Edward's October 2021 Mix

 

 

 

Another month of all-encompassing work to the point that home is only a place I seem to visit anymore. I felt a toll taken with the physicality enough I scheduled a doctor appointment. Not surprisingly, my doctor tilted his face and narrowed his gaze, straight at me. He told me my medication is attributing to my anemic condition, but then he summed it up like this: “Well, think about it, your heart is a pump and yours is faulty.” I admire my doc. He always tells it like it is. I put a new Gretsch Streamliner Lefty in my shopping cart (online) but removed it last minute. Nosiree! I didn’t let a bout of caprice hoodwink me. I can’t, not when there’s a Roland JC-120 to be picked up first!  Steam had a decent Halloween sale this month, but don’t forget to check out HumbleBundle and Fanatical for the best deals, folks. Game on!  

 

Steel Division: Normandy ‘44 on PC: This has to be the most difficult real time strategy game I’ve ever played. Short, but oh so dastardly hard! Consisting of three campaigns: American, German and British, each one raises the bar in difficulty. Each campaign is a mere four missions. I initially thought, oh, this will be a breeze. Red eyed, caffeined out, and ready to throw my PC out of the window sometime later, I’ve decided I’ve met my match. Still, I’ll stay the course. My buddies who’ve played and beaten the mission tell me I’ll get it eventually. I just don’t want to be in a nursing home when I do. The game is gorgeous though, satellite topography was used in the making of the landscape, and you can zoom in to Company of Heroes level views. The game would be much more enjoyable, however, if it was just slightly more . . . doable. 

 

Warrior on Blu Ray: Not unlike a Rocky movie or any other favored sports underdog movie, this one ranks right up there as one of the best I’ve seen in a long time. But this one has a catch. What do you do if there are two underdogs competing against each other, and you find both of them compelling?  I almost picked this up on 4K Blu Ray. I’m glad I didn’t. The whole film is shot authentically with no Hollywood glitter which makes it seem like it’s happening in your own suburban neighborhood. It certainly wasn’t an epic feature designed to take advantage of the extra expense of 4K production. The Blu Ray was an excellent transfer, however. And the authenticity carries over to the shooting itself, in which Tom Hardy broke a toe and a finger and numerous ribs. 

 

Dead Wake: The Last Crossing of the Lusitania by Erik Larson: Yes, this makes month number three I’m still covered up in this book. See what working all of the time does? It’s the great robber of time! But with that said, the miniscule peeks I get into this book are still a fascinating read. I’ve come to the part where the Lusitania has actually been torpedoed. The story is such a stark contrast to what happened to Titanic. The sea is calm, we’re talking pancake flat. The green hills of Ireland can clearly be seen less than twenty miles away, and the captain comes out on deck and proclaims, “Don’t worry folks, the ship is not going to sink.” Erik Larson conveys all of this with an admirable clarity. He is a great teller of tales, especially historical ones. 

 

Elton John Goodbye Yellow Brick Road on 180-gram vinyl: I have my beautiful daughters to thank for this one. “Funeral for a Friend” reigns as one of my favorite intros of all time. Hearing it so full bodied on my Fluance turntable with its Ortofon Red diamond stylus, this was the Elton John/Bernie Taupin synergy at its best. This album was arguably the crown point of John’s 1970s recording career. I’ve written it before, but this album was the soundtrack to the summer of my 12^thyear. Hearing any of the hits, the titular, “Goodbye Yellow Brick Road,” “Bennie and the Jets,” “Saturday Night’s Alright for Fighting” or “Candle in the Wind” is an instant time travel device for me. And then there’s the artwork. Man oh man! This is reason enough to get caught up in vinyl all over again.  

 

 

Silent Hunter 4 on PC: Perhaps it’s my current infatuation with World of Warships or maybe it’s because I’m reading Dead Wake: The Last Crossing of the Lusitania. I’m not sure why, but I installed Ubisoft’s venerable WWII submarine simulation, Silent Hunter 4 because I wanted to rack up some tonnage of my own. Steeped in authenticity, the game even has a toggle to turn wave undulation off for those susceptible to seasickness. As for me, having spent time in the same waters depicted in this game, I think they nailed it. This was the sea I came to love and hate during my own stint in the US Navy. The game captures all of the mad dashery associated with an aggroe’d enemy destroyer coming down on you in full force, and it captures the guilt plagued joy of watching a behemoth battleship sink due to your expertly launched torpedoes, complete with seeing terrified sailors in the water, lifeboats picking them up, and not to mention the lives lost going down with the ship. War is hell.    

 

Rush Hemispheres on 192kHz/24-bit FLAC: I didn’t jump aboard the Rush train until 1980 when Permanent Waves came out. I actually didn’t know of this album or its songs until I listened to Exit . . . Stage Left the live album that came out a year or so after Permanent Waves. I thought the live album was a good rendition of the songs. These studio versions are better. “La Villa Strangiato” is my favorite Rush instrumental and always will be. When I can play the acoustic opening without fault, I’ll know I’m an accomplished guitarist. And this is why I’m so in love with Alex Lifeson’s chops. The boy can play like nobody’s business. And then there’s “The Trees.” Fans have tried for years to interpret a far deeper meaning of this song for the masses, and it’s always funny to hear Neil Peart (who penned the song) in interviews chuckle and admit it’s just a silly song that has no hidden message. In high resolution FLAC the album has more dynamic range than a CD and I can hear a difference. It’s a worthy pick up for any Rush fan, but of course all of the Rush fans already have it. 

 

The Man Who Knew too Much on DVD: This was the Alfred Hitchcock movie that almost wasn’t. It seems that Hitchcock, under contract, owed one more movie to Paramount, so he decided to take the easier route of remaking one of his earlier films. Casting Jimmy Stewart and Doris Day proved to be a success. Interestingly, during shooting, Day became overly concerned because Hitchcock spent so much time on setting up shots, and getting the lighting correct that Day felt he was disappointed in her performance on camera. It irked her so much she finally confronted him about it. “Miss Day, my dear, if I’d been concerned about your performance then I’d have to direct YOU!” Ha! Typical Hitchcock. Released in 1956 in glorious technicolor, the film checks all of the boxes Alfred Hitchcock is known for: interesting and exotic locales, likeable characters, villains with characteristic flaws (who always get their just due) and a great soundtrack (this one by Bernard Hermann, who also gets centerstage for a part of the film.)  

 

The Terminator on Blu Ray: It had been years and the last time I watched this was on DVD. I decided to revisit it on Blu Ray. I remember when this movie released, I saw it at a downtown San Diego theater when I was in the Navy. Looking back, it earmarked that part of my youth. Despite the vibrant transfer to Blu Ray, the movie is showing its wrinkles, but I can’t deny it launched one of my favorite movie franchises. Watching it again, I didn’t realize how sad the movie is. Witnessing Kyle Reese’s haunted loneliness requited by his relationship with Sarah Connor, and his depiction of the horrible world he left is heart wrenching at best. Arnold Schwarzenegger, in an interview, stated from the moment he read the script and began working on the film he knew it was going to be much more than standard sci-fi fare, more than a simple B movie. He knew it was destined for greatness. James Cameron admitted the same, the movie was going to be special and he knew it before it released. He said every year after The Terminator in which there were no plans for a Terminator 2 the demand for such a movie grew exponentially. And of course, we all know how big Terminator 2 became.

 

Edward's September 2021 Mix

 

 

 

Took in a feral kitten this month, and after 3 weeks he’s no longer growling and hissing when I try to pet him. He’s been a time consuming “pet” project, but I think he’ll be worth it. My reading goal this year, 20 books. I’m not sure I’m going to make it. It seems I’ve fallen behind. I suppose it would be easier if I didn’t try to read three books at a time. My vinyl album collection is starting to grow. Listening to music has become a ceremony in my house.

 

Need For Speed: Shift 2 on PC: I take my PC sim racing seriously enough, not Fanatec and homemade rollcage seriously, but seriously enough that I’ll turn laps for hours just to shave a second and a half on a favorite track. I do take breaks though with some notable “sim-cade” racers, namely the Need for Speed series. Lately I’ve been enamored with Need for Speed: Shift 2. It’s clearly a newer iteration of the original NFS: Shift. You start with simple cars, race them, earn cash and buy nicer cars to win bigger races and win even more money. I didn’t have any problems with the original, this one, however, oh man! I’ve had to eschew using my wheel and paddle set, resorting to plugging in an Xbox Controller and setting the difficulty to Medium. I’ve been racing sims for 30 years! Medium difficulty indeed!

House of Cards – Season Five on Netflix: Frank Underwood is the US President we love to hate, though his underhanded shenanigans enlisted to keep him in power are so heinous and crafty one cannot help but to root for him. This season has him running for reelection. He hires a shady helper to infiltrate the NSA, upload crippleware that shuts down all cellular towers in DC, and after proclaiming the perpetrators to be Middle Eastern terrorists, orders the same shady helper to remove the nefarious program, the cell phone towers have come back up, and Frank Underwood being responsible for the fix becomes da man! How could you not vote for him? This series casts Capital Hill politics in a colorfully corrupted light. There’s no way this stuff could happen for real. Or is there?   

Dead Wake: The Last Crossing of the Lusitania by Erik Larson: Still enjoying this fascinating historical read. I’ve discovered I certainly would not have wanted to serve on a WWI U-boat. Even their crews referred to them as iron coffins. And unlike our own US Navy, which is comprised of an all volunteer submarine crew force, the German U boat crews were assigned. To aid in diving, the crew was ordered to run to the nose of the submarine, their weight exacerbating the rate in which they dove. And to ascend, you guessed it: the crew would run toward the rear of the boat.

Tom Petty & The Heartbreakers Their Greatest Hits on 180-gram vinyl: My first purchased album, and boy is it a beauty. This album is so good I find myself playing it all the way through, no skipped songs here. Picked this up at of all places, a local Walmart. I have to admit, ripping the plastic and opening the double gated album brought back fond memories of being a kid. And the smell. It was as thrilling to me as the scent of an old bookstore on a rainy Saturday afternoon. It’s a great sounding album. The bright acoustic intro on “Learning to Fly” had me smiling. After years of exposure to heated debates, vinyl VS CD I have to say, yes, there is a difference, and it’s a good difference. I wouldn’t say one is better than the other. But I would say hearing music on vinyl albums makes the trip down the abyss worth it.

The Crossing by Cormac McCarthy on Kindle: The story continues. Our novel’s protagonist Billy Parham, who has just returned from Mexico on a trip to free a she-wolf he has rescued, comes home to find a great criminal tragedy has befallen his family. So, now accompanied by his younger brother, Billy must return to Mexico to exact revenge and make some wrongs, right. Gritty, packed with hard cracked dirt, and blistering southwestern sun, this novel pulls no punches in being a bleak tale of the loss of innocence, the acquisition of wisdom and the questioning of one’s moral constitution.   

Pink Floyd The Dark Side of the Moon on 180-gram vinyl: Hailed as the number one album new turntable aficionados flock to, I can see why after listening to this. Hearing the electronic sounds of the tabulators and the cash registers on the beginning of the song “Money” reverberate back and forth to each of my speakers was incredible. And to think I was “Pink Floyd’d” out after listening to them countless time on my CDs. “Time” sounds absolutely majestic. Hearing this album is like hearing them for the first time.

Painkiller: Black Edition on PC: I was coming along just fine, playing this on Nightmare difficulty, the penultimate level of difficulty. I was at the halfway point of the game, Level 3 (out of 5), 12 hours in and the unthinkable happened. The game started crashing. A lot. Each time I loaded a save I would be immediately tossed out to Steam. I hit the Steam forums and discovered it’s not an uncommon issue. It’s easy to lay blame with Steam and insist they post a disclaimer “play at your own risk” warning on the storefront of the game, but I guess I’m really just angry because that’s 12 hours I’ll never get back. Oh well, now I have an excuse to finish other games in my long Steam backlog.

 

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.