The Pros and Cons of Having an Afro

I don't know how many of you have noticed but my hair is a bit...err...afro-ish. It's been on and off like that for a number of years now (all through high school really) and it's brought me many different emotions before I eventually just became indifferent. At times it has brought me love and friends and at other times it has brought me scorne and sarcasm. So I just thought I'd list the pros and cons I've personally experienced having an afro like the obsessive compulsive tool I am.

Pros

• Some people are friendlier to me because of it. Let's face it, I'm no charismatic stud. I'm an awkward man at the best of times and I tend to overanalyse social situations to the point where I realise about 15 minutes too late that I should've asked how they were. Therefore I need all the help socially I can get.
• It does provide some shade
• Coupled with my height, people find it easy to find me in crowds

Cons

• Random yelling from cars. You wouldn't believe the way young hooligans in cars behave towards me sometimes. I put up with years of "Guy Sabastion!" being yelled at me as a P-plater sped past.
• Jokes. I hate having to stand there forcing weak laughter in response to a joke about my hair that I've heard many times before from other people. It's embarrasing for all involved.
  
• It's embarrassing when someone says I have something in my hair like a stick or some leaves. It's even worse when I'm in the shower at the end of the day, a stick washes out and I realise I've been wearing it all day.
• This one's really only an isolated incident but one day my best friend was drunk and called me a "Flat-fro motherfucker." This wouldn't have normally bothered me but I, too, was drunk and in a sensitive, crybaby kinda mood.

That's more or less it I think. People also like to try and straighten my hair. I always tell them that my hair will win but they never believe me. I don't mind though, hair straightening is fun.

1000 Words Anyone?

I Wish I Knew Where My Copy of "Thirteenth Step" Was

Does anyone know where my copy of Thirteenth Step is? It's one of my favourite albums of all time and I really feel like listening to it right now but I don't know where it is. I'm sure someone else has it...but who? Here's what it looks like.

WARNING: The rest of todays post will be a personal analysis of Thirteenth Step and why I love it. If you don't want to witness my gushing and getting all loving and emotional on you I suggest you read one of my earlier funny blogs or something. Maybe the Guide to Being a Villain or my porn review or something. You've been warned!

Anyway I thought that while we're all looking for Thirteenth Step I'd share with you why this album is held in such high regard by me (hopefully the thief who stole it will feel guilty and send it back to me...with a letter of appology...soaked in tears...wrapped in money). Anyway so Thirteenth Step is the second studio album made by A Perfect Circle, a band formed in 1999 by Tool frontman Maynard James Keenan and Billy Howerdel, a guitar technician who had worked with Tool. Together they gathered other musicians to collaborate on some songs they'd been recording and eventually a new band (A Perfect Circle) and album (Mer de Noms) was born. Mer de Noms was a great album featuring several awesome songs like Judith and (my personal favourite off the album) Orestes. It was heavy, but also intricate and atmospheric. Many people consider Mer de Noms the best of their work; those people are wrong.

When I first got into A Perfect Circle I had totally missed the Mer de Noms era and was entering the scene after discovering the bands various connections with the Smashing Pumpkins (my favourite band evaaaaaaarrrrrggghh). Anyway so I downloaded a few tracks and blah de blah de blah I ended up buying their second album, Thirteenth Step.

Thirteenth Step is highly realised and conceptual. It deals with issues of addiction (the album title explicitly refences the thirteen step program for alcoholics and drug users) . Each song takes on a different role in the complexity that is addiction. There's regret, anger, accusation and fear woven throughout the lyrics. Sometimes the songs are from the point of view of the drug, maliciously manipulating it's victim, offering it empty comforts. Other times the songs are about friends in denial, not wanting to believe that they are watching someone who is essentially dying. There are twelve tracks with twelve stories to tell, each becoming part of the larger tale that is the album. One of my main issues with APC's first album is that it sounds disjointed and stilted. It sounds exactly like what it is, a series of great songs recorded and written individually and then glued together at the end. Thirteenth Step however is fluid, even though the songs have different sounds, stories and images you never feel like one song has ended and another has begun. As stated earlier the songs merge as part of something bigger. I have analysed this album lovingly for many hours, even that fact that there's an unamed and unrecorded "13th" track at the end of the album, perhaps signifying that the story of the album isn't finished; like it's left for us, or whoever needs it, to finish for themselves. That said the album isn't explicit. The songs never actually say "I'm on drugs and boy I love it but it's also not good for me." You can honestly take whatever you want out of the album. I recommend Thirteenth Step by A Perfect Circle more highly than you could imagine.

One of these days soon I'll think of something funny to write about again. Just felt passionate about this post is all.

Watchmen Review

Before I get into the serious review stuff I'd just like to congratulate Tom on his speedy response to my previous post. Elija Wood shall be yours my friend.

Moving on now, the Watchmen. The Watchmen is about a group of vigilante style "superheroes" who are outlawed by the American Government and forced to live out their lives as regular human beings, which you'd think to be relatively easy to do because all of them, bar one, ARE regular human beings. Anyway the year is 1980-something and the doomsday clock is ticking out it's last 10 minutes or so as America aniticipate the onset of nuclear war with Russia. I won't dig too much farther into the extremely involved story because we've got bigger things to discuss. Now overall I liked the Watchmen. I went in expecting a shitty, no-brainer superhero action flick of the Daredevil ilk but instead was treated to one of the grittiest and most tense films I've seen since The Dark Knight. Every one of the heroes is a well developed character with their own flaws and problems to resolve. As heroes they are all morally questionable in some way and as such you're left with a sense of deep running emptiness as you watch these vigilante heroes ruin innocent lives. You can forget about calling Spiderman a conflicted character because he can't balance his real life with his superhero life. Try watching a man who can't bear to be without his mask as he clashes violently with anyone who ticks him off. The effective thing about having such flawed main characters is that not only do you characterise them more strongly but you also end up connecting emotionally with the people they wrong along the way, the everday people.

Having said all that the movie is gritty, heavy and dark to the extreme. I wouldn't recommend it to just anyone, you need to be prepared for it. It's like trying to digest a really good meal without chewing it properly, it's a movie that'll sit heavy in your brain for a good while after watching it. That and it's graphic. There's reasonably explicit sex and some extremely visual violence. If you don't want to see a man have his skull cleavered repeatedly then don't watch this. I thought the soundtrack was pretty solid though, even if it was also unsubtle. I was thankfull that the movie wasn't trying to ram some no-name bands new single down my earhole and instead went with proven rock classics like Bob Dylan, Simon and Garfunkel and Jimi Hendrix.

My last issue with the film is that the movie feels as long as it is, which is very. I'm conflicted as to whether this is a good thing or a bad thing because on the one hand I didn't feel like there was an abundance of unnescessary bits , in fact there were moments were you got a sense of having missed something. On the other hand it can't be good if I check my watch and say to myself, "it felt much longer than that." The movie is based off a graphic novel of the same name written in the 80's and had quite a bit to fit in and coming from a person who hadn't read the novel I found it coherent and enjoyable, so perhaps the length issue was an inevitable necessity. Every main character has his own tale to tell in the movie and they're all given a fair hunk of time to work with, so I guess that's a good thing. Overall however I find Watchment a hard movie to review. It does so many things really well and does so many new things with the overly formulaic "superhero" genre that I'm tempted to call it a must see. Unfortunately the gritty and violent nature of the film makes it unsettling and will probably alienate certain people. It's a powerful film that challenges the superhero ideology and the black and white nature of the superhero genre, but it's also likely to divide audiences.

Are YOU Prepared?

Went to the cinema last night with my friends to see The Watchmen. I'll probably end up talking about The Watchmen in a future post but for now we're focusing on the previews. There was a particularly lame trend in the movie previews and it wasn't just the "coming this summer" husky voiced American douchebag doing all the voiceovers. It was the fact that every single movie was a disaster movie (except maybe one more "thriller" style movie about taking a subway hostage or some shit but it's pretty similar really). But seriously it was freaking rediculous. The third trailer started with school children joyously opening a school time capsule and I jokingly said to my friend "and now everybody will die" and as if cued by my words the trailors tone shifted and mass deaths were being alluded to all over the place. Apparently what has been unleashed upon the world is a lack of creativity. Maybe they should base a disaster movie on me wherein my wry, hilarious jokes somehow come true in devastating ways. In fact to save Hollywood from its apparent "good ideas" drought I thought I'd sketch up a rough outline of my movie.

I would obviously have to be played by someone as funny and devilishly charasmatic as my good self. Will Smith would be my suggestion. Now I would go about my daily life making the wise-cracks that have made me the popular lad I am today and then I'd go home to watch the evening news where it would turn out my witissism was, in fact, bang on the money. At first my closest friends and I would shrug it off as coincidence but then it would become apparent that my jokes were capable of altering the future in frightening ways. Then there'd be some soul searching, a romance would develope somewhere, chuck in a car chase. In the end the remainder of humanity turns against me but in some stirring final scenes the crowd are convinced that a world without me would be an even bleaker one. I've even got a trailer scripted.

Voice over - Coming this summer...
Me - ...and then I told him his haircut looked like shit
My Friends - hahahahaha
Voice over - ...a man must choose...
Some Old Guy - You know one of these days your joking around is going to land you in trouble
Voice over - ...between the world he loves...
Evening News - Local boy ran into trouble today when a sewage pipe burst next to him today, drenching him in feces.
My Friend - hey, wasn't that the guy you were joking about?
Voice over - ...and his humour
Me - The things I've been joking about...they're coming true
Friend - (yelling) I don't think I find you so funny anymore!
Another Friend - Why don't you just joke about something good?
(car chase scene)
(Fireball through a tunnel)
(A makeout/mild sex scene)
Me and Friend (looking at each other) - nah

(action montage then movie title)

Old Guy - The world can be a depressing place sometimes
Me - That's when we need laughter the most

(The screen with the website and shit)

I think it's going to be great. I kinda thought as a special offer to the people who know me personally you now have the opportunity to suggest actors/actresses to play youselves. Just drop a comment. Don't be shy.

Street Fighter IV Review

Xbox 360 is fixed and I've been playing Street Fighter IV. As promised I thought I'd have a little chat about the game and tell you what I think. First of all the game looks great and the characters are all fairly well balanced. No characters feel feel overpowered or anything so there's a real oportunity picking who suits you best. Despite the couple of complaints I'm about to make it is still an excellent fighting game.

My first complaint is a minor one, the dialogue. Street Fighter IV isn't going to win any awards for its brilliant story or anything like that but that doesn't mean the dialogue has to be this bad. The commentator actually says "the weak lose and the strong win" fairly regularly, which constantly reminds me of how bad the dialogue is. Voice acting isn't particularly strong either, Chun-Li sounds inappropriately like one of the kids from Rugrats, Zangeif has a rather patchy Russian accent and Ryu doesn't sound Japanese enough. Now onto a slightly bigger problem. Street Fighter IV is quite challenging, even on the easiest difficulty setting. This mostly comes down to the fact that the games final boss Seth is the cheapest motherfucker I can recall. He teleports behind you and grabs you before you can even turn around. He has stretchy punches that extend for the majority of the screen. He even has a move that sucks you helplessly towards him so that he can pick you up and grind you between the solid ground and his buttcheeks. Cunt. Seth. Is. A Cunt. I haven't been this frustrated by cheap enemies since Mario Kart Wii (fucking blue shells, fuck fuck fuck).

One other issue is that the Xbox 360 controller isn't ideal for fighting games. Luckily Madcatz have released some Fightpads and Arcade Sticks that are awesome for Street Fighter IV. Unfortunately they aren't out in Australia yet and they are sold out globally. Don't even think about looking on ebay unless you want to pay triple the RRP. Here's a picture of the standard edition fighting stick.

I am personally probably going to either get one of these or a fightpad. There is another better Fighstick called the Tounament Edition which uses all the Sanwa parts found in the arcade machines but they're a little pricey for me. I'm very much looking forward to getting one or two of these bad boys though.

Over-Analysing The Merchant

Resident Evil 5 has been out for about a week now and for some reason I've decided that's a good enough reason to start talking about Resident Evil 4. I guess you might remember that RE5 was on my list of "games I am excited about" basically because RE5 is approximately equal to RE4 (which was excellent). Anyway that's not really what I'm here to talk about. I am here to ponder over the existence of RE4's infamous "merchant." If you've played the game you'll know who I mean. He's a mysterious man in a lot of dark, heavy clothing that conceals most of his features as well as his "goods." He also sounds like a sex offender and gets particularly "excited" when you purchase something hefty, like a rocket launcher (which he keeps under his coat?). One of the first strange things about him is he is the only local who is not affected by the "Los Plagas" (some sort of zombie bug), which makes him pretty suspicious in my books. He also has a rediculous supply of weapons which he is only too happy to sell to you, a strange foreiner. Why does he want money anyway? He's the only person in the entire country who you can buy anything off so what does he want it for? To buy things from himself? Also in these desperate times all you want is guns, ammo and medicine and he's getting rid of it. Just to illustrate my point I've done up a list of items describing their appocolypic usefulness.

• Guns/Ammo - When the whole country wants you dead and doesn't particularly care about their own wellbeing or safety then you are going to want a buttload of guns and ammo. Especially when they're armed with chainsaws.
• Medicine - Sure it won't help if you had your head cut off but you're bound to be injured if you're fighting so many creatures.
• Money - Money is good for...errr...making you rich?

Apparently even more valuable to the creepy old merchant than money is random treasures. I'f you've picked up a ming vase during your travels the merchant will part ways with his precious, precious money in order to posses this artefact. So he loses weapons, he loses supplies, he loses money and he ends up with a crown missing a jewel. How does this guy stay alive? What does he want treasure for so badly that he's willing to put his own life at severe risk just to hold it?

Oh yeah and there's one more thing that the merchant does that is detrimental to his survival. He runs a shooting gallery. At anytime in the game Leon can stop shooting zombies and just for a change of pace shoot wooden targets instead. Guns and ammo used are not from Leons personal inventory, meaning that the merchant MUST supply them. So now he's just throwing supplies away just so Leon can have some fun during the zombie appocalypse? I realised here and now that the merchant is a nutjob and decided to end his sad life here and now to save the zombies the trouble.

Just a little while later there he was again. He greeted me, "Welcome Stranger, I've got some rare things on sale." I hate that creepy merchant.

This Post Was Supposed to be About Street Fighter IV

Which I got supremely juiced up for. I popped the disc in my Xbox 360 and was totally blown away by the awesomeness of the opening screens (which is highly unusual for me). I selected my character and I watched their intro cutscene. I started fighting. It felt good. It was smooth and sexy but before I knew it the bitch wasn't "in the mood" anymore. After seriously no more than 10 seconds of play time my Xbox 360 was experiencing hardware issues (one blinking red light told me this, non-gamers might not get me on this bit). Fucking Microsoft. I've already had the damn thing fixed before with the highly popular "Red Rind of Death" issue and now I was experiencing some other problem. I called up customer services and they ascertained that because my warrenty had expired I would have to pay $140 to have my Xbox fixed. That pissed me off a whole bunch. They know damn well it's their own fault and they should've done a better job fixing the console tha last time I sent it to them. I still have a working Super Nintendo from the 90's and here I have a console that's broken twice in about 14 months through no fault of my own. This picture pretty much sums up my feelings on the matter (note: not my hand, not my xbox and not my picture).


I was extremely happy a few days later when my girlfriend, who had sympathised completely throughout my bitching, saw the console and asked "so what's wrong with it." I turned it on to show her and something beautiful happened. It was STILL a hardware failure, but it was a good one that Microsoft has had such issues with that they saw fit to extend the warrenty for this particular issue for up to 3 years. My console now had the red ring of death. I must've been the happiest person ever to have their console fuck up. I called up customer care and sure enough they're repairing the console free of charge. I don't know what the deal was, I guess a broken Xbox 360 is kinda shit at self-diagnosis (makes sense really). Kinda seems sketchy especially when warrenty is a major player in the game. So anyway I'm expecting it back soon so expect to hear about Street Fighter IV soon (in this regard you probably wanted my console to stay broken).

An Update on Morning TV

(It's gone completely shit).

Channel Ten often strikes me as a very juvenile network. It's in house productions are all Big Brother housemates showing their "absolute fav OMG rofl" youtube videos or chubby camp guys hosting televised cook-offs (you know what I mean). Now for the sake of my lazyness and fondness for my own blog cast your minds (and indeed web browsers; by that I mean read it) back to my early post in which I pondered, mournfully on the fate of Cheez TV. I can wait...have you read it yet?

Finally. Fuck you read slowly. Anyway as a uni student I am required once again to get up at what my mum calls a "reasonable hour". This means that I'll occasionally turn on the TV for something to stimulate my fragile brain before trudging off to Maths. Let me just falt out say it to you. I'm talking to YOU CHANNEL TEN. The best template for a breakfast kids show is having a couple of cheeky, charismatic hosts intermitedly break from the main cartoons and educate, stimulate and thoroughly entertain the audience before they're dragged to school. What ten do is hop around between hosts and tv shows like they've got commitment issues. They have a small talent pool of 5 or so hosts and more often than not they'll be in 2 or 3 different programs all back to back. They jump from Toasted TV to Totally Wild to some Playschool ripoff with dodgy CGI. In amougnst the chaotic host mess you only get to see one fucking cartoon. Repeat: In the morning of every school day the children only get to see one half hour episode of ONE FUCKING CARTOON. That and it's fucking Bakugan, which is just some sketchy fucking anime of the Yu Gi Oh/Beyblades ilk; aimed at kids who they want to sell merchandise to. It's not so much product placement as it is story placement. It's like a story was smuggled into toy commercial. Anyway I covered alot of topics today so perhaps it's time to take a breather. I'll be back soon with some witty, game-related observations and maybe even a cheeky review or 2. But none of my readers actually give a fuck about those, do they?

My Life at University

Yeah, yeah, yeah, I know. Slacking off on the posts. You don't really need to hear another insincere apology do you? The whole blogging process feels wasted when my only readers are myself and occasionally my girlfriend when held at gunpoint. Anyway so uni has been pretty full on and so I thought I'd have a little bitch on the matter. So anyway this is my life at uni.

First thing I noticed is a strange bout of favouritism when comparing arts students (ie pussies) to Science Students (the manliest of men). You see the arts timetable is akin to a pleasant afternoon stroll in a rolling meadow, where the gentle breeze carries the faint smell of lavender. The science timetable on the other hand is like being a filthy peasant on a massive, oar powered ship; rowing for hours and hours in sync with the steady drumbeat and the occasional lashing to motivate us. Half of this time is spent doing practicals which are not really my thing. Here's a rundown of how my subject practicals go

• Biology - Adjusting microscope resolution and searching for some tiny, obscured feature of something you don't give a fuck about which lacks about 90% of the features you can get from a textbook diagram. (OK so I actually do give a little bit of a fuck, but seeing the thing isn't as useful to learning as you'd expect)
• Chemistry - Not too much to complain about except I don't care enough about experimental accuracy.
  
• Geology - Haven't actually done a prac for this one yet. I came to this class a week late so maybe it'll straighten me out a bit? Maybe not? What we did do last week was go on an excursion which was rather dull.

I'm eternally grateful to whoever decided that there was to be no pracs for Maths or I'd be completely purged of all my free time (quite a bit of which has been spent trying to knock a Biology essay out of the way). That's about all I have to say really. I like chemistry a lot, partly because it retreads HSC chem quite a lot and also because our teacher is the product of some sort of Japanese experiment in manufacturing the most likable human being imaginable. Maths is pretty good aswell, albiet a little mysterious. The lecturer keeps making cheeky jabs at politics and religion during lectures. Biology is a memorising extravaganza (in a bad way) and Geology is a bit dull at times but easy to follow. So there you go. I still got shit to say (blog topics I mean), just not so much time at the moment to actually say it. Keep checking...please...