Today’s Rave: Advanced Civilization

Everyone knows the ubiquitous Civilization games, up past their fourth incarnation and founded by the much-loved Sid Meier. What you may not know about this venerable series is that it drew as its inspiration a game by those old masters of the board, Avalon Hill. Besides being responsible for dozens of board games that put modern video games to shame in fun, replay value, and brilliant design, Avalon Hill also authorized a couple of adaptations of their board games to PC.

One such adaptation was Advanced Civiliation. But let me back up. The original Civilization was a board game by Avalon Hill. Sid Meier played and liked said game; in fact he liked it so much he stole/adapted/altered the design for his own game, also titled Civilization, albeit with his name plastered in front of it. It has a decidedly military focus compared to the original Civilization by AH. Perhaps in response to this release, and also partly because the original Civilization had some balance issues, Avalon Hill released an expansion of sorts called Advanced Civilization.

Unlike Sid Meier’s games, Advanced Civilization is won mostly through clever trading and expansion. Military conquest is difficult and inherently balanced out by the games’ population system. No empire can expand indefinitely since the players use the same set of tokens for both population and treasury money. Expand too far and your cities will have tax revolts; but expand too little and you will not be able to operate at maximum efficiency.

The goods and trading system is at the heart of what makes AdCiv so special – each city generates one trade card per turn that represents a type of good. For example, if you have 1 city, you draw a card from the first of nine piles – so you’ll most likely receive an ochre or hide trade card, worth 1 point. If you have 2, you’ll draw one of two types of cards worth 2 points from the second of nine piles, and so on.

The brilliance of this system lies in the fact that cards are exponentially more valuable in sets than singly. What this means, for example is that a set of four hides, each worth one, is worth sixteen as a group (it’s the square of the number of cards times the value of the good). What this means, then, is that a fifth hide is actually worth 9 points to you (that raises the total to twenty-five), which means you would be willing to trade a good worth much more, say 7 or 8, just to get another value 1 good. Everybody benefits from this system, and no player is out of the game just because they can’t generate high-value goods – it’ll be worth something to somebody.

The other fact is that it’s not all goods in the trade decks – on occasion, you will draw a calamity card. Some of them you can’t do anything about, but others can be cleverly passed off to other players by bluffing during trading. You must trade at least three cards, and you must be truthful about two of them, but any other number of cards can be outright lies. This makes every trade exciting, because you never know if you’ll be screwed over; on the other hand, if you know that even if only two of the cards in the trade are very valuable to you, even if you get a slave revolt or treachery inflicted on you, it’ll be worth it.

Brilliance I tell you. You use these trade cards and some spare money from your treasury to purchase civilizational advances, some of which give you new game mechanics, such as winning conflicts more easily or allowing you to use money to help build cities, and some simply mitigate the effects of calamities so they don’t hurt you so much. Also, advances (called tools in the game) give you credit towards certain other advances, helping you afford the more expensive ones later on. The game ends when one player makes it to the end of the archaeological time table by fulfilling certain goals during play, though the player who ends the game may no necessarily win it, thanks to a balanced and complex scoring system.

The PC adaptation’s AI is brutal, even on its easiest setting. I have yet to end any higher than third place in a game, and I’ve played half a dozen of them by now. This game is abandonware, so it’s easy and free to get – but it’s old and you’ll need DosBox to run it (a free Dos emulator for Windows). For fans of the Civilization series, get ready for a crazy shock when you realize how a simpler and more elegant game can deliver all the addictiveness of the often overly complex Civilzation series.

Today’s Rant: The Happening…?

Look, I know with a movie entitled “The Happening” there’s only so much you can expect. It’s like trying to take what will clearly be a disastrous event and try to make it sound less like a disaster movie by adding  hint of esoterica to it. Something happened…but what?

Feh.

Anyway, I avoided this movie since I haven’t really liked anything of Mr. Shyamalan’s since Unbreakable, but as I was somewhat bored last night, I watched it through, thinking that at least there would be some weirdness if nothing else, and weird is good.

And as far as that went, it delivered. But the massively implausible premise actually interfered with my enjoyment of the movie. This rarely happens to me. When other people tell me they have trouble suspending disbelief in a movie, I just shrug and say “It’s a movie. You’re always suspending disbelief because it isn’t real.” But in this rare case, it was immediate obvious to me what the problem was.

I hardly think I’ll ruin anything whatsoever to tell you that the main idea is that the plants on Earth are collectively and spontaneously producing a laughably complex neurotoxin to punish humans for…uh…something. Amazing that it took four hundred thousand years. Our fault for cutting down the trees right? Er…anyway. This neurotoxin apparently makes you kill yourself in the most convenient and brutal manner to hand. While it shuts off rational faculties for things like self-preservation and speech and memory centers, you still apparently can operate motor vehicles or climb up a ladder, tie a noose knot, and hang yourself.

I will say that the images of such emotionally blank and creepy mass suicides are definitely disturbing. That aspect of the movie is done well, and I was still thinking about some of the more well-shot scenes later the next morning.

But a disaster/horror movie tries to bring you in by letting you feel danger vicariously through the characters. But the unbelievably unlikely scenario of all types of plants producing an impossibly complex neurotoxin that just happens to turn humans into creepy suicidal drones instead of even simply making them drop dead on the spot is so utterly ridiculous I simply cannot be scared by it. Obviously M. Night Shyamalan dreamed up these odd scenarios of mass suicide and had to come up with some sort of malevolent force to justify their happening. So plants have it in for humans. If only we’d been nicer to them. After all, plants react to human stimulus – so surely they could all gang up on us by, despite vastly different chemistry and genetics by all creating the appropriate apparatus to produce naturally which the most fervent mad scientist could only dream of.

And considering how fast people drop dead in the movie, about twenty minutes in everyone seems completely screwed. And point of fact, they were, since apparently the entire Northeast was wiped out except for the three main characters. Then it’s like, three months later, and everything is back to normal, some expert on TV warns us that the first one was the sign of a bigger attack to come, and then another “Happening” happens in Paris or something, and then you realize that we’re doomed, thanks to these needlessly malevolent shrubs. It’s also to hard to be scared when you know no one is going to make it out alive.

I sure learned a lesson from that movie. I’ll never be mean to a ficus again.

Feh.

Speed Screed: Exploiting Kids

You know, few things irritate me more than the use of children in commercials, particularly babies. This is the sort of genius advertising that comes from people following a line of thought like this:

“Everyone likes babies, since they’re cute. So how can I use this? Hmmm….I know! I’ll make this little baby explain to the watchers that this online investment company is the best in a completely mismatched voice, and then I’ll make him throw up on the keyboard, and everyone will go, ‘Awwwww!’ Brilliant!”

It might work on a few dopes whose brains shut down when they see a moderately cute baby, but for practically everyone else, they’ll just be annoyed that this poor kid is being forced to hock some shoddy product and he’s not even aware of it. To me its simply shameless exploitation of little kids.

You may also have seen that Target commercial where some kids are putting on a Christmas play and it ends with a stupid rhyme saying that Target is the best place to save for the holidays. The cognitive dissonance is overwhelming. First of all, I know that Christmas is pretty much about commercialism, but cheesy holiday plays put on by second-graders are not. No genuine play is going to include an overt advertisement for Target unless they sponsored the entire thing, and even if they did, it would cause spontaneous revulsion in the audience when they realized that Target’s only goal was to capitalize on the adorableness of the players to hock its wares.

I know I’m cynical, but this is not merely needless cynicism. This is simple logic. These sorts of ad campaigns rely on their audiences being more dimwitted than even I’m willing to believe. I can understand that certain people might enjoy the “cuteness” of the commercial, but at the same time I doubt that they would therefore make any sort of leap to purchase the thing advertised.

The “dancing baby” commercials that I think Blockbuster did maybe a decade ago were the worst. Another grievous miscalculation of what people would find entertaining and cute, whereas the end result was simply something creepy and pointless. Ultimately, unless you have kids genuinely acting like kids, the commercial is going to seem contrived and fall flat.

But that doesn’t seem to stop them from trying. Advertisements suck these days.

Today’s Rave: The Simpsons Movie

I finally saw the Simpsons movie the other day. It was good – better than I expected, really. But what I found compelling about it was not the humor – it was pretty funny throughout, though not hilarious – but the way they basically upgraded everything about the Simpsons to movie-quality. Better animation and clearer sound(and music scored for a movie, of course) are a given, though I will say there is more nuance to be picked up from the voice-acting here than in the show, and I also think the voice actors were either told to ham it up more, or realized the necessary gravity and did it themselves.

There are subtler important things woven into the way the movie is wirtten. I’m not convinced that the Simpsons have a true “canon,” nor am I sure that even if there is one that the movie would be in it, but much of the movie involves collapsing some of their most typical plot points from the show into a bigger dramatic arc. Everything is much more intense from a character interaction standpoint. For example, Bart’s tenuous relationship with Homer is an obvious plot used for many different episodes, but rather than a short reconciliation after twenty minutes of mental, emotional and physical tussling, Bart wholly abandons Homer to be with Flanders as he comes to realize what a father can be – and this gets worse for virtually the entire movie, ’till the very end where Homer wins him back by letting him hold the bomb as they race off to rescue the town. Essentially, I see their relationship as a “you can’t spell dysfunctional without functional” kind of thing, and that’s basically what they use to reconcile the two. Flanders also ends up looking pretty good, ultimately happy to see the two back together.

Speaking of bombs, they also made the conflict situation more serious than it would normally be – i.e. the government sealing off and possibly murdering the residents of Springfield. To be honest, the drama of this plot actually detracts somewhat from the humor – it’s hard to laugh when all of your favorite characters might be wiped off the face of the earth. I mean, you know they won’t, but I actually found this emotional tweak to the plot to be interesting because it let the writers and actors stretch a bit, which I always enjoy.

And perhaps the most particularly overused plot point, as far as the series is concerned, is of course Homer and Marge’s outrageously improbable and inexplicably continuing marriage. Of course, as this is a movie, when she finally inevitably decides to break it off, it is particularly dramatic (in fact, Julie Kavner adds a very skillful, heart-wrenching degree of hopelessness to her goodbye video monologue) , and of course when they get back together it is much more touchingly romantic than it is in the series, where it is almost trite at this point.

Anyway, what I’m trying to say is that the movie was not simply a longer episode of The Simpsons – the writers, actors, and composer(s?) all rose to the task and took one of America’s (and probably the world’s) most beloved TV families and actually made a real movie out of them. I have only one thing to say.

Bravo.

Speed Screed: Meaningless Advertising

In some ads, there seems to be this idea that attitude sells more than, say, actual words. Some of these phrases that get tossed around are actually completely meaningless, even though they seem reasonable. A favorite I saw on television recently was a Kia commercial. They refer to their cars as “stylishly affordable.” It sounds good, but actually it’s complete gibberish.

Consider that the adverb, stylishly, describes the word “affordable.” Generally, affordable is not a word that takes much description, other than that of degrees, i.e. “somewhat affordable, very affordable,” etc. However, not only are Kias apparently affordable, but stylishly so. That is to say that you can afford them in style. They are priced stylishly.

I know I’m rambling on about pointless crap more than usual, but advertisements in general annoy me greatly. Many of them suck, and I swear they suck more so than in the past. Many commercials these days are what I refer to as “pseudo-clever,” where they try to do something witty and it ends up simply being kitsch because they don’t have any idea of timing, tension, or how to deliver a punch line. I know I could write better commercials than 90% of the hacks at these ad agencies. I don’t because I think my ability to write could be better put to use, such as complaining about things rather than trying to fix them.

See? A joke. Ahem.

Personally, I long for the old commercials from the 50’s, where they simply tell you to buy it. The old “Enjoy Coke” ads in 50’s-style diners really cut to the chase. At least with an ad like that, I don’t have to wait through a poorly constructed quasi-narrative arc or an unfunny joke to find out what it is that I don’t want to buy.

Truly, DVR and TiVo have made watching TV so much less of a waste of time than in the past. Part of the reason I don’t watch TV is I don’t like watching ads, and that’s also why I download 90% of the stuff I want to watch. Consider also that the best shows are actually all of 20 minutes long since stations make the vast majority of their advertising money during a two-hour block known as “prime-time.” Simpsons episodes these days are actually about 21 minutes. They’ve been getting shorter, which I believe is part of the reason they got worse for a season or two; the writers couldn’t usually get a decent B plot going in the face of five or so missing minutes. For the more recent seasons, the episodes have been up to snuff but have been sort of like “Simpsons Lite” because there still is a weaker B plot.

Enough of my chattering. See you tomorrow.

Speed Screed: Soft Drinks and the Restaurant Industry

It just occurred to me, today, that soft drinks must have revolutionized the restaurant industry. Before Coke, Pepsi, and their ilk were around there were basically three things you could drink in your average restuarant besides booze: milk, coffee, or water. Water was free, and milk was basically a concession to kids. Kids would probably just be drinking water anyway.

But along comes soft drinks, and now there’s something special that kids can drink as a treat while their parents kick back a beer or two. Not only does that mean that there’s a whole host of drinks to be targeted to the spending money of minors, but it also means that restaurants can buy cheap and sell dear on a drink that really only costs them a couple of cents a glass. After all, if all the other drinks on the menu are already a couple bucks, you can easily inflate the true costs of a glass of soda into a tidy little profit for yourself.

I mean, any beverage that comes with free refills nine times out of ten is obviously so cheap that one person can’t even drink enough to lose money on the deal. I’ll bet you that this “buoying up” of the ability of restaurants to operate at a profit sparked a boom in the restaurant industry. I couldn’t readily find any statistics to support this assertion, but that’s alright because I enjoy being wrong, if it turns out I am. Still, it’s a pretty compelling product from a marketing point of view. People often drink several cans a day. And the profit margin is absurd. I often wonder if soda is one of the most “marked-up from cost” products, though bottled water is still, I think, the winner in that category. As Penn Jillette said on an episode of Bullshit!, selling bottled water is like minting your own money.

The profit margin on alcohol, by comparison, can obviously also be pretty good, particularly for cocktails and wine. But only adults can drink booze. The fact that you target the kids too is what makes soda so particularly effective as a method of getting more money from your average customer.

And lets not forget that soda companies has actually forged a minor cultural bond. In the old days you’d take your date to get a soda at the drugstore – like going out to a bar, but much more lame. There you have the iconic picture of the two teenagers on a date drinking the same soda that is resurrected by Coca-Cola every couple of years. Of course, back then that was as close as you could get to kissing in public. But I digress.

Now they have the a small “stake in America” angle that so many domestic beer companies capitalize on; not to the same extent, but Coca-Cola is at least responsible for Santa Claus in his current red-suited incarnation. And of course they run the commercials with the young people tricking out their bicycles and jousting with them and then all sitting around and drinking Coke and laughing. Not too subtle. But I also sadly realized that these kids are all sitting around and drinking coke and laughing because they aren’t allowed to drink beer. Otherwise they’d probably be getting trashed and then running their bikes into each other. I mean, wouldn’t we all?

Today’s Rave: Religulous

If you haven’t seen Religulous, the more or less anti-religious pseudo-documentary movie by Bill Maher, I recommend it to you without qualification. It essentially points out the inherent and fundamental danger in allowing anyone with transcendental beliefs to make any real-world political decisions whatsoever. He does this by continually pointing out inconsistencies, holes, and generally just taking to task any arguments that religion is at all a good thing. While the whole thing is definitely comedic in nature, he drops the act at the very end and clearly and severely addresses the audience to cast aside their childish superstitions and “grow up.”

Bill Maher is my hero.

He is not an atheist as such, but he is an agnostic with an agenda. Sometimes I feel like people use agnosticism so as not to get verbally burned at the stake by religious people. In his case, his use of “I just don’t know” agnosticism gets religious people to open up to him because he seems to be a lost lamb rather than simply lost. That means at the end people pray for you rather than chase you out of the building.

Technically, I’m agnostic (I don’t care whether there’s a God since I consider the question irrelevant) but I usually call myself an atheist because I really don’t think there is a God, and I like to piss off religious nuts. I’m not adamant about the non-existence of God, I can conceive that there could be a God, but I think there isn’t one.

Doubt is the default of the skeptic.

In any case, the movie is a somewhat personal one as Maher describes his own religious background and how he eventually came to be the atheist that he is. It was, more or less, because his family just suddenly stopped going to church. Without constant indoctrination, most religions tends to fall apart as things like rational thought suddenly intrude on your blissful dream of life after death.

But of course, I don’t have any problem with religion as long as you keep it to yourself. But it is not only morally wrong to force your views into politics, government, or society, it is extremely dangerous, as Maher points out consistently. Keep your goddamn commandments out of my schools, your Christian worldview out of my Oval Office (it’s our goddamn office by the way, we’re letting the President use it) and your religiously zealotry away from my high-rise office buildings.

Only transcendental thinking could possibly result in someone justifying the taking of their own life and the slaughtering of thousands of innocent people. If you don’t believe in a God or an afterlife, the only reason you would do something like that is if you were absolutely insane.

Oh wait. As Maher points out, there is no inherent difference between schizophrenia and hearing the voice of God (as so many Christians claim to have done). But we get these people help because it’s religion, and you can’t touch religion.

The world would be so much better off if we would take out eyes off the heavens and start looking around us so that we can build a better world here and now.

It is this that Maher communicates so clearly. Watch this movie, you’ll laugh, and you’ll get angry. Maher says we need louder atheists. Louder and more pissed-off.

Sounds good to me.

Today’s Rave: Surround Sound and Movies

We (by which I mean my parents) are going through a substantial remodeling of the upper part of the house at the moment. Since my parents have decided to stay put at our old house, they decided to make it nicer and build equity at the same time. That’s what I call good use of money.

Anyway, our kitchen is now awesome, and the living room has nearly finished following. But not withstanding that, we put the new home theater system through its paces the other day. Since the design, remodeling, and much of the other miscellanea was left to Mom, Dad got the theater system as sort of his part of the remodel. I have to say that we were probably due. We had an adequate set-up before but now this thing is ridiculous.

I have to say that I’m not much of a movie watcher, so I was only moderately anticipating the whole thing. I mean, the HD TV screen is impressively huge, but even the fact that I could now play video games on a huge TV wasn’t really all that exciting.

What ultimately impressed me (besides the crystal clarity of Blu-Ray movies) was the speaker set-up Dad bought. The speakers are actually optimized for listening to classical music, but they are of outrageous quality. We watched the new Indiana Jones movie on Blu-Ray and it was seriously theater-like sound. The subwoofer was of ridiculously high quality. It did more than simply shake the floor, though it did do that well, I must say.

So, in short, what the system is capable of aurally is what impressed me the most. Can’t wait to see what this bastard can do with metal. Um, when no one else is around. Preferably in the whole neighborhood.

Speaking of the Indiana Jones movie, it got reasonable reviews but many people bitched about how it wasn’t as good as the previous three. First of all, nostalgia is a powerful lens. I watched the other three movies recently in preparation to see the fourth, and in terms of writing, direction, implausibility of action sequences, acting ability, or plot, it was just as good as the other three. I think we expected less of our movies back in the day. Now we expect too much.

When I go to the movies these days, and I see an action movie like Iron Man, all I’m expecting is to have a good time. You can’t have The Dark Knight every time. Apparently we’re lucky to get a movie like that every couple of years. So when I sat down to watch Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull, I expected a semi-mysterious plot overarching a series of unrealistic fights and action sequences in exotic locales, and that the movie would never be boring.

That’s exactly what I got. Would I nominate it for an Academy Award? Of course not. But I had a good time and it seems like as good of an Indy movie as we could possibly expect after a gulf of twenty years.

Later.

Today’s Rave: The Venture Brothers

Astonishingly, I’ve never done a rave about the TV show The Venture Brothers. To be fair, I haven’t kept up with it for this most recent season but all of my comments should still apply.

The Venture Brothers is a cartoon on Cartoon Network’s Adult Swim, cowritten by Jackson Public and Doc Hammer. The show can be roughly described as a parody of “Johnny Quest” mixed with a sort-of “The Tick” -inspired attitude towards superheroes. Although the title refers to the two sons of one of the main characters, Dr. Thaddeus Venture, the show is more about the doctor and his failure as a super-scientist than his kids, who are a naive, inept, and display all of the penchant for going on dangerous adventures with none of the common sense that ought to accompany it.

The two brothers, Dean and Hank Venture are invariably accompanied by Brock Samson, an insanely deadly not-so-secret agent (voiced by Patrick Warburton, who you probably know as Joe from Family Guy) who was originally signed on as the Doc’s bodyguard as a sort of consolation prize by the US government in deference to the Doc’s nigh-legendary superscientist father, Dr. Jonas Venture. However, Brock has come to regard the Ventures as a family and actually relishes his assignment, as he often acts as a surrogate father for the boys, and also due to the fact that when he originally became a secret agent he had to bury his past and essentially sever all ties with relatives and friends.

On top of this moderately normal seeming backdrop of broken dreams and teenage angst (two phrases which could be said to constitute the prevailing attitude of the series) is a crazy cavalcade of characters too numerous to go into in detail, but I’ll mention a few major players. The Monarch is Dr. Venture’s self-described arch-nemesis, who is strangely unable to describe why he hates Dr. Venture so much whenever he is asked. Nevertheless, he spends most of his time and effort trying to kill or at least bring grievous harm to the Ventures. He is accompanied by Doctor Girlfriend (or was, this is more or less at the beginning of the series) pretty much acknowledged as the hottest supervillain by the community and who has, in an extremely amusing move by the creators, an unbelievably deep voice.

There’s also Doctor Orpheus, a pompous necromancer who is renting part of Dr. Venture’s old lab space to live in. He is a bundle of amusing catchphrases and wants to be a hero, partially as compensation for the fact that his wife left him for a younger necromancer. Conveniently, Dean Venture has a crush on Orpheus’ daughter.

Anyway, this all sounds vaguely complicated, and that’s just it: it is. What sets Venture Brothers apart from most serialized shows, apart of the bulletproof writing, impeccable sense of humor, great voice-acting, and keen grasp of applied zaniness, is long, fairly complex plot arcs and character development. 3 of every 4 episodes generally builds on the previous ones and a season generally involves an entire story arc, with the other 1 of 4 episodes being a break to make campy throwbacks, parodies, or just use an idea that is good but wouldn’t fit in the arc in any reasonable way.

The characters change over time, which to me makes an immensely more satisfying show, as it rewards previous watchings and careful attention to detail, as well as letting you see how the writers decide to evolve the characters. When character change over time, they have a much more human element to them.

The point is that The Venture Brothers is a very unique show in that it defies serial comedy conventions (and make no mistake, it is a very funny show) and follows a long-term story arc more like Lost or Heroes. This combined with the unique universe and unforgettable characters make for the most refreshing show for a decade. This goes right up there with Firefly in terms of outrageously good shows, although I still think that the canceling of Firefly is a crime against humanity, which, much as I love the Venture Brothers, I feel like it’s more of a niche show, whereas by canceling Firefly, Fox killed this generation’s Star Wars.

But that’s another rant. For another time.

Today’s Rave: More On Metal

Most people express surprise that I got into metal. I don’t really fit the typical description of a metal-head. But as you find out as you spend more time in the metal community (i.e. metal-archives.com) you realize that virtually anyone you know could be into metal and you would just have no idea. The people who wear their hair long, have multiple piercings and broadcast their love of the music is actually in the minority. In fact, I read a cutting piece of irony the other day about the satanic black metal band Gorgoroth – one of the members is a full-time primary school teacher.

Amazing, isn’t it? How’s that for compartmentalization? And so you never know – your boss, that kid across the street, your favorite professor – they may just come home and crank up Necrophagist until their ears bleed. You never know.

When I am asked why I like metal, the answers are actually fairly straightforward. I think I might be repeating myself here, but I’ll go into additional detail to make up for it.

1) The intensity. There is no music more intense, emotionally and in terms of the sound. It’s just massive, driving force distilled into music. As a person who has spent much of his life playing, writing, and listening to music, the sheer power of the music is just something that I really appreciate. That, and the sincerity manifest by even mediocre metal bands still sounds a lot better than the whiny nonsense you hear on pop radio stations. These people love metal, and that always comes through.

2) The music theory behind it. I studied a lot of atonality and 20th-century music in college, and after a while I finally started to get into limited forms of atonality; and in addition, the use of modes both ancient and new was a refreshing change (if you don’t know what a mode is, typically it’s one of 8 particular types of scales performed by playing 8 white notes of the keyboard in sequence). I’ve always loved modal music, and I basically had to go back to Renaissance and before or post-Romantic to get my fix. But as it turns out, many types of metal make heavy use of dissonance, limited atonality, and most of the music is heavily modal. So all that 20th century music actually heavily influenced one music genre: metal. I get much more satisfaction from listening to the novel ideas in metal than from the extremely hackneyed chord progressions of, once again, popular music. As a student of modern music, metal has a huge appeal to me.

3) The technical skills of the players. Few genres make such immediate demands on the performer’s abilities. There are definitely simpler songs, but most metal songs require speed and accuracy to even be played. No lazy thrashing around half hitting notes, at least not if you want any respect. I am constantly amazed that the drummers are not dropping dead from exhaustion during the songs. Blast beats for 5 minutes straight probably burns about 1000 calories. And since solos are such a major feature of metal, the technical skills of the lead guitarist (or both depending on the band) are clearly showcased.

As for the generally dark and macabre themes that much of the metal I listen to features, I simply see it as something that fits the music. Music this monstrous and intense is not going to be about love, or going to the store, or walking down some boulevard of broken dreams. Nor are there going to be clean vocals – this music demands harsh, guttural vocals. I appreciate when they switch it up, but honestly I think the harsh vocals came about just as much because it fit the music as some sort of desire to sound demonic or something.

Is it angry music? Yeah. But I’m not really an angry person. I mean, I know I write pissed-off articles here all the time, but I’m not sitting there screaming at my computer. I don’t consider myself full of rage. So I’m more attracted to the intensity that anger brings to the music than the anger itself. Plus it is extremely cathartic. Listening to metal actually chills me out.

Well, that’s enough raving about metal for another month. I wonder if I should so one of those stupid things where at the start of every article I write:

Currently listening to: Dissection – Night’s Blood
Current mood: Annoyed

Ha ha. Nah.