Doodling – Page 5

Cleaning the Closet – A Blarticle

The other day I had some free time, and I started going through all my video games and picking out ones I no longer liked or was sure that I’d never play again. Honestly, it was very hard. I’m a pack rat by nature, and it’s incredibly hard to look at a game and admit to myself that I’ll never actually play it again. God knows that most of the ones I kept will only continue to collect dust until my girlfriend (or possibly even my mom, she would love to clean my room) gets rid of them, but I ended up with some incredibly large piles. 32 games ended up on the chopping block, and when I mentioned it to my mother, she recommended I hit my Nintendo Power collection next.

While I’ve stopped getting them over the last couple years, I had subscribed to Nintendo Power magazine for at least ten years, and had a nice collection of really old ones from my uncle. They were eating up a sizeable portion of my closet, and I decided it was time to free up that space. Issues 92 (Shadows of the Empire, and coincidentally, the number of this article) through 198 were lined up neatly on a shelf and were an easy purge. It was just a matter of grabbing a handful and tossing them in the recycling bin. Everything I owned that came before #92 was a little more complicated. These issues were left in a milk crate in the corner of my closet, and due to their poor location, were mostly torn and ripped far past the point of me feeling they were worth keeping. A small stack of these ones is pictured below.

Getting rid of all these magazines was a terribly nostalgic ordeal. The shelf issues were in such pristine condition that I could barely bear to part with them, and looking at just the covers was like a trip backwards through my entire life. In retrospect, it’s perhaps a little distressing that I could take any point in my life and define it with an issue of Nintendo Power. Every time I grabbed a new stack, my heartstrings tugged a little harder as I remembered all those games and all the good times I had. I have at least one story (short and trivial though some may be) to go with every issue, but that’s not why I’m writing today.

What’s truly interesting was the crate pile. Or moreover, what was mixed into the crate pile. Among the torn, raggedy, old relic magazines was all sorts of neat junk that inspired just as much (if not more in some instances) nostalgia as the Nintendo Powers themselves. Old drawings, writing, other kinds of literature, and even a bunch of exclusive promotional junk that came into my possession through my subscription to Nintendo Power. This may be a terribly boring article to most, not unlike my tribute to the cottage (which is yet to receive its due second part), but to me it’s a wellspring of memories and cuddly feelings of simpler days gone by. This is my tribute to what basically amounts to a pile of junk.

The first (excluding the small forest’s worth of magazines) thing I noticed was this wonderful little booklet of looseleaf. It’s entitles “The Guinness Book of Freaks” and is essentially a time capsule of how broken my sense of humour was nearing the end of grade seven. Things were so hard back then, I still had no idea who I was as a person, I was trying so hard to fit in with anybody, and my usual material (stick men being killed in decreasingly creative ways) was starting to dry out. So I guess it was time to parody a record book? Isn’t that the logical next step? I don’t know.

Looking back at this “book” of about 3 pages, I start to wonder exactly what went through my head back in those days. I mean, yes, gross and weird. I get it, just like most young boys. But this book is really bad. And I don’t mean disturbing or anything like that, but rather that it just shows a complete lack of imagination or originality. The best entries held within include “World’s Fattest Man” and “World’s Hairiest Woman”. I’m fairly confident that at that age I still had an imagination, so I have no idea what happened to it here. Guess it was just a stinker. Those happened every once in a while. It’s not even finished, with more than half the book’s pages completely untouched.

And no, I’m not scanning any of the pages. The mere description should be more than enough. It’s just really bad material, though fairly interesting in that it’s not often that I find something I did almost a decade ago and don’t look at it with even a bit of nostalgic fondness. This just sucks. F minus minus.

Now this bunch of old drawings, I was very happy to find. It’s not nearly as old as the Book of Freaks, but it’s at least a billionty times better. Most of this pile is comprised of the original pencil drawings for Coozy For Hire comics. A good portion of them come from the time before the tablet, some even from before I started colouring them in! We’ve only been running CFH for three and a half years, but already I look at these like they’re some kind of long-lost relics.

Even better than old rough comics, is that there’s a veritable wealth of unused material stashed away in here! And it comes in all kinds: unused comic ideas (albeit they were never used because they’re terrible), hordes of doodles, character galleries, etc etc etc. Granted, most of it will never see the light of day as anything more than filler, but I love that it’s there to be filler. The well was runnin’ dry, you see, and now I’m good to shirk off my comicing duties for ages to come! (But not really.)

Also hidden inside this slimy little pile is a script for a short play (possibly short enough to be referred to as a “skit”) that I co-wrote for grade 10 drama class. Yeah. If you hadn’t heard, I took drama class in grade 10. It was cool. Anyway, it’s a story about… well, I won’t say too much about it, because I may turn it into a feature-length comic one day (as inapproprite for that medium as the story is), but I like it. It was fun to write my character, and actually doing the play was a gas too. Second best play I’ve ever been in, hands down. The best one only wins out because I got to drop my pants in it.

Hmmm. Seems I owe junior high a shitty holocaust book.

Grade eight, I believe. English class, we were doing the inevitable yearly holocaust/WW2 unit (seriously, do they have to teach it every goddamn year from 6-12? I got the friggin’ point after two years; Hitler bad, Vandals good.) It’s a terribly generic story about a girl who gets magically transported from her passover supper or whatever to a concentration camp and then has to survive to get back. I don’t remember the details, but I don’t care. I’ll probably burn this book for being a smack in the face to all the people who had to suffer through that horror.

Ah, this one is great. Sort of. It’s great for what it represents, not so much the finished product. Of course I use the word “finished” very lightly, as what is contained in the notebook pictured above is an unpublished article. I find it amazing that at one point in time I actually loved writing for this website so much that I would take a notebook places and work on articles in my away-from-the-computer spare time. Of course, this is the only one I ever actually completed writing, but it’s not the only one I ever worked on.

And what is the lost article about? Well, actually, it’s about porn. Yeah. One of two articles about adult-related media that never got published because I didn’t really want to smut up the site like that. This one was actually about my dissatisfaction with pornography on the whole, though it focused more on film than anything else. It’s not worth typing out and putting up, because it’s short and crappy (er, crappier than my usual crap anyway), and I really don’t like it. I guess I probably didn’t like it by the time I got around to typing it up, because it never came to fruition.

The other porn-related article I was going to write was about a game called 3D Striptease that, after a little searching, no longer exists outside a demo. The article then, obviously, was a review of that demo, as the full game was still in development at the time and I wasn’t going to pay money for something so garbage anyway. It was opposite the article in the book, however, as I had all the pictures and article structure ready, I just needed to sit down and write the thing. The game was supposed to be released in summer 2004, so I’m assuming the article in the notebook is at least as old if not older. Maybe someday I’ll dig up the demo and then write about the greatest stripper FPS that never was.

This notebook is only marginally more interesting. The first page is a continuation of the Spare! comics I wrote throughout high school. Only high school was over so I had no more material, since Spare! was based on actual events. I actually coloured and posted the first strip on this page on the blog many years back. It’s much better than the other two, which at best serve to set up the “I’m not in high school anymore so no more reality-based comics” premise of what I assume would have been called “New Spare!”.

I never made another attempt at new Spare! comics in either high school or after high school format. The only other use this book has served over time is as a stand-in for our old printer that never worked. In it, I copied down every single alchemy recipe for Dragon Quest VIII. I was pretty into that game, and of course I would have to complete the alchemy book. I’m obsessive-compulsive like that. Ironically, I never beat the game proper, as the last boss is too Goddamn hard and I totally fucked myself by putting skill points in all weapon types for my characters, rather than focusing on one or two.

There’s also a map to every hidden Sorcerer’s Scanner item in Tales of Legendia, which I did collect all of in the end, but really, Legendia wasn’t that good. And that’s coming from a pretty loyal Tales fan. Maybe I just need to play it again? I dunno. I’d rather just play Tales of Vesperia a fourth time.

Here’s a pile of Nintendo Power-related goodies, the one which I’m most excited about being the Nintendo Power Club challenge cards. See, back when NP was awesome and I read every single page (even about games I’d never care about in a million years), they put in little punch-out cars in the back of the mag that you could collect. I had tons of them, and I thought they’d been lost to the ether many, many years ago. But alas! It seems that there were a couple issues from which I did not remove the cards, and forsooth, I have a small number of them in my possession. Kinda shitty when you have a collectible that you can no longer collect though.

There’s more to these cards though! While they may seem like cheap eye candy or collector fodder at best, the back sides also have a couple challenges for each game. The MegaMan X card, for example, challenges you to beat certain stages using only the X-Buster. This is a joke because today I can finish the entire game with only the X-Buster, while asleep! But they were hard back in the day! They also give a short summary of the games’ plots, and some practical data, such as genre, number of players, and the date the game was released. You may also notice that the cards are color-coded; purple cards are Game Boy games, red are NES games, and green are Super NES – the same color-coding Nintendo Power used for page themes.

There are a couple Nintendo Power Supplies catalogues in here, but I definitely want to review those separately, and the big “confidential information” file folder look-alike is a promotional brochure for Goldeneye 007. I haven’t leafed through it very thoroughly, but I’m thinking it’s also worthy of its own article, so I’ll let it sit and collect dust for a few more years before I get around to it. Plus, it’ll be way more retro by then. Hopefully retro will still be cool.

I’ve always loved super heroes and comics. Every Saturday morning for most of the 90’s I would get up early and watch FOX’s morning cartoon line-up, which included X-Men, Spider-Man, and… well, I can’t remember what else. But I watched the shit out of X-Men and Spider-Man. Ask any male and they’ll tell you that those were some awesome shows. Hulk’s cartoon was nowhere near as popular and was never in the Saturday morning lineup, but he managed to make himself my favourite super hero with his pure awesomeness. I’ve been interested in super heroes as long as I can remember, I’ve read up a ton on them, and when I was younger, even had most of the toys.

I’ve also always been a huge fan of comics. Admittedly, they only had Archie and ALF (with a few Heathcliffs and Richie Riches thrown in for good measure), but my grandparents had a magnificent stack of old comics at the cottage, and over many years, I read them all. My fondest memories involve ads where Batman is selling twinkies. And these days (though admittedly less often than usual) I read at least five webcomics, and I even draw my own comic! It’s amazing! You’d think this obsession with comics would equate to me having a good collection of my own.

Not the case. Pictured above is every single comic book that I own. Yeah. Just over twenty. There’s a pretty wide variety, from Batman to Spider-Man to KISS to Star Wars, but it’s still a bit tiny and embarrassing. Though there is a Marvel art book in there called “Marvel Masterpieces 2” which is amazing and has some truly fantastic portraits in it. It’s the gem of my collection and is the only one in pristine condition. The rest range from okay to have-the-cover-ripped-off. It’s actually probably the only one I’m going to keep. I may not have many comics, but I’ve read them over many times each, so I don’t really feel much sorrow parting with them. It was fun, but I guess when it comes down to it, I’m just not a comic person.

This is just a bunch of window decals that I took from work before the Wii launch. It was a great time to work at TRU, because there was so much promotional Wii crap that I could swipe and enjoy for myself. Other than that, I’d say it’s no more enjoyable than most other jobs. Friendly crew, but that’s about it.

I would love to type “Ahh, the piece de resistance” at this point, but as cool as this book is, it’s not some kind of amazing article-finisher. It’s just a standard unlicensed Nintendo strategy guide. In pocket book form.

Edwin gave this to me a few years back. I forget where he found it, but I believe there was some sort of intent to see it on the website. Maybe not, I don’t know. It was ages (three years) ago. All I can think of when I look at this book is that I know I’ve read it before, but a glance at the index of games covered assures me that I have not. I’m certain that the book I read covered Monster Party, Friday the 13th and maybe a Choplifter game. But that was all the way back in grade five, so I may be off on a couple titles. Googling it, I couldn’t find a game index for any of the three follow-up books, but I’m pretty sure it was one of them. The cover just looks so familiar.

On the other hand, I looked up Jeff Rovin on Wikipedia, and while he’s a pretty prolific novelist and biographer, he’s also pretty big on movie novelizations. Which is not too bad, since he’s done a ton of original work, which makes up for the movie novelization’s inherent lack of imagination, but he novelized Mortal Kombat. Why? Why would you bother? “Read the book based on the mediocre movie based on the crappy game!” That would be the pitch. What a terrible idea…

And that’s about that. I should mention that while the article is titled “Cleaning the Closet”, we’re only talking about approximately 5% of the closet’s space, so it’s a little misleading. If I were to dig out all the old nostalgic junk from the entirety of my closet, this article would never end. And that would be more than even I could take.

Remembering the Cottage: Part 1

My fondest memories can more or less be summed up in three categories: “Shopping at Toys ‘R’ Us”, “Holidays/Trips”, and “The Cottage”. The first two categories can still potentially be added to, but sadly, the third is now sealed away as only memories.

I’ve mentioned many a time on this website (most often in the blog) my many visits to my grandparents’ house, which just happened to be a sweet cottage out on the Winnipeg River. The thing is, I never described many events in detail, or took any pictures while I was out there. to nearly everyone, this mysterious cottage could have just as well been a well-constructed myth. To me though, it was very real, and it was the essence of my summers. I spent at least two weeks out there during the summer months for as long as I can remember, and there were quite often other trips out there for such events as Spring Break, Christmas, Thanksgiving, family reunions, long weekends, and many more. It was a great place, and while I may not have appreciated it quite as much in my older years, it was still a place I loved being very much.

Imagine my heartbreak when I first heard that my grandparents were thinking about selling. As if enough bad mojo wasn’t surrounding me in the year 2007, but now my beloved cottage was going to be taken away? Yeah, it sucks balls. The place was actually sold right at the end of August, and on my last weekend out there, I decided I would take a few pictures so I could put them on a webpage laced with wonderful stories of the time I’d spent there. This is that page, and it’s definitely more for my own sake than for anyone else to read, but feel free to sift through it. There are a lot of memories and strong emotions here, so don’t expect even an attempt at humour.

The TV Room

Overview: Ah, the TV room. I probably spent more hours here than anywhere else, but there are a couple catches that help to make that seem less like I was glued to the TV for all the time I was at the cottage. The most obvious one would be that for a couple years I used one of the couches as my bed, so that racks up the hours pretty quickly. If I regret anything in my lifetime, it’s that I didn’t spend nearly enough time out on the balcony that extends from this room. Don’t know why, but it just never seemed like the place I should be hanging out.

Atari: I guess the earliest thing I can remember this room for is that it’s where we had out Atari. Long before I got hooked on video games, my dad left his Atari system out here, only to be dug up many years later so he could show me the kind of games that were around before the NES. I spent many many hours playing Kangaroo, Pitfall, and Pac-Man. Even back when I was only but a wee lad, I could recognize that ET was the worst game ever made. The biggest mystery about the whole thing though, was that we had a manual for Donkey Kong, but there was nary a cartridge to go with it. Oh, how I burned to play Donkey Kong.

Simpsons & Bonding time: My younger cousin would often come in to visit at the same time we did in the summers, and it worked out well because he’s very much like me, so myself and The Youngest One would often spend a lot of time hanging out in here with him and playing whatever handheld game was in at the time. Or just whatever the most recent Pokémon game was. Those two are even more into Pokémon than I am, and I would always get into it when we came out to the cottage, because the young ones just wouldn’t shut up about it, and that would drag me into it. The Tall One and I were also deeply entrenched in the MegaMan Battle Network series, and it was pretty much a summertime tradition to buy the games just before we went out the cottage and simply play the Hell out of them while we were there. Both series of games brought me not only the regular pleasure of playing video games, but also a lot of valuable bonding time with my brothers and cousin. Sure, I can still play with them at home, but it’s just not the same. Also, my grandparents got satellite TV a few years back, and it seemed like that on any given evening that we were there, the Simpsons would always be on at least one channel, so we generally always had that on in the background. Good times, they were. Good times.

Movie night: Back in the day, my grandpa would often borrow a bunch of movies from a neighbour so we had something to watch while we were out there (this was before the satellite, and we were restricted to like three fuzzy channels). This is notable because it’s the first place I ever saw Kindergarten Cop, which remains my favourite Schwarzenegger film, and is near the top of my overall favourites. Many other times, while my grandparents were staying in the city, my family would come out for the weekend and basically binge on junk food and watch movies. Most of them were stinkers like RV and Epic Movie (to name some of the most recent), but it was still cherished time spent with my family and many, many cookies.

Random thoughts: It was a great place to hang out, and of course we often brought more in the way of video games than handhelds, as Atari was fun, but never quite enough. We fought over which console we would bring each time almost as much as we fought over who got to sit in that big reclining chair you can see in the second picture. I played a lot of Donkey Kong 64 out here, and that particular week at the cottage remains one of the most memorable for many reasons. I’ll always carry in my heart the memories of the first time I caught all the legendary birds in Pokémon Blue, as they were all while I was out at the cottage. I spent many subsequent trips out there playing through the game again and again, always reliving my triumphs over Zapdos, Articuno and Moltres with a smile on my face, often in the middle of the night when I should have been long asleep.

Guest Bedrooms

Overview: Only one is pictures, but there were actually two bedrooms upstairs. While I suppose they weren’t technically guest bedrooms, nobody used them but guests, so there you have it. Until the shed outside was turned into a mini-cottage of sorts (more on that later), we would often sleep in these rooms. For a handful of years I slept in the TV Room, as I mentioned before, but these were where we stayed the majority of the time.

Bedtime: The room you see pictured is actually the final phase of that room’s series of redecorations. Initially it had two huge beds lined against the window wall and the wall opposite the shelving. And when I say huge, I mean huge enough to play underneath with plenty of room to spare. I guess they were more high up than anything else, but while they were in there, I was still small enough to think they were gigantic. Until The Youngest One was born, the older two and I would sleep in this room together, a crib or mattress was placed in the empty floor when needed, and I moved onto the second bedroom room when The Youngest One came along and three beds weren’t enough to satisfy the four of us. But until that time, we spent many nights staying up “late” (back when 10:30 was late) and telling stories and jokes in the dark. Being all boys, there was plenty of roughhousing after bedtime too, and I really miss those times.

Bedtime 2: Eventually, when I moved onto the second upstairs bedroom, I was on my own and free to do whatever I pleased instead of sleeping. Obviously, I used that time alone to play GameBoy, listen to music, and read (most memorably the Final Fantasy VIII strategy guide, because that was another completely kickass summer) all through the night. Once the boys started sleeping outside (in the aforementioned shed) I took over the original room for myself again, and at that point it had been rearranged into the room you see in the picture above.

Comics: You can see the shelving in the picture, but hidden behind the pile of assorted sheets and whatnot is a huge collection of comics. They consisted mostly of Archie, Alf, Heathcliff, and Richie Rich. While those aren’t exactly my first choices in comics nowadays, I was pleased as punch to spend countless afternoons leafing through them. And though it took me a couple years to get the job done, I did eventually read through them all. Taking note of my love of comics, my grandpa started saving me the Sunday comics from the Free Press every week, and every time I went out to the cottage he’d always have a stack of funnies for me to peruse. He still saves them for me to this day, and I haven’t put any time aside to read through them for a while now, so I’ve got a rather large pile in my closet just waiting to be read or thrown out.

Horsin’ Around: Back when we were young, and the huge beds were still in the room, my brothers and I spent a lot of time playing in there, often concluding in someone being injured, however slightly. The number one game would be “Lava Monster”, which I know is not exclusive to us, because I’ve seen characters on TV playing it. But in case you have no idea, basically one person would be the Lava Monster and have to stay on the floor, and anyone else would be trying to stay on the beds while the Lava Monster tried to pull them down “into the lava”. The limited playfield may seem like an issue when I describe it, but it was more than enough when we were just lil’ guys. Plus, we’d always get any other visiting children to join in too, so sometimes the Lava Monsters would amount to more than one, depending on rules (either “Tag” or “Last Man Standing”).

Random Thoughts: Now that I think about it, I guess probably the thing I miss most about the cottage (and childhood in general) was playing with the older two of my brothers. While we still hang out and play video games together now and then, we don’t spend nearly as much time together as we did when we went to the cottage. Back when we were kids, we fought a lot (like, seriously, a lot) at home, but as soon as we got to the cottage, we were like best friends. It’s weird to say because I still see them every day, but I kinda miss my brothers. The Youngest One, I still find plenty of time to hang out with though, so at least I’ve got that. For now.

The Kitchen / Dining Room

Overview: Honestly, the living room, dining room, and kitchen are pretty much all the same room. But that’s hardly the point here. Being the glutton that I am, this area of the house holds just as many lovely memories for me as any other room. My grandma is a wonderful cook, and even the simplest dishes meant a lot, just because. I’ll certainly miss the couple weeks each year where I was guaranteed to have three square meals a day.

Breakfast time: Where to start? I suppose breakfast would be the obvious one. I’m not a big breakfast eater. I adore the meal, but very rarely to I have enough motivation or time to partake. The nice thing about the cottage is that breakfast was always a sure thing (with the exception of the later years where I would stay up too late and sleep right through breakfast time). Most of the time it would be a simple cereal/toast/fruit affair, but that was okay. My grandpa would always have the paper completely read by the time I got up, so when I was eating breakfast, he’d have the comics and puzzles pulled out and ready for me. Eating cereal is twice as awesome when you’ve got a crossword laid out for you and someone to chat with. On the best mornings, my grandma would make pancakes. Oh, those were mornings to really treasure. Until later on when grandma didn’t feel like making tons of them, my brothers and I would always compete to see who could scarf down the most. Good times were had by everyone, but our bellies were probably the happiest of all. Lazy mornings are probably my absolute most favourite thing in the world, and at the cottage, they were all that much better.

Lunch: I never looked quite as forward to lunch as much as I did breakfast, but I still like to revel in the nostalgia of noon-related meals. Most of all, would be when I was between eight and twelve or so, and we would often get the boat out and go fishing with my grandpa in the mornings. We’d always get bored pretty quickly and just resort to fooling around on the boat, but going home was a payoff in more than just getting back on dry land. My grandma would generally have lunch ready by that time, and it was awesome. Coming home to a big plate of sandwiches, veggies, cheese, cookies, and all sorts of etc was just superb after a long morning of fishing. Of course, lunch was great on other days, but those are the ones I remember the most. Looking back on this, I guess maybe it all sounds a bit mundane, but you really had to be there. Being pre-adolescent would help too.

Dinner: This is where grandma’s cooking really comes into play. You’re not going to do anything too fancy for lunch, but dinner is a different story. Grandpa often joked that he ate like a king whenever we were over, and I suppose maybe it’s not too far from the truth. I’m a notoriously picky eater, so I would often pick at some things, but most of the time I ate really well. Hams were especially common, and my family seems to be imbued with the power of making wicked awesome mashed potatoes. Going to the cottage on special occasions was great too, because that meant my grandma would make an extra huge and extra delicious dinner, which was always something to look forward to, even for one with as particular eating habits as me. In fact, I actually wrote about one particularly wonderful Easter dinner on the blog. Turns out it would be the last Easter diner we ever ate there….

Elsewhere…

Overview: While it’s true that being at the cottage was in itself the high point of going to the cottage, there were plenty of other cool places nearby to spend time. Most were great for adventuring while we were little, and some offered more than a simple thrill of an excursion into the unknown. All of them though, played a vital role in making trips to the cottage as memorable as the were.

Town: The cottage was about a five minute drive from the nearest town, Lac du Bonnet. I never cared too much for it while younger, but as I grew, I started to realize that it was more than just a grocery store and a beach. Annual Canada Day parades, while officially boring as Hell, would become an important family tradition, and the fireworks afterward only seem to get better each year. It was also home to the only dollar store where I’d ever seen the infamous Nintendo Surprise. It has since closed down and moved to a much larger building, and the goods within have become only slightly less magical. When Subway moved in, it was all we talked about for ages. The only chain restaurant that had been in the town until then was Chicken Chef, and that’s not the kind of place you just go on a whim. Nope, after Subway moved in, I don’t think there was one trip to the cottage where we didn’t partake.

Town 2: Pinawa is a little farther away, and we visited less often, but always for good reason. Firstly, I would like to mention that if it weren’t for my need to shop compulsively for various electronic media, this is exactly the kind of place I would like to live in. It’s small, but not tiny, and most if not all of the houses are quite nice. I’ve always entertained the thought of living in a small town, and Pinawa has always romanticized that idea. Anyhow, the main attraction here is The Burger Boat & Ice Cream Barge. It’s not the best ice cream place I’ve ever gone, but there’s something special about getting your ice cream from a boat. Always a special occasion, going to The Burger Boat was something to really get excited about. Seriously! On a boat! Turns out they even have their own web page. Neat!

The Boat Launch: A short hike away from the cottage, there’s a boat launch that I’ve never seen anyone use for boats. We’d go swimming or fishing off it, but never any boats. Probably because nearly everyone with a boat in the area has their own boat launch, but that’s besides the point. In any case, over the years, it became more of a point just for me to travel out to just to get some alone/thinking time. There were better spots for such things, but they were all farther away, and I’m lazy. The hike there was worth mentioning too, as there was always a bunch of stuff on the way. Mostly bodies of water to skip rocks in and bales of hay to climb on, but they meant a lot back in the day.

The Rocks: Along Tower Road was, that’s right, a tower. To this day I’m not sure exactly what kind of tower it was. Maybe a broadcasting tower of some sort? No idea, but that’s not what we ventured over there for. All around the mysterious tower were what seemed like endless miles of rocks perfectly fit for climbing. Heading out there at least once per summer, we’d make entire days of climbing around, searching for something, but not quite knowing what that something was. Maybe we were looking for anything at all? To me, it always seemed like the formations had changed, but I guess that’s dumb to say. I know they couldn’t have, but I guess my mental mapping skills weren’t entirely developed by then. We did, on occasion, find a small pile of rocks that signified that someone else had been wandering around there too, and we’d often set up our own little rock piles, with the intent of showing both other people and ourselves that we’d been there already. I haven’t been out there since I was about fifteen, and many times I’ve considered just making a trip out there to visit both Lac du Bonnet and Pinawa, and to spend the rest of the day climbing around on the rocks I so loved as a young’un. Maybe I’ll get around to it one of these summers.

More!: Yeah. There’s still more here. Hell, I could go on nearly forever with stories of my youth in any of these categories. It just so happens that the ones that take place outside sound infinitely less boring to everyone else. There were a lot of other places we’d head out to see what we could see, often against our wills. The Pinawa Dam was close enough that we didn’t mind going, but there still wasn’t much of interest. Point Du Bois was much farther away, and while it held a bunch of great memories for my grandparents and dad, there’s like nothing there that’s even remotely interesting to anyone who never lived/spent summers there. There were all sorts of other landmarks that my grandparents liked to take us to, like a big ol’ suspension bridge, and yet another dam. All were pretty boring and mosquito-filled, but in the end, I appreciate them taking us, because as lackluster as they are, they still count as good memories.

Woof. Considering that I haven’t tapped even half the pictures I took, this article could very well go on forever. We certainly don’t want that, now do we? No. So, keeping everyone’s best interest in mind, I’ll stop here for the moment and call it Part One. How many more will there be? Who knows! It’ll likely only be a two-parter, but if I’m as verbose with ther rest of the pictures as I’ve been with the ones I’ve posted so far, we’ll likely be seeing a Part Three as well. But that’ll be the absolute limit. Even if I tried, there’s no way I could justify doing this in a four-part series. I guess you can’t really put a limit on your memories, but the honest truth is that most of the events that I found significant and still dream happily about would be viewed as horribly mundane by pretty much anyone else. So keep an eye out for number two. Given how long it took me to finish this one, we should be seeing it by the second half of 2011.

Gimme an R!

It’s been flying on the edge of the radar since it was announced, so you may or may not have heard about Drawn to Life. If you have heard about it, you know exactly why I bought it.

Drawn to Life is, in essence, a platformer. However, the platforming part of the game is like 34% of why I enjoy it. Quite frankly, the controls are a little sluggish, and it’s been painfully easy so far. But that aside, it’s also a game about drawing! Yes!

As you can tell from the boxart, you get to draw in your own character, and while that’s kinda neat, it also sucks a little. No matter how nice your drawing is, it will always look like shit in play, and it’s animated quite poorly too. I suppose that’s the price you pay for getting to draw your character though. But hey, the rest is pretty awesome! You get to draw a ton of other things, like platforms and weapons and stuff, and it’s wonderful! Unlike your main character, all the other sprites come out looking great, and I could simply sit there for hours filling in the landscape with custom props, and then bouncing around and reveling in their beauty. In fact, that’s basically what I’ve done with the game so far.

While you get to design a lot of objects from scratch, with the ability to do whatever you want inside a set frame, there are a handful of things you’re provided with an outline for and can only really colour in. Of course, this is still pretty fun. It’s not quite as great as drawing in an imitation Air Tikki where you’re supposed to draw a cloud, it still allows for a good amount of creativity.

The music in Drawn to Life is pretty upbeat and spunky, but nothing really special. I mean, it’s decent, but you could just as well turn off the volume and put on your own tunes in the background. The graphics, the ones that don’t depend on the player’s drawing talent, are pretty nice. Think Rocket Slime with a little more detail. The animation is very crisp, too. Not quite as smooth as you’d see in the more recent Kirby games, but the artist’s effort really shows through.

As I touched on briefly, the gameplay is weaker than I’d like, but it’s not unforgivably bad. The best way to describe it is to say that it plays like a good (but not great) Flash platformer. So kinda janky and amateurish, but still playable. The ability to doodle in most of the environmental objects and a ton of other stuff really makes the game worth playing for me. Did I mention there is plenty of secret crap to collect? Oh yeah, there’s boatfuls. In conclusion, I think it was totally worth my $30. It’s no Mario Bros game, but if I wanted a game where everything was already drawn in, I’d just play something else.

As for a score? I’d say six and a half out of ten interchangable rating doodads.

Baby BANG! BANG! BANG!

Here’s an interesting one. I don’t know if you’ve ever played Akumajou Special: Boku Dracula-kun (roughly translated as Kid Dracula), but there’s something odd about Dracula-kun. See, the thing is that he looks alarmingly similar to the comic representation of myself. I’m sure you’ve seen the Ryan character a million times by now, but just take a look at lil’ Dracky-Kun!

The similarity is undeniable! I was so shocked by this revelation that I even wrote and drew a comic about it. Not great comic by any standards, but it gets the point out there.

So obviously if there’s any plagiarist here, it’s me, because the original Kid Dracula was released on the ~~NES~~ Famicom waaaay back in 1991. But even then it was only ever released in Japan. I did read the article in Nintendo Power about the Game Boy version like a million times though, so maybe it just kind of burned the character into my mind. Who knows? As a character whose appearance has changed quite a lot over time, I obviously never planned Ryan to look like that, but the powers that be had other plans, I guess. Thing is, I would have lived my entire life without noticing if it weren’t for the magic of ROMs. To celebrate, let’s all go play some ROMs. Particularly Kid Dracula!

Don’t let me down, my sweet baby

So yeah. I was poking around the internets last week and came across the Odin Sphere artbook. Needless to say, I was impressed by the art direction, and the magnificent care that obviously went into creating even the minorest of characters (I love the mandragoras!), and the scenery is just fantastic. Of course, the brilliant art is what everyone agrees on about the game.

I happened to be in the mall on the weekend, and while I normally try to avoid the chain, I decided to stop into the EB and peruse their wares. As luck would have it, they actually did have Odin Sphere in, and, well, you know how I am with money. BUT! I have to say that it was $50 well spent, because just as I’d presumed, the game is right up my alley. There’s a fun combat system and what’s looking like a solid story, but the real enjoyment is in the very elaborate item juggling system. At least, that’s where I find the meat of the game, being an obsessive-compulsive packrat. If you watched me play Odin Sphere, you’d probably think it’s just all dull gardening and item mixing, because that’s what I’ve been doing with the bulk of the time I’ve spent with the game. To Hell with progressing the story! I want to make a potion that will fill the entire screen with phozons!

So anyway… Crap. I was totally going to make a completely different post today, but I guess that got derailed kinda quickly. Maybe I’ll get into what I’d intended to be today’s topic during the next couple days. I’ll have nothing better to do, because I’ve taken the next three days off in hopes that that’ll be long enough to recover from having my wisdom teeth torn out of my facehole. Which happens tomorrow morning. Not looking forward to that. I love eating, and unless I heal like a motherfucker (for which history will vouch that I do not), I won’t be able to eat anything but milkshakes for a while. Not that I don’t like milkshakes, but I’m really going to miss meat. And candy. Mostly the candy.

Just to watch it burn

Busy week here in Ryan Land. Tomorrow is what I like to call D-Day (as in Driving Test Day). I don’t know how well that’ll go, but here’s hoping it won’t get too ugly. I’m pretty confident, but it’s mostly false confidence. Which I’m told is a character flaw. But is it really false confidence if I know it’s false? The perplexity of it all makes my head hurt.

I also have to head back to the dentist on Thursday so that he can fuck around some more in my facehole. Getting a filling isn’t nearly as bad as some have made it out to be, but I could most certainly be doing more enjoyable things with my morning.

Nextly, it’s a pretty big week for Coozy For Hire. Along with the regularly scheduled comic on Thursday, we’ve got our 1st year celebration on Friday, which will come with a free bonus comic. And to top it off, the second episode of Spare! hits on Saturday, so you’re going to be getting three comic days in a row. Just nuts I tell you. Fortunately, I had most of them done early (though now my buffer is totally used up and I have to start drawing again). Not to mention, our traffic is steadily increasing every month, and that’s very reassuring. I imagined that this little project would flop long before the year mark. I even have some juicy tidbits for you: firstly, the comics up until at least the second week of October are gold. Secondly, I’m working on a new feature, but I’m not sure if it’s going to work out. It’s for a very minor audience anyway, so I doubt it’ll matter in the end.

StarFox Command hit yesterday, and I want it, but I’m a little wary. The whole “command the missons” junk is a little off-putting, but I think WiFi dogfights would easily make it worth buying even if single player is a miss. I’ll make sure to log my thoughts about it if I do decide to pick it up.

Keep an eye on RainbowPuke.com. I recently submitted a piece. It’ll likely appear once a third page is posted, and you’ll likely be able to tell it’s mine. Cause it has my name on it.

Due to my recent CD acquisitions, I will have to update at least one page in the CD Collection. I’ll also be adding a new page by the end of the week. Not many short ones left, either. B, Q, and S in particular are ones I’m not at all looking forward to doing.

After all this, I think it’s pretty much understood that I’m not going to be doing much on the article front this week.

The Supermassive Surprise Cone

Okay. I’m a little hesitant to do this one right now because frankly, I think the surprise bags are losing their luster. I mean, realistically you can only review so many surprise bags before the formula wears thin and the readers see through your guise, work themselves into a rage and hunt you down, behead you and plant your head on a stake out in your front yard as a warning for anyone else trying to pull a similar scam.

But alas! We here at Torrential Equilibrium are devoted to upholding our code of laziness and half-hearted reviews. We also hate that fact that we are such poor typers and have to fix like every second word. It literally doubles article production time to stamp out all those lieks and smoethigns.

But alas again! I’ve gotten off track. Story time, young ones.

A long, long time ago – June 30th of 2006, to be precise – I was in the town of Lac Du Bonnet to attend one “Canada Day Parade and Festival.” The parade was lackluster, to say the least. The average age of the participating people was “deceased” and the various “Miss Whatever” girls were all fat. It wasn’t cool. The festival part was much better, with rides, food, and those horribly addictive carnival games that promise great prizes, but rarely leave you with anything more than an armful of shitty little stuffed animals.

It was only on the way out that I realized that my beloved The Bargain Shop had closed down. It was there that I had acquired many great things, such as Nintendo Surprises and the Dick Turtle surprise bags. I was shocked and hurt. My soul was crushed. I tuned around slowly and dramatically, as if out of a movie. Then I looked up and saw it. It was The Bargain Shop! Only it had been freed of its strip-mall confines and moved into its very own at-least-10x-as-big building! ~~The Gods~~ God was smiling on me that day, and I happily entered the haven that was the huge new The Bargain Shop.

Long story short, I figured I was going to find a new surprise bag of some sort. I bet you figured that too. And if you did, you’d be wrong. Wrong like a guy who thinks metal sucks. ‘Cause metal is awesome.

Yeah. Cone. The Bargain Shop has gotten serious about baiting me with unknown goodies, I think. I mean, not only does it totally blow away the surprise bag in terms of basic visual appeal, but it’s got a lot of other little bells and whistles going for it. For one, it’s gihumongenormous. Comparing it to something everyone can identify with, like a DVD case, might help to show just how big this monster is. I suppose a regular surprise bag would have been the best comparison, but I didn’t have one at the time of taking the pictures.

The other thing that really compelled me to pick up a surprise cone was the price. Five bucks for the thing. Five bucks. It sounds like a total rip-off, and most of me assumed it would be, but a small part of me was completely reassured that the high price tag meant either good stuff inside or at least a shit-ton of crappy stuff. I was clearly more than ready to take my chances. After all, I’ve won several trophies for unnecessary/compulsive spending.

So that’s that, and here we are. I cracked this baby open the day I got home, and the pictures have been sitting on my hard drive collecting cyberdust up until now. It just seemed like such a monumental task, and like I said earlier, me lazy. But now I’ve sat down and begun to write, so I might as well get it all done. Then again, even if I stopped here and came back to it three months later, you’d never know, now would you?

I’m not going to lie. That clown is pretty much freaking me out right now. That indecent look in his eye, the enthusiastic smile, the grabby grabby hands. We all know that this guy is the clown that children have nightmares about. I intended to go down the “this guy’s a pedophile fo shizzle” path, but I really think that those kind of things would best be left to your own sick imaginations. But seriously, I’m pretty sure he wants to kill me and wear my skin like one of those animal scarves you see on rich cartoon women all the time. And then he’d comically set up and play my bones like a xylophone because he saw it on Itchy and Scratchy that one time.

I just noticed that the cone seems to be mostly in French. I mean, yeah, “surprise cone” is English, but it’s only got “bonbon et jouets” all over it. nowhere do we see a satisfying English “candy and toys” exclamation. What if an Anglophone has never seen a surprise bag before and wonders just what the surprise is supposed to be? He’ll probably think there’s a hooker in there or something and the surprise is which STDs she has.

I guess the top that signifies whether its for boys or girls ages three to ten would be kind of a tip-off. Hookers totally aren’t for kids between three and ten. Kids that young just can’t appreciate the wonders that are paying for sex and the trip to the free clinic the next day.

The picture is unacceptably blurry, but you can make out a small football, a styrofoam airplane toy, various stickers and junk. And wonders of wonders! What is that which I spy with my little eye? Could it be… a coozy? I didn’t even notice that one there until I went to open the thing. For various reasons, having a coozy intended for a small child would be like a dream come true. Well, perhaps less magical than that, but it would still be neat. I still have yet to acquire a coozy of any description, and I was certainly hoping the surprise cone could remedy that problem.

Wow. Oh wow. Just… holy freakin’ God. The surprise cone’s gone chocolate starfish. That’s just not appropriate. It’s all a normal cone until you open it and then BAM rusty sheriff’s badge. Seriously. Does anybody see anything other than a paper stink star? Because all I see is a big mudcutter. It’s kinda funny how you see things that unintentionally look like button spiders all over the place. I mean, do you think someone really designed this so that when you open it, it resembles a whale’s eye? Probably not, but it’s both gross and funny at the same time. I’m sure someone has a website devoted to this kind of thing.

…Oh man, I just got the awesomest idea. Heh heh heh. Awesome. Damn, this article just keeps getting more and more inappropriate.

Quite a haul, I might say. Certainly more impressive-looking than the bits of candy and Happy Meal rejects you get in surprise bags. At least, this stuff looks alright at a glance. I’m sure that you’ll agree with me once you’re done that it’s mostly crap. Hell, just look a little closer and you’ll see that it’s mostly crap.

Well then. Caillou, you say? That’s, uh… Well, it’s kind of a toddler thing. I don’t think any self-respecting kid over four years old would really appreciate Caillou. By that time they’ve moved onto whatever shitty battling anime is popular at the time and/or SpongeBob. Seriously. Have you ever watched Caillou? I struggle to imagine that even newborns could find any enjoyment in the show. And they pretty much can’t even think. I suppose that if you’re gonna break balls, it is just a colouring book, and anyone can enjoy a colouring book regardless of associated franchise/theme.

You know what’s the worst part of it all? Now I’ve got a colouring book, but I haven’t got a crayon to colour in it with! Whatever shall I do?

I’ll be damned! It’s Barney, and he’s come to save me from my horrible crayon-free existence! He’s even going to throw a party while he’s at it! Though based on Barney’s audience, I’m pretty sure I’m going to have to keep a lookout for that clown from the cone. It’ll be heaven for that freak.

Seriously though, this is crap. Four crayons? What the snap am I going to be able to colour with four crayons? Unless they can change colour at a moment’s notice, I just don’t think they’re going to be cutting any kind of mustard. And of course it’s just the primary colours and green to boot. So if I were to colour Caillou, I’d have to make him either yellow or red, and that wouldn’t be ethnically correct. You can’t imagine the anger I felt when they made The Honeymooners black. Not that I’m racist, but you can’t arbitrarily change an established character’s race. Jackie Gleason was probably rolling over in his grave when they announced that. So the point I’m trying to make is that there’s no way in Hell that I’m going to be turning Caillou into a rice picker or a feather head.

I’ve always hated sour soothers. Not only do I disprove of anything more than noticeably sour, but the product name is a huge oxymoron. Maybe they were shooting for the irony angle, but nothing as sour as these bastards can possibly be soothing. It fills me with unbridled rage. So much so that I don’t even want to talk about them anymore.

On the upside, it’s a foam dart. On the downside, it doesn’t do its job too well. At least, I don’t think so.

The way I see this thing, you put the elastic band on your finger, pull the dart back, and then let ‘er fly. But it usually just crashes into my finger and then dangles there while onlookers laugh and point. But It could very well just be me. I have a bad track record of using hand-powered projectiles such as rubber bands, darts, and boomerangs. The foam dart is clearly no exception.

I’d like to take a little stop here to mention that we’re about halfway through the article. At least as far as pictures go. I don’t know what lies in store for us where a word count is concerned, but unless I think up another relevant story to tell, it’s probably going to wrap up quicker than it started. Of course, I could go all Something Awful and talk about things that are only vaguely related, but I don’t really have the imagination required for that kind of thing. I mean, I guess surprise bags are kind of like Final Fantasy games in that they’ve always got different stuff in them but in essence they’re all the same, and even though they all kinda suck I keep playing them. But I don’t think I could draw that out for three and a half paragraphs.

So now that I’ve buffed up my word count quite nicely, it’s back to reviewing this surprise cone. Which is not at all like Street Fighter, because Street Fighter is always awesome.

They weren’t old like most surprise bag candy (at least, not as old, the date says 2004), but the Juicy Drop chews were pretty bad. I’m going to go out on a limb here and assume that all candy starts to taste like dust after so long, because that’s what always seems to happen, at least in my experience. The juicy centers were tasty, but the chewy outside was about as delicious as licking a shelf you haven’t dusted in a decade. Not cool. Not quite as new as the package would have liked me to believe, I guess.

Oh look! It’s a semi-clear plastic cup! And it’s got the word “GLO” on the side, so logic would denote that it must glow in the dark. Not bothering to read the rest of the label for specifics, I let it sit under the light for a while and then turned said light off. The cup did not glow. I was angered and threw the cup at the wall to spite it. It bounced and hit me in the head. I probably should have kept that bit to myself.

While I was “charging” the GLO cup, I rummaged through what was left of the surprise cone’s innards. It was then that I found the number one coolest thing ever found in a surprise bag (bar anything from the Nintendo Surprises): the styrofoam airplane. I could regale you with stories of how many of these things I bought as a kid, but that would take up a lot more time than you want to spend listening to my jibba-jabba. Foo.

So anyhow, I had a farkload of these planes back in my day. Not all at once, of course. The things are made of styrofoam, after all. This is their weakpoint, and will often lead to massive damage incurred by little boys playing a bit too rough. sometimes they don’t even make it past the building stage, when said little boys get frustrated that the wings won’t go in as easily as they assumed and end up crushing the thing in a fit of rage. Sometimes I still cry at night, thinking about my poor styrofoam planes and how they never really had a chance at life, being thoroughly crushed by pudgy, cotton candy-stained fingers. I am slightly comforted by the fact that these planes haven’t changed at all since my childhood. Even the packaging is designed the exact same way. In a world that is so unstable and constantly changing, it’s nice to know that some things will always stay the same.

I’m not currently sure where this particular plane ended up. A quick scan of my surroundings confirms that maybe I should turn the lights on, but the light switch is like halfway across the room, and I’ll be damned if I’m getting up.

I was perplexed by the strange object. I turned to myself and asked

“What the Snuckey is this?”

“I couldn’t tell you, buddy” I replied nonchalantly.

“Do you think it has anything to do with that dumb cup?”

“Probably, but I really don’t care.”

So guess what. I was a little off about the whole glowing cup deal. Turns out the cup itself isn’t s’posed to glow, but you’ve gotta pop these dumb glowsticks into the rim on the bottom. Yeah, dumb. And they’re those lame snappy ones that all the losers bring to their lame rave parties. Ugh. Just having these things in my possession makes me feel so inferior.

Yep. It worked. Whoo. Fascinating, isn’t it. Can we move on yet?

Aww, it’s a cute widdle penguin weeble! But what an odd pose for a weeble. Facing upward… that makes no sense. But wait! What is this?

Ye gads! It’s not a weeble, it’s a marker! A marker concealed ingeniously within a weeble! Airport security would never see it coming! Ha ha ha ha ha ha ha!

Well I don’t know what else to say about the penguin marker/weeble. it’s yellow, which makes it undesirable and impractical. I guess you could use it as a highlighter, but if you’re going to be toting it around, the penguin shape doesn’t lend itself very well to the task. I like it as a decoration, but beyond that it’s pretty useless. The second best thing in the cone by far, but only because it’s too adorable to dispose of. Even that’s cut really close too, just look at the sloppy-ass paint job. It’s a little disheartening, to say the least.

Thankfully, that’s the end of that little endeavor. Not that I don’t appreciate the styrofoam plane and the penguin weeble/marker, but having to slog through the rest of that crap to get to them wasn’t easy. Or enjoyable. Particularly the candy. At least the candy in some surprise bags is so terrible that it warrants discussion on its own. The crap in this one was just plain boring. And shitty. I mean seriously, who the snap like sour stuff? It’s all about spicy, my friends. If it’s not pastry or it doesn’t cause a ring of fire, it’s not worth eating, I say.

I would also like to mention that my youngest brother also bought a surprise cone. The only actual surprise came from the fact that we both got the exact same junk. Okay, to be fair we got planes with different designs, but that just barely counts. So, you know, if you see a surprise cone that looks the same as this one out there somewhere, don’t even bother looking twice. I bet they’re all the same, and the only difference is that the girl cone has a toy pony or something instead of a plane. The dart is probably still in the girl cone too. While it may be intended to be a toy weapon, I’m sure girls could find some way to appreciate it. Please excuse me for that, it slipped my mind for a moment that these things are meant for three-to-ten year olds, and as such, that innuendo there is totally inappropriate. It’s totally awesome if you imagine Marisa Miller buying it though.

In conclusion, the surprise cone was totally not worth five bucks. I normally don’t mind spending a dollar on a surprise bag for a cheap thrill, but five for this load of junk? I don’t think so. The plane alone would have only run me like 50 cents, and I could have lived my life without the penguin markeeble. It’s a sham and a half, that’s what it is.

As a thrilling epilogue to my story, I should note that there was a lot of other great stuff in the new The Bargain Shop like boxes of salt water taffy for 50 cents and all-day suckers. There’s awful computer games and movies just itching to be reviewed too, but my The Bargain Shop budget was pretty much shot by the surprise cone. It’s a mistake I will be sure never to make again. Until they redesign the cone and I’m fooled into thinking it’s a new cone, allured by the possibility that this new one might contain a coozy, and then when I get home and open it and see that it’s all the same junk at which point my eyes fill with liquid rage and I snap and take down as many people with me as I can. That’ll be the day…

With hand grenades and gasoline

Good evening, all. I figured I could take some time to pop in for a bit and let ya know that I’ve been making small updates to the ol’ DeviantART gallery over the past week or so. Nothing great, but it’s filling in quite nicely. There’s some photography, some new MS Paint abortions, and a couple other random bits of junk. Just thought I’d make sure those of you who don’t take a look-see regularly are on top of things. Later.

I’d never have a fear

I don’t really have anything to post about, but I do have a little somethin’ for ya…

1024×768
1280×1024

A chance to grab the newest Coozy For Hire wallpapers a whole week before those who don’t bother to read my blog! These are brought to you by my extreme pride in the latest CfH comic. The big one looks a little stretched, but do you really look that closely at your wallpaper anyway? But enough of this crap, I have to go buy me some New Super Mario Bros! (Make sure to click that link, they’ve revamped the site big-time.)

The mysterious vanishing title

I forget what my moving status was last time I updated you, but I now have all my “pseudo-article” content (except the Gallery – more on that in a bit) moved over. I’ve also finished up about half the mini-reviews, I’m even going over the older ones to incorporate the newer layout and the Pros/Cons boxes. The other half should be done by the end of the day or tomorrow. Lastly, I’ve also restored my address bar icon and created the January 2006 news archive.

I’ve decided that keeping a multitude of galleries is a bad idea, so to coincide with my Angelfire to Comedy-Napalm move, I’ll also be moving all the content of my art galleries to DeviantART to make my life easier. That should all be moved over by Sunday, depending on my enthusiasm for the task. There’s even some new stuff there to boot…

Moving everything is all well and good, you say, but where’s the new content? I’ve got some good news for you. I’ll be finishing a new non-review and a proper review soon. There will also be a new article on Comedy Napalm from me in a couple days. And don’t go spreading rumours, but there have been talks about bringing back a featurette that hasn’t been seen in a coon’s age. I won’t say exactly what it is, but I’ll tell you this: it’s not exactly the most popular feature on the site.

That said, I’m off to be productive. Funk Master R. Valentine, away!