Saturday, July 30, 2011

Recent Band Findings of the First Half of 2011 Part 1

Here's just a short blog about some bands that I have found in 2011 that I really enjoy listening to. I got this idea from Tenebris In Lux

So without any more of an introduction here are a few bands that I have found and enjoyed this year. Oh and there won't be anything from previous blogs on here.

1. The Creepshow (A Horror Punk, Psychobilly band that I really recently discovered a few days ago and they are also one of the rare bands that I love almost every song they've made). The song that is being linked is their cover of The Misfit's 'Halloween'.

2. Siouxsie & the Banshees (A punk rock, gothic rock band that I never thought I would like. I listened to one of their songs about a year ago and didn't like it but then ;Kiss Them for Me' came on when I was listening to pandora and I ended up liking this band. Oh and as a sidenote I was listening to their song 'Spellbound' a couple days ago when I was really tired and I ended up tripping out somehow lol). The song I linked is their song 'Arabian Knights'. This is a little off topic but doesn't Siouxsie look beautiful in this video?

3. The March Violets (A Gothic Rock band.. This band formed in the 80's but ended up disbanding in 87. Good news though, they reformed in  2010 with all of the original members, and they're putting out new songs too!) The song that is being linked is their song 'Electric Shades' which I believe is only available on their record of the same title, and that is only on vinyl or cassette.

4. Amanda Palmer (An Alternative Rock, Punk Cabaret band that I found out about when I was looking for bands similar to Emile Autumn). The song that is linked is entitled 'Astronaut'.

5. The Velvet Undeground (A rock group formed back in the 60's. I listened to their song Heroin and couldn't help but be amazed, I think this might be one of the first songs that I think is perfect musically). Yes, the song I linked you to was their song 'Heroin'.

6. Ashbury Heights (A synthpop, electric band that broke up in 2010. I found this band to be really good, first song I heard by them was Spiders which I got introduced to from the blog The Ultimate Goth Guide . I looked on amazon.com and for some reason their "Three Cheers For The Newly Deads" is well over $100!!!! Luckily there is a website that caters to people who love this type of music and sells CD's like this for reasonable prices, stormingthebase.com There's also discogs.com too if you don't mind getting used CD's ). The song I am linking is called 'Christ'.

7. Blitzkid (A Horror Punk band. One of my friends recommended this band to me and I ended up really liking them. They also do a song calls 'As the rope Bridge Sways' that has to be one of the best slow punk songs I have ever heard). The song  that is linked is called 'Let's Go to the Cemetery'.

There are many more bands that I could include on this list, however, I do not want to bombard you guys with links so those bands will have to wait for a part 2 or 3.

Friday, July 29, 2011

An unprofessional review about the movie Super 8

Sorry I haven't made a blog in a little while, I've been too busy watching TV... OK not really I've just been really lazy and tired the past few days but hopefully that will change sometime soon.

Moving on. This review will be an unprofessional trying to be professional meaning that I will critically look at the film but by no means do I classify myself as a professional movie critic (although some movie critics are
pretty bad). Also, this "review" will have some spoilers in it.


Here's a little background information about Super 8 before I start the "review": Super 8 is about 8 friends who love to make movies, they are trying to make a movie at a train station when the director of their film sees that there is actually a train coming toward them. This is perfect, he thinks and he tells everyone to get ready and that they will film the scene when the train is passing by. Seems innocent enough right? Well for some reason a car gets on the train tracks and crashes head on into the train derailing the train and everything goes to hell. It turns out that there is an alien as cargo and it is let loose because of this crash. The army then comes to the town and looks for the creature. The kids and the main characters dad try to figure out what is going on in their town. Here's the trailer if you want to either know more or want a better explanation. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vpzUCA5i6zY

 I saw the movie Super 8 on the weekend and didn't really think much of it, I mean it was an ok movie but I didn't really see anything great in it (besides the acting). However after I saw it I was bored and check out the reviews and to my surprise it got pretty good reviews from film critics. Now I'm not a film critic but I do have to say that I don't know why the critics gave it such high marks, I mean even Roger Ebert (my least favorite film critic on the planet but someone who people respect for some reason) gave it 3 and a half stars (and yet he only gave kick ass 1...).


Why exactly did this film get such high marks? Well one of the main reasons I believe is the aspect of nostalgia, now I wasn't alive in the 80s (ok fine, technically it's 1979 but close enough)  so there was no nostalgic factor for me in the movie which might be why I don't care that much for when the film was set (although I do have to say it is cool how they did that). I did go see this with my parents though, and my mom pointed out that they messed up on some parts, such as saying that the 7 eleven they have there is modern. I'd like to say that this is true but I cannot because I wasn't around in that time and I could not see any old photos of a 7-Eleven unless they're too old.

 Another thing could have been the way that the alien was reviled (it was actually pretty cool how the did this. The alien was in many early parts of the movie however the audience never got to see the creature until close to the end of the movie) although I think it might have been better if you never saw the creature or if you only saw parts of it like a leg, foot, hand, and/or arm. Maybe the acting also helped it get high marks? That could be true because the acting was pretty good, however the problem with this is that a movie could have great acting but that doesn't make it a good movie.

However there are quite a few major flaws in the movie. One of them was that the main character (Joe) notices that his dog is gone right away, but for some reason it takes him a day or two to realize that his dad has been kidnapped? How is this even supposed to work, he sees his dad every night so he should know that his dad

And speaking of the dog, the film does not show any dog ever again after the police find out where the dogs are. So did they get the dogs or did they just leave them in the town the dogs were in?

Another part I don't like is close to the end of the film when there's some symbolism, which I think is great, however the way that this symbolism is portrayed was a huge flaw. The part of the film I am talking about is when the necklace that Joe has is getting pulled to help make the aliens space craft and in the end Joe let's go of the necklace. The symbolism here is pretty good, it's showing that Joe is finally letting go of the past, however there is a major flaw here. The space craft has a gigantic magnetic pull, you see it pulling soldiers equipped with guns up from the ground, however Joe doesn't get pulled up, nor does his necklace break in half or go right through his hand due to the magnetism. This part of the movie could have easily been done if the director wasn't super happy about magnifying things.

The town where the movie takes place also gets set on fire (well the grass close to the town does, and that is why they evacuate the town) however the fire seemed to die down when the kids go back to their school to get information about the alien they are up against. I have no idea why the fire died down because I thought the point of the fire was to draw out the alien, not to evacuate the town. Maybe I was just missing something.

Another major major major flaw was that at one point Joe's love interest (Alice) was tied up and hanging from the ceiling. Joe gets her down but her feet are still bound together, not to worry though because there is a random person who doesn't have her feet tied? That just woke up and the camera goes to her, then back on Alice who suddenly does not have her feet tied anymore but Joe didn't cut the weird black cocoon thing that was binding her legs? Maybe the ghost did it! There's also an appearance of the police chief who was seen hanging from the ceiling but is suddenly on the ground without bound feet. Wow this ghost surely works hard! Yeah, this is just a huge flaw of the movie.

There might be some other major flaws I'm missing but I cannot remember any more right now. So besides those there are a few minor flaws (tanks that suddenly shoot rapid fire even though they can only have 1 shell at a time and have to be manually reloaded), a few things don't get explained, a guy magically survives a head on car crash with a train but the train is totaled. Explosives being carried on a train with cargo that seems too valuable to be in a train with explosives, the commanding officer knowing that people saw the accident and seeming like he will do something about looking for them but hardly does anything about it, the alien being too tall to actually be in one of the cargo holds on the train, ect.

In closing this is a decent movie, but if you look though it in the eyes of a movie critic it might not be that great. However, assuming none of you are movie critics or really care about analyzing movies (I think I'm the only one I know who does that, and I only do it sometimes like when critics say a movie is good. That is one of the reasons I like Black Swan so much, but it's not the time to talk about that movie), I think that it's at least worth a watch.

Also as a nice little side note I got a new follower :) Shout out to Incensis. I hope you will enjoy the future blogs.


Reminder for this blog: There's a difference between looking at a movie like a normal person and looking at one like a film critic, you can enjoy a movie a lot but that doesn't mean that the film is good from a critical view.


Saturday, July 23, 2011

OK, so It's a little different: Asexuality

First off, let me just say that there will be sexual terms in this blog because this topic deals with sex. However it is being used in an educational manner therefore it should not really affect you that much, enjoy the blog. I also want to warn you that the text may change fonts, I've tried to keep it one font but for some reason when I copied my Microsoft word text it said there were two fonts, so sorry about that. Well here we go (I guess it didn't take me as long as I thought, I guess that's good news).

 Sexually oblivious rhino strikes again

What exactly does it mean to be asexual? Well according to Wikipedia it is a mode of reproduction by which offspring arise from a single parent, and inherit the genes of that parent only.  However I am not going to talk about that kind of asexuality and instead I’m going to talk about the human asexual orientation. Asexual in this context means a lack of sexual attraction and the lack of interest in or desire for sex.
Simple and easy right? Well not quite as there are many different subtypes of asexuals or similar orientations to that of asexuals:

1.    1.  Aromantic asexual: These are the people who don’t want a relationship nor do they want sex.

2.    2.  Demisexual: These are the people who do not have sexual attraction until they grow very close to a person.

3.    3.  Gray-A: These people either have low sexual attraction, don’t experience sexual attraction that much, don’t have a desire to act out on their sexual attraction, or people who only like or want sex under certain circumstances.

4.     4. Bi/hetero/homo/pan romantic asexual: These are the people who are romantically attracted to others but do not desire sex.

Things you may not know:

+ Asexuals can find people attractive (not in a sexual way but an aesthetic way. It’s a way of seeing that someone is beautiful and instead of wanting to have sex with them they may want to go out with them and get to know them).

+ Asexuals can have sex and may enjoy it, even though some asexuals think that sex is disgusting.

+ Some asexuals enjoy pleasing their partner with sex and such, even if they do not have a desire to have sex themselves.

+ Some asexuals masturbate and watch porn

+ BDSM seems somewhat popular with asexuals (most likely because it’s more about psychology than sex).

+ Some asexuals can be sexual arousal

+ Many asexuals are sex-positive (pro sex), however some of them are antisexual (againt sex)

+ Some asexuals can joke about sex like everyone else. However other asexuals don’t seem to get sex jokes and thus the humor is lost on them.

+ Some asexuals are oblivious to flirting and some aren’t

(+) I think that you can still be asexual but interested in researching sex, just as long as you don’t have a desire for it. In this context the researching about sex is more like researching about mythology and the like since it’s something you don’t really care to do [like worshipping Zeus] and it can also be psychological such as why some people like certain things. This is kind of like me, I like reading about this kind of thing because it helps me get a better understanding of different people, and their kink/fetish however I don’t really imagine doing most of the research I look up. 

So what am I? Well I’m pretty sure I’m a heteroromantic asexual (At least people on AVEN thought so, and it does kind of make sense. I could also be demisexual but I’ll have to get a girlfriend to find out, and since I am very particular in personality to want to go out with a woman that might be a while lol I’m also pretty oblivious to flirting lol).  But why would you care to know :P

If this topic interests you here are some websites to check out.

So there you go hopefully that's talked about major points, if you have anything you want to add feel free to do so in the comments, or if you want me to go deeper into asexuality, or if there's something more you wanted me to discuss, just say so in the comments and I'll make a blog about it. 

Friday, July 22, 2011

A quick blog about the night

So I ended up failing at my goal to do a blog a day, well hopefully that won't happen again but who knows.

Night. The time where shops close down and most people go to sleep. Many of these people also prefer the day instead of night. Well not me. I love the night, as do many other people. Why do I love the night you ask? Well I love how peaceful night is. The typical thought of night is being scary and that it's the time where criminals roam the streets looking for their next victim, well that's not what happens where I live. At night almost nobody is out wondering the streets. This making it nice and peaceful, not many cars running, not many people out and about talking or running, the only noise is the relaxing chirp of the crickets.

It is also a beautiful sight to see the moon peer down from the clouds casting light among the darkness that is covering the town.

Night is also the time where some great events take place from going to a night club, to going to an amazing concert nighttime is a time for fun and relaxation, it's the best time of the day.

That's the blog, writing at 3AM is a little hard to do so hopefully I got everything looking OK and I got all my thoughts about what I think of night (I'm probably missing some stuff right now but whatever lol). The next blog will be the one people seem to be waiting for, the asexuality blog. It may take a few days to write though (I really want to get everything right as well as getting the most information I can get) so I'm going to be cross referencing and writing the blog in microsoft word so I can save it and work on it multiple days.

Tuesday, July 19, 2011

Music Pickup # 4: Fat of the Land,First And Last And Always, Headhunter 2000, Mind: The Perpetual Intercourse, Wishfire

In my previous blog I talked about getting a few CD's on vacation, and here they are.

 Fat of the Land - The Prodigy

I went to FYE when I was on vacation (I don't have one close to where I live) and ended up finding a few CD's that I wanted, this was one of them. Fat of the Land came out in 1997 and was the CD that really got the Prodigy into the mainstream (everyone I know has heard at least one of their songs and the songs they have heard are on this CD, either Firestarter, Breathe, or Smack My Bitch Up), and the CD has gone double platinum in the US. This band has been around since 1990 and are considered to be one of the pioneers of the music genre Big Beat  which is music typically driven by heavy breakbeats and synthesizer-generated loops and patterns in common with established forms of electronic dance music such as techno and acid house. (yep got that whole thing from wikipedia).

Anyway, you can see it's a promotional copy that's not supposed to be sold, I guess FYE didn't care so I ended up paying 4 bucks for this CD. It's basically the original CD but with a special sticker, branded case, and gold lettering. It's actually my 2nd promotional CD I have but it's definitely the best.

First And Last And Always - The Sisters of Mercy

This is a CD I got from a different used CD store that was pretty cool, it was really small but packed full of CD's and records. Anyway this was the first album by The Sisters of Mercy, however it was not their first recording, it was actually around the 4th record that they made (the first 3 all being EP's with amazing artwork). First And Last And Always was released in 1985 and was pretty successful in Europe but sadly not the United States. This CD has also helped shape the Gothic Rock music genre even though the lead singer of The Sisters of Mercy refuses to acknowledged that their music is Gothic. Also, talking about The Sisters of Mercy, they started way back in 1979 and are still around today (with different members other than the lead singer).

Anyway i found this CD to be a lot better than I originally thought (I heard a few tracks but I only really liked Marian and Black Planet at first). Which is great for me but not for this blog since it's going to be hard to pick my favorite songs on this CD lol.

 Headhunter 2000 - Front 242 (original song, but it's mostly made by many different bands that remixed Front 242's Headhunter song)

This CD is a pretty long CD (1 hour and 45ish minutes) and it's just remixes of their song Front 242 so there's not much to talk about except that Headhunter 2000 was released in 1999. Front 242 started in 1981 and are still together today . This band also influenced many electro-industrial and electronic artists.

I found this CD to be OK, it's a good remix CD but I wish it had more than 1 song that was remixed 17 times.

 Mind: The Perpetual Intercourse - Skinny Puppy

Mind: The Perpetual Intercourse was the second album that Skinny Puppy released in 1986. This CD was very influential in industrial music which influenced bands like Nine Inch Nails. An interesting fact about the cover, it was actually a picture of a scene in a porno movie and it seems to be one of the main reasons that there are parental advisory stickers on CD's today. Thanks to Tripper Gore (I wonder what would happen if she saw the Voodoo U album cover art?). Anyway Skinny Puppy started in 1982 and are still around today. They is considered to be the founders of electro-industrial music which is pretty cool since I love this type of music.

I find that it takes a little while to get used to Skinny Puppy since the vocals sound so weird, however when I did get used to the music I found it to be pretty good.

 Wishfire - The Crüxshadows

Finally, the last CD I got on vacation. Wishfire was released in 2002 and it has quite a few goods songs. The Crüxshadows were founded in 1992 and are still around today. They are a dark electro band.

I found this CD to be pretty great, I found out about this band from the first blog I ever followed The Ultimate Goth Guide which I find interesting to read most of the time. The funny thing is that the girl who writes the blogs, Amy, just wrote a blog about this band recently.

I'm finally done, so let's get to the music links.

Fat of the Land

Narayan

Mindfields

Funky Shit

First and Last And Always

Every track.... OK fine I'll pick 3.

Marian (Version)

No Time To Cry

Nine While Nine (it has some of the exact same lyrics as Driven Like Snow but it's still great)

Headhunter 2000


Headhunter (Remixed by Front Line Assembly)

Headhunter (Remixed by Apoptygma Berzerk)

Headhunter (Remixed by Talla 2xlc)

Mind: The Perpetual Intercourse 


It's hard to choose because it has quite a few really good songs but I went with these three.

Stairs and Flowers

Dig It

Chainsaw 

Wishfire


Another one that was hard to pick what 3 songs I was going to put up, so I decided to have 4 different ones because one of the songs is very short (1:51)


Return (I'm Coming Home)

Spectators 

Carnival 

Resist/R

Those are the newest CD's I have right now (I'll probably pick some more up on the weekend since I'm going to be visiting a 4 year college at that time so I'll hopefully be walking around town too).

Monday, July 18, 2011

I'm Back!

So finally after being back for a week or so I decided to make a blog!

I'm going to blame my lack of blogging on 'Lazy Summer Syndom' lol. Which I say is just being really lazy during the summer not wanting to really do anything. However that being said I did manage to join a few websites when I got back one of them was last.fm which seems like a nice site, here's my profile if you care lol. Uh oh, now you might know some of the other name I go by online :shock: ... that probably didn't show a smiley face emotion thing. The other websites were ones about sex lol, one of them isn't too bad AVEN (it's just a site about asexuality which is a topic that I am thinking about doing in a later blog along with some other things relating to sex but are odd to most "normal" people), but one is a little iffy which I won't link here :p  wow that emoticon looks quite odd. Anyway don't worry that website is not a website that shows adult videos just a website that I wanted to join to learn more about a certain kink I have that I've already talked about before.

Moving on... My vacation was ok, I got to see my Grandmothers which is always nice. I also got to see one of my Uncles, two Cousins, my dad's Cousin and his kids (I feel bad saying this but they seemed cooler than my cousins), and my mom's old high school friend and her family (with another two kids that seemed cool and I wish I had them as my cousins, ugh why are the other people I meet seem so intelligent, nice and respectful unlike the two... well actually I only saw one this summer because my other cousin was going camping during the week my family was there). Anyway I got to explore the small town of Ann Arbor with my family and that was pretty fun I liked going into the used record stores even if I only found 2 of the many CD's I was looking for. Sadly there was one annoying part during the Ann Arbor trip and that was the car show. I find these shows to be one of the most boring things to experience but my brother and father do not and thus I ended up being extremely bored when they were looking at every inch of the cars and saying stuff like "that car has a V6 engine". Can I ask why do you care so much about the engine a car that you are not going to own? I could go on about this but I'll save it for a later blog.

Other than Ann Arbor we pretty much just stayed at my Grandmothers house and sometimes we drove to the grocery store or target. I'm not really sure how long we stayed there (1 - 2 weeks is my guess) because during the summer I tend to loose track of time since I still don't have a job :( And I don't really have anything to do (friends don't have time to hang out). However because this vacation was this long you can bet it was boring not really doing anything (or having internet) for a while. I think the only other really interesting thing we did was go see the fireworks which was ok (better than last year's at least).

When I was away I manged to buy quite a few CD's which I'll talk about in an upcoming blog I found a promotional copy of Fat of the Land by The Prodigy (pretty cool it was so cheap), and I also got First And Last And Always  from my new favorite band the Sisters of Mercy along with some others.

 That's about it for this blog. I do have a few announcements down below

Firstly here are the things that I'm planning on doing topics on:
+ Asexuality and other things relating to sex (but in an informative way since our society seems to think that teaching kids about sex is wrong which leads to hate due to not being informed about someone's kink or sexuality. I can testify that my high school didn't go into detail about sex besides the usual that goes in there, and you get a baby. I don't even think they ever talked about safe sex!)
+ More CD pickups
+ More Music Time posts (probably at least the industrial and gothic rock genres).
Expanding my pet peeves (or maybe just a list of things I really don't like) since I left off a lot of stuff.
+ Movies
+ Another video game blog (I might also do something about my progression through the tutorial of the rock band 3 keyboard and maybe some rock band 3 songs that I can't seem to do well on with the pro keyboard)
+ Voodoo (I've been wanting to do that topic for a while now but I've been so lazy) along with other lesser known religions
+ Why Do You Care? (Blogs about things people get worked up about and I do not understand why)
+ Random short blog posts (usually so I can put out a blog post once a day. This might be as short as something that I want to do, or something as long as what happened to me that day. This will also be where the parody type blogs will be as well as the dream blogs too and maybe some things that I really like such as the night).


I guess I got a new follower during the time I was gone :) So shout out to Sydneysomething. I hope you'll enjoy my future blogs.