Of living amongst ladybugs and Rockband - 03 Dec 2007 - 1 view

Current mood:rockin
Lady Bugs
My apartment is infested with ladybugs – dozens and dozens of them. In my bathroom one lives above my mirror and greets me as I brush my teeth in the morning and at night. I do not consider them a nuisance. Not until, anyway, they start to become hundreds and hundreds. I think my plants – specifically my carnivorous plants – are luring them. Aphids are also being called by my plants. There was a nice colony of them growing on the stalk of a jade plant I have been growing from a seedling, and atop other plants, but I hand picked them all off and then in the following few days 'euthanised' the stragglers. Now they are all gone and my plants are happy again.
Rockband
... is easily one of the greatest videogames ever made. It is far better than Guitar Hero ever was – the song list is better, the play mechanic is better, the sound is better, the graphics are better, the controllers are better… My particular 'beef' with Guitar Hero is that the song selection in the new game is atrocious. It's all Heavy Metal and Alt Rock – neither of which I'm particularly fond of. There's no diversity in it. The play-list in Rockband is so much more diverse. In an ideal world I would be able to play nothing but psychedelic classic rock and prog rock (if only I could play Paranoid Android over and over!), but I understand the need for pop show stealers to make it more assessable (Hole's Make Me Over albeit a heinous piece of music is particularly fun to play).
Bands I would like to see in the next iteration are Dave Matthews Band, Pink Floyd, Led Zeppelin (which will never happen – I head Robert Plant say LZ does not licence songs), Radiohead songs that don't suck (look I understand Pyramid Song, Idiotheque, etc. probably wouldn't work in the games format – but good artistic Radiohead songs like Knives Out, everything off OK Computer, Where I End and You Begin, 2 + 2 = 5, and a lot more could easily fit)… lets see… and Elephant Minor, Fugazi, Phish, The Beatles, Sonic Youth, Portishead, Steve Miller Band… I'm sure I could go on and on. Oh and I would like to see them branch out into non Rock genres like R&B and Funk.
So far I have mainly only used the guitar, but I have played the drums and used the microphone too. The microphone is brilliant and easily could be used by itself for karaoke purposes (coincidentally I am thinking about getting SingStar). I only have few problems with the game: the 'pause' button too close to the strum button and so I accidentally press it too often and the strum button is a little too tight. I also wish you could divide the guitar parts up into Lead and Rhythm so that in multiplayer you could have more people play, and that it was easier to sing and play guitar at the same time. Overall though it is still a solid A+ game and I highly recommend it to anyone who enjoys the 'musical' experience – but may not have the time or talent.
PS
I just finished The Agricola and The Germania by Tacitus (I'll write more about this later), am about a third of the way through Lolita by Nabokov and am about 50 pages deep into The Letters of JRR Tolkien. All of them are particularly interesting and I reccommend all of them.
Cheers