80's Vibe Perfection.

 

Credit goes to Diana Darkangel on Youtube. 

How drunk can you get at nerdy events? (A comprehensive guide)

 

Their drinking is measured in gigawatts

It's becoming more socially acceptable to drink at nerdy events, as more and more people associate with the nerd kingdom and cross over to the dark side. It was only a matter of time before people would enter alcohol in the equation, and to be very honest, I'm glad it did. Without the sweet smell of cheap hotel vodka drinks and the balmy perfume of a well timed Smirnoff Ice, these people may not (speaking very generally) develop the courage needed to procreate and make more nerds. We need more nerds! Before we get started, I will say that this is satire. I'm a nerd as well. I will be ranking each situation and event with a basic 1-10 scale. Level 1 = zero alcohol, Level 10 = black out drunk. 

#1 - DragonCon - Level 6

     DragonCon is an event nerds look forward to in Atlanta every year to create memories that no one else cares about. They will create inside jokes, have their own terminology, and pride themselves on getting in the hotel it's hosted at ahead of others. An average DragonCon attendee in their second or more year will be at a conservative Level 6 for the duration of the event. Multiple rooms on each floor have tons of bottles of cheap alcohol to share with their fellow nerds to avoid the extravagant prices of booze on the floor. Everyone is going to spring for the "Limited Edition" beer/mead named after a dragon with glitter in it. $12 each? No problem. The experience DragonCon attendee can slam two of these, stay at a fun-buzzed Level 6 for 3 consecutive nights easily. Time to change your cosplay to meet your favorite late 90's failed TV show starlet? Time to have a quick mimosa with the girls as well. For those who take DragonCon to a Level 8, I say good on you, way to up your game- but it's safe at level 6. Some people will get drunk their first night, and those that are regulars at the Con will look at them with the "First time?" shame that they know all too well. 

#2 - Friday Night Magic - Level 3

     I have never been to a FNM sober. I get a light buzz on to cut through my intolerance of other's BO, and power through. Lately it has been MUCH more acceptable to drink a beer or three at your Local Game Store, which has been going on during Warhammer games for decades. Level 3 is a silent, comfortable, and light buzz that two decent 7% IPA's can afford you. Sneak out to the parking lot for a smoke and a beer to keep it going, laugh with the boys outside and head back in. Anything after 6PM at the LGS is normally fair game if you keep it chill with the owner. There is one exception to this rule: If they LGS owner takes it up to a Level 5-7 and it drunk super late playing Warhammer 40k, they you can 100% take it right up there with him and do some shots. Never should you surpass the Level of the owner, as he can kick your ass and your shitty pauper deck right the fuck out. If you do get kicked out, proceed to drink by your car for another hour for good measure.

#3 Smash Tournaments - Level 4-7

With the advent and lucrative penetration of Barcades in the market, Smash Tournaments in bars has been a huge thing in the last 3-4 years. For the uninitiated, Barcades are exactly like they sound: A bar/arcade, draft beer, and multiple TV's. Typically the tournaments are mostly fun, and it's always on a slower day like a Wednesday. In any case, It's a 100% fact I will drink 3-4 beers and a shot during one of these events just to start, when I'm just watching them. I have no fucking clue what is going on, and why people scream at odd times, and who is favored to win. I need a little alcohol to bring me to the next level so I can enjoy myself. I've found myself drinking somewhere else first, then coming to this kind of event last, as I normally would not. As a spectator, you could easily without shame get to a 7, scream for the right and wrong reasons, and no one would care. As a player, ramp that shit up to a 4. You need to loosen up and feel good and confident, and show your alcoholic dominance against the other Pikachu. Fuck that other Pikachu.

#4 Anime Convention - Level 8

I'm going to look at this from the view of a parent, which I happen to be. I love anime and have been to an anime convention in my younger years. I've lovingly wrote about it for years on this blog in the most romantic and affectionate way. Since I've been to one, I've noticed that the scene has changed, and younger people are dressing up, and there is a ton that I do not know. For these reasons, I would have to be a solid fucking level 8 if you want me to attend one of these. I know friends who go, and they say how cringe it is, the level of BO, the flea market style vendors.. It all just sounds kind of awful to me. My son, as an potential attendee that is young and going with his friends, I would say this would be a great place to have my first drink and make new memories.. and then never talk about it ever again. I joke! Listen- I totally understand why people want to go to these kind of things and have a blast, and I'm sure it is really fun. It's just not for me. Solid 8, possibly a 9 in the right conditions and there is a high level of Yugioh players around me.

#5 Furry Meetup/Con - Level 10

From all that I have heard from these conventions and meetups, is that it's all about just banging with your costumes on in some kind of anonymous Eyes Wide Shut style 4chan gang bang. No one knows who you are, where you are from, your background.. you could be a different person and act out your furry persona. It's 100% safe to get Level 10 blasted as a function like this. Pre-game, post-game shots, beers, cocktails, butt-chugs, you name it. Go nuts! It's hot in there so may I suggest something with ice in it. How do you drink with the costume on? There has to be a way. There is no way these meetups aren't happening with extreme levels of alcohol in the equation. Level 10 all the way. 

Till next time. 

Neon City (1991) Full movie!

 

Neon City is not the worst Mad Max rip off?

     Reading the title you may have thought to yourself, "This is going to be a great anthology anime review or something." That's where you be wrong my friend. Neon City is a 1991 cinematic low budget masterpiece. Think Mad Max, with some 80's screen conditioned Michael Ironside. Throw in a dash of Vanity of Vanity 6 fame, and full roided to the tits Lyle Alzado, and you have a recipe for a great midnight movie. Lyle Alzado could play Abobo from Double Dragon.. 100%.

     

My dream is to find this on VHS. Betamax copies are just fantasy.

  I'm kind of surprised this movie got made. From what I read, Vanity was slated to be the main, until they got ol' Ironside to take the lead role. Yes, she has a sex scene.. I think. The quality of the movie is so awful, and scenes are filled with smoke and poorly lit. Perfect in every way. 

Cybernetics Guardian (1989) Full Movie OVA

 

Cancer Slum's Finest OVA

     Time to watch some Anime tonight! I first saw this after watching KaiserBeamz - KYOTO Video's piece on it. If you guys are not subbed to that channel, you are 100% missing out on some seriously great researched and edited videos about the anime industry. You hear and watch the intro to his videos and you know you are in for a good time. Anyways- hope everyone is having a good weekend.

This is what happens to you when you watch this.

Circuit's Edge is a 1990 DOS Masterpiece.

Play in your browser for free!

   Very recently.. like in the last 3 years or so, I discovered you play old DOS games in your browser at several different websites. Archive.org Macintosh and Atari 800 games is where I got my start, then starting moving through all the old DOS games. I always had a hard time with DOSBox on my PC, and getting it just right, so this was a new revelation for me, really eye opening, and a creative use of emulation. I've talked about Dune several times, but today I thought I would do a quickie about an amazing game that changed my childhood- Circuit's Edge. (CE)

Gibson approved.

     I had seen a few "Cyberpunk" movies as a kid, namely Bladerunner, and I had no idea they were based on books. CE is based on an amazingly well written book series called When Gravity Fails by George Effinger. Forget all you know about Bladerunner, here is the dark and gritty version in a place called Budayeen. Dropping with sex, drugs and ultra violence- this was the first game I played that pulled no punches. Before this, I had been playing Secret of Mana for Super Nintendo, so you could say this was a huge change indeed. I remember getting to a point at a bar where a woman propositioned me for sex, and it showed her ass. I had to quickly exit the game until my parents fell asleep before I attracted too much attention. I had never played or read Neuromancer, or even heard of William Gibson at this point of my life.

The story is top notch.

     Story on rails would be a good descriptor of how the game plays out. You are aimed in the right direction and set free to talk and see whatever you want. Very close in story and vibe to Johnny Mnemonic really. Spend too much time talking to bartenders, you get a call on your watch to keep things on track. Almost right away you get in some fights, which keep things super exciting and add the super violent gritty nature of the game. Absolute masterclass in storytelling and pace, even for an old game. You could release this today on Steam and people would think it was the new retro storytelling game everyone should play.

They are real.. if I can touch them.

     I felt like a total degenerate staying the night at a friends house, watching my buddy play for the first time late at night. I told him how good it was, the rated R/X nature of it, so of course he had to try it. CE is of those games you really can't put down, and was most kids first hard exposure to a world we had no idea existed. 

Blade Squad (1998) AKA: Inline Cops - Full Movie & Review!

This just writes it's self.

     I've been on a tear with Rollerblading again, even bought a pair recently to skate at work around the brewery. I've mentioned how I skated in the past, even got myself in a couple of magazines in the 90's.. so discovering more inline cinema cheese is going to be right up my alley. Science fiction? Check. Bad effects? Check. D List celebs? Super check. This is 100% something I would have watched as a 15 year old with nothing to do on a Friday and a 12 pack of Surge.

My backpack's got jets

    This movie is either the leftovers from Prayer of the Rollerboys pitch meeting (which I covered here), or a poor re-write. I see a lot of inspiration from that movie, Robocop 2, and the movie Hackers.  All movies that are guilty pleasures of mine, and really know how to channel the 90's energy. This is an obvious TV movie to series launchpad for the network, and just never really worked out, was believable in anyway, and didn't have enough star power to keep it moving. This is a piece of TV was locked in time, at the end of  decade when the popularity of something started to fade away, but alas it was too late, and the money was spent and script was written.

Channeling Bladerunner?

     The movie opens up to the busy streets of New York city, the smog and pollution in the distance- highly populated, congested, and fraught with overwhelming amounts of TV PG petty crime. The only solution for this distressed city is to police it with a crack team of inline skating 20-somethings with jetpacks on. David Bowie's "I'm Afraid of Americans" plays over the crime montage, which in this version, has been removed due to copywrite issues. I love this song and it the whole Nine-inch Nails thing he was going through at time. I remember seeing Howard Stern's birthday party on the E-channel, and watching him perform live thinking how cool he was, and questioned what time period he belonged in. I know now, that time is obviously the mid-to-late 90's,. Duh.

High Tech.

     They are being monitored back at home base with cameras that are not attached to the suits they are wearing, and are just moving around randomly, and makes no sense. They were trying to go for an Aliens thing with how that worked, and really just missed the mask. We get a really good example of what the team can do, jumping over trash cans and on to the backs of small time crooks. Ironically the city does not look that overwhelmed with people/cars in these scenes and montages, so a motorcycle would be more appropriate in 90% of these situations. I'm sure I'm going to mention this a few times, but I'm having a hard time wondering why we need to have rollerblades on for most of the movie. Speaking of...

24:40 is when this goes down.

     You really have to suspend disbelief here. This huge chase culminates in an abandoned warehouse that has super long stretches of open area. After a quick unnecessary grind down some stairs, and a wrist activated pulse of the jet-pack, our Blade Squad was easily able to overtake a sport bike on full throttle, and stop it just in time from hitting a wall. This is pretty much the theme for the rest of the movie. Really outlandish jump takes, jet-pack pulsing, and very little of the severe congestion and highly populated streets to navigate, which was kind of the reason this team was put together in the first place. I like the off-camera executions from the villain who looks like 1 part bully from Christmas Story, two parts Budnick.

I can't believe it's over.

    Wow. Really strange how this did not make it into a TV series. (cough) I see what they were going for, I really do. However, the show set up the premise and the rules right at the beginning, and violated them. It was explained very early on why the team was deemed necessary from the jump, then broke the mold and made exceptions right away. Shannon Elizabeth was a good casting choice for obvious reasons, and the main cast was not.. horrible. If they went a more sci-fi route, doubled down on the tech part, it may have had a chance to be a 90's cheese cult classic. This whole last paragraph was me trying my best to write a serious review about Rollerblading Cops... I appreciate you hanging in there with me on this one.

 

I created a blog and got 500k views.

Look at all those views.. but who cares?

      I think this should be some kind of milestone that most blogs strive to accomplish. I've done some research on this subject, with people asking other successful bloggers.. "How do I get to X point and make money on my blog?" In my case, it cost me zero dollars, has net me very little money, and took over 10 years. It should be noted that in the last two years I've earned the lion's share of the unique views with my new posting schedule; who knew that when you post, people would read it!

Some Blog Stats

• #1 SFW post - Col. Sanders is the best twitch streamer at 7390 views
• Fastest to 4k views - Employment, beer and other things
• Hottest Topic - Movies
• Average post views - 4183
• Number of posts total - 417
• Dollars earned - $94
• Dollars spent - 0
• Number of posts about the movie Legend - 4
• Average views per month - 21834
• Number of redesigns - 1
• Number of times I said I like tits - 9

     I suppose we could ask ourselves.. who cares? I've found myself checking views here and there, but for the most part, I never look. I do get excited when I get a comment or email adding to the conversation. I have another blog that gets much higher engagement, so that fills the need for the interaction that I crave. The blog is just my outlet for whatever I'm reading about or what I'm interested about at that moment in time. Beers get consumed, I want to vent to someone and talk to a friend, and because I've moved so much, I don't really have any of those. The blog has helped me on more than one occasion feel better about my situation, and myself. A peak under the hood- I spend about 15 minutes per post, I don't research what I want to write about, and I just keep a few windows open so I can google things and copy links.. it's about as low effort as it can be without looking actually low effort. Writing blogs is kinda my thing and I've been doing it since the mid-90's before it even had a name. 

Thank you.

    Thank you to all the repeat visitors and new visitors who have supported me and read the blog over the years. Seriously, I fucking mean it. This is your blog and I made it for both of us. I wish I had some more interesting things to say that does not have anything to do with beer, work and robot tits, but hey, thems the brakes. My hobby is collecting books, so if you want to hear/read about me actually put time and money into posts, you can head down that way, to First Edition Fantasy. I don't post frequently, but when I do, there is typically a lot of time and effort, custom pictures and going out into the market to find books to talk about. Buying books, driving, and taking pictures as well as researching values and topics all take multiple hours. Anyways! Thanks again for listening to my rants, and keep coming back to see what will randomly pop into my head next. 

"Unlisted Cheats" is the Unsung Hero of the Retro Gaming Community.

 

@new_cheat_news  is breaking retro ground.

    It's rare, but sometimes new cheats are discovered for very old games, and when it happens, it's always a buzz on the internet. Remember when Narpas Sword was discovered in Metroid? Insanity. Most games have hard coded passwords not seen by conventional password checks or Hex editors. Well, that was true until Unlisted Cheats blew up on twitter. 

Popular game, new game modes? What?

    All it took was an insane discovery in Super Punch-Out!! for SNES to blow the retro gaming community open, and transform what we know about cheat, hints and secrets in general. Skip to any one fight, new two player mode, debug mode, warp to chosen ending, sound test, and a few more. Any one of these codes would be a crazy discovery, but to find so many and all at once is just absurd. Is he done? Oh no. 

Top Gear 3000 - Only SNES game to use the DSP-4 Chip.

Previously, only two passwords were known to have any kind of advantage, and no one had found any more. How many did Unlisted Cheats find? If you guessed 17, you would be correct. Check out the links above, give the guy a follow as he breaks open a series of Game Boy games, finding 20+ year old easter eggs and hidden modes.

Long before Interstella 5555 by Daft Punk.. there was La Serenissima.

 

La Serenissima - Rondo Veneziano

         Twenty years before Daft Punk ever considered releasing Interstella 5555, an Italian Orchestra called Rondo Veneziano released an album that was a surrealist mix of bass, synth, drums and violins, written and orchestrated by Maestro Gian Piero Reverberi. This was matched with an animated short drawn and animated in a Japanese style and influenced by the pulp magazines and comic books of the late 70's and early 80s by Walter Cavazzuti & Giovanni Ferrari. The result was what you see above in all its pulpy Heavy Metal glory. 

      

You think Heavy Metal was some kind of influence here?

     You can clearly see the inspiration of the music video, art and album covers is based on the covers of Heavy Metal and Omni magazine. Raising Venice is an obvious choice for the Italian creators, and the mix of the rock-opera-roller-boogie vibe is strangely a pretty good marriage for the animation. Rondo Veneziano made several other animated shorts to pair with his music over the years, all based in science fiction and high fantasy. Quite the reality check when you compare the quality and music of this animation and some of the other things we find beautiful and different today. If you dig around enough, you may find out what you think is unique has already been done, and occasionally.. in some ways better. 

Enjoy some HQ animation cells below:

Robot Carnival (1987) Full Movie!

 

Robot Carnival.. it fucks

     Robot Carnival is an OVA anime-anthology style movie made in 1987, that saw some limited release in the US in 1991. Bootlegs were circulated, and you could find some unauthorized copies in shopping malls across the country with the segments mixed up.

     Made in nine parts by nine animators with vastly different styles and vibes. The music is pure 80's chillwave cheese, and is as good today as it was then. Other anthology OVA's like this came later after Carnival's success: Neo Tokyo, Memories, Genius Party, and Short Peace to name a few.

    This movie is absolutely stunning in every way. The themes range from serious and dramatic to sincere comedy. The high level of detail for its time, and the number of drawn frames is really a testament to the animators who put this together trying to show off their best stuff. Do yourself a favor and watch this classic before YouTube removes it for some reason. 

Enjoy the show.

William Hjortsberg posted some Legend behind the scenes photos

 

Click here to go to Hjortsberg's website that has the pictures and descriptions. 

       I've mentioned on several other occasions how much I like the movie Legend, starring Tom Cruise and Mia Sara. Any time something comes up Legend related, I have to report on it and share my excitement. This post may have been up for years on Hjortsberg's website, but I just stumbled upon it today. I found some other behind the scenes pictures on the Tim Curry Facebook, as well as Robert Picardo's Facebook. It's a really good to time to be a fan; you can just put in like 30 minutes of effort and really have some exiting stuff to look at. Older actors and actresses are reminiscing about old times as they age through the industry, so they are sharing on social media more than ever. 

    Anyways, click the link above, and enjoy some of the other pictures I found below:

My favorite, Tim pounding a 40 of High Life.

Prayer of the Rollerboys (1990) Full Movie!

 

Corey Haim and Rollerblades!

   In the not-so-far-away future, after "The Great Crash", gangs and drugs reign supreme. The great grandson of Adolf Hitler's rollerblade gang, dressed in white trench coats and black gloves, control the ebb and flow of a drug called Heaven's Mist. Naturally being a relative of Hitler, they are going to put something in the drugs to kill junkies and minorities. Checkmate fuckers!

These are bad dudes and they mean business. 

    Everyone settle down, because we have Corey Haim, and he is an accomplished rollerblader and can infiltrate this gang and counter corrupt it from the inside. At the middle point of the movie, I started to wonder if this was a prequel for the movie Solarbabies. It hit all the key points: Postapocalyptic, in the future, rollerblades, cast members from the Lost Boys. This movie inspired Corey Haim to pick up rollerblading full time, and often talked about it in interviews.

Skating in this way allows for perfect accuracy.

     My brother and I would wear one of my dad's trenchcoats and put skates on, and pretended we were part of the Rollerboys. Later on in life, after watching some more terrible rollerblade movies, I would end up trying to make a mini-career out of inline skating. So in a way.. I guess this terrible movie influenced me in some way? I guess I should write about that in some kind of future article.

Watch this movie, suspend your disbelief, and drink in the majesty that is Prayer of the Rollerboys.