This just in dickheads! You’re probably bloated and hungover from a steady diet of carbohydrates and consumerism from the past Thanksgiving weekend. Yeah, me too. While I don’t regret socking the elderly woman in the tits because she took the fucking last copy of Wii Fitness Masturbate Your Way To Toned Arms, I never expected her to die on the spot. And therefore, this cell is lonely and cold, but I’m glad that the local Starbucks next to the police station has free WiFi and they’ve let me use my iPhone.
LOL JK.
Monday Morning Commute. Every Monday I’m going to detail the various things I’m either currently or will be watching, reading, playing, and listening to in the next seven days. It’s Monday. You’ve got a long week of school, work, or compulsive masturbation to get through. Tell me the arts that you’re indulging in, to stave off suicide.
Not only is it Friday, but it’s the Friday after Thanksgiving. As such, there are certain expectations to be fulfilled — specifically, the eating of leftovers and the continued consumption of alcohol. Starting with a hearty bowl of stuffing for breakfast, I’ve made sure to eat something at every opportunity, paying special attention to desserts. More than content with my gorging, I really wanted to find a good brew for the review.
Therefore, I made sure to not rush through the weekly process of beer-searching. I took my time at the store, actually reading labels and trying to figure just what type of beverage I’d want to drink. My first inclination was to find some sort of coffee/espresso based lager; however, the staff informed me that such a product was not stocked and I was therefore SOL. Resolved to find something tasty, I continued the quest.
I then remembered that today marks the first day of the Christmas Season: “A holiday-brew will do,” I bellowed in Seuss-mimicry, “but how to pick a drink that’s sick?” Again, I wanted to be levelheaded about this decision, not jumping at the first six-pack with clever packaging.
Well, it wasn’t the first to grab my attention, but I’d be a liar to say that I wasn’t drawn to The Mad Elf Ale because of the label: a cartoon elf is drunkenly grasping a goblet while slinging three giant cherries over his shoulder. Hell, who doesn’t love elves? Legolas has such amazing hair. Hermey is an amazing dentist. And of course, Buddy is great at putting the star on the top of the tree:
While interested, I made sure to actually read the box and see what the beverage is all about. Looking closer, I realized that the ale is a product of the Tröegs Brewing Company, whose Tröegenator earned high marks about a month ago. I then discovered that the drink is “brewed with honey and cherries,” while touting an impressive eleven-percent ABV. Given the positive nature of my previous experience with the Tröegs, I decided to go for it.
I was cheerful, pleased to have found such a good-looking prospective brew. When I got to the counter, I took out the fifteen dollars that remained in my wallet and prepared to pay; needless to say, I was quite taken aback when the cashier told me that the six-pack was going to run me sixteen dollars and change.
Holy shit. Isn’t today Black Friday? You know — the one day with such good sales that my mom wakes up at 3:30 AM to find Chewbacca action figures and people across the country murder each other! And yet, somehow, I still get stuck paying more than sixteen bucks for a six-pack?! Madness! (Sparta!)
In any case, I busted out the `ole debit card and finished the transaction I had been so eager to start. Once home with the beers, I decided to do hit up the brewery website before beginning the tasting. The Mad Elf Ale, in their words:
The Mad Elf, a cheerful creation to warm your heart and enlighten your tongue. The combination of Cherries, Honey, and Chocolate Malts delivers gentle fruits and subtle spices. Fermented and aged with a unique yeast, this ruby red beer has significant warming strength that underlies the pleasant character of this intriguing yet delicious Ale. The Mad Elf, a jolly and delicious beer for the Holidays.
It still all sounded so good — time to find out for myself. Pouring it into a glass, I was especially struck by the ale’s color. Yeah, both the label and the website had clued me into the fact that the beer is “ruby red,” but seeing the cranberry-juice looking liquid for myself was different altogether. The aroma of the brew was slightly fruity, while still giving the drinker a clear warning about the elevated alcohol content. With the auxiliary aspects of the beverage being well above average, I was eager to pour it into my gullet!
Truth be told, The Mad Elf Ale might be the best (specifically) holiday beer I’ve had. The ale is extremely well balanced, robust with flavor while not being too heavy in the mouth. It’s not syrupy texture-wise, but still packs a punch on the tongue. The tartness first detected in the aroma is definitely pleasant, as is sweetness and a hint of some sort of spice (still can’t put my finger on it). Although the beer goes down smoothly, I might just caution potential drinkers to remember that with an eleven-percent ABV trying to polish off all six bottles may be dangerous. Or maybe not — I shouldn’t assume that alcoholics don’t read the brew review.
I had a vision recently, seeing myself drinking in a Christmas sweater only to pass out on my family room couch and wake up a sloppy/sweaty mess. If I take the initiative to make this a reality, I am most certainly going to summon The Mad Elf Ale.
Yes, the price was pretty steep. But the flavor was damn amazing. Final Verdict: A-
Alright, I’m really fucking excited for Ninja Assassin. For months I’ve been anticipating a mindless bloody explosion of guts and ninja stars. Then poor reviews started coming in, and because I’m impressionable, stupid, and spaghetti-spined, I began to panic. Then I was like, wait a second. Wait, let’s just take a look at these reviews.
I began to see that all the quotes delineating just why the movie is so poor…are exactly the reasons I want to see the fucking movie! Now, if you don’t like the various things I’m expecting: ultra violence, decapitations, ludicrous amounts of blood splattering everywhere, I can understand why you wouldn’t like it. But I mean, shouldn’t context count for anything?
When you evaluate a movie, do you take into account intent, context, and audience? I’m guessing no. And furthermore, I’m not sure if you should. A different debate, for a different day. But if you’re a fucking psychopath fanboy like me, check out these review snippets, culled from Rotten Tomatoes. Keep in mind these are all from negative reviews.
The gory decapitations and gushing blood – imagine filling a million balloons with cherry Kool-Aid and using them in a water-balloon fight – turn the action scenes into an indistinguishable sea of red.
Awesome.
Working with screenwriters Matthew Sand and J. Michael Straczynski (from an original story by Sand), McTeigue provides enough wire-fu fights and stylish gore to please the fan boys who expect ample bloodletting from an R-rated action movie.
Steven Ramos, Boxoffice Magazine
Exactly, dickhead.
As I left the theater, I found that my thumbs ached. I hadn’t realized that, during certain parts of the movie, I was pressing imaginary buttons as if trying to control some video game.
Bob Bloom, Journal and Courier
BOB, you’re so hilarious dude. The “I thought I was watching a video game” line isn’t stale as fuck and overused. You’re a pioneer of hilarity and incisive wit.
This one is simply a diverting, uncommonly violent action flick. No need for an extended critical postmortem.
Stephen Cole, Globe and Mail
Exactly. Again, I suppose if you don’t dig these things, I don’t blame you for not enjoying it. But what I have gleamed from these review snippets, because my generation doesn’t have the attention span to read entire reviews, is that these people seem genuinely shocked at what the movie contained. Were you expecting something other than super violence and madness on celluloid? Did you see the trailers? I ask this, because there are positive reviews that contain the same sort of content as the negative ones. Except, these people fucking get it:
This movie knows exactly what it is: Gonzo silliness about bodies turned into human salsa.
Kyle Smith, New York Post
I’m seeing this movie tomorrow night, on what is probably going to be a belly filled with turkey and potatoes. I hope the camera whirls so quickly and the violence is so extreme that I vomit a torrent of hot, mushy protein particles and gravy onto someone’s head in the row in front of me.
Yeah, it’s been like a fucking week since I mentioned Bayonetta. What the hell is going on? I fucked up. I’m sorry. Okay?
I wish I could have been brought back to one of my favorite subjects with good news. Nope. Recently Sega announced the winner of the contest they ran in conjunction with Maxim to find their Bayonetta lookalike winner. She sucks. It’s insulting. Peep it:
I dug out my copy of Ratchet and Clank: A Crack in Time yesterday. It had been sitting lonely on my subwoofer, giving me the stink-eye since the end of October. With a crazy deluge of bonerfying titles, or probably more correctly my fiend-like addiction to MW2, I hadn’t gotten around to playing much of it. It wasn’t out of dislike, but for some reason I was gravitating more towards getting owned by 11 year-olds or playing through Mass Effect for the three-thousandth time.
This game is dope, if R&C is your thing. R&C is a sturdy little franchise. It doesn’t do anything too radical from installment to installment for the most part, but it consistently brings it. You have the typical high-quality gameplay, an amusing storyline that I always forget ten seconds after finishing it, and impressive graphics.
So, whatever. I cracked this bitch open. It’s good, it’s amusing. It gets the job done.
But what I really enjoy so far are the Super Ratchet Galaxy levels. There’s a bunch of levels that are optional as you float through space in your Viper/X-Wing/Whatever you want to call it. You board them, and they’re spherical featuring challenges throughout a Galaxy-esque layout.
I dug them. I didn’t see them coming. When I was scratching my mind-balls about the levels, I remembered that some R&C back in the day featured these sort of spherical levels. I’m far too lazy to look up which game, or recall the particulars from my sludgy, decaying synapses. So maybe it isn’t Galaxy, but rather an extension of Insomniac Games’ prior diddling with the concept.
Nonetheless, they’re an unexpected and enjoyable inclusion. They break up the typical R&C levels nicely, and they’re not mandatory. Side-sessions that allow for some more creative gameplay, if you will.
So far, so good, so what? Yeah, I don’t know. R&C doesn’t reinvent the franchise, and apparently it finishes up the storyline. It’s a great way to wash the taste of getting teabagged by little kids in MW2 out of my mouth, and the Galaxy levels seem to offer something to platformer whores like me who want some optional challenges.
Ohhhhh, shiznit. Check this fly ass shit out. If there’s one thing that really bummed me out about the original Mass Effect – besides the barren worlds, and three-hour story mission, it was that Bioware really never came through on their promise of dope DLC that bridged the gap between the original and its sequel. There was a throwaway simulation piece of garbage, and Bring Down the Sky which was a shitty mission that could have been included in the game and I wouldn’t have known better.
Well, it appears my boys at “The Ware” are coming god damn correct for their new installment.
In a recent conversation with GTTV (via TVGB), Mass Effect 2 project director Casey Hudson revealed that most of the ME2 team would switch to working on ME2 downloadable content after the completion of the core game. And don’t expect just huge expansion packs — the game will support a range of different content unlike the first ME.“As part of trying to build the game, as ambitious as it was, one of the things we weren’t able to do technically was to have the support in the game itself for certain kinds of downloadable content,” Hudson said, speaking to the first Mass Effect and its hang-ups.
Hell yeah! It’s getting some good god damn support. I like how they’re all learning and shit. They’re talking about bringing new characters, new campaigns, and other shit to the DLC for ME2. Let’s be optimistic and assume this is building on top of an already ballin’ retail release.
I also love the fact that Hudson realizes that Bring Down the Sky fucking sucked:
What we found was that the content we could produce with a small team in a short time just wasn’t up to the standards we wanted to produce for DLC,” she continued in response to our question. “We were able to produce more uncharted-world level content in a reasonable time, and that’s what we originally envisioned ‘Bring Down The Sky’ as being, but in an early project review we just didn’t feel that it was measuring up to what we wanted from DLC.
What up, playahs?! And a happy preemptive Thanksgiving to all your asses too! If you’re like me, you’re going to spend this week eating five-hundred pounds of mashed potatoes, sneezing on blankets and giving them to Native Americans, and punching an old lady out in Walmart at 5 am on Friday morning so you can get that fucking deal on the new Nintendobox Wii-3.
Seriously though, it’s that special time of the year again. And by that time, I mean when the temperature drops, the sun goes away, and I spend all night getting salsa in my beard as I eat my way into hibernation shape. Kiss a loved one, fire up a video game, and count the months until your testicles/ovaries won’t shrivel into non-functioning status if you stay outdoors for a prolonged period of time.
Monday Morning Commute. Every Monday I’m going to detail the various things I’m either currently or will be watching, reading, playing, and listening to in the next seven days. It’s Monday. You’ve got a long week of school, work, or compulsive masturbation to get through. Tell me the arts that you’re indulging in, to stave off suicide.
Maybe that’s a nonsensical thing to write — not worth the energy required to move my fingers onto the keyboard. After all, who doesn’t love a good yarn? The sharing of narratives is one of the few (virtually) universal aspects of humanity. Even through differing perspectives, goals and messages, all tribes of Planet Earth are united by a proclivity for storytelling.
The thing is – I really like stories. If I’ve enjoyed something I’ve read, it’s only a matter of time before I revisit the pages. I’ve spent countless hours (probably days, at this point) discussing and debating movies with my friends. And I’m currently toying with the idea of teaching high school English not because of a fondness for grammar, but because of a genuine belief in the power of narrative.
Some stories are so affective that they keep me up at night, warding off the sandman until I’ve scribbled some quasi-coherent notes. And these are the tales I like best — the ones that want you to keep working, peeling away a bit of skin before getting to taste the fruit. I don’t consider myself a snob and definitely think there’s something to be said for straight-forward stories told in a straight-forward manner; but who doesn’t like finding a prize at the bottom of the cereal box?
With this stance in mind, it is no mystery as to why I’ve always been a fan of the concept album. First and foremost, the product is a musical collection and therefore is designed for audio-pleasure. But unlike “standard” albums, the listener may then elect to dig deeper, using the lyrics, booklet and artwork to reveal a story. While this format is a staple of the prog-rock world I once swore allegiance to (Hey, we all make mistakes), it is hardly confined to a single genre.
Finally getting to the matter at hand, I present Defeater’sLost Ground — a refutation the concept album as it has come to be known. There are no synthesizers, ballads about dark wizards, or masturbatory instrumental sections that make you scream “THIS SONG HAS BEEN ON FOR THIRTY-SEVEN MINUTES WHEN THE FUCK DOES IT END?!?!” While my favorite album of all-time may very well be a fair target for such criticism, Defeater manages to avoid the pitfalls. So whereas double-lengths like The Lamb Lies Down on Broadway and Quadrophenia popularized the concept album, Lost Ground reimagines its purpose.
In fact, Lost Ground is a six-song EP that comes into your room, tells you what’s up, and then gets out despite your pleading for more. Musically, I suppose the second release of the Boston-based group would be considered something along the lines of melodic hardcore. While there are definitely hard-hitting sections of soaring guitars and pounding drums, there are also many moments in which there is clarity, a refined levelheadedness. For instance, the introduction to The Bite and Sting sees an exchange of bass and guitar, a teasing that helps to build anticipation. This tension is furthered by the verses, in which soft staccato guitar is cleverly doubled over with a clicking on the rim of a drum. By the time the chorus hits, the listener feels liberation, a rejoicing at the prospect of open chords!
In terms of musical narrativity, the EP is actually a complement to Defeater’s first effort, Travels. Summarily, the band’s debut tells of one man’s journey away from life he hates and his unavoidable return home for a final confrontation. One of the highlights of that disc is Prophet in Plain Clothes, a track about a bum who sings his songs of woe. Lost Ground, in turn, is actually an exploration of the Prophet – chronicling his life as a young African American who decides to enlist in the Army for World War II. Horrors are witnessed, the post-war celebration is less-than-ideal, and we learn why it is that this man sleeps in barrooms.
Thematically, I think Lost Ground is an improvement over Travels. Maybe it’s because of the groundwork laid on the first album, but I find myself sympathizing much more with the narrator on this EP than I do with the one on the full-length. Furthermore, Derek Archambault’s delivers his vocals in such a way as to actually convince the listener that he was in the trenches, fighting Germans in the Second Big One. I think the artwork is a step above too, with the inclusion of a propaganda poster which depicts the misleading means by which blacks may have been enlisted. My only complaint about Lost Ground is that it isn’t a full-length, but I suppose a band can consider a release successful if it leaves people wanting more.
I’m not sure if Lost Ground is a World War II period piece that rocks my socks off or just an EP that happens to be historical fiction — but in either case, I’m better for having listened to it.
