Lamp, broken circa 1988

haha, scared off someone I was very much into. they asked to hear some of the music i've made, and, well, i shared where's that bernie mac video, with the "boy just be yourself" bit fuck

If The Last of Us is the peak of this generation, and the next generation is going to be spent trying to "top it" then I'm totally fine with sitting this cycle out. It looks great and seems like it was very expensive to make, but I reject the idea that the high point of gameplay over the last seven years is "Gears Of War Without Catharsis And With Weapon Durability." Fuck, I'm a huge fan of everything about Gears of War* and I'm kind of uneasy saying that's the peak too. *i understand that the story is bad, but the way the first game delivered that bad story was so different and impactful that even hironobu sakaguchi capitalized on it for Lost Odyssey. That method is also "The Entire Naughty Dog Playbook"

also I know so little about football and sports media that I usually just lurk in these threads, but come on, why are you trying to think about a thing skip bayless has said

He's fantastic. His mat wrestling ability in the UWF days were great and then he did the WCW stint where he showed he can be an excellent goofball too. Swayze speaks truth. Smiley's match with Yamazaki is a dang gem that gets passed over too much, and if you just search "Norman Smiley UWF" you get his shit with Maeda, Fujiwara, Takada and Yoji Anjo, all from 88 and all good to great.

Funny joke: I thought I was all out of things to pimp, and then I found another band from my Guitar Tone Mecca in Calgary. This one's called Faux Fur, and it's eight really tightly designed devices with two great, expansive ballads. Added bonus: there's an actual blood relation to Women in this band. The drummer is the youngest Flegel brother. Also, here's a single from Viet Cong, which is the band that the other surviving 2/3rds of Women started. Very gothy and comparatively straightforward. Catchy, though.

the souls games dont have permadeath

RED DEAD REDEMPTION.

The thought of Shellshocked getting over as a finish made me check my bug-out bag for comfort.

how dare you sully the good name of pitbull by associating him with macklemore

While you're getting started early by being shitty to strangers, I'm offering a final FUCK YOU to 2013. A year that was too hard on too many good people I know. It wont be missed.

Will there be Machines Keep our Insides moving Will there be Buttons to press Wires to twist Keep our lips wet To keep us talking? To keep our eyes lit? Oh it's wrong Treating the breath Soothe our skin Make us perfect What thing moves? What stands still? What thing moves? What stands still?

So I was talking to a non-wrestling friend of mine about the Kaufman/Lawler program. They asked if Kaufman was a good wrestler, and I said that he was perfect for what he had to do. Then I explained how a lot of celebrities can be afraid of getting hurt or hurting people so their angles end up looking bad, which is why the Kaufman stuff was great because he leaned into all of it when it was time to. So I tried to name other people who had that kind of commitment to the angle and all I could name were Floyd Mayweather and Mark Cuban. Am I forgetting anyone?

That tune is pretty fucking cool. More Bloody Panda or Khanate to my ears than Neurosis, but that's not because of the vocals (have you heard Enemy of the Sun?). Unsure what “I don't like a lot of metal.” is supposed to mean in that context. I love the hell out of Enemy of the Sun, even though most of the time I'm in absolutely no mood to hear it. So maybe it has sections like that and I've forgotten. With the "don't like a lot of metal" comment, what I was implying is that I appreciate sound and compositional nuance (namely dynamics and the use of space as its own accent) more than musicianship. I've got no taste for the technical/melodic death sound which seems to be the bulk of the metal that's getting pimped around the here and places like rateyourmusic. I respect the musicianship, but it doesn't do anything for me emotionally or mentally. Although I like that new Carcass record alright. It's just not because of the musicianship.

ALRIGHT. GUITARS. This is ordered in least to most extreme. The Diet – The Diet I don't know if we've talked about this, but my favorite album is “Public Strain” by Women. When I saw them live they had this band opening for them called Manchild, who had some neat ideas and a kind of similar sound. They were also huge fans of Women, judging by the look of childlike joy on one of the guitarist's face during the outro of Shaking Hand and the singer standing at the side of the stage clutching a beer and bobbing his head to every song as I was. What I'm saying here is I am biased and I love this album and I have no idea if it's any good. See if it's good for yourself! Circuit Des Yeux – Overdue Friend of mine put me up on this album after seeing her open for Bill Callahan this year. She makes sense as an opener because her work throws heavily to old, insular Smog. Her voice has an epic and powerful coloring effect to the elegant little devices she's constructed. The production is also pretty much immaculate (except for when it deliberately isn't) which allows her to make some incredible kinds of sounds like on the ending of the album's opener Lithonia, where she collides her deep voice and feedbacking guitar against a driving piece of chamber music. PK14 – 1984 Chinese punk rock and dedicated Fugazi worship. Check it out if you are down with either idea. Kind of no use trying to sell it if neither do. Blackout Beach – Blues Trip / Frog Eyes – Carey's Cold Spring I'm personally jealous of Carey Mercer's whole skillset. As a singer, his voice trembles while it holds up weight of his subjects. As a guitarist, the tone he uses makes me feel like I'm going to get electrocuted by my speakers. As a songwriter, he can create a wide range of sound with his self-limited palettes. As a lyricist, he writes more like a poet than anything, using words to communicate an emotion and a state instead of an idea. He also seems like a pretty nice guy, which makes the work he made this year feel pretty tragic. In 2011 he released an epic electronic record called Fuck Death, which was then karmically awarded with the slow death of his father. Mercer felt directly responsible, and the two albums he's released this year feel very much like an attempt to undo this hex. Blues Trip is a drastic reworking of 7 of the 8 songs from Fuck Death done in the immediate wake of the death of his father (with vocals added later). Carey's Cold Spring is the release of the record he's slowly been writing since the release of Fuck Death. The album ends with Claxxon's Lament which, a devastating ballad in it's own right, he revealed to be a song he played for his father on his death bed, and which may have been the last song he heard. So I guess what I'm trying to say here is, don't put these albums on if you're looking for a good time. They're still immense and worthy works, though. The Fat White Family – Champagne Holocaust Man, I kind of don't want to say anything about this record. All I'm going to say is that there's a progression in the sound and the writing that is absolutely brilliant, and that this record is gross. You can listen to it in full here (cover NSFW). The Drones – I See Seaweed You know a record's going to be dark when the opening song is about overpopulation and ex-girlfriends, and sure enough the whole album is bleak. It's also theoretically sound and sonically gorgeous, all delightful bait on the hook Gareth Liddiard has thrown into the water. The sound, to be more specific, ranges from excessively loud dramatics to slow rolling blues rock all while the lyrics spin darker and darker tales. The best place to start in the case of this album is the title track and opener, to see if that hooks you. Savages – Silence Yourself Yeah okay this one isn't so obscure. It still feels like the kind of dirty fueled raging fuck engine that Iggy Pop exposed rock and roll as being, which is a thing that a lot of modern rock records (and bands for that matter) just get wrong. Savages do not get it wrong, but really, you should've heard this by now. Destruction Unit – Void / Two Strong Hits / Deep Trip All the things I've said about lyrics are totally useless here. I can't hear shit Destruction Unit says. This would be a terrible fault if that was at all the point of listening to Destruction Unit. What they're doing instead is the kind of thing I'd like my music to do, where when you put it on it feels like the air in the room changes. This is the kind of music that Hunter S. Thompson was talking about when he implied that good music was fuel. So where to start? Well, that's sadly pretty easy: Void is a total motherfucker to track down. It was released on a limited vinyl run with no digital release, so all versions of it floating around the internet are vinyl rips. Of course this supposes you're lucky enough to run into someone with one. Deep Trip, though, was released on Sacred Bones Records so that's pretty easy to go find at this point. Make sure you get the bonus track, The Church of Jesus Christ. If you need even more D-Unit after that, well, Two Strong Hits is right here. Alternatively, just listen to that and see if you're up for an album of it. Perfect Pussy – I have lost all desire for feeling This is my overall favorite music release of the year. It's thirteen minutes and there's not a second of it I don't love. It's noisy as fuck, it's confrontational, it's fast (but perfectly timed), the lyrics are great... ugh. To my ears it's flawless. I'll avoid making any comparisons in sound and instead just link you here, to the record in full. Again, it's like thirteen minutes. You probably have that much time to get your ass kicked. The Body – Christs, Redeemers My favorite metal band is Neurosis, so I guess what I mean to say is “I don't like a lot of metal.” Lost in the style of all of the acts that claim them as inspirations or heroes is the atmospheric suffocation in those middle 90s Neurosis records, accomplished through their simultaneous use of samples and delicate composition, which served as bookends to the immense sonic devastation (the part a lot of bands come close to getting right). I don't know if The Body has ever cited Neurosis as a key influence, and I'm pretty sure they wouldn't (especially considering that their vocal delivery is “the even crazier guy in the padded cell next to yours”). Either way, they're still the only thing I've heard that's capable of making that intensive, vile mood that Neurosis built it's reputation on. See for yourself. And with that I'm out of stuff to pimp.

LEGEND OF GRIMROCK- Had it for a while and since I'm trying to buy less games after the steam sale (my steam library is above 250) I'm going through a bunch of shit I've never even installed but figured I'd want later (which I guess is now, now). ANYWAYS. Shit's rad. I dig on the first person dungeon crawling thing a whole lot and this is a pretty neat modern take on how to make it work. I wish there was some kind of hotkey function for moving people from the front line to the back line, but that's a pretty minor gripe. RAYMAN LEGENDS- it's pure joy, what do you want me to say here and now here are my mental notes from my first five lives in RISK OF RAIN: "wow this is a total grindfest" "man that was fast" "no, THAT was fast" "maybe I need to activate the portal sooner?" "okay maybe this time I should just stockpile items" ten minutes pass "HAHAHAHAHA RUN FOOLS RUN FROM MY BULLETS AND MISSILES AND MISSILE BULLETS" so it's pretty good. it's like spelunky and dota and bangai-o smashed into each other until they are nothing but liquid, then rebuilt into a nightmare funhouse

Minecraft is a survivalist zen garden with randomly generated dungeons. There is an ending, and it's really hard to get. It takes a lot of effort, and a good amount of luck. If you don't want to beat the game, there's plenty else to do. Success in the game is entirely subjective to what you define success to be. like, what is there to be missed here

Gone Home is $6.70 for the next two days. This is your chance!

(on vinyl) Plus a signal splitter pedal and two pairs of shorts. Pretty good.

actually a pretty good mark henry

What did El-P do last year? I used to love him when Def Jux was new, but he seemed to stop existing for me about a decade ago. He put out a solo record called Cancer 4 Cure that was one of the best rap albums of 2012, and he produced Killer Mike's album R.A.P. Music which was also one of the best rap albums of 2012 (personally I prefer Mike's record). So this year he made a punk speed sonic blast for him and Mike to take turns using. MORE PIMPING. I'm going to try to put off guitar music for one more week because while I do have a lot of stuff I want to talk about that has guitars, this is a board that also talks about lots of things with guitars. So I'd feel bad for leaving some stuff out. This block is all more experimental and wild kinds of music. The scale of risk ranges from “Going To A New Restaurant” to “Being A Test Pilot.” Ashley Paul – Line The Clouds To me as a composer, this is like a professional party magician watching an expert street magician. We're dealing with the same medium but our skill sets are so different that the only way I can understand what they're doing is through the frame of my own experience. All press materials for this record suggest that this record is largely improvised, if not entirely. Yet, for all the listening I've done of this record, it appears seamless and evident to me. The layout is so precise and clean that my mind just can't interface with the idea of how this could be improvisational work. At the same time, I don't really want the solution either. I'm just taken in by it. Here's the first track, to illustrate what I mean Tim Hecker – Virgins This is an album I have a hard time talking about it, because I can't really find the words for what I feel while it's happening. It sounds like machines if gears were pianos, and I'm worried that it and Oneohtrix Point Never occupy too similar a space so there's not a lot of people I've seen come out in support of both. I mean, I like this one, and you should hear it, but the Oneohtrix record blew my tiny mind, as I've already talked about. Here's the intro track. Jenny Hval – Innocence Is Kinky Alright, fine, this album has rock guitars, but including it with the rock/metal stuff I want to shout out would give the wrong impression both on this album and on those albums. I'll start by saying I love the hell out of both records she's put out under her real name, this one and 2011's Viscera. However, the relationship those two records have with each other is a caterpillar to a butterfly, with a year of art installations as the cocoon. I won't fuck around: this album takes a lot of work to listen to and understand. I barely do. Hval has a very particular voice, very specific vocabulary, and very deliberate style. I believe the return gained for that investment is an album of songs that no one else right now is capable of writing, and that's valuable to me. Maybe it will be to you. Marina Rosenfeld – P.A. / Hard Love Somewhere between ambient and noise collage, this record is a mixture of industrial ambient sounds, dub beats and singing, chaotic cello playing (from a musician I'll be talking about again in a few seconds), and unsettling sample work. Words really fail on this one, so here's the title track. Pharmakon – Abandon A solo noise musician who deals exclusively in strict composition instead of improv (because anyone can improvise noise). The fastest comparison is to early Swans, but what Pharmakon manages to create in 26 minutes is both more stripped down and more expansive at the same time, managing to capture that same disturbing airless feel with a different tone profile. Here's a sample, but watch your volume. Okkyung Lee – Ghil A record from the cello player on Rosenfeld's album. See, there's this thing I like about physical instruments over electronic instruments: with an electronic instrument you have to play by the rules of the technology that made it. Physical instruments are full of ways to defy the parameters of the people that made them. It feels like you can defeat physical instruments at their own game. Colin Stetson is a fantastic example of this, and so is Okkyung Lee's record Ghil. What Lee does to her cello in the course of this record is borderline defilement, pulling sounds and energy from this old tool that feel like listening to Lightning Bolt demos so wild that they weren't able to do anything with them. Here's an example. D/P/I – ESPRESSO DIGITAL Well, I've certainly never heard anything quite like it. Unapproachable sample work with maddening synthesizers. Yet, I feel like people should know this exists, because the experience of baffled dismay that followed me through my first listen of this record still sticks with me. If you try this record, good luck, and be sure to start from the beginning.

I voted USA/Japan with a caveat. The last time we fought about this, my understanding is that it was an access thing more than anything. Now that New Japan airs a lot of iPPVs, I think it makes sense for them to be included, but not for the rest of Japan. Continue not including Mexico, because that's just going to end up with Negro Casas losing to, like, Fandango or whatever because Negro Casas is the best worker of the decade so far but Fandango has pretty ladies and the light up shillouette so...

Another December release to throw in here! I don't want to talk about the rest of his work or his reputation or anything boring like that. I also don't want to talk about the short film and website and screenplay that accompany the album because I'm not going to fuck with those. On it's own, as a collection of songs, "Because The Internet" by Childish Gambino is really clearly one of the best rap albums of this year. No matter what flavor of rap appeals to you, there is something in there to satisfy that. It's a work of immense range and incredible craft.

Not Steam or GOG, but the Humble Store: Gone Home is $5 today only. Please try it if you can afford it.

Counterpoint: fuck cops, and fuck that guy in particular. How "smug pig talks down to influential black artist" is supposed to inspire anything but that is beyond me.