Edward's August 2021 Mix

 

 

 

 

My inclinations and strange urges to delve into new interests have always been a part of my makeup. Besides making my life more interesting, it’s also caused me to fool a lot of people into thinking I’m very smart. “Gee, how do you know so much about so many things?” Well, it’s this zest I’ve always harbored for new unexplored territories. And so, I’ve fallen down a rabbit hole once again. I’ve been smitten by hi fi componentry. The last time I had a turntable was back in 1985. Now that’s about to change. I’ve been reading a lot about record albums (aka vinyl.) I had no idea it was so proactive. Back when I was a kid, we just pulled it out of the sleeve and slapped it onto the record player. I had no idea you’re supposed to clean the album before and after playing it. It sounds like a lot of work, but it does make listening to music a much more involved experience. I picked up a Denon CD player, and I’m already hearing sounds in songs that I hadn’t heard before (and I thought I was a wannabe audiophile all this time!) It’s driving me to listen to all of my CDs all over again.

 

F1 2017 on PC: I spent many an hour in F1 2016, playing on Intermediate difficulty. I still finished last at the end of the season. With very little fanfare, I decided to abandon that game and dive into the next iteration. This is the edition that still has some of the old school about it, including the track girls (which were taken out after this season, a casualty of sexism) and the lack of the safety halo which was introduced in 2018. One thing I could never get to work correctly was the authentic driver-pit crew voice communications. It really is a game changer to simply say into the mic, “switch to softs,” and be able to pull into the pit and in less than 3 seconds have four new soft tires put on. The R&D aspect of the game is far more fleshed out this year. It’s fun to watch a new improved part replace an existing part and see your lap times get faster. The cars are still every bit a joy to turn laps with, and with a decent wheel and paddle set you’ll never want to leave your house.

Star Trek: The Next Generation – Season Six on Blu-Ray: Still very much immersed in this season. I’m about halfway through. The standout episode since last month is “Chain of Command” in which Captain Picard is captured by Cardassians and tortured. Patrick Stewart’s role is so convincing the entire segment is heart rending. David Warner who we all know as the bad guy in the movie Titanic also gets kudos because he was cast as Picard’s torturer on such short notice, he had no time to rehearse or memorize his lines. So, he is reading all of his lines from note cards at the time of the episode’s shooting.  

Dead Wake: The Last Crossing of the Lusitania by Erik Larson: It’s a story that many of us think we know but don’t. This is the tagline for this remarkable historical book. Larson’s venerable The Devil in the White City about Dr. H.H. Holmes and his murderous spree set against the backdrop of the 1892 Columbian Exposition was one of the most enthralling books I’ve ever read. I simply could not put it down. Dead Wake is quickly claiming hold on me the same way. The passenger ship, Lusitania being the main star, is described in the beginning of the book by one of her passengers as “The ship in itself, a perfect epitome of all that man knows or has discovered or invented up to this moment in time.” But this book paints a portrait of the other side, too. German U-boats in WWI were not the most desirable duty. Foodstuffs were brought on board before a cruise and crammed everywhere, even in the latrine. There was just no place to completely store it. Of course, as the food was consumed, more space was freed up. And the men did not take baths because the water was so tightly rationed. Can you imagine being in a long cylindrical tube under the sea for a month at a time with 36 men, none of whom had bathed?

Bachman-Turner Overdrive Not Fragile on 24 bit/192kHz FLAC: Picked this up on the ProMaster Studios site. I had it as a record album way back in the last century when I was but a wee lad. I forgot how much this album was a pure rock and roll album. It does not have a bad song on it. Interestingly, when the album was recorded in 1974, the producer stated he couldn’t hear a radio hit on the album. He asked the band if they had any other songs ready to go. They told him they had one last song called, “You Ain’t Seen Nothin’ Yet.” Who would have thought?  

World of Warships on PC:  I still play, though the honeymoon is over. I’m not attacking every day, but it’s still a blast when I do boot it up. I’m currently ranked in the 5^th league (out of 10) in the official ranked battles. My USS INDIANAPOLIS is a deadly force to be reckoned with against enemy aircraft, and I’m learning the ropes of torpedo usage with the destroyer, USS FARRAGUT, a quick and nimble little rogue ship.

The Crossing by Cormac McCarthy: My first exposure to Cormac McCarthy was his Pulitzer Prize winning The Road, which is the bleakest novel I’ve ever read. His other novels I’ve read are all westerns that are as one reviewer said, “tell the tale of that solitary man who is all men.” I get that. McCarthy’s writing is bold, blunt, and oddly beautiful. This book, the second of his Border Trilogy, is as the first story, a story of a boy losing his boyhood to manhood. The story takes place in the 1930s on the New Mexico/Mexico border and revolves around the bespoke character trapping a she wolf in a steel jaw trap and nursing her back to health. He travels to a mountain range in Mexico to free the wolf, and returns home to where his home has been plundered. He and his brother ride out for revenge. And so our story begins.

TheHunter: Call of the Wild on PC: I hadn’t touched this for a long while, but returning to it, I had forgotten how good it was. It’s a hunting simulator. I am not a hunter, but there’s something strangely therapeutic about tracking a large mammal in this game, taking aim with a large caliber firearm and bringing it down. There is a German national park set in the autumn modeled in the game. I lose myself in its environs every time I visit it. Fields of gold surrounded by orange trees, the sound of a chainsaw in the far distance peppered by distant barking dogs and the hum of a Cessna passing overhead. An editor at PC Gamer Magazine confessed that he often booted this game up just to walk through its woods. He didn’t hunt in the game at all. This doesn’t come as a surprise. Steam is almost polluted by its screenshots. Every visage could be a standalone wallpaper. The game is often sold cheaply on Steam sales. It’s worth a look.

MP3VA.COM: A Steam buddy turned me onto this site. And now I can’t quit. It is, as the name implies, an mp3 site, but the mp3s are typically 384 kilobytes. Lossy though they may be, I can’t “hear” it. The thing is, the site hosts every album I’ve thrown at it. Remember those great old cassettes you had that you can’t play anymore? Well, this site has them, often for $1.20 an album. The download mechanic is pretty intuitive. At first glance, the site looks fishy, but I’ve not had any problems. I punch the purchase button, download the album to my rig where I can then keep it on Windows Music (complete with the album cover) and then copy it over via USB to my Digital Audio Player. And the album is then archived on the site in case you need to redownload the album again in the future.

Quarterflash Take Another Picture on vinyl: This was a delightful little eBay score, factory sealed even! Imagine breaking the seal on an album from 1983. I’d had the cassette in my Navy days and I remember playing it over and again. And now the CD is 50 bucks plus on Amazon. The album sounds great on the new system, warm and analog-ish. I wasn’t expecting the surge of returning memories of long days (and lonely nights) on the ocean, thousands of miles from home and wondering every other day what I’d gotten myself into. This album from a production standpoint is really done well. There’s not a bad song on it. And I will admit it does sound dated, it doesn’t sound out of place at all.

Painkiller: Black Edition on PC: Coming out in 2004, the same year as Half Life 2, this first person shooter had its work cut out for it. It’s in the same vein as Doom, Quake, and Unreal Tournament (and even spent two seasons on the Cyberathlete Professional League’s World Tour.) The story is a bit farfetched. A happily married man takes his wife out for a birthday dinner, and while speeding to the restaurant in the driving rain (don’t want to miss out on those reservations!) he ploughs headlong into a truck. He and his wife are both killed. She makes it to Heaven, but he awakens to find himself in Purgatory. It seems God has other plans for him. He is going to fight four of the Devil’s generals (and their minions) to earn a place in Heaven. The game includes an assortment of weapons and monsters, not to mention great looking backdrops including old monasteries, cemeteries, an opera house and castles. Each level involves walking into an area, a door slamming shut and heavy metal music kicking in, along with the mayhem and the dodging and the blasting. It’s classic old school shooting at its finest.

Edward's July 2021 Mix

 

 

Still in the throes of working long hours, but I did manage to squeeze some niceties out of my free time. As you know, I had to forego last month’s mix; I simply didn’t have the time. But this month, perhaps I made up for it in the variety of indulgences I did partake in. I acquired a very ornery female kitten this month. Ah, the pitter patter of tiny feet in the household to make one feel young again. Speaking of feet, they’ve become an endangered species in this house. This kitten loves to attack toes, and there is no safe refuge. Feeling needle stabs on your toes is quite the rude awakening!

 

Max Payne 3 on PC: The original game in this series was a real hallmark innovation (for its time.) It introduced “bullet time,” which enabled your character to leap into a dive with both guns blazing, complete slow motion, and cap everybody in the room at quite the unfair advantage. It was perk that required an initial buildup, but its result was a game changer. Max Payne, himself, was a sympathetic character who lost his family to a bad run in with the mafia. And Payne’s problems continuing into the second game, finally crescendo in this third game in which we find him boozing himself to death, doing odd jobs as bodyguarding corporate suits in South America. The game is almost too cinematic, quite the change up from a Rockstar game, but the graphics are gritty and beautiful. Max Payne’s soliloquys are as bad as ever, as if penned from Dashiel Hammett in a drunken stupor. The shooting is challenging, (I continue to struggle as of this writing) somewhat brought down by arduous save checkpoints and unskippable cutscenes. I’m eleven hours into what seems to be a 12-15 hour game. It’s been fun, but I’m ready to move on to something else.

Star Trek: The Next Generation – Season Six on Blu-Ray: Only recently started this, the penultimate season. The best episode so far seems to be “Rascals,” in which Guinan, Ensign Ro and Picard come back through the transporter as children, miniature versions of themselves, their recognizance on par with their adult selves, simply trapped in children’s bodies. “True Q” casts Q visiting the Enterprise again (always a welcome treat.) The series has really hit its stride in season six and is another testament to the idea of keeping this series on my media shelf for future viewings.

Snow by Ronald Malfi: Winding down in this woeful tale of a guy trying to make amends with his estranged son by going to meet him in Iowa over a Christmas holiday. The story opens up with our man being snowbound in O’Hare International Airport in Chicago. Several feet of snow impending, and the man decides to finish the trek in a rented car with a girl he meets at the airport. They share the rented car with an older couple. The journey is fraught with horror as their car runs off the road into a snowbank and they are forced to seek help in a small town held captive by supernatural forces. Easily comparable to a King tale, Malfi has a gift for great metaphors and a twisted sense of humor. His characters are just what you’d see in a commercial airport filled with aggravated travelers. I’m now a fan. I’ll look forward zestfully to some of his other works.

Lost: Season 5 on Blu Ray: In a sense, this is a redux of the first series. The main crew, having been rescued are now back on the island once again (this time by choice.) It involves a heavy science fiction tone with time travel being a heavy slant. Many of my friends lost their way (pun intended) in this seemingly lackluster season, and I can kind of see it. But I’m in it for the long haul. It’s still a pleasure to come home from work, throw a bowl of salsa and chips together and lose myself for a good 47 minutes or so in a romp that involves characters I’ve grown to care about.  

World of Warships on PC:  My friend, Vic Berwick, got me to try this game. I’m always trying to get him to try different games, so I felt compelled to reciprocate. Boy, did he get me hooked. It’s nearly all I’ve been playing since. It’s a simple concept. You steer warships around a huge map and fire on enemy warships. Victories are rewarded with experience points used to research and purchase higher tier ships and join bigger and more fierce battles. There are numerous modes consisting of brawls (3 vs 3 against other people), co op fights against other AI ships, and full on PvP (people fighting teams of other people) and then there’s the operation of the week consisting of team-based objects that form a sort of campaign. The game is free to play, but I advise you don’t. If you do, you may run the risk of addiction. You’ve been warned.

Conquest of Paradise: The Original Soundtrack by Vangelis on CD: This hangs right up there with Vangelis’ Bladerunner soundtrack as one of my favorites. I’ve only watched the movie once when it was released on VHS back in the last century, but the soundtrack haunted me until I was finally able to procure it. More than the music itself, well, not more than, but more like as much as, the music is spectacular, it’s the mood of the music that fits the film so gloriously. The backdrop is Christopher Columbus’s voyage to the new world. Those who would frown upon our history and rewrite it, be damned. This is a powerful film I recommend if only to hear the wonderful soundtrack.

Gulliver’s Travels by Jonathan Swift: I always thought this was a children’s story. No way is this is a story for kids! It’s ribald, surprisingly obscene and probably one of the most intelligent fantasies I’ve ever read. I’m halfway through it, and I already don’t want it to end. Far be it from me to laugh aloud while reading a book, but this book has brought out the laughs and the astonishment. In the land of Lilliput where the people are only a few inches tall, we see our hero putting out a castle fire by standing over it and pissing on it. And then instead of being hailed the bespoke hero, he is held to task for doing something so unorthodox. And then in the land of Brobdingnab where Gulliver is the size of a field mouse in a land of giant humans, we see him used to entertain the daughters of royalty by being placed down their brassieres to tease and tantalize them. And to Gulliver’s chagrin, he finds the size and smell involved to be grossly stomach turning. I am honestly surprised this book ever found publication. (But I’ve been wonderfully amused by it.)

Alpinestars “Carbon Kid” featuring Brian Molko on CD: I first discovered this great song in a game soundtrack way back in 2007. The game was Test Drive Unlimited which involved purchasing cars, winning road races to acquire money to purchase even more cars, all against the backdrop of a very realistic Oahu, Hawaii. I lost many hours in the game when it released and this song was part of the line up for what played when you turned on the in-car radios. Brian Molko, the frontman for the band Placebo was the perfect vocalist for it. The song’s beautiful synths fitted perfectly for driving convertibles through forested roadways, shadows of tree branches carpeting the road ahead and views through the trees of the ocean beyond. I’ve since committed this EP to my computer’s Music directory and my Digital Audio Player (so it will always be with me) because I tried to play the CD in my car and it got stuck in the player! I had to purchase it internationally, and I’m not sure, maybe UK CDs are made differently or something. Google was definitely my friend on retrieving the CD from my player. I thought the CD hosed it. Whew!  

XXXII Olympiad, Tokyo 2021 live broadcasts in 4K: As a former distance runner, I’ve always enjoyed the Olympic games. This time around was no exception. I got to witness skateboarding (of the street freestyle type) introduced and won by a young Japanese man who, upon watching him compete, I told my wife, was the best skateboarder I’d ever seen in my life. I wasn’t surprised he clenched the gold medal. And of course, the track and field events, always my favorite, where I got to see a resident of Taylor, TX where I lived for some years, take the silver medal. As a military veteran I find it odd that I feel more patriotic watching the Olympics, then I ever did donning the uniform of a servicemember. I don’t know why that is, but I do. Maybe it’s because of my own participation in long distance running years ago. Maybe it’s a race I ran in Austin that secured a spot in the US Olympic trials for the winner. (My own little brush with Olympic potentiality.)