This is part 3 of a journey through my Spotify profile. If you haven’t, check out part 1 and part 2.
After albums comes a weird folder named Curated. A while back, presumably bummed out about not being at Glastonbury, I decided to organise an online festival. For a week, I encouraged my friends to make Spotify playlists representing the stage of their choice, and to my surprise, they listened. Spotstock ran for three years, producing wonders such as The Trouser Tent, The Martini Roso Stage, The Dubstep Room and At The Movies. I keep every Spotstock year in a folder. For a long time, I ran a small webapp displaying them all, but that’s gone now. Perhaps I should get it back online.
This is part 2 of a journey through my Spotify profile. If you haven’t, check out part 1.
Moving on, I have a folder of collaborative playlists. I can’t link any of these, as they’re semi-private, but among them I have Our Favourite Songs, which a group of us started some time prior to 2010. I have no idea how many people have looked at it over the years. We add things to it now and then. It is now 40 hours long, containing 619 songs. The quality of songs on there is extremely variable. I also have three related playlists from my friend Darren, who, upset at the lack of Boards of Canada on Spotify (mercifully rectified today), asked for our help in finding music that is “Like Boards of Canada”, “Not Quite Like Boards of Canada”, and “Not Like Boards of Canada”. They remain an excellent resource.
I’ve been using Spotify for a long time. I’m not 100% sure when I started using it, but it launched in 2008 and when I gave out invites to my friends, one of them took a 2 character username, so I guess it must have been 2008 or 2009. I have been using playlists from the start - I even have collaborative playlists from before they stored the date in which each song was added. Deep in all of this, there are some real gems, so I thought I’d dive through them and dig some up.
I wrote about Bloodborne on this blog a year or so ago, here.
In so many ways, The Old Hunters wasn’t about playing a game. For me, it was weeks of reading wikis, digging up lore, watching VaatiVidya - drinking in an absolutely endless quantity of information. I loved every second. Bloodborne’s story runs deep, deep down, and each area in The Old Hunters draws you into it further and further until you hit the very bottom. Finishing this expansion leaves you with a lot more knowledge, but a lot of new questions to go with it. It is a wonderful execution of the Lovecraftian mythos concept - the more you learn, the harder it is to comprehend the whole idea.
Hello folks. I wrote half of this review a year ago and never finished it. Finding it now, I don’t really like my writing in it, but I’m fed up editing it, so here it is.
The negative reviews on Cibele’s Steam page seem to come largely from people who had different expectations, so I think it’s best that we address them first: I don’t think that it’s accurate to call Cibele a video game. While there are game-like elements, it doesn’t really contain any challenges and I wouldn’t really say that it’s something that you “play”.