Some good stuff from this Slovenian avant-folk band.

Here's a remarkable recording of the great Zabelle Panosian from 1917, courtesy of Canary Records.

Yep, not a bad comparison. Hala Strana is one of many recording names that Steven R. Smith uses--he's basically got one name for every style that he dabbles in, and with Hala Strana he was going for a bit of a Slavic music influence. All his music is pretty top notch hazy psych folk/post-rock...

Not too shabby, reminds me quite a lot of Burial. Here's the opening track from a favorite album of mine, School of the Flower, by Six Organs of Admittance. Starts out sounding like it's going to be a tripped-out mash-up of free-improv and weirdo-drone-folk (not unlike some of Alice Coltrane's...

I'm not certain--I love Holy Grail and Life of Brian, but do really hate The Meaning of Life. I just don't think it's funny at all, full stop. 

Oh yeah, I didn't mean to imply that The Kinks are the most influential band on metal or anything like that, just that it can be fun to listen to the influences of the influences. Black Sabbath is the most influential metal band, full stop. They practically invented heavy metal and doom metal in...

As a former long-time player of XI (I consider it to be my true MMO love, and yearn for the golden days when it was at its height) and a former player of XIV (played it for about a year), I can tell you that they are very different games. XI is very much in the vein of Everquest, and XIV in the...

Kubo and the Two Strings (2016): 9/10   And that rating is mostly just reflective of the stunning technical accomplishment that this movie is. Surely one of the finest examples of stop-motion animation ever.

I posted my top 50 albums of the year regardless of genre elsewhere on Head-Fi, but here is a much smaller list stripped down to metal only:   15. The Dillinger Escape Plan: Dissociation 14. Be'lakor: Vessels 13. Cult of Luna & Julie Christmas: Mariner 12. Destroyer 666: Wildfire 11...

Finally beat The Witcher III and its accompanying expansions. Really enjoyed my time with it. Hearts of Stone in particular was fantastic--some of the best writing I've ever come across in a video game. Both the base game and Blood and Wine were a little rockier but still serious achievements in...

  If it makes you feel any better, I don't think I've ever played a game of Ticket to Ride where someone wasn't a mere 1-2 points behind someone else--usually behind the person in first.    Played four newish games recently--Epic Spell Wars, Smash Up, Mysterium, and Mechs vs. Minions. Didn't...

  Trailer made it look really cheesy, and the GF grew up in a Seventh Day Adventist family and had Doss's story memorized forwards and backwards by the time she was a teen--so she has absolutely no desire to see it. So it'll probably get a miss from me, even though I'm curious about Gibson's...

  Working on my first run-through still--just started the Blood and Wine expansion a couple weeks ago. The Hearts of Stone expansion is, I think, the best-written piece of game fiction I've ever encountered, and makes a strong case for games as literature. Blood and Wine has a lot to live up...

  Indeed, you've been quite busy.Think you may have seen more movies in the last few weeks than I've seen all year, lol.

  I don't know that I could just pick one, but if I could pick a handful it'd probably be this handful:   Bathory: Blood Fire Death (or Under the Sign of the Black Mark) Burzum: Filosofem (or Hvis lyset tar oss) Negura Bunget: OM Weakling: Dead as Dreams Deathspell Omega: Paracletus...

  This is why I love video games--for the vast differences in opinions they can generate. I think The Witcher III is a great game and Skyrim a terrible one--I can't fathom putting even 50 hours into the later, nevermind 500, whereas I've put 70 into the Witcher thus far and can easily imagine...

Played D&D (well, actually Lamentations of the Flame Princess with bits and pieces hacked onto it from Basic Dungeons & Dragons, Call of Cthulhu, and Burning Wheel) with three people over the weekend who had never played a tabletop roleplaying game before and they had a blast. They're still...

Will do--expecting good things, though with it only supporting five players getting it to the table might be tough--our group almost never dips below 7. Might need to convince them that we should split up occasionally to give some of the other games on our shelves some time in the...

  I don't know that any definition pulled off Wikipedia is necessarily 'established,' but I know what you mean. That said, pagan metal is an established genre in some online communities (like the above-mentioned RYM), so while it may not have useful widespread application, it is useful to some...

  Indeed it does, but that's why it's not a terribly useful genre descriptor. Wikipedia itself quotes a source as saying that it's more an idea than it is a genre, and that particular entry doesn't differentiate between folk and pagan metal at all beyond their thematic concerns. In the circles...

  The make-it-or-break-it for me is do I have to leave it set up between sessions or is it scenario-based? Neither myself nor anyone in my gaming group has a dedicated gaming room, and we all have cats whose favorite game to play with our games is Godzilla. I have heard of it though--I even...

Squad Leader! Great game. Got into it fairly recently (well, Advanced Squad Leader 2nd Edition), and it's a behemoth. I will probably never come close to mastering it, but at least I'm enjoying it.      I didn't realize it was on the iPad! I will have to look into that. Would be a great...

  Let me know what you think of it when you get the chance to play it. Still wavering on which of the many co-op Lovecraftian games to pick up, lol.    Talisman is a bit of a classic, been in print in some form or another since 1983. Used to play it a lot as a kid. It's not really a great...

Guys play anything good recently? Finally got Cosmic Encounter to an enthusiastic table, and it was a roaring success. And here's a recent picture of my copy of Talisman; still one of my favorite board designs of all time.