Stupid LoLSpeak #6: Zeal Stacking Edition

Actually, to be honest, the degree to which League of Legends players say incredibly stupid things has decreased a bit over the last few months. I’m guessing Tribunal is working. This, of course, is corroborated by the overflowing amount of threads in which people claim they were unjustly banned, while admitting in their threads that they rage and quit frequently. People don’t learn, but they sure do get punished. I can’t really judge the macro trends of the game’s population, so I’ll leave that to Riot. Commentary in italics.

126. “he always said this word, Suck my dick and fuck It’s really angry to my mind -”
As you can see, words are getting longer. Pretty soon, people will use the entire bibliography of Shakespeare as an adjective meaning “ornate”.
127. “suck ez so bad go hell”

128. “FUCKING I RAPE MY LANE NOW I LOSE TOWER CUZ OF U BAD”

129. “ill report you for not knowing how to spell virigin tard”
Ah, sweet ironies. then agian, i Am totaly a fukin swett literacy guy
130. “fiz only kill me cuz u are higher lvl of noob”
Actually, I’ve occasionally died because I expected a player to not make mistake X, and then their doing it throws me off.
131. “k noob u hate u fuck range”

132. “he foul languaje sid homosexual”
Let me guess: this guy hates the Commodore Amiga even more.
133. “doesnt stop telling everybody is noob and shit … most annoying one i never see”
You know, I could try to misinterpret this literally for comedic effect, but my brain’d explode.
134. “ks that duh support should never she dumb as fuck”

135. “FIGLe WTF!!1 FUCK!! WHY WQHY!!”!”! “
How about you try to come up with a witty comment for this one? It’s pretty hard.
136. “team my is nb”

137. “he has done lots of innaporpiiate word”
Who is this guy? I want to ask him what it’s like to fuck the word “fuck”. Does “ass” have a nice ass? And so forth.
138. “omg i report u for unskilled i dont want u playing at my level”
I did some research, and I found that correlation does not imply causation. For those of you who don’t know, if a player recieves a significant amount of “Unskilled player” reports, their ELO is adjusted downwards.
139. “WOW!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!1 y does it freaking lag wenevr im fiting?!!!?!?!?!?!??!”
Your clothes aren’t making you lag, but your shirt’s collar might be cutting off the circulation to your brain. It’s been known to happen.
140. “oh im sorry but GET SOME SKILLS U BALL SUKING BLOND ASS HOLES!”

141. “CHOGATH CALLED ME RUSSIAN NAZI SCHWEINEHUND; BUT NAZI WAS IN FRANCE; NOT RUSSIA OMGGG.”
I trust this player. He’s in 5th grade. He’s a paragon of virtue and knowledge.
142. “INTENTIONALLY NEEDS TO UNINSTALL WORST LABLANC EVER!”
I’ve never played Final Fantasy X-2, but it’s supposed to be pretty controversial, right?
143. “so many noobs trynd jungle and fail”
Because you can’t spell “Tryndamere” without “Try”.
144. “your so fucking awful stop fucking in my chat”
Why is your chatroom a brothel?
145. “called me a derogitory name.”

146. “shaco i suck u don’t know how or play but at least im not suck u”

147. “u helped ur team win i reprot u for Assisting Enemy Team”

148. “and kat says i die so much cause shes a noob”

149. “COME ON GUYS DONT SEE THAT SHIT fuck team”
You could just give them the URL for Net Nanny or some other children’s web censorship software.
150. “suck my dick emo useless lama shit”
Hey, man. Be nice to the Dalai Lama. He’d be nice to you!

Maybe I’m just more selective. These are arguably stupider than the ones in the first installment or two. I still don’t know who “Junlie” is, although I have a few theories.

Note: WordPress really needs to stop ‘rescuing’ things I delete from my posts.

 

Dissection – The Somberlain (1993)

So here’s the way I see it – this album manages to be interesting, creative, well written for 3 songs – “Black Horizons”, “The Somberlain”, and “A Land Forlorn”. Then it isn’t; why is this? It would be amiss of me not to mention that those three songs are at the beginning of the album, and are the longest on the album, taking up half its length.  Having listened to the second half of the album with much greater scrutiny than I’ve given it in a longer time, I find that it relies on the same songwriting and playing techniques as the first half. It appears to be greater ambition that makes this first half worth my time, and the second one not so much.

This is not, in my opinion, a release with particularly special riffing, or particularly coherent songwriting. Many of these songs feel like a bunch of tangentially related sections stapled to one another. The transitions would be abrupt and jarring if the riffs were significantly different from one another, which they often aren’t. One of the key features of extreme metal is that many songs contain a large amount of seemingly unrelated riffs. When they succeed, it’s because of two things:

1. The transitions between the riffs smooth out the differences.
2. Said riffs are arranged in an order that strengthens their impact.

I know I’m getting into vaguely defined territory here, but albums with particularly good composition (like Altars of Madness and In the Nightside Eclipse) tend to create specific effects in the listener. Let’s take “Suffocation”, off Altars of Madness, which aspires towards chaos. The first three major riffs (verse, chorus, after-chorus) form a circle of sorts which ‘encase’ the listener. They’re played at a breakneck pace and transition effectively into the mid-paced bridge of the song, which importantly serves as counterpoint to the main riffs, creating a sense of dynamics without having to resort to something like acoustics or a doomy section.

Altars of Madness is full of those little moments; it’s simple stuff, like the use of fundamentally different riff structures to demarcate sections of a song (Maze of Torment is the opposite, with complex verse and chorus riffs, and a simple bridge), and the use of harmony as emphasis, but that’s what makes it so memorable after 20 years. “The Somberlain”, by comparison, is a lot clunkier. Transitions are abrupt, riffs are samey, etc. Again, I feel that the musicians simply tried harder on the longer songs, so while they are afflicted by the same lack of craft that the rest of the album suffers, the greater ambition results in more anthemic riffs, more variety within songs, etc.

It’s not like those three songs are masterpieces or anything, but if the rest of the songs were given the same level of attention, this album would deserve the classic status it has. At its basic level, this is a simple combination of traditional heavy metal songwriting with the new forms of death metal and black metal of the time. One area where this fusion becomes most notable is the drumming, which mixes blastbeats (not the ambient sort) with the older thrash-beats and some slower, rock style drumming. They aren’t mixed together or hybridized (How would you?). The guitars are similar; they alternate between consonant riffs and more dissonant, chromatic riffs. It’s like the album is stuck between two modes of communication and can’t stick to one, or properly integrate the two together into something new.

I’ve heard that Storm of the Light’s Bane is closer to the nascent Gothenburg sound, but I haven’t listened enough to confirm this; maybe if I had enjoyed this album more I would’ve. Either way, it begins well, but the second half of it is markedly inferior; never really “bad” per say, but not worth your time. Bands like Rotting Christ and Necromantia pull off the heavy/black fusion better. Sentenced, At the Gates and Necrophobic write better riffs and have more interesting songwriting. Sacramentum (which is often seen as a Dissection ripoff) basically mastered this style on their debut full-length, then decided to show up the Dissectoids at their own simpler, more rock-like work on “The Coming of Chaos”. Definitely check those bands out if you’re into the whole ‘melodic metal’ thing; you can probably pass on this album.

 

Crazy Theories – Starcraft II as an interquel

Nerd alert!

I had this idea many aeons ago, as a result of looking at the plot of Wings of Liberty, and some of the stuff in the original and Brood War that didn’t get mentioned. The end result was that I found it wouldn’t take very many retcons to make Wings of Liberty take place between SC1 and Brood War, but actually making them probably would be fairly ill advised.

Now, I’m aware that a lot of things were retconned and expanded between the release of Brood War and WoL, and also that attempting to shoehorn this plot in creates problems of its own – but the main idea here is that forcing WoL between Starcraft and Brood War does resolve some of the issues that the chronology creates.

Examples:

1. The UED makes no appearance in WoL. Is it likely that everyone forgot about them, especially considering that they supposedly conquered the Dominion, however briefly? Besides, very little UED-related technology really shows up. Medics do show up in the campaign, but it’s not like the Koprulu sector Terrans would be unable to develop such technologies themselves.

2. Kerrigan supposedly was worried about the New Overmind on Char. If we assume the interquel theory, it would suggest that Kerrigan did in fact lose some of her powers as a result of the deinfestation, lending more weight to fear over control by the new Overmind. Brood War, at least, implies that Kerrigan is willing to make quick alliances of convenience.

3. Jim Raynor’s attitudes towards Kerrigan make more sense this way. At the end of Brood War, he has sworn to kill Kerrigan for the various murders, but at the beginning of Wings of Liberty, he’s desperate to save her. Is it more likely that he is capable of getting over the betrayal, the murder of Fenix, or that such events hadn’t occurred to influence his decisions?

4. The Dominion. Remember, in Brood War, Mengsk was forced to work with Raynor and Kerrigan in an attempt to get the Dominion back from the UED. However, the rebellion that Raynor’s Raiders caused appears to have had limited effects at best, and the Dominion was undoubtedly weakened by Raynor’s decision to work with Valerian in an attempt to “de-infest” Kerrigan, and the substantial casualties that occured. In the interquel theory, this may have given the UED’s small expeditionary force (the one that relied on already existent production, such as the Dylar Shipyards) an advantage in the conflict.

Notes:
- There are outside sources that I am ignoring due to lack of familiarity with.
- An interquel theory has problems of its own, such as:
A. Disrupting the timeline.
B. The issue of Samir Duran/Narud is left unsolved.
C. This causes issues with Zeratul’s prophecy, as well as the hybrids, although if we assume the interquel thing, it may have played a role in Jim Raynor’s “trust” in Kerrigan.

Remember, this is just a hypothesis that shifts things around substantially, and Heart of the Swarm may add details that render this illogical and obsolete.

On an unrelated note, how about Colossi that act like the Headcrabs from Half-Life? Full sized Colossi, in case anyone asks.

5,000 Views – Is This Worth Mentioning?

Frankly, I don’t know, but it seems to be more than a lot of blogs get. On the other hand, there are hundreds (if not thousands) of websites that record 5,000 hits a day or more. But the point is that, according to WordPress’s stats, the blog hit 5,000 views today.

Speaking of stats, here are some more:

• The busiest day was March 10th, 2011, when WordPress recorded 80 views. This month, the most views I’ve received on any given day were 35 on January 7th.
• March 2011 was also the month with the most views – 478.
• 2011, although light on traffic so far, has still been more active than 2010. The highest view count in 2010? 209 for December 2010; only in one month of 2011 did I receive less traffic (June 2011).
• Out of all the articles, the one with the most comments is this one, where I claimed that the brief use of a King Crimson sample in the single track “Power” by Kanye West would not contribute to the awareness of the former. This was before I decided it was best to ignore mainstream pop. As of this writing, it only has 4 comments. It’s followed by a writeup on Morbid Angel’s 5th album, “Formulas Fatal to the Flesh”.
• Akismet (the blog’s spam protector) has detected a whopping 3,510 spam comments. They have been blocked, and for good reason. The greatest number of them came in August, 2011; in that month I received 626 spam comments.

If it seems like pointless masturbation over numbers, that’s because it probably is. At this point, I have a large amount of content, but it’s mostly aimed at niche audiences like League of Legends players and metalheads. What you guys can do for me is tell your friends and family about this blog, get them to read it. It probably won’t benefit you in any way, but did you think about that when you forwarded that video of the sneezing panda to your entire workforce?

I thought so.

My spring semester classes begin tomorrow. They ought to be fun, or at least useful.

P.S: I’m not blacking out the site for the SOPA/PIPA protests on 1/18. While I support the complete and utter destruction of everything these bills stand for (and the removal of its supporters from their positions of power), I just don’t have the site traffic for it to matter.

The oddities of internet advertising

In the course of browsing the internet, I find all sorts of advertising. This is nothing new; even I’m trying to get word out on things like this blog and First Contact Is Bad For You. To this end, I’ve been doing a lot of graphical design work in GIMP, and I’ve been learning a LOT about the field from it – take for instance this banner ad I designed.

I consider myself an amateur at this, but I think it fits the main criterions of an advertisement – eye-catching, informative, not annoying or gimmicky, etc. Hopefully, not the sort of thing that someone would download AdBlocker for.

On the other hand, someone’s decided that, in fact, they don’t have to be informative. They clearly think there’s no need to even tell potential audiences the NAME of your product, otherwise they wouldn’t have approved and uploaded an advertisement like this:

Technically, it’s far from the worst possible example. Whoever made it had the decency to put SOME visual cues into the thing, so that anyone who decides to click it has some idea of what to expect, what with the police car and the low polygon count. I did some basic research, and this lead to a website called “TimeWasterz”, which, as you would expect, specializes in online video games. You won’t find anything particularly interesting there, but they do have such favorites as “Counter Kill”, “Park Your Ride”, “Mafia Driver 3″… what do you mean you’ve never heard of such things? Oh right, you can’t be expected to play all the latest shovelware. So it was basically one of  a million generic web gaming sites, probably designed to entice prepubescent boys in search of freebies, like OneMoreLevel.com. I also found a variety of shoddy advertisements on the site; some were of the anti-informative “Play” variety, others ripped off well known licenses, like Mario, and so forth.

I didn’t stop there, of course. First, I went to Quantcast and looked the site up – their traffic varies significantly, but for most of the months mentioned, over 50,000 (possibly unique? I don’t know) people visited the site each month. That’s an awful lot for one of these fly-by-night ‘arcades’, but most of them fell into the under-18, low-income part of the population, which was to be expected. Then, I found that the company directly responsible for the advertising services was called “Ideal Internet”. They supposedly manage web traffic for a bunch of these sites – besides the aforementioned TimeWasterz, there were a bunch of other crappy online ‘arcades’ with very similar page designs. II’s website is full of incoherent corporate babbling – for instance, check out their “About” page. Here’s some samples:

1. Our goal is to direct users to the appropriate website which best fits their interest.
Sounds honorable enough, but as an online gamer, I’d rather go to a GOOD, reputable Flash portal like Kongregate, Newgrounds, or Armor Games. The type of site you serve is the type I’d like to avoid.

2. This website should then be reconfigured in order to accommodate each audience group. Non-valuable traffic should be “equally traded” to another related website where it may hold more value.
In other words, they don’t want periphery demographics, and are willing to shunt them all over the place. Also, note how they’re more interested in redesigning websites so that they’re relentlessly targeted towards specific demographics than they are making user-friendly content.

3. This form of advertising is best suited for internet users who have no intention or real purpose online other than to waste time. Arcade websites present a near perfect environment for interactive advertisements and there is an abundance of internet gamers.
So in short, children. Quantcast is backing me up here. They rarely do their research beforehand, and also lack the judgement to avoid these dodgy advertisements/sites.

It’s an amusing combination – they’re working to ensnare an audience that not only isn’t capable of fighting back, but is difficult to profit off due to its lack of funds. That, combined with the fact their products are of inferior quality, is sure to catapult them into the public name overnight. The sad thing is that this sort of thing probably actually works – IdealInternet has been around since 2009 or so (according to a WhoIs lookup), and most people wouldn’t spend 3 years on the internet doing something completely ineffective.

Gargoyle – Furebumi (1990)

How many of you have heard of Gargoyle? I thought so.

This is probably one of those cases where information about the band is sparse because they write and perform in Japanese, which is actually quite rare in the metal scene. Other Japanese bands, like Loudness, Abigail, and Sigh tend to write in English to varying degrees of competency, which makes it more accessible to foreigners like us. Had I discovered this in 2008 or so, when I was more willing to delve through Japanese culture without the required language proficiency (like Nicovideo crawling and Google Autotranslate odysseys), it would’ve blown my mind, but it might’ve taken me a long time to determine the link between this band and the rest fo the metal world.

You see, Gargoyle is like Mac OS 7, which is arguably where Apple peaked in ‘coolness’. That OS (and therefore Gargoyle) provided a significantly different seeming experience than your average computer (band) of the time. When you look at the underlying hardware and design decisions, you eventually find that things actually ARE fundamentally different. In Apple’s case, they’d lost Steve Jobs to NextSTEP, booted Jean-Louis Gassée for “55% or Die”, introduced some low cost models, but remained fundamentally incompatible with IBM PCs, expensive, and prestigous. I don’t know if I would’ve bought a Mac had I been an adult in the early ’90s, but they were definitely more interesting machines than today’s glorified PCs with anodized aluminum and iDevice peripherals. But I digress.

How does Gargoyle compare? Well, in the late ’80s, they were obviously listening to some extreme thrash metal like Slayer and Kreator, but on Furebumi, as well as later albums, I can also hear the influence of early power metal, like Helloween and the country’s own X Japan. Of course, Gargoyle also came to the decision of playing every genre known to man on their albums at this point, several years before Sigh decided they wanted to do the same thing on their 1997 album Hail Horror Hail. Still, Furebumi is, at its base, a mixture of thrash and power metal, with various genre bending moments. Amongst other things, we see acoustic rock style picking on the otherwise extreme “Djirenma”, funk on “Naitzukushi”, symphonics on “Ryuuten no Seinite”, etc. Relative to their later albums, the genre bending wackiness isn’t all that pronounced, but the defining trait of Gargoyle is that they distill these elements down and make them fit in the core – when they don’t want to or can’t, they just write a ballad or hard rock song to fit it in.

As thrashers, they certainly excel – take for instance, the aforementioned “Djirenma”, which actually incorporates some playing techniques generally associated with death metal, like blastbeats (technically just extremely fast regular ‘thrash polka’ drumming) and especially fast tremelo picking. It also incorporates a ripping solo after the acoustic break – technically, it’s more conventional with attention to melody, and no Trey Azagthoth type whammy shenanigans. It’s still intense. The power metal influence generally results in more melodic songs – the two preceding (“Ounou No Goku” and “Tokimeki”) have a great deal of guitar leads over simpler, more tremolo oriented guitar riffing, and a later one, “Algolagnia” uses a relatively large amount of guitar strings to create a song that reminds me of Rage’s 1988 album “Perfect Man”. The key here is that the band excels even when they’re not drawing on outside influences, and is certainly worth your time if you’re into that sort of thing.

P.S: Gargoyle generally pulls out at least one crazy ‘funk rock/metal’ song per album. Here, it’s “Naitzikushi”. Other albums bring us such gems as  “Renaniuyuji”, “Samurai Dynamite”, “Doumushishubai”, “Karappo”, etc.