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May 6, 2010

The Greening explodes with amazing music in The Last Tibetan Midnight

Filed under: Music-Reviews — Tyler @ 7:36 pm
The Greening - Will Loving

Will Loving:Singer/Guitarist The Greening

I’ve listened to The Greening for the past 5 years. The band is a combination of Progressive Rock, Pop, Psychedelic Rock and other innovative musical styles. One thing that I’ve come to expect from the band is musical satisfaction. It doesn’t matter if you are at one of their live shows at Grant and Green in San Francisco, or if you are listening to one of their albums. The Greening delivers. And their latest album, The Last Tibetan Midnight is available for purchase of hard copy or in digital format from Amazon.com. This album is 44 Minutes and 25 seconds of sheer audio deliciousness. I put The Last Tibetan midnight in my car’s CD Player and the song “Black Lotus” came on and within 1 minute and 30 seconds I was having a time warping psychedelic experience. I thought I had listened to several tracks of music. I was engrossed in the song so much that it felt like the song was taking me on a sonic adventure. Fortunately I wasn’t distracted from my driving so I stayed safe while dropping books off at the library. But I hadn’t felt such a pleasurable time altering experience while listening to music since I heard “Cinema” by Yes. That first song made me excited for the rest of the album and it truly sounded fresh and exciting.

The next song, “Belong With Me” sung by Karl Meischen, was quite different from “Black Lotus” it had an almost 50’s love song feel to it and it was quite beautiful. Listening to, “Belong With Me” made me realize that there was going to be a lot of variety in The Last Tibetan Midnight. The production value in “Belong With Me” is superb. It sounds very intimate and yet full at the same time. The song captures an old song feel with high fidelity sound quality. This is the kind of song you can listen to while slow dancing with a cherished love of your life. Also the drumming done by Nick Tatro is excellent and keeps the tempo sensitive yet upbeat and fun to listen to.

The Greening Album

Buy The Last Tibetan Midnight at Amazon.com

The album takes a turn into the more Psychedelic part of town with the song, “Sleeping Grandpa Tacoma.” The song starts out with a weird intro that sounds like the guitar is trying to have a conversation with a disgruntled termite. But then at 20 seconds the song opens up into a Hi-Fi track with a rocking guitar line done by Will Loving and Karl laying down the law with his solid organ tones. The middle part of the song is chill Pop with some interesting rock in the mix. But then at 3 minutes 14 seconds the track gets Psychedelic with strange morphing tones that sound like cybernetic bubbles trying to reprogram a piano made out of aluminum foil. There are also cool sounds flowing through the speakers including harpsichords and even some horns. The song ends with an inhuman drum solo.

Since I like being happy, I really like music that puts me in a good mood. And the song, “Winter Sunshine” truly does just that. It starts out with warm ooooh’s and then kicks into a peppy drum beat. The singing on this song is great. Karl is singing about being joyful and smiling and passing moments and I love it. This would make a great song to wake up to and make a protein shake in the morning. I can just see myself scooping powder into the blender while listening to the “Ba Ba Bah Bah Ba!” parts of the song. “Winter Sunshine” has a great full sound for its ending with peaceful and beautiful polyphony.

Right now if you haven’t heard any of The Greening’s music before I recommend that you take a moment and check out The Greening on MySpace by clicking this link. Now when you go to their MySpace page scroll down to the song, “Don’t Have the Time” this song owns. It has pumped up distorted rock guitars that open the song. Then when the chorus kicks in with Karl on the mic it sounds aggressive and filled with charismatic vocal tenacity. My favorite part of the song is at 1 minute and 45 seconds. Here the song mutates into this totally Psychedelic vocal polyphony of what sound like twisted samples that remind me of “Here is the News” by Electric Light Orchestra (ELO). FUN FACT: Did you know that “Here is the News” is on the album – Time by ELO? And the song I was just talking about by The Greening is called “Don’t have the Time” ! Both the song and the ELO album have the word “TIME.” Is this a coincidence? Or is this a subliminal message for only the adept listener. I for one believe it to be the latter.

The next song, “Sunday Afternoon” not only rocks musically, but it has an excellent and colorful music video by Danny Ochoa. If you scroll to the bottom of this article you can see the video for yourself. “Sunday Afternoon” has an excellent narrative behind it and you get sucked into the lyrics. There really is a story being told here.

“She’s So Electric” was from The Greening’s EP. The track is burning hot and is definitely Rock and Roll. The song is fast paced and the stops and starts are punchy and great for dancing and head banging. At 2 minutes 25 seconds Karl says “C’mon!” and it is epic. It has the same feel of the excitement the band Trace has during their songs. At 3 mintues 22 seconds the song’s instrumental part gets really freaky and the keyboards that jump in the mix are to die for. It sounds like a funky keyboard solo happening while a bunch of planets are being sucked into a technicolor black hole.

The Last Tibetan Midnight is concluded by my favorite song on the album, “Thought I Told You.” This song is an 11 minute progressive rock epic that is a joy to listen to. The vocals are distant and thought provoking. But the parts that really stand out are the instrumental interludes and the finale. The seeping guitar pulls make me reminiscent of Pink Floyd’s album Meddle. Nick’s drumming is great on this song too, he really keeps a down tempo relaxed beat that lets the amazing guitar lines transcend to the surface. Today I found myself chilling in my car with the seat down and letting “Thought I Told You” wash over me till the very end with the windows down. I felt like a huge chunk of stress had been lifted from my body and mind. It truly was the perfect ending to a very diverse album. Listening to The Last Tibetan Midnight was a good decision.

As promised here is the music video directed and animated by Danny Ochoa. The song is “Sunday Afternoon” from The Greening. You can find this song on the album, The Last Tibetan Midnight.

-Tyler

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It is time to dismember some stormtroopers in Jedi Knight 2: Jedi Outcast

Filed under: Gaming — Tyler @ 12:35 am
JK2 barscene

In Star Wars Jedi Knight 2: Jedi Outcast you get to mess up a bar

Sometimes you need games to put you in situations that you would generally not imagine or experience on your own. As someone who loves Science Fiction and has seen all the Star Wars movies, I thought that I would have had my fill of the Star Wars universe. But playing Star Wars Jedi Knight 2: Jedi Outcast (Jedi Knight 2) and having the chance to whip out my lightsaber in the middle of a bar and battle tons of mercenary thugs and goons was an unexpected and totally enjoyable experience. Jedi Knight 2 lets you fight against hordes of stormtroopers and if you enable the proper cheat code, then you will be able to actually and realistically dismember them. I mean really dismember them, it shows the cauterization marks on the limbs where your lightsaber burnt the flesh. It is totally awesome. I am pretty sure that the game uses the GHOUL 2 animation system that makes the dismemberment realistic looking and very satisfying when you perform a good lightsaber slash.

So now I am going to tell you how to enable dismemberment for Jedi Knight 2. I have only been able to enable dismemberment in single player mode. I’m not quite sure how to get it to work for multiplayer at this time, but if you know please leave a comment on how to do it! OK, first thing first you need to do is to go into the game options screen where there is an option tab called, “More Options” (that may not be the tab name exactly so look around). Then when you find the tab look for the option called, “Dismemberment” and make sure that the option is enabled. Next, be playing a single player game where you have the lightsaber equipped for this to work. Then when you are in the game and no cut scenes are playing press the “~” (tilde) button on the keyboard. This is best achieved by holding “Shift” and pressing the “`” button which is usually above the “tab” key. Doing this will bring up the console and you will see a screen come down and there will be a lot of text. The next thing you will need to do is enter this exactly without quotes, “helpusobi 1” there is a space between the one and the word. Again make sure to type it WITHOUT quotes. Then press enter and it will seem like nothing happened but you will be able to enter new text on a new line. So then type this exactly in the console without quotes, “g_saberrealisticcombat 2” then press enter. Next exit the console by pressing “~” (tilde) again. Now to test to make sure that dismemberment is working walk up to an enemy with your lightsaber out and try slashing the enemy to bits. If dismemberment is working properly then when you kill an enemy with your lightsaber either one of their limbs, or their head, or their torso will fall off. Let it be known that you won’t be able to use your lightsaber until you get to stage 3. But the game is still fun for the first two stages. This is because you get to use lots of cool guns and lay trip-mines and use grenades. And once you get the lightsaber you will really feel like you earned it. So there is payoff for playing the non-lightsaber levels.

Now that you have your lightsaber and you’ve enabled dismemberment it time to lop off some stormtrooper limbs! In Jedi Knight 2 you will encounter entire groups of stormtroopers that want to kill you. But sometimes they don’t see you coming and they might be having conversations with each other. So whenever you walk into a new area and you hear someone talking stay still and crouch to stay hidden and listen to what they have to say. Sometimes the conversations you overhear are very entertaining and well acted. One time I listened to a stormtrooper talking to his commanding officer about how he never used his blaster against a human target before. And you can hear the commander saying how blown away he is by how green and raw the new recruits are. It’s pretty funny! But when you fight with enemies that are shooting at you try to not attack with your lightsaber until you know you are going to hit your target. That way you can deflect blaster bolts while approaching for the kill. Also if you see someone throw a grenade at you use your force push skill and push the grenade back at the enemy. This technique also works against rockets and other large projectiles. One cool thing about the game is that your lightsaber hurts enemies when you just hold it at them, not necessarily having to click attack. So if you are blocking a blaster bolt attack you can run up to the enemy using force speed and then you will probably be able to slice the head off of a stormtrooper without having to let your guard down. It takes a little practice but if you custom keymap your force powers in the options screen to your keyboard instead of having to scroll through them all the time you will be able to be more effective in combat.

SW JK2: JO

Lightsaber Fighting in Jedi Knight 2

There are also special moves in the game for your lightsaber that are pretty awesome. In the orange (medium) stance if you walk up to an enemy and attack and jump at the same time and keep looking at your enemy, you will do this jumping flourish attack where you swirl your sword around in the air. It is really cool to watch your character do this attack and it does tons of damage. In the blue (fast) stance there are two special moves. The first one is a backstab which you see happen when a Jedi in Star Wars Episode 1: The Phantom Menace stabs one shape shifter girl with his lightsaber when he comes at him from behind. You can do that backstab in the game by having your back turned to an enemy and pressing attack. The other special move in blue stance is a upward slash. You do it by crouching on the ground then hold forward and attack at the same time while slowly releasing the crouch button. You will do a powerful ground to middle body slash that is very fast. The last special move is in red (strong) stance. It is a jumping death attack that does tremendous damage but leaves you very vulnerable for a couple seconds if you miss. To perform the move you need to perform a standing regular attack and then before the attack is complete you hold forward and then jump and attack again. This move does uber damage and can kill a wounded enemy in one hit.

The graphics, sound, and gameplay in this game really are amazing. You will feel at times that you are really inside a Remnant Ship (that’s what’s left of the Empire after Star Wars Episode VI: Return of the Jedi). The levels are big and the music is the same amazing music you are accustomed to hearing from the movies. And the voice acting is really top notch. If you played Heretic II and enjoyed it you will probably love this game as I did.

If you want to buy this game from Amazon.com then here’s a link.

-Tyler

May 4, 2010

Babylon 5 is a great show that you can watch on theWB.com for free

Filed under: Reviews — Tyler @ 11:53 pm
Babylon 5

Click on the picture to watch Babylon 5 for free on theWB.com

Have you ever noticed that TV isn’t quite as epic and awesome as it used to be in the 80’s and 90’s? I remember watching Star Trek the Next Generation and then Star Trek Deep Space 9 when it came out. They were totally engrossing shows that made me want to watch every week. Well lately the only shows that I really wanted to see every week include LOST and Battlestar Galactica. But recently I have been looking for another TV show to watch that had a good universe like Star Trek Deep Space 9. I was talking with a friend and he told me to check out Babylon 5. Babylon 5 is a very cool show that has some similarities with Star Trek Deep Space 9. It lasted 5 seasons long and was very enjoyable to watch. The show is free to watch on theWB.com so click here if you want to stream it on your computer. There are commercials on theWB.com but it is a lot less then there are on regular TV. And also the commercials are only 30 seconds long at the breaks. Also you can lower the volume of the commercials, which is good because they are usually pretty loud.

There are a lot of things that I like about Babylon 5. The characters and the story are great. The setting is good too, at least the space station is. The planet that they are near isn’t mentioned very much in the show. The show is about this space station called Babylon 5. It is basically a trade port and a place for ambassadors from different worlds to come together and make decisions on politics, trade and military issues. Babylon 5 is guarded by a couple wings of fighter-craft called Star Furies. The fighter-craft are cool because they are fast and maneuverable and they make the battle scenes of the show more believable. The show has a great plot that revolves around political intrigue but there is lots of action and battle scenes as well. The characters are well developed and each one has his/her own back-story and personality quirks. There is a character called Michael Garibaldi who is the security chief of the station. He is a really cool character because he has flaws and because he has an interesting way of looking at situations. Garibaldi also is portrayed by an excellent actor, Jerry Doyle.

The space station, Babylon 5 itself is about five miles long and has hundreds of thousands of humanoid sentient beings doing business and living their lives every day. The station is owned by Earth Dome which is basically the Earth Government often referred to as “Earth Gov.” In this show Earth is more corrupt than in Star Trek and there is often political problems brewing within Earth Gov. Also the Babylon 5 universe still uses the concept of money, so economics is a big issue in the show. At one point the station has to deal with disgruntled union dock workers and strikes. It makes for interesting episodes and it gives a face to the internal workings of the station.

The space battles and fly-by cut scenes are all done by computer generated images (CGI). Although the ships and battles aren’t as impressive as the ones you see in Star Trek Deep Space 9, the CGI does a good job of getting the story and action across and you will get used to them after a few episodes. Babylon 5 excels in its use of aliens and creatures. There are all sorts of different aliens on the show. Some look like people. Others look like bugs. Other aliens look like they have bone protruding from the back of their heads. And some aliens are made of primarily energy. Overall you will be impressed with the aliens in the show and they breathe life into the station and make it feel large and populated. There are a few primary alien races that have specific ambassadors on the show and they are well acted and all look very different. There is one character in particular called G’Kar. He is a really cool reptilian ambassador who is portrayed by an excellent actor, Andreas Katsulas. G’Kar has many interesting things to say in the show and is always entertaining when on-screen. A lot of wisdom comes out of this character’s mouth.

I loved watching this show late at night on my laptop. It was such a good show that I eventually started getting the disks on Netflix and brought the disks over to a friends house. We had a lot of fun watching the show. But I had a friend recommend that we only watch seasons 1-4. The reason why he told me to do that is because the show was only intended to have 4 seasons. But I found Babylon 5 on theWB.com and I was really happy I did because season 5 although not as exciting as season 3 or 4, was still a great season to watch. And season 5 did a great job of wrapping up the show and giving it a sense of finality.

Another reason why I loved the show Babylon 5 is because it had many links and connections between episodes. Plotlines intertwined quite often and in some episodes you will see something happen that was a result of some other small or insignificant event in a previous episode. So the show really rewards you for watching it consistently and for remembering what happens. Overall this is a great show and since you can watch it at the theWB.com there is no real reason not to check it out. If you like Sci-Fi then this show is a must see. If you liked Star Trek Deep Space 9 you will probably love this show. If you are new to Sci-Fi, Babylon 5 is a good place to start because there is a lot of humor and the characters are good.

-Tyler

May 2, 2010

Inka Grill will melt your taste buds with Joy

Filed under: Reviews — Tyler @ 11:00 pm

Inka Grill – Costa Mesa

260 Bristol Street

Costa Mesa, CA 92626

(714) 444-4652

HOURS:Mon-Thur 11AM – 9PM / Fri 11AM – 10PM

Sat 11:30AM – 10PM / Sun 11:30AM – 9PM

Do you like spicy food? I like spicy food but I don’t want an ulcer. So when I eat spicy food I make sure to do it every once in a while and not to over-do it. But if you are like me you like it when you get a little burned from time to time. Well, if you are willing to give your taste buds the ride of their life, come to Inka Grill in Costa Mesa!

I’ve been to Inka Grill twice now and both times I’ve loved the food. I went there for dinner yesterday and I had a blast. The meal started when I ordered some water and I was brought some french bread. Seems normal right? French bread and water…you can get that almost anywhere. NOPE! There’s a twist. I looked to the right side of my table and what did I find? Some crazy pastel green sauce called Gringo Killer! This stuff is delicious on your bread. I poured some of it on my bread plate and dipped the bread and I was in heaven. The Gringo Killer sauce is creamy and spicy and it has a perfect spicy aftertaste. It is not jalapeno style spicy. Nor is it hot chili pepper spicy. Double-nor is it wasabi  spicy. No, Gringo Killer is a special kind of spicy that at first stimulates your taste buds with a crisp spicy. Then it soothes your tongue with it’s creaminess. And finally kicks you again with spice with its aftertaste! It’s just bread but it tastes great and it is a killer way to start your dinner.

I shared 2 entrees with my friend so we could try two different things. Also he brought a coupon for buy one entree get the other one half-off that he found in some magazine or something. So we were pretty stoked that we were going to save some bucks. Especially because the dishes here cost from $11-$19 and they are worth every penny. We got one pasta entree and one rice and meat entree. The pasta dish was called Spinach Basil Spaghetti. It had slightly creamy pasta with green sauce that was mildly spicy. The basil and spinach flavor was very good. The pasta was cooked perfectly and had the right kind of tenderness. The cool part about the Spinach Basil Spaghetti is that it is topped with lightly breaded chicken breasts. You have the option of having it topped with pan seared Top round steak instead, but this time I went with the chicken, and boy was I glad I did. The chicken was thin and wide and was perfectly breaded. The flavor of the chicken mixed extremely well with the pasta spiciness. I found myself lathering the chicken in the pasta sauce. If you order this item you might want to share it with a friend or be prepared to bring some of it home, because it is a lot of pasta to have in one sitting.

Now the delicious Chimbotanos with beef and vegetables was one of the best food decisions I have ever made. The rice was well prepared and not to wet or dry, just moist enough to go well with the beef. The beef was mixed with some green beans and it was amazing. The beef was tender, but not quite as tender as the chicken in the other dish. And that was ok because the beef was cut into bite size strips that were easy to chew. The sauce for the beef and vegetables was spicy but not overpowering and when I mixed a bite with the rice it was great. A great part of the Chimbotanos was that it had Andean organic potatoes that were made into a type of potato stew-like concoction. The potatoes were brownish-white and they had a very unique flavor that were way better than mashed potatoes or a baked potato. It was like having a thick potato stew with medium sized to small chunks of potato in it. And a thin brown sauce kept it all together.

Inka Grill was amazing and I am going to definitely visit this restaurant again. I had such a good meal that I am probably going to venture into other dishes and find out what they taste like. Their lamb stew sounds interesting. Just take note that there are a lot of spicy seasoning s and flavors in their dishes. So if you have allergies or ulcers you might want to pick a different place to eat. But if you are in good health and like a little spice in your life, then Inka Grill is the way to go!

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