Lamp, broken circa 1988

please move this out of the gif thread, i'd like to keep the gif thread

It's almost exactly Fatal Labyrinth. It's sillier in ways that are hard to explain, but otherwise it's the same. Throw magic rings at landsharks, pick up the same dagger over and over for three floors, eat too much meat, drink mysterious potions, get paid. Oh! That's the other difference. In the first game, the money just determined how fancy your grave was (I LOVE THIS). In this one, the amount of money you have seems to govern a continue system. I don't know this for sure, but I know that I've died and gotten to continue, and then died immediately on the same floor (FUCKING CRYSTALS) and didn't get to continue. EDIT: Okay, after some research I don't know what this fucking game is. Dragon Crystal for the GG came out in 1990 in Japan. However, Dragon Crystal came out in the US on Game Gear and Sega Master System... the same year Fatal Labyrinth came out on the Genesis. So I guess there was some cubicle section in Sega of Japan that loved the main character sprite SO MUCH that we get all these games about him. I also played and finished a PC game called THE FALL, which is awesome if you love Flashback and stories about AI. I love Flashback, so I had a great time. The puzzles got a little Gabriel Knight-esque. There's specifically a puzzle with a wooden baby that was infuriating and unclear. Other than that, no complaints. There's a big old To Be Continued at the end, and I'd be down to play more if they make good on that.

They also have The Lucha Libre Taco Shop why would you go to a mexican place that's well-known to tourists like what the fuck are you even doing oh man, do people think that restaurants that get on TV/in magazines are actually the good parts of a city

here are some 3DS games basically no one will enjoy DRAGON CRYSTAL- a game gear version of the almighty genesis dungeon shitkicker FATAL LABYRINTH. Moves faster, soundtrack isn't as good. $3. digging it. IKACHAN- Squid-based adventure game. Short. Cute. Overpriced. KOKUGA- Equal parts tank game, bullet hell and dungeon crawler. All powerups are handled with a playing card system (you get a hand of cards at the start of the level and deploying powerups lets you draw another card. You have a very, uh, deliberate movement speed and turning radius, so a lot of what you're doing is about not rushing forward. Boss fights becomes a matter of guessing which powerups would be most useful, and then ideally ending up with those cards in your boss runs. Probably the overall hardest game I've played in years. Four player multiplayer though, so that's probably awesome.

christ, THAT's a throwback. Deciding between getting a Nexus VMU for all those Fire Pro D Moves and dumping all that money into Goldenboy for more NOAH tapes was a turning point in my young life. It is astounding I was ever attractive to anyone back then. I'm going to avoid saying much because my opinions on 90s AJ are not popular at all, so I'll keep it to "hey maybe NJ's junior division would be a cool topic?" *i bought the vmu **i think that was the right choice? ***since i make a bunch of crazy shit now but i started with a bass guitar and fire pro

The farewell note: "we are now at our best and so Death Grips is over. we have officially stopped. all currently scheduled live dates are canceled. our upcoming double album "the powers that b" will still be delivered worldwide later this year via Harvest/Third Worlds Records. Death Grips was and always has been a conceptual art exhibition anchored by sound and vision. above and beyond a "band". to our truest fans, please stay legend." So there's still another album's worth of stuff due this fall. Real Big Black style.

someone just pointed this out to me, but The Powers That B will end up being album #5, which sure makes 5D on Exmilitary on suspicious. Especially considering in their breakup, they have explicitly said that Death Grips was a conceptual art piece. I dunno. I'm cool with a band fucking my life up and leaving. I was 12 when I bought Relationship of Command. They didn't even survive to my next birthday.

You know I'm not hating on you, right? I just don't have any fondness for this place after living here all my life and being stuck here while I finish my degree. I'm sure surface level San Diego is really nice, but my San Diego routinely hurts my friends and people like them to improve tourism and the old money neighborhoods.

I saw someone on here say San Diego is awesome, and I don't want to start a fight about that in an irrelevant thread, so, here's a brief annotated list of why fuck san diego -Our biggest tourist attraction is a festival of advertisements. -Our second biggest tourist attraction is all the animals we keep in cages. -Our third biggest tourist attraction gives its employees worksheets about how to deal with people asking them why they still fuck with killer whales so badly. -We make all the predator drones. -Our last mayor was caught groping sexual assault victims who were also veterans. It is still a tough call between him and his major opposition. -We were the fifth most vocally aggressive city over keeping Michael Sam out. -Our most prominent all ages safe-space venue got vandalized after getting its funding cut. -The people running and mismanaging the nearest nuclear power plant were caught LARPing on the job. The plant has since been decommissioned. So, yeah, the weather is nice or whatever, but San Diego should burn in shit. Stay away.

If tragedy strikes and there must be a fourth thread, could we call it "JEEZ LOUISE" I don't have anything actual to vent about right now, so here's this instead: I'm declaring "murrica" dead and buried as a joke. If you use it, you deserve to be booed anywhere it's least convenient (without it being, like, a home invasion).

There are those Scottish guys in ICW called the Bucky Boys. Or at least I think they are Scottish. "Buckfast Tonic Wine, commonly known as Buckfast or Buckie, is a fortified wine licensed from Buckfast Abbey in Devon and distributed by J. Chandler & Company in the United Kingdom and Grants of Ireland in Ireland. ... In Scotland, Buckfast is recognised as the favoured drink of neds: young males who are associated with hooliganism, casual sports clothing and stupidity. Its ties to anti-social behaviour, especially with drinkers under 18 years old, have been attributed to its very high caffeine content: each 750ml bottle contains the equivalent of eight cans of cola." So I'm gonna say 95% chance on Yes, Scottish. Also, I am bummed that there was never a heel tag team that took advantage of Sparks while that caffeine. So much promo potential.

Knowing how Jason's tale ends, this song can inflict some real damage. It feels exactly how it's named: a farewell transmission. Also, as a student learning psychology & front line therapy (hotlines, crisis centers), there's two verses in here that put a lump in my throat. "The real truth about it is No one gets it right The real truth about it is We're all supposed to try There ain't no end to the sands I been trying to cross The real truth about it is My kind of life's no better off If it's got the map, or if it's lost"

maybe I'll put a thing with a guitar later, but this song is my "okay it's time to cry right now" jam EDIT: Having reread the rules, here's what's up. Milo is starting to become my favorite rapper because of songs like this, where he addresses loss and brotherhood in such severely explicit detail, while using nerdy references as what they are- distractions. He tends to make those referential lines when he's trying to avoid the direct terror of a situation, and maybe that just works on me because that's how all my people deal and I see it. And then, regardless of any abstraction, Milo just lays it down: "Every night before I fall asleep I think of where my brother went- How something so real can just disappear, I must be too fucking dense!" And that's when all that distraction fails Milo, and he just starts to come apart.

Good luck.

My best friend is letting me DJ his barbeque. I know. I know!

angry birds came out on a bunch of consoles, which is your "indie guy nakes it big" metaphor and for every angry birds, there's hundreds of garbage knockoffs that change little things and insist that makes them different enough to be valuable and, there are plenty of people (clash of clans) that don't ever want to make it to the big time. They've decided this is it, so they just exist how they are until they can't. so, chikara. boom now I dont want to talk about that any more

Well... when I have money, I can exchange it for goods and services. These can either be necessities or luxuries. Either way, I have never chosen to spend this money on a smartphone. This is a trend that has continued for many years.

This is a general discussion thread, so, here's something general. Friend of mine found that Force Choke Chokeslam gif and asked me "so at what point do you just pack up and go home on this hobby." We talked, and so here’s an analogy we made that makes sense if you play video games. Because he was all like "i never see you have enthusiasm" and I was all "I do, it's just really specific enthusiasm." Anyways. WWE is major console developers. It’s really expensive. Sometimes it’s good, and sometimes they make infuriating decisions for no reason. US Indies are smartphone games. I do not have a smartphone. I do not want a smartphone. I only kind of understand smartphones, but enough to know that I do not want a smartphone. Mexico is the independent PC scene, full of really creative people doing wild shit because that’s their life’s goal. There’s a lot of legacy, but also a lot of people bursting out by being themselves and being different than everyone else. Basically, everything I fell in love with. Japan is still Japan. Insular, kind of crazy looking, occasionally transcendent. A proud history but these days it’s mostly ignorable. Japanese indies are Japanese phone games. What is… I don’t… just... make it stop. Go. Go enjoy it over there. It hurts my head too much.

So I accidentally started a band*, and made a shopping list for the thing I wanted to do (I don't want to spell it out because I've never seen anyone do it & couldn't make it show up on google so I don't want it to exist on the internet otherwise). My plan was to get it all by late fall, maybe. Well, a bunch of lucky breaks hit all at once (money I didn't expect, craigslist sales happening), and I'll have everything I need by next weekend. *like, a friend and I were joking about having a band and then we had a really good idea

I am loathe to invoke Jim Cornette to make a point here, but there was some shoot interview he did where he dropped a quote from some anonymous wrestler: "I liked the business a lot more when the marks were in the seats." I come closer to understanding exactly what he meant every year.

RBI Baseball got the music wrong, so, don't buy RBI Baseball until they get the music right.

"doing"

We did this last year, and it actually ended up being pretty cool, so here's the sequel! ALBUMS 10. Tom Vek - Luck Tom is actually the guy who inspired me to start making music on my own. He played all the instruments on his first record, and Me Age 17 didn't know that was allowed, let alone possible. Anyways, Luck is kind of the same thing he always does, taking a single melody and just getting every bit of song he can out of it. Whatever, this is mostly sentimental. 9. God - The Bible I haven't had that kind of "what the fuck is this gonna be" experience with a mixtape for a while. Like, "who the hell just calls himself God? This is either going to be funny or amazing." Surprise: it's amazing! Chicago trap with all the lyricism and flow that I'm missing from most of that stuff. 8. La Sera - Hour of the Dawn The album sounds like the cover. The cover is one of the Vivian Girls dancing in the midday sun wearing a Poison Idea shirt. I don't know what else to really tell you here. Katy's a lot more vocally assertive on this record and it's made for the second straight La Sera record that's dramatically better than the last. 7. Antwon - Heavy Hearted In Doldrums I love how wild the west coast is right now. Even when a guy like Antwon is going pretty by the numbers, it's still huge and unique and naturally boundry-pushing. Antwon just makes recession-era party bangers, and it's awesome, and it's probably not for everyone. RIP Sad Andy 1992-2092. 6. Liars - Mess The first six tracks on here are enormous fucking siege weapons. The back half breathes in an unsettling way that I'm not always in the mood for, which is the only thing holding it back. 5. Young Fathers - Dead Young Fathers should probably be the biggest band in the world. Rap trio making their own hooks with their own gorgeous singing voices. Just a brilliant record that's unlike anything anyone else is doing right now. 4. Lower - Seek Warmer Climes My favorite song of the last batch of Lower stuff was "Someone's Got It In For Me," which was a big expansive hymn sounding thing. This whole record proceeds down that track. Apparently other people were just expecting tantrumming young men? Well whatever. Lower is post-punk revival coordinated in a way that a lot of their peers aren't. 3. White Suns - Totem This album makes every other metal/rock/noise record I've heard this year feel fucking weak. A literally uncomfortable listen for me. Music that has the same tension as Lovecraft's descriptions effect his characters. I don't know how to really describe it. 2. Carla Bozulich - Boy When I tried to get a friend of mine to listen to this, they got like two songs in and went "Yeah of course this is your fucking thing" and then he didn't revisit it for two months. This is like the karmic result of every shitty blues band from the 2000s, just making this hideous, huge, sexy, vital record. This album is not for dudes scared by sexually assertive women. Or maybe it's exactly for them. 1. clipping. - CLPPNG Any way a rap album can be progressive, CLPPNG is. Beats, lyrics, themes, all of it. It's alternately funny and bleak and heavy and tragic, depending entirely on what the song calls for but always executed with compositional excellence. I mean, fuck, it ends with a John Cage cover after explaining exactly why their music is so dark. SONGS A necessary honorary mention goes to DJ Rashad and DJ Spinn's remix of Kanye West's "On Site." Better than the original. RIP Rashad. 10. Carla Bozulich - Number X This doesn't exist on youtube or anything like that, which is good in a way since it's the outro track. Giving catharsis to something as intense as her record is a tall fuckin' order, and she does. 9. The Men - "Different Days" Reason #58 I love The Men: Watching Ben Greenberg (former Zs) figure out how he wants to write for this band. He had all of my favorite songs on New Moon (Without A Face, The Brass, I See No One (and I think the b-side on the Electric single?)), and now he has my favorite on Tomorrow's Hits. 8. Ratking - "Canal" This one's like putting the sun in my gas tank. Just all of the joyous energy of flow. CUZ WHEN I SPIT, YOU SEE MY VEINS BULLLGIN OUT, COLD AS CUTS FROM MY BLADES 7. A Sunny Day In Glasgow - "In Love With Useless" This single made the SIX YEARS between the records seem like it'll be worth it. ASDIG has an amazing sense of harmony and melody, but not really clearer, logical production. Well they fixed that and now they're making giant arena-worthy pieces like this. 6. Swans - "A Little God In My Hands" The horns of the 'chorus' make me want to put my hands up in the air reflexively. Swans leaning into funk is kind of amazing, and a more natural fit than you'd ever believe. 5. La Sera - "Losing To The Dark" I hum this chorus all the fucking time. ALL THE TIME. It's a real problem. 4. Liars - "Mess on a Mission" same 3. clipping. - "Story 2" The first time I heard this, I almost quit writing music, because why fucking bother. I will never be this smart or talented. 2. Thee Silver Mt. Zion Orchestra - "What We Loved Was Not Enough" Play this at the world's wake. 1. Antwon ft. Lil Ugly Mane - "Rain Song" Two years straight, Antwon makes a song so obnoxiously amazing nothing else could compete. Antwon and Ugly Mane paint amazing pictures of togetherness and loneliness in the same song. I mean they're both pretty gross, but it's Antwon and Ugly Mane, not fucking Donovan. Although you could be confused for thinking it was with how absolutely gorgeous the beat is. WHAT SAY YOU, EAR-HAVERS

This is kind of a sidebar, but a friend of mine showed me some soccer dive and said "that is some wrasslin levels of silly" and I was all "how dare you." Then he asked if there are any wrestlers with pro/semi-pro soccer experience, and that stumped me. Anyone know of anything like that? It seems improbable.

Kentucky Route Zero is on sale for half off for the next 8 hours. I highly recommend it, but keep in mind it's an episodic adventure game that's taking a "when it's done" approach to putting episodes out. It was a year between 2 and 3. However, what they're doing with the time is making a really amazing surreal american gothic adventure game. It is a game for people who have been driving on winding roads late at night, stopping at a fork between where they were supposed to go and where they weren't, and regret taking the right road.