No matter what you’re looking for, there’ll always be one particular [any-country] buffet that fulfills your gluttonous needs. Especially when one gives in and admits: I’ll Try Living Like This. We all have our delicacies and guilty pleasures, and people know exactly how to tick at their tack. Take, for example, Minado. This location is marketed as serving a buffet of “Japanese”/sushi (yellow fin) cuisine, but it’s totally not; it’s incredibly Americanized, but it has a variety of dishes for everyone who enters. Shit, they got the dumplings and fried rolls, cold noodle and bok choy salads, fish and meat cooked and uncooked, cooks ready to cook for you, tempura milieu, ice cream, a bar of baked goods, sake, crab legs, shrimp, etc, etc. It’s all really high-grade shit, unlike some random Chinese restaurant off Stroop Road you maître d’d at for a minute, always feeling free to take J-O breaks in the bathroom, only Minado is exactly like that J-O break in the bathroom, but with jet-wind, Dyson blade hand dryers. Hand-and-foot hospitality systems. Yet, alas, it’s impossible to gorge on the entire buffet. And although you try, it’s a pleasure and a guilt trip to leave completely stuffed, having the last thought, “I didn’t try the crab and shrimp stuffed white fish. Wait, what did I eat?”
The hardest part about casinos is walking past a row of digital poker machines and trying to figure out where to gamble. It’s like, (1) “Where to?” and (2) “How much?” But whatever, you’ve broke even twice now — once with dice, once at the races. So hitting up the Black Jack table becomes a $1,500 venture, and as the Jurassic World penny slot machines start syncing up with the Michael Jackson Moonwalker slots, you notice the music being played faintly at the bar that people are yelling within and instantly lose $1,200. You’re sweating into your fifth free drink, taking $300 to the roulette table flips around $2,000, but mathematics was never your “thing,” as much as luck and actuarial sciences, so you just go back to the bachelor party at the lobster buffet. Chill on ice while finally sitting down to one of them digital poker machines, hit a streak with the groom as a good luck charm, and tank $3,500, breaking even once again, but tipping the dancers atop the food-guards, trying to make eye contact, and as soon as they do, a pal turns and tells you something super insignificant that becomes a memory later without a location because forgetting this moment may just come and haunt the psyche.
Game designers… tune their machines to the key of C in order to optimize harmonic cohesion; one team of designers, the story goes, even spent a month perfecting a single ‘ding’ sound on one machine. — Adrian Rew, Slot Machine Music
Owning a Raspberry Pi has pretty much ruined how I play modern videogames, as I can’t fuck on single-player new-gen storylines as much as I’d like to with retro ones. So, some nights I’ll spend from three to six hours into the bird-chirping hours of Sunday, trying to find the perfect game, when the perfect game is playing Warlock: The Movie, dipping out after drowning within 30 seconds, seeing Wardner looks like garbage, so instantly quitting warming up Wacky Worlds, an RPG builder? And it’s not like I give a shit about anything at this hour, though my rate of consumption is incredibly high. Like, killer cholesterol high. My Raspberry Pi, stacked to the gills with retro gaming ROMs, is me eating a plate of bacon for breakfast every morning. Then there’s another top-down space-ship shooter. A fighting game. That bootleg ROM of 32-bit nude gals. None of the buttons are correct. Dying countless times to figure anything out. The next day only remembering bits and pieces from games and giggling about their nostalgic entrapment. Something so appealing that it’s too hard saying “No,” but not entirely agreeing that it’s a “Yes” either.
There needs to be an ending point. Especially with I’ll Try Living Like This by death’s dynamic shroud.wmv (who on this release features James Webster and Keith Rankin). Yet, there isn’t one. It actually stops abruptly and goes back into the harsh glitter-casino sound from the beginning, if you’ve put this on repeat. But if you don’t get the gist yet, I’ll Try Living Like This is super, super sick. Like, too ill. I want every sample to play for infinity. There are beats on here that I wish were the whole album. At one point, in the track “Somebody Home,” I wished the end vocal sample would go on forever, while the album played along with it. And even though vaporwave was “born” into “death,” and even though I’ll Try Living Like This is certainly not “vaporwave,” EVEN THOUGH I’m mentioning vaporwave in terms of corporate satire via 4D midi collage, and even though I want more and more of each sample of each track, I’ll never be able to have it. The tease for me is loving every sample. I’d rather it be mixed with other parts of the album. Actually, I’ll Try Living Like This would be more interesting as a cell phone application, rather than trying to be a fluid album. Had I’ll Try Living Like This been a program on my phone that includes pre-set or customizable music, I feel like the experience would be way more pleasing than submitting myself to a pre-mixed CD. The mindset syncs up and dips too quickly for listeners to follow, but it hangs on just enough to become addictive. However, if this is the only hope of hearing these samples (for the lazy and software uneducated), I’ll Try Living Like This is exactly what I need on a bummed-out Wednesday, drinking on the low at work.
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