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Oh music, how much time I waste listening to it. Hours of listening, and hours of analyzing. I have come to several items that is killing music.

First is piracy, people downloading songs is totally destroying sales. People no longer buy CDs and instead just download songs. People hear a song on the radio and instead of supporting the artist and buying the CD they fucking download the song. A common argument against this is “I don’t want to pay for a whole CD when I just want one song.” Well there is your fucking problem, listen to the full album, you will probably enjoy it if you like the band. That logic is fucked beyond belief. I can say I can’t afford a Ferrari, but that doesn’t give me the right to go ahead and steal one. Because of piracy, the record labels increase the cost of the CD, which actually makes less people buy it. It’s a stupid strategy but the label has to pay the band somehow.

Even legal downloading is killing music a bit. Artwork is no longer needed, people wouldn’t just sit around and look at a picture in their fucking iTunes but they would look at the CD when they put it in their CD player or whatever. Concept albums wouldn’t work online, it’s like listening to one Pink Floyd song from The Wall and not listen to the entire thing, it’s fucking pointless. Song running orders also don’t work, forget the songs that flow into each other. You are just going to listen to what you like, instead of being exposed to new music.

Next problem is the radio. Yes, the source of the problem is the place music comes from. The main problem with the radio is that it plays stuff that people WANT to hear, otherwise it would have no profit. But playing stuff that people WANT to hear limits the variety of stuff that people DO hear. Sometimes when I actually do listen to the radio, I hear the same song twice, about 20 minutes apart. Large variety of music my ass. All that plays is the same shit over and over again. I used to listen to The Edge 102.1 live at clubs. Then I noticed they play the exact same songs on those nights, except in different order. That is essentially what the radio is, a random playlist of songs that you already heard. If you are like me, you don’t even like pop, and you wish that you heard some metal on the radio.

The next point is singles, in order to make money bands have to release a song that people will be exposed to and be played on the radio. This is known as a single and most of the time it is the most generic song on the album. Now singles are good to introduce someone to a band but chances are that the single sounds totally different than the rest of the album (unless it is Dragonforce.) Bands, also sometimes concentrate too much time and energy into making a single instead of making the rest of the album good. Once again this is because of piracy, if a band can make you love one of their songs, then maybe you will actually BUY their album.

Next is people being worried about their popularity, these people are known as hipsters. They are worried about their musical taste being made fun of so they listen to whatever is popular. Therefore the bands that are already on the top 40 become even more popular while bands that are unpopular become ignored. Some of the bands I like actually skip Toronto, and the general area due to a lack of popularity.  While they sell out shows in Europe. The problem is not the band sucking, it’s Europe’s open mind about music.

The last thing is people being genre fags. As soon as something is a different genre than what people are used to, they dismiss it. I love metal, but I have to admit that there are good rap, techno, or even pop songs. I find that metalheads complain about genres a lot. “Oh, I don’t like Metallica’s new album because it is not brutal enough.” Fuck, just because Metallica doesn’t sing about Satan and use excessive distortion doesn’t mean it’s not a good album. I guess if you want the same shit over and over again you should listen to Dragonforce.

And that, is my 70th blog post. Enjoy.

So we currently are ”in a recession.” On the radio I heard that people were tipping less in restaurants and eating out less, spending less money and being cheap fuckers. Awesome, they are taking more money away from the economy and making it worse. Now let’s face it, unless you got fired you still have the same wage. So why are you being cheap if you are not being affected?

So for Final Fantasy 13 Square Enix confirmed that there will be no Random Battles like we all remember in FF1-10. Now while this might be a bit more “realistic” for me it just means I have to walk around more. Back when I played Final Fantasy X I used to run around in a circle and literally kept fighting enemies. This was awesome because I leveled so damn fast. When I got Final Fantasy 12 I learned that I can’t do that anymore. So I ended up beating the game at a pretty low level.

The excuse Square gave for the non-random battle system is to make the player know when he’s going to get in combat and to let him avoid it. Now in Final Fantasy 12 I had a really hard time to “avoid” the enemies. And walking around in battle didn’t help me with jack shit. Final Fantasy 7: Crisis Core combined elements of FF12 and FF7 and made it totally awesome. Random battles, and the ability to run around during the battle. But unlike FF12, walking around in battle actually made a difference, where you can dodge attacks based on your reflex.  Now this made the game incredibly easy. It was a near perfect battle system, but perfect for the PSP.

Are random battle really that annoying? If you actually LIKED RPGs back in the day, you shouldn’t have a problem with random battles. However if you are a casual fag that is trying to get into RPGs through Fable then you won’t like Random Battles. There is a fucking differenc between action-RPGs and just RPGs. I am a fan of both, but I like the difference they have.

So I don’t rant alot about Playstation, mainly because it’s a pretty solid company that doesn’t screw me over. But it seems that people on the forums just love kissing Sony’s ass.  Now this might be alright if you know what the hell you are talking about, but if you are a dumbfuck you should shut up. Below are some examples of conversations I had on the Playstation forums.

TOPIC: PS3 Price Needs To Drop // I agree
Some guy: People don’t want the price of the PS3 to go down, it’s fine the way it is
Me: The sales of the PS3 would increase after a price drop, the PS3 was a great value at first because it was cheaper than a Bluray player. However, for the price of a PS3 now, I can buy an Xbox 360 and a Bluray player. I understand that the amount that Sony makes on ever PS3 would drop, but they would later make up for it by selling more games, and more accessories.

TOPIC: What the PSP2 needs
Some guy: The PSP2 needs to have PS3 quality graphics, it needs to get rid of a physical disc drive and it would be replaced with downloable only games. It should also have a touch screen, The PSP2 does not need Bluetooth or Wireless G/N, B is perfectly fine.
Me: You guys are demanding way too much from the PSP2. It is not going to have PS3 quality graphics. Downloadble only games would  make the PSP2 a bad choice for kids who do not have a credit card, or those people who are too paranoid to use one online. The PSP2 does not need a touch screen, it would not improve gameplay at all and the last thing I would want is there to be greasy fingerprints all over my wonderful screen. The PSP only has wireless B. The range on it is terrible and it would be nice to have at least G. Even though PSP games do not require more than the B bandwidth limit, it would be a great thing to have for future use.

TOPIC: Gran Turismo 5 should not have damage
Some guy: I would hate it see my brand new Ford GT being smashed up by someone who doesn’t know how to drive (are you talking about yourself?) or by some AI. Did you ever play GRID? It was impossible to finish a race without damage.
Me: You are missing the point the Gran Turismo is the ‘real’ racing simulator, and it should be the most realistic one out there. Why should other games like Forza have damage but not Grand Turismo? I would agree with you that a damage system would make the game harder, but remember that in Grand Turismo we have pit stops, so you won’t be throwing your controller at the screen after your car dying in a 2 hour race.

TOPIC: Metal Gear Solid Touch
Me: Metal Gear Solid Touch looks like a terrible game.
Some guy: How do you know that if you have never played it?
Me: After playing games for most of my life, I know what I would enjoy from a game. After looking at Metal Gear Solid Touch, I put it under the railshooter genre and thought that I could play the exact same game, for free and win an iPod on a Myspace ad.

So Microsoft released a public beta of Windows 7 a while ago, I used it and it was fucking awesome. Yet, I hear people complaining how it is shit just because “Vista is shit.” Correction faggot, if you actually bought a good computer Vista outperforms XP in most situations. DirectX 10 is superior to DX9, and it was actually made for current computer configs instead of XP which wasn’t made for what we have now.

Deep down, the ‘hate’ for Vista comes from Apple who keeps promoting how Vista has bugs and errors. I have no idea what fucking errors it has because I have never gotten one yet. Here is a tip, get good hardware and update your drivers. Suddenly all your issues will be gone. Faggot.

But if you are cheap faggot, I suppose Windows Vista sucks. But I got news for you cheapfucks out there. Windows 7 also runs good on shit hardware! Rejoice, your Pentium 4 with 1GB of RAM will no longer need to run XP, and you can finally enjoy a new operating system.