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    Mushroom 11

    Mushroom 11

    Games

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    As life struggles to gain a foothold in a devastated world, a new lifeform emerges from the rubble....

Bridges Burned
Bridges Burned
Annette Dashofy | Mystery
10
10.0 (1 Ratings)
Book Rating
Can Zoe and Pete Solve the Case Before They Burn Bridges?
It all starts with an explosion. One of the few houses in a new subdivision explodes after the residents report smelling gas. While EMT Zoe Chambers isn’t on duty, she rushes to the scene to offer whatever aid she can. While she is there, she stops the distraught owner from rushing in to see if his wife was home. Sadly, the wife’s remains are found in the rubble. The fire investigator also find evidence that the gas leak and explosion that killed her wasn’t an accident. While police chief Pete Adams, Zoe’s new boyfriend, immediately suspects the husband of setting things up, Zoe doesn’t believe it. It helps that she has begun bonding with the victim’s daughter. Both Pete and Zoe dig in their heels, certain that they are correct. Where will the facts lead? Will their relationship be destroyed before the truth is revealed?

With Zoe and Pete’s relationship being fairly new, this mystery really tests them. As always, both are prominent characters, even sharing time as our third person view point characters. That’s a good thing, too, since it allows us to better understand where they are coming from in their arguments and lets us see they both know when they might be wrong or did something stupid. But all this drama is only part of the book. While this might be a bit more of a procedural than the multiple suspect books I am used to reading, we still get plenty of twists and turns to the case and a climax that had me turning pages as fast as I could to see what would happen next. Obviously, Zoe and Pete are strong leads, but the rest of the cast are just as strong. Like the rest of the series, this book straddles the line between traditional and cozy with just a smattering of foul language and a bit more detail than in the books I normally read. Just know that going in, and you’ll be fine.
  
Ultimate Turn On by The Music Machine
Ultimate Turn On by The Music Machine
2006 | Rock
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Album Favorite

Trouble by The Music Machine

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Track

"For me, this is the best guitar fuzz sound on record; it’s absolutely brilliant. I’ve been trying to get that sound and I’ve never got close, I’ve no idea what it is, apparently The Music Machine made their own pedals. They’re well-known to people who are into garage, psych-y stuff and I discovered them via Nuggets or Rubble compilation, or something like that. It’s strange, I love that song - I’m not hugely keen on the vocal but it doesn’t really matter to me on this song, it suits its purpose. It’s like the opposite of The Zombies’ Colin Blunstone’s voice. It’s not sweet and melodic, it’s gritty and punky and not my usual sort of thing but it screams attitude to me. It’s the sleaziest thing I’ve ever heard and it’s very, very inspiring for production. It’s the whole groove of it, the whole thing, but it all comes back to that guitar fuzz sound. With bands like The Beatles there’s so many books that go into the recording techniques, but not so with The Music Machine. Personally, I’ve learnt that the problem with fuzz tones is that, for example, people say you can get the fuzz sound from The Rolling Stones’ ‘Satisfaction’ by buying a Maestro Fuzz-Tone pedal, but I’ve seen countless demo’s of them and it sounds nothing like it, because it all depends on all the elements, like whether the guitar went straight into the board or if it was played through a broken speaker, or any number of things. There’s no way of knowing for sure. Maybe it’s because it was the ‘60s. Things weren’t documented but I still do it now, I get a sound and I won’t make notes on it because it’s like, “Why would I sit there and make notes on exactly what I did?”, so it becomes kind of lost and when people ask, “How did you get that sound?”, I don’t remember. Maybe it’s something that’s meant to happen - almost like you’re not meant to know, for ‘Trouble’ maybe it was the sound of the leather gloves they wore. The Music Machine had a very strange look, I think the singer wore a single leather glove and the rest of them wore roll necks and medallions."

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Final Fantasy: The Spirits Within (2001)
Final Fantasy: The Spirits Within (2001)
2001 | Adventure, Animation, Sci-Fi
I have almost nothing new to add, everything you've heard is true: the animation is almost religiously astounding for the time and even now (in spite of some expected hiccups for the rudimentary motion capture of the time: i.e. speed being an issue - anything that moves above 0.1 MPH has an unsightly motion blur all over it and all the running looks like mall-jogging), CGI wouldn't look this good for years and years afterward but the thing moves at a snail's pace with an oddly apparent avoidance of any sort of fun. Certainly still weird and visually prepossessing enough to get a pass (if this didn't have its unforgettable photorealistic animation it would suck just as hard as any other generic sci-fi fodder, this is home to some truly bracing imagery) - but what the actual hell were they thinking with this writing? All the characters are nonentities in their own story (delivered with similarly boring voice acting by an all-star cast, which most animated films would later replicate directly) and whatever remnants of a story are left behind in the rubble *do* have the potential to be poignant and thought-provoking but are rather just passively mentioned a time or two by way of banal exposition into a mess of things that don't add up to anything more than a stupid story. Can't believe they thought this would work with... anyone (especially fans of the character-driven games given that they turned this into some odd but rather bland alien film for some confounding reason lol) considering all the massive amounts of money they shoveled into it - and minus a few more points for being another tech-heavy future fantasy set in a world that's entirely grey and decrepit. However, the last half hour is some squarely invigorating, enigmatic spectacle that finds an intense beauty in how mind-boggling and glamorous it all is - you'd think the whole thing is always one second away from collapsing into the best of non-western genre surreality. In fact It seems almost unreal in and of itself to be watching something so conventional yet so unrestrained and auteurish. Really needed like eight movies to fully explore these themes but I'm also kind of glad they didn't - half epic and half yawnsville but the epic is more epic than the yawnsville is yawnsville.
  
    Frontline Commando: D-Day

    Frontline Commando: D-Day

    Games and Entertainment

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    Lead the charge on D-Day as the tip of the spear in the largest Allied invasion of WW2! Defeat the...