Back to the homepage.
Back to the index.

Date: March 16th, 2020.

Time of Writing: 9:31 PM.

Weather: Somewhat chilly, from what I can tell.

Mental and Physical Health State: My aches and soreness have subsided. The cough is more phlegmy, and my low fever isn't bothering me much anymore. My difficulty breathing is also gone. Emotionally, I might need to sit on the porch for a bit tomorrow for some fresh air. I can't be cooped up this much.

Day Overview: Stayed up pretty late last night watching my brother play video games. Shadow of the Colossus was the one. I woke up in the middle of the day today. My Dad left to get a few more things from the store. I found myself feeling a lot better, even though my cough was gross and phlegmy. I had these pizza bagel bite things as a snack, and those were pretty nice. Otherwise, not much has happened. I played a video game online with some friends a few minutes ago. It's called Fistful of Frags and I think I might have talked about it on here. It's a cowboy shooter, and it's really technical and difficult, but I've got like 87 hours in it so I'm alright. I'm decent. It's just wacky enough that I'm willing to play it, and it runs well on my computer because it's a source engine game.

On My Mind: I'm going to make a playlist of quarantine music soon. I know I'm comitting to a lot of projects on this blog but fuck it if I say I'm going to start a bunch of things then the chance of me actually doing one of them is much higher. I can commit to having this playlist out by Thursday night, when my radio show would be. It's going to be roughly as long as one of those. I'll link it in here. I'm also going to work on having a page with links to all of the spotify playlists for my previous shows, soon. Maybe by tomorrow, if I get tired of gaming and stuff.

• Pony by Orville Peck: Somewhat average alt-country. I like Peck's lyricism and wordplay, but the music side of things isn't especially appealing to me. It's the kind of album that makes for very good playlist fodder, but when it's taken as a whole sort of product it suffers from sounding the same a lot. I'm going to try and keep my thoughts on each of these things short because I got a lot of them today. This one's a 6/10.
• Styd I Sram by Yanka: Demented, tortured indie folk from Russia, with lo-fi noisy guitars and distressed wailing vocals. I wish dearly that I could understand the vocals on this one, usually I'm not too bothered when I don't understand the words in foreign language releases, but in this one I feel like I'm losing a lot. Like Pony the songs here run together in my head a little, but they're generally more pleasant so this is less of an issue. It sounds somewhat unfinished, both in the positive sense that it feels raw and emotional, and in the sense that a lot of the repetitive noodling on some of these tracks feel like placeholders for elements of musical progression that didn't materialize for some reason or another. 7/10.
• Melee by Dogleg: When the age of social distancing is over and summer is upon us, I'm going to call up my friends, plug this album into someone's car stereo, and we're going to drive around and celebrate that we survived. That's the kind of feeling I get from this, somehow. It's incredibly powerful, fist pumping emo/indie crossover rock, and it hits hard both lyrically and performance wise. It's got a bit of a sour sort of middle that isn't necessarily bad, but loses momentum, but is otherwise a sublime record. The strings at the end of the last track were amazing, and although their effect would have been spoiled if they were more present on the record I wish similar mind was paid to experimentation. 8/10
• Call of Duty: Modern Warfare Remastered developed by Raven Software, originally by Infinity Ward: I played through the campaign of this game on normal, and I liked it a good deal. My initial instincts to run-and-gun my way through the game - because it's COD, I thought, what else do you do? - were almost immediately nipped in the bud, and I found myself playing a much more tactical game than I ever expected to play. The plot is nothing to write home about, but I liked a few of the side characters, even though I couldn't stop shooting them (on accident!). I haven't touched the multiplayer aspect but I'm sure it's good fun. Overall, an 8/10.
• No Players Online developed by papercookies: Decidedly not good. It was hard to take this game seriously. A lot of the depth is in puzzles that have nothing to do with the gameplay, or even the story. And the story is like, creepypasta tier bad. I didn't like this one bit. The sound design was nice, but that's about it. 2/10.

• My Hero Academia Season 4 animated by studio Bones: Episode 18.

Works Produced: I did a thousand or couple more words of critique of someone else's writing, which was received pretty well by my estimation. That's it, though.

Other Thoughts: Thank you for reading the plague blog. More updates to come in the following days.