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THERE IS A PHOOLE AND THE GANG SHOW TONIGHT, despite... (gestures vaguely to entire world)
I used to listen to thousands of promos of new tunes every week.
I feel like there was a while there when more artists were taking some risks and putting some sounds into their tech house that were funny, surprising, entertaining, different.
THAT IS MAINLY OVER NOW.
Something has happened, maybe lots of things, and funny, fun risks in music are largely not being taken, except by those with great experience in taking fun music risks, from whom we expect delight and always get more than we bargained for.
When I talk about artists from whom we expect more, I'm talking about Mr. B the Gentleman Rhymer's new album NATIONAL TREASURE, of course. You will get to hear many tunes from this incredibly-great brand-new album on Phoole and the Gang Episode 460, which is tonight's show.
I'm also talking about WBBL and his wubbular deconstructions of beloved grooves, and Louis La Roche's continuing musical experimental archaeology, specifically devoted to recreating the 1980s, saxophone solos and all. And the Planetoids and High Contrast and of course Skeewiff have new things out too, and they're all in the show. It is basically a "I went music shopping and I've dumped out the stuff I bought on the floor and now we're listening to all of it" show.
The matter of punching targets whilst having the dang arthritis
My knee ain't no account, as rustic and bucolic persons might be heard to grumble, had they knee pain attributable to simply existing for five decades and more.
*I* have this.
My left knee has ground off all of its cartilages, I think, or ruptured its bursae, or done some other idiotic spiteful shit, and now it hurts when I do squats - and after I do squats, it hurts and hurts and hurts all the live-long day.
I love my Meta Quest 2 Les Mills BodyCombat XR violence-bonanzas, you know I do - but there are very few options in that fitness game for workouts that don't include squats.
One does have the option of simply...not squatting, during the moments in the game when the player is cued to squat. But then you lose all these points. And a hallmark of my particular CPTSD is a need to WIN and OBTAIN APPROVAL CONSTANTLY. So if I have to deliberately fail whilst frolicking with my machine-learning overlords, it gets under my skin.
So...I've been cheating on Les.
For the past two weeks, I've been working out with Supernatural instead.
In the BodyCombat virtual gymnasium, you're in a kind of...alley? Chute? Hall? Piste? You're in a kind of long rectangular gym-y space, with targets originating from a hatch that appears to be about 50 feet away from you. There are very cool environments surrounding this space, which change from workout to workout, but the combat area is largely the same from workout to workout.
In Supernatural, you're on a disc, HOVERING IN SPACE above or in mind-blowingly-beautiful natural landscapes for some workouts, and crazy gorgeous artificial landscapes for others. Round portals open up in front of you and to the sides of you, and targets fling themselves out of the portals and hurl themselves at you from a variety of directions.
I have fiddled with the game's accessibility settings so that the disc I'm standing on is JUST A LITTLE BIT LARGER, because I tell you what, it feels like I'm gonna fall off of that thing when I have to shift my footing to defend against attacks from different directions. I know I'm just in my living room, and I won't really fall, but my reptile hind-brain is pretty sure we're gonna die. The expansion of the Disc of Standing has not reduced my enjoyment of the terrifyingly-lovely landscapes.
There are myriad other differences between the games - Les Mills has two coaches, both of whom I love, while Supernatural has SIX coaches (I thought there were dozens of them, since six is much more than two, and all the variety shocked me), all of whom are charming and at least one of whom is GAAAAAAAAAY, which is a huge treat; and Supernatural has workouts with MUSIC YOU HAVE HEARD BEFORE, which you know is a delight to me - but the critical difference for me is that I was able to flip a switch in the accessibility settings directing the game to not make me have to squat. I have been able to get in heart-pumping, heavy-breathing, super-sweating punch-fests for two weeks while giving my knee a rest.
Come join the show tonight - stay home, stay safe, tune in, Phoole out!
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