05.04.08
Posted in Music at 20:21
The observant reader may have noticed a band called Surfact has been graced with a position in the Music slot of all my posts lately. Surfact is a relatively new Danish grunge/metal band whom I finally got around to noticing after listening to their excellent song Supression exactly as I was finishing a blog entry.
I dug out their MySpace Music page and gave the five songs on there a listen, and I realized I’d heard no less than three of them on the radio and liked them all without realizing they were from the same band (that’s the problem of listening to the radio while you work, you forget to pay attention). I looked into them and discovered that they’ve only released one album so far, Terrific Downfall. I decided I ought to own this album.
After hunting across the city for it, I finally managed to buy the last copy in the third shop I visited. Then I got home, sat down to give it a good listen, and fell in love with every song on their record. I also noticed that I was already familiar with a fourth song on there from the radio, Monkey On Your Back, which was a pleasant surprise. It’s always kinda tricky to recommend music on a gaming blog, because I have no idea what sort of songs you, my readers, are into, with a few exceptions. However, I believe if you enjoy grunge a’la Pearl Jam, the softer side of metal a’la Muse, or just good rock in general, you are quite likely to enjoy Surfact. Give them a listen and judge for yourself.
- Game: Grand Theft Auto 4
- Music: Surfact - Sundown
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11.21.07
Posted in Music, Personal at 19:47
Having finally acquired a proper video editing program, I pulled some recent cat footage off the tape in my camcorder and made a little video with it. I decided to edit it to the instrumental Last of the Wilds by Nightwish because it was a great fit and I’m really into celtic music at the moment. The result, should my video plugin choose to display it, can be seen below as a 19mb flash file:
Loading...
In addition, I have uploaded a more high-quality 62mb downloadable MOV-file 
for those of you who don’t like streaming video (weirdos). And in addition, I accidentally encoded it in MPEG2 
, but even RAR’ed it’s 185 megs. It’s very big and very high quality though.
- enclosure: http://rooc.offtopicproductions.com/BlogStuff/LastOfTheWilds.mov
63631741
video/quicktime
- Game: Team Fortress 2
- Music: Nightwish - Last of the Wilds
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11.18.07
Posted in Games, Music at 23:32
Apart from Call of Duty 4, I have been enjoying two additional entertainment products these past few days. The first is Team Fortress 2, which has surprised me quite significantly by not being frustrating or boring or just plain uninteresting. I really don’t have the patience for competitive multiplayer in general - cooperative play is the definition of Awesome as far as I’m concerned, but games that pitch me against other people rarely keep my interest. Once in a while though, something will come along and push the right buttons. It happened with Counter-Strike, it happened with World of Warcraft’s battlefields, and now it’s happened with TF2.
There are several reasons for this. The primary reason is that TF2 is (as the name implies) a team-oriented game, meaning I’m not measured exclusively on my own ability to kill the enemy players. This is enhanced by the class system which offers several support- or defense-oriented options in addition to straight-out assault. Yesterday I kicked ass as the rather n00b-friendly Soldier, but today I found my niche as a medic. I didn’t even realize how much better I was at playing medic than any other class before I looked at my stats after the last game today and realized I’d scored 3 points more as a medic than in my best round as Soldier in spite of having played Soldier far far longer. This means I can be valuable to my team even if I do suck at killing the other guys.
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- Game: Team Fortress 2
- Music: Nightwish - Last of the Wilds
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09.14.07
Posted in Music, Other media, Personal at 22:53
I’m currently working on the script for my first audiovisual production (that is, short film) at the university. I’ve grouped with two great girls who are really good to brainstorm and bounce ideas back and forth with. Them being female, I expected the worst and brought a love story to the table initially, but one of them proposed a story about a schizophrenic, and I was sold immediately. The story we settled on after a few revisions for some reason reminds me of Hurt by Nine Inch Nails, so I see this as a great opportunity to finally try to write something around a piece of music.
I’d like to establish a certain synergy between the film and its soundtrack, using the song to define and build a particular style in the way the story is presented. As I work on the script, I keep Hurt running on repeat so I remain in that mellow, slightly threatening and sinister mindset. I’ve only written the first few minutes of the film, but I think the intro is really good and I know pretty much exactly how the ending will be structured according to the song. I only hope I can cut up the song like I want so we won’t end up making a glorified music video 
Of course I still have to sell the idea of integrating this song so strongly in the film to the others, but I think they’ll agree when I show them the first draft of the script.
- Game: Guitar Hero II
- Music: Nine Inch Nails - Hurt
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08.20.07
Posted in Games, Music, Other media at 22:13
Boil - Vessel
Excellent album from Danish/Icelandic progressive metal band Boil. For some reason everybody I’ve played this for has commented on its unoriginality, and I’ll agree they sound a lot like bands such as Tool or A Perfect Circle. But I really like that kind of music, so I’m enjoying listening to more of it. Stupefy was the original reason I bought the album, but Abstemious has turned out to be an extremely pleasant surprise.
The Bourne Ultimatum
Watch Identity one day. Then watch Supremacy the next. And then go to the cinema and watch Ultimatum. I know it’s “just an action movie”, but it’s one of the best action movies I’ve ever seen. Of course I read the original comic book series many years ago, so I was a fan of the concept before it ever became a movie. The Bourne trilogy has given me an immense respect for Matt Damon, who is one of the few Hollywood superstars to consistently transcend his own identity and make you forget he’s an actor. Ultimatum’s only weakness is that it’s sorely missing Franka Potente, but then on the other hand it features some moderate political commentary, and that almost makes up for it.
Not playing Knights of the Old Republic 2
…until Team Gizka finish and release their patch. That said, I’m glad I’ve played the original and experienced what a rushed and wounded game it is. I believe I’ve learned something from observing the choices Obsidian made when they had to cut important pieces, and seeing the consequences it had for the integrity and coherence of their story. Also, that game is in need of some serious balance testing.
- Game: KOTOR2: The Sith Lords
- Music: Boil - Masters of War
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06.20.07
Posted in Music, Other media at 21:38
I should be reading about Asian films in preparation for my impending exam on Friday (man do I mention that a lot these days… I wonder why), but Call of Juarez has kickstarted a sort of western phase in my film viewing habits, and yesterday I got Morten to send me the theme for The Good, The Bad, and the Ugly. I actually have that theme on an old 45 RPM vinyl disc that my mother once gave me; it also has The Ecstasy of Gold on the other side, so it’s a great record, but unfortunately I have no record player, so I can only play it on my parents’ stereo.
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- Music: Ennio Morricone - The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly
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06.14.07
Posted in Games, Music, Other media at 23:32
I am feeling exceptionally elated after today’s incredibly fun and productive study group meeting which lasted from 3:30 pm to 8 pm and during which we managed to go over French cinema since the New Wave, Danish cinema from 1960 until now, and finally American cinema from 1920 until now (Morten spoke about this for… it must’ve been over 2 hours, it was incredible). Now I’m just kicking back, enjoying some good music, and making ready to test a level editor NVShacker coded up for our Breakout minigame in TNM (yes, we have a level editor for one of our minigames, how cool is that?). I have a sudden onset of exhibitionism, I feel a need to share with the world what sort of entertainment I am currently ingesting:
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- Music: Green Day - Working Class Hero
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07.09.06
Posted in Music at 14:14
It’s not that I don’t have any more computer issues to whine about, but I generally strive to not sound like a broken record, so I think I’ll just stop complaining until I finally get my wallet out and empty it all over a bunch of hardware stores.
Friday, I believe I discovered Tool. It’s not that I didn’t know of them already, I’d heard one (1) song with them before, namely Eulogy, and while I thought it was nice and interesting and original, it didn’t really speak to me. But then they release this new album, 10,000 Days, from which the songs Vicarious and The Pot were played on the Danmarks Radio’s Modern Rock station. After hearing it a few times, I began to like The Pot, which has a pretty weird and fascinating beginning, and Vicarious stuck straight onto my brain first time I heard it.
Being slightly annoyed with myself for missing them at Roskilde (their concert and Volbeat’s performance are the only reasons I might have gone to the festival), I decided to make up for it by buying 10,000 Days. I must say, that is one impressive album. Their music is pretty weird, but their songs appeal to me with their experimenting instrumentals, their defiantly nonstandard structures, their mildly creepy and psychedelic atmosphere, and their deep, murky lyrics. Especially the lyrics I find very fascinating, some of them seem pretty straight forward, whereas others are much more resistant to interpretation, and they often contain more or less obscure references to religion or psychology.
Rosetta Stoned is probably the most difficult song to interpret, I can’t figure out if it’s about being a misunderstood and ignored prophet or just about being completely stoned. Either way, it creates a lot of strange and disturbing images in my head, and that’s always interesting.
I would have to say my favourite song right now is Right in Two. The meaning of the lyrics isn’t very difficult to understand, but the instrumentation is incredibly atmospheric and melodic and the vocals have this airy, eerie quality to them along with, of course, a really good melody. On top of all that, it’s a very dynamic piece of music that seems to evolve rather than change as it goes on.
And then of course there is the packaging. In, I can only assume, an effort to make people buy their record rather than downloading it from each other, they decided to include a couple of stereoscopic lenses in the cover itself. It works amazingly, I think I’ve already spent an hour just looking at the detailed, mysterious, pseudo-intellectual, symbol-laden images in captivating 3D. Of course the drawback is that the list of songs is hidden away somewhere inside that little cover-book thingy rather than on the back of the cover where it should be, but these lenses are such a cool gimmick, I will forgive the extreme inconvenience.
To summarize, I think this album is great for two purposes: You can either lie down on your bed, put this CD on, and get completely lost in its weird, experimental, psychedelic world, immersing yourself in the music and the images it creates in your head; or you can leave it on while you work or just do something else, and it will serve excellently as background music which occasionally jumps out and grabs your attention for a moment, inspiring you for whatever you’re doing.
And to finish off, a mostly useless rating for my own amusement:
Tool - 10,000 Days
Music: 
Packaging:
- Location: Weird Realm of Alternative Metal
- Music: Tool - Right in Two
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01.23.06
Posted in Games, Humour, Music, Personal at 22:16
Man, a lot of stuff has happen since my last update. It all just seems rather trivial, so I didn’t think I’d bother you guys with it. But of course, I just remembered that sharing your immensely uninteresting daily experiences with the Internet At Large is the entire point of having a LiveJournal, so now you’ll get the summarized version. Hey, at least I’m not whining about anything! …today.
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- Mood: Verbose
- Music: Volbeat - Fire song
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10.15.05
Posted in Music, Personal at 13:54
Bah, I bought a new CD yesterday. After my meeting at the Planetarium, I called my mum at 11 am to hear if she wanted to go out for lunch. Unfortunately she’d had breakfast an hour before, so she suggested I pick her up at noon. This left me with an hour’s time to kill, so I took a walk down Strøget, the central shopping street of Copenhagen. On the way, I first dropped into EB Games, which had no interesting games except Fahrenheit which I plan to buy when the price has dropped a bit, and then the music section of Fona 2000. I found no less than three albums I wanted to hear: Ten Thousand Fists by Disturbed, Good Apollo, I’m Burning Star IV, Vol 1: From Fear Through the Eyes of Madness by Coheed & Cambria (good lord, what were they thinking when they came up with that title!), and Dark Light by His Infernal Majesty.
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- Mood: Dorky
- Music: Disturbed - Stricken
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