I can't in good conscience buy Ging Nang Boyz new album

So Ging Nang Boyz have a new album released right....now.  I would have been super excited for this.  I really like their screaming breaking the speakers punk rock.  I love it when they got it the fuck together and made the Boys on the Run single.  I think the Boys on the Run "video" is heartbreaking and beautiful.

There other videos are all very and beautiful in this shame and teenage sexuality and how weird is to be that public about it when you are 15 or in your 30s.  Bomb The Music Industry's Jeff Rosenstock likes them enough to cover one of their songs in Japanese, "I don't wanna die."

So first we have a video which is very cute and almost a counterpoint Boys on the Run.  It is 12 minutes of cute girls blowing kisses at the camera.  The song is called "paadamu" which I'm not going to pretend I know what it means with even a dictionary.  I'm also not going to pretend what the lyrics means but will try by having it play in the background over and over as I write this.

Paadamu is almost a counterpoint to BotR.  BotR goes out of it's way to humanize and break down walls of the boys/men that are presented.  It shows them all in a very vunerable light.  I'm not sure what they were told to draw on the white board, but you have an incredible wave of stuff from "I don't want to disappointment my parents anymore", "I want a girlfriend", "I want to have sex with this AV Idol", or just "Frank Zappa."  They interview a huge range of guys.  You're given a brief chance to relate to a hundred+ people.  And you give hundred+ a voice.  Ging Nang Boyz based on youtube views have more fame than you'd expect them to have as a screaming punk rock band.  Then again I didn't know this band　（warning creepy clown mask) until I saw their video with a billion views or this band that literally has cocksucker in their name.  So don't trust me to know what's popular in Japanese rock music.

Asside: Sekai no Owari is so イメージ it hurts.  I actually really like that song despite me wanting to hate it.

So the female counterpart is full of male gaze.  We do have a woman saying some words at the beginning of the song.  Who is speaking or why?  I don't know.  Let's assume the band wrote the words that were spoken.  "Do you see this beautiful world?"  "You are my beginning and end."  Then the not bad song plays and we return to the most male gazey part of a very male gaze filled video of a girl trying to not look at the camera.  I can't decide whether we're supposed to assume she's looking at the camera or at the person the camera is supposed to represent.  Most of these girls submitted the videos themselves (I hope! Not someone submitted videos of them without knowledge) There was an ad on their website a while back.  But these girls are not presented to show that they are people (if you prick them do they not bleed).  The Boys/men were.  We are just to sit here and enjoy all the pretty girls.  Which I definitely did, but contrasted with Boys on the Run it's probablmatic.

That's not the only problem.  BotR was an old song, for a movie (which I also think is very good for humanizing the loser males of Japanese society, aka my favorite film of 2010.)  The problem is the 42 minute other video used to ?promote? the new album.

BEGIN TRIGGER WARNING

 Tokyo's Last Story

I do not recommend watching that video.  It contains rape.  I'm going to describe the video in as simple but complete detail.

It starts innocently and awkwardly enough for Ging Nang Boyz.  A guy wants his girlfriend to fart in his face.  That's not far off from their weird sensibilities and whatever grown adults want to do.  There's definitely the weird submissiveness from the girl that I don't know how to process but that's a much much larger Japanese culture issue.  10 minutes into the video Yakuza thugs show up beat up the guy, throw the girl by her hair, and hawl them into their van.  We then get the music portion of the MV as the yakuza drive them into the countryside.  We get plenty of shots of Tokyo, an exhausted and fearful guy and girl, and the Yakuza laughing.  There are also lingering pantyshots on the girl.   Then rape on both the man and attempted rape on the woman.  The car crashes as a result of the girl trying to not be raped.  We then see the man trying to carry the woman through the woods. 

The man stands over the woman and comes to the conclusion that she texted the men who did this to them and was compliant in it.  He cuts off her head with a mysterious available shovel and carries her head through the forest.  The end.

The man is raped with a large dildo.  Through out the forest scenes we keep being told he still has the dildo in his ass as he travels through the forest.  I assume it is supposed to be funny.  Except it isn't at all because it's the result of a graphic rape we just saw.  And for the man's conclusion that his girlfriend was in on it, she is beaten and ducttaped and humiliated.   So in talking about "the art and interpretation" I'm pretty sure he was wrong about the conclusion (his reasoning was while he was trying to smell her farts (HAHAAH) she was looking through the window as they approached.)

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So the video is a very bad time.  It left me with a sick taste in my mouth. Then a good friend who had not watched it but had watched the pretty girl video made a really good comment.  "Wonder what the pretty girls think of that video?"  That's a really good question.  They aren't presented in the 42 minute video.  But they are presented as the campaign piece in hype for the new album. 

To go to my own morals, I went from being excited about the new album to boycotting it.  As an adult I'm pretty against any entertainment or media that's a bad time.  That is entirely bad things or bad times.  There's enough very real evil and bad in the world that my media that is supposed to escapism from that.  There's no artistic statement to the video.  There's just this video where terrible things happen.  One of the worst things happens.  Then it is over.  And it theoretically is supposed to get me excited about spending money on music.  But I'm not.  I feel betrayed because my good time expectations turned out to be very wrong. 

It's paired with a video about looking at pretty girls, which i also have to have trouble with.  I love looking at pretty girls, but I have to compare it with BotR and suddenly I'm upset about what the video is not.  A band I really like I have to almost revile.  I'm not sure it has tainted their music before this, but it might have a little bit.  They made the worst thing they could then a bad album.  You can forget a bad album.  I can't just exorcise this video.  If I link Boys on the Run in the future to a friend I have to give them a huge warning if they go look at other videos they might find you know, terrible stuff. 

I just want to welcome everyone to 2014.

Roomania #203 (Dreamcast)

A few weeks ago, a dear commenter asked or I promised that I play Roommania #203.  I'll talk about that experience.  I'm in my room in a house I didn't grow up in but have spent 10 years off and on in.  My room in the last hour has developed strange odor I couldn't figure out the source of.  I went looking and took out the garbage (It was garbage day anyways.)  I sprayed Frebreeze.  I lit a match.  The smell didn't go away.  It's still here kind of.

So then I sat down infront of my BEAUTIFUL Dreamcast.

I popped in my Japan game booter.  I looked away from the TV to close my computer.  When I turn back I freeze.  There's people, actors, playing mahjong.  I can't hear what they are saying either because of the volume or my speakers.  After two minutes it pulls back to show our Roommate of Roommmania #203 watching the mahjong show on his own TV in his Japanese apartment.

Then it loads the title screen.  It asked if I wanted to play the tutorial.  I did.  It drops me and asks me to "click" something.  I find my fixed cam view not helping me much.  I start throwing balls with the A button at things. My Roommate sits there and smokes a cigarette.  He then gets up and goes off camera.  I think he was opening the blinds.  I keep throwing balls.  The screen flashes ”イライラ！”  I guess I'm irritating my roommate who isn't paying any attention to me.  After 3 long minutes the session ends and I get a result screen.

I eventually got more camera views.  I got to move some furniture when Roommate wasn't there to freak him out.  I was also getting very sleepy.

On a Monday Night I played a barely interactive game experience where I watched a man kill time in his room.  He was finding things to do between sleeping and not being in the room.  Here I was choosing to bare witness to him finding things to do.  I could keep throwing out balls that seemed to unlock more camera angles.  It gave me goals that flashed on the screen for half a second and my kanji skills failed me to decipher them.

Is this...really how I want to spend my time?  I turned off the game and spent a couple of minutes thinking of how it could have become a profound experience.  I thought about The Stanley Parable.  The original version of that made almost no impression on me.  I didn't even remember playing it until I saw my own writing saying that I did.

I think now about Contact.  I always meant to write about that game.  Maybe I did at some point.  Contact is a strange beast.  Turning off the game requires more effort than actually playing it.  So you keep playing it.  The game eventually begins to notice the player.  The Avatar rebels and goes to your house with a blue subaru parked outside.  He tells you he won't take it anymore.  It turns out the professor ran away with all your money.  He says you can remember the good times by playing the game again.

Okay so the subaru wasn't blue.  That game kind of left me in a daze.  Did that ending make up for the twenty hours of almost video game?  I still don't know.  I gave my copy to Ryan Starsailor.  Or I sold it to him and he never paid me back.  It doesn't matter.  Maybe he's got opinions about it.  He probably just stopped after 3 hours.  Or looked at and always meant to play it.

So would Roommania #203 live up to that if I sunk 5 or 10 hours into it?  Possibly.  But the thought of wasting my time not doing things watching a digital thing waste time not doing things is a bit too void-y.  It's dark and icky.  I should be concentrating on playing my Xbox360 shooters before I don't own a 360 anymore.

Cherry Tree High Comedy Club (PC)

Glory be to the Japanese gods that we lowly westerns can now enjoy the great world of barely interactive menu selection games.  I guess you do walk around in this one like in Persona only none of the characters are nearly as good as in Persona. 

But they are making a comedy club.  So it should be funny?  Which means I guess that the player character likes Sentai?  And is high school anime slice of life crazy?  So wacky.

Yep.  I sure was waiting for something interesting to happen in my picking menus.

Macgruber (Jorma Taccone) Redemption (Steven Knight) John Carter again

So I really liked John Carter when I saw it in theaters last year.  Enough to put it on my small shelf of Blurays.  I've now watch it again.  I still like how it changes genre like 5 times in the first half hour.  The two hour run time is still long.  I went and checked my websites about an hour in and left it running.  The plot is not as strong as I remember it being.  I may be looking through it through the new eyes of seeing Star Wars A New Hope recently and being floored by it.  Despite being a long term Star Wars fan.  Every single line in that movie is peppy.  Still John Carter (of Mars) is a better movie than that Madonna movie about Nazi Sympathizers or a movie featuring Adam Sandler.

It is also better than Macgruber.  I thought SNL movies were supposed to have jokes?  There is like one joke in Macgruber.  I guess he's supposed to come off as arrogant and incompetent, but it's done with such weak punchlines.  Hopefully it is the worst film I've seen this year!

In Redemption The Stath is a homeless war veteran that stumbles into a rich apartment who's owner is on vacation.  So then he starts looking like the Stath and gains Stath-fu.  Then the Stath has to make some moral choices at...Redemption???  The original name of the film was Hummingbird and there certainly Hummingbirds in that film.  Which makes that title better than having The Stath say it in voiceover over the closing moment of the film.

Gunhound EX (PSP) Impressions

I finally opened Gunhound EX which I got back around Valentine's.  It is a doujin PC game ported to PSP by GRev.  It is a love letter to the Assault Suit Valken games.  The first level is pretty dang awesome.  The second level is almost impossibly hard unless I am missing a big thing.  See it is an escort mission with forced scrolling.  This snake thing is coming up from behind and I can' go meet it so it just ends up in my escorting thing and wrecks it before I can murder it.  I'm not even sure I can murder it.  It is hard.  Game is conflicting.

Linda Cubed Again (PS1), Tomba (PS1)

After having it on my PS3 for a couple of months I finally launched Linda Cubed Again.  A JRPG the west never got again with a great cover and probably like a totally mind-blowing plot man.

I almost immediately regretted not getting an action game in its stead.  Playing a JRPG in another language I only 60% understand means I'm basically making it very very difficult to read a book in another language I only 60% understand.  Unless the the battle mechanics are really enjoyable (they weren't) It isn't worth it. 

I'm also going to be an asshole and say that the plot is probably amazing in the never read a book sort of way.  And if it isn't I put up a lot of effort (trying to comprehend the plot/what I need to do) and time (playing a JRPG UIH) for not a lot of reward.  It is 2013 and I am an adult and I can figure out where to most effectively spend my time.  It is probably playing Freecell games while listening to music and not playing Linda Cubed Again.

I played it for about 90 minutes.  I got the basic gist of the plot.  I was about to do a lot of dragon quest style JRPGing to see that plot. 

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Tomba eventually gave me the same reaction even though I was playing it in English and was more charmed by it.  That game sure does give you lots of things to do.  It doesn't have super sharp jumping and bumping which is getting more and more a stickler for me.  The pseudo 3D metrovania aspects were also starting to get overwhelming.  I played that for 3 hours and enjoyed my time, but I'm not sure I'm going back.