Just realized the link for the December mix CD was broken, whoops! I should check my e-mail more often. Thanks to the six people who A) told me of this over the last week and B) blew my mind by showing that people actually come here. I guess I should start updating more.

Link is fixed now.

As penance, here is an album I probably should have had on my Top 50 of last year and just forgot about. Mount Eerie’s Lost Wisdom. I don’t really like Mount Eerie all that much, but anything with Julie Doiron on it is going to get a big ole thumbs up from this guy.

So I guess the big news now is that I’m writing for Ripten, which you may or may not have seen featured on G4’s The Feed before. Definitely cool. I’ll try and stop being so lazy about updating here, but I also don’t think I’m going to bother posting every single news story I post. Maybe I’ll do like a daily or weekly collection of them and throw them up here. If you really want to follow what I’m doing, just go here. I’m having a blast with it so far, and the Ripten guys (and girl) are super great.

So, once again, the fiction is on hold for a little bit.

I think this video represents the internet better than any video before it. We should probably shoot it into space to show the aliens we mean business.

For years, there were only a few bands that I could make the following statement about- No matter how they change stylistically, I will still like what they do. These bands were The Dillinger Escape Plan, Cursive, Saves the Day, and Between the Buried and Me. Of course, there are other bands that I love every album by, especially at the time that statement was most pertinent, but I always limited it to bands that took stylistic jumps and seemed to be big on progression in their music. Between the Buried and Me is the last band from that short list standing. Saves the Day dived into the shallow end head first with In Reverie, an album so bad that it was the first Saves the Day album I didn’t get laid listening to. There would be no way to get it up after hearing that crap. They have never recovered. Then, years went by without another band falling.

Then the last calendar year happened. Within 12 months, Cursive and Dillinger Escape Plan both impaled themselves on mediocrity. Dillinger’s was the most damning, as Cursive’s new CD still had the wonderful “From the Hips” single on it. I listen to the album and it grows on me a little bit, but will never be listened to as much as The Ugly Organ, Domestica, or even Happy Hollow. I tried the same thing with the last Dillinger CD… and I just hate it even more now. Still, one miss in a catalog of amazingness, and more than a decade of contributing to my enjoyment of local shows, I will continue to give them chances to redeem themselves.

The new song sounds great, it sounds like a solid hybrid between new and old DEP. More singing than one would have been used to prior to the musical misstep that was Ire Works, but it actually works this time. I’m withholding any real excitement towards this new release until I find out whether or not this is the only song that sounds like this on the entire album. Last thing I need to do is get excited and find out the rest of the CD is a Nine Inch Nails tribute album.

I was going to make a mix of Christmas music, but then I remembered that this was the first year in nearly a decade that I didn’t have to have Christmas jingles fucked into my brain every day since Halloween due to retail whoring. Freed, at least temporarily, from that horrible world of nametags, polo shirts, and awful customers who seem to only exist to ruin any shred of joy you can find in your meaningless bitch work, I decided to just make a regular mix and slap some ecchi on the front of it in order to get more hits. Because now, instead of being a retail whore, I’m a self-promoting whore.

I went with heavier, angrier stuff on this one because, thanks to horrible extended family and a certain limey who will remain nameless, this is a bah-humbug filled holiday. My fury translates well into your musical enjoyment. Regular updates begin again on Monday, plus a new entry in Exterminators. Should be putting one up every week for the next few weeks since video game journalisming will be kind of slow until the big releases start hitting again.

01. Oktober Skyline – If I Were In The Chinese Army
02. Daniel Striped Tiger – Property Lust
03. Kylesa – The Warning
04. Machinemade God – Kiss Me Now Kill Me Later
05. Submission Hold – Salt
06. Betrayal – The People’s Fallacy
07. Ghostlimb – The Custom of The Sea
08. Forever Is Forgotten – I’m Glad You’re Dead
09. The Tony Danza Tap Dance Extravaganza – the electric boogaloo
10. Harvest – Waterfall
11. The Holy Fucking Spirit – Talking Leaves
12. Abigail Williams – Watchtower

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The holiday season is upon us. To some, that statement is joyous and represents the love of their families and a cozy return home. To others, mostly those who work retail, it is an ominous phrase which causes flashbacks that would make Jacob Singer cringe. Whether you deck the halls with holly or bah humbug, you’re still probably going to run up a whole lot of credit debt over the next month. The world’s economy has put retailers in a hole, and this is the time of year for them to claw themselves out of it and make some sort of profit in the name of Yuletide joy. The likely largest bringers of joy are terrible novelty shirts purchased on Christmas Eve from relatives, the kind of relatives that don’t really know you but remember you wear shirts. A close second: video games.

Website redesign tomorrow due to an unfortunate relationship fail which means that any comics that were in the pipeline are currently and indefinitely shelved, that means I have more time for non-comic fiction though so expect some coming up, finished a novella that is a tribute to my one true muse- Lady Gaga, going broke because of lack of freelance gigs, article this week pushed back a bit due to idiocy on my part this week, apology to TheGameReviews. I have just summed up an entire news post in less than a sentence, and people said brevity was my weakness.

Also, if you don’t find this funny, I don’t know if we can be friends.

Sometimes I get pretty cocky. My site gets a couple hundred hits a day, my articles do real well hit-wise online and, I like to think, are unique and well crafted. People retweet my tweets about tweeting which is the real victory. Through my snarky, pretentious nonsense I get to tell you about video games.

Then I see things like this and I question every ounce of talent I have.

So this guy, lets call him The Best Dude in the History of the Internet, decides to review Star Wars: Episode I. Yeah, that abortion. Well, I’m sure any of us who enjoyed Star Wars would be able to rant for a couple minutes solid on why George Lucas is a big neckbearded untalented asshole and he ruined Star Wars. Some of us who are more professional could probably give you a couple pages where we try to be witty and flex our sci-fi knowledge muscles by telling you how William Gibson and Blade Runner are awesome but Star Wars: The Phantom Menace is garbage. Even the most socially inept Star Wars geek can stare blankly into his webcam and breathlessly hit the 10 minute limit of a Youtube upload.

This man, this beautiful hero of a man, has taken it to a whole new level. For 70 minutes…. SEVENTY MINUTES… he rants about this terrible movie with a fury that is so amazing, so flawless, that it is more entertaining than the movie itself. I don’t mean that ironically. This isn’t some internet thing that is so bad that we hold it up like it is our kingdoms flag as he run from messageboard to messageboard extolling its virtues. This is just flat out the most hilarious, most well edited, most intelligent, and most flat out true review of anything ever in the history of ever.

Enough words. Watch this now.

This is only part 1 of 7, but you should be internet savvy enough to find the other six friggin parts.

It may not seem that way, but I’m a big fan of simplicity in reviews. My theory is that, unless you are doing something all hip and new-games-journalismy, the review should really let the reader know where its going in that first paragraph. Maybe not in an overly overt way, but the feeling and meter of the review should be known almost immediately.

With that said, Left 4 Dead 2 is like Left 4 Dead but with more stuff and not as good.

Because I’m a pretentious dick, one of my favorite ways to weed out potential ladies was always to say that my favorite band and philosopher/poet shared the same name. If they could answer it, they got a big smiley face in the book. If not, well, it depended on how nice their ass was. The answer is of course Rainer Maria. They are one of those few bands that just never released anything bad no matter how deep into their career it got, and considering two of their albums are pretty much classics that is a big feat. Their farewell show was pretty amazing, and here is a video from it for you.

You might not believe it, but that is a real picture. Every so often space does something to remind us that we are all insignificant little dots in time who don’t know anything about anything in the grand scheme of things. Norway just got a big ole hello from the cosmos in the form of something absolutely unexplainable. Now, people are saying this is because of some Russian missile test that failed, but I find that hard to believe. What kind of missile shoots rainbows and God smiles? Honestly though, I’m going to be super pissed when this turns out to be some generic thing and not something like a fucking star exploding and giving us all the power of telekinesis and weather manipulation.

Because it is damn cold out and I plan on changing that with my powers.

Link to full story and some youtube videos. It isn’t real unless it is on youtube.

I hope I’m not the only person to find the fact Modern Warfare 2 is censored in Japan to be hilarious. The things they choose to censor and not censor are a bit randomI watch a lot of anime, most likely because I’m a socially awkward internet geek who writes about video games and wants to try and shop this novel around about a android from the future who fights crime for the government, but is also a pop-star who has a lot of rough sex, but because of watching that much anime I can tell one thing; Japan is awesome. I’m pretty sure they have an entire district in Osaka dedicated to forced Cthulu sex.

While groping girls on the subway and blurring out perfectly good vaginas is fine, showing people get shot in an airport is where they draw the line. Kind of silly, but who am I to judge. Instead of judging, I will just post a video that I think really represents the good wholesome values of Japan. The ying to Modern Warfare 2’s evil no good dirty yang. This is a little art film by the name of “Kite.” It didn’t really catch on over this side of the pond, I can’t imagine why, as it is really a heartwarming tale about a girl trying to find her place in this crazy, messed up world we live in.

Oh and some heads explode.

Oh, and I hope you like high school girl rape.

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I posted about Thingy before, but I worry nobody got the message. Thingy is, in my opinion, Rob Crow’s best project. Yes, I’m aware he was in Pinback. Yes, I’m aware he was in Heavy Vegetable. No, I don’t care. Thingy was the best. Every song is catchy, and most of them are under two minutes long. Go figure. I guess you can call it indie, but indie without an ounce of pretension. You might not think that when you hear it right away, but as the ridiculousness of the lyrics start to sink in you realize that Thingy probably wasn’t taken too seriously in the wake of Heavy Vegetable’s dissolution. You owe it to your computer to put these albums on it.

These are the most disturbingly decadent delicious gingerbread cookies in existence. People seem to be marveling over the fact they are Left 4 Dead 2 shaped or something, but I enjoy the fact that there seems to be so much icing on them that you would go into a diabetic coma just from eating one… and I have a couple people I need to eliminate deliciously so they will come in handy. Also it is probably more fun to go into a diabetic coma from these than it actually is to play Left 4 Dead 2’s “improved” versus mode. What a crock of shit.

From the “shows I’ve been to that I found on youtube” department, I present to you the friggin amazing Do Make Say Think. If you consider yourself a fan of post-rock, which most of us bearded flannel wearing jackasses do, you should probably have been listening to this band for the last decade. Everything about this show was just spinetingling really, from the imagery to the setting to the music. Just amazing. Thats what you get when you combine the best band in the genre with the best venue in the city. I don’t go to shows much anymore, yeah I’m one of those, but I couldn’t stay away from an opportunity like this, and you will see why.