Have a playlist

So... thanks to a number of issues, I have pretty much fubarred this week, and I apologize. The fuckupery has reached the point where this is actually Tuesday's post, even though it is going up Wednesday morning, while Wednesday's post will go up some time in the evening, and then hopefully that will bring the planets back into alignment and the flow of time will again proceed in a normal, ordinary fashion through Thursday and Friday's posts.

Also I've had to delay the last Fundamentals post and the post about #GamerGate they were building up to, because I've been to fatigue to maintain function in the requisite thinky bits.

Oh, and I'll also finally get the Kill la Kill liveblog up this evening, too. Sorry about that.

So, much of the music in the Xenosaga series is really, really good. I mean, you've got Yasunori Mitsuda and Yuki Kajiura, how could it be bad?

The answer is "quite easily," because some of the music in the Xenosaga series is fucking terrible. (Especially everything in Xenosaga II that wasn't a cutscene, because somebody other than Kajiura did all the actual gameplay, and they did a terrible job.) Also both the actually good composers occasionally like to dabble in styles they really shouldn't, like atmospheric droning noises, elevator music, and some weird twinkly variant of techno that I'm sure has a name and equally sure I don't care, because it's weird, twinkly, and techno.

However, everything good in the series would make a ridiculously long playlist, so I went a bit narrower than that. Here, then, is the Best Parts Version of the Xenosaga soundtrack, clocking in at 2 hours and 12 minutes.

"Rains of Castamere"

Game of Thrones is getting increasingly clever in its use of the rather mournful "Rains of Castamere" as a leitmotif for the mounting tragedy of the Lannister clan. Best use to date, I think, was the most recent episode, where the "And so he spoke, and so he spoke" part, played on cellos, emerges out of the mostly unrelated background music immediately after Tyrion's (amazing, potentially Emmy-worthy) speech at the end of his trial, leading into a full, cello-heavy instrumental version playing behind the ending credits. Ramin Djawadi, the composer for the series, doesn't get anywhere near enough credit, in my opinion.

The Protomen!

Went to a Protomen concert last night. If you're not familiar, they're a metal band who have a rock opera based on Mega Man (here's my favorite track from that), and also the only people allowed to cover Queen as far as I'm concerned. They're pretty good in studio, and straight-up amazing live.

It was a seriously good time, and if you somehow haven't heard of them before, I strongly recommend checking them out.