Exfanding Your Horizons on YouTube

It's taken almost four years, but this humble little blog finally has its own YouTube channel. Before you get all excited--no, we're not really posting any content. Right now, it's really just a place for me to assemble playlists of other people's video game music without cluttering up my GeminiLaser channel. However! We've at least reserved the channel name so that, should we ever decide to make videos, we won't risk having to settle on whatever goofy approximation of our name hasn't yet been claimed, like "Expanding."

Currently on the channel are two Mega Man Megaplaylists, forming literally half a day's worth of music from Mega Man 1-10, Mega Man I-V (Game Boy), Mega Man & Bass (technically Rockman & Forte, the Japanese SNES-equivalent with the same tunes but better audio), and Mega Man: The Wily Wars. Plans are in place to add playlists for Gradius, Metroid, and at least one or two other series before I remember that I'm neglecting a half-dozen other side projects I should probably be working on instead. On the plus side, all the content here has already been created; putting together a couple playlists shouldn't take too much time, right?

This particular project came about as a response to the relative disorganization of video game music on YouTube. Entire soundtracks are posted without being grouped into playlists; finding playlists on people's channels is a chore; titles, descriptions, and search tags are a mess; sound quality is all over the place...seriously, it's like YouTube lets people upload whatever the heck they want with no quality control whatsoever. Rather than continue to sift through ugly search results and bookmark playlists whose URLs keep changing for some reason, I finally decided to construct my own comprehensive playlists--ones that I could launch and leave alone for hours at a clip, and ones that other VG music aficionados might find useful.

I'm open to suggestions as always, but until such time as we start posting actual content, this is one side project that's truly just for my own entertainment. Still, I hope you get some enjoyment out of it all the same.

Here's the link once more: http://www.youtube.com/user/Exfanding

Sunday Spotlight: Netflix Recommendations

With nothing particular in mind to spotlight this Sunday, I'd like to share a few quick recommendations of things my wife and I have recently watched on Netflix:

Mystic Pizza (1988)

This seemingly predictable story of three girls working at a Connecticut pizza joint ended up being a pleasantly unconventional, comedic, and heartwarming tale of love and friendship. And pizza. I realize that's about the most generic description of a movie anybody could possibly write (seriously, "heartwarming tale of love and friendship"?), but it's a cut above the average...whatever category of movie this is...because the characters are believably human. It took a little while for me to get invested in it, but we ended up giving it a 4/5, though I could have been persuaded to settle on a 3/5 instead.

What Women Want (2011)

This Chinese remake of the 2000 Mel Gibson/Helen Hunt film by the same name is an almost verbatim retelling of the original movie (as I remember it, anyhow), but there's more than enough unique flavor brought to the table by the cultural and casting differences to make this not only a worthy remake, but an enjoyable movie in its own right. There's a fun chemistry between the two leads, and the supporting characters are amusingly quirky, but triple-threat actor Andy Lau really sold me on the film--whether dancing, singing karaoke, or emoting dynamically, his sheer force of talent and personality got me to like him not just as his character, but as an actor--I'd easily watch another of his films simply because he's in it, and that's not something I can say about more than a dozen or so actors. We also gave this one a 4/5.

Cosi (1996)

Organizing the patients of a mental institution to put on an opera by Mozart sounds like something with equal potential to be touching, hilarious, or incredibly uncomfortable, depending on how it's handled. Fortunately, this Australian film does a good job of balancing the first two and somewhat minimizing the third, although it takes a while for the momentum to get going and the humor to fully develop. I was inclined to give this a 3/5, but everything builds up to a riotous conclusion, complete with what might be the most wonderful post-credits tag we've ever seen in a movie...which is what ultimately swayed us to also give this one a 4/5.

I picked this one out after seeing Colin Hay in concert and being curious about his film and television appearances, but it was an added bonus to see the actor who played Faramir in Lord of the Rings alongside him as a fellow patient of the mental institution (which, of course, we didn't realize until after the fact).

We're Still Here

We haven't forgotten about the blog, I promise. Despite all but completely abandoning our new posting model, and despite Alex's extended leave of absence, we're still here. I'm working on GameCola stuff, and Alex is working on literally every other thing on the face of the planet there is to do.

It's how I feel about Morrowind sometimes, with all the sidequests I pick up--"Hey, aren't you supposed to be out saving the world?" "Yeah, but first I've gotta solve this murder mystery and deliver this clay pot to somebody and follow a magical white guar into the hills." Writing for Exfanding is in our quest journals, but we're devoting more attention to other things at the moment.

Alex promises (and you can quote him on this) to return in a week or two or three; I promise (and you shouldn't quote me on this) that I'll at least continue with Sunday Spotlight and a minimum of one post somewhere else during the week in the meantime. That's our new new posting model. I.e.: subject to change whenever we feel like it.

It's refreshing, in a way, to not be constrained by a regular posting schedule. Conforming to a daily deadline for over three years was a great help in keeping us sharp, in practice, and dedicated to continuing this blog. Even if we go a few days at a time without posting nowadays, we've developed enough discipline to not let a few days turn into a week, a month, a year, and another abandoned blog. Would it be easy at this point to casually stop posting and let the blog fade out on its own? Sure. But we've got plenty more stories to tell, lots more fandoms to share, and a blog birthday coming up that we're definitely not going to miss.

And Alex still owes me his half of the Year in Review for 2011, so I'm not letting him go without that.

Even if you've been following us from the beginning, chances are good at least one post slipped by you at some point; we've got nearly four years of posts in the archives, and these frequent lulls between posts are a perfect opportunity to get caught up, and to marvel at how much we've changed over the years (for better, for worse, and for different). There's even one or two posts that I haven't read, because I'm holding off until I've read or watched whatever it is that Alex is spoiling in said posts. Who knows what you'll find?

Aside from the obvious, of course. You'll find almost four years of posts.

We're open to suggestions about posting topics, too, so feel free to toss some ideas our way. So, until next time...

Sunday Spotlight: Jonathan Coulton

If you recall my PAX East 2010 Recap, you know that, at least in one point in my life, geek musician Jonathan Coulton was a name to be spoken with disgust. Despite an agreeable musical style and clever lyrics about mad scientists and Swedish furniture stores, I found too many of his fun-loving songs to have undertones a little too dark or depressing for my tastes...but more importantly, his music had been completely ruined for me by venomous hecklers who, in my mind, were indicative of who Jonathan Coulton was and what kind of fans he attracted.

In other words, I wanted to have nothing to do with him or his music. Except "Mr. Fancy Pants." That song was awesome.

I owe much of my current tastes in music to what Pandora has introduced to me, and once again, I have Pandora to blame (or thank; I'm not sure yet) for reintroducing me to Coulton's music in a way that neither made me angry nor caused me to look down on him as a person because of the way I had been introduced. A few of his songs came up on my playlist here and there, and Pandora's vast knowledge of the kinds of songs I do and don't like were supremely helpful in picking out all the tunes in his repertoire that are up my alley. Not the zombie song; not anything that's fun on the surface but makes you feel bad about the human condition if you think about it too hard--all the songs that made me laugh, smile, and want to sing along the way Paul and Storm did at their part of the PAX East concert.

In other words, I gradually found myself liking Jonathan Coulton. Whoa. I still wouldn't call myself a fan, but I like enough of his songs now to not be an anti-fan. So there's that.

For your entertainment, here's a sampling of his music if you're unfamiliar with it (or just want to listen to it again):