#the penultimate day... wowee

[art--harridan]

[Image description: A digital drawing of the Iron Giant. He is motionless, rusty, and his eyes are glowing. Smoke billows from his metal frame. The colouring is scratchy, and the lineart is a stark black. The colours are cool tones, except for the background. The background resembles a sunset.]

Inktober Day 30: Gear

Film: The Iron Giant

#inktober #the iron giant #inktober 2022 #the iron giant fanart #digital art #the penultimate day... wowee #also i go back to college tomorrow which i think is incredibly cruel #on halloween... really... >:(

[weirdmarioenemies]

It’s another Wario’s Woods masterpost!

Yeah! The one I kinda sorta hinted at an entire year ago! So we’ve already gone over the wonderful little basic monsters that Toad can pick up and toss around and tragically blow up with bombs. And the bosses in the NES version are, for the most part... generic. Disappointing. Not worth mentioning.

But then we have the SNES version! There is a whole cast of wacky opponents for Toad to face in his quest to defeat Wario. Let’s waste no time looking at each and every one!

Katsini

Starting off strong! Katsini is a very well-dressed purple fellow who looks a lot like Tatanga, the villain of Super Mario Land, who we have really not covered yet for some reason, wow. He is full of charm, but also kindness! Unlike most of the bosses, he encourages Toad. How nice!

Galrog

Galrog’s mouth doesn’t always hang open like this, but I’m glad it’s the image the Wiki uses. As you can see, he is some sort of cyclops/ogre type thing, but this shocked face is really the main attraction. He’s still in training, and asks Toad to go easy on him. I bet you were judging him based on his appearance until you read that! Shame on you.

Harley Q

Wowee! This is a fun one! Harley Q is certainly designed with a jester or harlequin in mind, but clearly not just someone in a suit. Could this be... a wild, natural jester? Not the domesticated kind we’re so used to seeing? Her dress thingy is constantly spinning, too! Fun! And sort of reminds me of Dimentio... another important villain we haven’t covered yet for some reason! Because we have our priorities in order covering silly stuff like this!

SamSpook

A very bold decision to give ol’ Sam a green pumpkin head instead of orange, and I’ll give them bonus points for that! His body is suspiciously similar to that of the plumbers... but the combination of overalls and pumpkin immediately makes me think “farmer”! But not just any farmer, of course. If he were to grow pumpkins, they would be his children! I don’t know how that would work! So it’s time for the next one.

Sven

The thing that immediately strikes me about Sven is his art style! A bit different from the others, don’t you think? More dynamic and Looney Tunes-like! A scrappy little furball. Like Wild Mike from Barnyard. Remember that? I do. I remember them claiming that the official website revealed Mike’s species. It didn’t. Don’t believe the media. Wait, this is supposed to be about Sven, isn’t it? Well, he’s got a viking helmet and boxing gloves! That’s a neat combination I’ve never seen before!

Parrotor

Parrotor is apparently a mix between a parrot and a monitor lizard, but is really basically a parrot with a lizard tail. But there’s nothing wrong with that! This is a very Funny Bird we see before us.

Mssr Boo

This is the good stuff right here! A slightly French ghost! A very simple ghost, but I love simple ghosts! And I love simple things wearing hats! It’s the best thing for them to wear!

Aqualea

Aqualea is a mermaid. An angry mermaid. That just so happens to be exactly like one of the bosses in the NES version! That mermaid’s name is Mad, and I don’t know if she’s actually angry, but we can assume so. Since her name is Mad.

Razor

And we go right from one kind of fish person to the other kind! As recent film has shown us, Razor is the sexy kind of fish person. Has anyone ever found mermaids sexy? Probably not. That would be weird! Despite Razor’s appearance, he is very philosophical. I guess unexpected personality traits is a theme here!

Tad Rock

OH YEAH!!!!! Tad Rock calls himself the coolest player around, and while something like that is usually a very pompous thing to say, you can tell by Tad’s name and fashion sense that he is telling the truth! 

Thak

Hm. Sorry, Thak, Galrog already fills the niche of “ogre thing”, and does a better job if you ask me... but your teeth are cool! Very sharp! I’m sure you’re great at eating meat!

Lizardon

In case you didn’t know, Lizardon is the Japanese name of Charizard! This is likely no surprise at all, but I’ll take this pudgy purple goof over a Cool Dragon any day. Lizardon is also hilariously full of himself, claiming that he’ll crush Toad’s dreams of fame and be the star of the next game! I’d play it, honestly.

Sarissa

Sarissa really nails that “cute girl” type of design that’s so popular, I think. If this game was more well known, she’d probably be the most popular opponent! Along with Harley Q, because people REALLY love wacky jesters, and... I want to say Tad Rock. People love things that are radical! Anyway, I never got all the cute girl hype, but I am digging Sarissa’s fashion choices.

Mangylox

Now this is a real classic “monster”! A big ol’ hulking figure completely covered in hair, wearing shoes... wow! Even more Looney Tunes vibes! I think this is a good time to talk about what the character dialogue is like in this game. Behold Mangylox’s mighty lexicon!

“I've been waiting for you. You have been impressive, but now it begins. Instantaneous decisions will be necessary. Know this--my abilities are unmatched!”

Dedar

Goblin time! We got a goblin! Or maybe more? Dedar is like a combination of goblin, imp, elf, all that good stuff, and I think the result is pretty great! She doesn’t even have a nose or a mouth, and we all know that the fewer facial features, the cuter a design is!

Carlton

Carlton sure is a knight, I guess. Or maybe a sentient suit of armor. That would be more interesting. Either way, he may be the least interesting character here. But that’s okay! Because next up is the penultimate opponent! What could possibly be even more imposing than an iron-clad warrior? Tremble in fear before...

Harry H

Harry the Hare! Yup, the final opponent before Wario himself is a smartly-dressed hare named Harry. You might expect that he’s well-mannered, too, and he even refers to Toad as a “woodlands hero”! I think he’s probably quite a nice fellow who’s really here to make sure Toad is ready for the final battle. Don’t you just love Harry Hare? I do!

...and then there’s Wario! We’ve talked about him in depth, though, so there’s not much to say here.

With that... I guess we’re done with Wario’s Woods... I don’t want it to end! I want more funny creatures running around and stacking smaller funny creatures! Please, Nintendo... acknowledge this game... make weird Wario games again...

But let’s not end on a sad note. Which one is your favorite, besides  Wario, of course? Vote now!

https://strawpoll.com/3re4411p

#wario's woods #mario #mario enemies #mod chikako

[bradleyhartsell]

Who is Thom Galt?

Radiohead- In Rainbows 2007 (32nd of Top 100)

It’s funny how a subgroup takes an already-menial fragment of culture and erects its own tenets. Pavement fandom, for instance, is on the margins, but inside the rock intelligentsia, the band has two accepted masterpieces (Slanted and Enchanted and Crooked Rain, Crooked Rain); yet there’s been a groundswell in the last decade or so to say you know, Wowee Zowee is actually their best work. Animal Collective, in honor of a 10-year-anniversary, had some extolling pieces written this year about their magnum opus, Merriweather Post Pavilion, but die-hards prefer Sung Tongs or Feels. Similarly, the Radiohead community seems to have dismantled the established twin gold standards of OK Computer and Kid A in favor of In Rainbows.

A part of that may steam from the disparity of The Establishment favoring context and cultural narrative, while the community cuts through the bullshit to find the best songs. OK Computer and Kid A had their respective myths built for them (the moment when solipsistic art rock became commercially viable; the moment when that same band rejected that trailblazing notion, alongside the supposed last-gasp of The Album in the wake of Napster). In Rainbows, in many ways followed suit, albeit of the band’s own making, as Radiohead helped pioneer self-released, name-your-price digital delivery method. Perhaps because that model was fairly brief, as streaming subscriptions and their algorithms became dominant (for more mythmaking, see also the comically myopic “newspaper album” that is The King of Limbs). If OK Computer is eternally a sonic alternative rock landmark, and Kid A is the signpost for intrepid career U-turn, In Rainbows gets left behind when name-your-price is draconian compared to the $9.99 Spotify everything.

Still, to the band’s community, late ‘90s sonic upheavals, new-century influence, and Napster are too-worn talking points when the community’s thesis is which songs are best. Hence the chic pick nowadays is to say In Rainbows. Of course, I’ve already played contrarian, to both The Establishment and, likely, the said community, by asserting Amnesiac is definitively Radiohead’s best work (and my former all-time favorite album; still third). But even devaluing a band’s narrative and social context, as I’m want to do, I still think, on balance, the twin purported masterpieces rate a little higher than In Rainbows, though even I have my days where it’s fluid. And regardless of these inconsequential squabbles, there’s little question of In Rainbows as one of this young century’s greatest records.

While everything about In Rainbows is resolutely Radiohead, it does mark something of a subtle departure for them. Consider that coming without the fanfare, Amnesiac expertly blended their jagged, claustrophobic rock with isolating electronics (and unfortunately, Hail to the Thief came off as a bloated, uneven imitator). With In Rainbows, the band found a way of faithfully representing this hybrid DNA in fresh, more buoyant ways. Despite comparable running times, In Rainbows feels like Radiohead’s leanest work, as the songs are open and breathe in a way divergent from the panicky restlessness they’d so well done previously. Distortion and crunchy riffs get traded in for clean, Sunday morning arpeggios (so much so that they seem to meta-name “Weird Fishes/Arpeggi” after it); industrial mechanizations get replaced with billowy strings and hovering atmospherics.

That’s not to say In Rainbows is a bright springtime record—the stretch from “Nude” to “All I Need” is as sonically sobering as they’ve been, while “Videotape” is the bleakest song they’ve ever recorded. In fact, even apart from its dour soundscape, their 2007 record seems to have perfectly captured delusion, taking the character in “Karma Police” to its logical conclusion; whereas the “Karma Police” narrator is deliberately played as a product of manipulation (“Phew, for a minute there / I lost myself”), it’s not even safe to say Thom Yorke is playing a character. “Videotape,” for instance, is the most beautiful, yet heartbreaking kind of cognitive dissonance, in what could easily been seen as a suicide note: “This is my way of saying goodbye / Because I can't do it face to face…No matter what happens now / You shouldn't be afraid / Because I know today has been / The most perfect day I've ever seen.” “All I Need,” meanwhile, is equally played straight, as Yorke delicately and sincerely sings a love song, except he’s comparing himself to a “moth / Who just wants to share your light…I only stick with you / Because there are no others.” Like an insect or “an animal / Trapped in your hot car,” the feeling is genuine, even if it’s unhealthy. On “Weird Fishes/Arpeggi,” Thom insists he’d be “crazy not to follow…where you lead” but it’s merely a “way out,” even if it means following to the “edge / Of the earth…And fall off.”

The sonic choices faithfully score York’s being unencumbered, however deluded, with fuzzed-out, solitary bass plucks of “All I Need” leading one of the band’s most spare choruses, before piano and strings swell into a lovely power ballad (a dutiful ode to someone/thing, no matter its degrading qualities). The breeziness of the shaker and Red Hot Chili Peppers-esque arpeggio guitar (for better or worse, though it’s a lovely riff) in “Reckoner” threatens to blow away if not for Yorke’s ultra-silky falsetto, followed by piano, strings, and subdued bass line managing to ground the song, ultimately making it the heart of the album (even if it’s not the album’s best song, it’s a worthy candidate).

Conversely, Radiohead has a bad habit of putting head-scratching, out-of-place songs on its albums (“Electioneering”; “Optimistic”). “15 Step” never quite seems in league with those missteps, maybe in part because it’s unburdened as the opener, and maybe simply because it’s really good; it’s muscular, yet economical, with Yorke nailing a charged hook: “How come I end up where I started?” And apart from the comparatively jarring aggro-Aphex Twin breakbeat (especially as it’s the only song with drum machine-based percussion) and stormy atmosphere anchoring the song, the melody and its flourish still has a HSN-ready arpeggio and a repeated snippet of children cheering, both of which do hint at the core sound of In Rainbows—something naïve, carefree.

After the jagged, Hail to the Thief-seeming “Bodysnatchers,” In Rainbows settles into being the best possible version of Red Hot Chili Peppers singles if they were both ondes Martenot-forward and Ayn Rand scholars. It’s even likely those two songs give the album the muscle it needs to keep from evaporating into the sleepiness that doomed The King of Limbs. In fact, In Rainbows does err a couple of times with “Faust Arp” (among Yorke’s least compelling performances, as he fails to meet the music’s heightened airs) and “House of Cards” dozing off, the latter with the unique distinction of joining “Electioneering” and “Optimistic” as conspicuous black marks while still being completely on-brand for the album in question. If “Electioneering” and “Optimistic” are unnecessary throwbacks to a rock period they sonically outgrew, then the longest song on In Rainbows is doubly a drag, with a lifeless hook underscoring Yorke’s overproduced vocals (“Forget about your house of cards / And I’ll do mine”), even as its clean arpeggio saunters around a thoughtful string arrangement, not unlike the vastly superior “Reckoner.”

I’ve argued that sequencing redeems In Rainbows, as “House of Cards” being the penultimate song quickly would sink this album closer to the hit-and-miss Hail to the Thief. Instead, the record concludes with its two best songs, “Jigsaw Falling into Place” and “Videotape.” The fingerpicked acoustic riff and Phil Selway’s racing drums chase each other on “Jigsaw,” as York offers a stunning performance—first speak-singing right in your ear before wonderfully opening up on the second “The beat goes round and round.” Interestingly, Yorke plainly sets a will-they-won’t-they in a club, which feels so apart from the edge-of-the-world, lambs-to-slaughter pathos he commonly evokes. Most successfully, the infectious energy of the song makes it feel like the congenial successor to “Idioteque.”

Moreover, In Rainbows is Yorke’s most immediate and beautiful performance. No song here is garbling or digitizing his voice; in fact, the worst song is the one oversaturating his voice in echo effect. Yorke’s elegant register is the connective tissue to so many of these songs, like the stellar “Nude,” when he snakes alongside Colin Greenwood’s sultry bass line before delivering an enshrined vocal take on par with the end of “Life in a Glasshouse” and “It’s gonna be a glorious day” from “Lucky”: “You’ll go to hell for what your dirty mind is thinking.” You don’t realize how much Yorke relies on his angel hair falsetto during the album until he pulls you aside to talk to you during the opening verse of “Jigsaw”; and then, in one of his most intimate performances, Yorke sings right into your ear on “Videotape,” so much so that you can hear the P-sound popping in the mic when he says “pearly gates.” With no “Fitter Happier,” no instrumentals, no digitized dystopia, it’s fitting that In Rainbows is the band’s warmest album to date.

That’s not to discount Radiohead at their most paranoid and icy; the satellite-beamed anxiety of OK Computer can still be more thrilling (and equally contemplative); Kid A (mostly) feels exotic, as if from some dystopian planet; Amnesiac is equally mysterious, except its predecessor’s interstellar relay gets subsumed by a technocratic Dante’s Inferno. The allusions here aren’t nearly as arresting—an Atlas Shrugged-versed Chili Peppers is comparatively tame—but In Rainbows is the most direct, distilled version of what makes Radiohead great. It’s also the album that finds the oft-cagey and anarchist songwriting recalling some faux-peace, as if coasting off laudanum drips, thus making the record’s narrative point of view the band’s most nuanced. And when projecting to Radiohead’s aforementioned community, perhaps grassroots support for In Rainbows is simply due to it’s being the band’s most “chill” album to put on while hitting a bowl.

When reviewing the album, Pitchfork had a joke of name-your-own-score. But I bypassed that contrivance by snagging an In Rainbowstorrent. I listened to my music the way I always had. And while a fickle and temperamental culture quickly buried In Rainbows’ meta-narrative, it’s reassuring to know there’s still a niche community more interested in textual greatness than contextual machinations.

#Radiohead #In Rainbows #ok computer #Kid A #amnesiac #hail to the thief #pavement #Animal Collective #red hot chili peppers #ayn rand #atlas shrugged #Aphex Twin #dante #inferno #Thom Yorke