Posts categorized “Of the Month”

Link of the Month:
Project Rooftop
As Project Runway is to fashion, Project Rooftop is to Superhero fashion. This site is dedicated to imagining redesigns of comic book uniforms and outfits. It has news on all new costumes worn by comic book superheroes, and it also takes submissions come from all over (you can submit stuff yourself if you want). It’s shockingly engaging to read and look at.

Album of the Month:
Julia Massey & The Five Finger Discount: Is There Room For Me?
*Contented sigh* The 2nd album from the Seattle superstars is every bit the masterpiece that their first one was. Another album funded through a grassroots Kickstarter campaign that exceeded what it asked for, this album is destined to be my album of the year. Just like their last album.

Game of the Month:
The Humble Indie Bundle
Not just one game, the Humble Indie Bundle is a periodic release of a handful of the best video games from independent game makers. You can get some games that are really unique, and best of all it’s name your price for the whole set! Pay what you think they’re worth or what you can afford. This is a great way to get exposed to some games you wouldn’t otherwise ever know about.

Link of the Month:
Tee Fury
It seems like there are a handful of websites that offer one daily t-shirt for sale every 24 hours, but I tend to like Tee Fury’s geekish offerings more often than any others’ designs. I follow their feed for easy updates!

Album of the Month:
Blue Scholars: Cinemetropolis
A damnably catchy album with an equally wonderful origin story: The local Seattleite duo of MC Geologic and DJ Sabzi funded the entire album through their fans via a Kickstarter campaign that ended up bringing in more than double the money they asked for! Geo has one of my favorite flows in all of hip-hop right now, and his lyrics are intelligent and clever. Sabzi pulls out some head-shakingly-good music for this project. Here, watch this video for “Fou Lee” (which is an Asian market on Beacon Hill in Seattle):

Game of the Month:
A Boy and His Blob
This is a gorgeous, soothing, adorable game. It’s a re-imagining of the insanely frustrating ’80s video game. In remaking it they removed all of the things that made the first game so difficult to actually play. The result is a strangely pastoral experience, like walking through a beautiful forest… with puzzle-solving. My favorite part: there’s a button whose sole purpose is to make the boy hug the blob. It’s so frikkin’ cute, and it serves no purpose other than to be cute.

Link of the Month:
Popped Culture
A delightful blog that specializes in the mashups of various pop-culture icons. For example, the recent Josey Wales & The Pussycats:

Album of the Month:
Open Mike Eagle: Rappers Will Die of Natural Causes
Just like I did last year, I’ve named Mike Eagle’s new album as my Album of the Month BEFORE it is released! Don’t worry, you won’t have to wait long; it’s released on Tuesday 6/7. Here’s a video to tide you over:

It’s gunna be suh-weeet.

UPDATE: Here it be!
http://itunes.apple.com/us/album/rappers-will-die-natural-causes/id442636707

DVD of the Month:
The Middleman: The Complete Series
The Middleman was a small show that kinda slipped under everyone’s radar a few years ago. It quietly aired a dozen episodes on ABC Family, then disappeared. It’s a shame; it’s one of the geekiest, most gosh-darn fun shows I’ve seen in a good long while. It’s a TV show for people who love TV shows, Movies, and Comic Books. It was canceled before they got to make the final episode, so after you watch the series you should pick up the comic book they made of the finalé.

Whoops! forgot to do this until today (only 2 days late)

Link of the Month:
Dads are the Original Hipsters
Sorry hipsters, your dad was the original hipster and he was killing it back in the day. This site has photographic proof that no matter how cool you think you are, your kids will think you are an absolute dork. And they’ll be right.

Album of the Month:
The Asteroids Galaxy Tour: Fruit
This is an incredibly infectious and poppy album that has sweet hints of 60s spy jazz music liberally sprinkled thoughout its happy, bouncy, electro-pop sensibilities. Danish vocalist Mette Lindberg has a thin, girlish voice that I find incredibly appealing in such stand-out tracks as “Around the Bend” (which was featured in an iPhone commercial), “Golden Age,” and “Bad Fever.” Also they seem to have a song about Ghost Rider. Awesome fun.

Book of the Month:
Usagi Yojimbo: The Special Edition by Stan Sakai
It is a great shame of mine that I do not own any Usagi Yojimbo comics. You may remember him from some (strange) crossovers with TMNT, but Usagi has a life completely on his own, and is celebrating his 25th anniversary. Usagi Yojimbo is easily in the top five greatest comic book series of all time, and I would love to own every single issue. I’ll begin my collection with this extremely handsome edition that collects the first seven volumes of the series (from Fantagraphics) with many fantastic extras. Hopefully I will be able to continually add volumes to my collection.

Link of the Month:
My Birfday
It’s my birfday next month. Here’s my Wish List. SHAMELESS PLUG.

DVD of the Month:
Max Headroom: The Complete Series
A unique and fascinating 1980s cyberpunk TV show, where the dominant technology is television broadcasting, not computers (though they do play their part). It’s truly a fascinating world where ratings are king, and your boss at the network is sometimes your enemy and sometimes your supporter. Unusual production design and strangely low-budget production values give this show a real alien feel. Not every episode is a hit, but there aren’t very many, and it is endlessly intriguing.

Game of the Month:
Sketch Online
Here’s the premise: imagine playing Pictionary over the internet with strangers, only there’s no board; just drawing. And you have to draw with your finger on a smartphone screen. It may not sound like it, but Sketch Online is ridiculously fun. Sure, every now and then you get some schmo who doesn’t play by the rules or draws something obscene, but for the most part everyone involved seems to actually be trying their hardest. Look for me online: my username is angrybeef (of course).

Link of the Month:
Housewife Alert
Finally, a website that’s a news aggregate that meticulously follows the most important, newsworthy subjects of all time: the Housewives of the ALL various “Real Housewives” shows. Truly, these good, honest, decent, intelligent, level-headed, sane women are deserving of all of our time and energy and adulation, and this website makes it so that you can now spend ALL of your time focusing on these women, who truly represent everything that is good in the world.

Book of the Month:
Dude, What Were You On!? by Richard Lockhart
An hilarious treatise that uses detailed speculation about what drugs the creators of any form of art that is slightly outside the rigid confines of conformity must have been on, because we all know that it’s IMPOSSIBLE to be at all creative if you’re clean and sober! My favorite section is on all the crazy drugs that They Might Be Giants must be on to write such WACKY and WEIRD music!

Movie of the Month:
Remember that Rain in November Falls Too Soon
This movie is absolutely, hands-down the best-ever movie in my favorite of all genres, the romantic film where a sensitive guy falls in love with a beautiful girl who is slowly dying of a mysterious disease that doesn’t affect her physically in hardly any way up until the beautifully romantic scene where she dies at the end. This movie, starring Joel McHale and Anne Hathaway, puts such films as Sweet November, A Walk to Remember, Autumn in New York, and Here on Earth (to name just a few) to SHAME! It’s so romantic, especially when Anne Hathaway dies at the end!

Link of the Month:
Boxcar 2D
A shockingly addictive “game” in which randomly-generated, wheeled vehicles are pitted against one of several 2-dimensional terrains. The cars that do the best in any given round then “breed” to create the cars of the next generation. A fascinating simulation of how environment shapes evolution as the cars “evolve” to be better and better over the course of many generations. You can introduce other factors, such as a chance of mutation or a “seed” car that you can design yourself. I suggest you load this website before going to bed and then checking on it in the morning to see just how many generations have passed and how evolution has shaped your creations.

Album of the Month:
Geli Wuerzner: Before the Eye
Electric violin virtuoso Geli Wuerzner participated in the RPM Music Challenge: record an entire album in the month of February 2011. The result is this remarkable 10-song album, which is in turn beautiful, haunting, and just plain pretty! Mostly instrumental, but periodically Geli’s voice appears to blend perfectly with her strings, and there are pianos, organs (as in the delightful “Spectacle“) and even some electronica sounds. Take a listen, but more importantly it’s only $6.00 for the entire album! Support local independent musicians!

Game of the Month:
Tetris Party
Man-o-man, is my wife ever addicted to Tetris, though it comes and goes in phases; she’ll spend entire months playing it nonstop, and then take a year-long break from it before picking it up again. This year we got the Wiiware Tetris Party with a gift card I got for Christmas, and I have to say—it really is a lot of fun. There are some crazy modes and special items (especially the one that drops a tiny little man into the playing field that you have to try not to squish). The multi-player modes are where it’s at, though, whether playing with your wife as she sits intensely on the couch next to you or playing with people around the world via wi-fi. It’s a hoot.