It's coming up soon. Not much else to say about it, but I am going to put up a new banner to celebrate. Some of you may have already even seen it...

On a video game related topic, I was standing pretty strong for... four days. Today I couldn't restrain myself, and bought Dance Dance Revolution: Mario Mix. But it's not as bad as all that. I've wanted a DDR game for the longest time, and this was the perfect excuse. Now I just need to sucker someone in my family to buy another dance pad thing. While the game is all you can expect from DDR (assuming you have prior knowledge of the Dance Dance Revolution series), the songs are quite an odd bunch. It's mostly remixed Mario music, as you would assume, and all the other songs are remixed classical songs. No popular music to be seen. Not that I'm complaining. The one thing that does bug me is that the "story mode" is the most ridiculous thing ever, but it's not a big issue. There are actually quite a few mini-games too, but most of them are boring and not worthy of mention. There really isn't much more to say, so that's all for now.

Here. Take it. A mini review. We were feeling kind of bad that we probably won't get another full-size review done by the end of the month, so we wrote a little one for our fans. Expect a new entry in the CD collection to pop up pretty soon as well. But we've been engrossed in We <3 Katamari for the last week, so we're going to go back to that now.

And God said, "let him bust a crunch." After many years of searching, I finally found a term that wasn't already featured on the Urban Dictionary.

And now for something completely different.

I guess I'm not surprised, as I haven't spent a cent on the site, but you know, it would have been nice to at least lie and tell me I'm worth $1.43.

NEWS FLASH! (12:07PM) - Maddox is BROKIES!!

I just saw the most horrible thing I've ever seen on children's programming. It was this frightening dancing puppet that was a dead ringer for the infamous Brian Peppers, just with popsicle stick arms. Chills me to the bone. After a little research, I fould a picture of the monster. A bit small, but you get the idea.

In other news, went to a hockey game last night. Kickass game, the Moose raped the Peoria Rivermen 6 to 1, and there were some fantastic goals; the first in particular. But there was one thing bugging me the whole time: Peoria. Sound familiar? And to top that off, their logo resembles Stan from American Dad. It left me pondering if by chance Seth McFarlane was the owner of the team. Also, at one point there was a "wave" going around for like 3 minutes, and I lost three precious minutes of hockey because it was so damned entrancing. Did I mention that the box seats at the MTS Centre are ultra-posh?

The best part of the game, however, was during the last two minutes. Seriously, 1:06 left on the clock and a brawl breaks out. At first it's just the standard two guys throwing down, but then a couple more guys start throwing punches, and finally a third pair starts trying to beat each other's face in. It was magical. Anyone who says hockey is boring needs to go to a Moose game. I've never been disappointed, and that's even without the beer. (Seriously, it's too goddamned expensive.)

So I just watched "The Amityville Horror". Not a great movie, but it had some disturbing imagery, so I'm satisfied. The ghosts and the basement scene towards the end gave off a really strong Silent Hill vibe, and that's actually a movie I really want to see. I don't like the Silent Hill games for gameplay value so much as the atmosphere and storytelling, which is different for me, because usually I don't give two shits about the story and whatnot. With that in mind, I believe that it could make the move to the big screen faily well. But anyway, onto the main point of the post.

I'll admit it, "scary" movies (excluding slashers) do strike some irrational fear into my heart. I don't have any idea why, but I always have trouble with darkness and sleeping after a horror flick, no matter how cheezy/stupid/boring it is. You may think less of me for this, but that's the way it's always been. I'm trying to overcome it (I'm typing this in the dark), but the fear is always there. The wierd thing is, I've never been scared by a videogame, even if they contain essentially the same things as the movies that send chills down my spine. I mean, SH4 should scare the living daylights out of me, cause it's filled with ghosts and horrid imagery (To be fair, there is a single room in the game that I refuse to enter, because it does creep the hell out of me), but no such fear. Even the first Silent Hill should be horrifying even though its graphical prowess is limited, but again, nothing.

I do have a sort of conclusion though. See, in the games, I'm always in control, and I'm able to defeat, overcome or escape anything that threatens me. Thusly, my brain interperets that if anything like that were to come at me, I should be able to defeat it as I did in the game, even though it may have involved some crazy voodoo magic which I don't happen to possess. The movies however, do not put me in control, and as such I've never tackled those forces even indirectly. It's always someone else doing the dirty work, and more often than not, the movie ends with the evil still intact, ready to get revenge on whoever may still be alive or plotting for its next victim. Since the antagonist is rarely vanquished in the movies, I subconsciously think that there would be no hope to escape such a menace, should it happen to be real. I know that nothing like this can actually happen, but unfortunately, that little voice in the back of my head wants to believe it could, so it ends up poisoning my entire psyche in the end. It may be hard to comprehend what I'm trying to get across, since you're not privy to my thoughts, but I've explained it to the best of my ability. Hell, you'd probably go out of you mind if you had to decipher all my thoughts.

But anyway, that's just something I needed to get out into the open. I even feel a little more comfortable now that I've got it off my chest. As a reward for reading this drivel, I'll tell you a secret. The article will be up later today. I kinda slacked off today, but it's almost done. If you didn't read the whole spiel, then shame shame double shame on you for cheating and skipping to the last paragraph to see if there was any article news there. Also, this week's comic is going to be hilarious. At least, that's what we think.

The newest "feature" of the site is up and ready to go now. I've been itching to do this since like December of last year. It's about time I finally got to it. Speaking of which, I promised an article for the weekend, didn't I? Shit, better get to work on that now...

But before I get back to that, I picked up Matthew Good's In A Coma "anthology" and my God, it is the most amazing thing ever. The new songs rock, the classics were well-picked and the acoustic songs are absolutely beautiful. And I haven't even thought about the included DVD yet. Best of all, it was only $30. For two discs (17 and 19 tracks respectively) and a DVD crammed with goodies, that's an excellent price. To top it all off, Matt Good is gonna be playing a bar show here on the 25th and 26th. I really want to go, so I need a posse or a girlfriend ASAP.

If you've got an account on my forums, can I ask you a small favour? Would you try loging in? I'm not asking for board activity, it's just that I was trying to log in and it won't let me. Says I need an activation key, and when they sent me the key, it doesn't work. So yeah, give it a shot. Pretty please? With sugar on top?

UPDATE (7:40PM) - I managed to log in, and wiped the whole place. Now, the Forums of Death are the Torrential Coozy Forums. I decided that we need a message board for Coozy for Hire, and thus I've relaunched it under a guise of being the official forums for both sites. And also, I mentioned a new pseudo-article to be up near the end of September a while back. While it's pretty late, that'll be ready to go tomorrow.

MIT one-ups the MythBusters. Well I thought it was pretty neat. Anyhow, I've got a rather small yet difficult report to write, so I'd better get to that. An article is in the works, and should be done around the weekend.

First I'd like to note that the offers on both the Super Mario Bros. Super Show and Bots Master theme songs have expired. If you really want to download those songs, youse-a gonna hafta find 'em youseselves. It's sad, I know, but the dumping of excess weight saved me over 1.5MBs. Hooray!

On to the task at hand, this month's "band" is the Canadian rocker Matthew Good. Anyone out of the loop might be inclined to ask "But isn't it Matthew Good Band?" Then I would point out that "No." True, there was a band, but that was ages ago. Sometime in between 2001 and 2003 (I can't remember for sure, and I'm not going to look it up), the band broke up and Matt went out on his own. Word on the street is the breakup was caused by Matt's assholic personality, and who's to say differently. If you want to try to figure it out, the picture on the sidebar leads to his blog, and you can read into that if you really care. If not, you can keep reading this. It's not like there's anything better out there. Trust me, there isn't.

It all started back in 1995, when the MGB released their first album, entitled Last of the Ghetto Astronauts. This was before I listened to them, so I've never heard this one, even though I've bought mostly every other MGB/Matt Good CD. The other one I don't own was a half-assed attempt released two years later, featuring only five songs, two of them coming from the previous disc. Raygun may only have five songs, but they generally charge the normal CD fee of $15 for it, and I'm not shelling out $15 for five songs. Some places even bump it up to around $20. "Generation X-Wing" is a pretty damn good song, though. Almost makes it worth it.

My personal experience starts with Underdogs, which was released the same year as Raygun. I think the first MGB song I ever liked was the incredibly slow "Apparitions". I still really like the song, but there are better ones out there. Other greats on the CD inclued "Everything is Automatic" and "Indestructible." The next CD, Beautiful Midnight, was easily the peak of MGB's success, being home to at least four hit singles. "Hello Time Bomb", "Strange Days", "Load Me Up" and "The Future is X-Rated" are all great, but don't think that that's all the album has to offer. "Giant" is a first-rate and somewhat touching song, and "Jenni's Song" mixes a great chorus with a tune that I know is from another song. Or at least very similar. This is a great CD to start with if you're just getting into MGB. My personal favourite of the MGB releases is their last, The Audio of Being. This one sounds different from the previous ones, or it does to me anyway. The sound gets a lot more serious and while I don't stretch as far as to call it emo, some might apply that tag here. There are plently of good rock songs here, but the overall mood seems to be of a slower pace and has a more mature tone to it. Eventually, "Anti-Pop" hit the big time with some radio/TV play, but I think that's all the mainstream world really saw of this album.

And that was when they split. Would this cause a big change in the music? No. Not really. As far as the music tells you, Matt was pulling all the strings, at least towards the end. There's very little differenece between the Matthew Good Band and the Matthew Good solo act, so fans could breathe a sigh of relief. His first solo release, Avalanche, is fantastic and provides a great split between the moodier sound of The Audio of Being and the more rock-oriented previous CDs. Something for everyone here, and it even brought Matt back into the mainstream with the singles "Weapon" and "In A World Called Catastrophe", the latter which had something of a thematic video (at least I think it was that song), presenting you with footage of the war on Iraq. While I generally look down upon political music (another story altogether), the song itself doesn't explicitly touch on the subject, so I can deal with it.

The most recent album, White Light Rock & Roll Review is just as good, if not better than its predecessor. In fact, I often confuse some of the tracks between the two. More radio hits here, I've heard both "Alert Status Red" and "It's Been a While Since I Was Your Man" get plenty of play on the local rock station. I personally like the uber-simplified "Put Out Your Lights" and hard-rocking "North American For Lofe", but hey, if I chose what they played on the radio, I'd be the king of mainstream. And yes, I meant for that sentence to go nowhere. The cool note is that this is the only MGB/Matt Good CD (that I've listened to/can remember) that totes a hidden track. "Hopeless" is an excellent song that's almost country, but I love it, and am very disappointed that it doesn't show up on the upcoming greatest hits CD.

And speaking of that, In A Coma (October 11th, if you're interested) will be released in not one, but two versions. The first is your regular greatest hits package with a couple new songs tacked on for fun. The second, though, is just mind-blowing. Not only is it two discs long, but the second disc is full of acoustic classics and rare songs. To top that all off, it also includes a DVD packed with videos, commentary, a documentary and all sort of other superfluous junk. As you may have guessed, I totally coozied when I heard about this one. It's probably gonna cost a pretty penny though, and I'm not really looking forward to that part of the transaction. Other things I should mention include two EPs, Loser Anthems and Lo-Fi B-Sides, the latter of which was given a limited release, with only 500 copies produced. Too bad none of those copies made it into my grubby hands. The former also has some limited availability jargon associated with it, but I don't feel like retyping my finds.

And so another Band of the Month segment comes to an end. Seriously, if you like Matthew Good and are thinking of picking up a CD, go with either Beautiful Midnight or one of his solo CDs. Of course, the impending release of the In A Coma anthology looms on the horizon, so you could always wait for that. There's not much else to say, except for that tomorrow I'll be putting up a new mini-review, somewhat related to today's post, and I'm not gonna be making a post specifically to draw attention to it tomorrow. I'll be too busy, because Castlevania: Dawn of Sorrow and MegaMan Zero 4 released yesterday, and Future Shop or EB should have them by tomorrow.

The best Fark Photoshop thread ever. Cartoon characters selling out.

Finally, a new "Steve, Don't Eat It!" Silkworm pupas. Or is it pupae?

As for me, I've got nothing. Those should be plenty entertaining for now. BotM tomorrows.

Last night, I watched one of the coolest movies I've seen in a while: The Cell. The basic plot is that this psychotherapist (played by Jennifer Lopez) goes into the mind of a serial killer and tries to figure out where he's got his latest victim hidden. Anyhow, I started watching because I flipped by the channel and I saw Vince Vaughn, and figured that I haven't seen a bad movie with him in it yet so why not. A while in, it occured to me just how similar this movie is to one of my favourite PS2 games, Silent Hill 4: The Room. Honestly, if you've played the game and understood the whole story, you would just be blown away by when you watch The Cell and see just how many things they have in common. Or vicey versa, whatever. They're not entirely the same, but you'd be hard pressed to not see similarities between the two. The point is, if the guys who wrote SH4 said they weren't at all influenced by this movie, I wouldn't believe them for a second. My advice is to play SH4 and watch The Cell. Awesome game, awesome movie. It's just like how the original Silent Hill had a lot in common with Jacob's Ladder (which are also awesome, by the way). That is all.