At DragonCon 2009, I had the pleasure of stumbling into a concert by Faith and The Muse. I thought that in my Gothy McGothical ways I had already been familiar with this iconic band. BUT NO! How could I have missed them? Perhaps it was a fluke of fate which [...]]]>

Monica Richards at DragonCon 2009

At DragonCon 2009, I had the pleasure of stumbling into a concert by Faith and The Muse. I thought that in my Gothy McGothical ways I had already been familiar with this iconic band. BUT NO! How could I have missed them? Perhaps it was a fluke of fate which allowed me to find them now, when I was sorely in need of just this type of music.

It was Sunday night, the final night of bacchanalia at the convention, and we wandered down to the presentation hall in the Hyatt to find a monumentally long line. Of course, the staff were also being jerks about it. I suppose they have to get their jollies somehow, but when I’m durnk [sic], I ain’t want security to be up in my biznizz. So we stood and watched the line, which was entertaining in and of itself.

Eventually, the time came to let people in, and we stood for at least five minutes (maybe even TEN) just watching the line queue forward. And then the end of the line passed us… so we followed it. In typical DragonCon fashion, we were able to just go in after the line was finished being a line. And ‘lo, there was piles of space left.

The dancers were a sight to behold!

Waiting for bands to start is always exciting for me. Lingering in the dark, crushed in a crowd, with a palpable sense of anticipation in the air. I love it.

The entrance of the band certainly wasn’t a letdown, either. The backup vocalists, both outfitted in some sort of melange of Egyptian vs. Mythical Chinese costumes, wafted slowly onto stage, waving about their foot-long feathered fingernails and looking like beings descended from the astral plane as ethereal music swelled to full volume. When Monica Richards and William Faith came on stage, the crowd went nuts. I have to say, everyone in the band looked absolutely amazing. It was classic goth meets new wave Oriental mythology, which is apparently the theme of their new album, which is due out in October.

The girl playing taika drums was both cool and hot.

I managed to capture a video (download it below) of them performing one of their new songs, Battle Hymn, and it catapulted itself into my list of top gothic rock songs.

The band themselves have been around since the early 90′s, and were in full-swing around ’99 when they formed their own label, Mercyground. But, as with so many things, the comedown from the party of the century pulled the rug out from under the band and they went on hiatus. Thankfully, they came back and have since published two albums, the most recent of which is The Burning Season. Their sound is somewhat akin to a mix of Souixsie and the Banshees and Dead Can Dance, but of course with their own darkwave artistic touches. I’m a fan of their commitment to an ethos of primal, faerie-tale energy paired with a post-punk gothic sound. Not only does it sound cool, but they pull it off really well.

William Faith was elusive in the darkness...

Their new album will be released on Halloween of 2009, and is entitled : ankoku butoh : , which pretty much sums up the intended atmosphere for the album. Apparently, ankoku butoh is an extreme style of street performance that began in Japan after WWII. It’s almost farcical, and it emphasizes taboo topics and methods of performance. The introduction of this style in the US resulted in one of the performers dying after falling from suspended ropes while enacting their performance in Seattle. It strikes me as sort of a modern dance parody of traditional Kabuki. Certainly this is some deliciously appropriate material for a darkwave band to build from. I highly anticipate the album, especially after listening to the EP Tatsu, which has the original and a remix of Battle Hymn.

Check out some of their earlier sounds as well as some videos at their MySpace site.

Download ‘Battle Hymn’ performed live by Faith & The Muse

Cryptic Studios is set to release the newest superhero MMO this September, and I got a chance to try it out during the open beta.

Having played a fair bit of City of Heroes, and a smidgen of City of Villains, I was pretty hyped to check out [...]]]>

The end of beta event for C.H.A.M.P.I.O.N.S. Online

Cryptic Studios is set to release the newest superhero MMO this September, and I got a chance to try it out during the open beta.

Having played a fair bit of City of Heroes, and a smidgen of City of Villains, I was pretty hyped to check out the newest offering by Cryptic. The icing on the cake is that instead of simply creating their own generic superhero world (which was what City of Heroes was), they chose to purchase and develop an existing universe.

Champions was an original role-playing game published for the first time back in 1981. It was a fairly advanced conceptual work, allowing players to create any sort of superhero they could imagine. An especially cool offshoot of this was that a group of science fiction and fantasy writers (including two of the biggest names in the genre, George R.R. Martin and Roger Zelazny) got together to start playing a Champions campaign. From this effort was born Wild Cards, a shared world series of novels that is still going strong 20 years later!

Cryptic has taken this established world (using the Champions heroes, not the Wild Cards ones, alas) and used the well-tried and tested rules as the basis of their new MMO. Add to this solid base the stunning graphics and monumental character customization tools that Cryptic are known for and the result is (so far) a success!

For me, simply creating a superhero is a game in itself. I managed to fill up every available character slot during the two weeks of beta play, and I was still tweaking and modifying their look up to the very end of beta.

Let me tell you ALL ABOUT IT!

First off, I find that choosing a ‘theme’ for each hero is pretty much the only way to tackle the huge number of customization options with any sort of sanity. Actually, I do this for any character I make for any game, both online and tabletop.  My first character was fairly tame. I’d just seen District 9, so I was in a space alien mood. Mixing and matching, I managed to come up with Sebek (my standard online name), who is some sort of purple psychic alien.  He’s up there fighting the Destructobot, right in the middle. (Hint: he’s kinda purple pink.)

Once I had the ‘serious’ hero out of the way, I was free to customize my other slots with my own special brand of awesome. Something I find really enjoyable is attempting to find the outer limits of what is allowed when making a character in a new game. My first attempt was Delicious, a naughty little angel who skirts the edges of what is acceptable. What does that mean? He’s as naked as I could get him. Ha!

Tennis shorts are entirely acceptible for fighting crime.

Fascinatingly, the angel wings become functional once you purchase a flying power. Flap flap! Predictably, I chose the ‘supernatural’ starting power set for this character, which includes a variety of powers that range from vampire, werewolf, and dragon up to and including angels. He sort of shoots energy chains out of his hands. That’s pretty angelic, right?

Holy chains of Light!

Wonderfully, you can even customize your superpowers in this game. Though, that pretty much means choosing whether they fire from your hands, fists, chest, or head, as well as the color of the effects.

I quickly exhausted the amusement factor of wandering around the starting area in underwear and angel wings, embarrassing myself while taking incriminating screenshots with with the scenery.

"Oh, ha ha! Your injuries cause me to laugh. Some angel I am!"

Once I had my jollies out with the nearly nude not-a-hero, I got down to some serious super hero creation. For almost every other character I made, I drew upon my Dungeons and Dragons roots to recreate some of my favorite monsters and creatures from the history of the game.

Thus, we have:

Arcanoslaad, the magical Limbo frog. Doom Squid, the illithid lightning mage. Hugasaurus, the generic draconian.

So, there you go. My cavalcade of strange and not-so-heroic superheroes. I also attempted an Umber Hulk, and did fairly well, though it ended up looking mostly like the insect aliens in the starting crisis area, known in-game as the Qularr. Then I had to make an obligatory cat-person. I just have to. I love the kitties, especially when they are clawing freaky bug-aliens to death.

The game itself is quite fun and dynamic, allowing players to mix and match their powers with very few restrictions. Combat is both intuitive and complex, mixing tried-and-true mechanics (auto-attack powers, nukes, and such) with some new concepts (charging up powers for bigger effects.) Overall, it was a fascinating and utterly fun experience.

I look forward to the release of the full game!

Illithid vs. Qularr!

Such was the case when I stumbled across Major Lazer’s album, “Guns Don’t Kill People …Lazers Do.” This phrase is somehow irresistable. Even now, you succumb to its will.

What was intended as an amusing diversion ended up catching [...]]]> It’s funny how sometimes the most inadvertent of things can end up dragging you along against your will.

Such was the case when I stumbled across Major Lazer’s album, “Guns Don’t Kill People …Lazers Do.” This phrase is somehow irresistable. Even now, you succumb to its will.

What was intended as an amusing diversion ended up catching my attention. Originally, I thought this would be some sort of bass-heavy porno-track album, or else a sex-crazed sub-genre of mixed rap and dance music fit for Shawty Gettin’ Low stylins. But there was this wierd quality to the beats, and something new and different about the construction of the tracks. I ended up listening to it again. Then, I added a few tracks to my ‘best of the moment’ playlist (especially “When You Hear The Bassline (ft. Ms. Thing)”). I began to realize that the image of this artist(?), band(?), superhero(?),  that was put out for this album was far more clever than I had thought.

I was intrigued.

So, as I usually do when I’m looking for new artists or info on artists that tweak my interest, I hit up the MySpace page. The fact that all the MySpace pages are based on the same template can be a bit misleading, as even the cheesiest, most horrible, cheap-ass groups can get a decent looking page in no time. Add to this the new movement in art and advertising to this retro-kitsch look and you can just never tell by looking. So, I watched the videos. “Pon De Floor (featuring Afro jack & VYBZ)” hadn’t struck me on first listening, but I checked out the video. You should too. It’s different, and within a few seconds I was grooving on the beats and laughing at the images. It got added to the playlist too.  This was something different, and you don’t see this kind of different in pop/dance/modern music all that often. What had I stumbled on? And STILL the beats were popping in my brain, and I caught myself skipping to the tracks just to hear them over and over.

“Hold The Line (ft. Mr. Lexx and Santigold)” started out looking like a cheap Flash clip, but the sheer onslaught of awesome content (cybernetic arm vs. zombie’s face, amirite?) had me hooked. Then I realized, wait, Santigold is making a cameo in this song? She’s alterna-pop gold right now. Who IS this Major Lazer?

Well, the press release says this:

“Major Lazer is a Jamaican commando who lost his arm in the secret Zombie War of 1984. The US military rescued him and repurposed experimental lazers as prosthetic limbs. Since then Major Lazer has been a hired renegade soldier for a rogue government operating in secrecy underneath the watch of M5 and the CIA.”

It goes on to detail his life and times. Pretty impressive stuff. But wait, zombie-fighting and cybernetics don’t really make hot club tracks, do they?

Turns out Diplo (Philadelphia-based DJ and producer Wesley Pentz), and Switch (the pseudonym of British producer and DJ Dave Taylor), are the mental muscle behind this invented Musical Cyber-Mercenary. So who are they?

DJs Switch and Diplo

Well, DJ Diplo ends up being an American kid who was born in Mississippi and went on to become a musical mixing star. He apparently brought the Brazilian genre of funk carioca to US dance/pop music. Which got him the attention of M.I.A., who not only recruited him as her touring DJ, but recruited him to her bed too.  Of which he says:

“All you little fuckers…M.I.A. came out of nowhere and tore all your asses upside down made music that was interesting for DJs that wasn’t completely hollow…all you fuckers who sit home and talk shit and don’t actually put your heart on the line everyday as a musician need to eat shit. Peace.”

Sounds about right.

So, DJ Switch is a UK-based big-name DJ who worked with M.I.A. on both Arular and Kala. Solid stuff there. He also helped work on Santogold’s debut album. Superstar stuff.

And there we go, travelling from a wacky album title that caught my attention to the behind-the-scenes DJs who helped bring us the new, hot-hot stylings of M.I.A. and Santogold. Their collaboration to incorporate Jamaican beats and music into dancehall is what brought Major Lazer to life. No wonder the beats wouldn’t let me go. This is the real thing, and I’ll for sure be keeping my eye on these two from now on. Especially in case of another secret Zombie War.

So seldom does a movie manage to combine convincing science fiction, social commentary, and a solid presentation that I’m almost always shocked when I have the pleasure to see such a film.

District 9 succeeded in providing me with both a convincing social framework of how humans [...]]]>

David James and director Neill Blomkamp on the set

So seldom does a movie manage to combine convincing science fiction, social commentary, and a solid presentation that I’m almost always shocked when I have the pleasure to see such a film.

District 9 succeeded in providing me with both a convincing social framework of how humans tend to treat the alien as well as a compelling look at aliens that I’ve seldom seen done as well.

What really kicked this movie up to top notch for me however, was the directing. The integration of documentary and slice-of-life shots with narritave action was seamless and very well done.

This is the movie I was hoping for when I went in to see Cloverfield. That movie gave me motion sickness and didn’t manage to generate a palpable realism despite that. I had some high hopes for a modern take on horrors from space eating New York, but it ended up being more like fan footage backstage at a soap opera take on tried and true alien invasion. With, of course, the added unhappy ending we expect of hand-cam movies as put forth by The Blair Witch Project. That movie gave me motion sickness too.

District 9 managed to take the mechanism of ‘real footage’ and television documentary and weave it together in a way that was actually appropriate for the big screen. Shots from surveillance cameras interspersed with post-timeline interviews combined to set an almost mundane framework that pointed our viewing minds to the action of the movie, instead of forcing us to focus through the jarring medium itself. By the time that the climax of the movie has built to a head, the documentary style had become slightly secondary. But it had already done it’s job, and I felt more emotionally invested in the outcome of this film than I have for a big screen movie in quite a while.

Certainly, I see now why Peter Jackson put his name on this movie. I know we’ll be seeing more from Neill Blomkamp in the future. Hopefully with additional alien power-armor, please.

Mecha-Prawn is beautiful. Mecha-Prawn is robot.

Only the fittest of user interface elements can survive in the wild on its own.

I have chosen to fly in the face of the natural order and cultivate my own special garden of UI elements.

The Atahualpa Theme options panel was a bit daunting at first, as there are just so many settings. But [...]]]>

Atahualpa Options

Only the fittest of user interface elements can survive in the wild on its own.

I have chosen to fly in the face of the natural order and cultivate my own special garden of UI elements.

The Atahualpa Theme options panel was a bit daunting at first, as there are just so many settings. But with a fair bit of fiddling, I got more comfortable with the setup. Basically, it runs as an automated CSS editing interface, allowing you to make incrimental changes with standard HTML tags without having to upload files to preview every change. Some of the option pages are way too long though. I’m fairly pleased with the result, but I’m sure I’ll be switching stuff around anyway. Such is the nature of user interfaces.

This process did give me an opportunity to refamiliarize myself with some HTML goodness. Most helpful were this random color picking site for CSS hex codes, and Webmonkey helped me remember any of the tags I’d forgotten.

In addtion to Atahualpa, there are a couple of other nice options that plugins have afforded this page.  The Avatars plugin lets anyone who wants upload their personal avatar. Just so you know! That means, find one and upload it!

The graphics were probably the most fun, since it gave me a good reason to open up Illustrator and Photoshop. I got CS4 this summer and haven’t had much motivation to try it out. So far, it seems mostly like CS3, but just better. I’m tempted to say, even betterer. They do run smoother, that’s for sure, thanks to the video card support.

I’ll be continuing to fiddle and update the graphics as well, so let me know if you have some feedback!