Codex Alera

In my last “whatcha readin’?” post, I mentioned that I was just starting in on Codex Alera, Jim Butcher’s more traditional fantasy series. I mentioned that it didn’t grab me, and that continued to be true. I didn’t actually finish the first book. In fact, it contributed to me falling off the reading wagon — it had so little grip on me that I spent less and less time reading, until I didn’t want to pick up my Kindle at all. Maybe the series gets better after Furies of Calderon, but if I can’t get past the first book in the series, it’s very hard to find out if I’ll enjoy the rest. Maybe I’ll read a summary of #1 on a wiki and try out #2 one day, but that’s so far on the backburner that that day may never come.

A Song of Ice and Fire

I went into this series knowing I was in for disaster. One of my dark secrets is that I don’t really like Lord of the Rings. I like it in theory and I enjoy the base story and I appreciate it for what it is, but I don’t like to read things where I have to chew through every thick page to get to the next one. I want to be urged onwards constantly, and these massive fantasy tomes do not necessarily do that — that’s not their goal. They create something much larger, much more expansive. Still, I enjoyed watching Game of Thrones so I thought I would start in on Game of Thrones the novel. I read part of it, and I will continue to read it, but it isn’t something I’m going to be able to read cover-to-cover without any pauses. I read a good chunk of it and I’m taking a break by going back to an old friend.

The Tawny Man Trilogy

Robin Hobb’s The Farseer Trilogy was on my list last time — it was a trilogy that, despite its slow beginnings, I really came to enjoy, full of characters I really loved. After being in a reading slump for a few months, going back to that world was exactly what I needed. The first book in the trilogy, Fool’s Errand, picks up 15 years after Assassin’s Apprentice. Fool’s Errand is what I have in progress right now, and right within the first few pages it immerses you in the Six Duchies again. It’s like a homecoming. It feels good.

What next?

After I’ve wrapped up the Tawny Man Trilogy, I’ll go back and read a little more Game of Thrones. Ghost Story, the latest Dresden Files novel, releases on July 26th — top of my list, for sure. After those, who knows? We’ll see what time brings.

I picked up a Kindle quite awhile ago and I realized I’ve never really mentioned what I’ve been reading on it. Considering this blog exists, it seems like something I should do, no? I’m not going to review any of these titles, just yap about them very briefly.

The Dresden Files

I eased myself back into hobby reading by picking up a fun, simple series — Jim Butcher’s The Dresden Files. It’s a series about a private investigator. Also, he’s a wizard. Wikipedia’s synopsis:

The Dresden Files is a series of fantasy/mystery novels written by Jim Butcher. He provides a first person narrative of each story from the point of view of the main character, private investigator and wizard Harry Dresden, as he recounts investigations into supernatural disturbances in modern-day Chicago. Butcher’s original proposed title for the first novel was “Semiautomagic”, which sums up the series’ balance of fantasy and hard-boiled detective fiction.

The series is an easy read and absolutely a cheesy romp — there’s plenty of gratuitous violence and sexual tension with a ludicrously powerful main character, but I’m cool with it. It’s fun and forgetting how to appreciate simple fun is one of the worst things you can do to yourself.

The Farseer Trilogy

Robin Hobb’s Farseer Trilogy is a great fantasy series that starts off very slowly. It’s a rich setting and the trilogy as a whole was made better by it, but the first half of the first novel is all scene-setting. You’re given the background of the kingdom involved and are given an overview of the main character’s growing years, from being a small bastard child left in the care of his father’s right hand man, up to him being a teenage apprentice to the royal assassin. I have rather severe untreated ADD. My attention span and ability to focus is complete shit and it’s something I struggle with quite a bit. Muscling through the first half of the first novel was hard. Not only is my attention span shit, but there was also nothing reaching out and grabbing me and forcing me to focus — if books had a voice, the first half of Assassin’s Apprentice would have sounded entirely monotone to me. It gets better.

Once the series got going, there was no stopping the events in motion. I loved the series — and I hated the main character. You want to cheer for him, but he’s constantly fucking everything up for himself and everybody he comes in contact with. You hate him, but you still want him to win. It was an interesting feeling.

The Tawny Man Trilogy is a followup to The Farseer Trilogy, taking place fifteen(ish) years later. I haven’t read it yet, but it’s on my list.

Codex Alera

After wrapping up the most recent addition to The Dresden Files, I was curious how Jim Butcher handled a pure fantasy setting.  Codex Alera is his attempt at that — I’m currently reading the first novel in the series, Furies of Calderon. It’s … okay. It is far too early to say whether I like it or not, but it hasn’t grabbed me. It’s simply not interesting. I’m going to give Butcher the benefit of the doubt though, because I do love Dresden and early Dresden wasn’t the greatest material, either. Based purely on faith to the author, I’ll probably give it until book two to grab my attention.

Have any of you read this series? Does it get better?

What next?

After Codex Alera, I’ll either move onto The Tawny Man Trilogy or go back to the Vlad Taltos series. A good friend of mine recommended them to me a few years back and I very much enjoyed them, but for some reason I stopped reading right in the middle of Dzur and never picked the series up again. Considering the recent release of Tiassa, it seems like a good time to get back into them. Though I hear that reading Phoenix Guards before Tiassa is highly recommended — I haven’t touched those yet either. So perhaps Dzur, Jhegaala, Iorich, Phoenix Guards, then Tiassa? We’ll see.

Yes, that is one of the most adorable things in the world. Laura Shigihara, the Plants vs Zombies composer, bought herself a webcam and decided to sing the PvZ ballad for us. Guest starring: George Fan, creator/designer of PvZ.

The first of many.

I’ll call these “rapid reviews” because I didn’t actually finish either game, so I can’t fairly call them full reviews. I did not play them from beginning to end, I played them from beginning to whenever I got bored as hell.

As mentioned previously, I have an XBox 360 now. However, I can’t afford to keep myself stocked up on new games, so Gamefly is my source of gaming sustenance. It is very unfortunate that I didn’t enjoy my first two games, because Gamefly’s turnaround time is garbage when compared to Netflix. It takes Gamefly roughly a week to get me a new game, whereas Netflix takes about half of that. I suppose that’s what happens when the closest distribution center to Milwaukee, Wisconsin is in Pennsylvania, I guess. It’s still cheaper than renting games from a brick store in the end. …Anyway, that’s a completely irrelevant tangent. On to the reviews.

Resident Evil 5
The Resident Evil games were among my favorites as a kid, and it’s somewhat strange as its the series that has helped me bond with a lot of people in my life that I normally wouldn’t have. My step-dad and I took turns working our way through the first Resident Evil. Resident Evil 2 and Silent Hill were that way for me and my grade school best friend. It’s a series that, at one time, was very special to me. When I put Resident Evil 5 in my console, I was bracing myself for a return to the games that I had invested so much in once upon a time.

Good lord did I get tired of this game quickly. The controls have changed very little from, what, 13 years ago? 14 years ago? This is not a good thing. It fit the games back in the late 90s and early 2000s, but the idea that they’ve stayed that way on current-gen consoles is baffling. They are slow and cumbersome, and while I understand the argument that certain things need to be that way to make a survival horror game even the slightest bit frightening, I don’t need to enjoy it. I’m playing a super ripped soldier, I think the character I control should feel quite a bit more athletic.

I’m also not big on joining online games with people I don’t know whatsoever, so I wasn’t interested in playing the game co-op. I wanted to play it solo. It turns out that’s a terrible idea. Most of the horror in this game came from the fact that Sheva, my attractive female sidekick, could not manage her inventory if our lives depended on it. Oh, right. They did. If I gave her bullets, she would try her best to place them in everything except for the bad guys in front of us. If I took her bullets away, she ran around punching everything that looked the slightest bit rickety to see if there were any sweet, sweet bullets hidden inside. If I said screw it and loaded her inventory with herbs so she could stand back and hold my healing items for me, she found every possible opportunity to waste them. If I stubbed my toe, she would throw herbs at me. If I took even a scratch from a zombie, she would run over and rub herbs all over my glistening biceps. Quite honestly, I’m not even sure where some of the herbs went. She was making herself salads with them for all I know.

And every time I got a game over in the game, it’s because Sheva got her ass kicked and then I got mine kicked trying to save her. Personally, I consider the game unplayable solo, but I’m sure people have had better luck with it. As I said, I didn’t finish this game. Far too frustrating for me.

Prince of Persia
Prince of Persia is the second game I got through Gamefly, and I had quite a bit of fun with it. Sadly, that fun only lasted a few hours, because I came to realize the entire game was more or less the same as the opening sequences. The narrative wasn’t strong enough to keep me going, so I stopped playing once I was all parkour’d out.

This game’s artistic style is beautiful. I cannot stress that enough, this game is pure eye candy. The Prince himself has been mocked elsewhere for his colorful plumage, but I really enjoyed his character design. More than that though, I loved Elika. Both her appearance and the way she moved. Her model and animations just made her feel light, the sort of girl that you’d swear can’t weigh more than a feather. It was really quite perfect.

The acrobatics were fast paced and fun, and the interactions between Elika and the Prince during it were well coordinated and really made them feel like a strong pair. If Elika was in your way, she didn’t just block your path or get shunted in the other direction like some games that try the tag team thing (I’m looking at you, Resident Evil 5), the two of you maneuver around each other in a smooth motion. It was fantastic. The crazy high-flying stunts the two of you pulled off were fun to watch, especially through the many-tiered environments they give you to explore. You also didn’t need to worry about Elika’s well-being. Ever. Not while jumping off of tall cliffs are running across walls or lazily swinging your sword at demons. She existed only to help, never hinder.

The problem is the entirety of the game is exactly the same. Jump, climb, slide. Climb, slide, jump. Jump, slide, jump, climb, slide, jump. There’s some combat to break it up, but the combat system is terrible. Elika and the Prince have been leaping and climbing and flipping all over creation, but the second you’re faced with a battle, the two of you have damn near forgotten how to move. I don’t expect a Bayonetta out of the combat system, but I expected more out of a game that gives us such lovely acrobatics.

The environments also struck me as being a little too large for the purpose they served. They’re fun to move through to get to the boss, it’s fun figuring out how all of the platforms line up to gather the post-boss collectables, but you often have to go back and forth through the same areas repeatedly. Just look at this map.

The Temple is your starting point. It’s also where you need to return every time you have enough Light Seeds to “power up” Elika and allow you to explore new areas. The game is non-linear, so each power up opens different areas in each quadrant of the map. Each dot is essentially a small level, the difficulty going up slightly the farther away from the Temple that you are. When you’re trying to travel from one end of the map to the other, it gets really damn tedious. Returning to the Temple from the farthest reaches of the map just has you running through areas you’ve traveled through multiple times already, devoid of meaningful enemies or challenges. I love the environments, but I don’t want to go back and forth through them a dozen times over the course of the game. Adding quick-travel options would have made this much more tolerable.

The power ups themselves are somewhat of a bother, too. The power ups give you things like the ability to fly or scale buildings or whatever else after touching the proper points in a level. It’s mandatory to progress to the more “difficult” parts of the map. The problem is these things are not very fun, they’re glorified quicktime events where you push Triangle a lot and then sometimes you need to tap your joystick so you don’t slam face first into a low-hanging branch. The more powers you acquire, the less parkour you’re doing.

The acrobatics were the entirety of the game’s fun to me. Between these power ups and the constant back-and-forth travel, the game didn’t have a lot going for it. It’s very sad, because I adored the aesthetics. Elika is one of my favorite female companions in a game like this. I just couldn’t justify putting more time into the game. I didn’t feel like it had anything left to offer after 4 hours or so. I wanted more Elika, I wanted more of the Prince, but at that point in the game it felt like I would have more luck turning to the murky depths of FanFiction.net or DeviantArt.

Roughly a month ago I decided to do something crazy and buy myself an XBox 360. This turned out to be a horrible mistake financially, but such is the curse of hindsight. Or the lack of being able to tell the future, one of those. There isn’t much I can do about it though, so no reason whining. So I have a 360 now, and this is the first console I’ve ever purchased for myself. I was rather spoiled on consoles as a kid, they were always my big gifts around the holidays. I’ve had an NES, the old brick Game Boy, a Sega Genesis (as well as a 32x and a Nomad), a SNES, a Sega Saturn, a Playstation, a Playstation 2, and that was the end of my console legacy. I got my first computer during the PS2 era, and that killed any drive I may have had to buy other consoles. I think StarCraft singlehandedly made me a PC gamer.

So why did I slip back into my console gaming ways for a 360? One word: Bayonetta. I was slowly coming to realize there was a void in my heart that the PC couldn’t sufficiently fill. I needed to play an action game and I needed to play one bad. Back when my PS2 was still my favorite toy, I put countless hours into the Devil May Cry series and the God of War games, not to mention Dynasty Warriors and Samurai Warriors of various flavors. I could play shooters and RTSes and RPGs all I wanted on the PC, but I couldn’t play the really badass high-impact action games I used to love so much. There was something missing from my life, and I just happened to realize it just before Bayonetta‘s release date. It had to be mine. So it was!

Bayonetta was awesome as far as combat goes. It was, essentially, the height of Devil May Cry‘s combat distilled and refined. It wasn’t as complex as DMC, but that wasn’t necessarily a bad thing in the context of the game. You were a saucy witch out to beat up angels. That was the entire point of the game. Combat being fast, simple and rewarding was a good thing. Any additional complexity would’ve taken away from the combat pacing, I think. To say it fulfilled my need for a badass action game is an understatement. It was fantastic.

The game isn’t without its flaws, though. Much like Devil May Cry, they tried very hard to build a story around the action, but the formula they used didn’t really work here. The narrative was shallow and made little sense, much of the dialogue took place during weird storyboard sequences, and there was way too much talking going on for a game about kicking angel ass. They failed to make me give one shit about anybody in the game besides Bayonetta’s more attractive (but unfortunately less bootylicious) counterpart, Jeanne. The load times were also horrific, I was honestly grinding gold in World of Warcraft between scenes in Bayonetta. The loading screens had a neat feature where you could try out combo moves in a black void while you wait, but you can only do that for so long before you realize you’re throwing high kicks into nothingness for no gain and no purpose. It was a pain.

Bayonetta was a gratuitous action game and the combat sequences never, ever pretend to be more than that, so it struck me as odd that they tried so hard to string together a tragic story throughout. Can’t a witchy temptress* that summons demons out of her own hair (which is also her clothes) beat up angels just for the hell of it? Seems simple enough to me!

The quicktime events were also something of a bother at times. Most of the time you could see them coming, and pushing Triangle to jump off of an exploding platform at the last second wasn’t a big deal. Other times it was just damn unfair. When you’re in the middle of a very zen moment of asskicking and suddenly it goes WHOASHITPUSHTRIANGLETODODGETHISFLYINGBUILDING while giving you barely a second to hit the button… it’s very enraging. Dying to something like that made me more angry than I want to admit. These moments were few and far between, however.

I highly recommend the game if you do like action games. Don’t expect much depth, it’s not an epic tale of good versus evil or anything like that. It’s over the top action with a strong, sexpot main character. Buy the game, kill some angels, relish in it. It’s all that matters.

A Bayonetta/Devil May Cry crossover is on my list of things that absolutely must exist before I die.

I’m in a Mass Effect kick the last few days because a good friend of mine finally started up the game recently. We talked back and forth about it a little, so I decided to give it another playthrough. Yep, still an amazing game and it left me hungry for more. But since Mass Effect 2 isn’t out until January 2010 or somewhere around there, I had to get my fix somewhere else. I decided to hop onto the app store on my iPhone and pick up Mass Effect Galaxy.

My brutally honest opinion, in short, is that it is an awful game. Allow me to elaborate, however.

Combat and Gameplay

This is what kills the game. It is most certainly a game but the game part of the game was the weakest part of the product. I don’t have a ton of experience with the iPhone as a gaming device, I’ve only played Mass Effect Galaxy and Peggle on the thing, so the game might be held back entirely because of the limitations of the platform. I don’t really know. But regardless of why it was bad, it was pretty bad.

The game is a top-down shooter, and it uses the iPhone’s accelerometer for movement. Basically,  you tilt the phone in the direction you want your character to go. You target enemies by tapping on them, and you have a set of abilities you tap to make combat go your way. Any time you’re in line of sight of your target, your character automatically sprays bullets. That’s the entirety of the action in the game. There are minions and bosses, but the only way you can tell you’ve hit a boss is because they load the screen up with more enemies which makes the whole thing awfully laggy. The game suggests the thickness of your targeting reticle will tell you how strong an enemy is, but it wasn’t very noticeable. The lag? I noticed that. Not so much the reticle. It’s just an unpleasant experience.

Art and Story

Mass Effect Galaxy is another story that takes place in the Mass Effect universe, naturally. While it doesn’t focus on Shepard, it does have an impact on the Shepard saga because Jacob Taylor and Miranda Lawson, the two main characters of the game, will appear in Mass Effect 2 as squad members. Mass Effect Galaxy serves to give them some backstory, set up what sort of people they are, and what they’ve done. It also tells us more about the batarians, one of Mass Effect‘s alien races that hadn’t appeared in the original game. You meet them in the DLC campaign Bring Down the Sky, but the DLC is such a pain in the ass that you probably haven’t played it.

The story isn’t a huge, sweeping saga like the Shepard story, but not everybody can be Shepard. It’s a smaller (but still important) story around Citadel politics and drama, and a potential terrorist attack. It’s fun, and it immerses you deeper into the universe. I enjoyed that aspect of it. The game could have benefited from more care being put into Taylor’s dialogue options, but the narrative was there and it was a good time. It wasn’t good enough to make me overlook the godawful combat sequences, but it was still good.

The art is very stylized. It’s recognizable as the Mass Effect world, but it’s not chasing after realism. It’s a different medium, so it needed a different approach. I think they pulled it off, I enjoyed it. My only gripe is that the animation is incredibly limited, there’s no fluid animation here. Every scene is just a few frames. Comic book panes, not a cartoon.

BioWare also continued its habit of modeling their characters after real people. In the case of Miranda, her design is based on her own voice actor, Yvonne Strahovski. Note, I say based. They didn’t copy/paste her into the game or anything.

Really, that last detail was largely an excuse to include a picture of Yvonne Strahovski. It’s largely irrelevant.

To Sum Up

The gameplay sucks, the art and story is fun. If you don’t think of it as a game, and instead think of it as an interactive comic book, you’ll have a better time with it. Is it worth the money? Well, that depends. It’s $2.99 on the app store. Would you pay $2.99 for a comic book? If you would, then buy it. If you wouldn’t, don’t. Easy. Personally, I would consistently pay $2.99 for miniature Mass Effect cartoons on a platform like the iPhone. More fluid animation and voice acting, leave out the terrible combat segments. The combat brings down its worth to me. It was tedious and a waste of time. I would seriously consider paying an extra dollar to skip all of the combat segments if the option were available.

My lust for more Mass Effect still isn’t sated, though. I don’t think it will be until I have my hands on Mass Effect 2. January 2010 cannot come fast enough.

TED.com, the official site of the TED conference, is one of my favorite websites on the entirety of the internet. The TED conference is a place where some of the greatest minds of the world come together to share their knowledge, thoughts and ideas, and through the magic of the internet, almost all of it is available to us for free. Completely non-profit. Originally aimed entirely toward Technology, Entertainment and Design, these days it’s more varied.

Some of my favorite TED talks are the ones that give you some insight into the human mind/brain. It’s such a complex thing that we may never fully understand it, but every little bit of knowledge that we have is endlessly fascinating. The one I watched today with neurologist Oliver Sacks discusses Charles Bonnet syndrome. Charles Bonnet syndrome describes the phenomenon experienced by roughly 10-15% of blind or visually impaired people in the world. They’re very complex, often confusing lucid, visual hallucinations.

Watch the video embedded above, and pay close attention to it. Consider some of the numbers thrown out, and some of the little details about the mind that Mr. Sacks gives us. The visual portions of our brain include hundreds of thousands of different, distinct cells or groups of cells with their own specialized purposes. I find that incredibly fascinating, and the fact that even one little cell misfiring could change our entire outlook on the world around us is both amazing and frightening.

I’ll probably be linking more of my favorite TED talks in the future, but this one in particular stood out to me today. A close second is Dan Pink on the science of motivation, since his topic is something I’ve been pretty passionate about the last couple of years myself.

Do any of you watch these talks? Do you have a favorite?

I could have gone my entire life without seeing Jack Nicholson’s boner, but if that’s the price I had to pay to see The Departed, it was worth it. Yeah I know, about three years late to the party, right? The thing came out in 2006. Well, I put off seeing this movie for a really long time because my attention span sucks, and the thing is 2 1/2 hours. Plus, I was still working for Hollywood Video and on the brink of quitting the job, and I didn’t want to watch another freaking movie for all the money in the world at the time. Watching movies was the last thing I wanted to do. So I finally got around to watching it now, three years later.

Anyway, the movie itself. I’d been nervous about the length and my short attention span conflicting, and I really didn’t need to worry about that at all. The movie was 2 1/2 hours long, which is pretty freaking long by current standards, but I was never bored. It never lost my attention. I assume most people know what it’s about, but if not: It’s a cop/mob movie. Martin Scorsese suspense flick with tons of betrayal, deceit, and… people getting bullets through the skull. It was incredible the whole way through, and the cast really couldn’t have been any better.

I’m not going to do a rundown of the whole cast, but I wanted to touch on one person: Leo. Leonardo DiCaprio is one of those names that a lot of people roll their eyes at ever since Titanic, but I’ve come to realize it’s pretty unfair. The guy is great, and I think he’s at his best in movies where his character is a little more dark. See: Blood Diamond, Gangs of New York. This movie really played that up, and it was fantastic. His character reminded me a lot of Donnie Brasco, which is another good movie in the genre. The characters match up with the whole “losing yourself” aspect of what he had to do. You’re around terrible people doing terrible things so long that you start doing it yourself, whether you think it’s right or not. It just becomes a part of you, it’s something you need to do to get by regardless of your morality. It’s always a fascinating transformation to watch.

The ending was a bit depressing, but satisfyingly so, if that makes any sense. It wasn’t all sunshine and rainbows, but it didn’t leave you feeling empty either. Everything was simply… done.

If you haven’t seen this movie yet, please go do it. If you have seen it and think I’m an idiot for not watching it sooner, feel free to mock me ruthlessly in the comments section.

The ginormous picture you see above is the Pinocchio sand sculpture they had more or less right at the entrance of Henry Meier. At least, at the entrance that we used (since there are three different ones). Yes, it’s made out of sand. Ridiculous, isn’t it? I guess it was being constructed as the festival was happening, but we went on the very last day so it was already done when we got there. Shame.

I had my first cannoli, which was awesome. They had regular cannolis and chocolate cannolis, and I bought a chocolate one thinking the cream filing would be chocolate… but no. The entire cannoli was dipped in chocolate. Holy crap! It was delicious, though.

I wish I could say the same for these things the festival was advertising as “funnolis” all over the place. I saw the price, $1.50, and immediately suspected something was wrong with them. Come on, festival food that only costs a buck and a half? They’re either disgusting or poison, one or the other. There is no in between. Luckily for me, it was the former.

It was nothing like a cannoli. It was basically a puff pastry with white icing on top, and red/green jimmies sprinkled on to make it look like the Italian flag. The filling was supposedly strawberry, but it basically tasted like chalky paste. It was pretty much the worst thing I’ve tasted in a very, very long time, which is disappointing because it was the last thing I ate on the way out. Seriously? I go to an Italian festival with awesome food all around, and I had to pick the most disgusting thing there as my last taste of the festival? Ugh.

And… we honestly didn’t do much more there! We tend not to do much when we go to these festivals, all of the various events and attractions in the park cost more money than we have to spend, so we stuck with food. Beyond the cannoli and funnoli, I had a pepperoni calzone. I fuckin’ love me some calzones. Nicole had a Sicilian Steak sandwich, whatever that is, and some weird peach wine drink. I just had a Mountain Dew. Sorry, I’m not down with paying $7 for festival booze. $2.50 for festival soda is already absurd. $7.00 for one drink is out of the question.

Afterwards, we did some driving around. My step-dad showed Nicole around downtown Milwaukee and portions of the east side. She was excited about it right up until we went to the lakeside Alterra Coffee. After we had our coffees/shakes, I think she shifted into “I’m tired and do not give one single shit” mode until we got home.

By the way, you guys from out of town, if you ever visit Milwaukee you absolutely need to swing by Alterra Lakefront. It’s kind of a hipster coffee shop, but it’s built into an old, old building that was original a river purification plant from the very early 1900s. Most of the machinery that was used then is still there and you can look at it, read about it, and sit right next to it if you want to. Very cool place. You can check out some pictures of it (not mine) right here.

If you haven’t heard of Auto-Tune the News, you live a sad, hollow life. Luckily, you have me around. Auto-Tune the News is a relatively new video series that has taken the internet (more or less) by storm recently. Using the hip-hop phenomenon known as Auto-Tune, they… well, auto-tune the news. They craft songs out of recent headlines and quotes.  They are amazing and only seem to be getting better; certainly not any worse. Their newest is certainly the best so far, I think. John Boehner‘s stretch of the song is awesome.