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"I didn’t want to have a theme in the records I picked. It’s a record I’ve listened to a lot lately. One of my children is 7 years old and he’s been learning a lot about Greek history recently and picking up tidbits of information. He was saying to me that he really wanted to hear some Greek music. This is not what he wanted to hear. He wanted to hear some folk music, not some weird shit. He wanted: ‘Ops la! Da da da da!’ Some cheery Greek dance music. I stumbled onto this. I asked him if he wanted Greek or ancient Greek and he said ‘ancient’ because it sounded cool. But this is incredibly trippy. It feels like a play. You don’t know where the down beat is for most of the songs. I have never figured out what about it is actually Greek. It was recorded by Spaniards in the 70s. Whether it's real or impressionistic, I don’t care. I just really like it. There’s a lot of haunting stuff in it. I’ll have the record on late at night when everyone else has gone to bed. It’ll be playing and you’ll hear the voice speaking Greek and squeals. I’ve really grown to love it and know certain pieces. I know they have made other records and I want to get them"

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The Good, The Bad and The Queen by The Good, The Bad and The Queen
The Good, The Bad and The Queen by The Good, The Bad and The Queen
2007 | Alternative, Pop, Rock
(0 Ratings)
Album Favorite

"I never really listened to Blur much or many of the other Damon Albarn projects, but I was on tour and kept running into Dangermouse. He was on tour and we were playing a lot of the same festivals. He may even have given me a copy of this record. I remember being in Adelaide in this lonely hotel, drinking a bottle of red wine alone at sunset and listening to this record and being completely mesmerised by it. I love the whole thing. I love Dangermouse’s glitchy, hip-hop Beatles production ideas. It’s just a really great recipe: the whole thing. I spoke to him about making that record but I almost don’t want to know what it involved because it’s so magical to me. I’m totally into Paul Simonon’s bass playing. Even though it’s not a reggae record, courtesy of him it has some of that kind of soul. And Tony Allen’s drumming is wonderful. It almost sounds like military drums. It’s very angular. It doesn’t swing. It sounds like ‘Let’s attack, let’s attack.' At the heart of this record, you have really simple rock & roll performances, but the production brings a lot more detail to it. I’ve worked pretty briefly with Dangermouse on something in the past. I enjoy his personality a lot and I’d sure as hell like to work on a record with him one day."

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Piranha 3D (2010)
Piranha 3D (2010)
2010 | Comedy, Horror, Mystery
5
6.3 (18 Ratings)
Movie Rating
Kind of great, definitely awful
Looking for a silly, average, stupidly gory horror film? You could do a lot worse than Piranha 3D.

This movie is never going to be considered a horror great, not even close. It's cheesy, it's brimming with awful acting (except Elisabeth Shue, we love Elisabeth Shue), and it's completely brain dead, and in spite of all of this, Piranha 3D knows exactly what it is, and just waves it in our stupid entertained faces - it's a lot of fun.

The build up to the ridiculous finale is filled with a lot of one dimensional characters that are hard to care about, but has enough sudden gore (with some pretty nice practical effects for the record) to keep you interested.
They even throw in Christopher Lloyd just being a perfect bat-shit crazy version of himself, because why the hell not.

For the most part, it's all very standard and pretty average. But that aforementioned finale....Christ.
The final 20 minutes is gratuitous and then some.
The audience is just assaulted by outrageous violence, enough to keep you firmly grasping just how silly this film is...it's kind of glorious, and the whole thing deserves it's place in the infamous so-bad-its-great hall of horror fame.

It's dumb, but it's entertaining. A must for anyone who fancies a braindead popcorn horror now and again.
  
Mansions of Madness: Second Edition
Mansions of Madness: Second Edition
2016 | Adventure, Exploration, Fantasy, Fighting, Horror
Really in-depth adventures and well made (0 more)
The app doesn’t always work properly (0 more)
Want to play more!
Despite the price tag, I took the plunge on this one. I own the first one and thoroughly enjoyed it, but the lengthy rules put quite a few people off that I was playing with. If you have the patience, then once you’ve learnt the rules then he game goes a lot quicker. This particular edition attracted me as the app makes learning the rules a lot easier. Ive played the shorter adventure twice already and i am keen to do the longer ones if i can get the people to play, although I’m pretty sure you can actually play 1 player. The figures in the game look amazing and all the house/scene tiles are nicely illustrated.
The downside for me is that the longer adventures seem to take a LOT longer than it states on the app which usually leads to it overrunning and a non-completion of the game. When we went to return to the game, the app had deleted where we were, which was frustrating. The app sometimes crashed and reset, but in general it worked smoothly. But saying that, the app really encourages players who aren’t as into board games as I am, meaning I could enlist more players at Christmas time XD.
  
A good and extremely informative read about the female computers at NASA who were behind a lot of the theory behind space flight, and were integral to getting rockets into space and to the moon.
I did enjoy reading about these women, but I did find some of it extremely heavy going with a lot of the information being around maths and science. But it was a lovely read to find out more about the women who have been hidden for so long and not had the credit and recognition that they deserve in the history books.
I will say, that this may be one of the only times that I have actually preferred the film to the book. And I think that might have been because it flowed better as a story rather than how Margot Lee Shetterley presented the facts. I think the film showed just how much the women had to endure with segregation and made it a lot more shocking than reading it in the book. While it was shocking in the book the extent of things, I don’t think it quite hit as hard as seeing it on screen.
But overall, a very interesting book if you want to learn more about how these women helped shape space travel as we know it today.
  
The Hurricane Wars
The Hurricane Wars
Thea Guanzon | 2023 | Romance, Science Fiction/Fantasy
8
8.0 (1 Ratings)
Book Rating
I think I came at this book from a completely different angle than all the 1-3 star reviews I’ve seen, because I thoroughly enjoyed it! The world building was perfectly done - I believed in these places, customs and conflicts. The magic element was exciting, and Talasyn’s journey to learning how to control and use her magic was fascinating.

And then there’s Talasyn’s love interest. Alaric uses a magic that’s the opposite to Talasyn’s - dark to her light. When their magic accidentally merges during a battle and creates a new, immensely powerful magic, Alarics interest is piqued. Talasyn hates Alaric and his kingdom - or does she?

There’s a lot of sexual tension going on in this book, and Alaric and Talasyn have a rather combative relationship. There was a part of me that just wanted them to sort it out, but there’s a lot of water under the bridge between these two, so it’s understandable.

So, I’m looking forward to the next book for a lot of reasons: there’s the “will they/ won’t they; whether Alarics father will ruin everything or not; whether the continents will survive the ensuing natural disaster; whether Talasyn will harness her powers in time; what’s going to happen to Talasyn’s friends?!
So many questions and I’m just going to have to wait!
  
Mary I: Queen of Sorrows
Mary I: Queen of Sorrows
Alison Weir | 2024 | Fiction & Poetry
9
9.0 (1 Ratings)
Book Rating
I always feel that Mary I gets a lot of bad press. She’s remembered for her bloodthirsty streak (aka Bloody Mary), for being a strict Catholic and for marrying a foreigner - and a Spaniard at that! Oh, and she was a woman at a time when women weren’t believed to be capable of ruling a country in their own right.

Alison Weir is writing a work of historical fiction, but she has done her research. Of course, a lot of Mary’s story could be open to interpretation, and we’ll never know her exact inner thoughts, but she wrote letters and people wrote things down about her at the time. And personally, I really like Weirs interpretation. She makes Mary a human being, with thoughts, loves, hates and responsibilities. The period in history is described so well, that the reader can understand why Mary had such an extreme reaction to those who wouldn’t convert to Catholicism. And, well, Elizabeth I killed a lot more people than Mary ever did, so 🤷🏼‍♀️

I found the chapters on Mary’s childhood really interesting and very sad. What a traumatic childhood she had.

So, if you enjoy historical fiction and want to find out more about Mary I, then this may well be the book for you too. A totally absorbing read!
  
Westworld  - Season 1
Westworld - Season 1
2015 | Sci-Fi
Characters (2 more)
plot
That season finale
dragged along at times (0 more)
Though a remake it is still such a unique concept.
Westworld started off as being just interesting enough for me to keep coming back for more but at the same time I didn't fall in love with it as fast or as hard as a lot of other people did, but by the season finale I was so hooked even though I guessed the major plot twist part way through the season that the thought of waiting for season 2 was heartbreaking.

The concept of the show is such a unique idea and I love how it shows people at their worst when they have free reign of their own stories, there are a lot of plot twist and even though I figured out most of them it really didn't takeaway from the show at all.
  
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Awix (3310 KP) rated Fisherman's Friends (2019) in Movies

Mar 20, 2019 (Updated Mar 20, 2019)  
Fisherman's Friends (2019)
Fisherman's Friends (2019)
2019 | Comedy, Drama, Musical
Punishingly trite, manipulative and formulaic (not very) based-on-a-true-story rom-com melodrama. Jaded urban over-achiever finds himself stranded in remote rural community, learns to appreciate the value of The Important Things in Life; meanwhile a crew of hairy fishermen sing songs with lyrics like 'Nacker-nacker-toory-ay'. Cornwall and its inhabitants are arguably patronised a lot.

Utterly predictable and not very funny (well, we did laugh a lot during the bit with the funeral, but we're not very proud of that), the script overdoses on feelgood platitudes while not bothering all that much about things like characterisation or internal logic. The music is not that bad (if you like that sort of thing), but sheesh, you can go and buy a CD for that. In the end this is a sort of lobotomised version of Local Hero with added folk music.
  
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Ashley Wold (5 KP) rated A Court of Wings and Ruin in Books

Jan 31, 2018 (Updated Jan 31, 2018)  
A Court of Wings and Ruin
A Court of Wings and Ruin
Sarah J. Maas | 2017 | Romance, Science Fiction/Fantasy, Young Adult (YA)
7
8.8 (113 Ratings)
Book Rating
FEELS (2 more)
Action-packed
Court of Dreams banter
Melodramatic/cheesy/repetitive writing (3 more)
Character development overall isn't as satisfying
Feysand smut isn't as interesting, feels excessive
Some of the plot feels forced
I'm conflicted about this book. I definitely liked it better than ACoTaR, but ACoMaF was so incredible that I had high expectations for the third book, and some parts of it just fell flat.

The first bit pacing is a bit slow, but picks up. There were times I felt the writing was a bit cheesy and/or melodramatic, and at times repetitive. For the second book, there was a lot of sexual tension, but in this book it just seems like excessive sexy times since they're already together. A lot of the plot felt forced.

Don't get me wrong, I still enjoyed reading this book! But it definitely felt more like a "guilty pleasure" read.