Hot Heart

This is actually a great album; less eclectic but tighter than the previous one. I like how they've matured with the newer line-up but without losing that pop sensibility. Lots of nice guitar lines and the production is top-notch. While Hayley Williams has always had a great voice, this song in particular is a brilliant vocal performance. How it goes from sort of sweet to frustrated as it goes through the verses is nicely done. Also, the coolest non-rhyming chorus since Jimmy Eat World's "The Middle".

I would say highly likely.

Currently playing Rise of the Tomb Raider. I loved the first one and this has been a good continuation so far. The writing's a bit hacky in places but the story seems decent enough. Lara's VO has this weird habit of pronouncing Constantinople with a B instead of a P and it bugs me the same way she messed up "pestle" in the first game. She's good enough at the acting for everything else, just undermines it all a little there.

They were both a decent price on Amazon. NOT TO SCALE

I finished Hap & Leonard S2. I was a bit dubious about it at first but it quickly picked up. It's not as crazy as the first season but they actually have a more active role and I like the private detective style approach. Some aspects of it felt a bit weird in how the ending seemed to place a lot of importance and significance on elements that felt a little rushed over, like I'd missed an episode or something, but otherwise it had a great mix of drama and humour. In other news, awwww yeah. Yay, more Nick Frost. Also, it's weird seeing Tommen Baratheon as a badass.

I actually kinda dig the approach

From the band that did My Own Worst Enemy. wtf is this.

Battle for Rokugan Played this with the full 5 players, all new to the game, last night. It was great fun. So much that they're desperate for a re-match this week. Very simple area control where you take turns placing down combat tokens with armies, navies, shinobi or other stuff like raids, diplomacy and bluffs. Since this is all done face-down and revealed at the end of each round, it creates so much tension as you're not sure what tokens your opponents had available and how much they've committed (if even at all). There are elements of tactical manoeuvring as most attacks can only come from adjacent provinces, and only one token per border, but you can make illegal placements just to trick people as well. There were so many funny and shocking moments like when three of us all looked to be invading a poor player's province from all sides... only for it to be revealed that all three tokens were bluffs. Or when one player burned down my 6-point capital when I thought he was trying to capture it. Or when I got him back with a shinobi ploy (can be placed anywhere, enjoying adjacency) to accompany a raid and torch his 5-point region. Or when the Unicorn Clan switched a couple of tokens at the end of a round, as is their clan power, which torched a region and invalidated all the attacks coming from it. Or, since I had an objective to get loads of points for controlling the fewest provinces at the end, I was trying some masterful manipulation to make that true... which failed spectacularly as the Lion Clan was left with 1 province to my 5. It's so vicious but so hilarious.

Got this thanks to an eBay alert I'd set up and a last second bid. Literally, so on the cut-off that the app got confused telling me "Sorry, you missed out" and then "YOU'VE WON PAY NOW" This is the Kickstarter edition along with extra promos for only £10 more than the cheapest price for the standard edition anywhere else (and the previous owner has the cards all sleeved, too). Noice. Sounds like a pretty neat game that should work with higher player counts because you can do simultaneous turns (not tactically ideal but if it holds everyone's attention better...). Gorgeous artwork and a cool theme of creating and evolving species to take up different traits to survive, whether that's becoming an almighty carnivore or a herbivore who has horns and alarm calls for better defence, etc.

You just reminded me... goddamn, does this song sound like Led Zeppelin. Jack White must be kicking himself that he never captured this sound.

Decided to finish up Horizon Zero Dawn after doing every single sidequest. It really nails that action-RPG thing (with the emphasis more on action, obviously). Great story and characters. Brilliant game. Now to play the Frozen Wilds DLC and watch that documentary then, I guess, wait for HZD2.

Saw this for a decent price and jumped. Partly, because it shares some design elements with a game I'm working on; even though my version of the similar game mechanic was thought up independently and is a little deeper (this has a simple "combo" system with directional arrows and A+B buttons played on card symbols during combat = damage). Not sure how often I'll get to play it, though, since a) it's 4-player max and b) I can tell it will take a long time to play, even if it looks p fun and interesting. Oh, and the first edition has twenty-three cards with printing errors. At least you can contact the publisher who are already manufacturing and sending out replacements.

At some point, I think every English pop musician experiments with "eastern" musical elements. I kinda dig this though.

Just a small update because I've not really played anything new. The only new thing is Concept. I remember a lot of buzz about it a few years back and it sits in that "clever party game" style mould, but just never had a chance to try it and never sought it out. (Not my image because you're actually really busy during gameplay since it's got a "who guesses it first" scoring thing) Essentially, it's charades but with picture aids instead. Each round, two neighbouring players will become the clue-giving team who draw a card and then select one of the 9 options, ranked in groups of 3 across "Easy, Hard, Challenging". These cover a wide range of categories and I could see how difficult it would be trying to get across certain phrases and expressions that are marked as "Challenging" (we struggled with "got up on the wrong side of the bed"). The clue-givers then use the green ? to signify the main concept (aha!) whether it's an object, person, country, saying, etc. and then use the other !s and coloured cubes to tie together other elements that might clue in the other players guessing what you're trying to convey. There is obviously difficulty since certain icons cover a few possibilities (e.g. the skull = death, evil and... something else) making what should be straight-forward clues a little ambiguous. It's a lot of fun though since you get to be creative as a clue-giver or feel proud at nailing a concept so quickly or just have fun watching the clue-givers react (in exasperation) and readjust as you guess (they are allowed to give verbal acknowledgement if you're on the right track). For example, in one team we chose Luc Besson and so went for the obvious Man, Real/Historical connected to film. Then we both started trying to "describe" his films. I matched coloured cubes across the water, fire, wind, earth and heart symbols while my partner was trying to do Leon with death and weapons and a plant and a young girl. It took them a while so I started trying to add Leeloo by linking woman, head and orange but that wasn't helping. Of course, later on when I was helping to describe a baguette I realised I could've added in the Country/Flag icon and used the "tri-colors" but then again that may have also been American (I couldn't tell them I would add in a star if so at the time). Anyway, highly recommended as I think many people would enjoy it.

All the Witcher books are 99p on Kindle right now, so I grabbed the rest of the series and will probably read them next. I've been flitting between a couple of non-fiction books and Empire's Daughter but I'll probably put that down since it's actually kinda slow and boring even over halfway through.

This popped into my head the other day for some reason. Haven't listened to this album in ages (and YouTube has blocked most songs in the UK).

It was the original, clocking in around 140 minutes. Maybe the cut scenes would've helped frame things a little better. I was expecting longer considering The Godfather and thinking of other "epic" war films like David Lean used to make, or it was reminiscent (well, other way round) of something like Munich.

Apocalypse Now I know what you're thinking: how could I rate one of the greatest war films of all time as okay?! Well, I did, so there. It's one of those GOAT films that you "know" through popular culture but I'd never actually sat down to watch it before. It was shorter than I expected but it's still too long. I guess it's being too familiar with it that spoils the experience, and it was obviously far more impactful during its time. The performances are good and it's a harrowing watch (how anyone could even bother to ask whether or not it's anti-war is strange to me) but it never feels as deep as I was hoping after the brilliant narration and setup early on. I think in the same way I couldn't get into The Conversation, I'm just not a huge fan of Coppola overall.

Was trying to hold off buying any more games for as long as I could but this had been beckoning to me for months. Plus, I've started to sell off games I probably won't touch again. I don't know much about the Legend of the Five Rings universe (other than it using made up names that translate into silliness) and have no interest in the CCG/LCG (I forget which) but this game sounds ace; accusations of cultural appropriation aside. It sounds like the big old Game of Thrones board game stripped down to its perfect, quicker-playing ideal, focusing solely on area control. It sounds very basic, in that you take turns putting out tokens to invade or defend areas but there are all sorts of wrinkles in the way of asymmetrical powers, unique clan tokens, special abilities if you control certain regions, shinobi attacks from anywhere, raiding to make areas worthless, bluffs, etc. And it looks purdy.

Plus, you know, Cap's shield produces sound when struck/striking things. Ah, that takes me back to the first Captain America film...

On a less serious note.

I finished Altered Carbon. Overall, it was great. It's just the action finale bit that felt a bit cliche with the "gunpoint hostage situation back-and-forth" stuff you've seen a billion times. Otherwise, the actual denouement is really nice and fitting of the noir genre.