Zeus

2 hours ago, Bear said:

I thought this was a really good season finale, and as for the complaints, I think they are understandable. I've enjoyed the season from start to finnish, but there is no denying the fact that this is a different Game of Thrones in in the 5 first season. The drama that made the series one of the best series ever are gone in exchange for standarized action-adventure with one fantasy cliche after another. But tbqh, I don't mind even though the quality has falled quite a bit.

 

I half want to blame George RR Martin for this, and I half want to blame D&D for this. We know Martin is a slow writer but D&D have known how the story was going to end for some time now and they could have polished up some rough parts of the scripts. I would have done it for free! I mind the plot and the story line less than how fast everything moves. Of course time passage is implied but what Game of Thrones did so well in the past seasons was to fill the time going from point A to point B with banter and witty dialog and exposition that brought the characters to life.

I don't think this season was disappointing. Far from it, even though I was able to predict everything that's gone down. If anyone read the books, devoured theories, and paid close attention to the show they could have done it too. I think predictability is a good thing this late in the show - trying to surprise me with late-game twists and turns ends up with the show losing sight of the end game because they're trying to hide it from the viewers too. Real talk, if the show wasn't predictable we'd have a problem because that means I can't envision how it's going to get to the end...and that's the problem Martin is facing writing the books now. He expanded the books so far even in book five that to contract the story, tie up all loose ends, and come to a satisfying conclusion he's going to need three books...sorta how like we unanimously feel like we could have used more this season or more seasons in general. Just some thoughts I had bouncing around in my head here I totes agree with you.

2 hours ago, Bear said:

This last episode however was back to old standards if you ask me. It was more than just your average fantasy-action.

That's because there was less maneuvering characters from place to place and more actually getting on with the fucking plot. Everything we have been waiting for all season happened in this episode and it unfolded so naturally because I feel these were most of the big points Martin told D&D to hit and so it feels more like him and less like them trying to fill gaps.

2 hours ago, Bear said:

 

Btw, I'm both surprised and impressed by the CGI this season. I think it's really well-done, and from the looks of it these dragons will actually look more than decent in 10 years, which is something I don't say often about CGI.

That's that lack of direwolf budget for ya.

10 minutes ago, Valicious said:

if you saw the term "second-hand" next to the name of a store, would you think their merchandise is of lower quality?

Yes. Bias is in full force for me and I'm too tired to try to explain why.

24 minutes ago, herpes said:

With all due respect to yoshiki can eat my ass

I will allow this

I love having internet friends but I dread the inevitable day when they pass. I dread the other inevitable day when I find out. There are a lot of people who I have only met through the Internet that have shaped my life and they could pass on and I may never know. I just might see their tag and an indication that they haven't logged on in a long time...

1 hour ago, rebelstrik said:

"Im in LA right now, recording #XJAPAN new album.. almost done.Xx 
https://www.instagram.com/p/BYGmJIbg84e/?hl=en&taken-by=yoshikiofficial
#KissTheSky #chopin #fantasyimpromptu"

 

https://m.facebook.com/story.php?story_fbid=1513019278737048&id=148183251887331

 

So you're in the studio recording for an album which was supposed to be done and shipped two months ago?

Schrodinger's album confirmed. It exists as long as none of us have it.

I've got nothing against MONO or Taka, but MONO has seen diminishing returns in albums since "Hymn..." because of the same progression in every song. Unfortunately, this sounds like more of the same. I'm hoping the rest of the album is experimental and plays with vocals, mood, and tempo together in a way that isn't a slow rise to the climax, or this album is going to end up like the last three MONO albums: pleasant background music.

3 hours ago, gen-shoku said:

  Hide contents

Sam did leave the Citadel, you think he's going to go back and reclaim his name? I know Jon kinda did that with Winterfell but he also technically died, I wonder if things will go as smoothly for Sam if he does. 

That's a reunion I'm looking forward to! I love the conversation Jon and Gendry had about their dads (well, Jon about his "dad"). 

Also I don't think Dany would respect his claim, they had that scene with Missandei about how she was following Dany because she was a queen she chose, not because she respected some claim of royalty from a foreigner, and I think Dany has also kinda taken this view. Like yeah she's a Targaryen and this was the claim she was raised believing was hers by birth, but I don't think that's the only thing motivating her at this point.

 

Stay on topic. If you have nothing to add to this discussion, don't post.

Here's another link.
 

It....actually doesn't sound that bad @CAT5, @Seimeisen

7 hours ago, Peace Heavy mk II said:

 that sucks! Hopefully he feels better soon. Is that a condition that gets better, or is it a chronic thing?

This is actually really serious. A third of the people who get a cerebral infarction die. I hope they caught it early.

I figured this place could use another discussion topic.

There's a real encyclopedia of information and music knowledge there and if the last.fm servers ever go dark that's a lot of information that could go missing, but the real draw for me is a near-permanent place on the internet to source album and artist pictures. I'm not even sure where I would go to get what I need for my reviews if last.fm were to go. I thought about returning but I am a man of my principles and I don't scrobble as heavy as I used to, so it wouldn't get much use.

Why do you guys still use last.fm? How do you guys still use last.fm? Is it still working for you?

I thought it was a joke and then I listened for myself. This is not the Ling Toshite Sigure I knew. I fear they've been apart too long and may have lost their edge, but I need to hear the whole single to be sure.

34 minutes ago, doombox said:

Zekuu gets into songs the band wrote when they were inter-fighting a lot/almost breaking up, revisiting those songs would be really interesting if they chose to do it. I think recapturing the mental state they had at that point would be near impossible, but I can't lie, I'd be far more interested in reworkings of those songs than the 2 albums they've chosen so far.

Interesting point! I chose the question I chose for the poll because it naturally leads to a thought like this. I agree that Zekuu was that era in time that MUCC was unstable and almost on the verge of disbandment, and they've taken a handful of tracks from this era and re-recorded them for the BEST OF/WORST OF compilations, but I don't think they'll rework Zekuu or KnT. I don't think they should. Albums are a combination of time, place, and mind set. It will be impossible to capture the original essence of the album and I don't think a re-recording will do it justice. I am interested in hearing all the songs of Zekuu reworked, which puts me in quite an awkward position. I just don't think they'll touch KnT because generally you don't mess with a good thing, and it sounds fine so it won't really benefit from a remaster.

This is the first single in a while where the A-side makes me interested. BURN isn't catching me but I kinda like the riff. Higame sounds like your typical boring visual kei ballad.

If it's in both there's no need for all that work now, since we know where it comes from! The sound chip or onboard DAC between the two systems may be the culprit. The one where you can hear it must be of a higher quality or something.

3 hours ago, The Bread Wolf said:

Ugh. Negative-Nelly here again but honestly, guys...

 

I know this thread has been on the forum for a good while now, and I didn't understand it when it was first posted and I don't understand it now. Do you guys seriously need a support group for not finding VK likeable anymore? Or what is this about? I'm about this full of people constantly whining about how "current VK bands aren't good" or "I've realised VK sucks" or "I've just moved on". (And by constantly I mean multiple times throughout years, not necessarily all the time every day. ) OK, that's great. Good for you. But do you need to be telling everyone else about it? Why do you feel the need to come amongst people, who most likely are still into that stuff, in some way or another, and just tell them that you're not that into it? Do you think anyone cares? 

 

Damn this forum sometimes. Makes me wish there was a therapy moderator who'd just listen to people's whining so they wouldn't have to come on the forum to do that. 

I can think of a few good reasons why.
 

1. There isn't anywhere else. There wasn't ever anywhere else really. During the VK heyday, most of our "competition" were blog spots. Finding downloads is easy. MH is one of the few bastions of hardcore music discussion left on the Internet dedicated to visual kei.
2. It's not endemic, but it's not uncommon either. There's something about visual kei that comes and goes in waves and perhaps by sharing our experiences we can all come to a common understanding on what visual kei really means to us. The more I think about it, I don't "fall" out of other scenes or genres the way I do visual kei. I could go three to four months only listening to visual kei, and then spend another three to four months not listening to it at all. It's got a really addicting quality to it! Some people remain steadfast, others worship the false god K-Pop, and then the rest of us are somewhere in the middle, one foot still tied to this place. Or at least I am.
3. For me at least, it's really interesting to see why people are leaving visual kei. The first reason given is usually a general one that hides the real one. A pattern I have noticed and never seen mentioned is that all it takes is one band's untimely disbandment for the wind to leave someone's sails. Mine was D'espa.

For what it's worth, I haven't noticed too much complaining in this thread. But I have noticed that a lot of members have refined tastes in visual kei, and know what they like, and will tune in when something catches their interest. There's just so much going on in the scene these days, if one is not knee-deep in it and doesn't have a gateway band to ease returning into the scene, it can feel like the scene has nothing to offer them anymore.

6 hours ago, Saishu said:

I'd rather rerecorded than remastered. Rerecorded at least provides a fresh take on old material (usually, there are examples of rerecordings being mostly redundant, like Gazette's Traces Vol. 2). Remasters are tricky too, though, because more often than not a remaster these days is just someone raising the levels on the original recording, and making something louder does not equal remaster to me. Unfortunately, the remaster of Homura Uta falls prey to this, so I'm perfectly fine with my original copy. The rerecording is fine, but I think the only song that benefitted from it is Zutazuta.

This is a very interesting point you make! One element to remasters which makes them tricky are the compromises baked into the original recording. For better or worse, it colors the listener's perception of an album. First impressions are very strong. Muddiness can become atmosphere and mistakes musical quirks. In a rush to polish old works musicians may not stop to think about how their interpretation might be different from mine or yours. There has to be enough of an improvement to warrant making a remaster in the first place, but no matter how much one tries to maintain accuracy the parts that change affect even the parts that don't. I can't think of many examples where a simple remaster fixed all the issues I had with an album. It's simply not doing enough in the dimensions it restricts itself in, and many times one bad change in a remaster negates all the good ones.

It's for that reason alone that my review ignores the second CD. It can be argued my rating is a little high, but since I viewed the second CD as a bonus it didn't impact the first CD for me. I can choose which one I want to listen to and having the option is nice. The remaster is more accurate to the original version of the album, but it feels sterile. The new version doesn't capture the rawness of the original, but it captures the essence of the album far better (which is what I suspect they are going for). This contrast shows just how much of an art production and mastering is. I suppose it's one of those things where no one should notice you did a thing at all if you do a really good job.

Three songs from their self-titled...am I noticing a trend?
 

REDEEMER and MONSTERS would have been better if you turned each into a mini album and then combined them together. Some people's opinions have become more positive of the last two albums but my headcanon has D'espairsRay firmly disbanding at 2007. Even in my post about bands I missed, I made it very explicit that I don't care about anything post-MIRRORS like at all. There are some cuts on REDEEMER I like, but the entire album reeks of lack of anti-depressants fueling the music much like MUCC's sterile Houyoku sounds like the audio equivalent of disinfectant wipes. Pop never suited D'espairsRay and while people are allowed to grow and address their problems it should not be at the expense of their music. The B-sides for REDEEMER hinted that they know how to write metal (Cocoon, Bullet, Scissors) but the album was missing the juice. And then I'm not going to mention how much they hyped up "electronic effects" that were supposed to be a new feature of MONSTERS and then only the first track had it and the rest of the album was considerably less electronic than [coll:set]; which by the way [coll:set] is a fucking classic and if you can't into it i am genuinely sad for you.

While reading the series I had a recurring thought I could not shake. Watching the television show this last season, that fear is confirmed. I call it escalation tactics but there's probably a more apt literary term than this. Basically, a story can be divided into exposition, rising action, climax, falling action, resolution. Simple stuff, really. The trap I feel this show is falling into is that the stakes are ever higher and occasionally boils over into some action, but the climax is still nowhere in sight. To put it in perspective, we've been waiting for The Battle for quite some time, and even though Jon is telling everyone that Winter Actually Is Coming  This Time Guys For Real we know that it's not going to happen until next season. While this season should be about resolving all the issues in King's Landing and resolving leftover threads in Westeros and Essos, three episodes in I feel like they're still setting the stage. There has been six seasons to set the stage already, and three hours of posturing from everyone involved. The next two episodes absolutely need to be explosive because the climax for Cersei's arc needs to come and go.

On 8/3/2017 at 0:34 AM, totoromi said:

vk won't grieve grieva at all

Tracklist:

 CD 1: Shin Tsuzetsu

1. —-.
2. Momoku de Aruga Yue no Sogaikan (盲目であるが故の疎外感)
3. Samidare (五月雨)
4. Hai (廃)
5. Itai Tegami (イタイ手紙)
6. Chintsuuzai (鎮痛剤)
7. Yoru (夜)
8. Suna no Shiro (砂の城)
9. Haitoku no Hito (背徳の人)
10. Shofu (娼婦)
11. Danzetsu (断絶)
12. Ieji -2017 Hisyou- (家路 -2017 飛翔-)
13. Kurutta Kajitsu w -2017 Haru- (狂った果実 w ～2017 春～)
14. Kare ga Shinda hi (友達(カレ)が死んだ日)

CD 2: Tsuzetsu 1st

1. —-.
2. Itai Tegami (イタイ手紙)
3. Shofu (娼婦)
4. Chintsuuzai (鎮痛剤)
5. Hai (廃)
6. Suna no Shiro (砂の城)
7. Yoru (夜)
8. Haitoku no Hito (背徳の人)
9. Momoku de Aruga Yue no Sogaikan (盲目であるが故の疎外感)
10. Danzetsu (断絶)

| Aged like fine wine.

Ever the black sheep of MUCC's discography, color me shocked when it was announced that 痛絶 (Tsuuzetsu) would be among the first two albums MUCC would re-record in full fifteen years later. This release, entitled 新痛絶 (Shin-Tsuuzetsu), includes two discs: the first disc including re-recordings of the entire album, the second disc including the out-of-print original first press of the album (and 友達が死んだ日 (Kare ga Shinda Hi), an extra track that didn't make it). The original 痛絶 (Tsuuzetsu) is not the coveted starter album for new fans: that honor belongs to their second album, 葬ラ謳 (Homura Uta). It's not an album anyone talks about with rose-tinted glasses, between huffs of nostalgia, it's not even an album people bring up when discussing their favorites! I chalk it up to the style. This style of angura-kei wasn't all the rage back in 2001 and its popularity has only been sinking since. In this age of bands courting old and new fans with new versions of old material, 新痛絶 comes across as the most honest and straightforward application of this tactic thus far. Fifteen years later, this album may finally make the impact that it originally should have. Plus, the new jacket for 新痛絶 (Shin-Tsuuzetsu) is dope. The one for 新葬ラ謳 (Shin Homura Uta) looks like Robot Chicken claymation, but I'll leave that alone.

The success of this entire venture rests on this conservative approach. MUCC takes the adage "if it's not broke, don't fix it" to heart. They demonstrated this in 2006, they tackled "娼婦" (Shoufu) and "五月雨" (Samidare) for pre-極彩 (Gokusai) singles, and "断絶" (Danzetsu) in 2007 for the WORST OF MUCC compilation; they didn't sound out of place then and they don't sound out of place among the other seven tracks now. For all the changes they could have made, most of them are not alterations to the songs or their structure.  This is more important than I had initially realized. The international scene has felt burned by sub-par re-recordings in the past and this hesitation carries over to MUCC despite their good track record. One thing I desperately hate is for a re-recording to share little similarities with its original - for all of that tweak it some more and sell a new song! I want to have an air of familiarity around what I receive, and in this regard, 新痛絶  exceeds in spades. It's the same album, but it feels new without changing much (or anything) at all. A part of me wonders if this was planned long ago and they finally got some time to do it.

The quality difference is night and day. This can prove to be a problem for the handful of 痛絶-era fans used to hearing the album a certain way, and the second disc would be for that crowd. There's even a third disk live performances to sweeten the deal, but only for those who bought the pre-release edition. I find myself in the group that likes both versions, but prefers the clarity of the new version. There's no doubt in my mind that the budget-conscious choices of the original pressing has become a part of the atmosphere and experience, but hearing these songs with new details and increased clarity is more important to me. It's not going to cause a resurgence of angura-kei bands no matter how for it I am, but it does provide a window into what turn of the century visual-kei would sound like with modern recording techniques and that's worth the price of admission alone. I can confidently can state that I gain more than I lose in this exchange, and I would have no problem recommending the new version of the album to anyone interested.

Support the band and pre-order your copy today!

AmazonJP | CDJapan

✣新痛絶 (Shin-Tsuuzetsu) is not yet available for general purchase ✣

26 minutes ago, rekzer said:

I bought ARMS and it has been the worst 60 bucks I've spent. I hate it so much. It's boring and barely has any content. Playing solo the CPU will rape you if it's on a high level and online it's just a game of dodge and grab.

 

So what you are saying is that ARMS has no legs? Lul.

ARMS is what happens when a video game can't decide if it wants to be for the casuals or for a smaller, competitive circle. Attempting to appease both leaves a game for no one, because it pushes the developer to leave good ideas on the table if it won't go over well with one demographic. Also in every case like this, when it's down to casuals versus competitive players, companies go for the casuals because they're more likely to drop money on the game even if past ventures show they probably don't. OW is suffering this problem too - there are so many things I want them to do but as long as they continue to treat the game like "baby's first FPS" and remove any kind of depth to a character because it would be too difficult to learn it's not going to get better. But OW is massively popular and ARMS is not so I don't think they can afford to emulate Blizzard without the goodwill to fall back on a tried and true formula if it doesn't work out.

6 minutes ago, rekzer said:

Anyone here playing Splatoon?

I have Splatoon 2 and by that I mean I put fifteen minutes into it and went back to Breath of the Wild. I  may go back to it at a later date because it is a really fun game but only so many games can hold my attention at once and Overwatch is still queen of FPS for my fingers.

I am happy I bought my Switch but I'm not going to lie, there are some things that piss me off royally with it.

Virtual Console is Sad

I can't believe this is still a thing. I know Nintendo is bad with all things online, but this is just inexcusable. Imagine if Microsoft released the Xbox One on the same Xbox Live network as the 360 but locked the new consoles out of the old store. They're literally pissing money away here and this would be the first thing that should have worked on the console.

Online is a Mess

Splatoon 2 online is dreadful. Why do I have to download a whole separate app to talk to my friends on the console?

Limited amount of games to play

The situation improves by the day but to be honest there's like three games I would like to own for the Switch and I have two. The third I can buy through the shop (le gasp). Oops. The system would excel with non-traditional offerings such as retro titles and card games due to its portable nature and yet no one has caught on. There's a ton of potential here.

For those on the fence, give it a few months and a potential hardware revision and the Switch + PC is the best gaming combination of this generation. Hands down. But the things that the Switch needs to improve on are so obvious IDK why  Nintendo is sitting on their hands waiting for magic to happen. It's not going to happen unless they make it happen.