Over the past few years, one media darling has risen up to conquer all in entertainment: the lovable zombie. Whether in books, comics, movies, televisions, or something the kids call ’video games’, it’s fairly obvious reanimated corpses are a hot commodity. The zombie revival has been welcome by most, but been entirely annoying to those elitists who hate things they like becoming popular. This is ignorant of how bad things could actually be. Zombies could be angst-ridden and beautiful, sparkling inexplicably in direct sunlight to the delight of tweens everywhere. Instead, zombies feature in cool things like Left 4 Dead. No sparkling, just exploding heads – zombies 1, lame teenage wish fulfillment vampires 0.
Ah, Thanksgiving. The time of year when you return home to explore how far apart you’ve grown from your extended family and how foreign their archaic views on the world have become. Enjoy the time spent realizing most of your major missteps in the last year can be blamed on your upbringing and the actions of the very people you are currently silently masticating with and feigning civility towards in the name of celebrating the butchering of an indigenous culture. Fear not, you won’t have long to swallow your tongue when your redneck uncle and young neo-con cousin find they share the same political opinions and openly discuss their hatred of both the government and Obama without actually making any intelligent point using actual truth or facts, because shortly you will be able to make the excuse that many of your old friends from high school are in town, and you haven’t seen them in ages.
Of course, much the same thing will happen when you witness that they all remain exactly the same, and still gravitate towards the same clique and cultural lines that they did six years before. You swallow your statements again as in their stories they play up their accomplishments in a never ending game of one-upsmanship to prove who has been doing best in the 30 mile radius of your small town. You will find out that you don’t want to be there either. Suddenly you don’t belong around the people you spend years with, and you notice that the memories and stories you have rehashed every year since graduation while standing next to this woeful whiskey stained local dive bar lose their impact more and more. You try to enjoy your alcohol addled walk home, as the wind whips through the bare, skeletal fingers of the trees. The few leaves that remain on the ground skitter across the concrete and make the same noise as rats would while fleeing a sinking ship. You start to feel like you have something in common with those rats. These are the same streets you spent your formative years in, and now they are as barren and desolate to you as the horrible fucking season that currently grips the region. Is that chill in your bones the cold air creeping into your seasonally inappropriate hoodie? Or is that the chill of facing your own mortality and realizing that the distance between who you are now and who you were is greater than any physical mileage that could possibly be put between you and this god awful town.
Then again, maybe you just aren’t an overdramatic asshole and just want to eat some pie.
This months mix CD reflects either the desolation and detachment of your mid 20s or the fact I really like post-rock, take your pick. The image I used for the cover is shamelessly (apologetically) stolen from an incredible artist that I’ve been looking for an excuse to link to by the name of Sophie Blackall, and you should go buy one of her prints because they are wonderful.
01. The Timeout Drawer – Blue-Eyed and Filled With Horror
02. Mogwai – Take Me Somewhere Nice
03. Ghosts And Vodka – Sex Is Popular
04. Saxon Shore – Thanks For Being Away
05. Do Make Say Think – All Of This Is True
06. Shora – arch&hum
07. Yume Bitsu – Song 7
08. The Pax Cecilia – The Tomb Song
09. Gifts From Enola – Aves
10. From Monument To Masses – Checksum
Flairs always brings the surreal when it comes to music videos, Better Than Prince was just bizarre and awesome, but it looks like it has just been topped. This is so NSFW that it words do not even do justice to telling you how NSFW it actually is. Unless you are like me and don’t put pants on for your job, in which case it is probably SFYPB (safe for your parents basement).
Ranked in order of importance to humanity, from least to greatest; Neil Armstrong. The Treaty of Rome. Abraham Lincoln. The Big Bang. Starcraft.
I know, I know. You are probably saying to yourself “that is a little bit ridiculous” and you might be right, I might have something rated a little bit too high- but honestly, I thought landing on the moon was really important to humanity from a scientific point of view.
Well, I’m pretty sure I’m the only video game journalist who uses his blog to post wrestling matches- I’m going for that crossover demographic. I guess I can get away with it because I legitimately view pro-wrestling as an artform. It is performance art at its most athletic and intense, I don’t really understand why it is so maligned considering the dumb nonsense people consider entertainment nowadays. I’m going to start posting wrestling more often because it is awesome and makes good filler during busy times, which right now certainly would be considering all the releases and assignments I’ve found in my physical and internetical mailboxes. Hopefully after next week I’ll have time to do more stuff for Exterminators. Also, the scripts for our first comic collaboration are done and currently traveling through the tubes to Becky as we speak, so expect me to spam your twitterbooks and facespace.fm accounts with links to that relatively soon.
Anyway, this is the I Quit match between Jimmy Jacobs and Austin Aries. The AOTF hadn’t yet imploded and Aries hadn’t yet “turned to the dark side” and become one of the top heels in the business as his second title reign was still a bit in the future. This is honestly one of my favorite I Quit matches, and it is a pretty strong testament to why I am such a huge Jimmy Jacobs fan. The Age of the Fall angle was just botched and cut off at the knees left and right and still stayed semi-over, mostly due to the fact Jacobs’ is as underrated in the ring as he is on the mic. It legitimately drives me crazy that the AOTF got so marginalized, they had one of the best debuts ofany stable in years and just an overall solid lineup. This match was probably the last good part of the whole thing, as at the time the AOTF had already started losing matches inexplicably and lost any momentum. It would eventually fizzle out with a cursory Black-Jacobs feud and an ending so bizarrely nonsensical I still don’t comprehend what they were going for. Regardless, this is one of my favorite I Quit matches ever. If I were booking ROH for TV right now, the very first thing I would do is beg Jimmy Jacobs to come back and give the AOTF another chance.
Oh, and if you find any cool wrestling videos online or have any you want to throw up on z-share or megaupload or something, shoot me an e-mail at gavin@inanothercastle.net and I’ll throw them up. Especially if they are high quality, because the quality on this one and most videos I’ve been finding lately has been pretty low.
This may sound bizarre, but occasionally something will strike me absolutely speechless. I often try to extol the virtues of professional wrestling not just as entertainment but as an art form to you all. This match is so wonderful, so beautifully poetic that I don’t even need to frame it for you. It’s brilliance really speaks for itself. If Meltzer doesn’t give this one 5-stars I am going to have to burn the subscription to Wrestling Observer that I don’t have.
So after playing Dragon Age: Origins, I have come to one conclusion…
I would trust BioWare with brain surgery. I don’t think they are capable of making anything that clocks in at less than legendary anymore, let alone actually making a mistake. The BioWare formula is so fantastic, so utterly impossible to not lead to a steep drop off in your real life social interaction, that I’m pretty sure they could do anything they want as long as they can break it down into a heavily micromanaged strategic RPG format.
And I’m pretty sure you can do that with brain surgery now.
You all know Becky and I are working on a webcomic. It isn’t going to be super heavy or anything because, well, we don’t feel like doing something super heavy for our first publicly viewable collaboration. Instead we decided we wanted to put the final nail in the coffin for ham-fisted zombie sociopolitical commentary. One of the things I’ve caught myself doing in preparation is going back and reading comics of artists and writers who I admire and trying to absorb their creativity and drive through osmosis. This has lead to me rediscovering some stuff I completely forgot about, and has also greatly destroyed my productivity because I have to go back and read every single one of them.
One such comic is/was minus. I really am hard pressed to think of a comic I enjoyed more both as an art style and just in general. Ryan Armand is absolutely, unequivocally, 100% the most underrated webcomic creator to ever get an Eisner Nomination. Re-reading this stuff again is just such a breath of awesome air. It is also pretty humbling since I would actually punch myself half to death if I thought it could make me this talented. Luckily, I know that isn’t how it works. The only way to become more talented is to hit yourself with a sock full of half-brick, and I only have whole-bricks. So you will just have to deal with my averageness.
You can, however, click below and go read minus. which will show you how things are supposed to be done.
Funny how things can change in a few years. To those of you who haven’t really been into ROH for the long-haul, this is going to seem like the most foreign video ever to you. CM Punk without a title belt, American Dragon with no Final Countdown, Ole chants non-related to Generico, Heel Cabana, and THE GOD HIMSELF Ricky Steamboat who was, at the time, in a very awesome feud with CM Punk that helped get him even more over and forward his career. This is a very good match that got a little bit forgotten due to high expectations that weren’t quite reached. Still, a very cool match and a nice little thing to see with hindsight.
The Miracle on Ice? That was alright I guess. The Flyers beating the Russians in 1976? That was pretty cool too. The Drive, The Catch, The Play, The Music City Miracle, The Immaculate Reception. All pretty awesome. None of them are the greatest accomplishment in sports though.
That belongs to Dock Ellis.
If you haven’t heard of Dock Ellis, the odds are you either need to learn more about sports or you are a pretty British girl with lots of tattoos who has never seen a baseball game and gets mad anytime I say “soccer” (Hi Becky!) Consider this your education. What did he do that puts him in such high regard?
Well, he once took a baseball bat into the stands to chase down a racist heckler. He also tried to fight a Cincinnati Red’s security guard and ended up getting maced when the guy didn’t believe he was a player. He also, maybe out of revenge, then decided that he was going to put some aggression back into his Pirates’ teammates and proceeded to plunk the first three batters he faced before being pulled after throwing two pitches at Johnny Bench’s head. These are all some pretty awesome stories, but nothing tops his coup de grace.
He pitched a no-hitter while trippin’ balls on LSD.
This video is an animation put to his story of the day and it is absolutely fantastically done, plus I legitimately cannot hear this story enough. The best part is that he pitched a pretty terrible game, with hit batters, walks, and wild pitches aplenty. He still got through it and got to be placed into the annals of history completely high. Dock Ellis died in 2008, but he will always be remembered as one of the most bad ass dudes to ever play baseball.
If there is one thing we all love, it is being so scared that our sleep pattern is messed up for a week. While video games may not be considered as unsettling as television or movies, a well crafted survival horror game can be just as detrimental to one’s bravery as any other entertainment. But what sewn-together Frankenstein’s monster would it take to make a universally enjoyed game in the genre? The courage of Sweet Home? The heart of Silent Hill? The brains of Left 4 Dead? The incredibly fashionable red-sequined shoes of Clocktower?
I’ve been neglecting my little pet writing experiment lately due to the pitfalls of needing to scrounge up money for my bills, but no longer fair readers! My stream-of-consciousness-no-planning-ahead sci-fi serial continues now. I have moved it over to its own section of the site, but I will make sure to update the main page just to let you know that a new entry is over there. The general idea for those of you tuning in late is that I’ve developed pretty terrible OCD about writing fiction and end up outlining, planning, or just rewriting everything I do to death. I also have a terrible superstition about showing my work to people before it is finished. In order to beat all of those negatives out of me, I am doing a serial without even cursory planning- entirely stream of consciousness. I write until I’m bored and then post it as a part of the story. I only give it a cursory edit job and I won’t be allowing myself any rewrites unless I absolutely have to fix some glaring plot fuck up. The link to the right of this post (the one that says EXTERMINATORS in CAPS EAGLE) will aggregate all of these bits in once place from now on.
Anyway part 002 of the story is up. The talented Tara (Russian Housewives) no longer has to be hanging on her cliff about my last entry. You happy now!
Also expect a few design changes and some artistic expressions that don’t look as visually appealing as a bank statement over here as the gorgeous rainy island dweller Rebecca Holdcroft will be moving her art in soon. Or at least she better be or else a stern talking to will be in order.
I don’t express through verse
But sometimes you feel the urge
When you notice certain things.
Like how alcohol stops being bitter
And how whiskey tastes better
When life is just working right.
How it tastes like inspiration
Instead of liquid self-flagellation.
Gavin Bard was not available to pen this review as he has been sent on location for an interview of intergalactic proportions. In his stead, FACEOFFGAMES has spared no expense in procuring the writing of a talented video game journalist from the distant alternate future of “a few years from now.” Without any further delay, we present to you Mr. Rockatansky’s review of Borderlands.
After successfully liberating a copy of Risen from the evil cavern of Gamestop, you return to your home. With trembling hands, you open the plastic case and put the disc into your computers DVD-ROM drive.
Your journey begins. But Risen is a game of duality, ying and yang, good and evil. First, before you click install, you must choose the games alignment.
Red Faction: Guerrilla has a plot. The government is evil, it controls and mistreats all the miners on Mars – things happen, whatever.
You can blow up every single damned thing you see. That is what this game is really about. Sure, the plot is weak and the voice acting can get kind of silly at times, and sure the PC version has a couple of performance issues that detract from enjoyment, but they seem entirely patchable. None of this matters. The real plot is in the debris you send flying across the battlefield.
Did I mention you can destroy everything? Everything!
I always think it is awesome when bands that are legitimately talented finally get a chance to be on national TV. Cursive is one of the best and have been around for a while, and not to be Generic Indie Fan but Kasher is such a genius it is about damn time they get on TV. It is a shame they had to play something from the underwhelming Mama, I’m Swollen but it ended up sounding so bad ass I might go back and see if I still dislike that album.
