"[Muse's Black Holes & Revelations] makes you question your own ability to kick ass, then gives you all the tools you need to strut across the peak of Olympus Mons like you don't give a shit that you can't breathe methane or carbon dioxide. Go forth and #SLAM_DANCE!"

Human imagination is a horrifying thing. This album's cover features a bunch of REM-looking motherfuckers sitting on Mars drinking tea. Calmly. Something in the artists' lives inspired them (imagining the electrical whirring of the human mind) to make the music that inspired the album, that inspired the cover, that inspired us to listen to the music that made us imagine a Acropolis-themed nightclub housed on a space-zeppelin's lower deck orbiting Mars' second moon, Phobos.

"The view was always the same, it was mostly just the colors that changed, really. It was always the same temperature, the same water, the same sky, the same sounds -- only the color changed."

As time went by, the world began to rebuild itself around him. Things were quiet. He didn't feel the blood in his ears at first. It was his lips splitting open. That was how it began.

The Stonecutter's skiff drifted on through the doldrums and the leviathan still kept quiet.

"[Waiting at an airport] is a really slow time machine that forces you to pass through an alternate Mirror, Mirror version of Nazi-occupied Britain before letting you reach your destination."

Flaming fucking hellshit in a deflating life-raft, I hate the airport. Every moment is an internal dialog. It's all questions. It's all criticisms, complaints, seething judgments, and escapist fantasy. How can this be so slow? How can this person be on their phone while disassembling their bag for security? Why is a soda cheaper than a water? Why does this guy smell like fruit that my girlfriend's cat puked up onto the radiator? Where the fuck is my plane? Why are all the people working at the airport so apathetic? Always? Why hasn't the air-travel "'business" imploded into itself with all these inefficiencies and infinite requests to tolerate their dickish practices? Seriously, 9/11 was almost 10 years ago, that's not an excuse. Get your shit back together. It's getting worse, they're just finding ways to gouge and tithe us until holograms put them out of business.

"[The Alchemist presents] Something even better than value."

For a while, we were wondering what all the fuss was about with The Alchemist. We read it years ago, so the fact that these details come straight from memory are a testament to how sticky these concepts are for us. It's not that long of a book and it's written. . . poorly isn't the right word. "Simply," is the right word. It is "simply" written. It's a vivid vehicle for a concept, not a style.

"[Sucker Punch is] like Michael Moore's version of Bill & Ted's Excellent Adventure. That movie would blow, and so does this."

The titular sucker punch refers to the fact that you, moviegoer, are what powers shallow, exploitative, CGI-soaked power-fantasies that dominate modern Hollywood. And that's why this movie is hard to enjoy, even when its German/orc/robot bodycount is in the hundreds.

NB: This is entry #15. We skipped #14. Why? Because #14 is Paradise Lost, the greatest thing ever written. Not only do we need to do it justice, we got to writing about it, and left the computer for a bit, and then came back, and had an epiphany. Needless to say, in order to prove a point, the review of Paradise Lost might not go live until July 19, 2011. You'll understand why when it drops. So, instead, we have a treatise on strip clubs. 

F-Zero GX

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(originally published March 16, 2011)

“Casually whittling down the competition in F-Zero GX is shark-esque. It’s Tiburonean.”

The men and women that work on Wall Street are often accused of making money off of other people by simply saying the shit they own is more valuable than the shit other people own. Oftentimes, that shit is something like the predicted value of a commodity in Malaysia, and the Wall Street firm has a physical copy of the exact booking numbers to back up what they’re saying, so you don’t have much a leg to stand on if you want to disagree. Plus, these investment firms have a team of, like, 30 dudes and chicks fresh out of Columbia Law on retainer. Mean motherfuckers. The kind of people that list “killing drifters” in the Interests section of their Facebook profile. Regardless, Armie Killingsmanship, Esquire, is legally right in more ways than you are. Don’t bother trying to fight them in a court of law. A lot of people think what these firms do is rigged, calling them thieves and morally-compromised manipulators, caring about nothing but their dangerous competition, gambling all day and night because putting their nuts on the chopping block is the only way they can achieve an erection these days. We don’t really know how it works—we assume at the end of it all, one guy gets rich and the loser gets prostate cancer or something. F-Zero GX is the greatest Wall Street Investment Firm Simulator to date. It’s Goldman Sachs: The Official Game Of The Firm.

Fancy yourself a hard drinker? Go do a few Jell-O shots made with grain alcohol at altitude in Colorado. It's like a Freaky Friday moment where you've suddenly swapped alcohol tolerances with an 80 lbs. girl, and somewhere else, a young woman has suddenly found a knack for cosplaying as Marion Ravenwood.

That's real drinking you won't find in the summer months.

There comes a time every year where a man's just got to face facts, open up the windows, buy a paperback that's more than 1000 pages, and start paying extra for iced coffee. Winter is over. We mourn his passing, because winter is the best season of all. Winter is the season of slankets, sleds, and slightly-mad snowday schemes.

Final Fantasy IX

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(originally published March 3, 2011)

“Final Fantasy IX is a videogame, meditating.”

There’s a difference between prolonged self-reflection and cowardice. Not risking anything can be a huge risk. You might stagnate. You might be accused of not caring, of beating a dead horse, or of trying to squeeze blood from a stone. Merely pretending to not take a risk though... that is a legitimate creativity Philosopher’s Stone. Aha, and now we can venture into the realm of satire, a flexible form if executed well. It grants you the ability to toy with critics, lean on well-worn supports, bait, switch, lure, surprise, skew, skewer, parody, honor, celebrate, and prove your understanding of creativity’s contents. If done correctly, that is. It allows you to laugh at your flaws and comment on myth—leaning too hard on self-reference can make art impenetrable though, and fortunately, Square and Hironobu Sakaguchi, Final Fantasy IX’s producer, knew exactly what they were doing when they crafted this timely, retro-piece. In the hive-mind that acts as the capitol city to http://www.ghostlittle.com/, Final Fantasy IX is universally recognized as the third best video game of all time, a position it’s held for 11 years now. Here’s why:

"...body of a reindeer, feet of a chicken, antlers like tree roots, chest plumage of an eagle, tail of a fox, face like a painted semi-humanoid African lion mask (yup!)..."

The moral of Princess Mononoke flies in the face of established western religion. Well-sketched human ambiguity flies in the face of established western religion. Taking place in a land that sort-of-isn't-ancient-Japan (further research suggests it's technically around the 1300s, but a fantastical version of the 1300s, so it might as well be in Asia-Narnia), the earth is being contaminated. Humans have been driving the soil too hard, subjugating the animals too harshly, and mining too deeply for iron to build their fortresses of sand and mud. There is societal and technological progress as a result. Humans are safer from the wild beasts. We have crude guns. The mountains are being tamed. The future is drawing closer. And somewhere in the wilderness, a princess raised by a thirty-foot wolf is plotting revenge against the fortress' governess.