In this installment from the Emerald Podcast Network, writers Eric Schucht and Mathew Brock discuss the forthcoming gaming system Nintendo Switch.

Listen to the episode below. Subscribe to Emerald podcasts on iTunes here.

The post Podcast: What should we make of the Nintendo Switch? appeared first on Emerald Media.

In this installment from the Emerald Podcast Network, Emerald reporters Connor Kwiecien and Miguel Sanchez-Rutledge talk about why you should be invested in the ASUO (the Associated Students of the University of Oregon), as well as how to find and attend the ASUO meetings.

Listen to the episode via SoundCloud below, or subscribe to the Emerald podcasts on iTunes here.

The post Podcast: What is the ASUO? appeared first on Emerald Media.

In this episode from the Emerald Podcast Network, writers Dana Alston and Mathew Brock discuss Warcraft, the forthcoming Assassin’s Creed adaptation, and consider why film adaptations of video games don’t always make a lot of sense.

Subscribe to Emerald podcasts on iTunes or listen to the podcast below:

The post Podcast: Why video game adaptations don’t always work appeared first on Emerald Media.

In this installment from the Emerald Podcast Network, Emerald political columnists Alec Cowan and Zach Moss discuss the second presidential debate and the recent leak of recordings from Donald Trump’s hot mic (during which he shared his lewd remarks about the perks of his celebrity stature), as well as how the 2016 presidential election will be remembered.

Listen to the “Locker Room Talk” edition of the Emerald Podcast Network below.

This episode was produced by Emerson Malone. Theme music by Evan DuPell.

When University of Oregon sophomore Sara Bass reached for the textbook Essential Clinical Anatomy at the UO Duck Store on the first Monday of classes, the $89.69 price tag didn’t faze her. She knew her books would be expensive, but she viewed them as “a necessary evil.”

Bass is not alone; this year, the average UO undergraduate will spend $1068 on books and supplies, $54 more than last year, according to estimates made by the UO financial aid office. The U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics estimates textbook prices have risen 88 percent in the past 10 years. Students and bookstores want to cut costs, but publishers are raising prices to offset declining revenue.

The Duck Store subsidizes the cost of books with revenue from its sportswear sales by providing 10 percent off new books and up to 32 percent off used books, according to Katie Conway, Duck Store marketing director. But Conway says that this practice is rare in collegiate bookstores across the country.

Students and professors say the rising cost of textbooks is further straining the finances of those already facing higher tuition.

UO economics professor of practice Tim Duy took matters into his own hands.

“I am writing up notes for [my] class because I am not willing to tolerate the high prices unless the textbook really adds value,” Duy said in an email to the Emerald. “In my honest opinion, too often they don’t. I am not in the business of making other professors rich at the expense of my students.”

What’s causing the rise?

Although The Duck Store is a nonprofit and has various programs attempting to reduce the cost of textbooks, prices from textbook publishers keep climbing, said Bruce Lundy, team leader at The Duck Store.

Publishers are increasing prices in the face of innovative forms of textbook sales such as bookstores with rental programs, online publishers and used-book wholesalers.

Amazon entered the textbook market a decade ago and often undercuts its competition. For instance, the online retailer charges $21.77 less for the “Essential Clinical Anatomy” textbook than The Duck Store. But unlike Amazon, book publishers are often required to raise prices in order to stay profitable, and that means higher prices for places like The Duck Store.

Gates expects this trend to continue in the following few years, but believes that eventually a leveling off will occur and The Duck Store will see a stabilized year-to-year revenue, he said in an email.

How does The Duck Store help control costs?

The Duck Store continues to look for ways to keep textbook prices in check, but assistance from sports apparel sales is impacted by declining revenue.

According to 990 income tax forms, revenue for The Duck Store hit $42.9 million in 2010, but sales have declined to $29.8 million in 2014 – a $13.1 million drop.

“Some of the contributing factors are fan fatigue (unsustainable football success), increased competition, changes in consumer behavior in general,” Jeremy Gates, the chief financial officer for The Duck Store, wrote in an email.

Another way The Duck Store is curbing costs for students is a textbook scholarship known as Book Awards. Nearly $170,000 has been awarded in over 10 years since the program began. Twenty-five students each term are awarded the $200-300 gift card to be used on books and supplies. The store uses a lottery system when selecting students and Gates is one of the store employees that personally hands students a gift card.

“It’s always fun to get to play Santa Claus, so to speak, and brighten the day of someone,” Gates wrote in an email.

The Duck Store also offers a rental program for students, but this option isn’t always the cheapest. For instance, if the rental book is damaged, a student may need to pay for the book’s replacement. Employees are the ones that make the call on whether a book is too far gone.

“When I last rented, the bookstore wouldn’t take [the rental] back because of minor damage,” wrote sophomore Sara Bass in an email. “I had to pay more.”

The ebook option

As the Duck Store team leader, Lundy helps make ebooks more readily available for students. This option, typically less expensive than purchasing a printed book, helps students save money but cuts into publisher profits. To offset these losses, some publishers have begun selling directly to instructors, sidestepping college bookstores such as The Duck Store.

One ebook publisher, Greater River Learning Publishing, provides college students and faculty with “more engaging publications by integrating multimedia and technology,” according to its website. Six University of Oregon Instructors currently use Great River Learning as course material, according to the GRL website.

A recent report from the Student Public Interest Research Groups claims these publications, ones which require “access codes,” are monopolizing textbooks. Students are required to purchase the access codes or suffer a failing grade due to the inability to participate in online activities, according to the report.

“In one swoop, the publishers remove a student’s ability to opt-out of buying their product, eliminate any and all competition in the market and look good doing it because the codes are cheaper than publisher’s exorbitantly priced textbooks,” Ethan Senack, higher education advocate at the Student PIRGs, said in a blog for the Huffington Post.

The Duck Store is working on another solution. A new program would provide classes with “inclusive access” textbooks to keep up with new trends in market demand, Lundy said. Students who take a course using this new online textbook service would be provided with the digital format on the first day of class. It would potentially be cheaper than purchasing a new textbook, but if a student found a more affordable option, they would be able to opt-out of the program, according to Lundy.

Lundy says this program is still in the planning stages but he hopes to have it come to fruition by winter term.
For the 25 students per term who receive The Duck Store’s $200-300 scholarship, some help is readily available. The scholarship is a step toward helping students afford textbooks, but the rising costs for some can be the difference between a class and a meal.

For most people, Monday evening primarily gravitated around a very specific debate between two people, both of whom are competing for the same job. The conversation included whether one believes that climate change was a hoax concocted by the Chinese, how to alleviate the relationship between the black community and the police and whether either of them has a plan to systematically demolish ISIS.

It was a very serious evening grounded in very serious matters. These were the strange circumstances during which I divorced reality and stepped into an Animal Collective show. The Baltimore-based experimental-pop group played the McDonald Theatre on Monday, Sept. 26. Eric Copeland, vocalist for experimental electronic group Black Dice, opened.

Animal Collective plays at the McDonald Theater in Eugene, Ore. on Sept. 26, 2016. (Aaron Nelson/Emerald)

An Animal Collective show is a sensorial baptism by fire. The stage decoration included towering, cubist sculptures of heads, which loomed over the band’s three central members: Avey Tare (real name David Portner), Panda Bear (Noah Lennox) and Geologist (Brian Weitz).

Geologist earned the moniker for sporting a headlamp during each show, as if he were spelunking, but the real reason is much more practical; the visuals are a busy, mangled montage, an inexplicable fusion that defies easy explanation. It evoked pixelated cartoons siphoned through a kaleidoscope and the surrealist imagery of Spanish painter Joan Miró. The theatrics were wasted, but so was the crowd, so it evidently did wonders for them.

A friend in high school once suggested to me: “I think you have to be young to enjoy Animal Collective.” It made sense at the time; the band embodied a certain youthful whimsy that no one else did.

One of the more marvelous things from AnCo is the rapport between Avey Tare and Panda Bear. They have voices that pair very well together. Panda’s evokes a young Brian Wilson, while Avey’s is a bit rougher around the edges. They have an inimitable way that they sing together. Sure, they harmonize and sing in counterpoint, but they also do a rapid call-and-response, sharing syllables between them, dancing up and down the staircase of a melody with grace and vitality. Almost none of this rapport translates to the live show.

Animal Collective plays at the McDonald Theater in Eugene, Ore. on Sept. 26, 2016. (Aaron Nelson/Emerald)

The setlist was a hodgepodge of tracks with a heavy emphasis on the group’s album Painting With, which dropped this year. The set also included a nearly unrecognizable arrangement of “Water Curses,” a relatively deep cut in the band’s catalog that already sounded like it was recorded inside a fishtank. Then there was the doomy, synth-filled cover of “Kids on Holiday,” an interesting take of the acoustic, chipper cut from the 2004 album Sung Tongs.

There were all the standard Animal Collective ingredients: tribal drums, the many layers of modular synths and the spotless tenor vocals layers from Panda. But there didn’t seem to be anything to galvanize the show as a whole. Even the horrifying bass and melodic synth flourishes of “Summertime Clothes,” a stand-out from 2009’s Merriweather Post Pavillion, was tiresome and seemed to fall flat.

With time, the band’s hooks have gotten poppier and dumber. The opening verse to “Summertime Clothes” is a poetic description of night sweats and restless agitation during a sweltering summer night befitting a Stephen King story  (“My bones have to move and my skin’s gotta breathe”). Compare this with “FloriDada,” the single from Painting With: we hear Avey’s vocal chords pogoing up and down as he sings “Flori, Flori, Flori, Flori, Florida, Flori-dada, Flori-dada!”

Maybe the band has veered into senselessness and any emotional bond I had with them has dissolved; maybe Roger Murtaugh and I have something in common, and I’m getting too old for this shit. When I’d returned home with my roommate after the show, he had an easier epiphany: “I hate the youth.”

The Portland-based indie-rock band Fruit Bats certainly deserves your attention, even if the name doesn’t always ring a bell. Even the HiFi doorman cordially greeted me: “’Sup, man? You here to see Fruit Flies?”

In terms of masterful, textured arrangements and poetic, elegant lyrics, Fruit Bats are arguably the closest surrogate out there to The Shins. Johnson writes painfully visceral songs, many of them about solitude and loneliness, and much like Wilco’s Jeff Tweedy, can somehow turn them into a track that makes you want to dance.

The band, that played the HiFi Music Hall Friday night, Sept. 23, was opened by a solo show from Portland-by-way-of-Louisiana musician Kyle Craft, formerly the frontman of the freak-folk band Gashcat.

Kyle Craft at the HiFi Music Hall on Friday, Sept. 23, 2016. (Emerson Malone/Emerald).

Craft commanded the HiFi stage with a harmonica, acoustic guitar and his mighty, dulcet tones. Craft’s solo album Dolls of Highland was released on Sub Pop records in April this year. As with most opening acts, the crowd was sparse; some leaned against the bar, others on the opposite end of the room. He’d introduce songs like “Pentecost” in jest, facetiously calling it a “smash hit.” Despite the genuinely good tunes, the only moving object in the whole venue was the leisurely gyrating disco ball, painting the room with lavender dots of light.

The Fruit Bats’ stage was decorated modestly, like someone had halfheartedly made an effort for a Halloween party or a séance: a few dozen tiny, pastel-colored LED candles were placed around the stage, bookending the keyboards and holding down the tacky blankets draped beneath the amps.

In “Humbug Mountain Song,” named for one of southern Oregon’s remote topographical sites, singer-songwriter Eric D. Johnson sings about looking at the sky: “Forgive me, but I don’t know if I remember enough to say what the air was really like that day — may have been clouds or sun. I don’t recall. I was young.” But tonight, there was no ambiguity surrounding Johnson’s song. There were no clouds, just pure, blissful clarity. HiFi is the perfect Eugene venue to see Fruit Bats due to the pristine sound quality, as the name suggests. Every texture in the tracks was immaculate: the slick guitar solos, the stellar keyboard melodies, the shakers and drums.

Eric D. Johnson of Fruit Bats at the HiFi Music Lounge on Friday, Sept. 23, 2016. (Emerson Malone/Emerald).

Johnson sported a formal, baby blue oxford shirt buttoned-up to his Adam’s apple and hair that passed his shoulders. During “Dolly,” he traded his guitar for a tambourine and hopped into the middle of the audience to dance with everyone. His magnetic charm makes him a natural showman, not so much like a mega-famous, egocentric rock star, but more like a good friend who stopped by to play a house show.

“This must be the best show we’ve had in Eugene,” Johnson smiled.

Fruit Bats’ keyboardist was also a delight to watch, like he still gets a kick out of singing back-up vocals to goofy lines like, “she came to him like a flip-flop floating on a wave.”

Read on: Check out our Q&A with Eric D. Johnson here

A few weeks back, Eric told me in an interview that his dream venue — although he was making it up on the spot — would be Pompeii, an answer that he said was directly inspired by the famous 1972 Pink Floyd concert film.

And HiFi, where the wall behind the stage is lined with 7-inch records that spell out the venue’s name, where the cement floors get sticky from spilled lager, certainly isn’t an ancient Roman amphitheater. It may not be Johnson’s dream venue, but seeing him gleefully dancing amidst his fans would make you think otherwise.

After the show, I approached Johnson at the merch table to thank him. He told me that the band has played several shows around Eugene — at the WOW Hall, at Sam Bond’s Garage — but this was easily his favorite to date.

“I wasn’t lying,” he said.

Watch the music video for “Humbug Mountain Song” by Fruit Bats below.

The self-titled album from Preoccupations begins with more than a minute of feedback noise and nasal radiator drone as a foreboding preamble. In the opening track, “Anxiety,” bassist-vocalist Matt Flegel murmurs cryptic, paranoiac verses (“I’m spinning in a vacuum, deteriorating to great acclaim”), but his frayed voice never comes across as self-pitying or defeatist; instead, he uses his anger to fuel his gas tank.

The record, which was released Sept. 16 from Jagjaguwar Records, comes after a few name-changes for the Canadian industrial art-rock band. Flegel, guitarist Daniel Christiansen and drummer Mike Wallace made up a Black Sabbath cover band before forming a fantastic rock group by the name Women, an outfit that disbanded after an on-stage fistfight in 2010 and guitarist Christopher Reimer’s death in 2012. Songs by Women are relatively hard to find, not only because its debut EP was a self-released cassette tape, but also because it’s basically futile to Google “Women band.” Later, members of Women rebranded as Viet Cong, which released an excellent self-titled EP in January last year.

But the name “Viet Cong” inevitably proved problematic, as the band was accused of being insensitive, practicing cultural appropriation and opening up old wounds. The name was considered offensive enough to justify cancelling a show at a liberal-arts college in Ohio in March 2015.

Preoccupations represents a significant evolution from the band’s days of prior names, as the majority of songs are virtually hookless and have the searing atmosphere of being trapped inside a furnace. Vitriol and angst are the album’s unifying elements, and the abstract meditation on anxiety is embodied by a muddled tangle of guitars and bass. The epic 11-and-a-half minute centerpiece “Memory” is an elegant bass-driven composition. A few minutes into the track, Wolf Parade’s Dan Boeckner takes a turn on vocals.

The tracks “Forbidden” and “Sense,” both of which run under two minutes, are relatively mellow respites for the blistering mood. By contrast, “Stimulation” sprints by with break-neck speed as Flegel shouts with glee, “All dead inside! All gonna die! All gonna die!” The album closes on “Fever,” the taunting electronics of which recall noise-rock group Holy Fuck. The synths begin in the backdrop before towering over Flegel’s “You’re not scared” mantra and ultimately drowning him out.

In May this year, Preoccupations played its first show under the new name at Sasquatch! Music Festival in George, Washington. The return was anticlimactic, to say the least. Unfortunately, a number of circumstances were geared against the band’s set, not the least of which was that it was a late add to the festival roster, and that no sensible festival-goer wants see a band called “Preoccupations” on a Saturday night, especially when it’s sandwiched in a lineup between Major Lazer and Tycho.

The show was attended by a sparse scattering of a few devotees. There was no stage banter, no formal introduction. Bass feedback filled the silence between songs. Christiansen’s abrupt guitar chords stomped on Flegel’s sporadic thanks to the crowd. During one quiet moment, the intro blips from “Midnight City” echoed from the main stage to this shadowy corner of the festival grounds. Later, silence overcame both band and audience when Flegel looked into the thin crowd and asked deadpan, “You guys know M83 is playing, right?”

“That’s the name on his driver’s license: M83,” Flegel remarked to his bandmates, forever fixated on the significance of band names.

Watch the music video for Preoccupations’ “Anxiety” below.