Monday, April 25, 2011

The Magic Bluesfest Pipe Player

That 1 Guy was one of the odder Bluesfest finds. He plays a Magic Pipe, which loops and electronica and drums and is pretty much totally awesome and bizarrely compelling (and ladies, sometimes watching his hands can really make you blush).

You can watch the official music video if you want, but I recommend watching the live footage to get a sense of the ridiculousness that are his concerts. Also, his stuff makes hilariously awesome dance party music:

Friday, April 22, 2011

Every part in its place

I have a deep fondness for puzzle games and finding out how things interact, and the game Grow (both the original and the games that followed) does this better than any other game I've found. The goal is to find the optimum order to activate the different elements, but since everything affects everything else, this is WAY more enjoyable and challenging than you might think (after all, if you don't get the lake big enough before the sun shows up, you end up with something of a desert). I wait with perpetually bated breath for the next instalment.

Monday, April 18, 2011

Bluesfest is good for the soul

Michael Franti and Spearhead (fondly referred to by me and mine as Franky and the Orchestra [I am notoriously bad at names]) is probably the best concert I have been to in Ottawa and from Bluesfest 2009.
Political, angry, uplifting, and so very danceable, at one point he had us sing a chorus, and just left us for five minutes while we sang our little hearts out. The whole crowd was into it, and it was glorious.

Friday, April 15, 2011

Grrr! Arrr!

I have a huge fondness for zombies. Zombie Walks (I swear I will go this year), Zombie movies (Fido), Zombie spoofs (Shaun of the Dead), and Zombie video games (Hunter the Reckoning anyone?) are all equally adored. I even have truly epic Opinions about Pride and Prejudice and Zombies (also, the movie is coming up! I look forward to having Opinions about that too).

So it should surprise no one that I have spent far too many hours over the past couple of days playing
Rebuild.

In this tiny flash game, you carefully direct your survivors so that you can reclaim a city and not be devoured by the ravening hoards outside your walls. Pure bliss. But like Mardek, don't click on it if you have something else you were planning on doing today. You've been warned.

Upcoming marathons: Walking Dead (I will almost be in time for season two)
Upcoming shows: TyLean and thOrN at the Avantgarde Bar
Upcoming craft shows: Originals at Landsdown

Monday, April 11, 2011

Bluesfest: Guilty Pleasures

For bubblegum pop, LIGHTS was perfect for the hot sunny day at Bluesfest and she was totally adorable with her ridiculous keytar and her cosmic love for us all. I don't care that she looks like she is 14.

Saturday, April 9, 2011

Level Up!

If you too love a well balanced fight to kill dragons, arrange your inventory, and increase your skills, let me strongly recommend the RPG game Mardek, which is not only funny and irreverent on all those classic RPG tropes, but can also be played online for FREE!


And the best part is that there are three VERY substantial chapters so far. But, I'm going to let you in on a secret. Although you can find this game on a number of websites, I encourage you to start on Kongregate. This is because it is the only website with Chapter 3 and you don't want to have to play through the whole thing AGAIN just so you can bring your favourite sword *embarrassed cough*

To any of you who had other things they needed to get done... I'm sorry.

Poetry update: Walt Whitman was lovely, as always, and I may have become somewhat emotional while reading "Out of the Cradle Endlessly Rocking"

That is the whistle of the wind—it is not my voice;
That is the fluttering, the fluttering of the spray;
Those are the shadows of leaves.
But I am very excited for Emily Dickinson next.

Monday, April 4, 2011

Sunset at the Bluesfest

One of the things I really enjoy about Bluefest is that one of the stages has a glorious view of the river while the sun sets.

Renaissance played right when the full colours of the sunset hit the water. Moody, with a rich operatic voice, it was perfect for the time and place.

(My friend and I then got to have a very pleasant conversation about ProgRock and how it could have gone a different direction than the Progrock band we'd seen the year before [and whose name I prompty forgot, because I didn't care how seminal they were, I did Not. Like. Them], but that is perhaps beside the point.