And now, instead of another installment of downer blog, I'm going to tell you about a new game I invented called "Six Degrees of Cannibal Corpse." It's the product of my raging insomnia (Because despite my best efforts to end the relationship, 3 a.m. and I are still kickin' it. Bleh) and my current obsession with downloading all the music on the Internet.

What you'll need to play is a program for the downloading of music, something that has a feature that lists similar artists. I use Acquisition, but any of them will do. If you don't have such a program, you could probably also use a site like Amazon or one of the other ones that sells music. As long as it has some means of looking up similar artists (You know, the "Hey, if you like these guys, you will freakin' love these guys" sort of thing) it should work just fine.

The object of the game is to get from Band A to Cannibal Corpse using as few connecting bands as possible. How you play is first you pick a band or singer you want to connect to Cannibal Corpse. Newer players should start off easy with something like Metallica or Slayer. As your skills improve, you can try bands like The Carpenters or Blues Traveler. Once you've picked a band, check out the list of bands your downloading program thinks are similar. From that list, select a band you think will be most likely to lead you to Cannibal Corpse. Check out the bands listed as similar to the second band, and pick the one from that list that seems most likely to lead to Cannibal Corpse. And so on and so forth. Continue this process until Cannibal Corpse is one of the options in the similar bands list.

Bands like Metallica or Slayer will lead to Cannibal Corpse in two or three connections. The best I've been able to do with The Carpenters, however, is ten. I did, however, manage to connect Pat Benatar with only three other bands, so that's something. Eclectic taste in music and knowledge of a wide variety of bands helps because otherwise you have to rely on the bands' names to help determine what sort of music they play. Watch out for anything German, and especially beware of Rammstein. I know it seems like Rammstein would be a solid choice, but it's a rookie mistake. Very rarely will Rammstein yield a usable list of bands. More often than not, you'll get trapped in an endless loop of freakish German techno artists. If you escape the German techno pit of despair with fewer than 20 connections, consider yourself lucky. Another pitfall to beware is that some of the downloading programs have very odd ideas as to what bands are similar to others. Once, in Tom Jones’ list of similar artists, I found Dr. Dre and Flin Flon. Um, okay.

At any rate, that is the game, and I hope you enjoy. It has provided hours of entertainment in this, my time of insomniac need.

last - next