Say Anything / Arcade Games

I recently had a friend reprimand me for not keeping current on here as of late. So I have two entries, none of which could stand on their own, combined into one entry.



Say Anything

I didn't like this band. Not the movie. The band.

They are odd. But I finally got a bunch of it (all of it) off of my roommate. And... well... I'm taking my words back. They're good. So here's where I've been corrected:

The first thing that turned me off to this band was their lyrics. Their lyrics are bazaar. Max Bemis, their lead singer, is psychotic, quite literally. On the early albums, a nice mix of excessive pot use and undiagnosed bipolar disorder made his lyrics quite awkward. But the more I hear, the more I indulge in his collage of verbal awkwardness from track to track. It takes a lot of guts to sing about an ex-girlfriend by name, a drug breakdown in a tour bus, and the holocaust all in pop punk format in a single album. Yet this guy pulls it off. And he recently found Jesus I guess, so his latest album brings that edge to the religious talk of how poorly Jesus is treated in both pop culture and Christian sub culture.

Second. They use the studio as an instrument and do a lot of things on the album that could not be mimicked live, such as string sections, sampling, and guest vocalists out the wahzoo. Here's the thing though, they make it work. I know, that's a lame answer, but they really do. In this way, a live show is interesting, because they have 6 members, so there are enough of them to assign tasks to recreating that sound. Ya gotta love that. Once you get passed the bias of live instruments on every track, their albums are quite enjoyable.



Arcade Games

I was talking to some friends at breakfast. And we began talking about arcade games. You know, the ones in the movie theaters and big tents at the fair. That's when it hit me: I have a dream to own an arcade game.

Now if I became rich (not gonna happen), I would fist throw money left and right at charities to begin with. This is most likely so I don't seem like a hypocrite for calling out every celebrity who buys a yacht and wants a key to the city when they give a check to an orphanage and take some photos for People magazine. So once I had charity-ed my butt off, I would splurge on arcade games.

Some would go with the classics. Pac Man. Space Invaders. War Lords.

But I didn't grow up with those. I can think of three that would be great:

1) Time Crisis. This game was great. You get that little foot pedal to pop up from cover and you don't even have to walk around. You just point and fire. But you never had time to play through the whole thing when you were in an arcade, and that's why I would buy it.

2) Tekken 3. I never learned the combos. I would just press the punch over and over and over again. This managed to both make me lose and look like a total jerk. With some time alone with this masterpiece, I could master the arts.

3) Arctic Thunder. Snow mobiles. Missiles. I'm in.