raycevick posts
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Q&A: January 29th, 2025
Majin Brandon AsksWhen it comes to the general public's opinion on the Halo series overall, how do you feel about the interesting shift to view everything Bungie touched as gold and everything by 343 being worse? Or is my perception wrong, and it was just always like this? Because I swear 2's and 3's campaigns were seen with more mixed reception among the fans, and ODST was more mixed as a game by critics and fans. I could joke it's just kids who grew up with total nostalgia of the Bungie games, but I swear some of these people ...
Plans For The Future
I've mentioned here and there on Patreon having gone on a trip last year, attending a wedding, visiting family, and letting Sparky take me to the big milk.Don't ask.There were many amazing things about the trip that were a welcome change from my usual day to day life, but the part I didn't really process until arriving home was having my own private space. Not waking up to hear business calls, playing music without headphones, and not dealing with the wonders of living among alcoholics.I didn't consciously register this at first...
Recommendations: Starfucker by Slayyyter
Years ago, I heard Fantano describe Billie Eilish's Oxytocinas "if Pharrell Williams made a Nine Inch Nails song." I'd give the same to Slayyyter's Purrthat was my gateway to this album.The rest of the album doesn't fit that description, it ranges from the slow horny goth club vibes of Erotic Electronicto the very steady but beautiful melody of My Bodyand Miss Belladonna.Whichever style happens to be playing, I find myself nodding along regardless. When Pop slaps, it slaps.
Why Was Twitter Addictive?
In 2015, a friend and colleague I've known since I first got a "break" on YouTube via a community channel called "GXPTube" were talking about Twitter one day. I can't recall what the conversation was about, but I think it was about how pointless, silly, and obtrusive the website was.So, we both signed up on the same day with a challenge. We were going to post once a week, and see whoever the long run would post something that'd get more "hits."Now, if I had a time-machine…Well wait, let's not get ahead ...
Recommendations: The Creative Act by Rick Rubin
One of the goals since coming back home was to consume more art across all of its forms I've loved, books included. It's been a hot minute since I've had one on here, and it makes a lot of sense that the one I am recommending, is all about Art.What I'm loving about Rick Rubin's book is that it doesn't overly romanticize Art. Chapters aren't dozens of pages vomiting one dude's take on what good Art is, but instead, one incredibly experienced veteran's takes on the dozens of ways you can channel creativity in a...
Q&A: January 15th, 2025
Dzera AsksWhat video game story made you genuinely depressed after finishing it?Soma.I part of the reason the credits song lives rent free in my brain is every time I hear it, I remember just sitting and staring at the computer screen until it started the post-credits sequence...Which made me even more depressed.Multiple of the bad choices in Mass Effect 3 I find hard to watch, same with many of the ones in Cyberpunk.Hearing Misty be angry ,or Judy crying over voice-mail is just...Rough.Majin Brandon AsksI'm curious about your takes on the ...
Recommendations: Dark City
Welcome to the most fun I've had watching a movie in years.It really shouldn't have taken me so long to get around to watching what's often merely viewed as "The Matrix before The Matrix." This is an almost exact balance of cheese, mystery, over the top, down to earth, fucking fun, and thought provoking.I can't promise this film will do for everyone what it did for me, but by the first five minutes, I said aloud "I'm fucking with this" and not once did that change.Oh, and like Robocop, you'll have fun poi...
What It Is About The 00's?
There's precisely one reaction channel that I actually like, LM Reactions.I'm not an avid watcher, I'm not sure if I've ever even watched a full video of theirs start to finish, I only watch reactions for shows that I've seen to completion, and I skim through them being that… well, I already watched them.I like them though because they're not blankly staring at the screen for forty minutes, while also not talking over every scene every two seconds. They're emotionally invested in the shows they watch, but they'...
Recommendations: Rally
Last year, I recommended a Youtube video that was more accurately, a multi-part three hour documentary about Canada's biggest company.Rallyis quite the opposite.It's a slim ten-minute fictional short film made in Unreal Engine with minimal dialogue, plot, and even events, but sells something with such potential to be taken further in almost any form, be it a Film, Animation, Game, etc, that it remains in my mind as the most memorable of what I've watched these past two weeks....I also won't lie, and say it didn't make me fee...
Q&A: January 1st, 2025
HAPPY NEW YEAR Y'ALLSpeaking for myself, 2024 felt like a bit of a repeat for me of 2023. Tons of personal progress in-regards to... Mental Health: I've not sought a new Councillor after mine moved Provinces, feeling comfortable enough to prioritize...Physical Health: Started writing this Q&A after just signing up consultation forms for specialized clinics.Who I Am: I can tell ya, three years ago, I would've been counting the minutes to leave a Wedding rather than staying till the plastic cups were being collected in the trash, disa...
Recommendations: Obsidian by Northlane
Holy Shift's gonna be happy about this one.Normally, I like to space out recommendations from artists I've highlighted not too long ago, but I also have to acknowledge this is been the album I've been repeating these last two weeks, with even certain songs just being looped for hours.While Northlane are in the "Metalcore" sub-genre, Obsidian is a fusion project mixing together Metal, EDM, Ambient, and even Brit-Pop in songs like Novathat rely almost entirely on vocalist Marcus Bridge's singing, who nails everything throu...
Operation Health
On June 7th, 2017, Ubisoft's Rainbow Six Siege released one of its most… uh, everything Update's in the game's history.Important, infamous, amazing, terrible, dumb, necessary; there's dozens of words in the dictionary that could be argued to perfectly describe this update, which is why I think you can find people both groups mocking it, and ones begging for a sequel. Whatever one's thoughts may be, there is often a conflict in games of all-types between content (the things we play throughin a game) vs core (the things we p...
Recomendations: Robocop (1987)
I thought it was kinda weird to have not watched Aliens or the Star Wars Trilogy until I was 18... meanwhile, Robocop I never watched until two days ago.The main reason I'm recommending it however, isn't that I think it's amazing... I mean, it kind of is in Paul Verhoeven's almost unmatched ability to make you laugh hysterically and churn your stomach with violence that's stillgruesome.No, the main reason I'm recommending is if you're here, you're probably a gamer, and I spotted Deus Ex , DOOM, and Titanfall in j...
Q&A: December 18th, 2024
johnny1248 AsksWhich vocalist would you describe as ''it isn't bad, it's infuriating''I honestly can't think of any... Fred Durst is bad, and it's hilariously entertaining. Duncan Gohl AsksFavorite type of Burger?Hmm... just a good ol' Bacon Cheeseburger for me. However, I love me some Chicken, and I've definitely changed from being that kid who only strictly wanted Bun, Meat, Cheese. Nowadays, I'll basically try anything.Matthew Malone AsksFavorite type of Cake?Man... y'all hungry?Pumpkin Cheesec...
Recommendations: Slut Pop Miami by Kim Petras
One of the lyrics is "I'm a Semen Jesus."Enter this album expecting your IQ to increase after listening, and you should be submitted to a lab for Medical Experiments. Go in wanting a good laugh and nodding to some melodies catchy enough to classify as an infection by that laboratory, and you'll get it in all 24 of this EP's minutes.It's kinda funny because I didn't much care for Kim's previous EP in this now series at all, and yet, with this installment, there's not one track I skipped, in-fact, it might be o...
Hard Mode
There's this fear with meeting friends made over the internet that was very much assumed to me by my family and theirfriends growing up. That these people who you may view as a colleague, friend, maybe even family, will in the real world, turn out to be nothing like who they are when behind the luxury of anonymity and a muffled headset...But I've been doing this for a while now, and I've been lucky enough to meet multiple friends from multiple friend groups all over the world and most recently, all in person in the same place at the...
Recommendations: Spin Rhythm XD
Originally, I was going to recommend a completely different type of game for this week's recommendation, but I want to give it just a little more time to cook in the oven for my thoughts...I don't need to do the same thing with Spin Rhythm XD.The only reason I've stopped after an hour tonight is because I've got an early Dentist appointment in the morning, were it not for that, I'd be spending another hour or three dancing in my chair at the expense of maintaining my combo.It's been 15+ years since I completed DJ Hero, a...
Q&A: December 4th, 2024
Andylad AsksThere is currently a community online client almost complete that allows players of NFS Carbon to play online multiplayer and provides several game improvements as well as adding and connecting the Rockport map! There is a discord server where the devs are constantly posting their progress and it is set to release on Dec 24th. Are you interested in checking it out?I'M SORRY, THE WHAT!?YES.YES, I AM.Duncan Gohl AsksWhat, in your opinion, makes a good Tom Clancy game? Do any of the modern TC games meet the criteria (examples such ...
Recommendations: Spy Game
On a whim, I watched the 2005 Tony Scott "Fuel for Max Payne 3" cloaked as a movie called Domino, starring Keira Knightley, and I absolutely loved it...But it's not a good movie... it's anything but a good movie.That probably won't stop me recommending it one day on the grounds of it perfectly encapsulating what people mean by a piece of art being "2000s." Granted, that could describe a lot of the output Ridley Scott's brother. However, before recommending maybe his worst film, I'm recommending arguably his b...
This Genre Used to Be Ahead
Everyone has that sensation of wishing they hadsaid something, but it's too late. That's the nice thing about writing, you get to do that all the time, and it comes across as if you've always planned to say something when you've said it. Truth be told however, I'm not sure the following is something I could've squeezed into my video about Racing Games, though, it is related…Reading this title, most would probably be thinking about how Racing Games used to be unique graphical showcases for each console generation.3D0 - ...
Update: November 26th, 2024
Hey everyone!Having (not quite) fully recovered from Laryngitis, and archiving everything from my trip to the East Side of North America visiting weddings, friends, and family, I'm back working on all my projects that were started before I left!Though that is the key the word.... Projects.Yesterday in particular, I ended up writing a whole lot for not one video, but three videos, and not like when I was bouncing back and forth on whether or not to make something about Blitz The League, there seems to be a fire behind all of these that's...
Recommendations: Wet From Birth by The Faint
Normally, I like to mix up the recommendations as best as I can. Follow up each post with a different medium, a game, a movie, an album, if I read more, a book. However, last week's Teen Mortgage seemed to have open the floodgates and I've been adding so much music since leaving the Vogue Theater...Not to give the impression that The Faint sounds like Teen Mortgage, in-fact, I'm not quite sure I can specifically define this album, and that's kinda why I love it.It is an absolute roller-coaster from top to bottom with no track so...
Part of the Problem
Thetopic of complacency is something I've often seen discussed in regards to quite heavy subjects, and the struggle with heavy subjects is just that, they're heavy.They're laced with nuances often ignored not even out of ignorance or bigotry, but just time, and the eternal challenge of communicating a convincing argument about a topic in seconds of speech.It's also just something that even the most committed and hardworking activists can't have a raging hate-boner for at all hours of the day. Sometimes we just want to kick b...
Q&A: November 20th, 2024
The_Surviv0r AsksRecently played through Signalis and greatly enjoyed it. Did you ever ended up trying the full game?I did buy it after a conversation with a friend a few months ago reminded me that they're one out of dozens that have recommended it, and rightfully so. I played the Demo before the game came out, and just that short little snippet of the game lives in my head to this day.Holy Shift AsksYou've probably been asked this when it was more relevant – any interest in going through Wanted:Dead? I recently finished it and it fe...
Recommendations: Teen Mortgage - Self-Titled
Should say something that the first thing I'm doing after going to see Death From Above 1979 live in Vancouver, is recommend the band that opened for them!Yes, DFA was still the main reason to go and a band I've recommended and will continue to recommend forever, however, old-school raw-punk is something that's generally been lost to time, and weirdly, something the kids have to pick up on behalf of the legendary names of the past...And Teen Mortgage is doing exactly that.I was very happy to see they're not just a fun live-act, ...
Time
So I finally just took a nap on my flight back home to Vancouver with two-hours left of what's totaling up to be a twenty hour journey, ten of those being stranded in Washington D.C.It's times like these when everyone wishes the E-Cigarette from Metal Gear Solid V was real.I was desperate enough to look up "sleepinginairports.net" to see if there was anywhere in D.C's Reagan that'd allow me to get as close to that in-game device as possible, rather than the asshole design of the airport's seats, that have a tall armr...
Recommendations: Anora
There's many different styles of Acting.There's the scene-chewing over the top antics of Tim Currey in Red Alert 3. The reserved yet moving words of Morgan Freeman in Seven. The endless electricity of Brad Pitt in Snatch. However, Anora's acting across the entire cast is something I can only describe as real.From the pacing, to character development, and revelations within the series of events, Anora is exactly the type of film I've wanted to see more of. Like Challengers, it's not about the world, or the world's savior,...
Q&A: November 6th, 2024
Tucker Legate AsksWhat e-ink tablet do you have, and what writing software do you use on it?Bought a Remarkable 2 after seeing everyone swear that it is notably better than the Kindle Scribe, though looking back, I do wish I at least tried a Scribe to see the differences, because while the Remarkable's pen feel is way better than you're average touchscreen, it's still not paper or even close to it, and the price difference between the two is very significant.I'm slightly tempted to sell it, buy a Free Write Alpha or Traveler, an...
Recommendations: Juiced 2 Hot Import Nights
I'm absolutely the person who completely wrote this game off back at release just from the marketing and subtitle/sponsor alone. Juiced 1 has nostalgia, and was a decent first effort for a first time studio, but couldn't compete with the likes of Need for Speed Underground 2.Juiced 2 meanwhile... it actually can.Featuring customization that's better than most modern games for both your car andcharacter, a fantastic drift mode, pink slips + betting, and even a damage model that allows bumpers to hang on the edges of your vehicle whil...
Recommendations: The Company That Broke Canada
I've never recommended a Youtube Videobefore, although, calling this a Youtube Videofeels a little inadequate, though in its own way, speaks to just how much the landscape of Youtube has changed. I can't imagine telling my 2005 self that twenty years later, I'd be watching a two-parter documentary epic.More than Bobby's mirror-like polished presentation this story itself is just fascinating, pitching a "David vs Goliath" narrative that rather exposes the potential insecurities fueling David's ambition, especially whe...
