The Distorted Gamer

Top 7 Reasons Why Virtuosity Would Make A Good Video Game

2012-03-15T01:03:00.000-05:00

If you were around during the 90's, you’ve probably seen this techno/virtual reality movie from 1995 in the Netflix instant streaming queue on the Xbox 360, PS3, or Wii. It’s your typical future-esque internet movie with all the right actors. Denzel Washington, Russelle Crowe, and the gorgeous Kelly Lynch are all featured. So what could go wrong with it? Well, the movie is flat-out campy, retarded, and completely over-the-top. It's not Sandra Bullock's The Net bad, but it’s still a fun movie for a late Friday night, even 15 years later.

If you haven’t seen the movie Virtuosity, please do yourself a favor (and mine), and go watch this bad boy right now. I even like to invite some friends over and break out the old Virtuosity drinking game. Every time they say “SID or SID 6.7″ or Denzel's character name “Parker” or “Barnes”, take a drink. You’ll be drunk by the 10 minute mark. I swear they use these words to just fill space. Yes, we've been watching the movie for an hour now, yes, we know that Denzel's character is "Parker". This makes it simply one of my favorite movies.

But as I sat there looking through IMDb on the movie, I couldn’t help but notice the similarities the movie has to a video game (even along the same lines as the Scott Pilgrim movie). It's not as “bang you over the head” with the video game references as Scott Pilgrim, but they're there just the same. Here are just a few of them:

1. Pulse pounding end-level boss music

Every action sequence has got this really cheesy (yet somehow awesome) Lords of Acid techno/rock remix to get the blood pumping. It’s not unlike a similar tactic video games use to invoke excitement and tension (excluding Final Fantasy which uses the sweeping orchestral numbers). Now, this might not be a great reason to put it on this list because a lot of films have this type of music, but the fact that the music is down-right annoying and dated puts it on the list. Most boss music is celebrated in the game industry, and there are hundreds of dudes on Youtube playing it on the guitar.

I know you have sat there late into the night playing a game and trying to beat an end-level boss, only to die and start over. Don’t you hate having to listen to the pulse pounding music over and over again as you die, die, and die again? Yeah. I would hate to listen to this shit everytime my game save loaded up. Just listen for 2 minutes and then do it over again, you’ll get the idea.

2. Overly used voice lines

Oh man. Like I mentioned with the drinking game, this movie continuously uses lines over and over and over again. Hell, I would bet most of the lines from Russell Crowe are just Sid taunting Barnes, “Come on’ Parker!”

The lines from Virtuosity are straight from a 1994 video game. Where else can you hear lines like: ”Which God would that be? The one who created you? Or the one who created me? You see, in your world, the Lord giveth and the Lord taketh, but in my world, the one who gave me life doesn’t have any balls.” Was this the subtitles to a Duke Nukem fight? No. And after that, a boss battle breaks out.

Here’s another gem: “Just because I’m carrying around the joy of killing your family inside me doesn’t mean we can’t be friends.” Just. Wow. Or how about: “Hey buddy! How’s the wife and kid? Still dead, huh?” Yep. These all sound like video game boss taunting, and they are all great memorable quotes from Virtuosity.

3. 1995 crappy CGI graphics and virtual reality

This is what an alien Russell Crowe’s ass would look like (with silicone injections I might add) emerging from an alien cocoon.

Are we going to have virtual reality yet? VR has probably had the biggest delay in getting out to the public sense the recent release of Gran Turismo 5. Are we ever going to see virtual reality in the home? We waited five years for GT5? Virtual reality has been dangled in front of our faces for more than 15 years. Fifteen years people. As in a one and then a five. Throw in the fact that the movie features references to video game graphics of 1995, virtual reality games, computer and Lawnmower Man-type internet scenes (of what the internet looks like), and this movie definitely carries the video game stigma with it. It's cool to see what we thought was interactive back in that day and age (i.e. huge chairs with screens over our head as we dangle our arms and legs like we are running), but looking back now it's just retarded.

4. Russell Crowe walking to the Beegees in a purple suit

No words.

5. Death TV

Virtuosity also tackled a pretty big video game issue at the time: violence. Russell Crowe’s character Sid hijacks a TV studio to start up his own creation called Death TV: a show dedicated to showing headshots, killing, and torture to innocent bystanders. This could also just be called the Call of Duty channel.

Computer and video game violence was in it’s infancy, but it showcases the public’s fascination (or men aged 16 to 28) with blood and gore. That in order to get ratings and sell something, you have to go over the edge from time to time to drive your point home and get eyes on it. People will eat that shit up. How many times have you gone over to shock websites like Rotten or Break.com to see people in pain? It’s really not unlike the recent Medal of Honor fiasco we had with soldiers and the game getting banned on US Military bases because of the word Taliban and being able to kill American soldiers in the game. This is also true for basically every time a GTA game comes out. People blame the violence on the video game because kids want more of it, so they then supposedly act out and do it for real.

6. The story is basically right out of the video game "Dead To Rights"

Yep, that outfit is straight out of the video game featuring Jack Slate and his trusty wolf companion Shadow. Only question is: where is Shadow? Oh that’s right, Sid probably cooked him up in the sushi place in the beginning of the movie.

The similarities are downright scary. Jack Slate is looking for the killer who killed his father. Parker Barnes is looking for the killer who killed his family. Jack is framed for a murder by a corrupt police officer and sent to prison, only to fight and break his way out. Barnes accidentally kills a camera crew while his family is murdered, then sent to prison, and then gets screwed over by the guards and has to fight an inmate in general population.

We could also throw in ties to Demolition Man for the fact that only one person can stop the antagonist (Sid or Simon Phoenix). I know. This one is kind of a stretch as well, but it’s the first thing that popped into my head.

7. SID 6.7 is basically a PS3 firmware update

That’s right. Sid is the equivalent of a PS3 console, and his “master” (i.e. Sony Computer Entertainment) has decided to continue to update his firmware religiously on a regular basis to make him smarter and better at killing people (or they just really like to send out End User License Agreements).

I wonder how long Sid’s damn firmware updates take? Do they kick him on and immediately get asked, “In order to access Sheila 2.3 you will need to update to firmware 6.7. Press OK now to accept the terms and conditions.” Or maybe there is an option to turn him off after it has been downloaded and installed.

Jesus people, this was over 15 years ago. The only thing we had at the time were shit-tons of free America Online CD’s that constantly updated to version 3.0, then 3.1, etc. To see something of that magnitude (version 6.7) was incredible. This movie knew about firmware updates before firmware updates were even invented. Sony probably go the idea from Sid 6.7.

I really hope all of these glorious in-depth reasons (yeah right!) have swayed your thoughts on one of my favorite cult 90′s movie. I hope you go out and watch it (or buy it for $5 bucks at Best Buy).

Please don’t forget about Virtuosity and just watch that other definitive 90′s movie with Keanu Reeves (“I am an FBI AGENT!”) Great acting Keanu. Could've won an Oscar.

This article was from the heart and is all in good fun. Please don’t take anything too seriously people. I simply wrote it out of love for one of my guilty pleasure movies – Virtuosity. So with all of this being said, I’ll leave you now with a quote from the one and only Parker Barnes: "Game Over."

Let's Get This Party Started......Early!

2012-03-08T17:28:00.000-06:00

We all see crazy shit on our drive to and from the workplace. Hell, it could be any time we get behind or in a car. From the random homeless dude panhandling for money then turning around to piss on the sidewalk, to the twenty something chubby chick high on ecstasy with a pacifier in her mouth, we've seen a lot of things. But what I saw the other day was just wrong. Plain and simple. W-R-O-N-G.

I was heading south through Garland on my way home from work at 4:30pm. It's one of the benefits of working with a school district. Notice I didn't say FOR a school district. I get the benefits of working there, but the pay scale is much better suited for my over-indulging gaming habits.

As I make my way home, I pass through no more than 3 school zones, on the same road. It's a factor of this road in Garland, and part of my commute. I accept it. There's no way around it.

This road has three lanes heading southbound, 3 northbound, with everyone under the sun fighting and jockeying for position to get home .25 seconds faster than the next guy. It's funny to sit back and watch just how far and how much people get worked up over to get home a minute or two faster than the guy next to them. Like the school zones for me, everyone has to deal with other obstacles on your drive home that you might not notice, but are part of the territory. DART buses stopping, school buses that stop at each railroad crossing, cars that slow down to turn right at lights, you have to take into account all of these things into your drive. Get stuck in the far right lane and you'll probably have to wait for a DART bus to pickup and drop off a few passengers.

All of this stuff is really pivotal to the story. I know it might seem like mindless banter right now, but it all adds in to the grand scheme of things.

As I'm heading down the road in the middle lane, I look over and see a dirty, busted up Kia Spectre to my right just ahead. The front end looks to have been smashed up and the hood is crumpled. Let's also not forget the back end has got red electrical tape over a broken tail light in the hopes of "fixing" that problem. I love that move. Let's make it as inconspicuous as possible, but when the slightest breeze takes it off or it gets wet, now I've got a nice streamer behind my POS car.

I desperately want to get the man behind the wheel's race out of the way, but I feel that by doing so I'll sound really bad and slightly racist for this story, so I'm going to hold off (for now anyway). The actions of this douchebag should not be laughed at or slighted over because he's one race or the other, and I haven't really given anything away by the broken down Kia Spectre already, so we're fine there.

I glance over to my right side as I slowly pass him and carefully bring my attention back to the front of my car. There's a big ol' Suburban in the way that I need to watch out for and it needs my undivided attention to not ram it. As the Suburban in front of me slowly gains speed and pulls away from me, I see a glimmer of gold from my right side. What could this be? Does his passenger have over-the-top flamboyant jewelry that caught the glare of the sun and sent a beam of light my way? Does the driver have on a gold watch? I saw him put the piece of gold shiny whatever-it-was back into his lap, so it could be a watch?

He brings this piece of gold back up again and I realize he's driving his broken shitty Kia Spectre while drinking a 28oz Miller High Life. It's 4:30pm, and we just left a school zone. Yeah, I guess it's close to 5pm somewhere, but goddamn dude, is it really that important to drink and drive at this time of day (or anytime of day for that matter)? Maybe if you didn't drink your Miller High Life and get drunk, you'd be able to drive better and wouldn't have fucked up your front end or backed into someone and broken your taillight?

Not only was this guy drinking and driving at 4:30pm through school zones, he was also setting a great example for his 7 or 8 year old son in the passenger seat. Really dude? This is the example you're setting for your highly impressionable kid? That it's okay to head on down the road at anytime of day and drink and drive. Then on top of that, his fat overweight wife was in the backseat passed out or asleep, just out on a leisurely drive to take their son to a soccer game.

And this got me thinking: this is what some people do with their freedom.

I couldn't believe it. It's just sorry.

(I'm almost positive by now you should be able to pick out what race this person is (I left clues). If not, leave me a comment down below and I'll post there.)

The Most Boring Video Game Ever.....

2012-02-13T17:19:00.001-06:00

In a normal city bussituation, you could run into a laundry list of crazy characters. From weirdhomeless dudes who smell of piss, to crazy asians who don’t speak a word of Englishand smell of burned fried rice, you’re going to find it on a public transitbus. But here in City Bus Simulator 2010, you’re just going to take Peggie (and othermindless patrons) from her accounts receivable job back to her shittyworkplace at the trucking company on 5th Avenue.

The video above like Isaid is from the completely groundbreaking and awesome original video game City BusSimulator 2010. Read on to see a fewkey features about the game pulled straight from the game description to get you pumped up for your minimum wage job,huge buss driver ass, and brown sack lunches.

The complete routeincluding side streets can be explored from the very start of the game (withthe exception of the tutorial). Go by bus or take a walk through this excitingcity area!

Tutorial: Our virtual supervisor “Jack” will teach you in aninteractive tutorial in how to drive a bus plus more important things. This isthe right place to train your skills before you launch into your virtual life.
Virtual World: In this game mode you can select tours andschedules at the terminal stops where you can take on your next task. Repeatthis as often as you want. Stay in the virtual world while selecting theschedule without leaving the game. Day times and weather are dynamic. And ofcourse, you can also explore the virtual world any time you want.
Missions: In the “World of Bus driver” series you´llfind many exciting missions including voice audio output, radio communicationand real virtual colleagues who you can talk with. That’s what we call a“living simulation game”!
Campaign: Our campaign is an exciting interactive crimestory confronting you with many challenges. And guess who is playing theleading parts in this story … What do you think? Yes, right! Your character“Carlos” together with his colleagues. We are sure you will have lots of fun inthis mode. Of course our simulation game comes out without any violence.

Wait! There’s noviolence? This would be fucking sweet if this was maybe set in LibertyCity or any other GTA-type city (imagine San Andreas!), but to not have Russianimmigrants, gangsters, and hoodrats jumping on your bus? That’s just lame; reallymega lame and really fucking boring.

[via The Epitome of Profundity]

Week's Pay For A Hard Day's Work

2012-02-11T10:13:00.002-06:00

No, this is not me. I had a better laptop than he had.

I don't think I've ever told this story to too many people before. Not because it's not interesting or funny, but because it's time has passed. It just wasn't relevant anymore after the news broke a story on this employer and their scheme. After that, I don't see how this company could stay in business and continue to do what they were doing. And before you say anything, no, I wasn't a callboy manwhore on Harry Hines Blvd (a notorious street in Dallas for hookers). I was merely a young lad looking for a job who had just stepped out into the huge metropolis that is Dallas, Texas.

Arriving in Dallas for me was like stepping foot into Tamriel (the location for the Elder Scrolls video games like Morrowind, Oblivion and Skyrim) for the very first time. These game worlds are huge, with thousands of locations, cities, monuments, shops, caves, and barrows to explore. In Skyrim, you step off of the cart before a brief fray with a dragon, and you're released into this vast world of the unknown, with no first mission or set quest to accomplish. You are alone on this journey for now, but know that you'll eventually get wrapped up in the city and it's treasures.

Then comes the job hunt.

You have to find your place in this city, and the first place I looked was the newspaper and on Craigslist. Sure, I probably could have done better on Career Builder or Monster.com, but with the limited resources I had at the time (no laptop or internet connection), the paper was the best thing I had.

Since I had just come from a data/voice network technician, tasked with pulling cables in ceilings, dropping them down walls, and installing the network jacks to go with them, I started there, hoping to find something along the same lines. Previously I had to travel for this type of work, as there really aren't too many jobs that can support a full-time position at one cabling location for very long. They are usually a week here, couple of days there type of thing.

Then I heard about doing audio/video speaker installs, and I thought this might be the next logical step. Surely there are enough people in Dallas who want high-end surround sound speakers and television setups. I immediately perked up once I saw all of the ads for jobs with 3-5 years cabling experience needed to apply. I immediately found one in the paper and talked to a guy over the phone, and was scheduled to come in the next day for an interview and training. Awesome!

I showed up for work at 8am to a location in Dallas right off of 35E and Royal Lane. It was your standard warehouse, with about 2,000 or 3,000 sq/ft of space and a small area for accounting and office personnel. I walked in to the office and was ushered to fill out a few pieces of paperwork, talk with the guy I spoke with on the phone, and wait around for the other guys to get into the shop. As I waited, he took me on a tour of the warehouse, showing me the pallets upon pallets of boxed up speakers, anxiously waiting to be installed in customers homes. This was great. If this guy was needing to stock up on this much inventory, the money and work must be really good around Dallas. Things were looking promising. I had finally found a job where I could make a decent amount and not have to travel anymore.

After about 15 minutes or so, a few of the work crews started rolling in for work. They mostly consisted of two man teams. This wasn't out of place, as I'm sure running light speaker wire down a wall is much easier than multiple data lines. I wanted to make a good first impression, so I immediately jumped in and started loading up white Ford and Chevy work vans that they had backed up to the warehouse doors. One by one the crews of two began loading 4 to 6 boxes per van to head out for the day for installs. Of the group, I met the two guys I would be working with for the day, going out on a training assignment with them. Sadly their truck didn't have an extra seat for me to sit on (hey, it's a work truck), so I was forced to sit on a boxed up speaker pushed in between the two front captain's chairs. Not comfy, but we're only going to the job site and will be out of the van in no time.

As we pushed off from the warehouse, the two guys in front began to talk about a few of their previous jobs, their late night shenanigans, and where one had just come back from working in Chicago. He filled the other one in on how business was going up there, and that it was nice to be in a warm state again. Cool! Maybe I'll have the option to travel this time around, and not be forced to travel if I don't want to. Since he was here from the Chicago office, he was also given per diem to eat each day, and was given the option of getting a hotel room. He would have gotten one, but decided to stay with a buddy of his in town.

After a 15 minute drive over to Preston and Walnut Hill (a very happening and busy intersection with strip malls, grocery stores, and a collection of places), the driver of the van rolled his window down and was trying to get the attention of a fellow motorist in the next lane over at a stoplight. Maybe he's just letting the guy know he's got a light out or has a flat tire? Nope. What happened next completely blew my mind. For the sake of making it easier to understand, I'll try to transcribe the conversation that happened, and we'll name the person in the car David, and the guy in the white van Drew.

Drew: (makes motion to David to roll his window down)
David: (rolls window down to make sure everything is okay)
Drew: Hey man, what's going on? Listen, I just got this speaker install to do over in this really nice neighborhood and the warehouse gave me an extra set of speakers. It's not on the inventory delivery sheet they gave me and as soon as I take it to the house, the install guys are gonna know what's up and just keep them for themselves.
David: Okay?
Drew: So, do you want to pull over to this parking lot and see them? I could sell you these really nice speakers and everyone is happy? You would get a really nice set of speakers for cheap, and I don't have to deliver them. Just follow me and I'll show you.
David: Okay.

So at this point I'm thinking, "Oh shit, someone at the warehouse fucked up." and "I can't believe that my first day on the job this dude is wanting to fuck over the company on my first day. He must not get paid enough."

So we draw the guy in the car (David) behind us and proceed to pull over into a busy shopping center right in front of a UPS Store. Drew shuts off the engine and goes around back to show the speakers off. The other gentlemen in the van (Leroy I guess) ushers me to sit in the drivers seat while Drew puts on a "show" (that's apparently lingo in the biz for a sales pitch).

I scoot up front and watch as the driver (still called Drew) opens the back and starts to make a sales pitch to the guy he grabbed out of the middle of the road on his way to Starbucks or wherever else he was headed, to see if he wants to buy some speakers. For the life of me, I don't remember the exact retail price of the speakers, but I know the guys carried a laminated spec sheet for the speakers with a price tag of $250 dollars apiece. The out of the back of the van discount put them right at $90-$100 dollars per speaker.

I do know this though, they weren't quality speakers. Not in a long shot.

Side track: My dad has always been the go to guy when it comes to speakers or audio equipment. If you've ever been to my house and seen his setup, you know exactly what I'm talking about. I wish I had a picture for you to see it. I used to have one, and he used to have one too, but after awhile these speakers just became part of the family. Hell, they are part of the family. They became the decorative pieces of the house in one room in particular. 8 foot tall, 4 foot wide front speakers with ribbon tweeters, 3 - 5 inch mid-range, 2 - 8 inch lower, and 2 - 12 inch bass speakers per side. Yeah. I laugh in the face of all of those out of the box 5.1 systems. Especially Bose. FUCK BOSE speakers. If you have Bose and you think you have an awesome sound system? Shoot yourself in the dickhole, then shoot yourself in the face. Spare us from the sound of that garbage. The average system in a box power output? Probably around 75 watts to 110 watts per channel. My dad's setup? 1,000 watts for the left channel, 1,000 watts for the right channel, and 200 watts for the surround speakers. Do the math kiddies. That's 440 watts per channel (but not really). It might be more with the surround and subwoofers, but those are the specs off the top of my head.

So I know a few things about speakers, and the ones these dudes are trying to sell out of a van are pretty shitty. You probably already knew that. They're not Bose shitty, but probably just above that.

In this day and age, I don't know anybody who carries around that much cash with them on a given day, and even then, would actually want to buy a set of speakers out of a UPS Store parking lot by a shady guy in a white van.

After the "show" sales pitch ended and David didn't want to buy the speakers, we loaded back up into the van and headed out towards the job site.

We never made it to that job site, and I never got to install a speaker setup in someone's luxurious home. This job was essentially driving around Dallas in a white van trying to sell speaker setups in parking lots. I did that job for one day. ONE day. I had to sit through 4 or 5 more of these "shows" in parking lots, driving all over Dallas for the people "hot spots", and had to remain sitting on that hard cardboard box in a bumpy van for 7 more hours.

I never got paid for my time that day either (apparently the company only starts to pay you or let you have a share of the cut after you get out of the training period) and you only get money per sale. I honestly can't remember if the guys split the profits or if the company gets a cut of it.

My theory in all of this after the fact was that I think there was some shitty Taiwanese company who made some horrible speakers and just wanted to get rid of them, or used them to sell Taiwanese slaves in California, an needed a front for the operation. They got to America and sent the slaves to the black market. But what about all of these shitty speakers? They'res got to be a better way!

The news in Dallas eventually picked up on the whole deal and ran a story a few months later on these people in white vans trying to sell speakers and blew the whole thing wide open. I don't know if that company is still around or is still in business (like I said, I don't see how they could be after the DFW news got involved), but I do see a few online chat boards and communities comment and mention the van/speaker racket in Dallas still.

I have to put a notch in my cap for that job, and thank them for an experience I'll never forget. Part of me stuck with it for the whole day because I wanted to see it through and take it all in, and the other part of me thought, "Surely this can't be real?" It definitely was an experience, and real, even if it was only for a day.

And no, I do not include that bullshit job on my resume, just a blog post. But this is what it would look like if it was:

10/01/2003 (8:00AM) - 10/1/2003 (5:00PM) - White Van Speaker Salesman
A self motivated sales professional with extensive experience in sales and merchandising. Excellent communication skills and a commitment to team work result in exceeding sales quotas. A flexible and dependable employee. Also an achievement-orientated salesperson with a proven track record of creativity, negotiation and in-depth product knowledge. Able to work independently or as part of a team to meet company sales objectives.

Sadly, Life Got In The Way......

2012-01-11T19:25:00.001-06:00

With the invention of portable laptop PC's, tablets, high-powered internet-enabled cell phones, Twitter and Facebook, not to mention Google and the Blogger format on which I type, you would think that I would be more connected to the internet.

Sadly, this is where you're wrong.

Over the last few months of 2011, I've gotten married, bought a house, traveled to Tennessee to send a week off for Christmas, have another week off from work, and spend three full days on the toilet. Yep. I do have to throw in my fucked up bowel movements. Also, there's this little video game called Skyrim. Actually, the proper saying of this game is The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim, but we'll go the short route for the remainder of this post.

First off, I'm sorry. Really sorry people. Really sorry for fucking not posting for your dumbasses. Yeah, so sorry there fuckwads. I'm so sorry that you need me to post stupid bullshit on the internet for your fucking enjoyment. In the words of the ever eloquent Douchey Tim, "Eat a dick!".

I've really struggled over the last few months with trying to get up the energy (both mind and finger) to spill my thoughts onto the page. This was set in motion with the closing down of Loot Ninja, where afterwards, I decided to take a break from writing video game news and doing a podcast every week. Doing so let me step outside of the PR/journalism/rig-a-ma-roll that is video game news writing. I had put my time in and worked my way up, only to be over at this new job doing the same thing, only not really getting credit for it and starting at the bottom of the totem pole yet again. Do I really want to go through that all over again at a larger website? Where the writers are out on the internet hovering like flies over a dead carcass, waiting to jump in at a moments notice when they see an opening of fresh untainted meat (i.e. breaking news).

I took a break.

A month turned into two. Then three. Four. Then five.

At this point I've been out of the circle so long that I think it's just best for me to write about stuff I'm passionate about here on my personal site, and not be force-fed bullshit screens of an iPad game that need to be put up on the site to be on the good graces of PR personnel. I'm done with that.

Do I still love video games? Hell yeah. Do I still enjoy writing about them? No. No I do not. Maybe one day a friend will open up their own webpage again and ask me to write for them. Writing for strangers sucks. Trying to get recognition from said strangers sucks even more.

I'm gonna really try to put myself in a position to where I can post more frequently on this website. I constantly post stupid videos and link articles I think are funny on my Facebook page and I favorite all sorts of random-ass videos on YouTube. Please hit me up on both as McCullster. I'm there. I'm in my own little world, and I think I like it better that way. No need to bend over backwards and suck some PR persons dick. No need to pump out bullshit article after bullshit article for no one to read. And especially no need to put up with douchebags from other publications poaching your content.

If you found me and enjoy what you read or see, in the quickly entertaining slightly sarcastic line from Belethor in Whiterun, "Do come back."

It's Friday, So I Like To Fuck Off

2011-11-04T17:04:00.000-05:00

With it being Friday and all, I like to fuck off in various ways throughout my day. Not only at work, but with everything I do. Seriously though people, we should band together, rise up and make Friday a real "fuck off" day in the work world. Screw all that bullshit Occupy San Diego and Occupy Oakland (which I didn't even think WAS occupied because of the Raiders) people just go through the motions on Friday, show up for 8 hours and then go home. Why go through the trouble of wasting money, gas, and time as you sit in traffic to come to the office and go home at the end of the day. I say have everyone work from home on Friday. Yeah that's right. Everyone. Respond to e-mails, set things up and prepare for the coming week, and be done for the day. That's all you need to do on Friday. I don't care if you're a CPA that still deals with paperwork or a guy out in the heat digging ditches. There is something you can do on Friday to prepare for the next week. And if you don't? You need to quit your job because you and your job are worthless.

I often get those random bots through instant message at work that annoy the piss out of me and want me to go to a website for a free VCR (seriously? who uses those things anymore?) or to find cheap canadian pharmaceutical drugs. Basically they just want to find out my age/sex/location in order to Craigslist-style butt-fuck me. Well, today is Friday, and since I don't have anything else going on, I decide to mess with one of them.

(3:39:49 PM) wilmapellishymk: hey r u there?
(3:39:58 PM) McCullster: nope
(3:40:08 PM) wilmapellishymk: hey!!! my naem is Stephanie, wuts goin on, wanna chat :)

Infantile thirteen year old spelling of "name" is supposed to throw me off from thinking your a bot? What is this, To Catch A Predator now? You have sweet tea and cookies all made up for me too?

(3:40:14 PM) McCullster: yeah sure
(3:40:27 PM) McCullster: as long as you'll be my mommy

Obviously I just want to get this over with as soon as possible. I usually hint at a few things and then drop the bombshell, but in this instant, I'm ready to get into the action.

(3:40:38 PM) McCullster: and change my poopie diaper
(3:40:46 PM) McCullster: I'm all stinky down there
(3:41:09 PM) McCullster: and I really want mommy to help. She usually sucks it out of my ass and cleans my bottom up with her face
(3:41:15 PM) wilmapellishymk: I got ur name from the aol messenger directory, im bored lookin for someone to talk to hahah, so wut r u doin??

Does any of that stuff I previously said even register? I basically said I want this person to suck shit out of my ass (preferably with a straw), and they glaze over that statement.

(3:41:29 PM) McCullster: I'm just sittin' in my highchair
(3:41:33 PM) wilmapellishymk: what's a bot??

Oh I see, they're trying to throw me off by having a conversation with an imaginary person or something. This statement really lets me to know that these are real people that have "telemarketing assets" or a list of copy and paste statements in order to communicate in a quick manner. I see it all the time when you "chat" with a service person. They have a set of question that they will answer quicklike and just copy and past that shit into the chat window. This clues me into the fact that this is a professional operation at least.

(3:41:48 PM) wilmapellishymk: cool, i just got home from work... 7 hour shift, nobody was there so i got to work out hahaha, perks of workin at a gym ;)
(3:42:01 PM) McCullster: I got my sippie cup filled with appie juice

I don't give a shit about your day bitch. I want you to talk about my day and what I'm doing right now.

(3:42:25 PM) wilmapellishymk: lol ya i keep my booty tight hahahhaha well thats what they tell me ;) wanna come see what i look like?

Um, I just got married. So no, I'm not interested. I'm still in that "awesome married hitting skins" phase.

(3:42:45 PM) McCullster: it fills up my diapee with yellow liquid
(3:43:07 PM) McCullster: and then mommy takes it and holds it up above and squeezes the juice out on her face

I'm going to just sit back at this point and let the rest of the conversation just play out, because at this point, I had just annoyed the person on the other end of this chat window and I'm sure they just tuned me out. Also it was just me going off on this person and continuing the story of this male adult (let's call him Justin), approximately 29 in age, sitting in a high chair at home, drinking out of a sippie cup and surfing the net on a laptop. Just put that mental image in your head, as well as a mother who would come home from a long day at the office and the first thing she does when she gets home is hold up a diaper of said man's pee pee juice and drink it down and splash it all over her nice business suit.

(3:43:13 PM) McCullster: will you do that for me?
(3:44:19 PM) McCullster: I go poopie all the time
(3:44:55 PM) McCullster: mommy are you there? I thought you were going to come home after you worked at the gym?
(3:46:16 PM) McCullster: sometimes mommy brings me fiber bars from the gym to help me go potty
(3:47:19 PM) McCullster: and even sometimes, mommy brings home a big strong man with big muscles for me to play with
(3:48:06 PM) McCullster: I tell him that if he wants to put his big daddy in mommys hoohah that he has to take a piece of my shit and crush it in his buttock muscles
(3:48:34 PM) McCullster: sometimes water comes out
(3:48:59 PM) McCullster: luckily I don't get blamed for the mess
(3:49:26 PM) McCullster: because the dog comes in and licks it up
(3:49:40 PM) McCullster: and then magically, it finds its way back outside!

There ya go. I love fucking off at work sometimes. I come up with the most random stories in my head.

This Dude Loves His Time Crisis

2011-10-15T15:27:00.000-05:00

Listen, I love games. I do. There are certain gaming franchises out there that I will kill a newborn baby in order to get it months before everyone else does. But somehow, watching this dude get into this arcade version of Time Crisis makes me want to laugh at him. I guess it's because he's doing it in public, with his camouflage pants, tactical gloves, and sees fit to give out hand signals and reload his fake plastic gun. I sure as shit don't dress up in my N7 armor to play Mass Effect 3. Now where is that baby I just had......

Review: Pearl Jam Twenty

2011-10-13T19:04:00.000-05:00

In the wake of such a whirlwind of emotions - with me getting married and having a guys weekend right after - I figured now would be a good as time as any to write a review for the Cameron Crowe documentary PJ20.

Here in Dallas where I live, we occasionally get the opportunity to see cult indie films that aren't shown across the U.S. We have our own little Dallas Art and Film Festival once a year, with a few B and C actors showing up in Big D to mark the occasion. I won't go as far to say that Dallas is above the Austin, Texas area as far as "cult" status, but I'd say we're a close second.

Dallas originally had two showings planned for Pearl Jam Twenty on Sept. 20th of this year. With word quickly spreading, the two showings quickly sold out within hours. I being the idiot (or good future husband - whichever way you want to look at it) I am, chose to hold off on purchasing tickets because of our wedding two days later. We would be so wrapped up in planning and preparation of leaving town, packing, and all the things that go into planning a small intimate wedding that we wouldn't be able to get away to go see the documentary. I held off, and the tickets sold out.

Weeks passed, and I eventually got married as planned on Sept. 24th in Hot Springs, Arkansas to my best friend and companion Jen. I won't bore you with details and I won't shove pictures down your throat, but know it was a cool time and a helluvalot of fun.

So jump forward a week or so, and things have gotten back to normal (as normal as they can be with me). I continue to get weekly newsletters from the local theaters and venues in Dallas showcasing new acts and shows that might interest me. Usually I skim over them, don't really see a name I "have to see" and move on. But this one part in particular caught my eye and drew my attention. It read "Pearl Jam: Twenty" with a link and a little bio on the movie. Cool. So they put a few reviews in there from their blog.

I click through the link to read about the awesome experience other people had on the 20th showing and my draw drops. The Magnolia theater in Dallas is showing an encore performance of Pearl Jam Twenty for one night only, one show only. And what's that? Tickets are still available? The next minute or two was a dream sequence: Wallet out. Card out. Numbers punched. Two tickets selected. Purchase. Done.

Even with the knowledge that the PJ20 high-def blu-ray was to be released a week or so later on Oct. 25th, I still wanted to see the movie in a theater setting with like minded Pearl Jam fans.

What happened as the lights began to dim and the movie began to play I will never know. It was almost an out of body experience for me; being whisked away to Verona, Italy for Release in 2006, to the epic rendition of Crown of Thorns at the Las Vegas 10 year Pearl Jam anniversary show. I wasn't in a movie theater with 50 other fans, I was in the audience. I was singing Better Man with thousands of other people TO Eddie Vedder as we lit lighters in Madison Square Garden. It was an other-worldly experience for me, but I will try to put this into words.

First off, Pearl Jam as a group is on a completely other level for me. There's Pearl Jam, and then there's every other band (even the Who come in as a close second). So I'm probably not the best person in the world to get an even keeled review of this documentary, but I will try to give my account and base the other off what my wife said as we were driving home.

The documentary starts off in the mid-80's, with glam rock, arena rock, and hair metal in charge in the music industry. Woven from the same cloth, the entrancing Andy Wood of Mother Love Bone dies from an overdose. With the close-knit Seattle scene losing one of it's brethren, the core group of Mother Love Bone and Cornell form Temple of the Dog as a tribute to their lost comrade. It is here that Cameron Crowe is at his finest, showing us the human elements of each band member, and how Andy's death affected each of them. We get to see the band members as human beings, going from boisterous, playful 20-somethings to morose, sorrowful adults having to deal with the loss of a close friend. It's an emotional turn that happens relatively soon in the movie, but sets the groundwork for everything that was to come later.

After the passing of Andy Wood, Stone Gossard and Mike McCready begin to jam, eventually taking in Jeff Ament, longtime friend of Stone. Matt Cameron is brought on board to lay down drums and they lay down the Momma-Son trilogy of songs (Alive, Footsteps, and Once). It eventually gets into the hands of San Diego surfer Eddie Vedder, who lays down vocals over the tape after surfing one day.

The next section shows the band's rise to stardom, their standoffish approach to the media at the time, and their lack of press after Ten. Crowe does a great job showing us and taking us on a rollercoaster ride of Pearl Jam fandom. From the spawning of Mother Love Bone, to the stuttering because of the death of Andy Wood, to the rise of Pearl Jam, grunge, and then the emotional train wreck that is the Roskilde Festival, where 9 fans were killed during the beginning parts of the Pearl Jam set, Crowe touches everything in the Pearl Jam catalog.

After we see Pearl Jam hit hits pinnacle of success around the release of the Vs. album, we think that we'll just coast on over the third and fourth albums Vitalogy and No Code, with a resurgence of popularity later with the album Yield. This is where the documentary shines, as it is able to touch on the very delicate subject of power struggles within a band. And not just any band: Pearl Jam. In the early years, the power came from the songwriting techniques of Stone Gossard and Jeff Ament. Later on in the bands lifecycle, Eddie Vedder began to hit his stride as a songwriter and brought a multitude of finished songs with accompanying lyrics to the table, instead of bringing forth a simple guitar lick that was fun to play and needed to be expanded upon (like some of the bandmates). It was just easier at the time to perfect and fine tune a song with all of the pieces there, instead of spending more time in the studio hashing out the unfinished jams. It's here that Vitalogy and No Code come off as experimental, hard to listen to, and could come across as somewhat lazy. These are not bad records by any means, but need to be slowly taken in by the listener, something most are not accustomed to as we've had with hits like "Even Flow" and "Daughter".

Coming in at 1 hour and 49 minutes, it's a lot of Pearl Jam music and information to soak in. At times it plays like a Behind the Music: Pearl Jam episode, interweaving interview footage from the band in between concert footage as it tells the story. I loved the fact that it wasn't just a "here's a Pearl Jam concert" approach either. This documentary does a great job of getting the right interview audio piece for the music, and magically blends it together seamlessly. For some casual fans who only like a few of the bigger more well known songs, I still think it's a must see movie. It's an incredibly well done documentary, pieced together by hours and hours of archival footage collected by Crowe, roadies, friends, family, and band mates. I have to say, to find, source, and include all of this material over 20 years is an incredible feat. Crowe and crew do it, and do an excellent job. I bow down to thee.

Pearl Jam Twenty tells an incredibly great story of one of the greatest American bands still left today making music after twenty years. If you are a Pearl Jam fanatic like me, you should buy either the blu-ray or DVD come Oct. 25th. It's well worth the price alone for the movie, but no doubt there will be some killer bonus features.

I'm still pumped that I got to see Pearl Jam Twenty on the big screen, with the massive surround sound volume pumping out tunes and being in the intimate setting of a movie theater. The documentary is able to pull you in as soon as it starts with it's low-fi approach, but really takes over once they get into the newer "HD" era, with better sound quality, better video quality, and a more in-your-face shooting style. This is where you break down the wall of the theater and begin to believe that you are there, among the crowd, and amongst the waves.

Like I said before, my wife loved it and thought it was a really good movie. She's not a hardcore Pearl Jam fan at all, only liking a few of the famous tracks I've played for her. Throw in the fact that she's an antsy movie watcher that either needs to check the time on her phone during the movie, or while we're home watching will get up and go do something for a bit and come back, showcases even more how good this documentary is. She didn't do any of those things during Pearl Jam Twenty. So yeah, I guess that's what I'm basing my movie review on, is that my ADD wife could actually sit still, not fidget, and watch PJ20 and then afterword say how much she loved it.

It's incredible. From the rise of the Seattle scene, Green River, Mother Love Bone, the fall of Andrew Wood, the slow rise of Temple of the Dog and then into Pearl Jam, this documentary takes you on an epic ride through Pearl Jam-ville. Sure, there are a few sorrowful moments like Roskilde and Eddie Vedder's stalker, but it all adds up to an incredible ride. One I can't wait to take again.

So with my personal take and review going on into the stratosphere, I wanted to say a few thank you's and sign off.

Thank you to Cameron Crowe, Kelly Curtis, and all of the people who collected and kept all of those Pearl Jam trinkets, ticket stubs, demo tapes, CD's and posters. You made this awesome documentary experience possible, and I can't wait to watch it again.

Thank you to the Magnolia theater in Dallas. Thank you for adding an encore show. I feel you did that just for me. "What? Justin wasn't able to see Pearl Jam Twenty because of a wedding? Shit! Add another show for him."

And finally, thank you to Pearl Jam. Thank you for helping me go through one of the hardest things I've ever had to tackle on my own. You've been there every emotional step of the way. Songs like "Indifference" and "Porch" were played on my way to my new school senior year every morning. Songs like "Yellow Ledbetter" were played to look back at all of the great memories my friends and I shared. And thanks especially for releasing the two concerts I attended in bootleg CD form (August 15, 2000 in Memphis at the Pyramid with my buddies, and July 17, 2005 in Little Rock, Arkansas before I drove 14 hours to Savannah to see my friend Tim). I will forever have those two bootlegs and can always go back and listen to them, remember how young I was then, and relive both of those incredible nights. And also, thank you for the song "Just Breathe". No matter where I am and how I hear that song, it will always makes me think of my new wife Jen, and how she loves that song and what she means to me.

Thank you.

Many years of success from this lifelong fan.

ROMs Are An Eye Opening Experience

2011-08-28T12:38:00.001-05:00

For the better part of my long fascination with video games and entertainment, very few monumental changes have occurred in that time-frame.

The first time I booted up Super Mario Bros. (actually, I wanted to shoot ducks first with my plastic light-gun) and the first time I saw the shitty Super Mario Bros. movie with John Leguizamo (sp?), all of these instances changed my gaming lifestyle forever.

Each gamer has had his or her own set path of these game-changing events. For me, it was the first time I was engrossed in a game of Left 4 Dead that I started to fear and care for my buddies playing the survivor characters, it was the first frantic chainsaw duel in the Gears series, and it was my first paradigm shift in Final Fantasy XIII (also the first time I played a Final Fantasy game). You could also throw in the purchase of my brand new, bigger, 1080p high definition TV (after living with a 32 inch TV from 9 years ago), but that only really counts as seeing the games in a new and better way.

After all of these great moments in my gaming life, and I think I'm on the verge of another one of those game changing events.

Recently on G4's Attack of the Show, they featured a few new iPhone and iPad RPG’s to hit the App marketplace.

Now while I’m all for mobile gaming on a phone, something like this had never even crossed my mind. That these app games were able to give a deep engaging story and non-crazy haired Japanese characters on a mobile device. It wasn’t a one-sided waiting-room time waster or a five-minute gaming experience, this was a fully fleshed out video game; that was unheard of to me. An RPG without the crazy spiked hair? Holy shit that's awesome. Throw in the fact that it’s a game that I actually want to play and that’s even more rare.

Most of the mobile games that I had heard of consisted of 5-minute time wasters like I mentioned for gaming on the toilet. For that we‘re content with our Angry Birds and our Jelly Car games. But these mobile RPG games feature loads of gameplay, hours of entertainment, leveling up, collecting, and trading weapons and potions at a store for new weapons.

I did a little research on the title I had my eye on - which happened to be Battleheart from Miko Mobile - a title that had just come out and was sweeping across iPhones everywhere. I immediately went to the company website and got some bad news. Apparently the only version available at the time was the iPhone and iPad versions.

I have an Android device.

Miko Mobile was supposedly working on an Android version, but there was no telling when that will happen (when I wrote this article it wasn’t out yet, but you can get Battleheart now in the Android Marketplace for your Google-based phones). I turned to a few helpful websites (mostly just by searching in Google) and came up with a few lists of other great RPG games and one weird solution I’d never heard of: PSX4Droid.

Now what is PSX4Droid you might ask? It’s basically a Playstation 1 emulator for your Android phone.

Holy shit are you kidding me? This means I can download real video games and play them on my phone! It also means that smartphones today are incredibly faster and better equipped with RAM and space than your old grey PlayStation 1 console. This doesn't really mean much to you, but that’s awesome and dating myself all at the same time. I can’t wait until we will have Bluetooth headsets that can compete with the processing power of a PS3 or Xbox 360.

So to use PSX4Droid (which costs $5.99 on the Android Market) you’ll download a BIOS file and a ROM (or read-only memory file of the game) online, put it all on your phone’s SD card and go to town on it. PSX4Droid and some games even have a setting to allow you to play using a Nintendo Wiimote if you don’t like the on-board touch screen controls.

Having said all of that awesome knowledge and news, this is where things start to get even better.

The list of ROMs out there online is immense. Hundreds of sites (both free and membership-only sites) list everything from Final Fantasy 1 through 8, Chrono Trigger, Clock Tower, Colin McRae Rally 2.0, Persona 2 and Dragon Quest 1 through 7. These are just the games I am interested in and are downloading. There are hundreds more. If it was a popular Playstation 1 title, it’s probably in a torrent file or .iso somewhere out there on the internet.

Here’s my disclaimer though: the correct way to use ROMs is to only download the games that you already own or have owned in the past. ROMs are just a file format copy of a disc-based game you have already owned (like you're CD/MP3 library). That’s the legal jargon that you need to know.

The other reason is to download games that you don’t have and play them for free. My reasoning to do this is: Where are you going to find these games in a playable format anyway? Do you really want to go out and buy a PS1 on eBay for $40 bucks, controllers and a video cable to hook it up and get your Resident Evil fix? How long is it going to take you to find a disc copy of Shin Bakusou Dekotora Densetsu on the PS2 without paying mega bucks on it? Yeah, that's not gonna happen. Too much time buying stupid shit and not playing video games, that's how I look at it.

Sony has made their money on these older titles. The games in question are two hardware generations behind us right now, and they don’t care about these older games like this. They probably won't ever put all of them on the PSN store.

But don’t think that you can also just go out and snatch up every single ROM known to mankind. The trick is to get what you want and leave it at that; don’t go crazy; use moderation. You’ll probably hear of some douchebag out there that will do just that and fuck it up for everyone else. I see it all the time.

Some people in this world don’t know how to handle free shit. It's something I've learned over the years.

Take my job for example: we get free sodas, energy drinks and snacks in our break room. The first time it was offered (I shit you not) some dickhead decided it was a great idea to take home thirty Red Bull energy drinks in a backpack.

Needless to say, the company had to send out a fucking e-mail to everyone in the company - vice presidents, CEO's, managers, everyone - (not just to this doucher) to let us know that the drinks can’t leave the premises anymore. Wow. Thanks a lot dude! Way to fuck up a great thing for everyone else because of your greedy little ass. Now I can’t enjoy an energy drink on my commute home when I do the TGR podcast because your dumbass wanted to have a shit-ton of free Red Bull at home. That dude is nothing but a cheap piece of shit. I award you no points, and may God have mercy on your soul.

So anyway, back to games. The type of incredible experiences you got long ago on your original Playstation are now coming to an Android device. For me, all it took to open my eyes was this small segment on one of my favorite TV shows I watch almost every night, as well as a little internet Googling.

This I feel is my next gaming milestone, right up there with John Leguizamo’s awesome portrayal of Luigi in that shitty 90's movie. I can download games that I didn’t get to play before and enjoy them finally because I skipped a generation (PS1), and this way I can help a few fellow gamers out in the process by writing a blog about it.

I know ROMs aren’t this new fantastical thing that’s better than sliced bread, and I know that I might get flamed by readers who say, "Jesus Justin, a little behind the curve now are we?" But to them I say "Fuck you." I don't actively search shit like this, and I only will get into it if it benefits me. I know when I see a good thing. It’s almost like you hear this awesome track on the radio from a band, and you look into their music catalog and you see they’ve been around for years and have about 15 albums. What do you do? Just buy your favorite new song, or do you buy the album and go back and check out the 50 other tracks? I'm the guy that will dig deeper into their musical history and buy everything. All it takes is one person to introduce it to me (not tell me how awesome it is) and I'll get into it if I feel it warrants a new fan.

It’s fun to experience something like this. I’m sure you guys feel the same way or know what I’m talking about. To have a “project” that you’re so engulfed in that you want to see it work. Searching, investigating, finding ROMs; it’s one of those things that completely engulfs your entire day and all you can do is patiently wait for the download to finish so you can play all the games you want to on your phone (i.e. all of them).

I didn’t think I had anymore video gaming milestones left in this old gamer body. I thought maybe 3D gaming would be the next one for me with the 3DS? You just never know when you'll get smacked over the head with a good idea. For me, it took a few years for the whole ROM thing to catch on.

Who knows though. Sometimes things like this can’t be explained; they just happen. I don’t mind it in the least bit, it just means more video gaming for me.

Gearbox Community Day 2011: The Party That Was 15 Years In The Making

2011-08-19T17:42:00.002-05:00

A couple of weeks ago – okay, it was a long time ago - (June 11th, 2011), Gearbox Software invited all of its fans in the Dallas, Texas area to come on down to the Palladium ballroom and enjoy panels and gameplay demos from their wide range of upcoming and released titles. It was a similar format I had seen in the past at Quakecon, with developers, artists, and engineers all taking the stage to answer questions and give video gamers’ an inside look at the titles they make for us to play.

Community Day was just packed with fans. I had no idea there would be that many people in line at 9am on a hot Texas Saturday. Sure, I can understand the draw of QuakeCon with its huge Bring Your Own Computer LAN party and plush atmosphere of the Hilton Anatole hotel. This was at a glorified Texas bar. It was just a few short steps away from the stereotypical honky-tonk bar with a mechanical bull.

Gearbox sent out private invites to their beta testers, families, friends, and then put up an invitation for anyone who would go to the Gearbox website.

During the event, Randy Pitchford (CEO of Gearbox Software) stated that they had well over 2,600 fans pre-register for the events throughout the day, with more expected to show up for the exclusive Duke Nukem Launch Party later that night. The show did get off to kind of a late start. This was because of two things: scheduling conflicts with the Palladium and Gearbox not being able to setup early, and with all of those anxious fans wrapping around the building, waiting to check-in. Once the events kicked off inside, boy did it start.

They brought out the big guns and kicked off with a gameplay demo for Aliens: Colonial Marines (a game I’m really excited about).

From what was said during the Aliens: Colonial Marines panel and what I gathered from the gameplay demo, Aliens: CM will be the true sequel to the second Alien film directed by James Cameron. The guys at Gearbox Software are passionate about the alien lore and saga, as well as wanting to dive deeper into the world to answer some questions left behind on the planet LV-426.

You play as a marine sent onto LV-426, part of the cavalry that was called in from the movie, destined to investigate what happened to the original crew that stumbled upon the alien queen and the egg infested colonists. It’s a dark, ambient first-person shooter, with glowing reds, yellows, and whites coming through grates in the floor and ceiling. As a gamer and fan of atmospheric gameplay, I can usually tell with my first glimpse of a game what the developers chose to skimp on, and what the game engine’s assets are hanging their hat on. For Aliens: Colonial Marines, they’re going for lighting and ambiance. We all know that LV-426 and the colony is not a well lit happy place. It’s dark, dangerous, and you never know what will pop out next (and from where).

The mood for the demo was great. The sound system was turned up loud, the darkness of the room engulfed us, and everyone was sitting on the edge of their seat completely silent in the dark, waiting for the next scare or action sequence. Being a huge Alien fan, and sitting there with an entire crowd who was just as into it as I was, I got fucking chill bumps from the gameplay demo for Aliens: CM. I don’t know what it was, or how it happened, but I liken it to going to see the midnight showings of Star Wars. The audience is calm and waiting in the suspenseful moments, and rushing with excitement, loud and cheering as a marine smacks a xenomorph.

With the epic conclusion of the Aliens demo complete, the doors were opened up and fans were allowed to spread out into the Palladium and see what they wanted.

If you go and listen to the Aliens panel (around the 45 minute mark or so) you can start to hear all of these people talking and all-around commotion. This pissed me off to no end. Someone decided it would be a great idea to open up all of the doors surrounding the conference room to let people leave and mosey around. Not only did these people leave during a panel and be disrespectful, they immediately started chatting about how they were going to get their grubby hands on a PC to play Duke Nukem Forever, knowing full well they will have the entire day (until 5pm) to play it.

Display cases were filled with awards for Gearbox from all of the titles they’ve made in the past – from the PC version of Halo: Combat Evolved to most recently Duke Nukem Forever and Borderlands - the cases included a wide array of artwork, memorabilia, and trophies from each game.

Next up was the Borderlands panel.

The Borderlands panel was informative, if not a little long in the tooth. It’s hard to have a panel to talk about a game that’s been out for a few years and everyone has read everything about it online already. Still though, it’s Borderlands, and I had no idea that Randy Pitchford did the voice of Crazy Earl, and Mikey Neumann did the voice of the iconic Scooter from the game. Being a fan of Borderlands, it’s still great to hear little tidbits about a game you love so much no matter how small they are.

Next came the Brothers In Arms: Furious 4 demo. This was another one of the gameplay demos I “shouldn’t” have recorded (I still have the audio from both Aliens and Furious 4 on my computer at home, I just can’t share them). They turned out all of the lights, had 35 to 40 people pacing the aisle ways looking for any sign of electronic life. They even had a guy scanning the crowd with night vision goggles looking into the dark to try and spot any form of light other than the screen light on people’s faces. I hope he didn’t catch me picking my nose and eating it.

Set during World War II, Brothers In Arms: Furious 4 is about a small group of 4 soldiers (hey! I get it!) sent in by the government to kill Hitler on his own turf in Germany. These guys get access to some weirdly cool weapons from the government to wreak havoc on the Nazis. I don’t know what the official politically correct version of that is as far as trying to nail down a certain genre, but I’m calling it a fucking good time. We’re talking about 4-person co-op, dynamic cut scenes for each player, cool perks and weapons to unlock, and all of it stylized for this version of World War II.

I think the best way to sum this up was from Mr. Neumann during the panel when he said that the setting and time of the events is in WWII Brothers In Arms, but the attitude and style of the game is completely new. So we’re going to see gruesome chainsaw deaths, pick-axe throws to the heads, and we’re going to be doing it all to punk music or even Ride With Me by the Vines (great song by the way). It was definitely a different take on World War II; one that looks pretty fucking awesome.

Last but certainly not least was the reason that this whole day took place: the Duke Nukem Forever panel. This was obviously the star of the show and the reason we all made the trek down into downtown Dallas in 100 degree heat to be here. With John Saint John in front of a mic doing the voice of Duke Nukem, you know things got crazy. People immediately started asking him to say all sorts of stuff in the “Duke voice”, and Mr. Pitchford even opened up the Balls of Steel edition and gave it to a fan who tweeted the fastest.

The panel started out on weird note and had this “we did this and kind of fucked this up” type of vibe, but after Randy righted the track, the panel went into a new direction with the voice simply being, “We fucking did it! Even though it took 15 years, Duke Nukem finally has a home and a resting place.”

After 7 constant hours of panels and content without a meal and barely anything to drink (I need my caffeine!) I headed home for a quick catnap and came back for the Duke Nukem Forever launch party later that same night. Needless to say, the guest list was star studded. Cliff Blezenski (sp?) even showed up! We got entertained my the Crystal Method, the girls from Coyote Ugly (yes, that shitty movie bar is still around), and DJ Jazzy Jeff from the Fresh Prince of Bel Air.

My buddy Chris and I bugged our buddy Adam to go find Cliffy B so we could get a picture with the creator of the Gears of War series and most recently Bulletstorm. It was a great opportunity for gamers to come and rub elbows with the creators of Duke Nukem, those who spent so much time on the game over the years, taking refuge in someone’s house to continue development on the game, even when 3D Realms folded.

So with all that being said, Duke Nukem Forever is finally going to hit store shelves. It won’t win any awards. It won’t be a benchmark in video gaming and what to do or how to do something. It’s Duke. He’s back (finally) and you’re either a fan of Duke Nukem and his humor or you’re not.

I know the game probably won’t be any good at all (and it isn’t), but let’s face it people, the game is a mis-mash of game engine, audio, textures, and lighting engines strung along together since 2006.
So when you think about buying Duke Nukem Forever on release day or afterwards, ask yourself, “Did Duke 3D ever win any awards? Did Duke 3D ever get a high review score?” I’ll go ahead and answer that. No and no. But what you do remember is playing Duke 3D and having a great time, finding all sorts of hidden gems in the movie theater and the movie rental store. That’s the type of experience you’re going to get from this game. So when you play Duke Nukem Forever and you go into the bathroom and you pick up that piece of shit out of the toilet and throw it at the wall? That’s a Duke Nukem experience.

It took 15 fucking years to get here, but I’m happy he’s back. It’s a different type of game from a different time - a time when we didn’t have huge blockbuster and serious Call of Duty’s or MMO’s. It’s a relief for a lot of people who developed Duke to get this out to gamers’ hands who’ve been clamoring for it for a long time. So now we can get our taste of toilet bowl shit on the wall and wait for the next Duke Nukem game to come down the pipeline (You know I'm right. There will be another!)

Coldplay Rips Off Super Mario Bros.

2011-08-19T17:41:00.000-05:00

Normally when we see the band name Coldplay we think of the overly effeminate dudes in touch with their “sensitive sides” and make fun of them (trust me, it’s okay for you to make fun of them, they deserve it). I just want to yell at them, "Hey man, how about you listen to something more manly; it will put hair on your chest!"

Coldplay has become the gay-er version of bands in the same line as Nickelback and Creed, only with some added musical street cred. You really shouldn’t like any of these bands unless you’re a 18 year old girl with a vagina, or you’re trying to get into said 18-yr old girl’s vagina (we gotta keep it legal here people).

”Yeah, Viva La Vida is my new favorite song of their newer stuff, but I really like the earlier Parachutes album better….it’s more “indie” and unheard of. Ya know, like, before they went "mainstream".”

Here is a Youtube video clearly showing that Coldplay straight out ripped off the familiar Mario “Star Invincibility” theme to make their Viva La Vida song more catchy and recognizable....but subliminally. You don't know where you heard it before, and why you like it; you just do.

[via Today's Biggest Thing]

P.S. Yes. I am that dude that likes a few newer Coldplay songs but likes Parachutes better.

Review: Beyond Good and Evil HD

2011-08-19T17:39:00.000-05:00

Eight years have passed since we last saw Beyond Good and Evil in our original Xbox or PS2 disc trays. It’s been that long, but Ubisoft is giving fans of the original a chance to experience one of the best and most underrated games ever. I can see why though: it features a female protagonist, a pig companion and passive gameplay with not a whole lot of combat. She takes pictures of weird new animals and shit? Yeah, not exactly on par with some of the other Xbox games that was released around this time (*cough* Halo *cough*).

But what Beyond Good and Evil lacks in combat and fighting grit, it makes up for with its engaging open world, its story and its characters. The game was ahead of its time in these aspects.

Beyond Good and Evil tells the story of Jade, a feisty photojournalist with a weird fashion taste. By that I mean she wears neon green lipstick. Who does that? Jade is thrown into this violent war happening on her peaceful planet of Hillys, and is tasked with uncovering a government conspiracy while teaming up with an underground spy group called the Iris Network. She teams up with her talking pig uncle Pey’j to go out and fight the invading alien forces that crash down on Hillys, while bringing the truth to the people about the government conspiracy through pictures and articles. It’s definitely an original story I will tell you that.

The world of Hillys is vast and open for the player to explore (if you don’t mind a few short loading screens between sections). Never before have I played an Xbox downloadable title like this and felt so into, so a part, of the world in which I walked. It simply feels rich and alive. Definitely different than many other titles where you can tell someone with a magical hand knew you were coming and “flipped the switch” on the market district before you arrived, bringing the area to life, then essentially turned out the lights when you left and “reset” everything. Think of something like the Truman Show. It’s kind of like that.

What’s also cool about Beyond Good and Evil HD is that it wants you to explore. The game does lay out a mission for you to go do, but it also leaves a lot of the hidden gems out there for the player to find and uncover at his or her own leisure. This is something that is often lost in newer games today – there are 13 collectibles in this map, find them. The point is: there are multiple ways to be drawn into the world of Hillys, and that’s a very good thing for an 8-year old game. It just proves it still stands up to even to today’s standards, and that’s the making of a great game.

The other part of Beyond Good and Evil HD to take note of is the incredible balance of play-types the player can use to his or her advantage. Stealth plays a major part of the game, as it allows Jade to sneak into government facilities and snap the photos she needs to complete the mission and blow the government conspiracy wide open. You can also go in with your staff a blazin’ (there’s a weed joke in there somewhere) since Jade only has a stick to fight with (so no guns or knives in these fights) to take down guards if you don’t feel like sneaking around for too long. These differing styles reminded me a lot of GoldenEye 007. Where sure, you have the opportunity to feel like a secret agent and use stealth and silent kills to your advantage if you want to, but you can also go medieval on their asses with an AK-47 machine gun if you want as well. The choice is yours. Did I really just compare a game featuring a fat talking pig to GoldenEye 007? Wow.

The only major issue I found with combat was with the final boss battle. Like I mentioned, the game only sporadically asks you to fight enemies, and as such the final boss battle is somewhat broken. It’s almost like they didn’t know what to do with it, and pieced together something at the last minute.

In the final boss battle it throws wave after wave of smaller enemies at you while also having the ability to knock you down and then hit you again before you even stand up. It would be nice if it only did this to even the playing field if your whooping ass and raise the tension, but it does this over and over until you’re just…..well….dead. This type of broken game mechanic really can leave a bad taste in your mouth at the end of what is an incredible original game.

There is also the problem with the camera movement while trying to be stealthy and sneaking around enemies. To get things started, you can’t invert the Y-axis and keep the X-axis normal, or vice versa. You just can’t. Don’t ask me why, but this pained me to no end. Pressing the stick to the left and having the camera move the opposite way was frustrating and took a little while getting used to. I’m used to having the camera work for me in games - not against me - so I guess I just have a weird combination of camera settings. This isn’t really a downfall for the game, just something I wish would have been fixed with the port to next gen consoles.

Other times when in tight quarters the camera just simply broke. This only happened a few times in my playthrough, but the importance of the camera in those stealth situations is a necessity when needing to know where the next enemy is so you can make your next stealthy move. It also popped its ugly head a few times during the hovercraft races, causing me to lose the valuable first place finish. It’s a minor camera quirk, but it isn’t a game breaker by any means.

If you missed Beyond Good and Evil eight years ago and you’ve heard your buddies clamoring on and on about it in that 8 year span, now is the time to pick it up and experience a beautifully rendered HD port of the original game. Sure, there are a few minor downfalls with the camera working in tight spaces and the final boss combat, but for those two tweaks, the rest of Beyond Good and Evil is still a shining gem of a great game. It should definitely be in your gaming collection.

I give it 4 out of 5 stars.

o   Beyond Good and Evil HD: Xbox 360 (reviewed)
o   Release Date: March 2, 2011
o   Retail Price: 800 Microsoft Points ($10)
o   Review copy provided by publisher

My Very First GT Racing Wheel

2011-08-19T17:38:00.000-05:00

Not having had a gaming racing wheel before, I decided with the lowered price of the Logitech GT Wheel that this was a good deal to go with my recent purchase of Gran Turismo 5. What I found after hooking it up to my PS3 is pure, unadulterated video gaming bliss…..

To give you a little back story to my thought process, I think it is retarded to buy gaming accessories to play one game (Rock Band aside). Wii tennis rackets, golf putters, and baseball bats to fit the Wii controller into will never find their way into my gaming cabinet. It’s flat-out retarded and wasted plastic from Indonesia. You shouldn’t need that extra $1.99 piece of shit plastic bat to make you think you’re in Wrigley Field hitting a home run. Does that even happen, ever? No, it doesn’t. These are purely instruments for pain as you swing your arms around wildly with the family you love close by. No thanks. I somewhat “like” my family.

The point is, I never thought I would break down and be one of those dudes who bought a racing wheel for a game (even if it is the most anticipated racing game in 5 years). Racing wheels cost a lot of money, and it’s a lot of money to invest into that one game. A lot of money I could instead put towards one of the next big titles for 2011 (and believe me, there are a lot). Something inside me stirred up from my stomach and compelled me to jump on the Buy.com deal.

In the meantime I went ahead and booted up GT5 and trudged through with the Dualshock controller, knowing full well my wheel was on a shipping truck and would be here in a couple of days.
Silver and gold trophies were mine on the A and B licenses, even passing the retarded NASCAR school with a claymation-like Jeff Gordon. This is just the way I’ve played racing games like the original Dirt, Dirt 2, and even going back to Colin McRae Rally for the better part of my gaming existence. It’s just normal for me.

Something about the gameplay of GT5 begged to be let loose by the gaming wheel. I could tell it was different with Gran Turismo 5. It’s a different type of game. That this wasn’t just another racing game to be played for a few hours and then be put down for a month or two. It’s meant to be played for hours, nay, years until GT6 Prologue hits.

So fast forward a few days, and the delivery for the GT wheel is looming. Every gamer on the face of the earth, they know the feeling and love it when they get gamer magazines from Best Buy, GameStop, Xbox or Nintendo. It’s something small, video game related, and helps to tickle that gamer muscle. I don’t necessarily know where that gamer muscle is on your body, but I think it’s that huge vein that runs from the underside of your balls through your taint and up to your butthole. Yeah, it tickles there.

When you step it up a notch and order games online, it’s a full-fledged male/mail orgasm. Luckily the mailman is gone when I get my gifts because I would probably be a registered sex offender by now and have to go and introduce myself to all of my neighbors as such. Whew! Thank you mailman!

As I pulled into my driveway, I noticed the gargantuan box on my front stoop that can only be containing a racing wheel. A shudder of excitement went through my body as I hurried inside to un-wrap my glorious gift from Buy.com and Logitech. My girlfriend/fiance or whatever was inside waiting for me to unwrap it. She knows not to fuck with my packages or mail.

I ripped into that present like Ralphie did his Daisy bolt-action BB gun in A Christmas Story. The smell of fresh plastic and new gaming equipment wafted into the air. It is something to be cherished in my house. You know that smell. You get a faint whiff of it when you crack open a new game box after destroying the outer cellophane. That’s a small heroine-sized dose, but you to smell new game instructions, new disc smell that’s been encapsulated for a week from the factory. It all gives of a distinctive “new car” smell. To get a five pound racing wheel with pedals is like being given a wedding cake full of awesome all for yourself. Hell, I wish they would make a Yankee Candle out of that smell. It’s that damn good.

A few minutes later I briefly skimmed the instructions (which in turn means I just looked to see what all of the languages they included) I was setup and ready to rock. Insert the USB cable and flip on the PS3 and listen to the GT wheel roar to life. You see, each time the PS3 goes to the XMB or is kicked on, the GT wheel will do a diagnostic setup for you. It will roll two and a half turns to the left, back all the way to the right, and then become centered again ready to get you into the game. Good thing the Logitech GT wheel has got all of the PS3 buttons neatly placed all over the center dash.

Here I was being a gaming wheel-newb and thinking I needed to use both the Dualshock to navigate the menu AND the wheel to race. Nice. This is all I need! Navigate the entire PS3 console with it if I want to. And with the little GT light where the horn would be, I could even go into my video library late at night and watch Sex Cruise 5. Awesome. No more stumbling around in the dark to find my remote and hit the right button. Oh crap that was the surround sound (house fills with orgasmic noise as Angelica Sin climaxes)!

Getting into my first race was easy. Even right out of the box, adding the GT wheel with its default settings and calibration brought a whole new level of gaming into my living room. It fully immersed me into the game like no other controller could. And with GT5 being a top notch game to accept differing wheels; it changed on the fly to accommodate me. Before with the Dualshock, I was always minutely tapping the stick left and right, making little constant adjustments to my racing line. With the GT wheel, it was smooth sailing. My only beef (albeit a very small one) was before the race even started. The game would start me on a line just off to the side, and I would have the wheel slightly to the right or left to correct it. Then when the game would give me control, it would send my car in that direction, possibly bumping into a fellow racer and losing speed.

But after 5 hours into Gran Turismo 5 with the Logitech GT wheel, I finally “get it.” I was officially bitten by the “bug”. The “bug” as I call it is an addiction to the feeling that immerses you into the game even more in a completely new way. I will always have fun with the game and the GT wheel, but nothing will compare to those first couple of laps with a shit eating grin on my face. The one that sucks you into the game as you hear the tires squealing in DTS surround sound, feel the forces of the car trying to pull further away from the apex through the wheel, and feel the small bump as you hit the slower guy in front of you. It’s essentially the same feeling you get if you were to go to an arcade and play Daytona USA, but it’s in your living room with a better sound system (and you don’t have to hear tons of kids screaming). It’s the same bug that wants you to continually upgrade your wheel, find a better platform to mount it, and possibly invest in a very expensive gaming chair/racing wheel combo. Well, we’ll have to see about that last one.

Speaking of mounting spots, I did find a suitable place for it (as long as I keep my knees bent out slightly. Currently I have it mounted on a solid wood TV tray. The pedals are on the other side of the tray, and the wheel is butted up against the couch as best as possible to give me a seated position. This will allow my legs to go through the tray and hold it upright with my knees and prevent the legs of it from coming off the ground. I’ve already had instances with Dirt 2 (which is fucking crazy by the way on the rally stages) where I had the stand come up off the ground because I was going left, right, up a crest and was trying to steer the rally car at 120 mph down a dirt road. That shit is flippin’ nuts in the cockpit view.

To kind of close out this article: If you have a few bucks (or $90-$100) lying around and you love racing simulators or racing games, using a wheel is the way to go. It doesn’t have to be anything special (or expensive to get the experience). I’m perfectly happy with the $89.99 I spent on the wheel I have. I will continue to make fun of those people who spend $200 or $300 dollars on their racing wheel, but it won’t be much. They have the same racing bug that I have, but my making fun of them with have a little tinge of jealousy now.

Before it was all just how retarded they were for wasting money on something like that, but now I’m that retarded guy who has a Chuck-E-Cheese edition of Daytona USA in his living room. And you know what, I’m perfectly fine with that (let’s hope the girlfriend/fiance will cope with it). I’ll still have a shit-eating grin on my face all the way to the finish line.

Motion Sickness Can Stop A Gamer Cold

2011-08-19T17:37:00.000-05:00

I’d like to think I have a strong stomach. I do in a way. I can handle impaling, suicide, maiming, killing, blood, gore, and things that would make a 6-year old have bad dreams and run to mommy. I can also handle fast things like roller coasters, thrill rides, scary spook houses, and Halloween themed rides to make your stomach turn, not to mention all of the disgusting internet videos out there. But one thing that combines both of those things I apparently can’t handle is Dead Space: Extraction. It’s apparently too shaky and too spooky for this grown-ass man.

People on the blog should know by now I’m a huge Dead Space fan, always have been. But what I’m seeing and feeling after my first two chapters of Dead Space: Extraction leaves me with a bad taste in my mouth: I just can’t handle extended gaming sessions with it. And that sucks, because being the huge fan I am, I want more.

After completing a few games in my backlog, I set out to try Extraction and play an easy game for a change. Just something I can pop in and play for awhile that isn’t over the 30 hour gaming mark. Having beaten games like Mass Effect 1 and 2, starting Final Fantasy XIII and GTA IV, I needed something short and sweet, and Extraction fit the bill.

So on Sunday after being frustrated with a heavy boss battle in Final Fantasy and getting killed by the cops in Liberty City one too many times, I plopped in Extraction to see what it was all about. Now I before I go further, I do have the Playstation Move, so this would be my first foray into motion controlled gaming on the PS3.

Extraction is a “guided experience”. Basically it’s an on-rails shooter, so to play it all I would need to do is point the Move controller to fire and use the navigation controller to reload and use my stasis pull to grab objects. The camera work, tension, and shakiness would all be a part of the game.

I booted up the game and started the first chapter in complete awe. The game was great. The darkness, clever additions of the glow sticks, and the gameplay mechanics made for a harrowing experience. Just being back in the Dead Space universe gave me chills. As I continued, things of course started to go to hell, and with that going on, the camera started to shake more and more to instill tension.

For a little bit of background, each chapter in Dead Space: Extraction is anywhere from 45 minutes to an hour in length. I completed the first chapter with 5 stars and wanted more, so went on into the second chapter of the story. About halfway through the second chapter I began to feel queasy - nauseous almost. I couldn’t look away from the screen as I didn’t know where the next attack was coming from, but I also didn’t think a game could be doing something like this to me and my head.

I remember reading a bunch of reviews for Extraction when it came out on the Wii, but I don’t recall the reviews ever mentioning the motion sickness they felt after playing it. Then I got to thinking, maybe it might be my gaming setup? Can you have a TV that is too big for this? Is the refresh rate on the TV too fast? Do I need to adjust the brightness setting so I can focus on something as the camera is flailing about? Isn’t there an option to turn down the shakiness? I didn’t know what to do.

Finally after completing the second chapter, that was enough. I was too dizzy to go on. It’s almost like someone came over and said, “Hey, you want to have some fun? Put your forehead on this bat and spin around 6 times then try and sit on your couch and shoot something.” It’s fun the first time, but try doing that after an hour.

Through some digging, I did find a setting in the options menu for you to change the camera shakiness, so I might fiddle with that a little bit, but on the other hand, I don’t want to mess with what Visceral Games and the Dead Space series are all about: a fun scary horror ride. This is how the game makers intended the game to be played. Being the purist that I am, I don’t want to fuck with that! I love this stuff, but my weak little baby stomach can’t handle an itty-bitty video game. I guess I just might need to take Extraction two chapters at a time, making sure my little baby stomach didn’t eat anything before playing. Waah wah! After all, that could be one big necromorph mess in my living room for mommy to clean up, and then having to lay back so mommy can change my diapee. Not good.

Don’t get me wrong, the game is still a great ride. I don’t want to put people off the title by any means, I just can’t think of another game out there that has ever got me this queasy before? Maybe being drunk in GTA: IV for an extended period of time was the last? I can’t think of anything else though, and even then, GTA: IV is still fresh on my mind.

It will definitely be a different experience for me to take things slow in a game. Where everyone under the sun always puts some shit in their game to tell the player “Hurry hurry”, I’ll be taking a retirement home’s grandma’s pace through Dead Space: Extraction. That sucks, but I got to do what I got to do to make my baby stomach happy.

My Most Overrated and Underrated Video Games

2011-08-19T17:36:00.000-05:00

Go into any Best Buy or GameStop and you’ll realize gamers have a lot of choices to put into their disc tray. From 75-hour long Japanese RPGs to Bejeweled, the array of titles out there for us to enjoy is mind-boggling. How do you know which one is right for you? Do you take the opinion of your friends and what they think? What about all of the many video game blogs on the internet? Most of them hype the shit out of one thing or the other, and frankly, I’m sick of hearing about one and not the other. Here’s my pick for most overrated video game known to man, and then my most underrated video game:

OVERRATED -

For my most overrated game, I have to go with the Madden 09. I’ve had to listen to my good buddy Dalyn talk about Madden 10 for an entire year after he was tired of playing 378 games of online Madden 09, and even more for a few seasons offline. I learned about the new lighting/weather engine, group tackling, and all of the shit they were putting into the Be A Pro mode.

Then, when release day came around, we made a special lunch trip up to the game store in the nearest mall to pick up his copy. Jump to four months later and Dalyn was officially burned out on Madden. After over 400 games you can only play something for so long before you eventually get fed up with its cheap tricks and fluky plays. Dalyn was the type of guy that had bought every Madden game since ‘94. A few years hanging around me completely changed all that. I started to introduce him to interesting titles like Heavy Rain, Battlefield: Bad Company 2, the amazing detail of Killzone 2 (at the time), and the incredible story telling and action/puzzle sequences of the Uncharted series.

I taught him that there are more experiences (better experiences) and more fun games than just Madden; that you shouldn’t put so much hype into a yearly football game. Video games are about entertainment. And sure, you could be entertained by playing Madden 400 times in a row, but would you do the same thing for a movie? Would you watch the same movie over and over again? What about music? Would you listen to the same album 200 times in a row? I couldn’t.

From the dawn of time it feels like the guys at EA have been pumping out game after game, year after year of this crap. I personally can’t see myself ever buying a game that is essentially the same teams, the same controls, the same pretty much everything. “Oh wow, you guys put in a new weather engine……whoop-de-fucking-doo. Oh, awesome! You added in “group tackling”.” Hey I know! Why don’t you take a fucking year off EA and add in a shit-ton of content instead of wasting my time playing the same shit as last year with a roster update. You want $60 dollars again? Oh yeah, I can’t wait to spend that money again next year. Give me a break.

UNDERRATED -

For underrated, I have to go with the No More Heroes series. Ask around to any of your gamer buddies and they’ll look at you and go, “What the fuck are you talking about? A Wii game? Shut the fuck up!”
These games from Grasshopper Manufacture are epically fun, over the top, and completely bloody violent. So why in the hell have you not heard about them? Sadly, these games are on most peoples’ dust collector console called the Nintendo Wii. You’ll quickly change your tune when you completely annihilate a worthless henchman, chop him into small bit-sized pieces and hear his luscious scream as it fills your speakers. I usually have a little pre-cum soil my pants when this happens.

The comedy and style in the game is also worth a mention. Taking a crap to save your game is incredibly funny and awesome. Thank you Suda 51! Changing into a mech warrior and battling over a city like Godzilla is even more awesome-r. That’s right. I just fucking made up a word to describe No More Heroes.

Video game throwback lines to other titles, interestingly quirky but fluent control schemes, and an open world in the first No More Heroes are unheard of on the lesser powered white console. The game just oozes style in this kind of modified comic book Kill Bill world with over the top blood, shooting neck holes, and dudes splitting literally in half from a glowing samurai lightsaber.

It’s really a shame that hardcore gamers out there everywhere have not played No More Heroes or know what it is because they either have this stigma that there are no good games on the Wii, or their mind has been warped into buying the same old shit-tastic game year after year (look at Madden or Call of Duty for example). I award you no points, and may God have mercy on your soul.

I Want A Shadows Of The Empire HD Remake

2011-08-19T17:35:00.000-05:00

Every Star Wars fan (okay, maybe not the ones who love the “original” trilogy better) already know about the expanded universe in books, comics, TV series, and all sorts of other forms of media. The list of these books has grown tremendously over the years with their popularity, and it’s up to fans to pick and choose which part of the Star Wars saga they want to read about. Most fans like to read about events that happen in between or just before the movies. Others like to hear about what happens after the cute and cuddly Ewoks (with their barbaric weapons) take down the most technologically advanced group in Star Wars history: the Empire. Maybe next time the Empire shouldn’t have based their entire storm trooper technology on cheap white plastic.

One book in particular stands out in the massive library of Star Wars fiction as being one of the best: Shadows of the Empire. “Shadows” tells the story of all of your favorite Star Wars characters (minus Han who is trapped in carbonite already) in between the Empire Strikes Back and Return of the Jedi movies. The gang hatches a plan to save Han, but of course nothing is easy, and gets tied up in one of the galaxies most feared criminal organizations: Black Sun.

You’ll be introduced to other side characters that aren’t ever in the movies, like the droid bodyguard assassin Guri, the head of Black Sun Prince Xizor, and one of my favorite characters Dash Rendar, to play the gritty smuggler. He’s almost a carbon copy of Han Solo (so I can see why they didn’t want to include him in the movies), but Dash is even more of an asshole. I always loved that side of Han Solo, because he’s just a complete dick and he wins over the princess who is light years out of his league.

Shadows of the Empire features just enough of the main saga of Star Wars to care, but enough new fresh content thrown in to play around with the characters and see them in new ways. If you haven’t read the book, you might have already gotten everything by playing the N64 classic of the same name. In the game, you took control of Dash with his trusty sidekick droid Leebo, and saw a companion piece to what happens in the book.

The book mostly follows the other main characters Chewie, Lando, Leia, Luke and the droids. In the game, you follow Dash and will constantly go off on your own, but occasionally intersect with the main characters as you come back to help out. I just finished reading Shadows of the Empire, and now that I look back on that game, I realize just how great it actually was. Now I want a high definition remake.

The story of the book makes for a lot of flying and dog fights in space. It’s a little tough to read because you’re constantly trying to picture in your mind what’s going on in a large galactic battle or dogfight, but the book fits perfectly into what a game should be: action sequences. There were a few third-person platforming and exploration levels thrown into the N64 classic for a junkyard sequence and hunting down Boba Fett (before he gets killed in the sarlacc pit in Jedi) but this would also be perfect as well.

The story for Shadows of the Empire was the shining point; every now and then in the book you’ll see a small connection to the main Star Wars movies (which is what most fans want). Want to know how many Bothans died to bring Mon Mothma the second Death Star plan information? That’s in the book. Its small trinkets like this that tie back into the main story and you get one of those, “Oh yeah!” moments.

Sadly, the story and the ending is also its downfall. With all of this dog-fighting, chasing and battles, the end of the book doesn’t really wrap up. It just can’t. It’s got to make room for the Return of the Jedi movie. This could piss some gamers off. They just sat there and battled for 8 hours and they get to the end only to see that pretty much everything is exactly the same as in the beginning; Han is still in carbonite, people died, there were a few space battles, and Chewbacca growled a few times. Maybe they should just have the plans fall into the Alliance’s hands and show the first couple of clips from Return of the Jedi, then cut it off, I think that would make a great ending.

With the first Star Wars: Force Unleashed having a mediocre story at best and rinse and repeat gameplay (and also a Star Destroyer glitch to hamper the game), Shadows of the Empire could be a breath of fresh air that Star Wars gamers want and need. Sure, playing as Luke Starkiller in the Force Unleashed series is nice and all, being able to feel like a Jedi, but being able to tie into the main movies is something every Star Wars fan wants to do. That’s the reason the Rogue Squadron flight series did so well, and Dark Forces, and Dark Knight. See where I’m going with this? Who didn’t want to take down Imperial AT-AT walkers on Hoth in Roque Squadron? Anybody? Yeah, that’s what I thought. Everyone does.

So with those reasons right there: renewed faith in the Star Wars franchise, fun engaging gameplay, action packed sequences, and little tie-backs and hints to the original trilogy, gamers (me included) would line up in droves to play a high-def remake of the Shadows of the Empire game. I just hope Mr. Lucas signs off on it instead of trying to slap on “Special Edition” to another turd nugget of his most famous movies. Believe me; he’s signed off on worse: Jar Jar Binks for starters as well as the explanation of the Force down to the scientific molecular level instead of being the unexplained, ominous force that we can’t see or touch. Nice job Lucas. Let’s make up for that.

How To Create A European PSN Account

2011-08-19T17:34:00.000-05:00

Very often I read about video game news or demos and content that come to the European Playstation Network that we just don’t get over here in the hamburger-filled USA. It doesn’t happen very often mind you, because most of it comes to the states a day or two later, but if you’re like me and you’re impatient, you have to get that content as soon as it comes out.

One way to do that is to create a completely separate account for the European Playstation Network. How do you do that you might ask? Read on to get all of the juicy goodness of those fish and chip eating motherfuckers.

It’s basically just like setting up a PSN account for the US. You’ve done that right? Please tell me you have done that! First, you create a separate login profile on your PS3. This is simple and all you need to do is just add another user to your PS3 from the far left tab (where you go to turn off your PS3). This shouldn’t take more than a second or two to come up with another juicy name. I suggest “MCAnusExplorer”.

Second, you’ll need to sign in as the new User and proceed to link that user to an email and home address (no P.O. boxes). So what do you do if you don’t know a UK address? I’ll do that legwork for you. All the PSN is looking for is for an active postal address, that’s it. Just something to say that, “Yep, this person is in fact from the UK.” All you have to do is look up a business or flat number on Google and you’re set. I went on Google and searched for London Burger Kings. Yep, you heard that right people. I used a Burger King as my PSN account address. If they get any cool PSN schwag sent to them I’ll be pissed. The address I used:

85 Gloucester Road
London, SW7 4SS, United Kingdom‎

Third, go through the process of creating your new European PSN name. I suggest GuinessDrinker234, or ShephardsPie24, FishNChips87, or Blimey91. All of these are good PSN names.

Next, you’ll be asked for your e-mail address. If I remember correctly, I was able to use my current U.S. e-mail address that is tied to my normal SN account (how can Sony tell that an e-mail address is British or American?). Trust me, Sony really doesn’t care about this stuff. They don’t keep track if you’ve already used that e-mail address before. After that, you’re done!

Now you’ll gain access to the European PSN store and all of its juicy content. There you will find a few demos that you won’t get here in the US, as well as a few free programs that are pretty cool to play around with on your PSEye camera (if you have one).

The reason I am telling you all of this info? Because Previously the UK Playstation Network got first dibs on the PS3 exclusive game Heavy Rain before it was released, and took the US Playstation Store a week or more to post it. I don’t like waiting. We as gamers wait enough for release dates and DLC downloads, constantly been fed trinkets of information to keep us salivating. I want this shit as soon as humanly possible.

How The 3DS Screen Works

2011-08-19T17:33:00.000-05:00

The Nintendo 3DS was unveiled for E3 2010 and turned out to be the surprise hit for both Matt and I. We were sort of underwhelmed at the Nintendo press conference from a distance, but later when we got actual hands-on time with the pocket handheld, it quickly changed our minds.

The ability to show a 3D image on a flat 2D screen without clunky 3D glasses was just incredible. No need for battery powered 3D glasses, no hassle in trying to sync them with the screen, and no clunky headgear to give you headaches over time - your eyes are the only tools you need to create the 3D image.

After the jaw dropping first couple of minutes with the unit we quickly started to wonder how on earth something like this works. I was fine with the “black magic” answer, but I feel like I’ve found the real answer.

The technology is called an auto-stereoscopic parallax barrier. Try saying that three times fast. Auto-stereoscopic displays are used to allow depth perception without the use of specialized headgear or glasses. These displays and the technology have been around for years and have been used to provide stereoscopic vision in research environments since the 1980’s. The auto-stereoscopic displays fool the brain by providing a stereo parallax (3D) view for the user. Essentially, each eye sees one of two different images on the screen. The parallax barrier helps to separate (or bring together) the 3D image and send them to the correct eye.

With this technology, the parallax barrier is placed over the screen to allow the user to adjust the settings of the barrier (this is where the 3D slider comes in on the 3DS). This slider allows the user of the 3DS to adjust the parallax barrier to select how much or how little of the 3D image is entering the eyes, and how much of the image is separated. Essentially, the image is drawn twice on the screen in both red and blue, with the parallax barrier over that helping to send the correct color to the correct eye, creating the 3D image inside your mind. Yep, this is starting to sound like black magic to me.

Nintendo has tapped into great, proven technology for this new handheld console with the 3DS. Getting hands on with the handheld at E3 was quite the eye opener (literally) for both Matt and I to see it in action.

You may also be wondering why don’t they create TV’s with this. The answer to that is simple: the viewing angle. Trying to sit dead center and in perfect view of your TV in your apartment or home is hard to do on a normal day, let alone with a 3D image on the screen. Any variation to the optimal viewing angle and the image on the screen begins to distort and separate. I’ve seen a 3D movie in passing at my local electronics store, and I’ve tried to look at Killzone 3 in 3D without glasses and after awhile it begins to numb my brain. This type of technology wouldn’t be good for extended home viewing at long distances or weird angles from your TV, but turns out to be perfect for the smaller handheld that you can adjust to your sitting position and viewing angle on the fly naturally, without you even knowing your doing it.

The 3DS uses existing technology in a fresh way to continue to urge people to buy something most everyone on the planet has already. This is the way Nintendo gets into the 3D market without them having to completely redesign their flagship Wii console.

You can also read more on parallax barriers, auto-stereoscopic image technology and more at the3D forums.

[via 3D Forums]

Betas Exclude Their Fanbase

2011-08-15T19:16:00.000-05:00

What is a BETA? What does that term even mean?

Let’s read from Webster’s dictionary: A beta is an unfinished project (usually software) that will eventually make its way into production. By definition a beta test is a trial of machinery, software, or other products in the final stages of its development, carried out by a party unconnected with its development (in the video game industry it’s usually different).

That’s the definition in the dictionary.

To gamers though, it means it’s a chance to get our grubby little hands on the new kick-ass game that will consume our lives in less than a few months: the new game in town that is set to blow our socks off later.

Video game betas are a fucking awesome thing. It’s like being able to watch a movie you’re pumped up about or read the next book in the series before everyone else does (minus a few scenes). It’s a cool experience that we as gamers get to take a part of, because I can’t think of too many other industries that use the beta test with the open public. Does the car industry let you try out the all-new 2012 car prototype? Hell to the fuck no.

A few years ago, not many people were chosen to beta test games. It was a hush-hush affair. Usually only press and people “in the know” got access to them. Eventually, things changed. Now most gaming companies these days are beta testing out the ass.

If you go through and open up any one of your first person shooter games that released this year it gets you access to a future beta of something else – probably another shooter along the same lines. For Killzone 3 it was the SOCOM: 4 closed beta access. For buying Bulletstorm you got into the Gears of War 3 beta. There is all sorts of this type of shit going on now, and frankly I want it to stop. Not everyone needs to have a beta and not everyone needs to get into a fucking beta.

So by definition, beta access is the first look and testing for a game (both closed and open betas). We as game reviewers, writers, bloggers or even journalists are the closest thing the gaming industry has right now to beta testers: we get our hands on all sorts of games and are able to play them before anybody else does, and then we write up or comments, suggestions, and impressions on them. I have a lucky hobby that allows me to do this. If you’re one of the lucky few who actually get into a closed beta, it’s a great experience (or at least it used to be).

There are just so many video gaming blogs out there now that they are all you need to send invites to for a closed beta. Just have the press in the game to get massive amounts of impressions, write-ups, and coverage of your game. It's a win - win in my book.

So why do game developers taint this fuzzy good-time feeling with loads and loads of mandatory updates; 5, 10, even 15 times in a given week for launch? Now I understand that some things need to be fleshed out as the game come across your screen and they need a few client updates, but 1.6GB’s of updates for an online shooter? Jesus Christ! Shoot me now (in real life not in the beta multiplayer match)! That is ludicrous! With that much shit to download, by the time I start the the update I’ll be sitting there watching a status screen more than I’m actually in the match shooting guys online. This is fucking crazy.

As an example: I got in early access to an (un-named beta), but never got around to downloading the client. This past weekend I finally got around to downloading the beta client from the PSN store and proceeded even after that to download a 37MB update for the application client, and yet another 1.6GB’s of mandatory game updates. FUUUUUUCK!

I sat watching a loading screen as a military soldier stared at me over an amber field of wavy grass, his blutooth headset basking in the incredible orange sunlight on the plain. Who could he be calling with an AR-16 Bushmaster assault rifle on his chest? Could it be his wife calling to tell him not to forget milk on his way home from playing with the boys? Who on earth do you call when you are stepping in muddy earth and carrying an assault rifle? Maybe your gay hipster friends with the glasses who you want to meet up with after you get through the field to go get a good cup of black coffee? Your grandma to tell her you’re okay? Oh lord, I’ll stop now. But I did want to point out this is the type of shit that goes through my head as I sat for an hour watching a fucking progress bar - not killing imaginary people online.

An hour later the massive download finished and I was finally able to get into the beta and play a few team deathmatch rounds. But what got me thinking about this article was the younger male demographic who might not have access to their download/upload speed for their internet connection.
I myself have a 10MB downstream and 2MB upstream for my internet usage. It’s not the fastest on the market – FIOS speeds are capable of approaching 40MB or 50MB down – but it’s a comparable to a middle-of-the-road type speed. What if I only had 6MB down 1MB up? For my measly hour at a higher download speed, we’re talking 6 or 7 hours to download that shit with a slower connection. Or what about further back in my internet days when I was scraping by on my online multiplayer with 2MB down and 1MB up? The point is: not everyone has control of their internet speeds.

Then I tried to think about how long it would take someone on a college campus with monitored internet or someone who lives on their own and doesn't pay much for internet, or someone who still lives at home with their parents that don’t think the internet is important to download 1.6GB+ of updates in one fell swoop. Needless to say, I wouldn’t want to be any of those people. And when I got to thinking about it, I figured most of these multi-player shooter beta audience members would be in that situation - and that’s not good for the beta.

So the problem with the new idea of a beta - and most all betas - is that you have too many updates to download. This mostly falls on the developers lap. Why would they release something that needed so much patching on the user’s end? Couldn’t these patches have been implemented on the server side to ease the burden of the download to each console? Can’t you just re-release the client with the updates?

Not all betas are like this - with loads of updates - but I see it as a growing trend now-a-days when it comes to gamers getting in on the action before anyone else does. I guess it's the price we pay for early access.

I just think that there are a slew of things that could have been done beforehand in preparation to avoid all of these massive downloads for gamers like you and I. If the game developer is trying to gain knowledge on who downloads what as far as their game is concerned, wouldn’t this skew the numbers that they gather? If only gamers with super fast internet speeds are the ones getting into the beta and sitting through the download process, what happens when the game goes live for everyone with slower connections? The developers in the beta will see that all of the gamers can handle the tweaks and graphical improvements they put in, but this will bog someone down on a low end internet connection, affecting their game because they can’t handle it.

Does this even matter to most people? Our country’s internet bandwidth speeds are still on the low side comparative to other nations in the world. But would you proceed with the download if a beta still took 4+ hours to get in and play? How long is your waiting limit? Four hours? Seven? I just think that with all of these downloads, gamers with slow connections are shying away from betas that need all of these updates, and these gamers are exactly who we need to be playing it and giving great, honest feedback - only they can’t.

Think of all of the gaming you can get done in 4 hours: the levels you can beat, bosses you can defeat, the power-ups and save points you can get to in a game. Hell, some games can even be beaten in 4 hours (XBLA or PSN titles). Instead, you’re sitting on your hands watching a loading screen wondering if that soldier will ever finish his phone call to his gram-gram or pep-pep as he makes his way across the grassy field.

This shit needs to stop. Not every fucking game on the shelf needs to have a beta. I understand that you need to test some shit out in a real world datacenter network setting for your game to go live, but please, keep this to a minimum. Let’s go back to having those “higher than thou, I’m better than you” experiences again as only a select few get into betas to test a video game. I don't even care if I'm one of them. If I'm excited about a game I'm going to buy it regardless of my impressions of a closed beta. These very exclusive gaming experiences seem to be all but lost now-a-days, where everyone gets a trophy and everyone gets a beta key.

I personally would prefer it that way, where you are lucky again to get into a beta. Do as much testing as you can to implement the changes on the server side before the beta goes live. That’s why game developers get paid all of these big bucks, millions of dollars, and royalty checks to do what they do: to make quality games and entertainment that works well online so everyone can enjoy them. Let’s not continue to raise the internet download bar and leave the core demographic behind in the dust…..in the field…..under the feet of that unnamed soldier.

Alcohol: The Real Gamer Fuel

2011-08-15T19:15:00.000-05:00

For me, drinking and video games go hand in hand on a Friday and Saturday night. We've all done it at some point. It starts as a seed in our younger years when we drink juice boxes before the next level of Sonic loads up. We graduate later in life to sodas and Soft-n-Chewy Chips Ahoy before taking on that next passenger in Crazy Taxi. Then it blossoms from the sugar high to the adult beverage.

So as an “adult” (I use that term loosely when referring to myself) we carry the torch into alcoholic beverages; mixing them in with our next-gen video games. Drinking and gaming can be fun, or it can totally fuck up your game save forever.

Here are a few tips to help you stay up late and get your game on:

1. Drink in moderation when playing video games.

We all know the “Drink in moderation” speech. We’ve heard it time and time again in health class and from everyone bigger than us. Previously it’s referred to any type of drinking out in public or if you need to get home from a friend’s party. Never drink and drive folks (I am under contractual obligations by MADD to say this). For video game drinking on the other hand, you’re already at home, and you’re no more than a few feet away from the nearest bathroom or puke receptacle. The problem is, most people only do one or the other: drink or game. I'm here to tell you that you can in fact do both.

There is a fine line that you must tread to accomplish both, and when the alcohol starts a flowin’, that line gets harder and harder to walk (funny pun intended). You don’t want alcohol to stand in the way of figuring out that combo move or solving that pesky puzzle, but you also don’t want to just drink one beer in the course of a four hour gaming session you fucking pussy. You want the alcohol to add to the experience, not take it over.

Imagine for a second that one of your buddies came over naked and put you in a headlock while you’re trying to play a video game. You’re head is mere inches away from his cock as it flops up to meet your face. That wouldn’t be very fun now would it? In my analogy, you’re friend is the alcohol and that’s what will happen when you tread too far into the drinking zone: I will show up stark fucking naked and wrestle with you (not gay). Try to pace yourself and drink a 24 ounce beer or two and chase that with about a half a glass of water as you game. That's a good mix.

2. Choose your game(s) to play wisely.

Nobody in their right mind wants to suffer through a game on Veteran or Hardcore when you’re sober for very long, so why would you want to subject your brain with even more limited patience to that when your nice and toasty? Drunk rage anyone? I’ve seen it happen; on Cops, with a wife-beater, and it usually ended with someone getting tazed.

Start off with something difficult at the very beginning of the night if you must, but as the night wears on your patience - as well as your stash of beer - will start to dwindle if you are stuck doing the same thing over and over again.

Take into consideration the people around you (if there are any). Some people like to drink alone, but if there are people crowded around the TV watching your character’s every move, they definitely don’t want to sit around watching you play through a single player campaign, possibly stuck on the same boss or map for 2 hours. They want to play the game too. Break out party games like Rock Band or Mario Party. Get the competitive juices flowing with co-operative games like a 4-person Castle Crashers game or Left 4 Dead. Find video games that you will all enjoy playing but will also give you somewhat of a challenge. Who knows, maybe you can finally beat that head boss with a little “bravery gravy” in you? You never know!

Find that you’re getting more and more frustrated? Pop in a game that you don’t have to pay attention to every second that you’re playing it. This will help out with drinking beer to calm the nerves. More beer equals calmer nerves. It’s scientific fact. Just don’t be that guy pounding a beer in Left 4 Dead or Borderlands when all of sudden there is a mad rush and your character goes limp-dick on everyone as the other players get their asses handed to them. Be a quality team player in games, but if you see an opportunity to take a drink, by all means, drink away my friend.

3. Make sure you’ve got enough of the goods (i.e. beer and food).

Go ahead and plan your night for the worst. Order food ahead of time before you get shit-faced. This way you won’t wake up in the morning to a shitload of rotting, spoiling food sitting around your house stinking up the place attracting neighborhood woodland creatures. Plus, you don’t want to find some randomly weird concoctions you thought were awesome while drunk laying around. Sour cream and marshmallows? Doritos and spaghetti sauce? They might taste awesome when your drunk, but after they have been sitting out in the heat for 9 hours they are no bueno.

As a rule, I usually order in something easy like pizza/wings or Chinese food, but you can also pick up something on the way home from work - anything too outside of that realm and it could get really messy if you have too much to eat (if you know what I mean).

It’s also a good idea to have a mid-gaming snack, and both of those items I previously mentioned are great for leftovers (the pizza and Chinese, NOT the other two).

3A. Have the right amount of beer people.

I can’t stress this enough if you are going to be drinking and gaming. You don’t want to be feeling good mid-stride and run out do you? Don’t be that guy that gets into his gaming rhythm only to go to the fridge one more time and has to cut the night short because he doesn’t have any more beer left. I personally like going to bed a little buzzed, so staying up 3 hours after my last beer just makes me feel all crusty inside or something. Like the beer caramelized inside my body and I feel weird. This brings me to my next point.

3B. Don’t get desperate and go for the damn wine coolers.

Seriously!? Wine. Fucking. Coolers? Are you fucking retarded? This is what you’ve resorted to keep your gaming session going? No. Absolutely not dude. If you grab one, think about it or do it, you are borderline alcoholic, and need to go see a therapist or sit in on an AA meeting. I should throw your console in the street and piss on it. Keep it simple and keep the good beer for the beginning with your meal (when you can taste it), and then slowly switch over to the cheaper stuff when you don’t feel anything anymore on your taste buds.

4. Be smart about interweaving your drinking with your gaming.

Like I previously stated, it’s a fine line to drink and game. On one hand you can pound those puppies down to get fucked up while gaming, or you can sip away like a connoisseur with a fine glass of wine. If you want to go for the long haul, make sure you are in between those two options I just mentioned. You don’t want to just pound down beers. Hell, you can do that any old night and watch shitty Sci-Fi movies if you want to. You’re drinking to game here, so you want to do both.

Loading screens, level introductions, and pre-rendered cut scenes are absolutely perfect to get a drink or a shot in. I call these parts “mini-movies”. (side note: Watch out if you’re playing Metal Gear Solid 4 – those I just call "movies" - as this game features some of the longest cut scenes known to man. You’ll be headed to the bathroom to puke before you actually take control of Snake.)

5. Clean up after you’re done.

So you’ve paced yourself, ate some good food, and got your game on for most of the night. Now it’s time to clean up and head off to bed. Now don’t sell this tip short, this part is pivotal to the drinking experience. You don’t want to wake up the next day and wonder who had a weird midget orgy in your place with Chinese food as lubricant do you? Put the leftovers away in the fridge for breakfast tomorrow, clean up all of the cans/bottles you can find, and put away all of your gaming controllers, racing wheels and headsets because you’re more than likely going to be sleeping for a long time (if you did it right).

It’s best to go ahead and get this chore done so you can enjoy more nighttime slumber and not have to worry about it the next day when you’re hung over. Nobody likes to clean while dry heaving over a bucket. Bitchy girlfriends or bitchy wives waking you up too early in the morning because you missed something is not good at all. Clean up after yourself and prepare so you can get more sleep and you’ll be ready for the next night of drunken gaming.

Any rituals you guys do when you’re drinking and video gaming? Got any cool video game themed drinking games?

Who Doesn't Want To Have Sex With An Orc?

2011-08-15T19:14:00.000-05:00

Over the next couple of weeks, I plan on re-posting a few of my featured articles from my old site Loot Ninja. These aren't time sensitive, so they'll be prevalent now, and later on. So to kick this process off, I figured I'd start with the only real "news" I had. Now I know some of you really tapped into the gaming world probably already know about this, but for those of you that don't - read on.

I know I said in my previous post that I was going to be taking a break from posting video game news and what-not, but every now and then you stumble across some gaming news that needs to be shared. This is one of those stories.

A company called D-Dub Software (sounds like a porn company) - not affiliated with 40 ounce bounce - is in fact working on a video game to spoof the characters and lore of World of Warcraft. It will give gamers all over the world the opportunity to do what they have always wanted to do but can’t in Blizzard Software’s million copy selling game: have sex with a hot female orc creature.

The game (as you can expect) is not safe for work and features adult themes, sexual acts and allows the gamer to go on an “erotic fantasy quest”. There really isn’t a whole lot of other information (like you need any) on the game at this point, but imagine a Leisure Suit Larry-type experience or other similar adult titles and tell it to have sex with World of Warcraft characters. What you get as a baby from that is the game BoneCraft.

Here’s the description for the trailer:

Somewhere, in some galaxy, a peaceful land of orcs and elves is about to be torn apart. A mighty spacecraft hurtles through the sky, filled with invaders from a planet far away. They call themselves the Good Ol’ Boys, but the elves fear nothing good will come of their visit. These drunken space marines are about to discover that the planet harbors the most precious commodity in the universe: elf pussy. Can the elves vanquish this new enemy before they discover the secret elf brothels? Will the horny orcs be able to resist the charms of their sexy elf neighbors? And how will they defeat the most frightening enemy of all?

BoneCraft follows in line well with D-Dub Software’s other hit “BoneTown”, from 2010. In BoneTown, you could snort cocaine or do drugs, punch hippies in the face, and then have sex with stuff (probably ladies’ vaginas). BoneCraft is set to be more of the same, only filled with side-quests, battles, and something a small group of gamers already want to have sex with: half-naked bikini clad elves.

The trailer on the official site is hilarious (and stupid) and I highly suggest going out and watching it (if you can). It’s definitely not safe for work viewing so be careful, but you really can’t beat watching a General Knoxx-like character from Borderlands popping through a red silk curtain to a love-bed with what looks like a mechanical cock and balls for 3 scantily clad elven creatures. I can’t make this shit up.

There isn’t a set release date for BoneCraft, but we expect to hear and see something around the end of the year, so be sure to get your hands - and your lotion ready - cum.....I mean come December.

I'm Sick And Tired Of Being Sick And Tired......

2011-08-12T19:03:00.000-05:00

Man, I really should come back around here more often. I promised to try and update this shit every week or so, but I've really slacked off on that promise. I honestly had no idea how troublesome, painful, and mind-boggingly intense buying a house is.

"Okay, here's a form that says that you won't rent the house your buying out to a homeless person, kill them, shit down their neck and dump their body in the back yard. And this form? This is the form that says you won't rent out the house to a homeless person, stab them and leave them for dead. It's kind of the same deal, but we couldn't put it on the same form as the killing, shitting, and dumping the body in the back yard form. Also, on that form, could you initial here? That's just saying that the excrement on the body an option."

In my mind, that's what all of these stupid forms are for. Shit like that. "Here, sign this form. This is to prove that we told you something; that you have options for your good faith estimate on how much shitting you will do." Really? Jesus Fucking Christ. Shoot me now.

But not only am I going through the anal raping and paperwork of buying a house, I'm also going through the teeth-pulling process of planning a wedding at the same time, a week or two after closing. The wedding won't be a hard thing to do at all mind you - it will in fact be the easiest two words I've ever had to say. The planning of the invitations, rehearsal dinner (which got scrapped by the way because the barbeque joint is closing down when the wedding happens), ceremony wording, music, decorations, and even planning down to what couple gets what room in the bed and breakfast is all just intense and laboring. I swear, after all this shit is over with, we're moved in and happily married, we're going to be uber-bored. Both of us. I mean, I don't think I'll be able to play a video game again without having to stop after I shoot a guys dick off and sign paperwork to go along with XxX-DaMan2003-XxX's death certificate. Or signing something when I get a good faith estimate from the Final Fantasy XIII's gil shops. "Here Lightning, sign this fucking form that says we offered you the price of 250 gil, but you do have the option to go down the linear path yet again to get it later for 200 gil. It's your choice, we just need to have you sign this saying you do have a choice."

I feel really bad for not updating my blog regularly. I really should. And during this process of all of this junk I need to do, I've come to the conclusion that I'm pretty much burned out on video game news writing. I'll fill you in.

After Loot Ninja shut down, I immediately thought I could transition over to another site and begin writing articles and news immediately. Man, was I wrong. I went ahead and sent out e-mails to a few sites I wanted to write for, and I did get accepted to this gaming site, but having to work from the bottom yet again, feeding the public fucking morsels of bullshit games no one cares about, it just wasn't worth it. I'm not even listed on the website as a contributor, and there is no telling when that will happen. Write for us, you won't be listed, and you'll basically be writing for free work.

But during this insanely busy time, it really got me thinking about just how important video games news is: not very. Sure, I enjoy reading morsels about my favorite games coming out, watching developer diaries, and gaining as much knowledge as I can about them, but for every one of those articles, there are 100 articles about bullshit Iphone or Facebook games I care nothing about.

How important is it that I write an article about some Google+ game called Crime City? Does it really matter to anyone in my demographic? Why am I wasting my time writing something for a site I care nothing about? That doesn't care about me? What about writing up an article with a few screenshots for Resistance 3? WHO. GIVES. A. LIVING. SHIT. There are millions of things out there in this world that are far more important than video games, yet, hardcore gamers pine and await every word from their favorite blogs.

In a way this is me growing up (just a little bit).

Now I'm not growing up completely. I still play video games, I still piss in the sink if Jen is using the bathroom, I still do all of the same things I used to do in my younger days. I just think my mentality and importance I put on video game news has changed. I think of it as me being finally able to care about the things I want to care about, write about the things I want to write about, and play the video games I want to play in my spare time.

It's almost as if I've had this job that everyone wants. Let's use a video game tester as an example. Who doesn't want to get paid money, snacks, and free energy drinks to play an awesome game before it comes out for hours on end? Awesome right! Well, just like mechanics and people who work on computers all day, as soon as you come home, the last thing you want to do is pick up a controller, work on your car, or sit behind a computer for the rest of the night. I focused on this one thing for so long, it started to take over my life. Everything I did was for the site, the podcast, or whatever. Now, don't get me wrong, I absolutely loved doing it, but at the same time there was so much more out there I was missing out on. I thought I didn't need a break, but I needed a slap in the face and a bigger break than I thought.

I haven't written an article for that website in over 2 months. The last one I did do was about new fucking screenshots for Final Fantasy XIII-2. At this point I am just seeing how long I can mooch off the site and get PR e-mails directed to my inbox. That's about it at this point. I've finally become burned out on video game news and writing it. I don't play video games anymore. I don't write video game news anymore, and I don't do a podcast about video games anymore. Having all of this cut off sends you into culture shock where you don't really know what to do with yourself. It's gotten to the point where I'll have an hour left to go before bed and think to myself, do I really want to pop in a game and invest energy and time in order to get frustrated and tired of it? Why do I want to get frustrated and then have trouble sleeping at night? How far will I actually get in that measly hour? Probably not that far, so why even turn it on?

With all of this going on, I have since picked up reading again. Before a year or two ago, I had only read one single solitary book since high school. I hated reading. I think this stems from me hating English class, and having to read really hard books for a teenager like Catcher in the Rye, To Kill A Mockingbird, and reading Shakespeare's MacBeth. It was one of my worst subjects in school, which is why I'm constantly baffled that I took up writing/blogging. All of those books or plays I mentioned are great don't get me wrong, but definitely not something a high school senior would read in his spare time if he had a choice. I'm wanting to read MAD magazine, Playboy, and watch skin-e-max on TV. If you DO want to read that heavy shit in your spare time as a teenager, you probably didn't know what a vagina looks like.

So fast forward to last year.

Jen and I went to Olivia Munn's book signing for Jen's birthday. She's a huge Olivia Munn fan. Loved her on Attack of the Show and still to this day reminds me that Candice is nothing like Olivia. That book signing was the seed that planted this whole reading thing into my brain. I'd look around and see stuff that somewhat interested me, but didn't set the hook. Later came my infatuation with the 1988 Permian Panthers and Friday Night Lights (the movie and the TV show, as well as Varsity Blues - which is very loosely based on the book). In comes H.G. Bissinger's book Friday Night Lights: A Town, A Team, and a Dream. This set me off on a journey into the written page. To know that there were actually books out there that interested me: the Star Wars universe, Mass Effect, Lonesome Dove, Dead Space, Micheal Crichton, Stephen King, and Larry McMurtry. Over the next couple of years, I've read a total of eleven books.

Now I know that doesn't seem like a whole lot - as right now I'm on track to make up for the one book a year I've supposed to have read since high school, but didn't - but to me that's a huge amount of books to cram into over the course of a year. The books I'm reading now is The Drawing of the Three from the Dark Tower series by Stephen King (it's book two). Everyone I've talked to that's either read them or heard about them thinks that these are the pinnacle of Stephen King writing. I'm not gonna say that at this point in time, as I'm still getting into the second book, but so far it's intriguing enough to keep me going. Let's leave it at that.

So before I ramble on more, I think that's about enough for today. I really just wanted to say that I've pretty much had it with writing bullshit video game articles no one cares about. I don't feel like working my way up again from nothing, and that there are far more important things in this world than a few new tidbits or screenshots about Shin-she Shin-she Warriors 7.

Re-think your priorities people. What on this earth will make you happy? And in the famous words of Adam Carolla: "If it doesn't make you happy or make you money, let it go."

Guy Finally Cums After 38 Years

2011-07-05T18:04:00.000-05:00

This dude definitely has big meaty balls.

I just love the music that's featured with this video. It's almost Top Gun music. Like he went into the danger zone with his cum or something. I'd have to agree with myself. It's a normal bodily function (cumming) that needs to happen after the age of 16, probably once a week, if not more. Just saying.....

Part of me wants to believe that this is real, but part of me knows that there is a fetish for guys that like to pump saline or other substances chemical substances into their ball-sack to inflate it. We've all seen the huge dong pornos (and the ptyerydactyl porn) that feature coconut milk or something that looks like cum, but it's obviously too much.

I'll let you guys decide.

Some See A Negative, I See A "Stump Fucker"

2011-07-05T17:44:00.003-05:00

For everyone out there that doesn't follow me on a regular basis - okay, that's everyone - I work a second job as a valet car parking running-type person. I take your car keys, get in your vehicle, and drive around for about 45 minutes to an hour until you come back outside and ask for it back. Only if it's a good car though. I run Neon's and Dodge Journeys into a fucking ditch.

Here recently though, I've taken a kind of break from all of that to stay inside the cool air conditioning to get fat on snack cakes and play video games. I keed, but I really just wanted to separate myself from that extra valet money to see if I could survive without it and continue to support my ever-growing gaming habit. So far I've done well, and have been patient with my spending, finding ingenious ways to buy games for sweet deals and lower prices online.

One of the things I miss about valeting though is the experience of working with friends and gaining stories to tell. If you ever feel you're stuck in a rut doing the same thing over and over again each day, go slap on the black pants and collared shirt of a valet attendant and with one weekend you'll have a plethora of stories to tell at a party. You won't be getting into a chick's pants by any means, but you will at least have something entertaining coming out of your boring ass mouth for a change.

This is one of those stories.

I can tell this story because the person in question is better off than me. And as you all know, that gives me the right to point this out. Not so much to make fun of him, but to point out that it was quite odd to deal with the situation at hand.

I arrived at the valet location and parked my car in the back, then heading up to the podium to start my shift. We were at an Audi dealership off of the Dallas tollway after my 8-5pm job, apparently valeting guest cars for the new 2012 Audi A6 unveiling. Catering, wine, small caviar hors d'oeuvres - all were on display for the guests that were to arrive shortly thereafter.

We slowly began to take cars as they arrived, ticketed them, and showed the guests the way up the red carpet into the dealership. For those of you that need a refresher, I'll give a little rundown on how to operate a valet attendant; and no, this doesn't mean pulling his pants down and stroking his member - although that would be awesome if you're a hot chick. But when you pull up to the valet, they'll get the door for you and you give them your last name to be associated with your car. Some valet companies do this, some don't. It all depends on a lot of different factors I won't go into, but it's part of the valet process.

So after we take your last name down, we call a few 800 numbers to access all of your information and get your credit report through Experian, Equifax, and TransUnion. This let's us know if you're a cheap ass or might stiff us. That's not cool. If you tip us well, we might even call up Amazon.com and send you a gift basket from the valet company, only we used your PayPal account to pay for it. This usually only happens if the customer takes on three or more penises at a time and jerks to completion - we call this sexual move "returning the tips".

Anyway, after we get the last name, we write that name down on a ticket and break off a piece to hand to the customer for later so they can come back and we can associate the ticket to their car. I know I'm drawing this story out - like I always do to show off just how incredibly complex this valet system is (and it is) - but one guest in particular caught my eye in the way he took the valet ticket.

He rolled up in a very nice Audi sports car - fitting. Probably an '08 A4 with Motegi sport wheels? Very nice ride. Leather inside, great high-end audio system, all the bells and whistles. His date was gorgeous too. I can't really go into[b] too[/b] much detail here with my wedding coming up in a few months - my fiance would kill me - but know she was in a very nice dark blue evening dress with little crimps in the fabric around the thigh area. Oh, and Victoria's Secret tiger print thong panties. Very nice get-up for her to go to a car dealership to look at a new car.

The point is: this guy had it going on. As we like to say in the hood where I'm from he was "doin' it big" and/or "ballin'". No doubt he went home after the event, beat the hell out of his wife/girlfriend's pussy up with his 7 and a half inch penis (larger than normal), pet his Yorkshire terrier runt dog, and watered and seeded (not with his sperm) his green front lawn of his nice Plano custom-built home. But what I saw as he stood up out of the driver's seat made me do a double-take - he didn't have any hands.

That's right. No digits. He could only count to two. The hands were cut off at the wrist. He still had everything from the shoulder on down, but he probably wasn't able to wear a watch. Now I know what you're probably saying, "Justin, why are you making fun of this guy with no hands?" And I would answer that with, "Well, funny you should mention this, because the first thing out of my mouth after he left was 'I wonder if he nub-bangs his girlfriend in the vagina or ass with those things?'" That's what I want to know. Laugh all you want, there are people out there who are into weird "stump porn", that wouldn't have it any other way than to have intercourse with an amputated leg or prosthetic piece of medical-grade plastic.

That was basically it. He gripped the ticket in between his two "hands" and was able to put it into his pocket as he made his way up to the event arm in nub with his girl.

He has it better than me, plain and simple. He has the better car, the better living situation, the better job, the better house, the better dog, and the better dick probably. I realize my place in this crazy world we live in as a useless peon and deem it fitting to voice my stupid, retarded opinion on this blog. I am what you would call the peasant trash outside of the castle yelling racial slurs and calling the king stupid from a safe distance. I'm the sweaty valet guy taking your car in the 105 degree Texas heat while you go inside an Audi dealership with your hot lady friend and enjoy a great evening looking at cars that you can afford that I'll never be able to buy and socializing with others above my pay grade.

I make fun of your deformity because it's the easy route to take for most, but I also look at the fact that the dude is better off stump-fucking his hot girlfriend/fiance in their picture perfect home. So while some might see this blog post as a rant and picking on a deformity that's possibly a negative, I see it as a positive that should be praised. Even with no hands in the face of adversity, this guy was able to rise above it, get the girl, the dog, the house, and the bigger dick to make himself the better person. I applaud you sir.

But come to think of it, I don't really know if the guy was engaged or married because he didn't have a ring on. Go figure. Oops. Sorry. That was the last joke. I swear. I should really try and market engagement bracelets or something like that for people without hands. Just something to help the guy out even more. That way he'd give me a shit-ton of his money, instead of giving me a measly 2 bucks when he left to go home to bang his chick-friend.

Parting Ways Is Hard.....

2011-06-24T23:56:00.003-05:00

It was a very weird moment the other day, as I sat there in front of my computer doing the Twisted Gamer Radio podcast for the final time. I made a point to talk about all of the many great things that happened on our little slice of the internet called Loot-Ninja.com, but I also let people into the amount of shock and sadness that overcame me when I found out the news that the website is going away.

Being the writer that I am, I immediately started typing. This was a great way for me to slowly deal with what was happening around me, as well as get my thoughts out there in written form. After it was all said and done, I had over 1,900 words. Now I know I’m long winded (looks over at Jen), but 1,900 words in 20 minutes? This obviously affected me greatly.

I think if and when I move on to another video game blog or website, that I will never treat it the same way as I did with Loot Ninja - my first real writing gig. The circumstances and way in which I came into Loot Ninja and the events that followed, I don't think there will be another blog I care about like it. I didn't want to be yet another person to leave. I didn't want to tarnish my reputation that was put upon me to help out with writing. Part of the reason I think I stayed around so long was to not let Matt and Steve down again, even though I only met Matt in person once and only talked to them both once or twice on the Loot Ninja podcast.

To give a back story on this, I started writing for Loot Ninja in 2008 around July. I sent in a "resume paragraph" about the Gears of War 2 double XP weekend, and made sure to put as much humor and sarcastic comments in there as I could. It was dripping with comedy, going even so far as to ask the readers to salute the American way during the weekend by playing Gears 2, standing up, dropping trough, and saluting the flag. Needless to say, out of a group of candidates, I got the job.

For the next 2 years or so, I pounded away on the keyboard, slaved away looking at countless video game blogs, and scoured YouTube for any sort of game themed video I could find to post.

During the heyday of the site and numerous writers signed on, we had the Loot Ninja podcast. After about 3 months or so of doing the podcast, work, busy lives, and other things got in the way of doing and editing the podcast, so it was time to hang up the mics.

Cut to four months later.

I’ve always wanted to do a podcast. I've always wanted to talk to fellow gamers, and I've always wanted to get my voice out there on iTunes and the internet. It also didn’t help the fact that I already had enough content to fill two podcasts, partly in fact that I had these amazing conversations in the break room at work during lunch with my good buddy Dalyn – who is perfectly suited for my comedic stylings. When you talk to your buddy on IM and during lunch for 3 years, this happens. You slowly start to realize their speech pattern, get into a cadence with each other, and notice where there are spaces to interject and de-rail the conversation if you want to.

There were a lot of great conversations and funny bits in that podcast, and some of my fondest, funnest moments can forever be found in an audio file on my computer.

Both of these ventures - Loot Ninja and Twisted Gamer Radio - were passions of mine and parts of my daily life that I will struggle with to fill. The writing articles at work, uploading videos to springboard, and doing the podcast every week took up a significant amount of time out of my daily life. These are hours now that will need to be filled with something; I'm not so sure my regular job is capable of doing this. After I settled into my new job and got the hang of it, I made time in my day to write an article or two for Loot Ninja, as well as scour the internet for news, ideas, and articles.

I will not however, say "goodbye" to Loot Ninja or it's crew. That's why this is a "parting ways" post. Because I feel maybe one day later on down the road we'll be able to come back and make the proper time for Loot Ninja. We always said that when we weren't able to do the site to it's fullest, that we would stop, and that time has come sadly, but it might not last forever.

I hope to transfer some of that time now to this blog here. You might have already noticed I updated the design here and re-arranged a lot of the widgets on it. This should suffice for what I need it for - a way to write and get certain ideas out of my head. It should actually be better for you - the reader - because it will allow me to talk about all sorts of things in the world - not just video game themed posts. I do plan on bringing back the Twisted Gamer Radio podcast. It will sound very similar mind you, but like the blog here, it will not be so much video game themed as it once was. Stay tuned kiddies. It's gonna get real.

Justin M.

Spammers Are Stupid

2011-03-01T09:06:00.000-06:00

We all get spammed from time to time. From our e-mails to telemarketing phone calls, the spammers know no bounds. But since the dawn of Prodigy and the instant message, spammers have taken up a new fight and seen fit to spam your messaging client with stupid links and offers for useless shit.

I once almost bought Canadian Exten-Z because it just felt good to buy something illegal. Okay, so it might not be illegal, but it's certainly shady.

Yesterday was yet another one of those spamming IM's hitting my screen name. It was from a very cute young girl (according to her avatar) named Cristen who thought she was awesome. Well guess what? She was incredibly stupid.

I enjoy fucking with spammers. It's a glorious treat for me if I get to do it in a day. There are no repercussions, no shame, and you can say whatever the fuck you want to them and not get looked down upon. They are the scum of the Earth. Nobody on the face of the planet (Westboro Baptist Church members, Mexicans who can't speak English, friends or racist white supremacists) all hate spammers.

I'm just exercising my asshole muscles for the big game (when there is a big game).

I'll try and walk you through my thought process on this and explain a little bit as I go. But here is an actual transcript of an instant messaging conversation between me and Cristen. (cue Rescue 911! music)

cristenizawesome - this site has a free laptop for 10 ppl only hurry i got one (insert SPAM link here)

The IM above was sent a day earlier in hopes of catching me off guard. I was away from my computer at home when this happened. She sent her IM. This is usually where they stop. They send one and move on to the next unsuspecting victim.

cristenizawesome - heyaa!
cristenizawesome - hey

Finally I am able to see her IM and respond.

mccullster - yes?
cristenizawesome - hey

cristenizawesome - ...

Don't know why there is a pause here. I guess little Cristen was getting her link ready to spam me yet again.

mccullster - yes?
cristenizawesome - have we chatted b4?
mccullster - I think you got spammed

Okay. Here I am just laying it out for her. Sometimes peoples IM accounts do get hacked and they send out random shit to all of their friend's IM list or e-mail list. Just trying to be the stand up guy and let her know that something might be amiss. She needs to change her password.

cristenizawesome - nah, I am a vegetarian... no spam for me! haha

This is where the jig is up. Nobody is this retarded. This is where I say "fuck it" and know that the spammer still has control of the IM account.

mccullster - uh yeah, I don't want a free laptop for 10 people......
cristenizawesome - ofcourse babe
mccullster - So did you get hacked? Or do you normally try and sell laptops
cristenizawesome - ohh sry im forgetful sometimes.
mccullster - awwww, that's too bad. I'm sure it was a great deal on a laptop

Fishing for a link! Come on! It was an easy setup. In every salesman, spammer and the like, I know there is usually a switch that the person goes from "normal" to "salesman" over and back again. It could be Cousin Larry having a conversation with your aunt telling him that he needs to buy a new car, and then from across the room some douchebag will overhear "I want to buy a new car." and come over to give his sales pitch.

cristenizawesome - so anyways whats up?
mccullster - Not much. Just looking to buy a laptop
mccullster - you?

Again. I know it's there.

cristenizawesome - oh cool! hey you wanna see if you can beat my iq score? its really fun
mccullster - uh, that's okay, I can already tell by your typing and how you spell stuff I will probably beat you
mccullster - no worries though

The "dickness" has slowly started. Part of me feels bad for telling some little Cristen chick (who I know I can beat in an IQ test) that she's stupid. The other part of me says, "Don't worry, it's probably just some 34 year old dude in a shitty apartment somewhere selling stolen goods on eBay.

cristenizawesome - k go here (insert SPAM link here) and click on the start button
mccullster - no thanks
mccullster - what do you need an iq test for? Your screenname says your awesome?

All chicks have to do is flaunt their sexuality a little bit and they'll get whatever they want. Getting out of a speeding ticket? Flash some cleavage and you'll be able to do it. It's a little harder for a dude though. I can't really flaunt my ballsack.

cristenizawesome - Jenny

Don't know why she said that?

mccullster - Steve
cristenizawesome - after u finish the questions you got to put your cellphone number in to get your score k?
mccullster - oh awesome, so then they'll wire me my 10.5 million dollars from Cambodia right?
mccullster - man, that's awesome
mccullster - you're awesome Jenny/Cristen
cristenizawesome - let me know when your done i wanna know what u got k??
mccullster - done

30 seconds had passed. There is no fucking way I can complete an in depth IQ test in that time. Yet, Cristen thinks it's possible.

mccullster - 145 IQ
cristenizawesome - k cool!
mccullster - now it would be great if you would just send me my free laptop and new cell phone or wire me my 10.5 million dollars
cristenizawesome - ofcourse babe
mccullster - there's a supposed to be a space between ofcourse
mccullster - not helping your IQ score there
cristenizawesome - you done yet?

I really think at this point that the spammer had had enough, and broke his cover to just say this. Maybe she suffers from Memento disease? You know, where you can't make new memories? You just go back in time every 15 minutes and forget everything before it? Maybe that happened? But wait. This was literally only 10 seconds ago? Man, that must be rough for her.

mccullster - with the test? yeah
cristenizawesome - ohh i got a 113 tell me what you got.
mccullster - I already told you
mccullster - and 113 is borderline retarded
mccullster - My cousin Sami Salo sometimes eats his own shit out of the toilet and he's a 122

--(end transmission)--

Dream Journal: The Outfit

2011-02-21T10:36:00.002-06:00

Every now and then I have a weird dream during the night. I sometimes want to go look it up in one of those actual dream journals and find out what it means, only I really think I'll be off the charts and they won't have what I'm looking for. What exactly does a baby with a crab head mean again?

Researchers have determined that there is about a 3 minute window after you wake up where you remember your dream, and it is up to the sleeper to do that in that amount of time. If it's really good, I'll remember it and tell it to Jen when I'm in the shower. If it's weird enough, I'll remember it during the day and can type out a blog about it. That's where this comes in.

For some reason I had these weird pads in my mouth. They were on both the top of my mouth and my bottom. Imagine if you folded over one of those feminine panty liners and put it in your mouth. It would feel kinda like that. I don't have an earthly idea why I was wearing these pads in my mouth, but I was. And I was walking home and took one of them out. A long dribble of spit came out of my mouth while I did this, and I folded up the pad even more and wrung it out to get more saliva out of it so I could put it in my pocket. Yeah, like I said, sometimes my dreams are gross.

Cut to me getting ready for work. I was picking out my clothes for the day after my shower and had picked out a mighty awesome red sleeveless muscle shirt. Awesome. This actually reminds me of a Pearl Jam shirt I actually own. It has very short sleeves, so much so that they barely come down halfway to my elbow. That's pretty short for me. This was no sleeves at all. As in, if I lifted my arm up you could see my pit hair. Not exactly something "work oriented" to wear on the job. I'm thinking more "workout attire" for that ensemble.

So cut back out of the dream back into the real world, and I'll tell you a little bit about my work getup. I just recently learned that you are supposed to wear a black belt if you wear black shoes or something. I've always just worn a brown belt with my brown North Face shoes. I thought nothing as I wore my newer black Van's and black t-shirt. It's just a belt? Does anyone at my job fucking care? Not really...... But someone does. And her name starts with "J" and ends with "n". Oh, and there is an "e" in the middle. Yeah.

So I just recently (probably a year ago) found this shit out. I'm not the best dresser by any means. I choose to be that way. Why wear something nice and proper when I'm going to be handling dirty, dusty servers all day, throwing them around my test bench? What's the point? I just nick up and dirty up my good clothes that I spent all this money on. Pointless.

So cut back to the dream. I'm ready to attach the lower portion of my outfit. Now I'm just thinking to myself, "Man, all I need to get is a pair of jeans and I'll be set." But little did I know what was in store for me. Jen comes back from the closet and is carrying a long, flowing baby blue dress. It's silky and smooth of course - definitely something that will show off all the contours of my ass hair. I'm thinking, "Okay, awesome, that's what Jen is going to wear to work." I'll just go grab my jeans and be ready. Jen unhinges the clips for the dress and hands it to me as I lay on the bed. "Uh, okay." I grab the skirt and begin to put it on. It's an easy slip on type deal with a zipper that runs up from around my leg to my waist. The rest is this really cute slit that goes down to around where my calfs are. I wrap it around my body and begin to zip it up from the bottom. Surprisingly it fits me. Who fucking knew right?

I guess this is in style? A bright blood red sleeveless shirt with a baby blue silky dress to show off my incredible man ass. Awesome.

What the fuck people? This is the type of shit that I dream! It has no point or reason behind it. What does this shit mean? Because I have no idea. And to top it all off, I even have a MORE fucked up dream that I had when I was 14 that I still remember to this day. It could probably be made into a little funny skit or something, but that's another story for another day.

Sweet dreams everyone.

You See Some Weird Stuff At Gas Stations

2011-01-31T15:57:00.004-06:00

Living in a major metropolitan area like Dallas, TX, I understand that I will run across some weird scenes in the dank underbelly of the metroplex. I've had a person at a gas station (not the one in this story) ask me how the Dallas Stars did in a hockey game (I was wearing my Hagman jersey), only to quickly change the subject and beg for money. Talk about the transition from hell. And how many homeless people do you know are into NHL hockey? Do they get Versus or something under a bridge somewhere?

I've even been at a Walgreens doing overnight work and seen a homeless guy wake up in the morning dawn of downtown San Francisco only to piss in the middle of the street. Not in a corner. Not in an alley way. As in, he woke up from the building he was sleeping against, and walked to the curb and pissed INTO the street, making a large yellow rainbow. Lord knows what he did in the corner of that building around from where he slept. Point is, you see some weird shit at the wonky hours of the night. This story doesn't fall into that category. This is at 5:30pm on a weekday.

Usually everybody has their routine to get gas. For some people it's before work. Others it's during their lunch break. And even more still it's after work on their way home. I'll go ahead and state this fact: 99% of people fall into this category of getting gas. Yeah. Pretty bold statement huh? Well, the other .5% of people live in the wondrous world of Hippy Land and ride their bikes to work. Awesome. I bet they have weekly meetings on getting their chi back in order. And thanks goes out to Chameleon for getting my TBT Reports covered in your sweaty bodily fluids. I can't wait to turn this into the boss. The other .5% are those very few rich people that can afford those spaceship, shitty looking electric vehicles that don't need fossil fuels. Thanks but no thanks. I don't want to look like a douche nozzle ass.

I'm one of those people who like to go get gas after work. You see, I barely leave enough time in the morning to do the normal routine of taking a shower and actually cleaning myself. I cut it close, and more often than not roll up into work 5 or 10 minutes late, every morning. Not just a few times a week. Every, morning bitches. It's awesome. Roll on up and get my granola bars (no hippie jokes please) and Monster fucking energy drink then stroll on back for some blogging (like I'm doing now). It's great to get all of the after-work chores done and out of the way so I can go home and chill the fuck out, possibly killing a baby seal.

So on this fateful afternoon I make my way over to the luxurious Continental Ave. Exxon. Just the name "Continental" conjures up all of these classy and eloquent features. It makes it sound like its a one-of-a-kind very prestigious gas station where Christopher Walken greets you at the front door by name and gives you a heated towel for your face. Oh no my friend, this is not an uppity W hotel-style gas station (which they should invent I might add).

I was actually on the phone with one of my good buddies Dalyn before I arrived, and we proceeded to chat about a number of topics, ranging from working valet, video games, and complaining about our second job manager Scott. I pulled up into the station and went to one of the front gas pumps on the far right side (closest to the building). I pulled my vehicle in and got myself situated next to the pump, turned the Jeep off, and continued to talk to my buddy Dalyn.

It's at this time that I see a large black woman in roughed up clothes from the Salvation Army make her way in between my Jeep and my pump and stand next to the squeegee and trash bin. At first she made like she was heading into the store she was walking so fast, but proceeded to set up shop right next to my SUV outside my driver's side window.

The exquisite Continental Exxon is known for it's beggars. There are no valet attendants, but it's got quite the list of varying looks for hobos. Now, I'm not here to say that I hate or dislike homeless people. I do not. I want to help these people as much as the next American (which is usually nothing). I have simply been around these homeless people for 4 years (as long as I have worked at this location), and I've seen nary a change in their situation in those 4 years no matter how many people have helped them out. These people choose to live this way, and in return need sappy elderly hearts to continue their lifestyle. I say fuck that (in my best Varsity Blues Moxon voice). The moment all of their money runs out and their ploy stops working is the first day you'll see them start working as greeters at Wal-Mart.

Why give them money to continue the trend? Buy them food. Buy them water. Buy them necessities that they'll actually use and appreciate. If you do give them necessities or offer, more often than not you'll get the, "No, that's okay." out of them. Really dude? You're going to turn down a hot Tuesday Special (of two pieces of chiken) from Popeyes for $.99 cents or a large jug of water when I know you haven't "supposedly" eaten all day? Oh yeah, you probably have, and you've probably eaten better than I have. You get to live better than I do: no job, no responsibility, no house, no bills, and no car payment or anything like that to deal with. It must be an awesome life. The only thing I have that you don't is an active sex life. The sad part is, you can go behind the dumpster at McDonald's and offer a toothless bitch a dollar and she'll suck you off. That my friends is pretty awesome. The chlamydia and other STD dangers? Not so much.

Also at this gas station you've got the scruffy week-old bearded crazy guy with dreadlocks who plops himself down against the windows of the store, only to talk to an imaginary group of people about God knows what. What did he say? Unicorn farts are the key to the universe? I don't know.....

You've got the older lady who smokes a carton of menthol cigarettes a day and rides around on her motorized scooter. Wow. I about flipped when I saw this lady. First off, how in the fucking hell does this homeless lady charge that scooter? Under the bridge nearby? I'm sure as shit they don't have a 120 AC plug under there for such purposes. But she needs that money to buy a new pair of Reebok nurse shoes with velcro or to buy another bracelet to go on her arm. Nice. Maybe she needs to buy new batteries for her Hoveround.

So back to the lady standing not near my Jeep, next to my Jeep. She's been pacing around the trash-bin area no more than 4 feet away looking inside at me as I talk on the phone with Dalyn. She's fishing for a look. You know what I mean. You've had those salesman at Best Buy try to get you to switch to DirectTV, or you've had those innocent enough Girl Scouts try to sell you more cookies at the grocery store. It's an essential look to make eye contact and get an "in" to ask me for money. I do not oblige the black lady.

She's losing valuable money/time/people as they go into the store and come out to leave. She's dead set on getting me and my money. I don't blame her though. I'm a young white guy sitting inside a nicely taken care of Jeep that can obviously put money in the gas tank and take care of himself. She continues to ask a few other people close to my pump (maybe 3 or 4 other patrons), but she doesn't ever leave the side of my Jeep to ask the people at the gas pumps far away. She's waiting for the big fish. Me.

It's gotten so bad that at this point I've taken notice of her shenanigans and proceed to tell Dalyn about it. I understand her ploy, and want to make her work for it now. It becomes a Mexican standoff.

30 or 45 minutes go by and she's still waiting me out, trying to jump at the opportunity as my door jam cracks an inch. Still, I remain seated talking on the phone.

I'm sure as shit not getting out of the Jeep until she is gone now.

Why do I need to go through this just to go around the corner to my local gas station and pump some fucking gas? This is flat out retarded! I'm held hostage in this modified Stephen King Cujo-style because of a black beggar chick with no front teeth! Unbelievable. Only Dallas man. Only Dallas. Oh, and probably every other large city in the US who has a homeless problem.

At the 49 minute mark I see an opening and see that the "guard dog" has left her post. I get out to pump my gas.

I wish on a thousand stars that I had a stopwatch in my Jeep to keep track of how quick I slid my credit card and got back into the safety of the vehicle. We all know this takes at least a minute or two, maybe more, but on this day I'd give a NASCAR pit crew a run for their money. I was that fast with my card (swiped and accepted on the first try), and my zipcode (hastily entered). I could have entered a zipcode for Arlington. I don't know.

After it was all said and done, I felt bad. Let me rephrase that: I really didn't feel bad for her and her situation. I just wanted to have her spend as much time as possible next to my car and finally realize she's not getting anything. It was almost a weird game that you would see on TV where patience pays off. Only this time for her it doesn't. Does that make me an ass? Probably. Do I care? No. I wanted her to have wasted loads of her time and not get the payoff because she followed the ol' stereotype of white dude with money.

She passed on about 10 or so patrons who walked in because of her insatiable appetite to get me (and my money). I happily prevented her from a few dollars, and maybe gave her a lesson or two.

"Dinner Ready.......Is Pizza?"

2010-09-10T12:24:00.000-05:00

That's it? Fucking pizza? I'm gonna fucking shove my cock so far inside your throat and make you gag on it that I want you to spit up part of your lung you stupid bitch. I work for 9 hours each day and I come home and the fucking dinner that you "slaved" over was picking up the phone and dialing someone else to do YOUR job. Unbelievable. You get what you deserved bitch. Now after we eat this shitty pizza I expect you to make me pie. Blueberry pie. With homemade whipped cream on top. That will teach you. And you just let me put it in your vagina and blow my seed. Stupid fucking cum dumpster.

Man, It's Been Awhile.

2010-06-30T16:50:00.003-05:00

Just figured I'd pop in and lay down some random thoughts.

Right now the day job is going great I guess. I really just have to look busy and the people around me just leave me alone. There are some days that I really don't want to come to work because I know I'll be behind a computer all day just checking Facebook, reading funny internet stories and blogging. I can do that shit at home? Why do I need to wake up at 7:30am and go to work for that? I've continuously kind of molded and made my job into what I want. Now I'm able to reap the benefits of relaxing and doing the same old shit everyday. NOTHING!

I look at so much shit sometimes and open so many Firefox tabs that I crash my workstation. I guess 4GB of RAM and a Xeon 2.4GHz processor isn't good enough?

I've started a Word document now with about 3 full pages of just web links. Just videos I need to watch. It's my new Tivo. I feel empty or behind if I don't see all of the shit the internet has to offer that day. I keep wanting to go home after work and just sit there for hours and watch all of them, but there is this unmitigated force called Jen that lives in my cave as well. Can't really ignore the Grendel monster that hangs on the couch and reads all the damn time. Oops! Love you babe (if you read this). But back to what I was saying, I have a long list of things to watch, read and listen to, as well as write up for Loot Ninja.

Speaking of which, the writing gig for Loot Ninja continues to go well. I had an absolute blast going out a few weeks ago to go to E3 in LA. That's something I would never been able to do if I were just being me. I could complain and pay almost 300 dollars for a guest pass, but that is retarded. Loot Ninja got me in for free as media.

Last year I watched about 80% of the coverage on G4 and thought about how cool it would be to go and see that. I know deep down that 45,000 media, press, and video game podcasters showed up to cover E3, but deep down I really felt like I was king shit. Like, yeah, respect this fucking badge you fucking peon blog from the Netherlands. I don't know! It really got me thinking about this whole writing gig? That people actually make money off of this stuff by ad revenue and people are able to quit their day jobs if their site gets big enough. Loot Ninja is a great site and I hope maybe one day we'll get to that point, but I'll still just be happy doing my podcast Twisted Gamer Radio and writing for the site.

With all of those thoughts going through my head, going out to E3 really opened my eyes and helped me compare it to my normal day job. Out there I was in the company of such big wigs as Peter Moore (head of EA Sports), Peter Molyneux (creator of Fable), David Jaffe (creator of the Twisted Metal series) and got to see loads of other celebrities. I think back to being able to see Joel McHale perform at the Ubisoft press conference and then what my normal company does for "quarterly kick-off meetings". It's complete polar opposites. All of the guys that work there asked me a few questions and then it was time for me to get back to "testing servers and loading pallets". Really? The 5 minute obligatory response to ask about someones vacation when I know goddamn well all of you play video games and want to know every detail. You guys want to get back to work at your shitty job? Yeah, that's nice.

I will say that Mafia II, just one of the HUNDREDS of games on the show floor brought Playboy Playmates to their booth to show off their game. Quarterly Kick Off Meeting at my normal day job? I get cold rank cookies, a soda with a cup of ice from the Renaissance Hotel and a few beers afterwords. I still have to sit through a bullshit presentation on Monthly Recurring Revenue, Churn, and Marketing crap. That seriously puts me to fucking sleep. I want to see gameplay footage of some shit. Maybe someone raping a Big Daddy from Bioshock? It just really put the thought in my head that after I saw my companies quarterly numbers of making millions, that still was only a spit in a bucket for a huge company like Square Enix or 2K. They probably spent that much on their one time E3 booth for 3 days. Hell, fucking Activision spent 6 to 8 million alone on renting out the Staples Center where the Lakers play to put on a kick ass concert for twenty thousand gamers and media people.

Damn, I thought this was only going to be a short blog post, but I guess I rambled on like always. Long story short (wait, why am I telling you this now you've already read this whole damn thing?), life is great. I hope to continue to produce great material for Loot Ninja and boost my numbers for Twisted Gamer Radio on iTunes. Check it out if you haven't already.

Picture Of 1,000 Words Is Worth More.....

2010-04-06T16:13:00.001-05:00

November 25, 2008 -

Well, I'm off to see the family in Tennessee, and figured I would leave you with some funny sayings that I ran across on the internet. Take them all to heart, there were a lot more but all of these tickled my fancy (and my cockles). This is my sense of humor. This is me through other peoples words. Take them for yourself, read them and enjoy them. Should make for an interesting read I promise you that........

See you guys on Tuesday of next week when I get back! You guys have a very safe and happy Thanksgiving. I'll be at happy hour on the next Tuesday (Dec. 2nd) to let everyone know what I think of Ghostbusters: The Video Game, and every subsequent Tuesday after that until I beat the game! WOOHOO! Still fucking excited about that shit........

Cheers,
Justin M.

I like long walks on the beach, listening to music... BUT I FUCKING HATE MEDIUM-LENGTH WALKS ON THE BEACH!

People that wear lanyards around their neck are wearing the gold medal for douchebaggery.

You think that your college roommate is probably the worst you'll ever have. Then you go to prison....

I hate everything paraplegics stand for.

Do homeless people in Venice tread water?

I hate when people tell me a book is a real page turner. I know how books work.

I've always fancied myself as a sort of "Renaissance Man", in that my lack of hygiene and sanitation knowledge has caused the death of almost every single member of my family by way of plague.

Adding 10 vitamins & minerals to Lucky Charms is like putting a bouncy castle in Nazi Germany.

I know I'm dealing with an idiot when someone tells me "nothing rhymes with orange", because nothing and orange don't sound anything alike.

Darth Vader...worst hide-and-go-seek player ever.

I've never been in an orgy, but I did bang a carny in a House of Mirrors. There were 87 of us.

I recently walked in on my son smoking pot, and thought, "That's weird, I don't have any kids."

You mark my words highlighter! You mark my words...

I don't think old women should be allowed to drive...What a minute. Did I say "old" in there? Take that out then.....

On her deathbed, my grandma asked just one thing of me: to make sure she was buried next to grandpa, which didn't leave me a whole lot of time to kill and bury him.

The term "the night is young" always makes me feel weird about having sex in it so often.

Help a family find a lost pet... Tell them where you buried it.

When I was in the 6th grade the bigger kids would constantly beat me up. So I started working out every day after school, and before I knew it I was strong enough to break open my dad's gun chest.

"I'm drunk, you're Asian, let's f*ck," has never worked as a pick-up line for me. But I refuse to throw it away, at least until I get to try it out on an Asian.

The hardest part about my grandmother's death was making it seem like an accident.

What all Chinese fortune cookies should say: You are about to take a dump in 10 minutes.

People always say the worst thing is when you finish shitting and realize there is no more toilet paper. I think the worst thing is when you finish shitting and realize you're in the shower.

I wonder if some registered sex offenders are just really shy people who needed an excuse to introduce themselves to their neighbors.

Being homeless is just camping but the forest is urban. And a bear ate all your food.

My girlfriend saw me on the toilet and got so grossed out. I was like, "Everybody does it." And she was all like, "Let me finish peeing first."

I think twins are proof that god is kinky.

My friend likes to brag that his balls are like bowling balls. I guess it's true, though, considering they're very dirty and open for public use. And mostly dudes handle them.

"Pee onto others as you would have them pee onto you." That's the Golden Shower Rule.

They say dog is man's best friend. Which makes the fact that my girlfriend slept with my dog even more unacceptable.

They say that chicks dig scars, but try telling that to the last six women I've stabbed.

There Will Be Blood is easily the best name ever for a period piece.

If professional golfers choose to take the day off or retire, would they start to do actual work?

"I just flew in from the battered women's shelter and boy are my arms tired!"

I would give my left arm to be ambidextrous.

I always hated getting cut in line when I was a kid, so obviously I was glad when my school finally installed metal detectors.

Women are a lot like cats:
No matter how much raw fish you give them, they'll still think you're weird and ignore you.

I'd masturbate five times in one day, but I don't want to be a sore loser.

Live life as a dog would. If you cant eat it or hump it, piss on it and walk away.

One major advantage to being in a coma? Free beard.

Could whoever is giving homeless people markers please stop? Their signs are really bumming me out.

My ex-girlfriend always had a soft spot for my roommate. Unfortunately it was her vagina.

The type of dog you have says a lot about your personality, especially if the dog is dead.

Being white sucks. When we put metal stuff in our mouth we have to call them braces.

I ran into a friend yesterday and he asked me to help him move, but I didn't feel like it so I said I had other plans. I just hope for his sake someone said yes and he isn't still in the middle of road, sitting in his wheelchair.

-"You're schizophrenic? that's insane!"
-"You have OCD? That's so neat!"
-"You got a vasectomy? That's nuts!"

NASCAR is a lot like life:
It's long, boring, loud, it goes around in circles forever and you are always surrounded by idiots.

I think the government should give delicious meat coats to the homeless next winter. No one should have to be cold and hungry. They should be able to choose their fate.

Similarities between prison inmates and the kids I babysit:
1. Regulated schedules for eating, sleeping, and free time.
2. People are paid to watch over them.
3. They save piss in a container to throw in my face.

Worst Parents Ever...
Buy you Bugles chips, then tell you not to play with your food.

Time heals all wounds . . . except amputations.

Do you think it's rude for deaf people to talk with food in there hands?

I wish I lived in Alabama so my state was at the top of drop down menus. No other reason.

I recently tried Trident whitening gum. That sh*t is powerful. Immediately after chewing I bought all 11 seasons of Frasier on DVD.

If there's one thing I've learned about women, it's that they can't stand peeing.

Out of sight, out of mind. That's just mean, since I don't think ALL blind people are crazy.

Drunk people are a lot like dogs: They're loud, excitable, horny, piss on the furniture and sometimes need to spend the night in a cage.

Time Machines...
Is the fact that we don't see people from the future suddenly appearing all over an indication that time machines will never be invented, or that we just live in a very boring time?

CoinStar is the greatest invention ever, and anyone who disagrees has obviously never tried snorting coke with a quarter.

I would KILL to live in a jail cell for 18 to 25 years.

The doctor said my grandpa had the lungs of a 9-year-old... who'd been smoking for 70 years.

Every guitar is an air guitar when you're deaf.

There's no use crying over spilled milk unless your tears are chocolate syrup.

Dial-up is a lot like giving birth. It's painful, slow, and you'll probably scream and bleed at some point, but at least at the end you're rewarded with a naked person.

I just got back from Mexico. Everybody's lawn looked amazing.
Just kidding, they were all covered with car parts.

If you can't find a word that rhymes with "orange," then you are uncreative, unimaginative, and unglorange.

I was fired from my last job. Officially, it was due to "budget cutbacks," but that's bullsh*t, becuase I easily embezzled thousands of dollars from that company.

Canadians are not afraid of Mexicans because they have a huge fence called "America."

The only thing worse than standing next to your waiter at the urinal is standing next to your waitress at the urinal.

They say knowledge is power. But what if you know you're a pussy?

The sick zombie says, "I'm not feeling so well so I'm sh*tting your brains out..."

Homeless people are like squirrels. They're fun to watch from a distance, but the closer you get, the more you just want to throw rocks at them.

When people tell me that cigarettes contain ammonia, which is also found in dog sh*t, it doesn't make me want to smoke any less. It just makes me think a little more highly of dog sh*t.

Call me crazy, but when I hear my dog barking, I know there's a ghost in the room... because my dog died two years ago.

Expiration dates are the original spoiler alerts.

I just don't understand women. I can never tell if a woman is looking at me because she's interested, or because she's wondering why I'm staring at her crotch.

I like watching local news in Spanish, because at least you learn something.

It's crazy all the things that you used to be able to get away with as a kid but are frowned on when you're an adult, like making out with 6th graders.

I used to think adults were awesome, until I learned what "Phone tag" really was.

Laughter is the best medicine, unless you're suffering from severe bronchitis.

All it will take is one hateful, spite-filled seeing eye dog at an intersection to ruin it for the rest of them.

Wolves Are Still Cool Right?

2010-04-06T16:11:00.005-05:00

November 17, 2008 -

On my way into work the other day (I know I know, most of my blogs come from me driving) and I saw something incredibly funny that I figured I needed to tell you all about. I was sitting in traffic like I normally do around 7:40am or so and saw a big white Chevy 4x4 truck in the lane next to me on my right.

No biggie, trucks pass me all the time, I am one of those lame guys that leave about 5 car lengths in front of me to keep the flow of traffic moving. Love me or hate me and cut me off, it works and gets people through traffic faster. If you leave enough room to continue a flow of traffic it will continue to flow and then build up speed, until whats that? No more traffic jam! That's what I thought...........so SHUT YOUR FACE!

So this guy slowly passes me and I happen to scan over his truck for a minute. Why do I do this? It passes the time and gives me something to blog about apparently. So far nothing really catches my eye. Sure, he's got the big mudding tires to go traipsing off into big D because we just have LOADS of ATV trails to hit. That was about all that caught my eye until I looked at his entire back window decal. Now, I can take a rear graphic don't get me wrong. I've seen a lot of them. Perforated decals that take up the entire rear window of a truck. Some of them are the waving American flag, some even include a mad eagle with claws outstretched to grab that lame Toyota Tercel. Other items include faded stickers from bands back in the 80's, those annoying white Mac apples, and those ever eloquent political bumper stickers of candidates that either had no chance in the race or lost. I have to say, even if I was remotely political (and I'm not so please do not talk to me about that shit.......I liked both candidates *shrug* and would have been happy with both, but I'm happier with Obama *go figure*) I would TAPE my candidates bumper sticker on my car and then take it off if they lost..... Maybe next go round I'll tape it on there again....... No need to ruin my cars resale value to sell it to a potential McCain supporters. Way to exclude 46-48% of the population of the country. Thanks CarMax! Be sure to put on there Obama sticker included with the car!

This guy though had a full decal embossed on his rear window. I'm sure you have seen those really cheesy and corny wolf paintings, hummels, pewter figurines, porcelain figures or t-shirts out west in those Cherokee gas stations and laughed at them. Who in their right mind actually buy those shitty t-shirts? It's almost as if they could be lumped in there together on the same rack as those Napoleon Dynamite movie fan shirts and nobody would be smart enough to know the difference! "Hey Mom! This is just like the t-shirt Napoleon wore in the movie!". People would eat them shits up and not even KNOW!

I would give the guy a pass if it was a t-shirt or a pin. Well........it actually depends on the guy or gal wearing said wolf pack shirt. Normally it depends on the situation and the were-dude (like werewolf) wearing the wolf memorabilia. If the guy happens to be a pale skinned overweight guy with freckles and unkept hair and bad dental hygiene with sweatpants, its probably safe to say he thinks wolves are cool. If the woman has got that flesh fanny pack that can hide a panini sandwich under there, has frayed equate shampoo'd hair, and loose baggy clothes and no bra, she probably thinks its cool. Sorry to turn it into "You might be a redneck" there for a second but if you are a comedian or someone you know is cooler than that and wears a wolf shirt then its probably safe to say they are poking fun at the lame fad.

The guy in the truck obviously is in the category of "thinks its cool". He went through all of the trouble, expense, and time in order to get that sweet looking face shot of the wolf as well as a silouette of the wolf howling up into the sky with a few clouds in front of the big greyish tinted moon. It was made to be perforated so the guy driving could look back and see all of the people behind him admiring his kick ass wolf mural.

I just can't believe someone in this day and age of internets, LOLcats, tub girls, plushie schwartzes, 2 girls 1 cup, midget demon porn stars, and ptyeradactyl porn can think wolves, paintings of wolves, wolf t-shirts, and wolves howling at the night sky are cool. I think we have moved on from this. I do expect to see roadsigns for shops as I go into New Mexico selling moccasins, windcatchers, and wolf t-shirts. That's fine. That's part of their ancient tribal Indian heritage. For me, its just a lame dude driving a huge truck in Dallas thinking he's cool and doesn't belong in the year 2009. I will however buy some beef jerky, some moccasins and a wolf t-shirt as a souvenir out west whenver I make it that way on vacation........

Have a great day guys! Peace!

Things I Hear At Work

2010-04-06T16:11:00.004-05:00

November 12, 2008 -

I have a pretty laid back work atmosphere where I go to work. I get to wear t-shirts and jeans to work every single muthafucking day. It's always a casual week for me. Fuck that "Casual Friday" bullshit in other places. I go casual every weekday or I don't go at all. That's how I roll bitches.

My desk where I work is in the back away from all of the "suits". We end up rarely getting a visit from a manager or higher up and we pretty much just drop off of the companies radar as time goes on. We sit back in the back of our building in almost a warehouse type of room. Our cubes are right next to a large inventory cage with massive amounts of hard drives, RAM and miscellaneous spare servers in a tall room with no windows and only 1 set of double doors coming in. This means we can be as loud or as quiet as we all want to be because nobody really comes back here. Usually when they do though we get fair warning (I knew those detectors I installed would come in handy). (Think teenager with a red lamp above his bed to notify him of his parents coming up the stairs.)

My co-workers and I get to surf the internet at will, play music at high volume, and have enormously HR offending conversations. For Stars home games, I normally play my Pantera - Dallas Stars theme on my stereo which is set to 11 around 4:50pm..... And yes, I do have a pretty kick ass Creative 2.1 stereo system that I belt out anything from mind numbing Nazi marching style techno drum and bass, to Neil Young and classics like Bob Marley. My music palette goes all over the place, I'll just say that (and I include some great viral online videos too).

My co-workers end up having to put up with my music that I listen to because the way our cubes and room are setup. These aren't "real" cubes. These are half cubes with small desks. The desks are part of a small 6 cube line, with 3 on each side to even things out (I am on the end next to a small test bench).

We hear almost everything each other is doing and sometimes "prairie dog" to include ourselves at will with conversations taking off or going downhill pretty quick when we start talking about ladies, relationships, and of course cougar hunting. But today, as we started getting our dragging asses on a roll to start the day, we started the conversation on the good ole standby of past relationships.

My co-worker H-Bomb first asked me if I ever had "blood dick" from fucking a chick that is on her period, I replied, "Yep, it was thankfully in the shower and on the bed after the fact with a towel underneath." The next logical question in his brain was if I got my red wings or not, to which I replied, "HELL NO!" Next was if I ever had a stinky pussy, "Yes, I suffered through it to get out of a dry spell of course." Next he added the question, "Have you ever had a vagina that tasted sweet?" I of course said, "Yes, no real taste at all, but a slight tinge." I then asked my buddy which one he would like to have and I suggested he would be all up in a guys hairy sweet asshole if he could get the chance. Gay jokes, gotta love 'em. He mentioned that he is still looking for a girl that had Monster energy drink coming out of her tits, and her vagina tasted like Mountain Dew.

For me the next logical step in my crazy brain was, "That's simple, all you have to do is create a product called "Mountain Douche"........."

God I love working in an HR free zone.......

My Dreams Are Weird

2010-04-06T16:10:00.001-05:00

October 23, 2008 -

Well, I have two dreams to tell you guys about, I usually don't dream when I sleep, its usually just whiteness (or darkness) and I just wake up and go about my day. In the past week or so I have had two dreams stick out in my mind and come to the frontal lobe part of my brain (or wherever that memory part comes from).

The first one I believe I told everyone who went out last Friday night to State and Allen over beers and great fire roasted pizza. If you weren't there you missed out on this story because it was told while I had a few beers in me and that always livens things up. Apparently, according to Dalyn which I called during my Tuesday night Happy Hour, I turn into a whiny little frat boy and start to say things like, "Awwwww COOOMMMMEE OOOOOON MAN! YOUUURR KILLING ME BRO!" Imagine a drunk dude with his arm around his buddy saying shit like that with a beer in his left hand waving it around in front of his completely sober buddy. "Dude, you should TOTTALLLLY go up to her and talk to her man!" Yep, that kinda sounds like me. Dalyn asked if I was drinking, found out the answer was yes, then quickly cut the conversation short because he didn't want to talk with Stifler anymore (from American Pie). I digress, so lets cut into the first dream:

I'm at the American Airlines Center, on the ice skating around. No rhyme or reason, but I take it as a public skate for the fans or something. They did something like this a few weeks ago and it looked pretty sweet! I look up into the stands and see loads of people making their way down into their seats with the assorted drinks, popcorn and eatable items. I look around and think to myself, "Why would they do this type of stuff at a public skate on the AAC ice?" I can't be that entertaining on the ice when I fall down and hurt my ass? Well, maybe....that's why my team the Silver Wings have fans....... Well, if it helps the Stars sell a few extra concession items then go for it!

As I begin to look up at the jumbo-tron screen I begin to realize that this isn't just an ordinary public skate. I look around and begin to see what the other people on the ice are wearing, and it turns out that I'm on the ice with the actual fucking Dallas Stars! That music they are playing, isn't "Wake Me Up, Before You Go Go!" it's actually Pantera's version of the Dallas Stars chant when they come out of the tunnel! Holy SHIT! Wait, what is this? I look down to find that I am suited up to play my first ever NHL game with the big club. No F-ing way!

Now, here is my reasoning behind this and where I think the dream comes from. I play NHL '09 for the PS3. In the game I created a virtual version of myself and put myself in the AHL Stars affiliate (called the Rochester Americans). In the "Be A Pro" mode you are that player and have to work the slow way up from the 4th line position to the first line, produce certain tasks and achievements, and then hopefully get called up to the NHL level and play on the Dallas Stars. I haven't played NHL 09 in some time now but I'm guessing this dream has embedded into my psyche and its calling me back.

So back to my dream, I skate on the ice for a bit, circling around Turco who is preparing the crease for the game. I look around, see the likes of Dave Tippett (sans mustache), Stu Barnes (as the assistant coach of course), Mike Modano, Stephane Robidas and my new boy James Neal are all there on the bench waiting for the game to start. The horn quickly sounds to let everyone know the face off is about to happen. The crowd begins to build in intensity (with help from that jumbo-tron) and my excitement starts to grow inside my belly. The hair stands up on my arms under my pads. The slow smile begins to creep up along my face. I play Instructional League ice hockey and I still get excited before I go out on a shift in that type of situation, you can imagine the intensity of my excitement for going on the NHL ice.

I prop up on the bench and sit in between James Neal and none other than Mike Modano himself. Sawheet! I'm on the third line (well, the best producing line of the Stars right now) and I will be playing right wing (my off-wing since I am a left handed shooter). Almost time for the drop of the puck!

I get set up on the bench and get a swig of water. I can't even hold it down because I'm smiling like a mofo. Neal and Modano! WOW! Up until this point, the dream has been great, but some great dreams turns into nightmares (don't they all?). I look around and try to find my Easton Synergy stick.........no dice. It's nowhere to be found. I could have swore I had that sucker out on the ice with me? Didn't I? Oh shit! You have got to be kidding me! I don't have my stick? Oh shit! I'm in trouble now! What is Tippett going to say since I got called up and didn't bring my gear! So what do I do, I hastily exit the bench area down low and start to climb up the stairs of the AAC (skates and all mind you) past all of the fans and through the crowd of people coming down to their seats with beers. A few people stop me to congratulate me on making the NHL roster but I have to get out of there and get my stick so I can fucking play! I can't believe I have to do this, I have to get out of the arena and walk passed the concession stands with skates on. More crowds of people are there to hold me up! OH NO! Almost game time!

I end up walking out into the Dallas night air and towards the parking lot (I don't get Gold status like the players yet), still going against the flow of fans. It must have been a sight to see to catch a Dallas Stars rookie player out on Victory Lane in Dallas at the AAC heading to his car way out in ghetto-ville (can someone say Matt Niskanen and his Pontiac?). Once to my car I proceed to quickly get in and drive it with skates on all the way out to Mesquite to grab my stick bag. I don't know if I made it back to the Stars game or not? It was a great dream at first then with my twisted brain it turned into being funny.

A few key things to remember: 1) The equipment guys for the Stars in real life are completely top notch and have about 20 different sticks (or more) ready for each player taped and good to go the way they like them. Why didn't I have a few dozen extra sticks with them? I would have known this in real life so why not in the dream? Guess that's why they call them dreams..... It would just be completely stupid of me to only have 3 sticks EVER! 2) Why did I need to walk out of the arena that way and up the stairs to pass every single fan? IDIOT! I was probably on the jumbo-tron trying to walk up the concrete stairs in skates. Definitely NO BUENO for my blades! I guess for the most part I just felt embarrassed as I had to walk by everyone there for the game. I think I even said, "Sorry," to a few people. See, even in my dream I am courteous. 3) Why didn't I take my skates off to drive my car (it's a standard)? Did I really think I was going to save that much time by leaving them on, even though I had to drive all the way back out to Mesquite and back? Yeah, that's a 50 minute to an hour round trip. And trying to drive with ice skates for a manual car is a very funny visual though. It almost sounds like something I would do!

The second dream is even weirder (if that is even a word). If its not a word, fuck it, I just made it up. These things that I will list don't have anything to do with each other, they cut around in time, but in my head they made perfect logical sense. Here's what was in my second dream: AC/DC, an erupting volcano concert, an inflatable circus tent, Pearl Jam's song Jeremy, a middle school cafeteria, and about 200 screaming AC/DC fans.

I have seen AC/DC one time before in Little Rock, Arkansas back when they had the Stiff Upper Lip tour. Good show, at their age they still can rock out hardcore style. It's more physically demanding than say, the Stones. So! With that being said I don't know how I got to this concert, how the concert even happened, or anything leading up to the concert. All I know is I was about 2 hundred yards from the stage and even then had a great view and I could still hear their great sound. Looking back on my dream it kind of reminds me of a Metalocalypse episode where the band actually plays in an erupting volcano. The band is right at the lip of the volcano and the fans are strewn about down the mountain side. Apparently I somehow got access to see them on this tall video tower that they are shooting for a new DVD. Hey, if you are going to play on the side of a fucking active volcano, why not make a little money from all of the other fans that can't be there right? So the final song they play is "For Those About To Rock.......We Salute You!" The volcano is going nuts! The huge AC/DC stage decorations are all red and black and have this nice demonic feel to it. The huge crowd is jumping and waving and throwing fists up to the anthem.

Pyrotechnics go off when the lead singer says "FIRE!" after each verse and a few cannons go off with fire shooting up out of the stage and behind. For the grand finale though for the song they inflate a huge AC/DC designed air tent that envelops the entire stage and about 100 yards behind the stage. Overall the huge tent stand about 4 stories tall! Now comes the final crescendo! "For those about to rock! WE...............SALUTE...........YOUUUUUUUU!" And I literally see the entire volcano erupt with this red and golden amber magma color. The face of the volcano lights up from all of the pyrotechnics going off at once. There must have been over 100 explosions scattered around up in the air, plus about 50 big shots of flames coming out of the stage and elsewhere going up towards the dark heavens. That's it, the concert is over, the lights fade to black yet the volcano continues to erupt behind the band.

Now, if that wasn't weird enough, after the concert apparently I had access to follow the band around for the day (probably had to do with why I got that video tower access at the concert) and see what they did. We cut to a middle school cafeteria. The hand painted coloring art of random kids adorn the walls. Cheesy "Milk is healthy" posters with those gay ass cartoon animals. The band sits on the top of those collapsible lunch room tables at the end of a row of them. A few of them have their instruments and they play a few acoustic AC/DC songs. The songs flew by in my dream by the way, I have no idea what they played I just remember the last song. There are probably about 200 kids and adults there in the cafeteria watching AC/DC perform. For their final song they start playing this catchy bass riff, wait for a response from the crowd, then the lead singer leads into the song and starts to sing, "At home.......drawing pictures......of mountaintops! With him on top! Lemon yellow sun! Arms raised in a V! MmmmMmmm!" And then he kind of goes blank on the song. It's not his song and he doesn't know the rest.

He gets up off of the top of the table and begins to walk away from his end of the lunch table. The crowd is going nuts, even though they don't know the song. The band is kicking into high gear now and the crowd is loving it, they want more, but the lead singer just doesn't know the rest. He throws the mic into the crowd to see if someone out there knows the rest of the song. Who better to catch the mic for this song than me with my 6'3 frame. I catch the mic and begin to sing into the chorus for the song Jeremy. "And the dead lay.......in pools of maroon below! Daddy didn't give attention! Oh! To the fact that, mommy didn't care, King Jeremy! The wicked...oh, ruled his world..."

"Jeremy spoke in class today...!"

The acoustic band picked up again where their lead singer left off and I finished the song out with AC/DC backing me up. I sang every word to 200 people in that middle school cafeteria and they loved it. It almost broke out to some weird demented High School: Musical type shit where the people around me were on their knees looking up at me and putting their hands around my waist in awe. A few of the members of the crowd began to pogo dance to the bass guitar riff. On the final note of the bands crescendo I yelled out, "Jeremy, spoke in, class TODAAAAYYYYY!!!!!!!" I even went so far as to do those Eddie Vedder classic "oo, oo, oo, oo, oo," at the end of Jeremy when he is shaking his head fast. Listen to the song and you'll understand! That was it! I felt awesome and it got me my 5 minutes of fame there in a shitty middle school cafeteria in front of 200 people!

Thanks for reading guys! I usually don't post shit about my dreams, but felt they were somewhat blog worthy and I needed to post something as I haven't in awhile.

Cheers and may you have good health, great wealth, and your glass never be empty.

Are You Kidding Me?

2010-04-06T16:07:00.001-05:00

August 26, 2008 -

I was on my way home on a very hot and humid day here in the Metroplex. Off into the MINI with no A/C, to put on my shades and get the best damn trucker tan I know (left arm tan from being propped up on the door and the right one being inside)! I turned my usual right hand turn onto the service road and began my long arduous journey back to the casa. It's not too far I suppose, only about 30 minutes or so WITH traffic? It used to be a 45 minute drive from the Mound of Flowers and over an hour and 30 minutes from that Egyptian land known as Keller. Didn't they have the Olympics out there? Because I could have sworn that Beijing and Keller are side by side. Oh well........

I came to a traffic light on Continental Ave in downtown Dallas heading south and pulled up to wait for the light. Now, this is where I start my story. I'm usually the guy that looks around while he is in traffic. Nothing obvious mind you like turning all the way around in my seat to see people behind me, but I do glance at everyone in my plane of vision. To the left, right, and in front of me at all angles. So! I am in the far left lane of traffic wanting to turn left onto Continental and there are 2 other lanes of traffic to my right. I begin to scan them over as they pull up and stop along side of me and in front of me and so on and so forth. Crappy 107.9 Piolin vans, Oldsmobile rapper types, and a few Maximas and what not crowd the light. 2 lanes over I notice a black Jaguar.

It was a very nice Jaguar to say the least. I probably would have put it in the early 2000 build X-type Jags. Black, all black, the type of black that is as dark as the night itself. Black as Mrs. Butterworth in all of her black glory. That dark and clean. It wasn't the Jag that has that crowning vagina on the front either, this is one of the very nice old school "British" Jags with the flatter hood of the two and the four headlights molded into the bonnet a little bit. I notice the man sitting inside now.

He is a relatively young man (around 30ish or 34ish I suppose) with a button up white collared shirt and a loosened tie. His hair is clean cut and moussed up a little like a douche. You know, that businessman below the neck type look and the scruffy frat boy hair-do on top. Slightly messed up but just good enough for those board meetings and that juicy water cooler/break room gossip. The tan leather hugs and caresses his body in only a way that is known to Jag owners. I would probably wack off in the back seat of that car just to do it, then chicken out when I was getting ready to spurt and put a plastic bag over my junk to save the spray. And believe me, I do spray like a water bottle on stream (not mist)! Anyway, I digress.......back to the man.

I turn away and wait for the light to turn green. A homeless man lowers his head again as the light turns green and he has to wait for the next schmo to give him a dollar. But before we take off I notice something out of the corner of my eye. It's "Jag Man" again. He's moving in his car and I see him doing this. I look over and see him talking on his phone, obviously a nice one. It wasn't an Iphone or one of those poser look at me phones, but it definitely was a Blackberry, Tazer, Blazer, Roundhouse, Sidekick, or whatever else those fucking phone companies all call their new phones. He reaches down to his center console and pulls up a canned soda to take a draw off of. What he drank made me write this entire blog. He reached across the tan fawnskin baby deer leather in his 8 mile an hour city mileage Jag to pull a Diet Dr. Thunder out of his console. Are you FUCKING KIDDING me?

A .25 cent soda for your rich ass? I was flabbergasted! No! He couldn't have chosen that for the taste? Because everyone knows that Dr. Thunder is Dr. Pepper's 3rd removed retarded down syndrome stepbrother! They could drop a case of Dr. Thunder in a starving and water droughted country like Nepal and those people would suffer through and wait for something else. It's that bad! But to see someone with so much going for them, the nice job, the great car, the phone, the look, the attitude and probably the 9 at home waiting for them, they choose to drink the "cheap" soda. I couldn't believe it! I laughed for about 2 minutes straight as I drove through the light and smiled for the remaining 28 minutes.

It's little things like this that I pick up for just a split second and I read so much into what happens. I would figure that with all the things he had going for him he could have laid down the extra quarter to buy a real diet Dr. Pepper from the coke machine. And to top it off it was DIET! Dr. Thunder alone leave such a horrible bad aftertaste in your mouth from the iron and calcium deposits that I don't even want to know what kind of chemical reaction goes on in your mouth with NutraSweet or whatever 4th spawn Thailand sweetener Wal-Mart went with to make that abortion of a drink.

So, that's my short (or long) blog about a split second that happened in traffic the other day. I stretched out that small instance into a whole blog so I hope you guys enjoy it.

SIDE NOTE: With this blog I guess it would be a good time to let you guys in on something that has been in the back of my brain for sometime. I was on my way down to Houston this past week and it hit me just what I am passionate about and makes me happy. It's not money or a job or possessions (although those are cool for downtime) but its the incorporation of comedy into my life. I find that if I am having a bad day at work or a bad work week that I need to step out for a little and center myself with comedy. I go home after a stressful day and watch comedy troops like the Upright Citizens Brigade, Human Giant, and other Second City alum who got their start with group improv comedy.

I will stick with the UCB. They are a group that started in Chicago but moved to New York after a few years on the Second City stage. Amy Poehler (my favorite improv/actress/comedy star) got her start here. She started doing group improv and her wit and charm contributed to the groups success. I have no dreams of becoming a stand-up comedian. This is a different art form all in itself. I think I would be a great addition to a comedy troop and can add and take jokes up to the next level (sometimes dirty, sometimes too far) but the contributions I feel would make a great part for me. So, I have done some research and found a few classes that I would like to take just as a hobby and see where it goes. Who knows, maybe I'll get picked up and go on from there? We'll shall see, but it won't be easy. I'll still have to get up on that stage and speak in front of all of those people. Good times. Almost time for good tasting beer. If you want to know a way into my heart know my favorite beers/styles and be able to pick them out at the store! :-P Thanks for reading guys!

Blah Blah Blog

2010-04-06T16:05:00.002-05:00

July 6, 2008 -

Well, its been awhile since I have posted a blog. So figured I would just title it "Blah Blah Blog" and run with it. And we are already off to a big bang because I have already said "tit" in "title". So there. Not even three sentences in and I have a cuss word in this blog. Nice Justin. Very typical.

Anyway, had a great weekend out at the Shroeder family lake house in East Texas on a private lake south of Interstate 20. Passed through a few small towns like Canton, Ben Wheeler, and arrived on a pretty good sized man made private lake. Was forced to drink beer after beer of Sam Adams and Shiner. Way to go Justin. Enjoy the 4th the way most E. Texas people do and just get drunk on the back porch (in this case it was a dock) and throw up into a canoe (or styrofoam cooler if that is all you have).

Actually, I didn't throw up at all, I just think most people that are celebrating in THAT way would throw up off the back end of their truck and then drive fast to get it to sling off the tailgate. But I digress, beer was consumed, fireworks were lit, and everybody had a great time. But mostly the moment I want to touch on was out on the pontoon boat while the surrounding lakes were shooting off massive arrays of mortars.

I brought a 6 pack of Paulaner Hefeweizen (third best beer on the face of the planet behind Schneider Weisse German Hefeweizen "The Original", Paulaner Ocktoberfest (for Adam), and then the Paulaner Hefeweizen. But I had 2 of those before getting on the boat to go out and enjoy the show, as well as had two more in the wing for during the explosions. We got on the boat (about 6 of us) and started out to the middle of the lake. We started out going past a few houses that had some really nice roman candles and bottle rockets, then as we sat in the middle of the lake we looked around as everyone started to shoot off their fireworks. But after the north side of the lake got a taste of what the south side had to offer it was on like Donkey Kong. I felt like I was in The Wonder Years there for a second looking at the fireworks with Penny. And that Joe Cocker song "What would you do......if I sang you a song? What would you do if I sang outta tune?" kept reverberating in my brain. That and the beginning to the movie Zodiac, or the part in the Sandlot comes to mind too. Just those kids dropping what they were doing to watch the fireworks in their one and only "night game".

I sat there on the boat just zoned out looking around the edge of the lake at the artillery shells going off over the water. Blues, reds, greens and white explosions cascaded over the surface of the water and disintegrated. That was probably the highlight of my weekend.

Oh, and going into another thing. Being the gamer that I am I was able to show their family the ins and outs of the Wii. Apparently they have a Wii out at the lake house and are only able to use it while they are there on the weekends. They have a copy of Mario Kart Wii but didn't know or understand how to get things to work and be smooth. I showed them a race of the controls and what each things do (the ? boxes, brake boosts, etc.). 1 race and I handed it off to the other 8 or 9 guests and they were off like a bandit. They luckily had 2 controllers so it was a cool little battle between family members. We ended up not turning the Wii off and played Mario Kart for over 7 hours straight! Not one person but it was during the 99+ degree part of the day so it was best for us to stay inside and hang out. We did trade turns playing and seeing who was the best and what carts/bikes we each liked as our favorite.

One thing that bugs me about Mario Kart Wii is the ability for people behind you (way behind you) to take you out before you cross the finish line and make you drop 4 or 5 spots. I swear there was one race where I led the entire race and made sure to get the good power-ups to use. I would immediately drop the bananas and the green shells for the better red shells or the mushroom combos. I always got Mario so I had a good assortment of power ups unlike Donkey Kong who mostly gets those lame bananas. But I had gotten ahead of the pack around the last turn and saw the finish line in my sights. I was literally 2 feet (in virtual world space) and someone blew me up with a black spikey turtle shell with wings (specifically designed to take out the leader). I ended up shooting up into the air about 30 feet and coming down to see that I had slipped into 5th place. Are you fucking kidding me? I couldn't believe it! This type of programming should be banned!

And another thing on the new title I just picked up. I saw a few previews for this new game called "Alone In The Dark". It intrigued me and when I saw and heard about the new graphics/lighting engine that they were using and saw a few test demos, I got really excited about it. The environments are completely adaptive to the lighting. You can shoot off florescent lights off of the walls or ceiling (the cords actually) and then stand in the sewer and shine it around. It looks very lifelike and creepy like what a real sewer would look like and the outreach of that type of bulb. Its not like as soon as you pick this light up you can see like you are on the surface of the sun. Things are black if they need to be black, and things are halfway lit, and do cast shadows where they are needed. This gets me excited for Star Wars: Force Unleashed. I probably won't be buying anymore games for awhile unless something hits me in the face (well, besides the 20 dollar Rock Band Track Pack Vol. 1).

By that last statement I did pick up Rock Band for the Wii. I have unlocked all 63 songs included in the game and I'm desperately wanting more. It's all good though. The track list for Rock Band: Wii is a little bit different than the 360 version. I already have Don't Look Back In Anger by Oasis (which is DLC on the 360). Other than that its pretty cool, they have things set up in "Acts" similar to Guitar Hero instead of the World Tour type setup for the 360 or PS3.

Other games on my wish list I suppose:

August 26, 2008 Brothers in Arms: Road to Hill 30
- I always love a good World War II: Brothers In Arms video game (although the Call of Duty franchise will have a special place in my heart after Call of Duty 3: Wii Edition came out).

September 1, 2008 NHL 2K9
- Wii+motion controls+NHL+1st Hockey game for the Wii = total and utter fucking greatness. Should be great!

September 9, 2008 Price Is Right (2008), The
- Sorry, I am a huge fan of the show so this is probably just for those people that hold Bob B. and that show as cult status. Sorry Drew Carey, should have let the show die with the leaving of Bob. I seriously think that the company for Price is Right could make tons more money after the fact without a crappy show on tv to remind people and potentially steer them away.

September 16, 2008 Star Wars: The Force Unleashed
- Great game engine and what looked like decent graphics for the Wii. From what I hear they are going to push the Wii to the limits of what it can do and the fact that I will be able to use the wii-mote and nun-chuck as a fucking light saber put this game into the stratosphere. Definite BUY!

October 2008 Bratz: Girlz Really Rock!
- Okay, I just threw this one in there to see if you were still paying attention.

October 2008 Ghostbusters: The Video Game
- With the original guys all coming back to do voice over work and the huge 400 page script for this game it is sure to be awesome! I'm sure it will be a new story line but you will be able to go back and experience some classic scenes from the movie. DON'T CROSS THE STREAMS!!!!!

October 2008 Guitar Hero World Tour
- This is still on my list, even though I probably won't be buying GH: Aerosmith. I probably don't need 2 sets of drums from Rock Band and GH: World Tour, so this probably will be put on the wayside (even though it will have two extra buttons for cymbals, etc.).

November 2008 Call of Duty 5: World at War
- Like I said before, greatest and bestest WWII franchise in history (as far as I know). And this should be right up on par with all of the others that came before. Me likey.

November 2008 Star Wars: The Clone Wars -- Light saber Duels
- Not necessarily my speed seeing as it will probably be cartoon based like the prequel series on DVD. But this should be a pretty good game and it looks to be like a straight out light saber battle with an array of different characters. We shall see.

To Be Announced In 2008:
TBA 2008 Boogerman: A Pick & Flick Adventure [Virtual Console]
- WOW! Lot's of good memories from Boogerman. I can remember my brother Sean going apeshit when we got this game for Sega Genesis back in the day. He jumped up and down (similar to the N64 kid) and his little jammies flapped up and down because they were too big in the crotch. Awesome and what better game for a 7 year old than an overweight superhero that belches and farts to defeat the enemies! WOOHOO!

Ninja Hijack Survey

2010-04-06T16:02:00.001-05:00

June 25, 2008 -

How old are you/will you be on your golden birthday?

Golden birthday? What and when the fuck is that? Isn't that when I will be 90 or something? That is pretty much dust stacked high enough to be considered a person by law. That's it.

Are you the oldest child in your family?

Yes as a matter of fact I am. Oldest of 4 kids. So I know at least my parents had sex 4 times........GROSS! HAHA!

Have you ever eaten the worm?

No, I consider tequila off limits for me. I had a bad experience when I was younger.......no I HAD A BAD EXPERIENCE! I'll leave it at that!

Have you ever done the walk of shame?

Yeah, but it was only out to my car in the parking lot and then I drove 25 minutes home. The people in that town didn't know what I wore the day prior but for that short 300 yards I thought everybody was looking at me......

Do you ever play hookie from life?

Yes I do. I zone out for some strange reason. It kind of "centers" me if you will for a few moments, then I'll jump back into the conversation.

What is the last trick you learned?

How to charge an ipod with Gatorade and a potato or something like that? I don't know, it was on Break.com.

Why did you have to learn that trick?

I didn't HAVE to, but it was fun to watch. Then I saw this really cool set of bar tricks to do with beer and whiskey I believe? They were in shot glasses on top of each other separated by a playing card, and wouldn't combine or spill.

Did it work?

Yeah, it sure did. Pretty cool stuff to charge your ipod for about 15 minutes or so. I believe you soak the potato in Gatorade for about an hour or so to get the electric juices flowing, then hook up everything to the potato and charge that bitch up! Great if you have Gatorade and a potato in the woods and need your tunes desperately.

Do you lie for gain?

Yes I have, I actually lied on my apartment application a little bit when they asked me if I had my own washer and dryer and immediately blurted out "yes". I don't. So I don't know if I will have to get an access card later to gain access to the on-site washer/dryer place.

Have you ever been wrong and not admitted it?

I am stubborn. I think everyone has done this in their lifetime a few times. I usually try to admit fault whenever possible. Its hard for me to do though.

Have you ever been right and not admitted it?

Yes. I usually try to not to rub things back in peoples faces. If they know that they are wrong then that's all that needs to be said. That's not the right thing to do to constantly admit or say you are right. Because eventually the other person will have the upper hand and will remember what you did and give it back 10 fold.

Do you chew your nails?

No, I eat things that taste better than nails. Why would I want to chew nails? If I am nervous or anything I'll probably put my hands in my pockets and look around innocently.

Do you say burp or belch?

I usually say "Burp". I try not to burp at all these days. It's just become habit to hold it in and let it reverberate inside my throat. Kinda sounds like a frog though.

Do you have inside animals?

My parents do. Or I should say my little sis Ash does. She has a small miniature Yorkshire terrier named Razcal. He's about hot dog sized and weighs about 3 lbs or so. He is more considered a rat.

Do you give money to panhandlers?

No, and I never will. I will gladly hand my money over to a worthwhile cause like a charity or something that benefits the homeless more-so than handing out cash on the side of the road. I see the same homeless guys everyday when I come into work. If you have that routine of a schedule to get up and sit on a corner and look semi pathetic then you have exactly what it takes to be employed by SOMEONE!

Would you speak up if you saw a fight in public?

Nope, it depends though. I'm a white guy, I thrive on NON-confrontation. Sad but its true. I don't want to cause problems, don't want to be a part of the stirring pot, I really don't want to be a part of anything that I feel is a retarded fight or a senseless act. If for any reason I did have to speak up I would probably just get drowned out by the other people standing around yelling, "FIGHT FIGHT FIGHT!"

Would you speak up if you saw a fight in private?

I would definitely check to make sure everyone was okay with my close private friends. I still would try to avoid any punches or any confrontation what-so-ever but would try to smooth everything out by speaking up.

Do you think anyone can make art?

No, not everyone can make art. I used to write songs on the guitar and they sucked bawls. It just takes a special breed to do that. And plus it makes me respect them and their talent that much more seeing as not EVERYONE can do it.

Are you a list person?

Abso-fucking-lutely! I have to write down a list for everything and what store I go into. If I don't, I end up spending too much money on gadgets, CD's, food, etc. and I end up in the whole on crap that I don't need......."Do I really need that BeeGee's greatest hits just so I can have all of their hits today?"

Do you believe love conquers all?

Hmmmm, nope, I don't. I believe both people should have their own lives and do and go as they want. But what will bring them together is the common bond and friendship and they will want to share their space. But love doesn't conquer over all things.

Even taboo relationships?

Even mechanical relationships? Because I've heard the new thing on the internet is people spreading their "seed" inside or on a car. They are in fact in love with their car. So this in turn kind of proves my "love conquers all" theory. No way a love for a mechanical inanimate object can conquer all.

Can you wiggle your ears?

Nope. I sure can't. They were damaged when I was a kid. Part of playing tag where I was from (Alexandria, LA) we were a little slow in the head and played with the rules that as soon as you got tagged it you got one of your ears pulled hard. They eventually got better over time but only after a few years of NOT being pulled out of their sockets. Later this spurred me on to be a very fast runner in baseball.

Can you wiggle anything else?

Wouldn't you like to know......Yes, I can move another part of my body, but wouldn't you like to know what it is........alright, its my big toe! I can also wiggle my penis too, and for some reason they have matching goat cheese in between my toes and ball sack.

Ever do something you didn't want to just to keep peace?

Yes, there have been a few times I have been riled up pretty bad and wanted to fight. Last time that happened I was on the ice and accidentally pushed another play away from me in the crease. The person in the crease fell down (she was a woman) and on the next shift I was blindside elbowed across the face by one of her teammates skating out of our zone.

Do you daydream?

Yes I do? Huh? Oh wait.......I was supposed to answer this one? I forgot. I zone out for about 15 to 20 seconds sometimes and then come back from my little mini-daydream. It helps me get through the day.

Do you have a favorite quote from your grandma or grandpa?

Yep, its, "This is pretty good better buy you some!" (used when you have dessert or something and are enjoying it to death, then tell the other person without it that its so good that you should buy some from them), and "ah, hmmm, ah" (usually used a lot when trying to tell a story, its placed in the middle of details that she is trying to conjure up) plus "I need to round off the corners and get the good stuff." (Used when my grandma needs to get another piece of dessert and has to even off the cake in a pan to make it even.)

Ever act like you don't know your family in public?

Nope, there have been a few times I have gone out with them and saw a really cute chick up at the bar that was eyeballing me and couldn't make a move because of the parents. Just sucks......

Have you ever picked someone elses' flowers?

Nope, I usually suck it up and just buy the ones in the store. If I am strapped for cash I will have to go for the cheaper than cheap ones. Or if I am really desperate I will stop and pick some wildflowers. Don't know why I would do that with gas these days, I would just say to have a date over AIM to save gas.

Have you ever played in the rain?

Yes I have. I have also been swimming in the rain, which is also fun. You come up for air and you still get wet! And plus the rain drops on your head and around in the water feel pretty good. Plus, when you are underwater with it raining it sounds really awesome, especially if it is a nice rain.

Live to ride?

Hell yeah, that's what my MINI Petey is for. Nothing like the smell of petrol, a few crinkly dollars in your hands, and the open road (lined with honeysuckle of course).

Ride to live?

I wish I had a job where I could drive/ride to support myself. I still would like to get out on the track a few more times and experience a Drivers Edge event.

What do you think of motorcycle helmets?

Are okay I suppose. I really like the throwback helmets or the top only, not a big fan of the full face motorcycle helmets with the visor. Guess those would only look good on a ricer rocket. The half single strap throwback helmets would be good for a hog or something.

Do you have a conceal and carry permit?

Need to get mine. I have a very nice Springfield XD 40 S&W that I still love. I have 200 rounds of ammo waiting to be enjoyed! Slipping through the barrel at a very fast rate of speed taking that paper guys head off!

If you had to pick a body part to live without what would it be?

I would have to say my taint. How is anyone going to realize that my asshole and my ball sack are an inch closer to each other? Nobody! And this would let me see if I can stick my (insert dick joke) inside my own ass......:P

What's your blood type?

Have no idea. Last time I got blood work done (tetanus shot) I fainted out in the hot parking lot and was carried back in by my mom. I was out for about 15 or 20 minutes and didn't realize what happened. I just remember waking up on the cold floor with a fan over me.

Ever broken any bones?

Nope, never gotten into a fight with anyone. I would have been an animal, still think I would be if I got into a fight today. I sometimes have a dream where I kick someones ass so much that they are laying on the ground coughing up blood, when I turn to walk away and then turn back one more time and put my foot in their face.

Ever broken any of YOUR bones?

Nope, there are no bones in my junk right? So yeah, I thought I broke it off once, but it just hurt really bad. I am one of those really lucky kids that never got a broken bone and only got stitches once (when I was 5).

Can you kick the habit?

Hmmmm, well, nope, I don't think so. Masturbating 8 times a day is completely natural! Ask me how I do that on Mon. - Fri.! My workstation is a living biological experiment!

Do you believe the future is unknown?

Yes. There are too many variables in our lives that it is almost impossible to set a path for each and every one of us to follow. All of those "I could have gone that way" or "I just happened to be here at the right time" moments are just out of coincidence.

Who is your favorite cook?

Justin Wilson. He is an awesome cook out of Louisiana I believe. Specializing in deep south dishes and spicy cajun entrees, he is probably my favorite just because I remember my mom tuning in and remember his suspenders and brick haven he called a kitchen.

Do you prefer pie or cake?

Both please. I will take a Granny Smith apple crumb pie with peanut butter on top or a yellow Duncan Hines cake with butter cream frosting. Thank you! I will let you buy some and I will be sure to even off the corners.

Beer, whiskey or wine?

Definitely beer. I am about 60 beers away from getting my personalized plate at the Flying Saucer in Addison. So far I have drank 130 beers that they have on tap and in bottles. I will live forever on the wall of that awesome place! :D

Do you have a favorite number?

36 or 15

Why?

Jussi Jokinen and Niklas Hagman! Flying Finns FOR TEH WIN!!!! Also number 36 has been my number all the way through baseball since I was 9.

-Word Association-

I say Bush you say-

Kind of a douchebag, typical white guy, but don't really like politicians to begin with. Don't really like any of the candidates because one is there just because he is black, the other (McCain) is there because he's a war veteran and is the typical white politician figure, and Clinton only because she has a husband who gets his cock sucked and she is a woman. I'm not too political if you haven't already figured out.

I say party liquor you say-

Definitely grab a party melon to go with that.

I say early you say-

Time for work. 6:25am comes pretty quick in the morning.

I say truck-boat you say-

Duck. Really cool WWII amphibious vehicle that would go from land to water in no time!

I say "Hey!" you say-

"What's up man!"

I say please you say-

Alright, I guess so, but next time you ain't getting that Cleveland Steamer for free.

I say PAH-leeeeez you say-

Maybe I'll do it on a glass coffee table and you can watch from underneath

I say G-Love you say-

G-spot love baby! I hits it!

Do you answer your phone on the first ring?

Nope. I usually pick it up as soon as I know who it is and its convenient for me. Not going to pick it up in an awkward location that's too loud or needs to be quiet.

Have you ever let Jehovah's Witnesses inside?

Yeah, they still haven't found the bodies yet.......

Have you ever been lied to, found out and continued to believe the lie?

This does sound familiar. But I would probably take it one step further and say I was lied to, found out, continued to believe the lie because I wanted to give them the benefit of the doubt because I thought they were a better person. Turned out they weren't. Oh well, that's how it goes. I'm not going to hurt anymore over it. I got people to do, things to go.........

If someone offered you money would you take it?

Absolutely! I would probably be very gracious about it and try and give it back but as soon as they were gone I would totally be trying to figure out what I could do with it.

Is there a such thing as a no strings attached relationship?

Yeah, I saw a magazine once that was called DFW Swingers. I imagine there is a plethora of no strings attached swinging relationships going on.......

Ever have one?

Nope. I do think a few strings are good. And attachment is good, but when you start putting all of your strings on one thing you start to get dragged around and you aren't the same person you used to be. Its best to attach with a few strings and then let the other ones alone.

Are you friends with a former enemy?

Nope. I'm usually not enemies with anyone, I try to be as friendly as I can be and usually its just a misunderstanding or they don't get my sense of humor or jokes.

If so, why?

Rejection is hard. All of the people that are my "enemies" if you will hopefully will get over it. It sucks to be rejected. Believe me I know. But I don't have any bad words to say to any of those people who rejected me at all. I still think I could be their friends with them, but it would be different.

Are you enemies with a former friend?

Our personalities apparently don't fit very well. I don't show my nice side too often when I am around them and end up coming off too harsh and abrasive and this person is very sensitive and emotional. It's not a bad thing. I can't change the way that I am or how I interact with people, its just what has been embedded into my psyche. I hope they don't take it personal or hold a grudge. Not everyone is going to like me. You have to accept that. That's something that I haven't had to deal with ever and its a tough pill to swallow.

If so why?

Well, I pretty much explained it in the last question, but okay. I was in a dark place when I did some things I probably shouldn't have done behind the scenes with people on the side. It happened, I made those things because I was looking for something. It was stupid, but it just sucks that what had to come out of it was cutting a lot of people off because I didn't want that to happen again in that time span.

Have you ever pierced someones body part for them?

No never, not even by accident.

Did you wear pleather in the 80's (for the oldies)?

HAHAHA! I'm not an "oldie" so I will say no. I don't even know what the hell pleather looks like? I remember the slap bracelets and the little t-shirt ties that went at the bottom of t-shirts for girls that "dressed up" the t-shirts a little bit.....but that's it. No pleather for me.

Did you have a mullet?

No thanks. Luckily I wasn't in THAT small of a Louisiana town (or Arkansas town for that matter) and my parents weren't into that sort of hair style.

Do you have pics of either being worn?

Sorry, if I haven't worn or had either then this question is not needed. I hate you survey.

Can we see those pics?

Sigh. Why? Why do you persist survey? You need to back the fuck off! That's right bitch! I mutherfucking said it, back your rank shit bubble ass back on out of here.....

Ever play Domino's?

Does playing the Noid game on Nintendo count? I loved doing that! Of course I have played Domino's. I love chicken foot!

Do you like red, pesto or NO sauce on your pizza?

I am a big fan of red and pesto sauces. I still to this day love Gino's pizza from Ft. Smith. They were before Sbarro's time and you paid by the slice, only it was one of those no sauce places. Pretty good......

Ever kill a deer?

Yeah I was on this camping missing with my dad Chuck Norris in the Deldilorian Alps and he showed me how to kill a deer with a fingernail that he used as a deadly boomerang to slice of the deers head in one slice (think Oddjob with the hat or shoe). Thanks dad!

Ever kill a deer with a car?

My foster dad (Rick) was driving his 1980 something 325i through the back woods of Arkansas one night with me in the passenger seat and struck a deer on the way to my grandma's place. I didn't know what happened because I was almost asleep, then felt us hit a brick wall it felt like. He got out and through the dim light I could see him with his head on his forehead in frustration. I still hear him to this day cussing up a storm saying "fuck, ass, shit, goddamnit, etc." out in the dark trying to be covert about it with his young son in the passenger seat.

How about with a gun?

I would like to. But don't own a rifle. I would probably have more fun out in the early morning sun loving the thrill of the hunt. The thrill and the suspense right before the shot, and then the tracking that is involved to go along with finding the wounded deer.

Ever make homemade sausage?

Yep, its always at my place, ladies, just line up for about 8 full inches of homemade sausage right out of my house. It's good and juicy too. You can't resist! You know those Big Sausage Pizza videos? I am the guy that supplies the homemade sausage!

Do you know where the home of the double decker pizza is..?

England? That's a pretty good guess I suppose? I really don't know? Sounds about right though.......

Scariest place in the world?

The debt collection agency? HA! The prison where the Shawshank Redemption was filmed. Supposedly that place is intense with ghosts and spirits if you believe in that sort of thing.

Salt or pepper?

Pepper. Salt, you are NOTHING without pepper. Pepper you make my day whenever you are available to be put on my food. Salt just makes me want to drink more liquid and NOT enjoy the food. Pepper, you accentuate the food taste so it is better.....and Tabasco, well, if I were to ever turn gay, you would be the bottle I would turn to for all my anal needs.

Salt or Pepa?

Man, you really are trying to shove this salt thing down my throat aren't you survey? Oh, you are talking about that shitty 90's R&B girls group now? Oh, sorry, guess I'll let it slide. I was always into the Salt of Salt N Pepa. But that chick from TLC takes the cake though, I always wanted to make love to a hot African American baseball catcher......

Have you ever lost your groove?

I'm white. I have no groove. It's proven throughout history and sock hops around the globe. I just don't have groove to begin with.

Ever get it back?

I have a little bit now I suppose. Don't know how I got some in the first place but I guess my groove is just the retarded white boy shaking dance. I act a fool when I am out on the dance floor, but I promise it is a good time if I am around people I know and I have a few drinks in me.

How?

I just fucking told you asscunt of a survey! Jesus H. Christ! I got a little bit back because of my white boy dancing skills. Every white person gets a little groove when they ATTEMPT to dance. Its kind of a pity groove point. The more and more you dance and attempt it, the more you are likely to receive said groove points. I am at about 1 groove point (the average white person is at about 5).

Can we see?

No, you cannot see me try to gain groove points. It's just not needed. If you would like to see that be sure to send two or three Shiner's my way (preferably Kolsch) and if the beat is good and I like the company I'm dancing with, IT'S ON!

Piss Fetish Survey

2010-04-06T15:48:00.001-05:00

June 9, 2008 -

1. When was the last time you showered?

This morning before work, its my routine in the morning to wake my stanky ass up!

2. When was the last time you told someone you loved them?

Ummmm, last night I suppose over the phone? We talked about Rock Band and it was a very special moment.

3. When was the last time you had your favorite meal?

It's been a little while? Maybe 4 or 5 days or so? I love me some homemade pizza!

4. When was the last time you went to church?

Wow, probably Easter Sunday. The church my mom and family goes to is a little too mainstream for me.

5. When was the last time you read a book?

Does the instruction manual to a game count? I picked up Bully: Scholarship Edition for the Wii and read a little bit. Pretty cool "Grand Theft" type game with a twist from Rockstar…….

6. When was the last time you took a much needed vacation?

I guess you could consider taking a half day on Friday to go up to Frisco to get Stars gear with Carly would be considered a vacation? I bought almost 500 bucks worth of stuff (retail price) but only paid about 200……..

7. When was the last time you told yourself you needed to change?

Probably a few months back. Things were getting monotonous and they needed to change. I knew a few people would be mad at me for doing what I did but I thought it was the best thing to do.

8. When was the last time you decided you needed new clothes (even though you didn't)?

On my way out to the lake with Carly. I saw a few pairs of Old Navy shorts and a white collared shirt (it reminds me of a Mexican Barber shirt for some strange reason? ).

9. When was the last time you spent time with the family?

Sunday night my mom came in and told me of the house situation and my little bro Sean watched me play Bully.

10. When was the last time you ate your all time favorite candy?

It was game 6 of the Stanley Cup Final game and I ate some Red Vines licorice during the game. And before that I had a really nice slice of Key Lime pie after sex.

11. When was the last time you watched a really good movie?

Well, I thoroughly enjoyed MST3K: The Movie for the umpteenth time. But the last "new" movie I saw was Diary Of The Dead on DVD. Love me some George A. Romero movies!

12. When was the last time you made friends with old enemies?

I honestly don't have too many enemies. There are three at the moment that come to mind but don't know if they will want to be friends again. Maybe in time.

13. When was the last time you bought something for someone out of the blue?

For some reason it just hit me one day to buy someone an Eagles Greatest Hits CD at Fry's. I'm an okay fan of their music, not big into them, but whatever, they wanted it and forgot to put it back on the rack. So I bought it for them.......

14. When was the last time you helped someone in need?

Does changing Jerica's oil count? :-P Nah, she really wasn't in need, but I did help? The other instance that comes to mind is when I did stop when I saw a MINI on the side of the road and attempted to help them out but they had already called Roadside Assistance. It was the MINI thing to do!

15. When was the last time you took time to pray?

Last time I did that was out at Carly's lake house before an awesome steak dinner! Could have been steak and catfish but my corn flake lures didn't get any bites…….

16. When was the last time you told someone something personal?

I told Carly all about my piss fetish! :P I guess I will leave it at that! HAHAHA!

17. When was the last time you took the time to do something important?

Wow. I don't know really? I guess going the extra mile at work to get that Night On The Town Award? Used it wisely on Stars gear at the Warehouse sale! :D

18. When was the last time you spend a lot of money you didn't have to spend?

Well, read question number 17 again. I spent probably more than I should up at the Stars Warehouse Sale. And come to find out, after I took a half day off of work they lowered the price down even more on Saturday. But then again I didn't want to wait in line for 2 hours.

19. When was the last time you asked someone to forgive you or said you were sorry?

It was a Friday "date" night. Only I wasn't with the right person on that "date". And had to apologize for lying.

20. When was the last time you took a good nap?

Oh man, I look forward to the tryptophan filled air of Carly's house. I fall asleep as soon as I come in the entrance. So any nap over there is a good one. I usually sleep for 10 to 13 hours.

21. When was the last time you exercised?

On the ice Saturday night at the Silver Wings game. We lost in OT, but it was a great game and we gave our all for 45 seconds each shift.

22. When was the last time you felt in love?

Tough question, the verdict is still out on that one. I can't really pin point a specific time or what not. But it was a slow progression over the course of a long period of time.

23. When was the last time you felt loved?

Sunday afternoon. There was a pool of something on the sheets. HAHAHA! Yep, it was cool to sleep in and have some nakey time.

24. When was the last time you held somebody so tight you didn't want to let go?

Probably my ex's deceased dog Carter. I loved him so much. He was awesome, our laid back personalities just fit, and I can remember a few times I did hug him until I didn't want to let go. I hope you guys don't think I have this weird deceased dog fetish or something? :P

25. When was the last time you really thought about your future?

I sometimes think about it everyday, so today then. It's looking better and better. It's not going to be an easy road by any means, but things will fall together and get going. It all happens for a reason.

For The Freaks

2010-04-06T15:44:00.001-05:00

April 30, 2008 -

Hello there freaks! I know I know. Not all of you are this way, in fact, some of you are rather tame compared to me. But I figured I would let you guys in on some of my random thoughts and ideas. This story that I will read you is not supposed to be exciting or erotic in anyway. It is for a bit called Sextastic Tuesday on my favorite podcast Distorted View. I was driving home one day and was listening to Tim read an erotic story (if you want to call it that) about a huge fat woman sitting in front of a tv screen eating food. She had a bucket of chicken, and all sorts of side fixings to go with it. Now, since it is called Sextastic Tuesday it is supposed to creep you out and get you twisted just a bit. So, what happens in the story is she starts to picture the head of Howie Mandel on the end of a chicken leg and proceeds to stick it in her vagina. Pretty fucked up huh? Well, that's the kind of thing you come to expect from Sextastic Tuesday stories. People shoving maggots in their cooters, fingering themselves in Chinese Restaurant dumpsters, it all is out there and is just off the wall. Some of them are off of Literotica.com where they have tons of stories. Others are submitted by listeners of the show who have a good idea for a story and want to send it his way.

I wanted to do something that had never been done before, and was trying to find a story that I could latch onto and continue the story a little bit. Make another story out of a previous one. And finally one day it hit me which one I could do, and how. So, it inspired me to write this story. Now, I know that I sometimes get inspired by the most mundane thing on the face of the planet (like the Ashley in Flower Mound blog, or the Easter blog) but this one was a different sort of inspiration. It inspired my dark side. And you know what, I ran with it........

So here is an email I sent Tim (the host of the show) and my story follows it. Read with caution, I do want to warn you that it is rather graphic and disgusting, and if you get to a certain point do not continue, because it will probably get worse and more descriptive. So, anyway, I haven't shared a blog with you guys in awhile and figured this would suffice. Plus, this lets you guys into my dark side that hardly anybody gets to see. So, with that I give you my Sextastic Tuesday story........

Hey Tim,

I've been a fan of your show for well over 2 and a half or 3 years now. I've called in a few times to the voice mail line and heard my voice on your great show. One of my very first Sextastic Tuesday shows that I remember that really stuck in my mind was the one Cheryl Merkowski read about the two hot lesbians in the shower and the turd on the bed. She read that story and as soon as she started to mention how she poked a hole through the character's ass into her vagina and then shit out of her vagina I was hooked. I have always loved Sextastic Tuesday and hope it never goes away. Sure, a few of the stories have been clunkers but there are a few that stick out in my mind as classics.

I have been wanting to write a Sextastic Tuesday story for you for so long I just didn't think I was as fucked up as some of the other freaks out there are. As soon as I heard the precursor to my story I had my idea and ran with it. It is a continuation of another Sextastic Tuesday story you have read and one you just recently did as a classique (replay) story. Don't think what I did has ever been done before so enjoy the story, you should get which story I'm talking about as you go along. Love the show Timmy!

Freak for life,

Justin M.
(McCullster)

Crime Scene
by: McCullster

Chelsea and Steven were some of the best crime scene investigators in the Jacksonville, Florida area. There wasn't a scene in the metroplex area that they hadn't been able to crack and get enough evidence to convict a suspect. They arrived on the scene at the Twin Peaks Trailer Park together in an unmarked police car and strolled lightly through the gravel parking lot to the home in question. Police lights, tape, and a few investigators and men in blue scoured through the surrounding bushes to find any sign of information.

They slowly walked up the handicap ramp to the victim's residence. Anna Kerkowitz was her name. She had lived a life of isolation and seclusion, only coming out briefly to get groceries and order pizza. The ramp creaked and wabbled as if a person of great weight had walked this way many times. As soon as they opened the door to the trailer, the smell hit them. It was a culmination of all things rank and disgusting. The hint of stale food, dead flies, maggots, and feces were noted in the stale odor. It kind of reminded Steven of what a cat had done when it crapped on top of a hot stovetop oven while they were out running errands one day. The two let the door close behind them and the smell and atmosphere engulfed them into this weird and strange new world.

They stood there in the entrance way on the small square of vinyl fake tile, looking around at the kitchenette, the small living area, and then glancing back into the bed quarters. The scene was a ghastly one, the kitchen looked as if it had been rummaged through looking for spare pieces of meat and utensils. Old chinese boxes, fast food bags, half eaten boxes of pizza all sat overturned on the kitchen counter with cockroaches crawling in and out of the fridge and cabinets that had been left partially open.

The two investigators scanned down to the living area to see mutiple tv trays of partially eaten food. Spaghetti and meatballs infested with maggots and flies, mashed potatoes and gravy with flies caught in the gravy, and a three liter of Sam's Choice cola sat to the right of the recliner all adorned the living room. On the floor in front of the recliner was what looked like a small pool of brownish tan liquid. It had been almost 3 days since someone had reported the tenant missing, and after those three days the land lord had only gone up to the front door and smelled the foul stench of mushy diarhrrea and shit. The stain was only slightly mushy on the red shag carpet, and had probably bled through to the baseboard and rotted out the underside of her trailer.

Chelsea and Steven moved to the front of the recliner to kneel down in front of the victim. They saw the 500 lb white female laid back with a smile on her face with her jaw slightly open, as if she had gone in an immense amount of pleasure at the very end of her life. Her skin was a slight blueish color from the lack of oxygen, and her veins still remained red from the old blood that continued to sit in her circulatory system. They felt the floor beneath them rise and fall with the pressure of their hands and heard the almost sucking sound the soaked carpet and floor made . Chelsea looked up to notice the womans red pasty vagina lips and fat enlarged clitoris. She put on her surgical gloves and began to poke and prod at the vaginal walls. Small beef jerky like pieces of shit had dried and crusted to the underside of her stomach bunt. Steven stood up slightly and lifted the roll of skin up for Chelsea to get a better look underneath with the skin of the 500lb womans privates were made to look like a fanny pack.

"Oh my GAWD!" Chelsea exclaimed as her fingers slid over a piece of mushy meat caught inside of the dead womans cunt. Chelsea was able to spread and stretch the dead woman's vagina about 4 or 5 full inches to reach her whole fist inside to see and feel what was in there. She slowly pulled her hand out to get a few plastic sporks, a half a corn on the cob, and a small chicken leg with a few pasty black pubic hairs attached to the top of the piece of chicken. It was also covered in small bits of corn, mashed potatoes, and even a few maggot larvae had gotten a hold of the meat and was eating away at it.

"Gosh honey, you think she would do this to herself?" Chelsea asked as she inspected the piece of chicken once more in disbelief. "I don't know, why would she do something something like that to herself? Maybe her boyfriend did this to her and then fled the scene?" Steven replied still in shock. "Huh? Why don't you ever fuck me with pieces of meat? Like sausages, or even cucumbers sometimes......maybe even chicken legs honey?" Chelsea beamed sarcastically and looked up at Steven. "Well, didn't really think you were into that sort of thing I guess?" He shot back.

Chelsea sat down in the pool of shit, corn, blood, and semi-digested food matter and began to touch herself with her surgical gloves. She slowly undid her police cargo pants and slid the chicken leg down under her already soak stained panties. She continued to rub her clit with the food item and enjoyed its good balance of being dry with just enough grease to get her going. Steven sat down beside her and grabbed the bowl of maggot infested mashed potatoes and gravy off of the tv tray and ripped open her shirt to slather the cold white and dark goodness all over her chest and neck. The maggots continued to squirm and jerk as they tried to catch their balance in the landslide of gravy and potatoes. A few bit into her and one was even so lucky enough to latch on to her nipple.

Steven, getting excited all of a sudden, reached over and found his police line tape. He stripped off his plastic surgical gloves because he wanted to feel all of this crime scene had to offer. He wanted to make sure it got stuck inside the grooves of his fingertips and stuck underneath his fingernails. He found his police line tape and began to mummify his right hand, wrapping from his wrist down to the points of his fingers. He made sure to leave his four fingers straight and tuck his thumb underneath them to make a nice little jabbing utensil. He reached up and put his police line wrapped hand inside the dead Anna's pussy, stroking in and out and hearing the dead flesh squirt and move as his hand pulsated in and out. Her liquid filled stomach pulsed up and down with every thrust of his fist. Small chunks of her vagina walls began to come apart and fall out of her pussy. Chelsea had since moved into a position to catch them as they fell from the recliner. Steven began to cup his plastic hand now inside her vagina and was using a sweeping motion to pull and grab everything out of her vagina he could. Maggots, flies covered in 3 day old pussy juice, and small remnants of plastic continued to fall down onto Chelseas open stomach and vagina.

Steven then arose and stood slightly over the 500lb woman. He looked down to see Chelsea scoot down even further so Anna's vagina would spew forth more lucious liquid onto her chest and neck. She continued to play with the chicken leg and began to shove the boney end into her vagina. Steven moved around the dead womans blue red streaking fanny pack looking flab to a position that suited him, and began to punch and wail on the womans stomach. With each punch he gave a squirt after squirt of bile infused liquid spewed from her vagina and asshole onto Chelsea's chest. Chelsea quickly found out that the plastic sporks that Anna had used before her death she had actually used to created a hole going from her vagina into her asshole, and now was using both holes of her body to excrete the semi warm shit liquid. It rained down in stream after stream on Chelsea like a warm brown shower, and she rubbed her body all over and opened her mouth to catch some of the liquid to taste its chunky bitterness. She gargled the brown chocolate gravy and spit it back up into the air, a few pieces of corn getting stuck on her chin and cheeks.

Steven continued to punch on the dead Anna's huge flabby stomach, Anna's mouth slightly open with small gasps of air being sucked into her dried up lungs with each blow Steven threw into her. Seeing Chelsea was almost ready to climax, he threw both elbows down in a hard wrestler move onto the stomach of the dead woman, and with a sucking sound, a quief, and a slight moan out of the dead woman's mouth, she prolapsing her massive vagina out 5 or 6 inches onto Chelsea's chest. Chelsea tilted her head back in orgasm and rubbed the red prolapsed vagina onto her chest, feeling the wet stickiness of the vaginal walls. Just for shits and grins and being so turned on by the whole ordeal, Steven ended up jerking off with his mummified police tape hand seeing his wife lay on the floor in pleasure in this crime scene, and shot his load all over the dead lifeless prolapsed vagina.

The two had gotten all of the info they needed from this crime scene. They cleaned up and headed out the door. On the way out Steven and Chelsea couldn't help but smile as they walked out into the fresh air and saw a framed Howie Mandel photo hanging on the wall.......they had just done all of that incredibly hot action in front of Howie Mandel himself........

THE END

Easter Weekend

2010-04-06T15:35:00.002-05:00

March 26, 2008 -

Yes that's right. Just had a weird Easter weekend last week. Did the normal stuff I guess you could say, but in my head it was weird. I guess I am that type of guy. I sit here in the Comfort Suites in Houston drinking a Rolling Rock beer (my 4th of the night) and enjoying the dark hotel suite with a little iTunes music set on shuffle. My weekend Easter weekend was uneventful to say the least, but as most of you know I tend to pick up on weird instances and extrapolate them completely out of proportion.

The first instance was Saturday. I stayed out Friday night with my buddy until 4 am playing Rock Band and earning stars and fans. I slept in most of the day Saturday (around 2:30pm) when my mom hit me up as I lay on the couch all sprawled out with no shirt on and my scruffy beard blowing in the wind. It was probably just the fan up a little too high but it felt like a "super model" fan shot. Anyway, she then instructed me that they were going to be heading out to church at around 3:30pm. I had barely even set the timer for the oven to kick on and start heating up for my Tostino’s pizza. That gave me 10 minutes for the oven to heat up, then 14 for the pizza to cook, and a little less than 30 something minutes to sit in my sloth-like state and enjoy my pizza and watch mindless television. Hackers was on I believe and I enjoyed watching that with Angelina Jolie. They sat down in front of her "supposed" kick ass laptop that she had just got and all of the geeks in the movie were "oohing and aahing" over it spitting out things like "It’s got a 300mhz front side bus and was even equipped with a hella fast 28.8 baud modem." Are you F-ing kidding me! I can PISS faster than that and the servers I work on today (the crappy ones that are broke) have a 1333mhz front side bus! SHEESH! Just showed a sign of the times back in 1994 I believe?

Anyway, I sat and watched Hackers for as long as I can before I went back upstairs to change and put on some nice jeans and a nice collared shirt (tucked in for once). I wet my hair and combed it completely forward (pics in St. Baldrick’s Gallery) to make it nice and neat. But yet my hair continues to have curls on the back of my neck and I can’t ever get that one part to lay down. That is one thing I am NOT going to miss when I shave my head completely bald. But I got dressed and tried to brush my beard as best as I know how. I haven’t officially gone overboard and bought a "beard comb" or the like to keep it nicely shorn. I tend to like the scruffy pirate look and don’t really care how it looks. I will kind of miss stroking it and running my hand down my chin and underneath feeling the hairs. I kind of lift my head up and it reminds me of a dog lifting his head up when you scratch that certain part of his underside and he kind of sticks his neck out.

I fix myself up semi-decent and head downstairs and get into our van. It takes us over to the location for church and what do you know it. There are about 30 guys in orange vests and walkie-talkies guiding cars in and out of the parking lots. They essentially tell you what way to turn in, to form a line going into the parking lot, then direct you what aisle you need to turn down, and then even what parking spot to pick. All of this follow the leader stuff. Be a part of the crowd bullshit. Like sheep. Herding of sheep, or a flock. But you know what? Sheep get fucked in the ass sometimes by redneck hillbillies. So yeah, I want to be a part of that. But not really. But I walk towards the building anyway and see the "expensive people" that I touched on heading in. All of them are clean shaven and look like they shave every 30 minutes. They tan. They heat pan seared pea snaps. Hell, they probably ask for goat cheese on their pizza (to tie in the goat/sheep reference). They look at me like I have an aborted baby stapled to my face. Like they have never seen facial hair in their life.

Well, in reality I really didn’t want to go to church at all that day. The church my family goes to sometimes just doesn’t suit me. It’s one of those rock and roll concert type churches that is laid back and easy going. I swear if a homeless person wanted to watch a free concert with a band and light show they can just walk into this place and get front row tickets for the Jesus Extravaganza. I guess its one of those things that irks me. And it would be one thing if all of the teens and all of the 20 somethings went there for an "alternate" service besides the normal church activities, but when you go see elderly people there, people like your parents also there who think its cool and hip with the "new" Jesus message, then something just isn’t right. I guess its a subliminal message inside my bones that tells me that parents and kids are supposed to be completely separate entities. Kids are not supposed to like things that parents like (like esparagus and grits) and older people are supposed to grow out of the "yummy phase". Just a little take on kool-aid, shells and cheese, fruit roll ups, and lunchables. When do you ever see an adult with one of those? HA! Never! Well guess what......I eat all of them shits. But when you get older you are supposed to change and can at least handle the more adult meals. I make the same statement as above but only reversed and about grits. No kid in their right mine liked grits (at least I didn’t). But over time I grew to love the crap out of some good grits and butter. I have no idea what grits are? Maybe a weird version of breakfast rice? I don’t know. But damn is that stuff good.

And also parents aren't supposed to like what kids like, its just common nature. And if parents DO start to like and be a part of what the younger generation is doing then that means they are messed up, don’t have any adult friends, or want to be young and whorish again. So anyway, I force myself to go and get inside and get this abortion over with. I walk in and the informational video of random images of spikes and a crown of thorns done to a bass drum "push" are playing on the 4, count them 4, LCD jumbo-trons. They are the "cool" filler that show all of those images in an artistic manner and want to inspire you and make you feel some faith. But we get a seat in the back under the balcony and the laser light show begins with a band up on stage playing christian rock. I sit and watch as the production value goes out the window and they shoot the ceremony like a rock concert. Boom cameras and the like pan over the crowd and you would think U2 was playing up on stage with the LCD screens changing from bible inspiration images to video of the band and crowd.

The rest of the ceremony goes off without a hitch. They don’t have an actual preacher get up on stage and do a sermon. Oh no. This is better. They have a video streaming up link in HD to the OTHER laser light show in Plano where the preacher is and we watch a video of his sermon. Greatness. But that's not where my blog takes a turn. It was actually on the ride home. After being part of the herd for more than an hour and a half we headed out and got into the van. Once again, even leaving that place doesn’t mean you get to do anything on your own. You have to be guided out by the tag team men of the lord who share walkie-talkies. So you get out of the parking lot and think you get this sigh of relief? Oh no. You get to go out to the world and get told EVERYTHING you need to do. How you are supposed to do this, how the order is supposed to be kept. How you are supposed to get in line for groceries? And how you are supposed to drive and how you are supposed to act.

As I was on my way home in the backseat, we approached a red light and the cars started to back up all around us. I looked out of the windows and saw a small clearing with what looked like 30 or so birds in it just pecking around in the grass. I seriously thought of just F’ing with all of those people stuck in line at the light sitting there in their SUV in a mindless haze. Just run out in the grass and scare the F out of the birds and send them shitting all over their freshly washed (paid for the wash of course) sport utility vehicle. So at that moment I just wanted to change things up and make things "out of the ordinary" for those sheep out there.

I have a distinct car: MINI, check. I am growing out a scruffy beard, got that. I wanted to shove large plastic Easter eggs up the Easter bunny's vagina, that way, she would (or he) would get to crap out extra large pellets. And my personality is just way off and I think of this crap. I’m sorry guys. This little moment just stood out in my mind and I had to share it with you guys. I know I have an off kilter sense of humor sometimes and for the most part I let it out into the world and it touches a lot of people I come in contact with. But with some of the small moments like this I really don’t need to share it because it would probably be too much......

Anyway, take care guys, I will see you on the bald side of the moon.......hope you had a good Easter......

Random Thoughts.......

2010-04-06T15:32:00.001-05:00

March 20, 2008 -

1. I can throw a foam ball across all 6 of my coworkers cubicles against a wall and it will bounce right back into my hand. Sadly it nicked my Dallas Stars bobble head ice rink and kinda tore off a piece of Turco's shit mitt. I swear, that thing looks freaking HORRIBLE! Thank you little kids from the Philippines!

2. I have Miller Lite finger-less gloves that I got from a Stars Watching Party sitting on my desk with what looks like random clear goo liquid flakes from something? Maybe a Honey Bun that I set on top of them? I don’t know? But I can’t really be manly and tough with these cool beer gloves with fatty schmegma on the top parts.

3. I love that my boss brought in a guitar to work and has it at my arms reach whenever I feel the need to belt out a funny song. I usually play the guitar and my buddies around me will "flow" a few verses about all sorts of crazy stuff. We’ve sang about Popeye’s Chicken, hot supermodels on the internet, crazy stupid people from Myspace, and a few "van wreckers" even have a song about them (to the tune of "Hair Dresser") but my favorite song that I myself came up with was about this story that just continued to get worse and worse.

It was about me wanting some cookies that my co-worker had gotten from Quizno’s or something. Then I started to say that I wanted his MUTHA-fucking cookies! Then it turned into I was asking a mom for some cookies. But no, it got better. And the twist that I put at the end was that I was underneath the covers in an 8 years old bed and I was asking Susie’s mom to go back downstairs and get us some cookies for "build-a-fort" time. WHAT?! How did that come out? I’m in a little pink bed in a girlie decorated room and I tell a mommy to go back downstairs and get some MUTHAFUCKING cookies!?!? Sounds crazy I know but the way it came out it was simple and funny, and I just had to twist it a little bit and make it completely out there and wrong.

4. Why do I have a Conan the Barbarian Limited Edition Action Figure and see his loin cloth and kinda wonder what the hell that guy has just past the fabric? Wait.......WHAT? :P Just kidding.

5. I have 30 HR Violations and 18 Gross/Ass/Gay Violations on the Inventory Board. Every time I say something that wouldn’t fly in "corporate" offices and talk about crazy stuff my buddies go ahead and notch me a HR violation. And the Gross/Ass/Gay notch is for something that I say that is over the top on the gross scale. Just means taking things too far.

6. When I answer the phone most of the time I answer with "Yellow?!" instead of "Hello?"

7. Even after a bunch of years I still continue to quote Bud Kilmer and any of the West Canaan Coyotes from Varsity Blues.

8. Sometimes I wish I was a rat and could be up inside the A/C vents walking around in the cool maze of office buildings. Living the life in the cool air, dropping down in the break room for food instead of hanging out in NYC or California.

9. Whenever I hear the song "Route 7" by a band called Hoover my buddies and I all "flow" stupid lyrics to that instrumental song. It’s just a great song (although short) to spit out rip and rhymes (like DYLAN).

10. I’m very happy that I get to listen to music on my 2.1 stereo setup at work. My days would be overly stressed out and monotonous if I didn’t. But I get to watch and listen to all sorts of new things out there on the internet and constantly find new and interesting bands. Most of the time they are great but, other times I wish I would have shot myself 30 seconds ago before pressing play.

That’s all for now I suppose, better get back to work! PEACE GUYS!

I Hate Expensive People......

2010-04-06T15:31:00.001-05:00

March 6, 2008 -

Can you get ass fucked by a Blackberry? Because I did........

Wednesday wasn't a very good day for me. It started off okay at work and I got most of my tasks done that needed to be done. My buddy Adam had secured some tickets for me and a friend to go to a Stars game that night to see the lucious Hagman/Richards/Miettinen combo on the ice. Well, I being the great fan that I am am always up for seeing the Stars. I don't care if we are going up against the Red Wings and I just KNOW that we are going to lose (sometimes not by my boy Hagman for putting in the only goal in that game) I still want to go and hear the airhorn and jump out of my seat. It's a great experience and a good way to watch people in between periods.

Previous to Wed. I had car problems. Monday I drove home with my car pretty much in limp mode all the way home. Usually I could stop the car in a safe spot, turn the car off and back on again and I would be fine. But this time....... nope. The car was in limp mode and sounded like a lawnmower for the entire time. So I turned the car off at the gas station and tried to start the car. Crank crank crank, sputter and then dead. Crank crank crank, engine revs to about 850rpms and then dead. What the hell? Not enough fuel or something? I don't know. I called Will to tell him about it. I had had some random misfires in the engine but nothing major. I at first thought it was cool and might have been attributed to exhaust burble. But this? This was pretty serious. I couldn't start the car. So while I was on the phone with Will I reset the cars computer completely. Trip 19.......L_on, L_off, etc. and then Trip 21, then reset. Got it!

Tried to start the car again and gave it some gas this time as the car turned over. Now I was ALWAYS in limp mode! :( The car roared to life and I was able to get home safely. Now I had to be able to get to work and possibly make it to the bar? No way. Not gonna risk it just to get three beers closer to my UFO goal (which according to my calculations I am now 13 trips behind :( so if anybody wants to go up to the Flying Saucer and drink with me on a day OTHER than Tuesday let me know). I had to get to work and then drive my car up to Will's on Tuesday. Alright, no big deal, I can do that! Well, it was a little harder than that.

My gas gauge was right at half a tank as I left for work on Tuesday and started in. I got to 35E and the 635 turn and traffic started to slow down. Oh great. Just what I need with a car that is starving for fuel........idling. So, as I sat in a little traffic heading towards 35E I let the car sit at idle a few times and as I started to give gas again the car would jerk and throw hella fits about it not getting enough fuel. Finally on a decelleration from traffic the car sputtered and died going about 15 miles an hour on 635. Luckily I made it onto the shoulder and was able to reset the car again and get the lawnmower car started again. I made it into work after that incident and made it up to Will's after that without issue. My gas gauges was currently at 1/4 tank now! WTF!!!!!

I ended up having to ride in my buddies Explorer at work to go get our ritualistic .89 cent Popeye's special. You get a leg and a thigh for .89 mutha fucking cents bitches! Are you kidding me! I eat like a king there on Tuesdays! Get me two of those specials and a biscuit just for shits and grins and I'm out the door with less than 4 dollars out of my pocket! TAX AND ALL! It's really sad the routine I have gotten in at work. Mondays are double chicken fried steak meals for 4.99 at Grandy's off of Regal Row, Tuesdays are .89 cent specials at Popeyes, Wednesdays are 2.99 shrimp basket meals at Church's, Thursdays are up in the air and Fridays are anything too......

But anyway, getting off of my food habits, I dropped the car off at the shop around 6:30ish after traffic and made it back home safely and proceeded to get my car back the next day around closing time (5ish). That's what I was told it was probably a 3 hour job at max. They already had the part they needed and I should be ready before lunchtime. No biggie right? Well, this is where the plan goes out the window. You see, there is another certain person that spends a lot of dough ahead of me that would get some special treatment in fact. Screw the easy quick job. But I get ahead of myself. This person just HAD to have their custom work done that day so they could have their car that most of its life has spent under a garage bay and never gets driven.

My plan was to get a ride into work and get picked up after work at 5 and then head straight to the shop to pick up my car like I have had to do before. Then make it back down to downtown at the AAC in time for the game, beers, Stars, and great times would be had by all. I make the connection of Shaun of the Dead where Shaun is coming up with different scenarios of getting them out of the predicament they are in:

Shaun -"Alright! We'll go to my mom's house, get mom and Evan, take the Jaguar, go back, get Susan and friends at her flat, then we can all head to the Winchester and have a few cold pints until this whole thing blows over."
Friend -"Well what if Evan turns out to be a zombie/monster? Your mum did say he was sick?"
Shaun -"Alright, well, we will go to my mom's house, get mom, KILL Evan, take the Jaguar, go back, get Susan and friends at her flat, then go back over to the Winchester and have a few cold pints until this whole thing blows over."

That's kind of how my mind went as time progressively passed on Wednesday before the game and I was expecting a phone call any minute through out the day.

Me -"Alright, if he calls now I can get picked up, go to the maintenance shop, pick up the car, pay the bill, take the MINI, drive like a bat out of hell back, and then sit up in the stands and watch the Stars win! GOOD TIMES!"

So anyway, as time passed it switched to "come back and watch the second and third period," and then "just watch the third period there" and finally just "not go at all." It just sucked! I really honest to goodness can't blame anybody for what happened, I guess I'm just a sucker for making plans around what somebody told me to be how it would go down and turns out it didn't. So I had to eat the tickets and not go see the Stars, even though they lost to the Coyotes 2-1 on Wednesday. I still would have loved to be there to see Winchester get into that scrum and then minutes later score on Brysgolofphft :P or whatever his name is in goal for the Great One's crew.

But what really hit home and was most of the source behind this blog was what I saw and heard no less at the gas pump on the drive home...... We pulled into the Exxon station and picked a pump for the drivers side. Across from us was a very nice dark grey (dork silver) BMW. Probably a 3 series by the looks of it. I got out and scanned the card and got an oh so sweet smell of petrol that tickled my nose. Glorious fumes. Wait, I did eat a lot of paint chips as a kid. But I immediately heard this guy talking. Was he just chatting with the person on the passenger side of the car? Because I did hear two voices. Maybe the window was rolled down? You know, sometimes you do that just to keep the conversation going that you were having in the car? But I continued to pump and watched the numbers start to tick by and kind of leaned out to see this guy pumping gas while talking on the cell phone. Complete. Total. Idiot.

He was decked out in a nice Oxford collared shirt and some dark blue pleated khaki's with those little dress shoes with those nipple tassle things made out of leather? You know those little things! I only see them when I go to church once in a blue moon. And don't forget the dark blue matching cris-crossed triangle socks to go with the pants and the leather woven belt. He even had the nice watch to go with the whole gettup to know just how long he had been talking on the cellphone with his co-hort while he pumped his gas. But thats not just it, he could have ALSO been smoking a ciggie for all I know the way this guy was an idiot.

And what of that other voice I heard? Oh wait, there wasn't anybody in the passengers side. It was the person he was on the phone with. I could literally hear the conversation from 7 feet away at an Exxon station near a major street intersection. Just crazy.

Douche - "Hey Susan, could you please get with Evelyn in Accounting and get those claims and returns on my desk for tomorrow morning."
Susan -"OKAY SIR! I WILL DO THAT FOR YOU AND GET WITH EVELYN ON THOSE ACCOUNT SHEETS YOU ASKED FOR!"
And it went on like this for the entire time I was pumping my 40 dollars worth of gas. I basically got ear raped by a Blackberry by some douche at a gas station.

Douche - "Whats that Susan? What's it feel like to be thrust inside a 25 year old man's ass? Well, if you must know........" (proceeds to stick the Blackberry up my anus........SIDEWAYS NO LESS!! )

I really wanted to punch that guy though. I normally don't listen or watch the news because I honestly feel its not for me. Why do I need to know which snack packs are being recalled if they have already been taken off of the shelf and put into my cart? Why do I need to know if my Tostino's pizza rolls possibly have goat meat in them if I think goat meat is better? Why do I need to know if some teacher in Denton is banging a small kid if I haven't already dressed up in overalls and pretended to be a 4th grader? Why do I need to know all of that crap? You look at the world in a little bit different way than if you were to constantly wonder whats around the next corner or what could possibly get you infected, sick, and what household items could possibly kill me. I would think that since this guy HAS watched the news and knows of certain dangers that he wouldn't be talking on the cell phone while pumping gas? Oh well, guess not.......sometimes people continue to choose to be dumbass douchebags. Well, I hate expensive people. And I don't want to be that guy. And I especially don't want to wear those gay ass fucking socks. So in the end he who has the most money gets the priority, and gets to be stupid and not care in doing so at the gas pump (or in any situation for that matter). So if I can steer the course away from this life and that means living in my little world that I am currently in and eating .89 cent specials on Tuesdays for the rest of my life, then by goodness I will do it and I'll even throw in that extra biscuit too.......

Do I Have Bad Taste?

2010-04-06T15:29:00.001-05:00

February 28, 2008 -

I'm just curious if I have bad taste or not? It hit me on Saturday last weekend when I was mainly watching afternoon TV. I of course was bored and figured I could catch up on my TV shows on DVD to watch. I have a few in the chamber that I need to finish up. I was flipping around trying to be lazy and avoid setting up the DVD player. A few movies hit me in the face and were definitely keepers to finish off. First was Showtime getting right into the Shawshank Redemption. Morgan Freeman, Tim Robbins and the story makes this movie one of the greatest ever. I could probably watch the final 20 minutes forever in eternity in purgatory. Morgan Freeman's voice over and the final few scenes of Red in the corn field next to the large oak tree on the northeast corner. Just greatness. And then after I get my fill of that (some say I have ADD) I switch over to AMC and catch another great movie in the form of the Memphis Belle. A lot of great actors you never thought were in this movie were in it. John Lithgow plays a great military officer that gives the Belle special treatment against the other flight crews. All of the memorable characters like the guy who played "Rudy" being the ball turret gunner and even a good start from Harry Connick Jr.

Now, I could have chosen to watch any of these two great movies that I have seen obviously 4 or 5 times (more-so for Shawshank), but I chose to setup the DVD player. What would I watch that could possibly top those two movies? I have a few comedies like Metalocalypse and the second season of Robot Chicken here? Then some more I need to catch up on are a few dramas like Crime Story, Miami Vice, and the second season of Sea Quest DSV. Does this make me have bad taste? To turn down great cinematic genius like those two that are probably in the American Film History Museum for greatness so I can watch a freaking cheesy ass "Star Trek-esque" Sea Quest with a fucking talking dolphin and supernatural representations of Neptune and his long lost lover in a flooded Greek tomb. Really? You are serious? Or how about the episode where they go aboard a hydroponics lab underwater with no crew and no survivors. Only to find out that the plants mutated and are alive and can attack humans and turn them into golden plant fertilizer? I swear. That show now that I see it all over again, is the underwater Star Trek of its time. Back BEFORE Star Trek made its triumphant return to the TV screen and before all of those Galactica and other offshoots of Trekdom, this was it.

So, I guess I wrote this blog to get it out there that I occasionally watch shitty movies, I occasionally watch shitty TV shows. But for the most part they are cool in some form or fashion and I missed out on it. Kinda like I mentioned Miami Vice. This show was before my time, I shouldn't be watching it. But Don Johnson and Phillip Micheal Thomas in their cool 80's suits just tickled my fancy. Mostly the combination of music and visuals spur my interest. It has its moments where it shines through with greatness.

So do I have bad taste? Where I choose to watch Darwin the talking dolphin and cheesy Star Trek story lines? Or something like Memphis Belle or Mighty Ducks? Wait, Mighty Ducks is in the crap pile right? I forgot! :P Yeah, Shawshank should be there with Memphis Belle, I guess I am getting things confused now...... Need to keep my story straight.

So, just ask for my opinion on all of those movies or TV shows. I'll probably tell you they are the greatest thing since sliced bread........in their own way of course. They have their place, I just had to ask if I have bad taste or not for thinking they are greatness.........which I know they are.......wait.........why did I write this blog again? Oh yeah, I guess I am bored and don't want to do either a: walk into the other room and flip channels or b: walk into the other room and setup the DVD setup. Oh well, only a few more minutes till the Dallas Stars come on anyway! :D

Fuck You Ashley Of Flower Mound!

2010-04-06T15:27:00.001-05:00

February 17, 2008 -

Well, on Friday of this past week I was headed home in the cold February evening. I slipped into my car and plugged in the ipod. Usually my schedule consists of listening to the Adam Carolla Show out of LA in podcast form on my drive into work. It's great, and isn't your typical Dallas morning radio show. There are no time updates, no weather forecasts, no traffic reports, nothing like that. It's strictly a talk show in Adam's sense of the word. And being from LA I kinda like that its not the standard formula of morning radio, traffic, weather, news, news, weather, traffic, time, and then they start all over again without ever getting into any deep conversations.

On the way home from work this past Friday I turned on my normal after-work routine of sorts. I start listening to the Distorted View show podcast. It's a one man show of all of the most fucked up and out there stuff out on the internet. Most of it is usually porn related, but he does have a tendency to play new audio from all sorts of things that he thinks is funny. My new favorite audio clip is this homeless man screaming out all of this gibberish that makes no sense. He doesn't play my favorite "Don't taze me bro! Don't taze me!" but I get that from Adam Carolla from time to time. It's his favorite! But I pulled out of work and headed up 35E listening to the show which has always tickled my distorted funny bone. I actually got to hear completely crystal clear audio of a guy cumming into a shot glass! What would you think the girl is going to do with that right? Shoot it correct? Oh no! Not on this show! She grabs a nice little red/white straw and begins to snort it up her nose like cocaine. The audio of this actually made me bust out either laughing and also almost get a little sick to my stomach. I could hear the liquid going up into the straw as well as small chunks of stuff.

I continued on my way home listening to more stories from around the world that tickled Tim (Distorted View)'s fancy and got up to the Bass Pro Shop area. Now, this is where the fork in the road happens. I could have done two things.

A) I could have stayed on 635 in a long one line traffic jam and get off at Bass Pro and continue home like normal.
B) Take the exit early and cut through and meet back up at 2499 and head down that way to the house. Or........
C) I can get off an exit early like above and go the back way, it might be backed up but it is a tad bit faster, and plus I can also cut through the Grapevine Mills parking lot its even hella faster to bypass all of that other stuff on 2499.

I chose to go the C) route. To go the back way this time. Take a few turns and I'm over in front of Bass Pro cutting over to the mall. Take a left into the parking lot and start to drive into the parking lot and to go around the movie theater, etc. that is a little faster. I get to a stop sign and what shows up on my right made me want to punch a baby in the face. It made me want to punch a baby, and then put it in the freezer and then microwave it to get it back warm again! :P I looked over to see an H2 Hummer fully stretched limo at the stop sign there. Now, I see limos all of the time in DFW, hell, I see Lamos, Ferraris and all sorts of other cars but this one just twirked my hairy nipple just a tad. It was a big mutha and it even had the big ol blinging rims to go with it. But what it said on the side of one of the blacked out windows drove the knife home. It read, "Happy 7th Birthday Ashley!" in white shoe polish.

Are you kidding me? A 7 year old gets a fucking H2 blinged out limo to take them over to that crappy Chuckie Cheese with the stupid animatronic animals who are supposedly "in a band". It just hit home to me that this really is Dallas. And this is how things are. I can remember my 7th birthday back in Fort Smith, Arkansas at Crystal Palace skating center. Pretty much a skating rink with a few arcade games and even a DJ booth that was elevated but with limo tint. You had to put song requests on a sheet of paper and send it through "bank teller" style. My parents rented out a little room for about an hour or so there at the skate park and we had crappy Sam's club pizza and coke in those small weird styrofoam cups. About 10 of my best friends showed up to skate and partake in the store bought cake experience that IS Crystal Palace.

So, I just wanted to send out a blog to say FUCK YOU to Ashley in Flower Mound. F you for having a much better childhood than me! F you for taking advantage of that right now and then going back when you are older and outdoing what your parents did to you when you were seven. But, in the end I know that when Ashley probably gets to be my age she will look back and pick the right path and someone or something will show her what its like to be 7 in a 2020 or something. I guess she'll look back and see some 7 year old and watch him in a hovering F-18 jet or something with tint and blinging rims that has an LCD screen on the side that reads "Happy birthday J!" It will be my kid Ashley! So there! Suck on that piece! We'll be rolling up to the ice rink in a fucking F-18 bitches! I'll see all of you asses there! :P

Just wanted to say that. If I had picked any other way to go home I would have never seen it. I guess I was supposed to see that. It was supposed to remind me where I came from, and also where I am going. I appreciate everything my family and friends have ever done for me. Even those few times my buddy Brian went up to the concession stand and got a refill on his Suicide drink just so I could have some........:D

P.S. If you see or hear of any Ashley up in Flower Mound that looks 7 be sure to slap the shit out of her and tell her Happy Birthday for me!

The Best Thing You Can Do With Your Mouth.......

2010-04-06T15:25:00.001-05:00

February 9, 2008 -

Well, I better update this damn blog thing, and figured I could get your attention with a headline like that. I did didn't I? Well, good. I'll fill you in on that later......

I find myself more and more these days not doing what I should be doing. I seem to keep forgetting things left and right. Later I try to backtrack and say what I "should" be doing in that instance and that I forgot. This sucks for me because I am always behind the curve. I always get whats second best. And its never 100% out there in the open for everyone to see. I have had to turn around numerous times at night to go back into places and have almost walked away from something that is potentially great. I have not said something and then tried to say it later. In the end the moment passed and it just didn't work.

I'm working on all of this stuff. It's something that's hard to overcome. But in the end will benefit me ten fold. I wish I could go into more detail about this situation that I'm in but I just can't. In my mind its like something from a movie and I would kind of like to keep it that way. All I need is a great soundtrack to go along with it. I'm thinking of bands like "Explosions In The Sky" or "This Will Destroy You" to do that. I find myself listening to these guys more and more because it keeps me in that "movie" state of mind. That kind of stuff makes me happy and makes me chuckle from time to time to think about it. I think about all of those instances that I had and all of the "what-ifs" start to hit me and I start to re-enact them inside my head and see them happen fictitiously in my head. But I just want those things to happen for real, and all it takes is a little bit better outlook on things and trying to be in the moment.

The piece that really hit home was when I watched Cloverfield for the first time. I saw the main character have a relationship with a friend for a few days here and there. And that each little bit of our lives is made up into small moments that we need to take advantage of. The main character had this relationship and thought it was best to break things off because he was going away. But what he didn't know is that that's not always the best thing to do. What he should have done was have all of those special moments in that time leading up to the "Cloverfield" moment. That even though he was getting ready to leave they still would have that short amount of time together where those moments just fit. Just have to take advantage of those moments when you can, and not hold back. Some might lump that in with jumping the gun on feelings and being too emotional or what have you, but I see it as just taking those moments as what they are. And there is nothing wrong with that.

Saying you are going to do it is one thing, and actually doing it is another. Just have to work on that with my personality. So in closing I guess, and to answer the question I posed at the beginning, is that the best thing you can do with your mouth is to open it even when your mind is telling you to not say that. Also the best thing you can do with your mouth is eat 3 bowls of cereal and then chug as much of an ice cold Dr. Pepper as you can........

I've told a few close friends this, and it makes for a pretty cool Bill Nye science project if you are really bored watching cartoons in your boxers on Saturday morning. But eat 3 bowls of cereal (preferable Fruity Pebbles or Cocoa Pebbles) but Corn Pops and anything high in sugar will probably do it. Then have a nice cold DP ready for you for when you get done. I'm talking ice cold. Like almost to the point of freezing (but not quite). Take those three bowls down and then right after you are done with your last bite of cereal crack open the can (or cup) and drink down as much as you possibly can. I beg anyone to make it past 3 seconds without starting to cry. You can't do it. The chemical reaction or whatever it is in your mouth causes so much disturbance/tingling that you actually start to cry.

That's the best thing you can do with your mouth.......in my mind anyway. Take care guys and I'll be sure to speak my mind a little better out there......it helps all of us in the end. Helps us both in those moments.......

WOW!

2010-04-06T15:23:00.001-05:00

January 25, 2008 -

A lot of things have changed here lately in the past 48 hours. I sit here on Friday night enjoying a great band called "Band of Horses". They are this great down tempo kind of melodic rock band that I when I heard of them I really enjoyed their first CD. And like I mentioned elsewhere I purchased over 200 dollars in CD's (from Christmas gift cards) and had them arrive in mid-January. They are currently ripped onto my portable hard drive and are now part of iTunes. Just have to organize them and tag them.

It just started to hit me as the echoish melodies filled my ears that a lot of things have hit me all at once. Just all of the stuff that is currently happening right now just hit me tonight. I won't go into details because you guys really don't read blogs for that reason. It's basically just all of the stuff that I'm going to have to prepare for when my family is no longer here in town with me. It is a change that I wait for. Anxiously.

On a good note, I have everything ready to play hockey. I just need to get my shorts from Brillo and pay and get my shoulders, elbow pads, and shin guards from his buddy at work. Everything else is set besides the most important thing. Ice hockey skates. Those I already have my eye on and have received pretty much everything else in the mail. Surprisingly I have this nervous tick when I am out shopping for things. I really don't like to deal with salespeople, or people like that in general.

I really wish that they would come up with a system so if I actually needed help I would press a buzzer that I grabbed whenever I walked into the store and it would alert the tenant. That way I wouldn't get bothered by a pre-teen zitly faced punk kid who gets to bang the hot high school chick behind the counter when I have SKILLS! He gets to do that and pop in 20 seconds and me, a man with grown man skills doesn't get a chance......all because its supposedly "illegal"......:P I keed I keed. I don't have any skills. That's one of my good points. Don't have to worry about that crap with me.

I also don't like malls so most of my purchasing was done at the comfort of my home computer after I used their sizing guides to pick out most of my gear. I did buy 2 practice jerseys (white) and had to try them on to see exactly what size I was. But everything else the sizing guides on their website did a pretty good job of fitting me. And the helmet I got was adjustable. Decided NOT to go with a full cage mask for hockey. Decided to go with an Oakley half-shield just like Mickey Ribs on the ice. I figure it gives me enough protection for my face and covers all the way to my upper lip. I mean, think about it, the most sensitive part of your body (your eyes) are protected by just a thin row of small 1/32 of an inch hairs (eyelashes).

I've put myself in this position, I've made this all my own. And I have to figure a way out of it. Because sometimes you just have do things yourself whenever nobody else is going to help you. You have to prove to yourself that you can do it. And prove to every little shit out there that says you can't do it, and when you do you turn around feel like you should punch them in the face. But you let them know you did it and you move on. Then when the next little bump comes along you look around for that same person (or any person for that matter) to tell you you can't do something. They aren't there, it's empty. And sometimes its those people that you miss the most. When you do your task for yourself, you can truly be happy. Because when you meet that special someone out there that will complete your world, you know, without a shadow of a doubt, that it's there. It's always been there.

You have to take everything like its the last time. When you do that you will come out on the other side a better person and happier. I just have to get that mentality through my head and get over it........almost there, really I am, just need someone on the sidelines to say I can't do something.......

Oh Well.......

2010-04-06T15:22:00.001-05:00

January 18, 2008 -

Well, another week is upon us, and another week is behind us. Pretty soon we'll be around Christmas time again and wondering what we are going to do next year. I myself don't know where I will be in a year, what I will be doing, who I will be with, and overall where my life will be going. I think of this as a good quality. I don't want to change that. I've changed before to accommodate others but in the end when that was over it was the best damn thing to happen to me. I think this quality brings spontaneity into my life and tells me to go for it every single day.

I honestly can't wait to do something on the side that really makes me happy. For the longest time that was going to Stars games with my friends and enjoying their company and banter as we watched the Stars win from time to time. I had the great opportunity to take my family to their very first NHL hockey game.

My little brother Lance came in from Conway, Arkansas where he goes to school for the weekend. He came into town and did a few things with his old friends from school but mostly hung out at the house and played Guitar Hero and watched TV (while eating his favorite Cinnamon rolls). But that Monday night he came down with my mom and other younger brother Sean to go to the Stars vs. Wild game. When the lights went down and the heavy metal music started with the hits and the goals, I could definitely see their eyes light up. It's something I had my first game; and they helped me see it again. My favorite part of that intro is when they show some hits and then freeze it right as the players collide and you have big bass drum KICK right as it happens. I feel like punching the guy behind me I get so pumped up!

But like I was saying I saw that little glimmer of excitement in their eyes watching their first game of the Stars. And for me I still get excited when I see the Stars play, but now I am moving down to something that I feel will get that excitement in my eyes again. I am going to start playing ice hockey with all of my friends. I will be playing on the same sheet of ice as all of my favorite Stars players (Hagman, Ribeiro, Jokinen, Miettinen, and all of my favorite Finnish players).

I just recently bought most of my gear and just need a few more items to get before I'm all set. But this will help me get back into my competitive zone.

For the longest time I played baseball. I was barely old enough to run and I remember playing third base as a kid. I was the only kid on the entire team that could throw a baseball from third base to first base with some sort of accuracy and actually get it there. I played baseball from age 5 all through my senior year in high school. My mom and my dad especially were always there for me to give me support along the way.

A few things stand out in my mind though: One instance was my dad playing "Your Simply The Best" by Tina Turner on the way to the game to "supposedly" get me fired up. Basically all it did was make me want to put on a shiny sparkly dress and dance and shake. Then I can remember when I was about 16 I made the All-Star team that year (even more games after the post-season tourney). And they handed out a stat sheet for all of the players. I remember scanning over the batting averages over all of the players and seeing my name at the top with a .658 batting average and not really thinking anything of it until a few other players asked around to see who Justin M was.

Another memory that sticks out was the final day of baseball for me. My family had just recently moved down to a smaller 4A school in Arkansas and I was trying out for the baseball team there. I continued to wear my 5A Fort Smith Southside baseball cap during their practices to show them and make sure they could pick me out of the crowd (it was a baby blue fitted cap with a cardinal red FS on the front). I tried out for a good 6 weeks and went through all of the drills required to be on the team. I didn't really make or want any friends at school in that time and seeing as most of the baseball players already knew each other, I was an unknown outsider.

On the final day of the practice they were to post the starting roster for the team on the football building doors. After sixth period I remember going into the boys locker room to change before the practice started and I sat there for a good long while just thinking.

Now that I look back on it, it could have probably been part of a movie. I couldn't get my cleats on. I couldn't, or I wouldn't. I don't know. But my baseball practice uniform never made it out of the bag that day and I just went home. I never found out if I made the baseball team there. It was just over. I said it was over. I never heard from the coach after that like they wanted me, so I guess they didn't need me "that" bad.......

But now I found something to keep me competitive - ice hockey. Something that I'm not good at, something that I can't just go out on the field and immediately make plays like I've always done on the baseball diamond. I've played baseball for most of my life and to get back out there on the MINI softball gatherings was incredible. I pushed myself so hard that day that I puked behind the Boston's pizza place in a dumpster. Now I will be going out there on the ice with no experience whatsoever. I will be that innocent little five year old once again. Hopefully I will find my talent out there on the ice, and will be put in the right position accordingly. My height may have changed over the years, but my competitive edge is still there and I still can drink the crap out of those Kool-Aid squeezables. I just can't wait to play again and have my dad out there in the stands for one more game. That will make me smile.

Sadly I don't know if that last part is going to happen. I don't know if my dad will be able to watch me play. Now don't go thinking that he is going to die or is dead or something, but I have just recently heard word that my family is moving yet again. Nashville, Tennessee is the place, but they are going without me this time. The change in my life is looking like it is going to be forced on me.

I have made Dallas my home now. I have found an incredible group of friends that I now have the choice of being a part of or leaving behind. I really don't feel like I have seen everything there is to see in Dallas. Sure, I could go out there and be a Nashville Predators fan for their hockey, and see greats like Sidney Crosby come through on a regular basis and whoop ass, but I feel like I have too much here to leave behind. All of the moves that my family has made in the past has benefited me in so many ways and has gotten me to where I am today. I wouldn't ever want to change that. But I just don't think I can do another one at this point in my life.

When you grow older you do certain things in your life and slowly but surely those things start to weed off your friends. Just look at my parents? They hardly have any adult friends here in Texas. It's hard to make friends as an adult. So why would I want to lose the ones that I have made already? I've just got some great avenues to take my life here in big D and I don't want to leave them behind. So if you are still reading I hope you enjoyed my little update. I don't usually post blogs very often, but when I do they are massive.

Cheers,
Justin M.

Weekend of Ballz and Gunz!

2010-04-06T15:21:00.001-05:00

October 22, 2007 -

Had a great weekend out in the country with a few of my very close friends. We left on Friday and headed up to Yarnaby, Oklahoma. It is a town that is literally 3 buildings, a cemetery, and there are probably 3 times more cattle than people. The wild hogs that roam the countryside out there probably outnumber the humans! :D

So the weekend went great! I got a chance go mudding on a 4-wheeler! I haven't done that in a LONG TIME! I've ridden a few 4-wheelers (not driven) and I've been mudding on a mountain bike (yeah I was a little poor back in the day) but never had the joy of bringing the bearer of mud to someone else on the back! :D After that we retired to the house for some relaxation, then shooting of guns, and then grilling out.

I have to send a shout out to Steve for bringing these awesome freaking guns! :D One of them can be seen in my default picture! That and an AR15 assault rifle! NICE! Thanks Steve for letting me shoot those! I definitely owe you dinner and a nice chunk of change for all the ammo we went through. We shot for 3 hours!

Next we grilled out and cooked up some incredible steaks and chicken for the troops and hung around the charcoal flame and drank beer and joked around while the sun went down. Loads of fun! After that I think we played one game of Scene It! (SOUP LADLE!) and then I went outside into the night air and enjoyed the fire pit! Roasted some marshmallows and just had a great time with my friends and being out in the country again.

For some reason it just felt good, it felt pure, and it felt very nice to be outside without the sound of something driving by or flying overhead. To be able to yell out obscenities at the "Yelling Lake" or walk barefoot through the woods, it was all great times!

Definitely go and check out the pics from this weekend! They are tons of fun to look at and I hope to see some comments or something there from everyone! Take care! I hope your weekend was as refreshing as mine was! :D