Boyz (magazine)

Boyz is a free, London-based magazine, targeted at gay men and distributed mainly through gay bars, pubs, clubs and saunas in the United Kingdom. Published weekly, it tends to focus on news about the gay scene and celebrities (generally pop artists) popular with young scene-going gay men.

Boyz is relatively light on "serious" content, being quite tabloid in its outlook and design. A typical issue will include interviews with pop bands, actors or writers, a regular health page, film and DVD reviews, an agony uncle page, astrology, music reviews and a rundown of recent and upcoming events on the gay scene, including a night-by-night list of events.

General advertising for night-clubs, pubnights etc. now provides the bulk of the revenue for the production and distribution of the magazine and may go some way to explain the often subjective nature of its coverage of the gay scene.

On 18 October 2007, Boyz was relaunched and re-designed. The separate London/national versions were merged into one. It seems that a new team took over the running of the magazine and most of the sexually explicit content, such as the 'Backroom Boy' pin-up, was taken out. Instead, the magazine introduced an increased number of pages of photographs from recent scene happenings and a dedicated news page; the number of features on subjects not directly related to the scene such as grooming, health and partnership were reduced to just one or two per week. The Agony Uncle and relationship/sexual advice pages were merged into one section.

Boyz (song)

"Boyz" is a song recorded by artist M.I.A. for her second album Kala (2007). The song was written and produced by Maya "M.I.A." Arulpragasam and Dave "Switch" Taylor and composed in recording sessions held in several countries. A combination of the native styles and influences of these regions and her traditional and electronic musical roots, the song sees M.I.A. mock and simultaneously praise men for various character traits. "Boyz" is one of the first songs that the artist composed for the album and was released as the album's lead single through XL Recordings and Interscope Records on 11 June 2007, in 12-inch single, CD single, digital download and USB flash drive formats. It additionally appeared in an enhanced EP format for its CD single release, and appeared on the How Many Votes Fix Mix EP edition. On 24 April 2007, "Boyz" received its world premiere on the BBC Radio 1 radio station in London.

An uptempo dance song, "Boyz" draws from West Indian soca and Tamil gaana influences, incorporating electronica and club music influences to a 4/4 beat bassline. Displaying elements of worldbeat, its instrumentation consists of urumee drum percussion, trumpets, tambourines, electronic scratches and synths. Its lyrics make reference to male bravado, warlords, motorcycle and dirty track riding and dance moves originating from Jamaica, a country that inspired the song's composition. "Boyz" placed at number nine on the Rolling Stone "100 Best Songs of 2007" list and ranked one of the best songs of the year and the decade by Blender Magazine, NME, Eye Weekly and PopMatters.

740 Boyz

740 Boyz is a Dominican-American dance music group founded in 1991, by Winston Rosa aka BIG WIN from New York.

BIG WIN worked with several singers including Shaggy and Afrika Bambaataa. While working in a studio called INS Studios in New York City, he met Rafael Vargas aka Dose Material. Dose Material has been included in the group 2 In A Room.

Their first single, "Shimmy Shake", was successful in France (#2 in late 1995) and Belgium, while it had a little success on the British, German and U.S. charts. A few months later, the second single "Bump Bump (Booty Shake)" was released ; it peaked at #14 in France and achieved a minor success in other European countries, including Belgium and the Netherlands.

In 2003, The Porn Kings vs. Flip & Fill featuring 740 Boyz, reached #28 in the UK Singles Chart with "Shake Ya Shimmy".

References

Agony (Fleshgod Apocalypse album)

Agony is the second studio album by Italian death metal band Fleshgod Apocalypse.

On July 18, 2011, Fleshgod Apocalypse released a music video for "The Violation". On December 22, 2012, Fleshgod Apocalypse released a music video for "The Forsaking".

Reception

Max Lussier of The NewReview said that Agony "is a very different album than its predecessors". While he praised the speed of the songs and the guitar and drum work, he thought that the orchestral parts were "too large a part of the album's sound", resulting in "the guitar playing [becoming] slightly muddled and lost in the shuffle".

Track listing

Chart performance

Personnel

References

Agony (film)

Agony (Russian: Агония, translit. Agoniya; U.S. theatrical/DVD title Rasputin) is a film by Elem Klimov, made c.1973-75 and released in Western and Central Europe in 1982 (USA and Soviet Union 1985), after protracted resistance from Soviet authorities. The film is notable for its rich, sometimes baroque style, its sumptuous recreation of episodes from the final year of Imperial Russia and the psychological portraits of Grigori Rasputin and the Imperial family.

Synopsis

The storyline of the film follows the final months of 1916 up to the murder of Rasputin; some events have been telescoped into this time though they actually happened earlier, during the war. Rasputin's effect on people around him is shown as almost hypnotic, and the film avoids taking a moral stance towards him—breaking not only with Soviet history but also with how he was regarded by people near the court at the time, some of whom regarded him as a debilitating figure who disgraced the monarchy and hampered the war effort.

Agony (video game)

Agony is a side-scrolling shoot 'em up game, released by Psygnosis in 1992 for the Amiga platform.

Plot

Agony is a shoot 'em up but with a surreal-fantasy background. It features an owl (the company logo) flying its way through six worlds filled with monsters. The owl uses various waves of echo-location which the player fires at the enemies.

According to the manual backstory, the sun-wizard master Acanthropsis discovers the "Cosmic Power" with a toll on his life. Before dying he teaches it to his disciples, Alestes and Mentor.

Because of memory constraints, the game features no introduction, however the game and manual mention that Alestes has been transformed into an owl, and has to pass through Mentor's traps and monsters in order to reach the Cosmic Power.

Technology

The game makes great use of many Amiga features such as scales of colors done with raster lines, halfbrite graphics mode for the between-level pictures, three layers of parallax scrolling using dual-playfield mode, in-game palette swapping and continuous flashing of the background palette to simulate additional colors. Featuring three floppies, the game ran on all Amiga computers. In common with other Amiga titles, the music was created with sampled sounds.