2007-03-27

Of the Days Annoyances...

- The Nashville Predators are an “elite” team in the NHL.

- Bat Out of Hell II: Back into Hell. Geeze Mr. Loaf, if hell was so boring, why the return trip?

- Edmonton Oilers and Oilerfan. Nice MULLET!

- Al Gore. Do you really think you can convince people living in a part of the country that has NINE MONTHS of cold weather a year that global warming is anything more than specious science and a scam to sell DVD’s?

- Shakira isn’t my girlfriend

- The
CRTC.

- People suing fast food companies because they are fat, lazy fucks that think big corporations owe them because they are fat, lazy fucks! Grab a salad fatty!!!!

- The NBA. Has there ever been a professional sports league with more thugs, gangsters, and arrogant assholes than this? The answer is NO.

- Poker on
Sportsnet HD. Poker in High Definition? When there is a hockey game on the low def channel? Are you fucking kidding me? Since I’m going on about non-sports let toss these two out there: Golf and Curling*. I constantly hear people refer to these two GAMES as “sports.” They are NOT SPORTS! Any games you can play while drinking, like golf and curling, are just that: GAMES. I can sit around on my ASS and play video games for hours and drink while doing it, therefore gaming is not a sport. Get it?





* By the way, Scottish blokes who wanted something to keep busy at while drinking invented both Golf and Curling.

2007-03-21

My Boring-ass Life

You axed for them, you got them: It’s a Jaeger and VKI Grrl monthly update!

Taking a tip from Lupin The Great’s site, I give all you lucky people out there not living in the land of BRAINZ and MONKEYS an update, a tiny “peek” if you will, into our boring-ass lives!


Christ Jesus it’s COLD! It started snowing in fucking September, and has been snowing on and off (mostly ON) ever since. And it’s still snowing as I type this! No sakura blossoms for me, just COLD, and GREYNESS, and MISERY.

Anyway, on with the “update.” Bought a dual station smoothie machine for VKI for White Day and am enjoying the “fruits” (heh) of her smoothie making labor. It’s like having a Jugo Juice or a Booster Juice or whatever the hell that place is called in the states, in our flat! We even got some of those special vitamin, and protein, and Chinese herbal powders to go in the drinks to make us strong like ox and as sly as a canary.

Only 64 more days before my vacation! Remember to get those days off that we discussed McBain! Don’t fail me! You’re my only hope!


That’s all for this month, GOOD NIGHT NOW!

2007-03-19

Prepare To Be Reviewed

Straight from his home office to your living room or bedroom, it’s Jaeger’s review of

CRACKDOWN
By
Realtime Worlds
For the XBOX 360

Crackdown is a third person “sandbox style” shooter in which you play a genetically engineered Super Agent out to wipe the streets clean of its organized crime problem.

The game has a great open-endedness to it that allows the player to do whatever missions they feel like, in whatever order they like without the wretched tediousness of getting “locked in” to a particular playing pattern. If you the player want to go after a Gang Kingpin, you can, or if all you want to do is stand on a rooftop and blow gang members into fiery, meaty, chunks with a rocket launcher, well you can do that too, and believe me that is a lot of fun unto itself.

Leveling up is fun and fairly easy at the start and works like this: The more baddies you shoot, the better your aim and kill power becomes, the more gang bangers you curb-stomp, the stronger you become, eventually becoming strong enough to pick up HUGE shit like trucks, shipping containers etc. to use in pulverizing your enemies.

The AI is surprisingly smart too, so use of weapons and cover is crucial once the player reaches the last couple of Kingpins. The game also contains a little feature that I’m quite fond of that is missing in many other games (
Legend of Jack Sparrow, I’m looking at you): the ability to save your progress without having to piss around finding checkpoints, or finish a mission, or any of that other horse shit so prevalent in games today. For this feature alone I should give the game a five out of five!

The only downside to the game is when executing certain maneuvers it’s too easy to get “caught in the camera angles” and find your character getting cut to pieces by enemy fire before you have a chance to “find yourself.” But this isn’t so much a problem specific to this game (I have the same problem sometimes with
Lost Planet) but a problem with the industry in general, and how artists and coders can’t seem to get in-game camera movement just right.

Anyway, this game rocks. Go get it. Now!


Five (
Armor Agent, armor!) out of Five.

2007-03-11

Prepare To Be Reviewed

Fast and the Furious: Tokyo Drift
Directed by Justin Lin

This third flick in the
Fast and Furious franchise introduces us to Sean Boswell, a delinquent gear-head who after an insane street racing crash faces his “third strike” and the possibility of jail time. The police drop the charges on the condition that he goes to live with his father in Tokyo (???WTF??? What kind of “punishment” is that? Sounds more like a reward to me!).

Anyway, the flick actually gets good once the focus shifts to Japan where Sean is introduced to the world of
“drift racing” If you don’t know what that is, then look it up, because I’m not going to explain it to your sorry ass.

This flick contains things that Jaeger enjoys: cool Japanese cars, street racing, Tokyo, and last but not least, Japanese Hoochies. The movie climaxes with a cool race down Mount Akina that was ripped directly from the
Manga/ Anime/ Live action flick Initial D.
Sonny Chiba is also in the story playing a bad ass Yakuza guy who wears fedoras and smokes Cubans, so what the hell else do you want from a movie besides maybe an un-credited cameo at the end by Vin Diesel reprising his role of “Dom” from the first flick?
Oh, wait. . .

The DVD has a decent 16x9 anamorphic transfer that is clean and slick, but alas (for me anyway) on the audio side we get no English DTS, merely a Dolby Digital 5.1 which is loud when it should be and not so quiet that you can’t hear the dialog when you need to. There are a bunch of featurettes about the making of the film and about drift racing as well as a commentary by Director Justin Lin.

Flick: 3 out of 5

DVD: 3.5 out of 5

2007-03-05

Carb Wars

Six-plus years ago, my good friend Emu went down to the San Diego Comic-Con where she had the pleasure of meeting indie comic greats, Roman Dirge, and Jhonen Vasquez. She even ended up hanging out with them for drinks and partying like it was 1985. This is not what this MicroTale™ is about however.

This story is about doughnuts.

Yes, doughnuts.

For years up here in the Great White North, Tim Horton’s has reigned supreme in the world of doughnuts. I used to stop by one such shop every morning when I used to toil away at the Cosmodemonic Western Airbrake Corporation. No matter what time of the day the Tim Horton’s was freaking packed, with HUGE line-ups at both the counter and the drive-thru. My particular brand of “crack” was the special English Toffee flavored cappuccino beverages, and occasionally I would also buy doughnuts for my production girls.

One day some suit in Downtown Toronto (center of the Universe for those not in the know) decided to standardize the Tim Horton doughnut. As a result they got smaller, and were manufactured in Ontario, frozen and shipped out here to the various shops for re-heating. The point is they don’t taste as good anymore.

Anyway, Emu gets back from Comic-Con all those years ago with tale of a doughnut so sweet, so delicious, so succulent, that the very thought of other doughnuts filled her heart with distain. She was speaking, of course, of the mighty Krispy Kreme™.

Years passed.

Emu is gone now and my heart aches with how much I miss her. Then one day the Krispy Kreme™ Empire expanded to include Calgary and there was freaking Anarchy in the streets I tell you. People camped out for days in front of the shop just to be some of the first to experience the ecstasy that was the Krispy Kreme™ doughnut. For weeks the line-ups at these places dwarfed even the lines at Tim Horton’s. Myself, I never went, because I just didn’t care.

Fast forward to today!

Some guy at work brought in a box of Krispy Kreme™ fat pills and I decided to sample one. After one bite I realized that yes, it is sweet. So sweet, I think it gave me diabetes! Are they better than Tim Horton’s? Well they are bigger, and sweeter… I dunno I mean it’s a freaking doughnut for fook sakes!

I’ll never touch another doughnut again, but right now I sure got a hankerin’ for a Vente Mocha fukaccino! Anyone know of a coffee shop where I can get something like that?


GOOD NIGHT NOW!!

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