Castle Magus

The second video is a direct follow up to the first one, which I watched last week and thought I posted, but apparently not. It's probably better to watch them back-to-back, anyway.

I post this not (just) for the discussion of Lavender Town or even for the brief tangent into Stranger Things, as interesting as all of that was, but for this brief bit here. Hearing that, just those eight seconds or so, I was suddenly flooded with memories of the original Revelations: Persona on the original Playstation. It's not quite the same, but it was enough to bring it all back.

I wonder what Charles Cornell would make of something like Awakening Legend (i.e. the theme that played whenever someone's persona awakened for the first time). It's probably my favorite track in the whole series, and it was an almost literal crime that deserved capital punishment that they didn't have an updated version of it in the PSP remake.

As much as I liked the JPop stuff in the later games (Persona 3 and onward), I'll always have a soft spot for the first two games. (That said, the later games had some real bangers, too. [Still haven't touched Persona 5 at all, yet, thanks to it still to this day being infested with Denuvo on Steam, so can't really say anything about the music from that one.])

"This is wild."

---

Charles Cornell posts videos about Mozart, Elton John, and Radiohead?

I sleep.

Charles Cornell posts a video about the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles Nintendo game soundtrack?

Real shit.

I agree that the game's title theme kicks ass, even though, as a kid, I was upset that it wasn't, you know, the theme, even though it does have hints of it in there. (Also, hmm.)

And the underwater theme for the dam, as fucking crazy hard as that was the first dozens of times I attempted it (and it never wasn't nerve-wracking even after I got used to it), was always one of my favorites from the game. (No, the trauma doesn't set in until the "running out of time" themes start up. Those were my drowning themes as a kid. Though... in the case of TMNT, it was less drowning and more getting blown up by bombs. And this was the height of relief when you finally found that last bomb under the dam.)

I wish he'd gotten to the second overworld theme, from the part where you're hunting for the Technodrome, as that was probably my second favorite track from the game. (Also, hmm.)

I don't think I ever legit beat this game on the original NES, but playing it years later on an emulator, with saves states and such, it turned that I'd literally made it to the final hallway right before the room with Shredder in it, I just didn't know it.

The boss themes were pretty great, too. (And speaking of Shredder, it's just too bad that he didn't get his own boss music in this first game like he did in the second one, which was, of course, based on the arcade game.)

Hell, the whole damn soundtrack was pretty great.

Yeah, it's crazy what they could do with the NES sound chip back in ye olden days.

On the one hand, yeah, this shit sucks.

On the other hand, as mentioned in the article, auto-tune also sucks[1], and, not mentioned in the article, sampling also sucks (just to show that music "artists" were stealing from other, better music artists way before AI ever became a thing). I'm not saying that the prior existence of auto-tune or sampling excuses the use of AI (which is kind of like the worst of both auto-tune and sampling, in a way), because it doesn't. I'm just saying that AI isn't the origin of shitty musicians being "enhanced" by technology or shitty musicians stealing from their betters. In my opinion, AI music doesn't de facto suck just because it's made by an AI. However, AI music does suck (regardless of perceived quality of the music itself) because, like all modern AI shit such as writing or visual art, anything created with LLM/AI is only possible via unauthorized use of assets created by actual humans that was used to train it.

[1] - Except in the rare cases when it doesn't (the latter case being because Andy Samberg was supposed to sound like a weird space alien in that song).

Huh. So, it was only just a few minutes ago that I first learned that "Gangsta's Paradise" was not an original song. Funniest thing is that I saw it mentioned in a Reddit thread about Weird Al Yankovic.

(Kind of hoping this isn't another "Under Pressure"/"Ice Ice Baby" situation, where everyone and their mother's pet hamster's third cousin knew about this already, except for me. >_>;;)

Found via The Daily Cartoonist.

Now that I've finally managed to get my phone and the car console thing set up so that my phone properly connects to the car and I can play the music from my phone over the car speakers[1], I may never listen to regular radio again. Or, at the very least, for the next four years or so, considering it seems like all of talk radio (either of the NPR variety or the RWNJ variety [presumably, since I don't listen to RWNJ shit to start with, though I too often have to switch if away from that shit]) just wants to be all Trump all the time, these days. And if I'm going to be listening to music, regardless, I'd rather just listen to my own stuff than to whatever random shit that gets played these days.

[1] - The first stumbling block was just getting the phone to connect at all, which turned out to be because A) the Android Auto setting on the car console was turned off and B) the Android Auto app on my phone had long since auto-disabled itself since I never used it before now and it had to be re-enabled. The second stumbling block was that even after I got the phone to actually connect, it still wasn't letting me play any music, the solution for which was to uninstall the Samsung Music app that came preloaded on my phone and replace it with... the Samsung Music app... expect it had to be installed via Google Play instead of Galaxy Store. Go figure.

Still incredibly relevant, and for much the same reasons as it was in 2019.

(EDIT) I feel like I need to make a "perpetual Weltschmerz" playlist or some shit. I know this song and that David Bowie song would be on it, at the very least. (/EDIT)

(And if you don't want even that much of a spoiler... um... just don't click on that first embed, I guess?)


is the new


That is all.

(Damn, now I kind of want to play Majora's Mask again, too. It's been at least a couple decades since the one and only time I ever played through it...)

What very little I know about this whole "Kendrick vs Drake" thing has come almost entirely from CSB clips like the above, and from general (unwanted) Internet osmosis. Anyway, Kendrick at the Superb Owl is basically the "Rick Astley at the Macy's Parade" moment of this whole thing, at least for me. It's a completely dead meme now. Stick a fork in it; it's done.

I'll say this much, though. Despite how very little I ever cared about "Kendrick vs Drake," I care way more about "Kendrick vs Drake" than I do about the Superb Owl itself, or any other sportsball thing in general.