Rimbo

I was going to say something snippy like, "Well, who else would pimp for Peavey" but 1. the guy can rock, 2. Ed eventually worked with Peavey on the 5150, and 3. after watching a video this week on "how to get the right bass tone" I've regained respect for my bass amp and its 8-band EQ.

RIP. Tough month.

Me and your wife are on the same page, except I'm ranting. I've only been this angry at a piece of fiction one other time: After reading Heinlein's alleged novel, Number of the Beast. I tossed the paperback across my wife's living room when I finished. Like I said above, the critics only saw the first 4 episodes. I saw promise and potential at that point, too. It was only when the 7th episode dropped that I realized it wasn't "mystery," it was a writer who had no idea how to write a story of any kind. After episode 6, I thought it could be improved by making it a single feature-length film. Now I know better. There's no saving writing THIS bad. Last night, my son and I watched the direct-to-Netflix J-Lo thing Atlas. It's flawed and predictable; it has some really good things (great references to Titanfall, which was the only reason he was interested; J-Lo in yoga pants, who impressed my boy even though she's older than his mother; and the bit in Act 2 when Atlas and Smith are getting to know each other is some great, not good, dialogue). And every time we came across something trite or predictable, I'd mutter, "Still better than the Acolyte." Because it fucking IS: At least something trite and predictable is COHERENT! You get no money for betting on what happens at the end, but at least it makes SENSE. I'm so mad at this show because in the hands of someone with even BASIC competence in writing it would have been GOOD.

I mean, could be an NT in a 3-4.

Seeing a HUGE disparity between the audience and critics on e.g. Metacritic, and reading through a few, it's clear why: They only screened the first 4 episodes to reviewers. Sneaky fucking trick: Don't show the critics what a goddamn mess the show became in the second half. At least through the first four episodes, there was hope the story might actually become coherent.

Yep. Lee Jung-jae's acting and some well-made fight scenes rounded out the handful of good things about the show. But man... it's impressive that someone actually got paid to write that, when writers with basic competence are starving.

Still a better live-action Star Wars than The Acolyte.

Oh, yeah, that was certainly idiotic. If the writing had done ANYTHING to establish that she was powerful... or being seduced by the dark side... Fuck it, include that. It's still the worst. Include the animated series, too.

That shit is actually well established canon, though. Red lightsabers turn red by torturing other-colored khyber crystals into "bleeding" red. Ahsoka got her white ones by healing an Inquisitor's red saber crystals. As dumb things go, that doesn't even register.

The whole series is like a buffet of bad writing techniques. None of the characters' behavior makes sense at all. Which might have been somewhat forgivable if the story were any good! What even was that plot? It wasn't a rise, it wasn't a fall, it wasn't "man in a hole," it wasn't Cinderella, it wasn't a mystery. It was like one of those stories your kid writes (or you write as a kid): I mean. God. As bad as Episode 9 was, at least it had a mostly coherent story; "Somehow, Palpatine returned" is iconically bad, but at least the movie has a beginning, middle, and an end, you know why people are doing things mostly even if they're sometimes stupid or the reasons for them aren't ever properly explained. You can enjoy the movie, if you try not to think about some of the plot holes, ignore how stupid the twists are (She's a PALPATINE!), it more or less makes sense within itself and has some really cool SFX like that lightning blast from Palps at the end. This is just... UGH! Incoherent and ... I am literally angry at the time I spent watching it.

Honestly, you can stop watching after the lightsaber fight.

On the flip side, there was The Hit, with that guitarist with the transparent green guitar. They were hardworking, but they had nothin'. I think they got signed to a label simply through union rules/seniority.

Is that who that was? I just figured it was yet another loose end.

We're #1!

What y'all have is too much money.

lemme guess if the one part you thought was cool was the same part I thought was cool:

ended up getting pizza for lunch, myself

Welp. There's 4 hours of my life I'll never get back.

☝️ That. Can't go wrong with em, other than the pads wearing out and needing replacement after a few years. You can spend more, but there's diminishing returns, I think.

We were so naive back then. The only fencing I engaged in was with actual swords in Bellmont Hall.

Yes! That was it!

I need an answer to this, too. There was one other place I recall, just below the Castilian? Slightly better and slightly more expensive than Gumby's (but not much), $4 for a medium. I don't remember Gatti's pizza being good, just that a student could get a LOT of food on MLK for not very much money.

It's not just the energy on stage that made Dave great. It's the vision for the band and the drive he had BEHIND the scenes. The world is absolutely filled with musicians who are absolute God-tier that toil in obscurity, but you never hear from them. Quick: Name three famous oboe players. Can you even name one? And yet the oboe is one of the most difficult instruments to play, a key piece of every symphony. The average city symphony oboeist will outplay every famous guitarist you know on insanely hard parts three days a week before an audience of sleepy pensioners, and you can't name one. Ed and Al were going to be musicians, and they likely would've toiled away in obscurity, this rumor only a handful might have heard of, doing magical stuff in Pasadena back rooms... "What was his name, Edgar Van Hellig or something?" if it hadn't been for Dave. D ave had the vision of stardom, saw what Ed was doing, knew it had to be HIM that got him there, and basically conned his way into the band. It was Dave who put on the glam persona, who knew all the 40s dance hall tunes, who told the band to ditch the 6-minute long metal covers for 3-minute shuffles. When Gene Simmons funded a demo, only to try and "steal" Ed away, it was Dave that kept the band together. When the label showed no interest in that demo, it was Dave who circled the wagons, picked everyone back up and told them, we're still going to do this, we're GOING to make it. And you gotta remember; nobody was interested in Van Halen's style. They weren't Bad Company nor the Bee Gees. They didn't have any special connections, no cousin working for a big label. I always thought the sloppiness was a creative choice. Like the weird chords of Larry Lelonde or Mike Anthony playing the most boring basslines ever, they can actually play if they wanted to, but the style demanded something else.