Please excuse the mess while I work on putting this together.

Well, after taking an eternity and a half, my review of Virtue’s Last Reward should be published soon. The only left to do is to complete the skull from the first preview.

(And once that’s done, I’ll work on making the main blog more readable and getting the first episode of Five-to-Nine completed.)

Preview of the first feature for the re-branded blog.

(You won’t believe how difficult it is to make a skull in PowerPoint.)

And it’s not just because I accidentally ripped off Kill Screen’s logo. The entire content of this blog will hopefully be changing significantly in the future to focus on two types of content: audio interviews and written features with custom layouts.

1. Five-to-Nine will be a interview series generally focusing on people involved with things that have a sense of entrepreneurship and/or DIY spirit. I’m still working out the details, but if everything goes well, I’ll be conducting my first interview this Sunday, meaning that I should be releasing the actual recording a week from now.

2. The written features, on the other hand, will be an evolution of the sort of thing I did for my coverage of Fest Too, except reasonable enough in length to be worth reading (unlike the over 15000 words I had for all of my Fest Too coverage), or at least broken up enough to allow people to stop at certain places without feeling like they’ve missed anything. I’ve always been a stickler for detail, but at times that can lead to writing that is stupidly long, especially on the internet. That said, I don’t want to forego that, so instead of a single article being unnaturally splintered and compartmentalized, expect features to take the form of a short main article, followed by self-contained companion pieces that can be read on their own merits. This will allow me to make a much more articulate message, without demanding too much of the audience’s time. Plus, with each article being turned into multiple, smaller ones, you can return to a piece much more easily, since there are more start-and-stop points. That said, it’s going to demand more creativity and self-constraint to piece together multiple articles into a single whole, without taking this as free-license to ramble on as long as I want, just in bite-sized form. Oh, and every feature’s getting a custom layout, too.

Other than that, please excuse the mess while I work on the blog design, and I hope to have the first episode of Five-to-Nine out on next Thursday.

This interview is a follow-up to my coverage of Fest Too: What’s a DIY Fest?, which happened on June 15–16 at The Lab, supported by Convergence.

[Author’s Note: I originally intended to release a short version of this interview, as well as an audio recording to provide something more comprehensive. However, I accidentally recorded it at too low of a bit rate for anyone to be able to hear or understand it, forcing me to piece together the interview I wish I could have more content about what everyone involved with Fest Too was doing, but at the end of the day, the only way to cut an almost 8,000-word interview into a ~2,000-word one was to keep the focus on the event itself. However, if you want to read more of the highlights from the full interview, go to the long version and search for “001”, “002”, 003”, “004”, 005”, and “006”.

Also, I used ellipses to indicate content that I removed, as well as pauses. The latter is denoted by […].]

[Author’s Note: I originally intended to release a short version of this interview, as well as an audio recording to provide something more comprehensive. However, I accidentally recorded it at too low of a bit rate for anyone to be able to hear or understand it, forcing me to piece together what was said. The short version is here.

Also, in order to indicate pauses, I used standard ellipses to make the speech seem more natural. However, I also opted to remove parts from the interview in order to streamline the interview. These are denoted as […].]

Jeez, between taking the equivalent of four classes in six weeks over the summer, on top of two classes in six weeks at the start of summer, this attempt at writing more has really fallen apart. Well, assuming that school doesn’t distract me from this upcoming weekend, this’ll be the next thing I cover.*

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*On top of the Fest Too interview, the screen printing interview, the Field Notes review, an artist profile of Diarrhea Planet, and the review/analysis of Jiro Dreams of Sushi.

[EDIT: I probably should have mentioned this earlier, but I don’t expect people to read the entire article, and certainly not in one go. I wrote all of this to provide feedback to each individual band. However, if you want a reader’s digest version of the event, read the intro, the entry about the Magpie String Band, and the conclusion. If you want a highlight in terms of my writing, I thought the portion about the Pharmacists was pretty good, too.]

[AUTHOR’S NOTE: Fest Too: What’s a DIY Fest? was a creative festival that took course over June 15-16 in at the Lab, located in Alexadndria, VA. I don’t know how the first day was organized, but during the second one, each artist was scheduled, so that each band starting at a new hour would play at the Orange Room stage, a smaller performance area in the back of the building, while every band starting at the middle of the hour would play the larger, main stage in the front. During this time, the festival organized a number of workshops to help foster the DIY spirit, most of which were an hour long, starting at the same time as an Orange Room show. Sundials, the final act, played on the main stage, despite following Mary Christ, which also played in the same spot.] 

theairtightgarage:

Everyone!

Steve Bissette, who among his many accolades, published the brilliant anthology series Taboo(best known for first serializing Alan Moore and Eddie Campbell’s From Hell), is selling off copies of Taboo #4 on his site right now FOR ONLY FIVE DOLLARS. This is the issue that first published in English, in full, Moebius and Jodorowsky’s Eyes of the Cat. It also contains interviews with both of them, as well as an El Topo short by Spain Rodriguez. And dang, just check everything that’s in this thing:

“There’s a full-color cover by Moebius; Neil Gaiman and Michael Zulli‘s “Baby Cakes,” Elaine Lee and Charles Vess‘s “Morrigan Tales,” Mark Askwith and Rick Taylor‘s “Davey’s Dream,” Tim Lucas and Steven Blue‘s “Blue Angel,” and the special “yellow pages” section (a book in and of itself) featuring the first-ever English language publication of the rare Moebius masterpiece “Eyes of the Cat,” written by renowned author and film director Alejandro Jodorowsky (The Holy Mountain, Santa Sangre), accompanied by exclusive interviews with the creators, articles on the making of the story, and master cartoonist Spain’s never-before-reprinted underground comix adaptation of Jodorowsky’s midnight movie classic, El Topo.”

[it’s also got a chapter of From Hell tucked in the back]

The sale will be going till the end of the month, or until he sells out. I absolutely cherish my copy, and can’t recommend this enough to you. FIVE BUCKS, PEOPLE.

I don’t usually reblog posts, but this is really, really cool.

Oh boy, where do I begin with this? If you can’t be bothered to read this, just skip to the music below. Persona fan or not, I think a lot of people could enjoy this stuff.

ATLUS×P5 is a YouTube channel that showed up back in February that is home to a remix concept album based on an imaginary version of Persona 5, the next supposed entry in Atlus’ critically well-regarded Persona series. In other words, it’s a giant pain to describe in-depth to anyone who doesn’t already have some familiarity with the series. As far as this concept album goes, though, each aspect of it is  incredibly well thought-out. Whoever created this set of tracks went to a great amount of trouble to ensure that each track legitimately feels like a game soundtrack, so that even when artists like Pink Floyd are being sampled, each individual song is congruent to both the distinctive sounds of Shoji Meguro, the series’ main composer, and the set of themes that this nonexistent game supposedly has. This leads to a soundtrack that feels like it could very well be genuine, as there’s just enough imitation (and gratuitous Engrish) to feel like it’s an official work without going too far to break the illusion. In fact, it’s been very interesting to see how this entire channel has been developing, as each video teases at more and more details of the game, with more character artwork hinting at possible plot lines and the actual structure of the game, were it to exist. They even created a fake reincarnation remix album for some of the songs, similar to how both Persona 3 and Persona 4 have their own, resulting in remixes of remixes, all for something that doesn’t even exist. Knowing how crazy Japan’s doujin game scene is, I wouldn’t be surprised if an actual fan game eventually does get produced, especially if the ideas are as fleshed-out as they seem from the videos.

With all that said, here is a small handful of the songs from the channel: