Linkstew

Whew, ask and ye shall receive. My roommate had a whole bag of cough drops just sitting in his drawer!

Aw yeah, now that's the stuff! I can breath so much better now... And I have something to orally fixate on, to boot!

So last week, I bought Devil May Cry and I borrowed ICO from a co-worker. And in the case of both games, so far so good! "Finally!" I cried. "PS2 games worth playing!"

First up, Devil May Cry. This game is rated M for Mature, and it more than deserves that rating. This game is gratuitously violent, with a red-trenchcoat wearing, sword wielding, shotgun toting son of a demon on a mission to stop demons from making a mess of things. Sure, this game probably won't give video games a good name with parent groups, but good god is it well done, and it's so cathartic. I got this game on Wednesday, which was conveniently the day of my midterm. So after getting angry at my midterm, I went home and took out my frustration by slashing an enemy into the air and blowing him to pieces with a shotgun. Oh it's some good stuff, let me tell you. It's pure action, and the only flaw I've found so far is that the camera is a little wandery for my tastes. I repeatedly found myself wanting to hit Z and center the camera behind my character, a la Zelda 64.

And then there's ICO, which is simply breathtaking. It reminds me of an old Sierra game, with it's puzzle solving aspects and awe inspiring visuals. You play a young boy trying to escape from a castle filled with some shadow monsters, and your job is to figure out how to get your character and the girl you meet along the way out of the castle (she's not as physical able as you, so you have to find different paths for her than you used for yourself. Now, I've found two flaws in this game so far. First of all, the occasional action sequences where the shadow monsters try to take away the girl and you have to fight them off with a stick are rather irritating. The stick goes *pff* when you strike them, and really, if I wanted to kill some monsters, I'd be playing Devil May Cry and hearing the satisfying sounds of a sword slash and a shotgun blast. Second, the camera is a little wandery for my tastes. I constantly found myself wanting to hit Z and center the camera behind my character, a la Zelda 64.

This album has been years, and years, and years in the making. There are songs that I heard at my first TMBG concert in 1998. There are songs on it that were supposed to be on 1996's Factory Showroom. There are songs that were written 12 years ago when Flood was being recorded. And if you're the kind of person who only buys CDs, this is the first album all new content from TMBG since Factory Showroom in 1996.

Of course, if you're like me, and you're a moderate fan who downloads bootlegs or subscribes to TMBG Unlimited, you've probably already heard all but two of these songs. And that's one of my issues with this album. The first listen just didn't hold any excitement (pardon, Xcitement) for me. Instead of Xcitement, I just felt relief to see it all polished and finished . "Finally, they can get on to some new stuff", I thought.

My next issue with the album is that it really lacks any sort of coherence. Unlike the very definable mood and style of "August and Everything After" by Counting Crows (for example), "Mink Car" just wanders all over the board. I was more than happy to toss "Mink Car" into my jukebox, but unlike "August and Everything After", I can't imagine myself going out of my way to listen to just "Mink Car".

Of course, that lack of coherence is one of the things that makes They Might Be Giants Be Giants (Er, makes them might be giants). I've never actually desired to listen to any TMBG album in particular. Rather, I like listening to as much TMBG as I possibly can on shuffle. But if you're not a TMBG fan, this lack of coherence isn't going to be a good thing. You'll probably find one or two songs on the album to like, and a lot more to dislike.

My final issue just has to do with what the album isn't. First, I don't care for the name. The working title for quite awhile was "Unreliable Narrator", which I think is a much better title. And second, there's a ton of material that could have been on this album but which was omitted. The most notable omission for me was "Thunderbird", which you can hear here as a bootlegged mp3. I really like Thunderbird, and I really wanted a polished version. Oh well.

And now, because I'm not in the mood to do a normal review hilighting a couple of the songs, I'm just going to run down the tracklist and give you comments on each one.

1. Bangs - This song is about liking a girl for, above all else, her Bangs. And while it's as superficial as it sounds, the imagry of the song still leaves me happy and smiling.
2. Cyclops Rock - I like this song. It's very driving, and I like listening to it when I'm walking around campus. The crazed screaming lady at the end of the song actually fits amazingly well.
3. Man It's So Loud In Here - This song features lyrics which make fun of night clubs with a musical style that would fit right in at a night club. This is the kind of ironic song that I especially love from TMBG, and I'd love to see it actually get played at night clubs, but it won't happen.
4. Mr. Xcitement - This song is very different, but in a good way. It features Doughty (formerly of Soul Coughing) doing the vocals, and really gets my blood flowing. And thanks to the nonsense lyrics, it's something that doesn't distract me when I'm working like most TMBG songs do. I really enjoy this song just for the music.
5. Another First Kiss - The style of this song fits the sentimental mood of the lyrics perfectly. Unfortunately, John was trying to put too much emotion into his voice, and his vocals end up sounding more than a little thin. It's still not bad, but it could have been better with more work on the vocals.
6. I've Got A Fang - This is another song with good music and not so good lyrics. The music, however, is not as good as Mr. Xcitement, and so I usually just shrug this one off.
7. Hovering Sombrero - This song was supposedly written 12 years ago. And it shows, but not in a bad way. It just shows in that this sounds like a TMBG song from 12 years ago. This is another song with nice imagry which leaves me happy and smiling, and more importantly, motivated. I'm never just a hat, I'm never only just a hat.
8. Yeh Yeh - This song is apparently a cover of a song by some guy I've never heard of named Georgie Fame, but that's okay, because this is a great cover. A very good song, yeah, yeah!
9. Hopeless Bleak Despair - This is a good "typical" TMBG song.
10. Drink - I like the imagry of this song, and it does a great job of capturing its title.
11. My Man - This song is about being paralyzed from the neck down, and it expresses the frustration of the situation in a rather detached way. Not my favorite.
12. Older - A good song, but I'm tired of it. I've heard it many many times, and it's getting old, and every time I hear it it gets older still. But, if you're new to it, it is a good song.
13. Mink Car - I don't like this song at all. It's just a lot of nonsense about getting hit by a car in an easy listening lounge music style, and it again features John's thin voice. By far my least favorite song on the album.
14. Wicked Little Critta - This song is enjoyable, but I have no clue how to describe it.
15. Finished With Lies - This is a fun song with clever lyrics which I like a lot.
16. She Thinks She's Edith Head - I'm really sick of this song.
17. Working Under Cover For The Man - And this one.

Though my comments on most of those songs aren't very useful, they briefly say that if I can look past what isn't there, and the lack of coherence, and the part where I heard most of these songs years ago, then there's a lot of good content on the album.

So, is Mink Car for you? If you're a TMBG fan of any kind, or like a wide variety of musical styles, or are willing to try something new, then most likely yes. Otherwise, probably not. But! Thanks to the wonders of the internet, you can try before you buy, and you have the option of listening to 30 second samples of each song from emusic, and then buying and downloading the entire album of mp3s if you like what you hear. Or you can order the album from Amazon if you want an actual disc.

3.5/5.

School starts tomorrow, which is moderately confusing because for the last three years classes have started on a Tuesday. But then I'm confused back in the other direction when I remember that I don't have any classes on Monday, and I don't start on Tuesday until 2 pm.

I just did my time sheet today, and I worked more than 60 hours a week for three weeks in a row. Somehow I've managed to delude myself into believing that I'll be less busy once classes start. But considering that 60 hours is three quarters of what I'm supposed to work in an entire month during the school year, it might just be true.

And I'm only taking 13 units, which will be the lightest class schedule I've had since my first semester at Berkeley. I'm taking CS 188 and CS 170 for my major, Anthropology 160 (Folklore) because it sounds interesting, and CS 9E because I needed a one unit class for my scholarship. CS 9E is "Productive use of a unix environment," and considering that I'm only productive with unix at my fingertips, it ought to be an easy unit, at that.

Why do I need that magical 13th unit? For my scholarship. And considering that this is the first semester I'm getting anything more than a measly $500 stipend, I'm not about to risk it by trying to petition to take only 12 units. Speaking of my scholarship, the check came in the mail on Wednesday, and so I actually bought a few books yesterday.

I'm kind of looking forward to 170 and 188, to get new ideas about things I can do with all the information in the stew, and new ways to do it more efficiently. And I'm kind of looking forward to Anthro 160, because I've heard good things about it, and folklore interests me.

And yes, I'm very, very bitter that I can't into CS 160.

There was this project at work that I was working on for a very long time (something like a year), and on Thursday night, I declared it done enough and put it into production. That night, we were making jokes in the office that as the project got closer and closer to completion, my productivity went down and down.

And it was true. I was very burnt out on the project, and despite the three months I was working on another project from February to April I still hated the project. There are so many things I could say about that project, but I don't want to get into all the details (good and bad) right now. I will some day, though. Ah the advantages of working for a public institution with no such thing as an NDA.

What's interesting is that, in the three days I've worked since I "finished" the project (there's still a lot to do, but they're peripheral to the core system (Ah the beauty of in house systems)), I've been more productive than I've been since about mid-April when I was working myself to the bone to distract myself from everything else. Seriously.

Goes to show what difference the freshness of a project can make for my motivation to work on it. But that's why I actually like fixing bugs. There's the whole discovery that goes into figuring out what's wrong, and then the puzzle of fixing it, and then the relatively easy pay off. The work reward cycle is much faster.

On the other hand, massive projects that should have had two or three programmers working on it (for a lot of reasons besides man power (Can we say "Questionable design decisions for 300, alex?")) that I've been working on by myself for the last year have sucked my soul, and actually putting the damn thing into production was really anticlimactic.

It wasn't "Hey, I did it!" It was "sigh. Thank god that's over."