Review; Bring Me The Horizon's Count Your Blessings

Count Your Blessings is a mean spirited album which is more intent on trying to emulate the style of The Black Dahlia Murder while slutshaming on 60% of the tracks. There are musical ideas in here that I think are worth exploring, I think the unashamed guitar solos and pick squeals and breakdowns are fun to listen to but lyrically, for, all but three songs, Count Your Blessings really is more about trying to sound like the most annoying teenager on Myspace, with such prize winning lyrics as "Fuck yourself you stupid fucking whore".

That said, the few good tracks on here are very enjoyable. Pray For Plagues, A Lot Like Vegas and Tell Slater Not To Wash His Dick hold up as some of the most enjoyable of the genre and the two instrumental pieces really do improve the pacing of the album, whereas songs  like (I Used To Make Out With Medusa) drag and are just Bring Me The Horizon at their absolute worst. The Hot Topic version of Slipknot's Eyeless you'll either love or hate, and I'm personally fond of the stylistic quirks of Bring Me The Horizon put onto, to be frank, a much better songwriter's track.

It's just a genuine shame that for 70% of it, you're going to be wishing you were listening to Suicide Season instead.

While they've grown a lot in the years, this is an album which while formative, doesn't hold up as well as you'd think. There's better deathcore and there's better Bring Me The Horizon albums out there so playlist the two or three songs you actually end up liking and dump the rest.

Read More

Review: Netflix's You

The first thing I thought at the end of the first episode of Netflix's You was, Oh no, I really like Joe.

And that's awful, but also the point.

Netflix's You is a psychological thriller that will make you forget that it isn't a 2009 Rom Com film right up until it has a big twist to hit you with. Everything is there, the meet-cute the quirky love interest, the whirlwind romance.

Except of course that Joe is human garbage and he deserves nothing less than to fail at every opportunity.

And that's kind of great. Joe is objectively the bad guy but you can't help but root for him. He deserves to fail, he deserves to get hurt, he deserves all the bad things that happen to him but you want him to succeed, you want him to get the girl and that is terrifying.

It's a unique type of horror, it's grounded in the likeability and charm that real-life stalkers often have. Joe seems like a charming, nice, safe guy on the surface. He reads, he's articulate, he's smart, and super cute. But he will also murder in your name.

Just when you think there's no territory for the show to explore, it often pulls out a surprisingly profound aspect of dating, things like falling out of love with a partner. This show about the worst relationship surprisingly has more insightful things to say about a healthy relationship than most shows about relatively healthy couples. It's meditative on the complexities of intertwining your life with another person, while also making you fear very deeply that the person you're with might be a stalker and murderer.

It's subversive, in a strange way. Sera Gamble and Greg Berlanti have done a wonderful job of bringing the central premise of the book to life, while using all the techniques that makes the medium of television so different.

It's not without its flaws though. The gimmick can lean a little too much on Joe's side and there's a fair bit of plot contrivance to tie together some of the story beats. And for as likeable as Joe is, Beck can kind of be the worst. The finale will either work for you or it won't and it does take eleven episodes for Beck to get a clue.

But despite some hiccups, Netflix's You is compelling, gripping, thrilling and terrifying.

Now if you'll excuse me, I need to go watch something with Penn Badgeley where I don't feel guilty about thirsting over him.

Read More

Crunchyroll Needs To Adapt Or It Will Die

Crunchyroll is a streaming subscription service and content host which brings anime and manga to desperate and lonely weebs like myself, although my weeb power level hasn't quite gone up in a long time.

If you live anywhere other than Japan and you like anime, I'd wager a guess that your main anime source is Crunchyroll (or like, Netflix's paltry selection), or pirating. Not trying to out anyone, but the only other option is expensive imports or bootlegs and I doubt anyone is really doing that.

Now I like Crunchyroll. I like the idea that for an affordable price you can stream seasons of anime and get it at a decent quality with decent subs, and the upload schedule is fair. However, Crunchyroll might have the worst user experience out of all the streaming services I use and honestly, that doesn't bode well. The more I use it, the more feature bare it seems. And that's led me to one conclusion;

Crunchyroll needs to adapt, or it will die.

Any software solution has two parts, the back end and the front end. Back end is the hardcore mechanical stuff, such as the netcode and videoplayback and generally Crunchyroll does alright with that. Crunchyroll works, but it's the front end, the bells and whistles, the user interface that really lets the service down.

For starters, there are web 1.0 sites that are more visually appealing than this eyesore of trying to pass itself off as a design. Websites nowadays look a lot more like applications than interactive word documents and that's just the start of the problems with Crunchyroll.

Here's what Crunchyroll could use:

1. Animated Thumbnails

2. Trailers

3. Original Content

4. A Cleaner Interface

5. Curated suggestions of content on the home page

6. Animations, please, for the love of god, add animations to this website

7. Larger fonts

8. Skip Intro Button

9. Autoplay (At least moving to the next episode of the thing you're watching after 5 seconds)

10. A Continue Watching Tab

11. Dark Mode, Jesus please.

That's just all off the back of my head from different, better video streaming services. I couldn't believe this stuff was missing when it's clearly not that difficult to implement.

But this article is a dime a fucking dozen, everyone has gripes with Crunchyroll for different reasons and I'm not the first asshole to suggest it. Maybe use some of that massive marketing budget that hasn't built up the audience you've wanted.

What I wanna say is that I like anime, I want it to get to more people, I want more people to have access to a good service to use it.

It cannot be that hard to implement that. It just cannot.

Read More

Making (Art) Is Hard Work

Hey, I'm Matt-Dave, and I have released exactly two videogames, written over 100 blog posts, wrote a novel, and recorded 4 demos with a band that broke up.

And those things were all bloody hard to do.

Any personal project is something that's very hard to get off the ground. You're usually solely responsible for it's completion and holding yourself to task is hard. Often, the reward is... Nothing. Perhaps a small audience, perhaps a couple pats on the back, but most of the time you're shouting into the void and hoping someone hears it.

It's hard to make a career and name for yourself off of passion projects, hell, this blog has been going for years now and I couldn't tell you if any actual humans read my blog or if it's just porn bots.

Why do we do the things we do, even if they're difficult, tedious, time consuming and sometimes not even that cathartic?

Well, I crave creative satisfaction. I consider myself something of an artist. I make music, I make games, I write, all that good stuff and I publish a lot of my work online. Sometimes it just doesn't get noticed.

That's okay though.

Making art for the sake of making art is where the true joy in life lies. I wish I could spend my life just doing that. Just writing, just penning blog posts, just making games, just making songs. It's some of the greatest pleasures I've had as a human being and I wish more people could experience those things.

But it takes its toll.

Sometimes you do wonder if it's all worth it, if screaming into the void means you're just yelling at yourself.

I don't know what to do about that.

I do know I'll continue. I'm trying my best to make something out of nothing here and I hope some day it will pay off. In some ways it already has, so we'll see if there's any further return on investment.

All I can say is, finish your passion projects. Don't let them linger.

We all have too many lingering regrets already.

Read More