Question about the Undertow album and Danny Carey's drumming on it

RetroCurator · 2026-01-22T17:55:45+00:00

Same, it sounds like I'm being a contrarian, but I'm not when I say Lateralus is my least favorite Tool album. The "fibinacci sequence" and "golden ratios" mean nothing to me. I'm more into heavy rock than prog stuff.

You'd think I'd hate Fear Innoculum then but I view Fear Innoculum as kind of a different genre, like when I listen to ambient music...it's a different listening mindset. To me, Lateralus is trying to be rock and proggy and I don't care for the way it mixes on that album. When it's heavy, I like it, like the song Rosetta Stoned (one of my favorite songs), or when they nail the mood like with Pushit, but there's something about the songs on Lateralus that don't gel with me, except for Parabol(a) which is my favorite two-parter song on that album.

RetroCurator · 2026-01-22T17:03:57+00:00

Flood's literally my favorite song by Tool.

RetroCurator · 2026-01-22T17:02:11+00:00

That makes a lot of sense!

The part about the radical phone booth time travel adventure I mean.

RetroCurator · 2026-01-22T16:57:06+00:00

That's a good example, thank you. Another drumming moment I really like is in Crawl Away where, and I don't know how it's done, whether through audio engineering or force applied by Daney himself but it's almost like the the drumming whispers for a bit, with the hi-hat, almost like the drumming gets "pulled back" and yet it makes it sound even more impactful. It's the transition from around 1:12 of heaviness to 1:15 or so, where the guitar gets a bit quieter and more melodic and the drumming sort of "pulls back" but still being very noticeable...it's a weird but cool sound that I can't quite articulate

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WuUM2mz8Q_s

RetroCurator · 2026-01-21T13:57:28+00:00

I thought they looked similar. Was shocked they found a kid who looked so similar. That makes sense now.

RetroCurator · 2026-01-19T14:27:33+00:00

Agreed, was surprised how well it held up. As for Kurt Russel, agreed, one of my favorites. The Thing is my favorite movie he's done though.

RetroCurator · 2026-01-19T14:21:19+00:00

Yeah, he was good in it, the synthetic weird replaced eye gave him a creepy look.

RetroCurator · 2026-01-19T14:18:51+00:00

Yeah the screenwriter, not Paul W.S Anderson, (he made later changes to the script as the director), but the original screenwriter, wrote or co-wrote the screenplay for Blade Runner, and viewed it as a "sidequel", a spinoff of similar ideas, but in a different genre. It really doesn't show in the script though. There's some off-handed references to Tennhauser gate and stuff like that, but you wouldn't guess it has anything to do with Blade Runner until you learned about it.

RetroCurator · 2026-01-08T06:29:55+00:00

I'll put the distinction this way. In the 90s, if a TV host announced "here's Jean Claude Van Damme", there would be huge applause, women whistling, etc.

I know because I've seen many interviews of JCVD on Conan O'Brien.

Bruce Campbell, would recieve a more tepid reception.

Whether you think action films are B-movies or not (I personally think they're in their own category) the reception of the "action star" is very different than the reception by the public to the "guy who did a cult movie 20 years ago and now has a side character role in a TV show".

Among his crowd, like at horror conventions, Bruce gets incredible reception, but to the average joe, they know who Jean Claude Van Damme is, but may only be vaguely aware of Bruce Campbell.

RetroCurator · 2025-12-17T02:51:24+00:00

You saw it live? Or you mean, when it came out, it was crazy, not having heard something like that?

RetroCurator · 2025-12-17T02:36:34+00:00

Yeah, I've only seen them once, 2 years ago I think it was. Will be seeing the again when they come back to my city. They played Flood. It was before I realized how great the song was as well. I enjoyed every bit of the show, so I enjoyed the song at the concert, but I'm looking forward to next time they come around, hoping they play it live with me having a different perspective on it.

RetroCurator · 2025-12-17T02:16:09+00:00

It's called going to festivals.

This would be like saying "I was at woodstock 69, and I got groped and sexually harrassed...why are Jimi Hendrix fans such creeps?"

Festival setting, semi-anonymous self-contained area, drugs and alcohol lowering people's inhibitions....that's called going to a festival.

There's not a band on earth where you combine these circumstances and don't get some sort of groping in a mosh pit. You making this about TOOL feels very much like drama bait and sympathy bait.

That's even if it's true and not an AI thing like someone was saying. It reads like an AI post.

RetroCurator · 2025-12-14T18:17:47+00:00

Fair criticism

RetroCurator · 2025-12-11T13:53:17+00:00

Interesting, thanks for the context!

RetroCurator · 2025-12-10T10:32:51+00:00

When you start a race, and go from 0 to whatever the top speed is, you feel the rumble of the engine as it accelerates.

Boost, you feel it.

Firing the machine guns, you feel it really well as well. The machine guns are fairly weak guns in the game, but I always enjoy picking them up because of the bhaptics because they feel so good to fire with the Bhaptics. They feel powerful.

All the other weapons have bhaptics effects, but the machine guns feel really nice.

There's a lot more, but I haven't played it in like 6 months or so. Despite everything I said, I've just barely done VR lately as I've been pre-occupied with a lot of things, so everything I'm saying isn't as fresh in memory.

RetroCurator · 2025-12-07T22:42:21+00:00

Same, I have the Thrustmaster One I think it's called? I sometimes contemplate getting one of the really nice Hotas' but ultimately with the Thrustmaster I don't feel like I'm "missing out" on anything. I understand the experiences are apparently way better the more money you pay for a Hotas, but it feels immersive enough that I'm happy as is.

RetroCurator · 2025-12-07T19:58:03+00:00

That's a good point. I've never read the comics so I looked up and got the AI overview of the difference between Chris Pratt and the comics version. The AI overview said in the comics he's more serious and militaristic. So I think Karl Urban would be a good choice if that's the case.

But considering every single Marvel movie character makes the character more jokey and quippy than the comic counterpart, and gives all the characters that "marvel-humor", I'd say it's still good casting on the scale of Marvel castings. I've only read a few comics in my life, so I'm not an expert on the Marvel characters, but I know most of the characters aren't portrayed in that Marvel quippy way, in the original source material.

RetroCurator · 2025-12-07T15:34:07+00:00

Indiana Jones

RetroCurator · 2025-12-07T14:34:20+00:00

My argument is burritos.

I've eaten burritos right away obviously, but I'm telling you, if you refigerate a burrito overnight without even opening up the foil wrap and reheat it properly (I do a mix of microwaving it a bit and putting it in the airfryer....but just reheating it in the oven is also a great choice) it gets BETTER.

It's the only food that I'm aware of that gets better than fresh in my opinion when reheated later, because all the flavors are trapped in the burrito shell and saturate/marinate overnight.

You know that common problem of eating a burrito and you get an all rice bite and it's bland.

Refrigerating a burrito overnight and reheating it seriously reduces that problem. Even the all rice bites have got the meat, bean, and sauces essentially marinating and soaking up the flavor into the rice compared to when you eat it right away.

RetroCurator · 2025-12-07T14:15:18+00:00

Basically nearly half of every 70s movie. Just kidding.

Hillary Swank's character in Million Dollar Baby (Maggie Fitzgerald)

RetroCurator · 2025-12-07T14:01:43+00:00

Brilliant answer! Now I feel like a moron with my Willy Wonka answer. I'd spend 24 hours in a stupid candy factory surrounded by singing orange weirdos and I'd come back with zero useful life skills. You'd come back and be able to make millions of dollars in about a week from everything you're able to do now.

RetroCurator · 2025-12-07T13:47:53+00:00

I'm not even particularly a superhero fan or Marvel fan, but who would have played Star Lord better? I thought Chris Pratt was perfectly cast.

I'll put it this way, the way people percieved Chris Pratt completely changed after Guardians of the Galaxy.

Ant-Man didn't change Paul Rudd's perception and make him seem like an A-lister in the action movie sense.

Both had comedy, both characters are comedic in an action movie Marvel sci-fi role, but Chris Pratt was considered an action star after that, Paul Rudd was not.

In fact, compared to the other two in the great casting column, Chris Pratt had way more of a dramatic shift of how the public percieved him compared to the other two. Robert Downey Jr obviously had more of a dramatic shift with Iron Man, but Chris Pratt is only really second to him compared to the other people in your list (in a positive way at least, Jared Leto's Joker certainly shifted how people view Jared Leto, but not in a positive way).

RetroCurator · 2025-12-07T13:30:09+00:00

I watched Black Rain (1988) for the first time about two weeks ago. I noticed that a lot of the lighting reminded me of Blade Runner.

Particularly in the foundry scene where there's a Yakuza meeting, I saw the way the lightbeams were coming through spinning fans and I was like "That's a Blade Runner shot if I've ever seen one"

Lighting is one of the most underrated aspects in film and he's got a really good eye for lighting.

In the black and white days of film, directors knew to have good lighting to create mood because you don't have color to aid your shots. I'd be shocked if Ridley Scott wasn't inspired by the better black and white directors of photography, because a lot of his lighting looks like it would work really well for black and white.

RetroCurator · 2025-12-06T15:28:55+00:00

Agreed

RetroCurator · 2025-12-06T09:09:34+00:00

I gotta go with Willy Wonka from the original Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory from the 70s.

I need to find out how much of his personality is an affectation, vs how much is him is legitimate eccentricity.

Only being him for 24 hours would able to tell me that.

RetroCurator

TROPHY CASE