveable Rogues, extending the infuriating attitude beyond the confines of the song.
[0]

Daniel Montesinos-Donaghy: There is a lilt to the guitar playing that stirs up memories of the last great wave of UK ska. On one hand, a song as crassly homogenized as “What A Night” strips ska rhythms into shorthand for gauzed good-time music. On the other hand, I’m intrigued that the musical approach of UK ska-punk bands has somehow resurfaced to be absorbed into the mainstream. Minus Capdown’s frantic sense of joy, of course. And No Comply’s edge. And King Prawn’s message of inclusion. So really, all we’re left with are the dregs of that era: bad jokes, unnecessary meanness and major chord jolliness making up for sheer lack of imagination. No pulse, no heart. This sounds like [spunge] and even they had a song about kicking pigeons. For fuck’s sake, people.
[1]

Brad Shoup: I can’t properly hate this, as growing up I dined from the crumbs of my brother’s 2 Tone collection. Before he texts, I gotta admit that this isn’t ska by a strict measure; this is more Mraz than Madness. (I would’ve bumped my score up if the insectoid brass had been replaced with some baleful Rico-style slide.) But the shuffle is close, and the tempo is bonkers, as if the Rogues hope to ingratiate by sheer velocity. The text is brorem ipsum, but the chorus gets to a sweet place as do the creaky fadeout wails. And how can I hate a clapalong?
[5]

Jer Fairall: The musical equivalent of wearing a lampshade on your head.
[2]

[Read, comment and vote on The Singles Jukebox ]

Loveable Rogues: almost as bad as “Accidental Racist”! I love a lot of the reviews here but Scott’s commentary on lad culture is particularly fantastic.

:( (previously)

Tue, 07 May 2013 21:41:28 +0100

(previously)

katherinestasaph: thesinglesjukebox: LE KID - WE ARE YOUNG...

Tue, 07 May 2013 20:35:33 +0100

katherinestasaph:

thesinglesjukebox:

LE KID - WE ARE YOUNG
[5.09]

It’s Scandinavian Tuesday!

Katherine St Asaph: You can’t feel bad for Le Kid, exactly, as they know exactly what they’re doing; but you kinda do feel bad that they’re up and coming (sort of; they did Melodifestivalen, but the blogs won’t play that up) with a reprise of Icona Pop’s “I Love It” immediately after “I Love It” became déclassé. (It’s “overplayed,” apparently, which is usually code for “it was on Girls and on the radio for flyover Macklemore fans and therefore I can’t like it anymore.”) But fuck that; “I Love It” is great, having more spangle-brat anthems like it is also great, verses sung like Bratz-doll Kylies are, yes, also great; and as a rallying chant, “All I wanna feel! We are young!” is no less galvanizingly silly than “We are girls!” or “Uh-oh! We’re in trouble!” or really anything by Oh My! — or, for that matter, “tonight! We are young!” Le Kid hasn’t quite got the pacing down — this trips and thuds where it should throb — but otherwise? I don’t care. I love it.

[6]

[Read, comment and vote on The Singles Jukebox ]

I’m actually doing the Jukebox again.

Which is a great thing.

(personally I am in no way fed up with “I Love It”, and not just because it hasn’t quite fully hit the UK yet; I expect to be saying the same thing in a couple of months)

thirteen hundred words on the drag scene in the playstation game 'final fantasy vii', supplementary to the immediately precedent post, 'this post consists of approximately one thousand words on the drag scene in the playstation video game ‘final fantasy vii ‘'

Tue, 07 May 2013 20:33:13 +0100

timocraticyouth:

[…]

So in a sense FFVII is totally about drag. (In a thousand more relevant senses FFVII is about anything but. I know this. Bear with me.) The game presents Cloud as this sort of self-complete icon of masculine potential (via violence) that’s unfortunately common in the protagonist role in videogame design, in a way that’s only getting worse, still: look at the lead from Devil May Cry, or, worse, God of War. The game then goes out of its way for hours to reveal Cloud as manufacturing this role and this image as a conscious performance; and it starts setting up the narrative moves it will later use to do so in this flashback sequence where the player’s agency as motivator of the narrative is most totally disregarded. It’s surprisingly apt - like, fascinatingly fucking thematically coherent - that before this happens we set ourselves up by granting the player real agency in a scene whose specific idiom is drag: the scene seems peculiarly conscious of how deeply gender performance is embedded in the sort of aesthetics that are going to make the twelve-year-olds of 1997 find it horrendously cool.

OK, this bit means that having already reblogged the first part of this I really need to reblog this part too

timocratic youth: this post consists of approximately one thousand words on the drag scene in the playstation video game 'final fantasy...

Tue, 07 May 2013 07:29:07 +0100

timocratic youth: this post consists of approximately one thousand words on the drag scene in the playstation video game 'final fantasy...:

minimoonstar:

timocraticyouth:

There’s this bit about three, four hours into Squaresoft classic and The One RPG Everyone Owned On The PlayStation Final Fantasy VII where notoriously you have to dress the protagonist as a lady. (In his Kotaku retrospective Tim Rogers complains about the scene, and the use of the term…

NEVER FORGET.

I… actually didn’t know about most of this (as in all of the extra options). Wow. I remember having Vincent and a gold chocobo so I must have looked at guides at some points but this stuff passed me by. I did have an actual printed guidebook to Final Fantasy VIII which was my earlier and bigger love, but that didn’t have anything quite like this in.

U-Kiss - Standing Still Also I always really enjoy the bit where...

Mon, 06 May 2013 19:02:22 +0100

U-Kiss - Standing Still

Also I always really enjoy the bit where this song suddenly reminds me of Linkin Park

SPICA - Lonely One of the things I have brought back from...

Mon, 06 May 2013 19:01:15 +0100

SPICA - Lonely

One of the things I have brought back from Australia is listening to the radio station SBS PopAsia (on digital there, online now I’m home), which has a good playlist of pretty up-to-date K-Pop along with some older songs and pop from elsewhere in Asia.

Listening in a radio context is really different from seeking songs out on YouTube and some things have grown on me which I might not have given a second listen to otherwise. For instance this song, which is kind of like Girls Aloud’s “Can’t Speak French” given some extra sprinkles of variety and synth swizzly bits.

♪

Mon, 06 May 2013 17:08:02 +0100

Elbow - “Waving From Windows”

A particularly sleepy and lovely Elbow B-side from the Cast of Thousands era. That is my least favourite album of theirs but produced some great B-sides. ‘Strange what the sun through the trees through the window can do to you’ and the way Guy Garvey stretches it out is the highlight, although I also love the sound of the phrase ‘tinsel Mikado’