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why-so-serious-lucifer · 2 months

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K-pop Discography Deep Dives: Rolling Quartz 🎸

Rolling Quartz is the fourth band I’ve covered here, and the first girl band, which is very exciting! They debuted in 2020, with five members: bassist Arem, guitarists Iree and Hyunjung, vocalist Jayoung, and drummer Yeongeun. They aren’t exactly K-pop, but instead a blend of that and k-rock. Here are my credentials: I’ve been a fan of Rolling Quartz for a while now, after being recommended their excellent cover of Dreamcatcher’s Good Night, and though I know they’re not that popular (and so this review is more for me than other people), I thought it’d be fun to do to break up the SHINHWA epic.

Blaze was their debut, and what a debut it is! Coming right out the gate with a blistering, half-minute-long guitar riff, inspirational lyrics, and Jayoung’s signature husky contralto. From this first song, they immediately stand out from the crowd: besides playing instruments, having a grungier style and music video, and dabbling more in rock, their music also feels more personal, probably due to the fact that they weren’t assembled by a company but instead formed on their own and have the power to write their own songs.

Delight starts out quieter than Blaze, though it doesn’t stay that way for long. It keeps the inspirational lyrics, with a slower, more minimalistic opening that feels like it’s holding its breath until the song explodes in rock bliss. It’s a masterclass in pulling back and rushing forward, and keeps you guessing—in a good way. This was never one of my favorites as a casual listener but I’m pleased to say this changed my mind.

Holler starts with the somewhat haunting call of “Holler, holler, holler”, befitting of the MV’s vampiric inspirations (especially Jayoung’s awesome dress), and the chant repeats again in the post-choruses as a break from the established build ups. It’s definitely reminding me of a Taemin song, with its seductive creepiness, albeit based on far more of a rocky vibe than is usual for him. Overall, I like this one more this time too!

From the EP, Fighting, I liked the crisp guitar riffs of Higher and of course their excellent cover of Dreamcatcher’s Good Night...but my favorite would have to be Azalea. Adapted from an old poem protesting the Japanese occupation of Korea, it’s the true definition of an anthemic, passionate, head-banger, and I hope one day (Hera willing) I’ll get to experience its incredibleness in concert.

One is a collaboration, and goes more of a teen-movie-soundtrack-pop-punk route; as one comment I saw said, “it sounds like it could be from a Monster High movie.” Which is absolutely not criticism, by the way; though I don’t think that One is as good as tracks like Blaze, Delight, or Azalea, it’s a fun break from the darkness and makes me want to relive my younger teenage years (though maybe not all of them, let’s be honest here).

Nazababara is their return after a while, and goes a much sunnier, brighter route, making it feel less like a political anthem and more like one for a night out for friends. I love the segments with less instrumentation in the pre-chorus so that the vocals have time to breathe, and of course the short “you got me, got me” bridge was a highlight too. It’s a short song, but a memorable one.

Sing Your Heart Out is a b-side, but it was given a music video so I’m treating it like a single. It’s harsher in sound and darker in tone than Nazababara, and more true to their usual sound. The guitar riffs are as sharp as ever, and have a great sense of build in those pre-choruses, before the chorus appears to smash everything out of the park. It definitely had me banging my head, especially during that great guitar breakdown and outro.

I’m A Loner isn’t a usual Rolling Quartz song in many ways; it’s both a collaboration with Nam Do-hyun, and an OST. But, it retains their staples of driving beats and Jayoung’s strong voice with those sharp guitars that propel it forward. I hadn’t actually heard this song before this deep dive, but I ended up liking it. I wish it had more of a cathartic end to its great build-up, but otherwise it’s pretty good.

Fearless takes a more EDM-based approach to its rock, for another banger, this time choosing something I normally dislike: an “I’m-so-cooler-than-you” song…and yet, they pull it off! That guitar solo was perfection and I couldn’t resist the urge to dance along with them as they played their instruments in the rain (which I hope they didn’t have to film more than once).

Reminiscence is their most recent single, and though it starts with a sharp snare drum, its first verses are actually a quite straightforward ballad, made unique by the ever-present power in Jayoung’s voice. But of course, since this is Rolling Quartz, it soon becomes a power ballad worthy of single status, and manages to be incredibly captivating despite its music video only being them playing their instruments in their studio, and it actually became one of my favorites of theirs. Also, I had no idea that Jayoung plays piano, so that was a fun surprise.

I’m glad I did this! I knew I would have a great time, but it was still a fun ride. I forgot how few songs Rolling Quartz actually has, but when every one of them is so high in quality, I can’t really complain. I learned a lot more about them as people too, watching some interviews and behind the scenes content and having some good laughs along the way.

My Top 5 songs are Blaze, Azalea, Nazababara, Reminiscence, and Fearless, with Sing Your Heart Out as an honorable mention. Rolling Quartz gets a 9 out of 10 from me, the same as The Rose did, which isn’t surprising at all. I don’t think that there’s a single song of theirs I don’t like, and very few that I don’t love. They’re remarkably consistent and incredibly talented, and I can’t wait to see what they do next!

Next time, we’ll finally be finishing the SHINHWA deep dive, so stay tuned. Tschüss!

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brokendeerteeth · 9 months

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tumblrs new format

Does anyone know how to change the shitty new format???

Wish tumblr would learn that people don’t want it to become a a gross ass Twitter clone, make sure to leave a 1 star on the App Store so they know how you feel about the new changes

#tumblr #tumblr news #tumblr format #new tumblr format #twitter clone #tumblr admin #let us turn off tumblr live indefinitely #tumblr staff #1 star review #leaving tumblr #fix tumblr #dont update tumblr #tumblr live #tumblr blaze posts #blaze posts #facts about tumblr #things I like about tumblr

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carpisuns · 1 year

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I posted 5,583 times in 2022

660 posts created (12%)

4,923 posts reblogged (88%)

Blogs I reblogged the most:

@tizzymcwizzy

@crocojagged

@frostedpuffs

@botherkupo

@jascurka

I tagged 5,317 of my posts in 2022

Only 5% of my posts had no tags

#toh - 821 posts

#ask - 467 posts

#ml spoilers - 387 posts

#ladynoir - 300 posts

#anon - 285 posts

#ml - 282 posts

#marichat - 265 posts

#adrinette - 260 posts

#huntlow - 247 posts

#q - 226 posts

Longest Tag: 134 characters

#u already saw me go bonkers over this but consider this another healthy round of me losing my effing mind: 🐝‼️✨💕🥰🫠🔥🤩🌟🌈😭🥳❣️💟

I sent 1 gift in 2022

My Top Posts in 2022:

16,770 notes - Posted November 11, 2022

shoutout to slow creators!

i know it can be disheartening to work so slowly when it seems like everyone around you works so fast and churns out great content left and right. i know it's easy to get frustrated with yourself for having to spend so much time on one thing and sometimes it's hard to stay motivated long enough to finish. but the things you make are so good, and taking lot of time on something isn't a bad thing. creation can be a very painstaking process, but the amount of love and care and effort and attention you pour into your work bleeds through. people can feel it. they appreciate it. they see how hard you try and they see how your thoughtful approach to creation affects the quality of the end product. speed is definitely a skill you can develop and chances are as you practice more and get more comfortable with things, you'll be able to work faster. but no matter what, the things you make are worth waiting for. keep creating! you are wonderful!

26,916 notes - Posted February 22, 2022

friendly reminder for things you might have forgotten!

clothes in the washer

dinner in the oven

unanswered email/text/call

meat that needs to defrost

plants that need to be watered

garbage day

upcoming birthday or anniversary

the alamo

32,607 notes - Posted April 28, 2022

guy.s

i saw a post that said it maxed out at 24. so i just. kept buying em. thinking eventually i would get a little message saying i had the max amoutn. but. guys. it didnt. it did nt

39,542 notes - Posted November 11, 2022

My #1 post of 2022

no, YOU have a microwave brain that slowly rotates blorbos. I have a washing machine brain that rotates AND soaks them and sometimes things get a little intense and it starts going THUNK THUNK THUNK and nearly breaks itself because of blorbo overload

62,123 notes - Posted August 20, 2022

Get your Tumblr 2022 Year in Review →

#tumblr2022 #year in review #I was initially too embarrassed to share this #But screw it #i am a little relieved the stupid checkmarks one wasnt my number one lmao #I did turn off reblogs on that one tho #Third one is something i blazed hahaha #also. was v surprised about the toh tag bc I didn’t start regularly blogging about toh until like a few months ago I think?? Omg #I was very good about tagging all toh posts tho so my ml followers could block #I only recently started using ml by itself as a tag #Bc before that was just the default hdjddj #Anyway. It was a year here on tumblr dot com #I feel like I post and reblog so much more than everyone else DHSJSM #no wonder I’ve gotten tagged like 20 times as one of someone’s top people they reblog from LMAO #I’m the only option it’s just me and my cartoons and I never shut up about them!!

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pressnewsagencyllc · 1 month

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Gene Wilder Documentary Reviews Are All In Agreement

Included in Remembering Gene Wilder is Peter Ostrum who played the all-important role of Charlie in Willy Wonka & the Chocolate Factory. Of Wilder, Ostrum says, “You could tell this was going somebody who’s fun to work with. He wasn’t treating me like a kid.” Gene Wilder received a total of two Oscar nominations in his lifetime. One for Best Supporting Actor for 1969’s The Producers and the other…

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#blazing saddles #Celebrity #Documentaries #Documentary #Entertainment news #fake-slideshow #gene wilder #Movies #Remembering Gene Wilder #reviews #willy wonka & the chocolate factory #young frankenstein

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hardcore-gaming-101 · 1 year

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Nightmare Reaper

What even is Nightmare Reaper. Like, what is this. When the boomer shooter revival hit, you probably expected things to stay mostly nostalgic, tired and true formulas with some updates here and there. Project Warlock did this, DUSK did this, ect. Enter Nightmare Reaper, a little game that has been in early access for a few years that has finally reached full release at 1.0 and about a billion new features. It is a large beast that uses roguelike elements without going full roguelike. The classic FPS formula with about a hundred asterisks. A looter shooter where instead of minor number changes, you can potentially get a double barreled shotgun that spews exploding fire balls that turn every single room into a wildfire. It is a lot.

It might also be one of the most innovative and downright thrilling FPS games to see the light of day since ULTRAKILL first appeared with episode one.

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commodorebuzzkill · 5 months

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Let's do a Game Review because why not?

So, anybody remember Blazing Angels? It was made by Ubisoft in 2006, and featured World War 2, planes, explosions and shockingly bad and frequent racist voice acting. It was made at a time when Ubisoft noticed that Bandai Namco were reliably churning out 1 Ace Combat game per year and making good money doing it, so they said "we need some airplane games like those people." So they set themselves up with a studio in Romania that would have the job of making Ace Combat competitors. Ubisoft Bucharest turned out a total of 4 games (Blazing Angels, Blazing Angels 2, Tom Clancy's Hawx, and Tom Clancy's Hawx 2) before roughly 2010 when Ubisoft as a whole decided to give up on competing with Ace Combat, as Ace Combat wasn't earning a huge amount of money anyway. Ubisoft Bucharest was then closed, and Ubisoft has yet to make any arcade air combat games since then. That being said, I still enjoy playing it from time to time, because I can make things go boom in an exuberant manner, and shoot down hoards of axis planes.

I first played it in 2008 when I got my first console , and my memories on the whole were and are largely positive in spite of the game's failings. My friends and I would whither away hours playing the various co-op modes, particularly onslaught, which is essentially a competitive hoard mode, pitting the players against an endless supply of enemy aircraft for a set period of time to see who could rack up the most kills for the fewest losses. Insanity can ensue if you set the time limit to 30 minutes and select the Spitfire IX, which is stupidly overpowered, and come out the other end having shot down 331 enemy aircraft, and being able to gloat over your less experienced buddies who don't have their own copies of Blazing Angels to build up their skills.

At the time, I remember the back of the game's case showing an advertisement for Blazing Angels 2: Secret Missions of World War 2, complete with cover art depicting a de Havilland Vampire being pursued by a Horton Ho 229, and I thought to myself "looks neat, might get that some day."

High School came and went and I never played the sequel. Time passed, and now the tired 30 year old shell of the young, spry, and charismatic young man decided to buy himself a copy on a whim one day.

So, having heard Japanese pilots saying "You shoot even worse than you fly!" in the voice a 1950s cartoon would have given to any character from Asia a good ten billion times, you are probably wondering: Did they fix the shitty voice acting?

Yes they did. It's not Witcher 3 or anything but you don't want to grab a pencil and forcefully puncture your own ear drums. Baddies generally speak German or Japanese in a manner that seems comparable to, you know, real human speech, rather than say, your racist uncle doing baddy character voices while reading a bedtime story about how the badass Americans blew the squinty eyed Japs to Kingdom Come for being the evil, treacherous bastards they are. So Hooray!

Also, the graphics have gotten an upgrade and generally look cleaner, brighter, and better textured than those of the first game, and just to put a cherry on top, the game has a fun, campy story with a reasonably entertaining cast of characters, even if it does jump the shark from time to time.

Gameplay sees a bunch of updates as well. First off, the player can choose from a selection of aircraft for each level of the single player campaign, a feature that the first game lacks. Second off, through getting kills and completing objectives during each level, the player earns points which can be used to purchase upgrades for the next level, improving the firepower, protection, and speed of all their planes.

So, improvements all around! Go buy the game and have fun right?

Wrong.

This game is perpetually frustrating, though you will keep returning to it like some abused lover seeing the promise the game has. You think to yourself "Well, next level will be better!" over and over and over again. So, where to begin with the game's failings.

Let's suppose you're in a dogfight, and you have a mission objective of, I don't know, escorting your buddies as they escape from a secret Nazi air base. You have to shoot down enemy planes, so, using your understanding of literally every other arcade air combat game you have ever played, you open fire with your machine guns.

Hah, rookie mistake. In Blazing Angels 2, your primary weapon generally sucks. You generally have to chew on enemies for a while to kill them using just your machine guns, and oh, by the way, literally every single plane in the game has the same crappy machine guns as its primary weapon. Instead of having the fun diversity of firepower present in the aircraft of the first game, planes will have 2 or 4 light or heavy machine guns, pretty much never corresponding to the total number of guns on the real aircraft they represent. Flying a Spitfire mark V? 2 machine guns. Flying a Mosquito? 4 machine guns. An IL-2 Sturmovick? 2 heavy machine guns. An Me-262? 2 heavy machine guns. A Lavochkin La-7? 4 machine guns which are wing-mounted for some reason. The major difference between heavy and light MGs, in case your wondering, is that yes, heavy MGs do put out more damage, but overheat after extended firing. And the damage output is still nowhere near as high as that of the hard hitting planes of the first game.

Really, the weapons you have that are worth a damn are pretty much always your secondary armament. Many varieties of secondary weapons are present, such as cannon, high velocity cannon, rockets, missiles, bombs and torpedoes. All of these have limited ammo, which can be replenished by killing enemies with ammunition icons above them. These guys are really what your normal guns are for, getting more ammo for your secondary weapon.

This is very irritating, because whenever you think of a World War 2 dogfight, even in a campy story involving Nazi rocket ships, planes are shooting each other down by rata-tat-tating away at each other with gunfire, not firing anti-tank rockets, or bizarrely slow firing cannon. It just feels "wrong".

The game's control scheme is more or less the same as it was in the first game, but either my skills have degraded to total uselessness, or they've made aiming just a little bit more difficult. And I would like to call attention to the overall weirdness of the Blazing Angels control scheme in general.

In most air combat arcade games that use a controller, there will be 2 option for your controls. In what is often referred to as the "classic" or "arcade" control scheme, 1 control stick will control practically all motion for the plane, and rolling and turning will be rolled into one. Move the analogue stick to the right, and the plane will roll 90 degrees and then turn to the right, and vice versa. In what is often called the "advanced" or "expert" control scheme, the controls more closely correspond to those of a real plane, with separate yaw, roll, and pitch controls.

For whatever reason, both Blazing Angels games try to have both control schemes at the same time. On the Xbox 360 (I don't have a playstation) the left analogue stick behaves like it would in an "arcade" layout, moving the plane up, down, left, and right, but the plane still has roll control from the right analogue stick. If you've been playing Ace Combat 7, or Project Wingman, or IL-2 Sturmovick Birds of Prey (a fantastic and criminally underrated console air combat game btw), you easily forget what kind of control scheme the game has, and you'll have a lot of trouble orienting your plane. It will also result in weirdness like your plane turning very tightly without rolling at all.

Lastly, there's the single player campaign. I haven't played multi-player, given that I have no-one to play it with, and frankly, I don't enjoy the game enough right now to want to play it with someone else. If I could describe the difficulty curve in this game in one word, it would be "punishing", then again you can take my words with a grain of salt because as I said before, I may just suck. That being said, the game gives a couple levels in which you can orient yourself, then immediately flings you into the deep end. The difficulty curve feels quite steep, because most of the time you are fighting against either a punishingly short time limit or defending a target that needs protection and has a very short life expectancy. When that isn't the objective, the new objective is frequently: suppress the defenses of an enemy airfield, land there, abandon the plane you started with for an enemy plane, and then use that plane to complete the next objective. Often times, the plane that you start out with on missions that follow this pattern frequently would have achieved objective #2 just fine, but the game wants to stick you in a JU-88 or a Kyushu J-7W Shinden so just shut up and accept that you only got 3 minutes to fly the Pe-2 or De Havilland Mosquito, just say goodbye to them. Another odd feature, and one that kind of bothers me to be honest is that I would say a majority of the missions in the campaign feature the player flying a captured axis plane by default, and often for no given reason. For example... you have to defend San Fransisco from a combined Nazi-Japanese submarine attack using V-1s and submarine launched MXY-7 Okka suicide planes using an Me-163 Komet rocket fighter which just so happens to have guided air to air missiles. Hang on a minute, a level that involves what now? If you have a story about some pilots carrying out secret missions in remote areas to stop some strange secret weapon from being used or constructed and then say, destroying the paperwork afterword to keep anyone from knowing these missions ever happened, that's one thing, but if there was a giant aerial assault on fucking San Fransisco in broad fucking daylight in front of like 2 million people, I'm pretty sure it would be hard to hide something like that. Isn't that stretching plausibility a little too far? Or did World War 2 look very different in this world?

Some games give you challenge with each level, but leave you wanting more as your skills improve, enticing you with their plot, or giving your work payoff at the end of each level. Others just seem to hit you with a sledgehammer, and you only persevere out a grim determination not to be beaten. This is one of those.

Also, I've noticed its getting difficult to get your hands on original Xbox-360 controllers nowadays, so I find myself shackled to a knockoff which has the most irritating habit of switching itself off if below 3/4ths battery, and subjected to heavy vibration. Another odd feature of the Blazing Angels games is that their level of controller vibration is unusually high. Like, vagina havers could use the controller as an effective sex toy while playing either of these games, and I suppose if you are a determined enough deal hunter, buying a used Xbox 360, controller and copy of Blazing Angels might just be cheaper than a hitachi vibrator, although the hitachi admittedly doesn't use batteries, and either Blazing Angels games will eat the battery of your controller like a motherfucker.

So, if you want a plane game that turns your controller into a sex toy, I suppose you can buy Blazing Angels 2. Otherwise, I wouldn't really recommend it.

#Blazing Angels 2 #air combat games #game review #the commodore reviews another game

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