Tannin
Well, that was fun — just tried to devise my own liquid cooling system. Note to self: next time, try pouring the iced tea directly on the motherboard.
Fragility
Agh! Ah! ho, ho, ho! ooo! hah! oh, my. Yes. Oh, jeez. This is incredible. The Fragile, I mean — eek. Holy…
The downward spiral and this album are a mobius strip. The Fragile succeeds amazingly in breaking from the “nin formula” and exploring new territory, the occasional subtle reference thrown in to what has come before. It begins where TDS left off, with some gradual recovery, followed by a re-breakdown of sorts. Finally, there’s a very ominous ending, as at the end of a fatalistic movie, bringing the listener back to the beginning of TDS again.
I swear I’ve never heard anything like this. Chamber music about the nature of futility.
I’m… shivering.
The Polygon Paradigm
Well, I buried my shame and picked up a a Dreamcast — even though I don’t really deserve one. And my god — what it does nearly brings tears to my eyes. Unfortunately, I made two largeish mistakes —
- Although I checked what are supposed to be the outside tell-tale signs of the disc, the copy of Sonic Adventure I picked up is the corrupted one. I couldn’t easilly test the thing in-store, as I picked up the thing at Toys “R” Absent (what happened to all of the stuff that used to be in there? Where are the Lego?), so I just held my breath that I’d not have to take the hour drive back to Portland just to return the thing. Well. Hum.
- I decided not to read the box and assumed the system came with one of those memory card/tamagochi things. Nope. So I guess I have to grab one of them if I want to be able to save at all.
The warnings about disc scratching are because the Dreamcast games are encoded on normal old cds (insofar as their physical properties) rather than those black, indestructible PlayStation discs.
The controller’s not too bad. By fact of it being a controller, it’s starting just now to wear out my hands. But it could be a lot worse. I have no particular gripes about it, but there’s nothing to acclaim loudly, either.
From playing the demo disc version of Sonic Adventure, they seem to have given Knuckles the personality of Ryoga. Hm. And Sonic appears to have Billy West(Stimpy; Fry from Futurama)’s voice — it’s similar to his voice in the ABC cartoon, but a little less annoying. The theme song reminds me strongly of the seventh or eighth season intro to Ranma 1/2.
Since I don’t want to bother retyping it all in original, slightly more comprehensible verbiage, I’ll paste in here my initial comments made on Soul Calibur, the other game I picked up:
Soul Calibur reminds me of Tekken, from what little I saw of that. But it’s astounding.
In SC, there’s this one character — she has a sword which is divided into several horizontal segments, connected through the center by a long fiber of some sort. When she swings the sword out a certain way, the segments seperate along the fiber, making a long, barbed whip. Strange.
I like Xiangua quite a lot —
It’s interesting. The different “players” — player one and either player 2 or the opponent — use different versions of the same characters. Not just different colors, as in Street fighter. I mean, the first xiangua has short, scruffy hair, a blue bandanna, a kind of happy smirk, is wearing a white-with-yellow-fringe silk blouse-thing and blue pants. The second xiangua has long, primly-dressed, darker hair, is looking a little less “wild” in her expressions, and wears a formal red kimono with white trimmings and a yellow sash. In otherwords, a kinda’ tomboyish version versus a noble-looking one. The same kind of differences go for everyone — the extent of it, I mean, rather than the details. The first player’s “nightmare” is in shining steel armor, while the second “nightmare” is in a corroded, barbarian-ish, copper helmet and neck armor, and has a bare chest and arms. This happened in Tekken, again, but it’s still a new concept to me.
Very well put-together game.
It’s odd, though — I’m not used to “next generation”-feeling games, with very clean fade-ins and outs and so forth — like a bunch of different elements are put together. A still screen is very recognizable as a static screen. And so forth.
Dream Date
Trent Reznor appeared twice last night on Mtv — I tolerated the channel long enough to tape both performances, as well as any few Janeane Garofolo frames which popped up in between (hey, the tape was already in there) and the three or four Dreamcast commercials which aired.
The interview: Kurt Loder asked him about all of the background vocals on the album, and Trent explained that when they were working on the thing, at 12:00 at night, they’d just go across to the local bar and grab a bunch of drunk guys to yell and mumble into the microphones, creating an atonal mess.
“We assembled what I think is the most atonal group of females I’ve ever heard… I hope… they aren’t… they’re not watching this now, but they were… comically horrendous.”
David Bowie showed up, and gave quite a dignified speech. Janine Garofolo, as mentioned, was perpetually around. And the crowd was insane during Trent’s performance — just from the shouting, you’d think it’d be the Beatles playing. It was really kind of hard to hear the song, and the band weren’t entirely in sync, it seemed — like they only started practicing a week or two before. But all in all, it fell together pretty well.
The band, when they finally showed up, two and a half hours or so into the show, were introduced by Johnny Depp — though he didn’t give much of an intro. He was introduced by Chris Rock along with a mention of his appearance in the new Tim Burton movie. Immediately I guessed he was showing up to introduce nin — why else shove him out there? But all he did was stalk out on stage, say something to the effect of “here are nine inch nails,” and then immediately leave. huh.
Nin played what I presume to be “the fragile” — it didn’t sound too bad, from what I could tell. Trent seemed kinda’ nervous. Forgot the lyrics near the beginning and started laughing, but recovered, sorta’. Interesting setup, with large metal arms opening and closing around the band, zig-zags of flourescent lights affixed to their undersides. Lots of cellos and things in the background.
The Fragile (the song) is mostly a kinda’ quiet bit; about halfway through, at least in the live version, things started to get a bit tedious. I think Trent forgot the lyrics to a section altogether; he seemed to be getting a bit flustered; the music was getting softer, and the crowd was getting noisier. Plus it was an attempted live recreation — So it’s hard to tell.
These are the lyrics, to the best I can figure [and here are the correct ones]:
