Peer Pressure Works!

This has nothing to do with Batman, actually…uhhh, imagine it being spoken in that ridiculous Christian Bale “When I’m Batman I apparently have throat cancer” voice if you wish.

No score and maybe a year ago, a band of brave types decided that it would be pretty damn cutting edge to move from the boring written word, what with its millennia of existence, and move on to that exciting ‘audio’ thing. Sure, it’s untested technology with only 150 or so years of existence, but what the Hell right? Sometimes you gotta take a chance on something! I’m sure we’ll be on to the video medium by around 2045, or right around when the damn kids are being entertained by their goddamn holographic images. Just remember that all of this is totally the fault of that bastard Marconi! He proved audio transmission viable, and here we are 72 years later attempting to disprove that theory.

Anyway, yeah…brave types…new venture. They gathered in the home of one James Keller and shared their…’genius’…with the world. They created :

Well, no, they didn’t create that so much…I mean, James did, but that was later when he was…well, I’m guessing he was high as a fucking kite when he came up with that bad boy…but THEY created Violent Aggression. And it just had a baby! Well…a…a 4th baby, I guess. Yeah?

James has toiled for quite some time on this, alongside apparently failing at writing a novel during the NaNoWriMo thing (that’s for punks…I plan to attempt writing some ghastly waste of words when it ISN’T some official competition! Just me and drunken louts who are professional writers!) and doing that whole ‘taking care of his family’ thing. Priorities, Keller!

Violent Aggression #5 – Violent Aggression vs. the Racist Candy – Get that bitch here!

-Think we won’t go there? We totally do! Hear a kinda funny story about a certain liquorice candy product blown entirely out of proportion!

-James drunkenly rants and mocks all of you suckers for listening to this on a work day after exploding in rage at math. And actually…he’s probably right!

-Hear about accounting! No, really! Is it more palatable if I refer to the story as ‘accounting errors’ on a corporate scale?

-Shaun talks about the show True Blood, apparently featuring the world’s dumbest shape shifters and a woman who wears a bull’s head for shits and giggles. Also, Vlad admits that he’s less than a man by having chosen to see a certain vampire film that even his wife hated…

-James gets lost in Scotland! Booze is involved tangentially!

-Shaun and his wife go parking in Scotland! No, not like that…they get drunk and sleep in a car! Apparently Scotland is a colourful country full of exciting places to get lost and drink heavily.

-Liam watched Elizabethtown. We talk about that in bits and pieces around discussion of Kirsten Dunst and the most horrible thing ever seen by human eyes. I ain’t linking to it, but you can feel free to visit Feelings of White because James is perfectly happy to do so!

-We end it the way that podcasts apparently end these days…mocking Michael Moore! Well, that and then James probably drunk again sounding like he may be fellating the mic.

Enjoy. Or don’t. It’s totally up to you, but I’ll just put another link to it right here. So tempting…

Thank you James…never have truer words been spoken.

Oh shit! The gang's back up in your kitchen!

Yes indeed, it’s that time again! Time for another personal jihad against decency to be unleashed upon an unsuspecting world! Well, I guess they should suspect something by now…this IS #4…but we’ll still catch them unawares! It’s like they know there’s a ninja in the building…they’re still going to die.

Yes, it’s Violent Aggression # 4 : Violent Aggression & the Legend of the F-Bomb. We explore all sorts of mysteries.

-Why can’t Kelly remember the name of his blog? Luckily, it’s in the blog roll!

-Who amongst us thinks that a business built on potential fraud sounds peachy keen awesome?

-Who doesn’t think that GI Joe was 90 minutes of pure sacrilege?

-Who the Hell watches The Apprentice?

-Which heartless denizen of our group decided to kill an innocent little creature for a trinket?

-Why do we insist on making up statistics and figures and throwing them around as facts? Actually, this mystery isn’t solved whatsoever but you’ll sure as fuck be wondering about it!

Oh, AND there’s a game involved. Let’s hear it for audience participation! Sure I put that little bit together at 2:30 in the morning of an insomnia racked night and…MIGHT have missed one when counting. Really, you should just shut the fuck up and be glad I involved you boring non-media types at all…commoners.

I think this one is a lot better than my previous work if for no other reason than I reigned in my enthusiasm and actually let a few people give this one a test listen. Their suggested fixes were done, and the result is much better. Last word to Mr. T…or is it???

Declare war on your morals and hit this link!

And we’ll conclude with a double shot of reminder that Steel Panther are the greatest musical act since the invention of notes :

Death to All But Metal

Community Property

It has been a busy couple of weeks! Between a 2009 roster set for Football Mogul 2010, a new podcast (oh yes, it is in the works bitches!) and this sucker, that has pretty much been my free time.

Again, if you hit the Scribd button in the Top Left and go to their site, it’s probably going to be a little more readable without use of binoculars. It turned out a LOT better this time…proper planning and only adding images once the writing is 100% done tend to be GOOD things!

Thought I’d forgotten about this, eh? Of course not! Having experienced all the fun of fighting against a legion of Down’s Syndrome soldiers solo, I an only imagine that commanding more guys will work absolutely flawlessly. Pardon me a moment, I have to go laugh until I pass out.

Oh, I actually finally remembered to thumbnail all the photos, so click them to see them big. I can learnz stuff!

First off, I noticed something when the game was loading up that hadn’t previously caught my attention. This is the ratings screen that pops up during the load sequence…notice anything a bit odd?

Mild sexual themes??!! Did they discard the Army’s ‘Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell’ policy at some point? Weird…also, if you see a scenario entitled ‘Exploiting the Rear’, maybe you should avoid it…

Anyway, that juvenile attempt at jocularity out of the way, on with command!

(continue reading…)

It is with great regret that I bring you the following news.

Eaner Pantalon was found this morning laying face down in a pool of his own distinctly wine scented vomit. Alcohol poisoning…or poisoning at the hands of any of the approximately 7,013 people who despise his existence…is believed to be to blame.

We will all miss Father Eaner. Truly he was a great, great man…a delightfully irreverent bastard if ever there was one!

In actuality, the saved games have just up and vanished. I’m not entirely certain what the Hell happened, but I suspect the newest version of CCleaner for some reason saw them as garbage files to be removed…it’s kind of hard not to take THAT a little personally.

So yeah, Father Eaner is gone. I did enjoy writing the AAR for the three chapters that it lasted, though. That’s something I will certainly look in to again, once I’m finished with one of the games I’m currently neck deep in (The Witcher and Dawn of Discovery). Actually, I’ve been meaning to give Hearts of Iron 2 : Doomsday another shot, so I might do an historical AAR…maybe play as Canada. Or do a serious-minded one this time…perhaps Republic : the Revolution would work for that. Plenty of options!

And of course, my continued delving in to the mixed up disaster known as Arma 2 shall continue! There isn’t anything quite as entertaining as playing a game so unbelievably, brainlessly stupid.

During the blogging challenge, one of my posts was about Arma 2…a god awful mess of a game with potential wrapped around dog shit AI and ghastly optimization…it was like wrapping delicious bacon around a dried up husk of a turd. Well, the game’s been patched a few times, so I spent some time with the 1.2 version of the demo.

One immediate improvement, I can turn the post-processing graphics effects the fuck down. The bloom was so insanely overdone in this thing that it looked like it must have taken place in the countryside surrounding friggin’ Chernobyl.

This wasn’t the first revisit…there was one hilarious previous attempt while talking to Kelly on the phone. I was shot to death by enemies I never saw while trying to throw grenades I never did access and all the while toggling my watch. Yes, toggling…my watch.

Before we begin, allow me to give you a bit of an intro to the level of detail here…there are over 110 different commands. With that many, most buttons have more than 1 control mapped to them depending on how they’re pushed. Quickly pressing the right mouse button brings up your scope…holding it simply zooms in the view (something that took a lot of toggling various items to figure out). Of course, holding it also holds your breathing to line up a shot WHILE using the scope. Confused yet? I was.

This is but a sample. See all that toggling shit I was talking about? Yes, you too can toggle your watch…

How…errr…useful? I have no idea when this comes in to play. Do I really need to know what time it is when I get shot by invisible enemies? Really?

(continue reading…)

So, with the start of another month, it’s time to put out another Reclaim Your Game newsletter that I figured I’d share on here. I’ve done things VERY differently this time, though. I’ve always wanted to start including graphics and stuff like that, so I got myself a free account on Scribd…basically, it works the same was as something like Imageshack or Photobucket, only you upload documents instead of photographs. And now I’ve got all kinds of fancy shit in there to look at! The other reason I liked them…easy Wordpress embedding.

It’s a bit of a rough one…proper formatting tends to work out pretty crappily when adding image content is a decision made at the 11th hour when the document is already 90% done. Overall it works, though. Enjoy…or…or don’t, I guess. It does render fairly small (sort of limited by the width of the main blog column), but if you hit the Scribd button on the top left of the window, it’ll take you to the document on the site itself.

Apologies for the delay in getting this out. It almost didn’t happen…for some reason, my computer apparently decided to move my saved games from one area to another. Luckily I found the damn things and moved them BACK to where they needed to be.

“Father Eaner?” Waryn asked again, standing before the priest who was himself slumped at his desk in the writing room.

“I thought that dude was girl…I…what?” Eaner blurted as he suddenly returned to a state of awakening from that awful nightmare, “Waryn…what’s going on?”

“Father, you…well, you missed your sermon.”

“I missed…CURSES! It was a good one, too!” Eaner truly was fuming. It was a rare opportunity to speak, for Father Bernard usually insisted on having the spotlight cast down upon him and his overly pink face at all times. This was Eaner’s chance to step in and shine in a colourful manner…the comparisons he’d written between The Duchess and the Whore of Babylon were fantastic! These backwoods country mongrels would have loved it…well, they would have loved anything not delivered to them by the Count of Somnolence himself, really. And now he had slept through his chance, having stayed up late in to the night making his final preparations. All of that good gambling time spent writing sermons, and it was completely and utterly wasted.

“My apologies, Father. We tried to find you in time, but you weren’t in your usual places.” Waryn explained. It was his polite way of saying ‘You weren’t passed out and covered in your own grape-stained drool somewhere in the rectory.’

(continue reading…)

Oh yes, it’s that motherfucking time again! Time for the innocent to hide in dark basements from the mayhem that is about to ensue! Time for the lawful and righteous to run from that which scares them so deeply that not a single pair of their pants will go unsoiled! Time for even the tyrannical and powerful to shake in their boots because they feel the electricity in the air…or perhaps because they’re a bit cold and forgot to pack a sweater!

Do I really need to say anything else?! Not really…but I will anyway because I love to see my own thoughts up there in the glow of the monitor, and my ego demands that you all be subjected to it as well!

What television show features net shirts and brightly coloured hair?! Who was overcome by lust (and citrus-laced alcoholic beverages) and fondled Chad?! Who is behind the death of Michael Jackson?! Who just can’t stop the cheezy lounge crooner within himself from coming out in all its’ shimmering silver suit glory?! Who committed an act of terrorism near a party?! And exactly who left Liam’s carpets awash in fecal matter?! You’ll find all that AND MORE right here

If you have the guts…

Not good enough?! Fine! Subscribe to iTunes and get it here, chump!

Still not good enough? Okay, how about this RSS Podcasting feed? Now it gets brought to you, you lazy mongrel!

Still not working for ya?! Tough.

Time had passed as the season swept in to what most called Winter, and what Eaner referred to as ‘that hellish cold nonsense’. Many months were spent lamenting the evils of this horrible world…aka drinking heavily. Why, he’d gotten SO drunk one night that the extra Aces he literally kept up his sleeve actually fell on to the table during a high stakes game. That hadn’t exactly helped his bottom line, ad he’d been forced to return almost all of his ill gotten gains to avoid meeting God himself in a very short order. (Yes, I know Poker probably didn’t exist at this time. Live with it.) In fact, the only reason he wasn’t dead despite such actions was that he had convinced the people of the down that they would be struck down by the Lord the instant they laid a hand on him. Sure, the New Testament ‘kinder, gentler’ version of God sort of went against that notion, and that’s precisely why he hadn’t bothered teaching them about that pesky New Testament. Well, that and the fact that Old Testament God was just so much more epic and nearly evil.

Other occurrences around town didn’t exactly help Eaner’s mood much. Two of the idiots he found himself competing with in this dead end dust bowl had already been granted the civic rights that he had so far been denied…he supposed those would come when he was able to walk in to the Registrar’s Office with his pockets bulging with ‘spare cash’.

While he could dig up a small amount of respect at the tacit underhandedness and greed behind such a scheme, the fact that these 2 simpletons, a couple of prime examples of the existence of Satan’s manipulations upon this world if ever there was, beat him to some level of official recognition was offensive.

(continue reading…)