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Showing posts from May, 2009

Fasting Completed!!! And other things.

My 7 days of fasting of video games and anything prowrestling related completed this past Monday, May 25th, 2009 at 11:15 pm EST. I talked about it in a previous post , and I'm happy to say it finished without incident. It was tough for the first 2 days but afterwards, was more easier. I was telling some friends the other day about it. Avoiding the temptation to game was much easier than it was to avoid the temptation of wrestling. Following wrestling is such a routine part of my day that made it all the harder to avoid. It sounds kind of crazy and maybe stupid, I know. Avoiding gaming was easy because there are steps to go through before getting to the game. But to me, avoiding wrestling industry related news would be analogous to avoiding all mainstream news for a week (ie. TV news, newspapers, news websites, radio, etc). I have the sites bookmarked on my bookmarks toolbar, and many times I was tempted to click them, although never going through. Here's a list of some of

Grand Theft Auto 4!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! (Xbox 360)

(Author's Note: this game was completed 2 weeks ago, pre-fasting!). GTAIV is the shit. It took near 70 hours to do it, but I finally did it: I achieved 100% game completion. There were some tasks that were so frustrating that I wanted to pull out my hair at times (the 200 pigeons, for those in the know). That being said, the times of joy greatly outweighed the times of frustrations. My only real complaint about the game is that the difficulty is a bit too easy. That is, all the story related missions (which doesn't include the afforementioned pigeons). The missions don't vary too much from the standard capturing & delivering something, assassinating someone or a combination of the two. Add auto-aiming into your controls and the whole process becomes cake. Even my sister was saying to me, "I don't hear much yelling or swearing from you, this game must be too easy". I should add that she takes joy in seeing me suffer through gaming (side note: in th

Terminator: Salvation... Does it save you? Or should you save your money?

I'd like to start off by saying that I love movies (as if you didn't know) but I've never gone to a midnight screening before. It was a pretty awesome time, but I was kind of tired when we arrived at the theater (we were painting the church walls earlier in the evening). There were more people than I was anticipating, it was near sold out when we got there. Already a line was built up, but thankfully we got pretty good seats, though we arrived an hour before the midnight show. It was quite a wild time, a theater full of rampant geeks. Yet they weren't geeky-geeks in the typical fashion, they were more rough neck geeks; the type of geeks that watch SpikeTV and follow the UFC... my kinda crowd! Anyhow, enough of that. In regards to the movie, I don't quite understand what the critics are clamoring about. Right now on Rottentomatoes, it's sitting at 33% (37 positive reviews out of 117) while Wolverine is at 37% (83 positive out of 225). I can honestly say

The Girlfriend Experience

"See it with someone you ****" . What a tagline. Amidst all the summer blockbusters opening this season, Steven Soderbergh's latest will open quietly into limited screens this weekend. The Girlfriend Experience doesn't have a storyline in the conventional sense; instead it opts to show a certain slice of life. In this case, the life we get to witness is that of a high-end call girl (or escort) and how she struggles to keep on top of things (no pun intended) while maintaining a relationship with a steady boyfriend, which apparently is a rare thing for women in her profession. We also get to see life from his perspective as he struggles to stay on top of his game as a personal trainer. Interestingly enough, the backdrop of the movie is set against the 2008 US presidential election. There is constant talk about the economy, the recession and Obama's likely victory. It's a clever way of symbolizing a sense of hope in the middle of all the darkness, which seem

7 Day Fast: No Gaming! No Wrestling~!

Last week my friend told me that she was fasting from television for a week and I thought it interesting because I was thinking about fasting the past few weeks. When I was wondering about what I should fast, food came to mind first. Usually people sacrifice food for a few days, but then I thought, sure I could do without food for a day or two but it just wouldn't have that same oomph that my other poisons would. I'd have to say that the two most time consuming activities these past few months would be gaming and prowrestling. I was weighing out which one of these should I give up for a week. Then today I thought, you know what, God deserves the best of me, I've gotta give up both. So effective at 11:15 pm, Monday May 17th, 2009, I will sacrifice gaming and wrestling for 7 calendar days. For those of you who don't know, since I graduated university last year, I've been job searching. It hasn't been quite successful yet but I remain hopeful. I'm hoping

X-Men Bore-igins: Wolverine

Why, oh, why? All I can say is, Bryan Singer left the franchise at the right time. He really opened the door for Marvel movies with the first X-Men , and expanded upon that with the epic X2: X-Men United . Then it went downhill with The Rat's marginal X-Men 3: Last Stand and now Gavin Hood's X-Men Origins: Wolverine . I don't know where he went wrong... Hood's last 2 movies were fantastic ( Rendition and Tsotsi ). This movie is an origin story to the Wolverine character from the X-Men movies. It follows Wolverine and his brother Victor (Sabretooth) as they grow up and fight together to the eventual fallout and rivalry between the two. Major Strkyer (from X2) plays a pivotal role as the man who forms a secret operative team for the government, and in doing so hires the brothers. Wolverine has disagreements with the team and leaves to start a life of his own in Canada. However, trouble soon finds him. During the opening credits, they do this montage of scenes

Review Roundup: Dragonball Evolution, Fast & Furious, Push

Dragonball Evolution There are just some properties that shouldn't be made into movies. Case in point, Dragonball Evolution . You need only look at the source material to know that it's gonna be a bad idea to convert it into a movie. The Dragonball canon is so rich and full of depth, that an oversimplified and watered down version would just not work. And not to mention we have a bunch of caucasian actors playing what seemingly are asian-ish (I think at least) characters... way to go Fox! The action was horrible, the dialogue was heinous, and the acting was a joke. A disaster. Everyone's acting was over-the-top and cartoony... for their sake, I hope it was purposely done that way. The only credit I can give this movie is that I didn't fall asleep through it... sometimes I surprise myself. And why was it called Evolution anyways? The only thing that evolved was my boredom. Fast & Furious "New Model, Original Parts." That was the tagline used to promo

The Art of Banksy

This past Sunday at church service, the pastor started off his sermon showing a few works from this street artist named Banksy. Banksy is a mysterious artist, almost like a ninja. His works consist of drawing, stenciling and graffiti'ing in public places, mostly on the street, yet no one has seen his or her face, or caught him or her in the act of putting up his art. So his/her true identity to this day is still a mystery. Supposedly, Banksy is from Bristol, England, but that is yet to be confirmed. He/she does travel around the world placing his art around several countries. His works are often satirical making statements on society, culture and politics in general. Browsing through his displayed works, you can see that he/she really likes using rats as a symbolic device. Anyhow, I've browsed through his website and posted here some of my favourites of his works. Check out all the other works by Banksy on his/her website found ( here ). Some really cool stuff within! Later g

Team Fortress 2!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

This past weekend, the Steam network offered an amazing deal to its members. For $10 you could purchase The Orange Box (which includes Half Life 2, HL2: Episode 1, HL2: Episode 2, HL2: Lost Coast, Team Fortre ss 2 and Portal ). What a deal! Six games for $10. I couldn't pass on it. Admittedly, when Orange Box first came out, I was pretty indifferent to it. I never heard people talk about the other games included, it was always Team Fortress 2 . The visual style was definitely interesting, but it didn't really speak to me. Two of my roommates at the time, bought it on launch day and they played the shit out of that game, all day and all night. Anyhow, I own it now and I'm hooked. On the first night I played TF2 til 3 in the morning. I should tell you also that I don't like playing games late into the night; I usually like reading, watching TV, blogging and/or Sudoku'ing. That said, TF2 grabbed me by the balls and didn't let me go. I started off as a

District 9

The trailer to the Peter Jackson produced District 9 was released this weekend, attached to the Wolverine movie. I'm not sure how the movie will play out, but the trailer is in a mockumentary style. The scenes of South Africa are really visceral, I can't wait to see how this plays out. It definitely tricked me when I was watching it. Check it out in glorious Quicktime here: District 9 .