Nels Wadycki

Nels W

Writes Code, Fiction

  • My Early Noms for Album of the Year

    Nels W

    frightened-rabbit-pedestrian-verse-album-artworksuch-hot-blood-cover

    Released first was Frightened Rabbit’s new album Pedestrian Version

    More recently: The Airborne Toxic Event’s Such Hot Blood (only $5 at the time of this post!)

    I’m not on top of music or anything so I just got both of these albums in July (which comes out to five months late for Frightened Rabbit and a month late for TATE).

    I’m sure there are others that I’m not really thinking of that I might have actually gotten when they came out, but so far, these two really hit the “Nels” sweet spot for the kind of almost-poetry/high-school-poetry lyrics and mostly upbeat arrangements. I think I’m not supposed to like the Airborne Toxic Event because Pitchfork gave their first album a 1.6, but the same guy gave the Childish Gambino album a 1.6, so I think that’s really code for “Don’t tell anyone that I actually like this because it would ruin my street cred.”

    Sure, a lot of the songs on Such Hot Blood are tailor made for performing in arenas, bombastic anthems that build and swell to something grandiose, but guess what, I like stuff like that.

    Also, they did this (an allusion to How I Met Your Mother):
    how-i-met-your-airborne-toxic-event

    So, I mean, come on.

    It’s rare, very rare indeed, that I actually like all the songs on any given album and can just listen to the album straight through without making a playlist to filter out the lower quality songs. Even those songs on Such Hot Blood are not bad. I’d say ‘True Love’ is my least favorite, but the pseudo-folk-Trampled-By-Turtles thing makes up for the fairly grating chorus and the annoying number of times he says “Cause it’s true love.” ‘The Fifth Day’ gets a little self-involved and over-orchestrated in it’s 6-minute playing time, but the beginning build-up feel so raw and genuine that again, it makes up for my minor quibbles with the middle part of the song.

    Now, as for Frightened Rabbit, I feel like their The Midnight Organ Fight and The Winter of Mixed Drinks while both brilliantly titled albums were not wholly consistent in their quality (don’t get me wrong, they’re still really good). (I haven’t heard Sing The Greys or the songs on the EPs, so I can’t speak to that) But Pedestrian Verse is so good that I actually looked up their tour schedule and pretty much immediately bought tickets for their Lollapalooza after show. I go to live concerts even less than I buy music (read: irrationally cheap), so I’m not sure that there’s anything that could speak more highly of an album.

  • The Sci-Fi Keeps Coming

    Nels W

    thor-the-dark-world

    So, at the risk of turning this blog into a full-out “movie” blog… Here’s some more that I didn’t catch in my Summer Movie Preview (and as an update there – I’ve actually seen 2 of the movies on that list, which for me is pretty good because I grew up when movies were $3.25 so paying $9-$12 to see a movie in a theater seems ridiculous). Also not that these aren’t “summer” movies, per se (hence the title referring to Sci-Fi rather than Summer); two of them come out in November bracketing my birthday very nicely.

    Kick-Ass 2
    Pluses: I love Chloe Moretz. She’s awesome. I’ve only ever seen her in 30 Rock and the first Kick Ass and looking at her filmography, I think I might like her less if I were forced to watch the other movies she’s done, but in this context, she’s great. Jim Carrey is pretty much unrecognizable as The Colonel, and it seems like a good role for him. Clark Duke is cool. He was good in The Office and I like his style of humor (from the trailer it almost seems like he’s playing the same guy).
    Minuses: You knew after the first one was a hit, they’d try to do it again… but this time it seems more like a straight up Good-Guy-Bad-Guy type thing as opposed to the kid turning into a superhero and then getting in over his head and having to struggle to be an actual superhero. Lots of other superheroes… could be good, or could suck. Either way, though, it can’t possible be as bad as Super, which I cannot honestly recommend to anyone who doesn’t just absolutely love gratuitous violence. If they’d kept that one to just even a decent level of violence, it could have been as good as Kick Ass (because Rainn Wilson’s character was a unique take on an origin story, and Ellen Page was hilarious as his sidekick). I thought the first Kick Ass was pretty over-the-top, but it almost seemed like Super was made just to be like “No, guys, this is over the top!” KA2 looks like it’s probably more mainstream and therefore will hopefully have a normal amount of unnecessary bloodiness.

    Riddick
    Pluses: Low expectations. I don’t think anyone is really expecting this to be a “good” movie… But it should be as entertaining as any Riddick movie. Well, probably not as good as Pitch Black but better than The Chronicles of Riddick, so by “as entertaining as any” I mean: as entertaining as the average Riddick movie.
    Minuses: You’re taking a pretty big risk if the the only way to escape an alien planet is to tell everyone who wants to kill you where you are in the hopes of capturing one of their vessels.

    Ender’s Game
    Pluses: The book is a Sci-Fi classic and it looks like they’re going to do a good job of adapting. Of course, multiple Academy Award winners and nominees doesn’t guarantee good performances or a good movie, but it can’t hurt. Hopefully they don’t try to big-budget-actionify it…
    Minuses: I’m almost afraid to say I want to see it because, yes, Orson Scott Card is totally anti-gay. Even his attempt at getting people to see the movie was half-hearted at best. To summarize: Hey guys, I still think gay sexual behavior is wrong and should be punished, but since the Supreme Court say it’s okay, then my opinion doesn’t really matter, so go see my movie anyway. Thanks dude. On the one hand, all the people who actually made the movie have already been paid, so boycott won’t really hurt them all that much. On the other hand, a boycott is probably only going to show up as a number on an executive’s spreadsheet where it will drag down the average revenue of the “sci-fi” category and make them less likely to want make more. On the third hand (this is sci-fi, right?), look at all the sci-fi movies that are getting made and one flop probably isn’t going to make that much of a difference. I mean, you’ve already got Upside Down dragging things down… So maybe for my birthday I’ll make a choice between…

    Thor: The Dark World
    Pluses: A cast that reads almost as impressive as Ender’s Game. Obviously there’s less moral elements (in the movie and outside of it), so that’s good for me being able to state my desire to see it but probably less good for the overall quality of the film. It’ll be fun. Probably not as good as The Avengers, but probably as good as the first Thor, which was fun.
    Minuses: To be honest, none. As long as you’ve got the appropriate expectations.

    and

    About Time
    Pluses: It’s about time travel. I’m a sucker for that even when it comes in the form of a romantic dramedy (which is actually in Merriam Webster – wow). It’s not a complete carbon copy of The Time Traveler’s Wife (even though it does also have Rachel McAdams her hair is totally different [and much worse, if you ask me]). About Time is a dramedy – even categorized as comedy and drama on Rotten Tomatoes, while TTW was a Romance/Drama (not sure if there’s a combination of those two words). This time, the guy can actually control the time travel, and I like the set up of conflicts this seems to set up (or at least appears to from watching the trailer). It’s from the guy who did Notting Hill, Bridget Jones’s Diary, and Love Actually, all of which I was far too macho (or just trying to be) to appreciate when they came out, but did enjoy eventually (even in spite of Renee Zellweger’s inability to open her eyes for what seemed like the entire movie; and the fact that Love Actually was a bit over the top and mushy on the romance).
    Minuses: If it doesn’t have any sharpness or roughness to it, the movie could easily slide into romantic drivel. Time travel is hard to get right. The lead guy looks a little bit too bumbling and awkward and unattractive… Even with time travel, I’m not sure I’d believe he could end up with Rachel McAdams (at least not as the perfect woman she’s portrayed as in these movies).

    So there’s that. I hope to have some non-movie related posts soon, but these are so easy since I only have to spend 2 minutes watching a trailer and then write what I think instead of having to document some technical process or something with screenshots and directions, let alone actually thinking deeply about something…

  • Happy Birthday To Me! (Later This Year)

    Nels W

    Ender's Game Display

    Just in time for my birthday!

    Ender's Game Display

  • First Ender’s Game Trailer

    Nels W

    So, I did a summer movie preview just 4 days ago, and now I guess this can count as my fall movie preview because I’m pretty sure this is going to be the best movie this fall:

    If I only had enough money to go to one movie this year, I would be a very poor man indeed, but this would be the movie.

    On a side note related to the summer movie preview post, there is now a trailer for The World’s End which looks super awesome and is easily in contention for the 2nd movie I would see if I only had enough money to go to 2 movies.

  • Scifi Is The New Black (Summer 2013 Movie Preview)

    Nels W

    Summer_2013

    In reading the Redeye Summer Movie Preview, I noticed that SciFi movies are kind of taking over. Now, granted, I filtered the two page spread by movies that I actually want to see, which means that the list is obviously going to be skewed toward sf-nal stuff… but if you look at the entire list, I think you’ll agree that I’ve got most of the movies that will be worth seeing in the following list:

    The Great Gatsby
    Much Ado About Nothing
    The Lone Ranger
    The East
    Star Trek Into Darkness
    After Earth
    Man of Steel
    World War Z
    Pacific Rim
    The Wolverine
    Elysium
    The World’s End

    The first four are certainly not Scifi (though I’m not entirely sure about The East, hence my putting it right before the SF part of the list starts). Let me clear the decks a bit by just saying that I think this is one of the most packed summers in terms of movies that I really, really want to see. There’s 12 right there. And I’m having a hard time deciding which of those I want to see most.

    So, as much as I love Joss Whedon, and while Baz Luhrmann is cool and fun, and Johnny Depp will probably make The Lone Ranger worth seeing… The movie I’ll be most excited to see will almost certainly come from the last 75% of the above list. And while the title of the post makes it seem like it’s going to be about how Scifi is taking over (and maybe it still will be), I am really just going to attempt to decide for myself which one I am most psyched to see… Starting with…
    (more…)

  • Defiance Is What Revolution Should Have Been

    Nels W

    Defiance_Syfy

    After one episode, I had some complaints about NBC’s Revolution (and yes, I tried another episode after that and it was just as hard to watch). But so far, the only thing I really don’t like Defiance is that it’s only available on the web version of Hulu, which makes it much harder for me to find time to watch it. Luckily, Syfy took my advice (in the second to last paragraph of that post) and (according to Wikipedia) are only having 12 episodes in the first season.

    The show starts off in kind of a typical way: Hero and his sidekick run from danger and stumble onto a secure community of survivors. From there they introduce a lot of characters and a lot of potential conflicts between them. For a show that hints at 8 alien races inhabiting Earth alongside humans, I was impressed and pleased with the lack of explanation and “As you know, Bob” going on. Clearly Syfy knows that this isn’t their audience’s first time watching a show with aliens. It also gives them a lot of room to expand on conflicts between the aliens and the humans (since each alien race could have a different issue with Earth’s natives) and also between the aliens themselves. I’m actually more interested to see how that all plays out more than the overarching plot of “Who’s trying to destroy Defiance and why” …

    Also, they totally got me with the “Come As You Are” cover at the end of the second episode. I generally love popular music when used well in TV shows, and this was a cool cover of a great song which fit the idea of the montage it encompassed (almost a little too “hit you over the head with the theme” well).

  • Most Boring Reality Show Ever

    Nels W

    13vatican2-cnd-articleLarge

  • Adobe Flash Mobster

    Nels W

    adobe_flash_monster

    These are the reasons to update Flash?

    • The top 10 Facebook games use the Flash Player.
    • Most of the top video sites on the web use Flash Player
    • Flash Player is installed on over 1.3 billion connected PCs

    That first one is most definitely a reason why I would not want Flash on my computer… The second one… well, as someone who knows about “the web” I know that the top video site has started converting a lot of their videos to HMTL5 compatible in addition to showing them in Flash. (I also know this because I can’t get Flash installed correctly for Firefox on my Linux box at work so I have to open up Chrome any time I want to watch a YouTube video that hasn’t been converted yet; but sometimes they just play and I’m like “thank you HTML5”)

    Finally, the last one… If I wasn’t someone who knew about “the web” I might be scared that Flash is going to connect my computer to 1.3 billion other PCs… Am I going to get hacked because of that? Is this one of those grids? Or does it have to do with the “cloud” I keep hearing about? Facetiousness aside, you would think they could have said “1.3 billion Internet connected PCs” … or “1.3 billion PCs just like yours” …

    Does anyone else feel like Flash is a character in a Game Of Thrones? You may love it, or you may not, but it’s there and it’s a major character… Still you can’t help but wonder if it’s going to be the next person to get beheaded or burned alive…

  • Advertising on turnstiles

    Nels W

    20130214-055442.jpg

    First time I remember seeing that.

  • Last.fm Trains Robot Ears

    Nels W

    In their post on advanced robotics, Last.fm explains how their using “robot ears” to identify music and make recommendations based on that. You can get in on the action by classifying the music yourself using their Robot Ears app and then comparing to what their algorithms came up with. I like the idea because I think (I hope?) I tend to be more interested in the style of music and want to hear more from artists who sound similar rather than just taking socially implied similarities between artists. Though sometimes I do like to put on “Bush” in Pandora and relive the 90’s alternative scene, I think most times I’m actually looking for a new artist that sounds similar to the ones I like, and it will be interesting to see if actual sonic analysis yields better results.