Friday Night Internet Fight: Round 35

This week MagicJuggler was kind enough to e-mail me about a fight he was involved in over at 40kOnline.  Being the painful read that it was, I knew I had to use it for this week's FNIF.  The thread is called Tarrins Take What You Want (TTWYW) thread: 1K Sons and it will make your eyes want to crawl under a how shower for hours on end trying to wash of the foul stench of the raping they have received.  The highlight of this thread for me is that the OP is not only completely belligerent and ignorant, but also is blind to when people are contributing to his discussion productively.

SWANS

This review should have been done weeks ago.  I was actually ready to write this at the end of September when the new record was released.  After all, it's not often that your favorite band ever that happened to have broken up in 1997 releases a new album for the first time in 15 years.  I've gotta say that usually this type of wait usually results in a huge let-down.  Bands often over-think things and wind up producing shit albums (see G 'n R).  So, it was with mixed feelings that I approached the release of SWANS new album, My Father Will Guide me Up a Rope to the Sky.  Expecting the worst, I was blown away by the record.  It's painfully loud, absolutely sublimely primal, and hauntingly beautiful all at the same time.  It's also not overly long.  The new album clocks in at just over 40 minutes, which is just about perfect.  Every song on it is a gem and there isn't any cheap filler material.

It's going to be one of those nights

Dr. Girlfriend just came home with a case of cheap beer and is blasting the dead milkmen.  Guess that means it's pumpkin carving time. 

Ps that big fucker clocked in @ over 50 pounds

-- Sent from my Palm Pre

Ch Ch Ch Ch Changes

I apologize for the title, but Ziggy Stardust was on Paladium last night, so I've got Bowie on the brain.  I've made a couple of updates to the page to hopefully make things easier to deal with.  I have disabled secret words for commenting.  We'll see how long that lasts, but I appear to have been avoiding spam for the most part for quite a while now. 

I have also, sadly, done away with post reactions.  They were adding a lot of clutter and weren't really being used too much anyway.  If you want them back, feel free to throw a shit fit, but it'll take some convincing for me to begin to care about what you think :p

Why all of these changes?  Meh, it's been a long time coming.  I've had a long week of coming to terms with some things- such as it turns out I might really like the upcoming Kanye West album... oh and that bipartisan politics are fucking up the country- and I just needed to spice things up a bit. 

So join me in one last sendoff for the boner city reaction.

Drumroll......brrzzzzzzzzzz: THE ROTOROOTER!

Over the past few months I've hinted in the most vague of possible ways that I have been working on a new IG list to highlight my Cadians.  I'd like to play test this a lot more, but time constraints being what they are, I'll go ahead and post what I've been working on so far- understanding that this is still going to be subject to a lot of play testing.  In order to dispel the myths that the Leafblower is the end all be all of IG lists, I've tried to create something that eschews a lot of the usual suspects that are most guard armies.  Specifically I wanted to avoid a few tournament stand-bys: the Hydra, Manticore, and Vendetta.  I'm not at all trying to play a fluffier than thou card or any shit like that because I still think the Leafblower is pretty unified in its fluff.  Neither am I trying to find a way to make Ogryn or Rough Riders viable.  I think that would be a completely fruitless effort.  Being the tread-head that I am, my list will still include a number of Chimerae and a shit load of other vehicles. 

The Blogging Oedipal Complex

In writing up the announcements for the House of Paincakes today (an honor which usually falls on Lauby's shoulders, but apparently he was too busy with things that he'll no doubt assure me are not in any way related to Fallout New Vegas) I realized something- its readership is about to surpass Dick Move and in record time, no less. 

Friday Night Internet Fight: Round 34

This week an article on Comp went up on BoLS.  Sometimes an article is so obviously going to result in a fight that I can't bring myself to use it.  Sometimes an article is so obviously going to result in a fight that I do have to use it.  This feel into the latter camp.

FNIF: Round 33 Results Show

For a while there during the first couple of days it was looking as though there might be a 4 way tie for winner amongst the participants.  That didn't last long though, as we all learned something and "Not going back to that Forum Any Time Soon" Pulled out way into the lead with 33 or the 64 total votes (51%).  If this thread was evidence of what business as usual looks like over there, that might be a safe policy. 

Amongst the fight participants, RedsandRoyals somehow managed to prove to be the least moronic of the lot with 12% of your votes. I am still shamed and astonished by this.  Trickstick and dedrier managed to pull some respectable numbers amongst the rest of the buffoons with 10% and 6% of the vote respectively. 

I think if nothing else, this fight has proven the value of having somebody in your forum who has at least read the rulebook all the way through and knows that GW publishes FAQs for all of their codices. 

Return of the Math!

It has been a while, but I think it's high time to resurrect the Dick Move Mathlete of the Week Program.  I just stumbled across Zheilt's blog Custodes and was pretty well blown away by what I found there.  It's a damn shame, but it looks like he's been at it for a little over a month now and doesn't have much of a following yet, in spite of some pretty good content- whore yourself out more.  Join the HoP, we'll get you some readers :)

Whoring of the blog network aside, Zheilt appears to have a pretty good grasp on stats and excel and has made some pretty easily readable charts, such as this one showing why melta lances are not really going to be the end of gaming as we know it.  He does similar things for several other topics, so take some time, poke around his site and make sure to follow it if you like what you see- I know I did.  Nice work Zheilt.  I'm looking forward to seeing more of your stuff.

Rock and Roll Diary- The EP is mastered and ready for print

Last night we wrapped on recording the Rise of the Templars Ep for Hoagy and my band, Crusader.  Unlike most of the days I've spent in the studio, I didn't snap any pics and upload them here.  We were basically just adding synths, mixing, and mastering the 4 tracks, so I can assure you that it wasn't so exciting.  No midget porn, strange donut frosting incidents, large body/regular sized guitar hijinks, or any of that- just 4 dudes sitting around a mixing board with my trusty MIDI controller in tow.  Trust me, as exciting as it was to hear the finished songs for the first time, it would only have ended in a "you had to be there" scenario. 

Other than being about 20 hours over budget, I have no real regrets about this recording session for the first time ever.  I think being a loud mouth jerk on the Internet has helped me to be more vocal about how I want things to sound.  It might be weird for a drummer to be so involved in the overall process, but I like what I do and I want that to come through in harmony with the rest of the band.  I've got to give it to the whole group, I think everyone was in top form. 

I was hoping to have more versions of 2 of the songs, showing how a track is built in the studio- from scratch tracks and demos all the way to the finished product.  Sadly, that would have eaten up a lot of expensive studio time that was already running very thin.  It's too bad, as I set out on this endeavor originall to let you all share in the experience of hearing something come together, but I guess it wasn't to be.  Regardless, I'll re-post the original scratch tracks for 2 songs that I've put up previously set against the final versions from last night.  That should give you some idea of what a little spit and polish will do to a track.  Enjoy.

Here is the scratch version of track number one (labled as #3 for some reason)- the title track "Rise of the Templars"



03 rise of the templars unmixed by dethtron


.....and here is the final version



01 Rise of the Templars by dethtron


Now for track number 3, Asgard's Fire, formerly known simply as the Viking song. I'm glad it finally found a name. This is the original scratch track



04 untitled unmixed viking shenaniga by dethtron


......and here is the final version. You may find that it ends a little abruptly, but it bleeds over into the next song, so it makes more sense in the context of the album.



03 Asgard's Fire by dethtron

That's it.  Enjoy these while they're up; I will be taking the tracks off of Soundcloud in a while, but all of this should be on disc and iTunes by early December.  Feel free to comment, but if it's about Hoagy's voice sounding nasal, I think you might be smoking crack.  I've got 4 other bandmates and a very experienced recording engineer that will all disagree with you.

FNIF: Extra Innings is up

I just wanted to update everyone quickly on a few things. Since I've had/am having a busy week.

1. Finished mixing the Crusader sessions last night (only 15 hours over-budget, thanks to our recording engineer being very generous with a few things- should have been 20ish hours over in reality).  I'll post final versions of the first two songs I put up in the rock and roll diary series later tonight because...
2. Have a managerial financing exam tonight- should be a joke, but am still compelled to study
3. participated in some 40k this week for the first time in too long.  Got to thinking about the next "game breaking" IG list and think I'm getting close to revealing what will become my main tournament army
4. getting 2 super special HoP posts ready to roll- one is a hobby article by me and the other is an interview with a well known gamer about his sweet ass army.  Those will be out over the next week and a bit.
5. Went to a pumpkin patch and saw a civil war reenactment with Hoagy, Dr. Girlfriend, and Hoagy's fiance, son, and mother-in-law.  Good times were had by all and Uncle Dethtron taught Hoagy's spawn some bad habits- win!  There will probably be some pics up on Hoagy's When Cannons Fade shortly. 
6. Last but not least, the newest installment of FNIF: Extra Innings is up on BoK in all of its ill formatted glory, check it out.  But seriously, if any of you word press users can figure out why the fuck it jams a bunch of shit that I had properly spaced together, I'd appreciate a heads up.

Friday Night Internet Fight: Round 33

There was a hard fought battle of the wits this morning as Dethtron fought Dethtron in a no-holds-barred steel cage death match to determine which of three absolutely ridiculous forum threads to use for this week's fight.  I think I figured out how to use one of them for my FNIF: Extra Innings series that no one reads, but ultimately I decided on going using one from a newer forum, Imperial Guard Message Board.  For some naive reason, when I found out this forum existed a while back I actually got a little excited.  Being a Guard player myself, I'm always on the lookout for some new info.  You don't have to be a rocket surgeon to figure out how this brief love affair ended:  I read a few posts and realized that not only is everyone there full of shit, but Melissia is a frequent poster...shit.

Why Comp Sucks: Inspiration Strikes

Today while doing my grocery shopping, I was struck quite unexpectedly with an image that got me to thinking about comp in gaming tournaments.  Somehow I've managed to run this blog since last winter and never really go off on one of the things that infuriates me most in the hobby.  Maybe others have beaten this dead horse into glue already, but I think I found a way to articulate what bothers me about comp: not that it drastically alters a game system, but that it is entirely counter-productive.  Now, I will preface this by saying that I do not intend to step on any toes culturally or offend anyone.  I know that sounds fucked up coming from me, but you'll see why in a minute. 

Rock and Roll Diary: Iron Forge

You can almost taste the maple shells and gold hardware- would you believe this kit's 14 years old?

I was planning on returning to writing about gaming today (I still might later), but Hoagy just sent me another test mix 12 minutes ago- I've now listened to the song 3 times, so that's how I know so specifically :). Apparently he finished up his vocal takes last night under the radar. 

Unlike the last "finished" song I posted, this sounds a lot more like the rest of our material.  "Engine face," previously posted, was written in the very early days of the group, so we're probably retiring it soon.  It's fun as shit to play, though, so we wanted to record it for fun and posterity's sake. It will not be making it onto the full length album, sadly.

Anyway, here is the test mix of "Iron Forge" including the controversial new chorus*.



Iron Forge by dethtron


======================================================
*for an early demo featuring the original chorus, check this shit out, recorded 6 bass players ago when we were a 4 piece with a different name....

Of Cocktails and Gaming

One of the many reasons I like playing at home would have to be the booze.  Usually when we get a game together at my house somebody brings some beer with them.  Now I'm not saying I have to have a drink to have a good time, but if you're going to get a relaxing game in, why not do it up right?  In reality I only really drink beer when gaming or playing gigs these days.  Too many calories in beer that actually has taste.  The rest of my casual drinking involves whiskey these days.  Hell I rcently decided that scotch plus ice cubes qualifies as a mixed drink.


This is neither here nor there, however.  In trolling the blogosphere looking for ways to not study for tomorrow's FIN 408 exam, I ran across a HoP related post and almost crapped myself.  Over on Crew Shaken, Not stirred, DaveHowitzer, the author was so tickled by being included in HoP's weekly top X list that he made up some cocktails dedicated to Lauby and Brent.  Now we're not doing the whole HoP thing for Internet fame, but I see this as a positive sign that we're helping to empower gamers and bloggers and perhaps inspire people to new heights of insanity.  This has gotten me thinking about what would be in a Dethtron themed cocktail.  Hopefully it involves raw egg. 

Anyway, that's it for today.  I should probably start studying a little bit.  If you're reading this and still haven't friended, followed, or joined the HoP blog network, make sure you do so today.  I'm sure there are still a few of you readers out there that need to check it out.

Steppin' out with dethtron

Commence speculation

-- Sent from my Palm Pre

Rock and Roll Diary: Engine Face Drums

Hoagy was kind enough to record some video of me playing, with me only being partially aware of it.  So here is, I think*, part of my first pass at Engine Face, the song I posted last night.  My favorite part is when I clearly go into the chorus a phrase early and am visibly pissed at myself.  Thanks for recording me playing like shit Hoagy :)






*It must have been pretty early, since I still had my glasses on.  I usually ditch those as soon as I start to get sweaty.  I'm pretty new to the glasses thing- anybody have a way to prevent them from fogging up?

Friday Night Internet Fight: Round 32

Fucking blogger just ate nearly all of my fucking post and now I'm re-fucking doing the whole god damn fucking thing.  Hey blogger, thanks for wasting 2 hours of my fucking time you piece of shit.

Re-enter the wall of text.  This week's fight comes from Black Matt's blog, where he wrote a highly confusing article about the upcoming battle for salvation for no obvious reason.  Apparently it was supposed to be an extreme argument for comp, since -duh- not all codices are created equal.  I honestly didn't get that from reading the article, but Matt himself admits that he "lack(s) the literary prowess to communicate everything effectively."  True enough, because they only thing that I got out of this whole thing is that you're a fat cunt.

Friday Night Internet Fight: Results Show- Rounds 30 and 31

It seems as though I forgot to post last week's results.  Whatever, it was a busy day, as that's when I started recording.......  Luckily I was kind enough to myself to accidentally leave the closed poll up all week so I can just lump the past two fights into one post.  Booyah!

Round 30
We had a pretty damn big turnout for this one, with 76 voters contributing.  In the battle of who is less of a jerk in the realm of pivoting to "gain extra movement" there was a pretty clear cut winner.  Corrode roped in 42% of your hearts and minds, just by making sense and adhering to what's written in the rules- something which too many posters seem to neglect in life. 

15% of you liked Frosty for talking about real world tanks to get his point across and even bringing video evidence to the table.  I'll have to admit that this is one of the only times I didn't want to punch somebody in the dick for comparing real life to 40k (or vice versa).  Additionally it would appear that 18% of  you are getting sick of arguments about and perhaps the entire concept of WAAC gaming.  You can lump me in that category as well.  The next few posts will hopefully not really invovle this topic- I think it needs a rest.

There were some other votes in there as well, but due to how long ago this fight was, it's barely relevant to discuss the minutiae.

Round 31
In the case of ZombYes v. Everyone else, it looks like the ravaging hordes of the un-undead have prevailed.  Fueled by rumors that pretty much every Dark Eldar unit will be able to take long ranged poison weapons, the entire Internet went into panic mode.  Thank god some level headed people in the YTTH comments section were able to finally bring some sense into the equation.

Sadly, though, I feel like I'm preaching to the choir here to some extent- or at least to the 55 of you that voted.  Fuck, I think that the votes even show this; we had lowish turnout and 41% of you would rather go club baby seals than give a shit about the fight.  In more "tell me something I didn't already know" news, Tarik clearly summed it up perfectly and sarcastically and managed to eke out the win among participants with 36% of the vote.  If I really must confess, Tarik's post was 90% of the reason I used this thread for FNIF.  In other obvious news, it would seem that even I don't see a connection to the works of Jonathan Ames and the fight- I think it maybe had something to do with his writings about being an amateur boxer and obsession with fecal humor, but really I think I just watched too much Bored to Death last week.  Meh, whatever, it's my blog things don't have to make sense.  In any case, the good news is that only 3% of you were with the Internet Chicken Little majority and feel that poison weapons en masse will shatter the already shaky game system.

Rock and Roll Diary: The Brutality continues....

Sadly, due to a number of guitar related issues, we are officially 4 hours over our recording budget with 1 track still needed vocals and a number of other touch ups needing to be done here and there.  We've got the time and $$ to make this happen, but it sucks watching the cost of recording skyrocket before my eyes.  But at least we all know how things will be when we go to flesh out our full length down the road.  In hindsight I'm honestly going to blame a lot of this on the fact that all of us have recorded exclusively with 4 piece bands in the past and underestimated how long recording 5 people would take.  Live and learn I guess. 

Rock and roll diary: vokills

Hoagy bunkers down to nail his vocals.  This should be our final day of recording.

-- Sent from my Palm Pre

Rock and roll diary: the muscles from... Schaumburg

Brad clomps out some guitar solos

-- Sent from my Palm Pre

Rock and roll diary more buried treasure

...and it was about that time that we found producer dan precision of 88 fingers louies squats.  Hoagy just peed himself!

-- Sent from my Palm Pre

Rock and roll diary buried treasure

Digging through the studio and found this

-- Sent from my Palm Pre

Rock and Roll Diary: Day 2 Sneak Peaks

Finished up the second day of recording a few hours ago and after taking time to decompress a bit, sat down to twiddling my knobs, as Hoagy would say.  By which I mean I started on a rough rough rough mix of adding synth to live elements to make sure everything jives. It's sounding good so far.  It'll be even better when I export everything for our producer to tweak (Dan from 88 Fingers Louie), but you can get the basic idea here. 

We finished up 1 (of 2) guitars today and all the bass parts.  I think we're a little behind schedule for tomorrow, so looks like we're going to be over budget shortly.  1 guitar and Hoagy's vox are set to begin tomorrow morning.  Hopefully we can knock out all the recording tomorrow, but I have my doubts that we'll get any final mixing done.  Who knows though, we might have some "1 take wonder" tracks for tomorrow.


This is what the guitar and drums sound like for the still as yet un-named song about vikings.  As with yesterday, there is pretty much no mixing or studio magic involved in this yet- I'm just showing you all the process as it progresses.



Viking ROUGH by dethtron




Here we get on to an extremely rough edit with adding the synths in to what you heard above for the first time.  I left the levels where I had them while I was still writing, so the synths and such are still at a much higher volume than the will be in the final mix- well except those chimes, those may get louder.  Also upon hearing this again, I think I forgot to mute the synth bass, but it's no biggie since I didn't have time to grab a wav of the live bass for his anyway- which is a shame, because Ian blew us all away with his playing today.  I promise this won't be one of those bassless metal albums you're used to.



Viking song first rough draft w synth unmixed by dethtron

Rock and roll diary denim edition

Guitar 1 is done.  Ian gets bass underway festooned in his canadian tuxedo featuring a jim beam hat and trout embroidered jean jacket.

-- Sent from my Palm Pre

Rock and Roll Diary: Sneak Peaks

It's been a long, yet surprisingly fun day for me.  I got all four of my tracks knocked out in the studio in slightly less time than I was allotted.  Set up was a complete bitch, but I think it will all be worth it when everything is mixed.  Our producer says I had $17,000 worth of mikes hooked up to my shit today.  That kind of blew my mind.  It's always depressing blowing 2+ hours of studio time on setup and level checking though. 

Anyway, my hands feel like they've been run over, trampled, and then run through a wood chipper, so I'm just about done typing.  Below I'm going to post 2 tracks from the day.  Bear in mind these are VERY VERY VERY early mixes.  Nothing has really been eq'd, had effects added to it or been particularly cleaned up.  My takes have been edited together into a final rough mix and that's it.  There hasn't been much studio magic yet and my kick sounds really weird since it's been eq'd (ok so some things have temporary eq on them) to cut through better so everyone can hear it.  The guitar was laid down yesterday by Joe and while it is super helpful to have a scratch track, there are many parts that will probably sound off to you.  Rest assured, my shit is pretty much spot on with the click track though (metronome).  If you don't know how albums are recorded here is a basic order.  A quick throwaway guitar, vocal, or bass track is laid down set to a metronome.  The drummer then plays over that, again along with a metronome.  From there the "scratch" guitar or whatever tracks are removed and the rest of the parts are layered on.  we got rhythm guitar done on one track tonight, but I don't have any of that available for your perusal.  If I get a chance I'll post these same two songs with more stuff mixed in tomorrow, so you can hear how things evolve.

Up first is the ep's title track: Knights of the Templar.  The guitar at the end was way off, so it was cut out of the rough mix, so just imagine that it's there.  Actually listening to it now, the guitar is a little off throughout, but the end was especially not good.  Again I will remind you that this is a very rough mix and only barely represents how the final product will sound.



03 rise of the templars unmixed by dethtron


Last but not least here is the as yet still untitled song about Vikings that I had previously posted synth parts for. This should song more metal than the all synth mix :)



04 untitled unmixed viking shenaniga by dethtron

Rock and roll diary

Let the destructification begin

-- Sent from my Palm Pre

Brad gets down to some serious business

-- Sent from my Palm Pre

Friday Night Internet Fight: Round 31

As you know, I'm pressed for time, but since I completely forgot to arrange for somebody else to do FNIF for me this week, I came up with something slightly different- a one sided fight with nobody representing the opposition.  Unless you're living under a rock you probably already know that the Dark Eldar are getting a new codex soon and probably don't smell like rocks.  If you're extra savvy and cutting edge, you may also have heard some rumors that the DA might be able to fit poison ranged weapons on just about every unit.  This has erupted in the inevitable shitstorm of morons running around claiming that 'nids are screwed, DA have broken the game (before they're even fucking released), and the sky is falling.