This is a video I made a year ago. I did this all by myself, so please enjoy!
This is me starring in my friend’s 48 Hour Film Competition at UWRF. The premise is I’m Steve Parks, who was getting ahead in world until he starts doing a maddening new drug. Hope you like it and share it with your friends!
Today’s song of the day is by the cartoon death-metal band Dethklok. It was going to be I Tamper With the Evidence at the Murder Site of Odin, but the file is too big apparently. So here is the best coffee jingle ever.
Grocery Stores and Why They Are Bizarro World Incarnate
I have to go to grocery stores many times now that I do not have a huge meal plan at my college. Many people have gotten used to clipping coupons and finding the best deals to feed their families, but for a single college student who is more preoccupied with homework, making videos, and typing this blog, I have no time to think about what to get. I go to these pits of insanity when my fridge is empty.
The first thing I notice is how in commercials they try to convince and persuade you to think that everything is healthy and cheap. That is the exact opposite of what grocery stores are. Many aisles are filled with stuff that everyone says,”That’s got sooooo much fat and calories! You are going to be obese and get diabetes!” These items are also the best selling items these businesses are depending their lives on. They get people to buy these things through coupons, which are the staples of how the company runs. People will eat anything if you can get them for 40 cents off!
Another thing is if I can either get one item for the regular price, OR i can get that item multiple times for a fixed price. The best example is Chef Boyardee; these cans are ALWAYS on sale and ALWAYS sold for 4 for whatever the heck they want to price it as. If I do get the 4 cans, what is really going to happen is I will eat one of them and the other 3 will just sit in my pantry in the dust because I do want the SAME can for the SAME meal again.
4 for $5! Might as well give me an IV set, inject it into my bloodstream and put me in a medical coma!
Another good example is when I bought 4 sticks of butter in a pack so I can make mac and cheese. I only used a half of one stick and let the rest spoil in my fridge so I can throw it in the trash eventually. You know that phrase,”Don’t throw your money in the trash?” Yeeeeaaah.
The other problem is how every product is trying to grab my attention with their pretty colors and exaggerated words. Every aisle is a rainbow made from high sugar, fat, cholesterol and cancer. If each of these products could speak, they would be yelling, “BUY ME BUY ME BUY ME BUY ME I’M GOOOOOOOD FOR YOU!” It would be like a Red Light District filled with edibles.
You filthy, filthy skanks
I get so overwhelmed by the whole store that I end up running out for my life with a bag full of frozen meals and pizzas and get to my car like I’m in Left 4 Dead and there are 2 Tanks charging to kill me. So I get home with my bag and realize I do not have that much and have do to the same shit over again in 4-5 days.
Song of the Day is by Kasabian. I chose this based off the music video directed by Richard Ayoade from The IT Crowd and the upcoming movie Neighborhood Watch, and starring Noel Fielding from The Mighty Boosh and Never Mind the Buzzcocks. I love the rhythm and chorus especially, so enjoy!
New-ish single by The Darkness, which you can get free at theactualdarkness.com. The catch is that you have to sign your email to some mailing list, but letting The Darkness let you mail stuff is better than some spam that claims you can “enhance your bulge for 16 hours”. Actually, that sounds awesome!
First blog post (What do I say?!?)
Yes the title of this sucks but oh well, I’ll get over it. I really like listening to music, but hold on now. I do not like a lot of the “music” being played on the radio, you know, generic pop noise that is supposedly (side note: there needs to be something other than italics to express exaggeration. Now where were we? Oh yeah…) GOOD. This is stuff like Rihanna (stupid), country (pants-on-head stupid), and Lil Wayne (I-want-to-leave-this-planet horrible). I am more of a rock/indie/metal guy, but OH WAIT! This does not mean radio rock that include bands like Avenged Sevenfold, Nickelback, A Day To Remember, and such.
Music is really a hard art form to really grasp, and because of its subjectivity, even I change what different bands and genres I listen to. So to make this simple, here are some bands I like right now.
Wavves
This band is considered “noise rock” which is a genre that grew out in the late noughts and has gotten big attention around music reviewers SPIN and Pitchfork, and has the song “Idiot” featured in Saints Row The Third. Nathan Williams is the mastermind (pictured left) of the group, and his songs reflect the area he grew up in, which is San Diego. The EP Life Sux has been consider one of the best EPs to be released in 2011. The sound is a combination of brash, energetic, and catchy. I want this group to come to cold Minnesota sometime soon so I can get a shirt similar to the King of the Beach album cover.
Foxy Shazam
I knew this band since 2006, during the Myspace happy fun-time circle-jerk that almost all high school kids were going crazy for. But at least something came good out of it. My friend Charlie suggested I should listen to this band on their Myspace page. When I first listened to “NO! Don’t Shoot!”, I was floored. During that time, they were more experimental post-rock (see At-The-Drive-In for the essential post-rock). But later on, they became more rock but with astounding stage presence and high-quality orchestration. I saw them live when they were with The Darkness, and it was a blast. Eric Shaun Nally has a tremendous voice with the weirdest lines said between songs (“Someone asked me, “How many licks does it take to get to the center of a Tootsie Pop?” Whatever many it takes, bitch.). Their new single, “I Like It”, has the best chorus line to be ever conceived: “That’s the biggest black ass I’ve ever seen and I LIKE IT! I LIKE IT!” People are already comparing Nally to Freddy Mercury, but even I think that is comparing those two too soon and too quickly. A better comparison would be that Nally is like Noel Fielding, but Nally is part of an actual band. And if you didn’t noticed yet, their pianist Schuyler Vaughn White looks like The Dictator, but he looked like for a LONG time!
I’m getting sick of typing, so I’ll post more bands later on.
