Netflix Minute: South Park - The Imaginationland Trilogy

Netflix Minute is a weekly feature highlighting a title from Netflix's catalog of instant view films. If you want to spend a night snuggled up with a bag of popcorn and don't want to drive to the video store, this is for you.

Despite all of the vulgarity of South Park, the showrunners Trey Parker and Matt Stone often manage to cram heaps of social commentary into their show. What they don't do very often is create multi-episode story arcs, mostly aiming for one major pop culture object to parody and one social trend to mock per show. In the case of The Imaginationland Trilogy, Parker and Stone cranked out a unique three-episode arc that combined the best elements of the series into one Emmy award winning masterpiece.

The March Music Wrap-Up Podcast

The Music Wrap-Up is a monthly summary of my favorite and other notable new releases. Having trouble keeping up with all the new music? Need some music suggestions? Then the Music Wrap-Up is for you. And please support these musicians as that's the reason I'm featuring them in the first place.
The Music Wrap-Up gets its own podcast feed! This mostly means that you'll be able to access the Wrap-Up episodes for longer. Three months to be exact. And what a way to kick off the new feed -- March was so full of great music that I almost couldn't keep up with it all. I've fallen in love with almost every release this month. DeVotchKa, The Dodos, Mountain Goats, The Strokes, World/Inferno Friendship Society, and more! So be sure to click those new RSS and iTunes links so that you don't miss out on future Music Wrap-Ups. And enjoy this months, because I think it's my best podcast editing yet.

Shuffled Podcast: The Voiceless Edition

Every other Wednesday I share my love of music in an assortment of ways. Shuffled is a podcast whose format is as varied as my tastes in music, so hopefully you won't ever be bored and everyone can find something to enjoy.
In this edition of Shuffled I return to the original show format for some music shuffling without a voice. Don't expect any long diatribes about the songs that came up, just a quick summation and then straight to the tunes. And oh the wonderful tunes that did come along via the gods of randomness.

Why I Currently Like the 3DS

The 3DS is not a worthless, gimmicky portable console. Not yet.

The short time I spent playing Nintendo's newest hardware changed my opinion of it from skeptical yet hopeful to hopeful yet skeptical. In a good way. Of course, the 3DS has very little to offer at launch, but that is no reason to denigrate the system's potential. And after getting a quick overview of a few of its games and features, I see how much the system has going for it.

Movie Review: Sucker Punch

If anybody has seen Zack Snyder speak publicly then they will know that he's not great with words. When trying to describe anything from motivation to descriptions, he gets tangled up very easily and starts to get incoherent. It's a wonder that he can describe what he wants as a director to his staff. His visuals are unquestioningly ambitious and he has a wonderful eye for the action sequence and montage. From his debut with Dawn of the Dead he has established himself as a auteur to watch. Sucker Punch is the first movie he's directed based off his own original material and, well...he should stick to directing.

Video Round-Up: The One-Man Band Edition

Video Round-Up is a weekly post collecting an assortment of videos from around the web. Whether they be music videos, creative viral marketing, just plain cool, or just plain ridiculous, they will all be found on Video Round-Up.
I once saw a guy that called himself The Amazing Elephant Man. He wore an Elephant Man Halloween mask, had a headset microphone, played a mini-accordian with his hands, a cymbal with one foot and a kick drum with the other. It was a strange but amusing concert, but not exactly what I would pay good money to see. In the age of electronics, however, the idea of the one-man band is completely revitalized. Just take a gander at some of these examples.

Sophist Radio Episode 42: The Soul Plane of Video Games

What do Linda Tripp, the KKK, and the 2 Live Crew have in common? Nothing. Other than the fact that they all get mentioned in this week's episode of Sophist Radio. Harold, James, and Aaron do manage to squeeze in some video game talk as well, though. Bulletstorm falls under the Sophist microscope first, and what begins as a talk about the game quickly turns into one the most intelligent, immature, and dare I say tense conversations the crew has ever had. Things do lighten up with the guys sharing their thoughts on a few other games such as Bit.Trip Flux, Shogun: Total War 1 and 2, and King's Guard. Come for the brilliant idea of USB-aided intercourse and stay for the awesome video game talk.

Movie Review: Paul

There are few things more enjoyable than watching Simon Pegg and Nick Frost playing best friends on an adventure. Their chemistry together is like that of old Hollywood legends, Bing Crosby and Bob Hope. Whatever movie they're in doesn't seem to matter since watching them together is so much fun. "Paul" is their first film together without Edgar Wright behind the camera but that's been taken care of, as Greg Mottola is more than capable at this sort of material. It's a shame that the potential is here for another modern comedy classic but what we end up getting is just "merely" good. Is it wrong to be a little disappointed in that?

A New Edition to the Schedule: Weekly Article Features

Cerebral Pop was envisioned as an outlet entirely devoid of news and reviews -- Primarily focused on opinion pieces, editorials, and other forms of original content. Eventually we introduced reviews and a series of weekly columns to help convey our opinions on newly released content, and to help pad out the rest of the site with more regular and entertaining posts.

You may have noticed that our reviews and weekly posts have come to somewhat dominate the entirety of our output in the last several months. So, now we're looking to change that. Every Tuesday we are going to have a non-serialized, original, opinion piece, editorial, or some other form of article hit the site. It will go up in our newly added Features bar under the heading of "This Week" and move down the line with each new Tuesday feature posted.

In this way we hope to show that we're focused on having quality thought-provoking, interesting, clever, or funny articles, even if we can only do one a week right now. They will be right up front on the site for three weeks after posting, so you'll always know what the last three Tuesday Article Feature posts were.

We hope you'll enjoy having even more content from us on a weekly basis, and will help open a discussion about the topics we write either in the comments or over on the forums. Thanks for reading our stuff! Here's to even more of it.

Insufficient Funds: Evil Empire Sucks

Insufficient Funds is a weekly post in which we feature a free, or very close to it, piece of media that you can enjoy without overdrafting your bank account. So if you're low on funds, stay tuned to Cerebral Pop every Friday morning.
A thousand punk bands are recording themselves in a thousand different basements right now and you will likely never hear the results. Some of them might have a lot of promise, but they'll break up before they ever get the chance to see that potential realized in a real studio with a producer to help them sound their best. Thankfully, the Internet allows us special access to this formerly lost world of music.

Evil Empire fits nicely into this category. I actually discovered them from their next release, Does This Genocide Make Me Sexy?, which is a significant step up in recording quality. I fell in love with their volatile sound and immense potential. So, I dug up their first recording to see how it compared.