Today's Existential Crisis:

Worrying about losing my hair is only going to make me loose it faster.

Goodnight everybody! Tip your servers...

WHAAAAAAAAAAAT?!

Jesus sh*t Sony, you're serious?

PlayStation is coming to pc. I... I don't know what to say. I would have bet my entire life savings on this never happening but now that it has (or is going to) I can see the logic. $60 a unit is no longer cutting it as budgets balloon out of control. I'm of the mind that $100+ special editions were a sly way of gauging just how much people were willing to pay for games. This move suggests the resounding answer to that question was "not more than 60 bones."

Well damn, if the subscription fee isn't insane I will definitely sign up for a month or two. Lord knows I won't want to hold onto PlayStation's back catalogue forever.

UPDATE: I've seen the list of games. I am unimpressed. Man... that was a fleeting high.

8. Hazmat Suit.

You can tell a lot about a composer's mettle by how they handle their montages. When almost the entire focus is on the music plenty can go wrong. The sad truth is the vast majority of soundtracks don't hold up outside the thrall of the film and there's nothing necessarily wrong with that. A good soundtrack doesn't have to stand on it's own... but the great ones always do.

So what we have here is something very similar to the end credits suite but in a slightly lower gear. The 10 note theme still works marvelously and Bear always puts a new kind of crescendo in each reprise because he's a total eff'in pro like that.

Soundtrack of the Week

There's always a story playing in my head. Sometimes it's something I've seen and sometimes it's something I've written. Either way, it demands music! Here's what the inside of my head sounds like this week:

If this becomes a regular thing, Bear Mccreary is going to be on here a lot. He's a genius and 10 Cloverfield Lane is already one of my favorites. The entire score is based around one 10 note (get it?!) theme and I should find it grating or annoying after a while but somehow I haven't. It's like a John Williams horror score, but not exactly. It has a bite Williams never had and yet it's got a sense of whimsy that honestly has no place in this movie. That's something Bear does sometimes. He puts moods and feelings into projects that shouldn't fit, but somehow they do. The lighter tones seem to speak to Howard's dangerously childish feelings toward women which serves to make his character all the more pitiful... and unsettling.

This is seriously one of the best horror/thriller scores I've ever heard and I hope you'll give this a shot. If soundtracks are at all your thing. Even for me, I'll admit this is pushing it. But goddammit you guys, I love soundtracks!

Striking Internet Gold

The internet is so full of people saying so much we can't find all the writing worth reading. But sometimes you're listlessly scrolling through a BMD comment section and sometimes someone holds up a nugget of gold: The most perfect summery of Bond's character arc in Casino Royale.

 

Digital Chicken Soup

Sometimes your worst enemy is yourself. I just had a dream that it was 8 years in the future and I had spent it all working in a decrepit strip mall pet store. Have I mentioned my sub-conscience is a motherf***er? Well he is, and I got dem' blues sumthin' fierce. Still, I think I know how to fix em':

2 years on, The Stick of Truth has aged marvelously. Now that I've come to grips with it's length, given it's 4 year development I wasn't thrilled that it clocked in barely under 10 hours, I appreciate it for it's successes. Like how it's basically a 4 part South Park episode with a solid action RPG underneath. It's still so damn funny and that's exactly what I need right now.

Oh, also my boss was Jimmy Pesto from Bob's Burgers. Because dreams are dumb.

What my buddy thinks of no man's sky

Thanks Patrick!

I may not have a dog in this fight yet and I won't until it costs at least half as much as it does now, but my friend got his hands on it and he's luvin' it. He regaled me with a tale of how he spent 45 minutes trying to escape from a hole in a mountain made entirely of gold. I'm not sold yet, but a couple more stories like that and I might ponder it. But over a year ago I wasn't convinced there would actually be anything to do in NMS. It's sad to see a butt-ton of critics and commenters concede that exact sentiment.